The Fermata

by Nicholson Baker

  “Suck him!” said Sylvie. “Ooh, God, suck him stiff for me. Just hurry and get something big up my ass. I’m so hot for it.” She circled Marian’s clit with her end of the Fusilier, gazing at the base of the Klockhammer buried in the older woman’s ass. Marian, her mouth stuffed with purple cock, groaned and opened her legs for the pleasure. As Sylvie felt Kevin jabbing the other Welsh-head in and out of her own buzzing cunt-lips, she reached back and spread her asscheeks open and said, “That’s enough. Stop sucking my boyfriend’s dick and get it in my ass!”

  Marian pulled her mouth off of Kevin’s dick. “Okay,sweetie, it’s ready for you.” She squirted lube on Sylvie’s asshole. The squirt bottle made rude noises, but nobody cared. She pulled Kevin into position by his cock and tapped the head of his dick on Sylvie’s now-sloppy asscrack, circling it over the opening. Then she pointed it and held it still. “Okay, push in slow, Kevin. Open up for him, Sylvie. He’s going in.”

  “Push it in me! Fuck this ass!” cried Sylvie.

  Marian held Kevin’s cockshaft while it began to drive slowly in. It bent a little as he put his weight behind it; then, as Sylvie relaxed for him, it straightened out and filled her.

  “There he goes,” said Marian.

  “Fuck me with that dick, oooooooo!” said Sylvie. Kevin began making very slow long strokes.

  “That’s it, Kevin—fuck straight into her perfect ass—you’re getting it.” Marian took hold of the end of the vibrator in her cunt and started pulling it in and out in rhythm with Kevin’s steady dick-thrusts. Its length curved up and disappeared into Sylvie’s clim. She kissed Sylvie on the shoulder. “God, I like being connected to your sexy pussy, sweetie!” she said. Sylvie was looking straight ahead, taking little breaths as she pushed back on Kevin’s thickness. “You like him in your ass, don’t you?” Marian asked her.

  “I like him to fuck me hard!” said Sylvie. “Fuck my hot ass, Kev. I’m getting closer to the smiley face!” She looked at Marian. “That’s what we say when we’re going to come soon,” she breathlessly explained.

  Marian sprang into action. “Hold on, though—one last thing.” She picked up the little okra-sized dildo and slipped it over her middle finger and squirted some Astroglide on it. “Can I put this in Kevin’s ass?” she whispered. “I want to feel him fucking you when you come. Can I?”

  Sylvie blew up on her bangs and nodded. “Just hurry.” Marian flicked the okra-dick over Sylvie’s nipples and then dragged it down Kevin’s ribs and slid around to the base of his back and gripped the near cheek of his ass, so that her four fingers were near his asshole.

  “What are you doing?” Kevin said, freezing suddenly.

  “I’m putting some okra up your ass so you won’t feel left out,” said Marian. “I want to help you fuck Sylvie. I want to feel you fucking her ass, and I want your asshole to feel you fucking her asshole. Don’t trouble yourself—just let it in and keep fucking.”

  “Let her do it, Kev!” Sylvie called earnestly.

  Kevin overcame his uncertainty and resumed his slow, deliberate ass-fucking. But now, each time he pulled out for the next thrust, Marian drove the okra-dick a little farther into his reluctant male hole. He seemed to like it more after a minute or two, and as he began to get his own butt in gear, Marian started urging and guiding his movements, making him go a little faster, getting him to angle his thrusts, the way she knew Sylvie wanted it. Every push he made made his high-jumper’s maximus-muscles bunch memorably under Marian’s cupping hand. “See how she likes it faster?” Marian said. “Fuck her like this.” She controlled his pumping torso with the okra-plug like a puppet-master and he said, “Oh, jeepers! Get it up there!”

  “Pinch my nipples hard!” Sylvie ordered Marian in an urgent whisper. “I’m right at the smiley face,” she called to Kevin.

