I’d also forgotten, I guess, that there is no substitute for the joy of first putting your arms around a woman’s nudity—when time is unfrozen and when she answers your embrace by actually embracing you back and you can’t believe how well naked seamless bodies can coincide, how accommodating they can be, even before erections have been manually confirmed and clitorises tested or tasted. And it isn’t often that you begin making out with someone, for the very first time, in a state of total nudity, as Joyce and I did. As if it was all part of our kiss, as if our bodies were kissing, Joyce moved underneath me and opened her legs and as I let more of my weight press on her she brought me inside, past her lush black fur and into her hot Fermata.
I whispered to her how good she felt. “Ready?” I said.
“Yes.” I felt her breath on my neck.
“Hold me really tight. Snap your fingers when I do.” I counted off, “One, two, three.” Then we kissed again and we snapped our fingers in unison.
It was difficult to tell for a moment if anything had happened. We looked at each other inquiringly, our eyebrows raised. Our slightest movement made my cock squeak with pleasure.
“Did it work?” Joyce asked.
I listened. “Hear that? It’s totally quiet. That’s the way the Fermata always sounds. It worked.”
She sighed with relief and started lifting her hips up against me. “Good news,” she murmured. “Good news. Can we do this for a while, though?”
“We can take as long as we want now,” I said.
Several Arno-and-Joyce-hours later, we walked back to the Meridien, wheeling the luggage cart with us. I showed her the negative black paths our bodies left behind in the constellations of hanging, glinting raindrops. “So—while you’re out on walks like this,” Joyce said, “you just take off a woman’s clothes, if she attracts you?”
I said I sometimes did.
Joyce tried it. She undid the black jeans of a motionless man in a leather jacket and pulled on his underpants and peered inside. She also unbuttoned a businessman’s raincoat and reached her hand into his jacket and felt his chest. “Hey, I could learn to like this,” she said. We took our seats at the restaurant and counted to three and snapped our fingers. The waiter appeared shortly after with our entrees. “The plates are very hot,” he said importantly, holding them with a cloth. We had been gone for no more than five minutes; nobody had missed us. Joyce and I talked for another hour, and we drank some more and then had some coffee, and then I walked her home and kissed her good-night at her door.
18
MY FINGER-SNAPPING PHASE IS NOW OVER, MY FOLD-POWERS are currently gone. I assume I’ll get them back sooner or later, but I’m never sure. What happened, as far as I can piece it together, is that one night, when Joyce and I were having sex, I unknowingly transferred all my fermational proficiencies to her. I had jokingly trotted out the penis pump and the Goddess Athena vibrator with the clit-stimulating fork-flamed torch of wisdom and told her that I’d bought them with her in mind, before we’d started going out. “I’m not a big vibrator person,” Joyce warned. But she did pump enthusiastically away at my penis with the penis pump, sucking it up into the clear plastic vacuum chamber and watching its veins pop out. When my penis had had more than enough of that treatment, I pulled it out and substituted the Athena vibrator in its place. Joyce and I then pumped the vibrator with the penis pump for a while, sucking it in as far as it would go. And finally, after some cajoling, Joyce turned on the Athena vibrator and slipped it inside herself. The fork-flamed torch of wisdom took her polytheistic clit to new heights.
But what we didn’t realize at the time was that the penis pump had somehow sucked all of my temporal powers out of me. Then, when the Athena vibrator went into the penis pump, the same powers were apparently transferred to it, and when the Athena vibrator muttered its way deep into Joyce, the powers entered her. As a result, the next time I snapped my fingers, nothing at all happened—or rather, everything kept on happening. But the next time Joyce clicked on the switch of her Athena vibrator, time dutifully halted for her.
I find I don’t miss the Fold too terribly much at present. My self-discipline has improved. I’m still temping, but I’ve begun going over some of the notes for my master’s thesis. (It’s a history of Dover Books.) Joyce, meanwhile, is having a good time. She carries her vibrating Cleft-Goddess around with her in her purse and turns it on at will, as when she has an important deadline at MassBank that she can’t otherwise meet. She strips pedestrians and tells me about strange genitalia she has seen and known. She talks of taking a jaunt down to Washington and sucking the presidential dick. Sometimes she uses Fold tricks while we’re having sex: for instance, she will alternate her mouth and her vadge on my richard so fast that I feel as if I’m in both places at once—as if she’s twirling over me. We’ve mentioned marriage as a possibility.
The other day I was in her apartment. I did some pushups on the floor. Then I sat on her bed. I called out, “Can I tell you about this great dream I once had about how you saved the two of us with your flying blue brassiere?”
“Briefly,” said Joyce from the bathroom. She was unbraiding her hair.
“We were in a boat in the middle of this lake of sulfuric acid,” I happily began, “and you were wearing your flying blue brassiere …”
Joyce has saved me, for the time being. I haven’t taken a stranger’s clothes off in weeks now. I’m trying to interest a publisher in my autobiography. But even if nobody wants to publish it, I could still have, say, a hundred copies made up. I’ll typeset them myself. I’ll get Copy Cop to bind them. I’ll design a jacket that uses the logo of some flush, big-name publisher like Random House. Yes, I’ll put that little stylized house on the bottom of the spine of my book. I’ll use a color copier to make the cover. It will look like a real book! And then, assuming I get my Fold-powers back, I’ll go to Waterstone’s or the Avenue Victor Hugo and Drop and put this book in people’s hands just as they think their fingers are closing on some other, real, book. They will read me. Word will spread. The Fermata, my Fermata, the keeper of all my secrets, will be a secret no longer.
BOOKS BY NICHOLSON BAKER
“It’s hard to find an analogue for Baker’s combination of intellectual playfulness and lyricism. The music of Erik Satie comes to mind. Also peanut butter and bacon sandwiches—something weird and wonderful about which you can only say, Try it. You’ll like it.’ ”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
THE FERMATA
Outrageously arousing, acrobatically stylish, The Fermata is a graphic, but good-natured peep deep into the ethical interstices of time, testosterone, and the furtive male imagination.
Fiction/0-679-75933-6
THE MEZZANINE
Startlingly inventive and filled with offbeat wit, this wondrous novel turns a ride up the escalator of an office building into a dazzling meditation on our most familiar relationships with objects and people we usually take for granted.
Fiction/0-679-72576-8
ROOM TEMPERATURE
Nicholson Baker transforms a young father’s feeding-time reverie with a newborn baby into a dazzling catalog of the minutiae of domestic love.
Fiction/0-679-73440-6
U AND I
Baker constructs a splendid edifice that is at once a tribute to John Updike and a disarmingly, often hilariously frank self-examination—a work that lays bare both the pettiest and the most exalted transactions between writers and their readers.
Nonfiction/Literature/0-679-73575-5
VOX
Vox remaps the territory of sex—sex solitary and telephonic, lyrical and profane, comfortable and dangerous, It is an erotic classic that places Nicholson Baker firmly in the first rank of major American writers.
Fiction/0-679-74211-5
VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES
Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order:
1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only).
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Nicholson Baker, The Fermata
The Fermata Page 28