Once at a bar, when I thought we might be able to laugh off such moments, I joked that if Catherine didn’t watch it she might soon find herself not stopping at the get-up-and-lean strategy for measuring relative percentages of mattress occupation, but actually climbing out of bed and walking around to my side to assay the situation. I delivered this line fully believing it to be humorous as a function of crossing another line, the one between reality and fantasy. It wasn’t. Catherine sipped her lager and said, “I do that all the time, honey.”
That’s what happened on the night I began reading The Mezzanine. I was lying there, scrunched over on my side of the bed, contorted into some strangled-by-the-cord position, desperately resisting the impulse to move and relieve the pain the position created in my lower back, and finally unable to resist this motion, a shift that resulted not in any real penetration of Catherine’s side of the bed, though my arm did, unintentionally, push one of my three pillows into the delicate pea who had been, until then, peacefully asleep under a fat mound of fabric.
The alarms sounded! Drowsy Princess Pea bounded from the bed! I remained frozen, but my skin sizzled head to toe as the floorboards creaked, tracking Catherine’s progress around the room. She approached crouched, her long, wild, wriggling hair coiling around her face in crazed slitherings. I dared not view her directly, but peered at her warped moonlit reflection in the shiny body of a bedside lamp. It was her Mr. Hyde.
The only monster in Nicholson Baker I knew of then—a “pornmonster” in House of Holes—didn’t seem particularly relevant at the current moment, but appropriate baddies fairly seethed through my recollections of Buber and Barthes. For Buber any institution was an It, and therefore a golem, and for Barthes silence itself was the beast, and the moment to fear was the moment in which “the loved being becomes a leaden figure, a dream creature who does not speak.” I squinted at Catherine’s twisted reflection as she hovered over me. At this my own inner demon began to rumble to life. I fought against my own reflexive rage! With love! This, I thought, this is the monster I must love. I love you, my troll, my bogeywoman. I did not move. Catherine completed her assessment, the conclusion of which could only be that I was not on her side of the bed.
“Goddammit,” she muttered, and stumbled off to pee.
It was in the aftermath of this, after she had crawled back under the covers and I was too anxious to sleep, that I went downstairs and fumbled about in the dark for my copy of The Mezzanine.
20
ACTUALLY I HAD TWO COPIES. I HAD THE GOLD-COLORED COPY Catherine had given me, the first sentence of which I had read and enjoyed, and I had a slightly dinged-up first edition (“light shelf wear”) that I acquired after I sold my proposal and ordered first editions of every one of Nicholson Baker’s books. It was this copy that I found on a shelf and carried through the dark rooms.
The blinking green power light on the tower of my computer and the steady LED charge indicator bulb, also green, of a sonic toothbrush in its pod in the bathroom gave the sleeping house a close to extraterrestrial feel. It’s this color of green that back in the eighties—when The Mezzanine was being written—came to be synonymous with the digital revolution. It was then a green associated with night-vision technology and the mysterious inner workings of escalators (I was fully expecting to see this described in The Mezzanine), but starting in the eighties, this alien green, like the black of Model-Ts, was the sole color of personal computer screens, of ominously blinking cursors, of letters themselves. It was a green that spoke to the future—a little-green-men Martian green in a we-are-the-Martians-now sense—and it was a full decade before better screen technology came along. Now it’s a color reserved for tiny beads embedded in small electronics. And it’s only when it’s particularly dark that we notice how bright these lights still are, how in a pinch they can still show us the way, and how they burn in the background of our lives, like memories.
I peed and rinsed my mouth simultaneously, the weird pleasure of urination combined with masochistic mouthwash pain, and then I nestled in on the sofa. As I often do with books, I took a good look at The Mezzanine before I opened it. The first edition has an oddly elongated trim size. Books generally have the rough proportions of a pool table, and deviations tend to signal the kind of book you’re picking up. Squatter books—closer to the size of a greeting card—may suggest that a book is either treatise-like or philosophical if the binding is cloth, or pulpy if the paperback cover feels like a cereal box. Squish down farther until a book is wider than it is tall and it’s probably a children’s book, art book, or coffee-table book, all of which rely on images that don’t reproduce well in trim sizes designed for text. The first edition of The Mezzanine is just the opposite of this, taller than it is wide and stretched even beyond the cost-cutting elongation of academic books, and it must have occurred to Nicholson Baker that the trim size of his first book embodied his body: every feature story I’d read about Baker emphasized his extreme height, which was one of the things, along with psoriasis, that he had in common with Updike. (I’m short and my skin is just fine.) The title of the book is oddly placed too, printed vertically down the right-hand side of the cover like Chinese characters, and both this and the trim size conspire with the cover art: a cartoonish rising escalator scene. We see the back of a somewhat bulbous man holding the small white bag (but not the paperback) from the book’s first sentence, and though the man is unaccompanied in a crowd, he holds aloft the index finger of his free hand, what could possibly be a call for a restaurant check or an auction bid, but which, given that he is alone on an escalator (and given the empty thought balloons rising from his head, just as he is rising), can be only a kind of aha gesture, the phalangeal equivalent of an exclamation point. The cover depicts a moment of insight so surprising it is adorned with body-language punctuation. In this, the image faintly echoes Renaissance art in which distorted pinkie fingers indicate status.