  “Let’s get off together,” said Marian, pinching as she was told. “Come on. Come on, come on. Fuck her, Kevin! Shoot that come in her. Look at this cock up my butt, Sylvie. Come over me. Oh! Oh fuck!” She let go of Sylvie’s nipples and held the Welsh-head tight to her love-bean as her orgasm gathered the necessary signatures. The autographed Armande had been in her ass for so long that she felt the biggest climax of her life had to be well on its way. But she wasn’t quite ready for it. She pushed her breasts forward and said, “Suck my titbags for a second, Sylvie. Suck them hard, bite them, bite them. Oh shit! Now come for me. Come around that hot dickmeat.”

  “Oh, God!” said Sylvie. She tried to suck Marian’s nipples but couldn’t concentrate on them and arched her neck, staring forward at the invisible pleasure in her head.

  “That’s okay—come for me baby. She’s starting to come, Kevin! Shoot that hot juice up her ass for her! Fill her ass with that burning come!” Marian finger-fucked the okra-dick faster in and out of Kevin’s asshole, and he leaned forward to take it and then straightened up, lifting Sylvie by the hips right off the ground and pulling her back against his cock. “Now, Sylvie?” he said.

  “Oh, fuck me good, Kev! Fill my fucking fanny!” Sylvie shouted, looking in Marian’s eyes and then down at her toy-filled fuckholes. “Harder! Oh, yes! Fuck me real good, darling! SHOOT THAT HOT DICK UP MY FANNY-HOLE! OH! OH!”

  With an astonished expression, Kevin made one last long lurching shuddering push and started to come.

  “OH YES!” said Sylvie, feeling Kevin’s cock empty ounce after ounce of boiling scream-cream into her ass. “AH! I’M COMIIINNNG!!!!!” As pagan pleasures wracked her body, she did indeed make a huge grimacing smiley face.

  It was Marian’s turn now. She allowed the idea of Kevin’s squirting dick in Sylvie’s ass to merge with the sensation of Armande Klockhammer, Jr.’s in her own. She conjured up the sight of the dollar bills stuffed in his asscheeks as he danced with his back to the audience. She thought of the shouting women; the whomping music; the sight of him turning on the stage and tossing his heavy live meat around inside its black silk pouch as he looked out at all his women. All these memories were up her ass. She opened her eyes and said evenly, “Please watch me come, now, you two. Watch my asshole and cunt come around these huge horny cocks!” Then she threw herself back on the wet grass and lifted her legs and rested her feet on Sylvie’s back; she let them watch whatever they wanted while the brutish, hunky orgasm ennobled her body. “Oh nice … so nice … so nice …” she sighed as the clit-twitching ebbed.

  When the three of them had recovered a little, Marian rinsed off Kevin’s softening cock and lifted herself off the Klockhammer and sprayed it fresh.

  “Can we pick some more of your tulips sometime?” said Sylvie sweetly before she and Kevin, dressed once again in their matching outfits, left for the fish hatchery.

  “Anytime you want,” said Marian. “I love young love.” Naked, replete, she put her toys and her abandoned book on the tray and went indoors. Over the next year, with Kevin and Sylvie’s weekend help weeding and planting and mowing, her back yard became the envy of her neighbors.

  15

  THAT WAS WHAT I-FINALLY RECORDED ON THE CASSETTE THAT I put in the tape-player in Adele Junette Spacks’s Ford Escort in place of Suzanne Vega’s Solitude Standing. It—Part Two—was sixteen single-spaced pages long, and it took, in addition to the twelve long hours and two fiercely snuffling orgasms I devoted to its composition, another two hours to record on tape. (I let both of my comeshots hop out directly onto the hazily indeterminate Mass Turnpike, my bottom scooched forward on the hood of my car so that my richard made a sort of hood ornament. Unable to endure the physically paradoxical contact of a surface going sixty miles an hour faster than they were, the sperm-drops began to sizzle on the roadway after a few minutes; they had vaporized completely in less than half an hour.) When I was done recording I didn’t feel exhausted—I felt exhilarated. My right wrist hurt a lot—this marked, if I’m not mistaken, the beginning of my carpal-tunnel problem, which has bothered me on and off since. It isn’t clear to me now why Marian’s adventures ended up being so unremittingly ane-o
riented in content—I like to think it was just a matter of mood. After all, I had never typed the word butthole before in my life. It isn’t a word that comes up much in business correspondence. Private coarseness is a known high. What was just as important, I wanted to minimize the chance that this Smith College woman would find my audiotaped company tame, and an anus or two livens up any gathering. I wanted my rotterly imagination to feed rather than limit hers, to extend without strain as far as hers would go; and I hoped that whatever she didn’t like she could filter out. I hoped that she would realize that I was an unusual man, possibly worth knowing.