Contrast that with the picture of Nicholson Baker on the back of the book: Baker as a young man with his hands hidden behind him as though each holds a pawn and you’re about to play chess with him. He looks like a chess player, actually: practically bald at thirty-one, his shirt button line poorly aligned with his belt buckle, and wearing a smug grin as though he’s got some hustler’s opening trap waiting for you. Oddly, it’s a full-bleed jacket shot, the kind of author photo you’d expect from a romance publisher that hopes their author’s raw attractiveness will translate to sales. Why else forgo blurbs? I asked myself: Was Nicholson Baker an attractive man? He’d since gone the way of prophets (I’d first pictured him as a hobbit, but truth be told he looked more like Gandalf than any wee halfling), but as a young man he looked destined to become a CPA, and he did work briefly in business, in finance, and The Mezzanine draws on this time in his life. I opened the book—it felt like a restaurant menu—and found the photo credit on the back flap: “Abe Morell.” Aha! I thrust my finger into the air. That was photographer Abelardo Morell of A Book of Books, produced almost two decades later (and with a rare square trim size). Baker and Morell had been friends for many years, it seemed. First author photos are an important moment in a writer’s life (Catherine took my first author photo: Years before we were involved romantically, she came to my house for a three-hour photo shoot sodden with sexual tension that, looking back, we both wish we’d had the guts to act upon), and that Baker chose Morell for his photographer would have indicated a fondness even if I hadn’t known they later did a book together. Recognizing this made me quite happy, as though I’d entered the two men’s community. I got an additional shot of community wh
en I turned back to the start of the book and found this:
This was totally charming, and it was a reminder that I was not only about to read The Mezzanine, I was about to enter the community of everyone who had ever read The Mezzanine. Who was Eileen Dobrin? I had no idea, but she had lovely handwriting and she cared enough about her books to stamp and sign every copy. Had Eileen Dobrin sold her copy of The Mezzanine, or had the book remained in her library until she died and it wound up in the used bookstore that advertised it online? I didn’t know, but I could probably find out. Did I really want to? I did want to, but I was already second-guessing that impulse, just as I was now second-guessing the impulse to feel anything like friendship toward Baker and Morell. Maybe I was second-guessing what I’d already thought about imaginary friendships needing to remain imaginary—because writers are real people, and the community that literature generates is real. Yet I don’t think I’ll ever feel closer to Nicholson Baker than when I read his work, or to Eileen Dobrin than when I hold her book. If literature is humanity at its absolute best, striving after the hard truths, straining to shed the egos that cripple nonliterary relationships, then books, the actual objects of books, are the physical expressions of the struggle to craft a better humanity. Entering the culture of books, even the culture of a single book—and every book is the culture of its audience—makes the world feel a little better, a little more true and welcoming. What follows logically from this is that every step that cheapens the object of the book—from the paperback to the e-book—is a stride in which the literary world marches in lockstep with modernity’s relentless procession toward convenience. So I was right, I thought, to have convinced myself that augmenting my reading experience with actual human presences would be a kind of backsliding. Books are not the introduction to a human relationship; they constitute one.
This got a little tricky once I began reading The Mezzanine, as I presently did, flipping past the dedication (“For Margaret,” Baker’s wife) and rereading the sentence I’d already read and moving forward, because reading a certain kind of book is a whole lot like meeting its author, is virtually indistinguishable from it, in fact, and what I felt invited to do by the first edition of The Mezzanine was hold that full-bleed photo of Baker in mind as I tracked the action of the first paragraph, which follows a very Baker-like figure walking across the lobby of the building where he works, and flows along with his mind as he makes a mental association from a pair of freestanding escalators to a shaft of sunlight cutting down from a high window, such that we already know that the escalator is a stairway to heaven and that we will not merely ride it, but ascend on it. And then I ran smack dab into the book’s first lengthy footnote at the end of the paragraph, a passage that describes an illusion of light or shine in the moving, now close-at-hand escalator handrail, which is quickly compared to the edge of an LP record.