  I didn’t leave my gift in her player right away, not wanting to be seen driving right there, brazenly next to her, when it came on. I started up time, accelerated, and moved a few cars ahead, then jogged back on foot to her car with the universe on pause and switched the tapes. Consequently I didn’t get to see her initial reaction. But I drove annoyingly slowly, forcing the buffer cars behind me to pass; very soon I had Adele in my rear-view mirror again. I put on sunglasses so that she wouldn’t be able to see when my eyes were flicking up to the mirror at her. I saw her doing something, leaning, examining: I guessed that she had ejected my tape and was checking for identifying marks. (It said only MARIAN THE LIBRARIAN on the label.) Then there was a long period where she—I’m fairly sure—listened to some or all of it. She passed me again, paying no attention to me; I Dropped for a second to verify that my tape was in her player and then let her proceed. We drove for quite a while together, over an hour, although I don’t think she noticed that I was keeping discreetly close to her. She fluffed her hair several times. I looked for signs of arousal: weaving, sudden slowing. There were none. I hoped she would be so aroused that she would have to stop at a motel very soon.

  To my surprise, she drove right past the turnoff for Route 91 and Northampton. She continued to drive west. Was she on her way to Chicago? That made sense. She was probably in graduate school there. (The University of Chicago sticker on her rear windshield was above the Smith sticker, arguing for Smith’s temporal priority.) I wasn’t sure that I wanted to drive all the way to Chicago with her, but presumably she would have to stop somewhere for the night. And even if she hated my tape, she was still driving, and driving allows for a great deal of idle thought, and idle thought is the perfect medium for the accelerated transmutation of remembered distastefulness. By the time she turned into a motel that evening, some image off my cassette might be soaring through her sensibility, robed in urgency and fire. And regardless of how she felt about my tape, she would almost certainly come in her motel room, since what else is there to do in motel rooms?

  As I drove, I worked out an elaborate plan of how I would proceed if she did check into a motel. As soon as she entered the parking lot, I would stop time and pull in ahead of her and park in an out-of-the-way spot. I would restart time. She would park and go into the office for five minutes and then reappear and walk to a room, say room 23. As she was pointing her key at the doorknob, with a semi-blank set-mouthed face that no actress could duplicate because it was so wholly a product of the certainty of her unobseivedness, I would pause her, go back to the office and get the spare key for room 23 from the key drawer, and enter ahead of her. It wouldn’t be a bad room, a little on the brown side, but there would probably be no good place for me to hide to watch her undress. I would be deeply sleepy by this time. My yawns would be coming every thirty seconds. It would be about seven in the morning Strine-time, counting my lengthy on-the-road Foldout, but I would still be needing some moment of closeness with this total stranger, who had become my chosen traveling companion. I would notice that in her room there was a locked door that led to the adjacent room. This would suggest some possibilities to me.

  Still fully fermational, I would leave her standing at the door with her key out and I would walk out and “buy” (in the usual informal manner) fourteen dirty magazines from a newsstand a quarter of a mile down the road. I like wandering around newsstands in the Fold and looking at people looking at magazines. Sometimes it’s just as you would expect: the thirteen-year-old kid with a fine little mustache looking at a shelf-ful of gory horror-film mags, etc. But often it isn’t so simple: it isn’t like the cartoon cliché about how people resemble their dogs. The man at the rack of computer magazines is someone you couldn’t have predicted would be there; likewise the woman looking at the sailing magazines and the man reading at the antiques rack. You can’t necessarily match people up with the periodicals they flip through. Perhaps this is because people who spend time in newsstands aren’t representative of the people who are deeply interested in a given hobby or subject—the real enthusiasts are out on sailboats or at antiques auctions, rather than reading about them; or more likely they are leafing through the magazines at home, where they can really study them, being subscribers. Some of the true hobbyists disdain the magazines because they have studied them for so long that the level of repetition in the how- to articles has begun to tire them. It might often be that the inhabitants of a newsstand are those who want a taste of what it would be like to have a certain interest without actually having it. But then again, some are probably true aficionados of their particular realm who are drawn to the newsstand precisely because here they can see their specialized sub-passion on display near all others: model rocketry right on an equal footing with Metropolitan Home; the science fiction magazines only a few feet from bodybuilding, or from those flimsy how-to-write-an-effective-query-letter writers’ magazines. Unlike a bookstore, a newsstand unifies its huge range of subject categories by its overriding sense of nowness. It is a Parthenon of the immediate present, a centrifuge of synchronicity. Each magazine is saying, This is what we think you want to know about our subspecialty right this second, in (you scan the covers) July July July July August July July July August August July. My Fold-powers are replenished by trips to newsstands; I find that the longer I spend in one, the more cleanly and responsively time stops for me the next time I trigger a Drop.

  So I would go down the road from Adele’s motel and buy fourteen men’s magazines at a newsstand, and I would walk back and arrange them on one of the beds in her room, room 23, covering its objectionable pink and brown coverlet with a superior quilt of plush womanflesh. I would get a washcloth from the bathroom and drape it on the edge of the bed, as if to catch the scumsquibs that were imminent from my bloated factotum. I would make sure that I had stroked past the point of caring at the moment I adjusted my glasses. Immediately thereafter, I would hear Adele’s revitalized key in the lock.

  When, on the threshold of her own motel room, she caught sight of me inside, looking up at her with surprise, she would say, “Oh, sorry!” and close the door. It would not be too difficult for me to act flustered and embarrassed. I would genuinely be flustered and embarrassed. “I’m terribly sorry—one moment!” I would call loudly. “Sorry, sorry!” I would hurry outside, doing up my belt. She would already be on her way back to the office. “It’s my mistake,” I would say. “I think I was given the wrong key.”

  “No problem,” Adele would say crisply. “I’ll get a different room.” She wouldn’t want to meet my eye.

  “What I mean is,” I would hastily explain, “I think I’m in your room. The man said room twenty-four, but then when I looked at the key he gave me it said twenty-three, so I just assumed that it was the room I was meant to have. Obviously I was very wrong. But if you hang on thirty seconds I’ll be totally out of your room.”

  Adele would say, “That’s all right—you’re obviously already all settled in there.” She would make a little laugh.

  But I would be full of sincerity. “You mean the magazines? I can pile those up in half a second, really. I think that you should have the room you were meant to have, since it’s my mistake. I haven’t even used the bathroom. Well, no—I did use it.” I would put my hand on my chest. “This is mortifying.”

  Adele would reassure me. “Don’t worry about it, honestly. I’ll get a differen
t room. You stay in that room, and I’ll get a different one. It’s fine.”

  But I wouldn’t want that to happen, of course. I would hand her my key to her room, the one I borrowed from the office while in the Fold. “Here’s the key to your room,” I would say. You get your suitcase or whatever, and I’ll get the right key for my room, and then I’ll be out of your room in two seconds. Okay?”

  She could so very easily not go along with this and insist on talking to the man in the motel office herself, and it would not be at all good for me if she did: I would have to use the Fold to escape, and I would have to abandon her while she was in the middle of telling the person at the desk that there was someone in her room, and then he would tell her that nobody was checked into room 24, and she would be left with a mysterious and disturbing sexual event that she could not; explain. The police would possibly get involved—awful to contemplate. But because I always mean well, despite my sneakiness, I would be flustered enough and genuine enough that she would believe me and accede.

  I would check in at the office and request room 24 and get the key. Adele would be standing outside room 23 when I returned. The door would be ajar—I would have left it ajar—so she would have been able to glance at the arrangement of magazines and the washcloth on the end of the bed during my brief absence if she wanted to.

  “There, all set,” I would tell her. I would noisily slap all the magazines in a big pile and cover the top one with the washcloth and carry them out to my new room. Again I would say, “I’m terribly sorry for the dreadful mix-up.”