Now, I knew this was coming. Long before U and I compared The Mezzanine to an infarction resulting from clogged arteries, Baker established a goal: “I want each sequential change of mind in its true, knotted, clotted, viny multifariousness,” he wrote in “Changes of Mind,” “with all the colorful streamers of intelligence still taped on and flapping in the wind.” Sounds nice. Less so in practice. Because my first thought was annoyance—again. I mean, I’d come downstairs to read a book about going upstairs, and I’d left behind a stressful raising-a-demon kind of moment, hoping to get at something better, some truer human feeling and maybe a twang of companionship. And just when I began my own little escalator ride through the text, it broke down. That’s exactly how the book feels, like you’re on an escalator or some other type of what the Baker-figure soon calls “systems of local transport,” gliding along, and then suddenly it stops, but you keep going because you have inertia and you have to catch yourself with a foot—otherwise you’ll fall flat on your face. So you do that, and the energy is absorbed in your ankle and seeps up into your knee and hip, feeling like a stress test performed on a cracked piece of metal. You wince, sigh, and then dutifully scan down the page and read the footnote and sigh a little more over whether that really needed to be a footnote, and then collect yourself and brace for the reverse jarring as the machine starts up once more. And what happens then? Another footnote. And another, and another—until Nicholson Baker is absolutely right, you’re going to have a fucking heart attack if you read even one more footnote.
The truth was, I loathed footnotes. That’s what I realized when I started reading The Mezzanine. Footnotes, to my mind, were exactly the thing that distinguished literature from scholarly writing. And scholarly writers not only lacked elegance and good humor, they relied heavily on awkward intrusions because the value of their work was never measured by how well they’d said what they’d said. By the end of chapter one of The Mezzanine, it’s clear that shoelaces are pivotal to the story—that’s what’s inside the little white bag on the cover—but footnotes are not actually like shoelaces at all, I decided. I’d been wrong about that. Rather they are like shoehorns, and even though The Mezzanine describes the pleasant feeling of a snug-fitting shoe, what I felt as a result of all those footnotes was more like the feeling of having tied one of your shoes too tightly, when you can feel the laces digging into the surprisingly nerve-rich skin on the top of your foot, and of course when that happens in your actual shoe, you just stop and retie it. But when it happened in The Mezzanine, all I could do was ask myself a question: Why was Nicholson Baker causing me pain over a simple pair of shoelaces, a trifle, an insignificance?
For me the answer was in the past.
21
AFTER GRADUATE SCHOOL, INSTEAD OF MOVING TO PARIS, I moved to a beach community on a small island in New Jersey. I lived alone, which enabled me to concentrate on reading. What I mostly discovered was that I wasn’t a particularly good concentrator.
I noticed that I had a tendency to drift while reading, that as I read, my consciousness would chop itself up such that one part of me would go on reading, while a higher, “governor” part of me would wander off into daydream. This was wholly involuntary. I would sit down fully intending to dedicate myself to the sacred task of reading, and it would happen anyway. I would be reading along, and then suddenly I would discover that I was not reading, had not been reading for some time. My mind was elsewhere. Or, I might have asked myself the question that the Baker-figure, not far into The Mezzanine, attributes to the absent-minded: “Where was my head?”
Reading, I came to realize, real reading, is an act of strenuous will, like running a marathon or climbing a mountain, or upholding a commitment or keeping a promise. I decided that what I needed to do, if I expected to be able to truly concentrate on words, was read out loud, not, as poets say, so I could hear the sound of the language, but simply so I could comprehend it at all. So that’s what I did. That year’s canon-dabbling included a couple of the longer Dostoevskys, the essential Kafka, the obligatory Hemingway and Faulkner, some Woolf and Welty and Paley, and a bunch of newer folks—Stone, Atwood, McCarthy, DeLillo. By winter I had canon-dabbled my way to Conrad, and I spent great swaths of time walking up and down the island’s mostly abandoned shoreline, strolling past slimy slinkies of whelk eggs and monstrous, gangly horseshoe crabs, not always watching where I was stepping because I was barking Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim into a stiff wind that seemed intent on stuffing all those words back into my mouth.
I felt like the island’s lonely lighthouse keeper, though the island’s only lighthouse was a two-story decoration that stood in the middle of a traffic rotary. Plus I wasn’t alone, even in winter. I was renting the front half of a small
cottage from a very old woman named Emma Praul who lived in back and was terribly lonely and afraid of dying. Only a thin door separated our apartments. It locked from Emma’s side, and sometimes she opened it without knocking to ask me to play cards with her. Once she caught me peeking at a scrambled adult channel on television—the scrambling ruined the picture, but the sound was crystal clear. More often she caught me reading to myself when it was too cold for the beach. It was the reading that bothered Emma more. Of the television she merely noted my peculiar viewing habits and waved me into her dim rooms, where a tattered deck of cards waited beside a score pad and a teapot. Emma was ninety-two. She had skin like baked phyllo. “I don’t want to die!” Emma said, as though it were a line necessary to the game we played, like “Go fish!” or “Gin!” Sometimes she cried, and I reached over to squeeze her skeleton hand. Emma asked me why I read so much. Crazy Eights with a man one-quarter your age seemed a perfect way to count down the seconds to a dreaded death—but reading? Why read when you could just watch your stories on unscrambled television?
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