That’s pretty much what happens from there. And it’s precisely because this is kind of a sweet moment (a faux-birthing sequence, spare on details: “[Marian] felt the weight drop in her hand and immediately folded the napkin over it and sprayed Sylvie clean”) that I reflexively leaped back to “going big job” in Room Temperature. The Fermata depicts what might be termed “shit intimacy.” This may seem like an odd pairing, but haven’t shit and intimacy always tended toward harmony? Does not a parent’s love trace back to having changed a baby’s noxious diapers, and does not a child’s love remain incomplete until he or she is called upon many years later to return the favor? Isn’t fondness for household pets a function of coaching them through the management of their “business,” cleaning up after them as the need arises? And even if we do manage to shut our bathroom doors, do we not gird our romantic love when we are called upon to clean a toilet we did not deface ourselves, and is not our love enhanced when a toilet we did deface is cleaned by another without reproof? At the risk of investing the cosmos with an intelligence it surely lacks, it seems to me that embracing nature’s most profound juxtaposition—it’s not some cruel joke!—is the surest and quickest route to happiness.
It’s all this that got me rethinking the come-face scene. Why, exactly, did I see this particular activity as being more about power than intimacy? Doesn’t an aversion to come faces—or scratch that, because this is probably true even for people who are pathologically drawn to come faces—rely on the insulting suggestion that semen is “dirty,” good enough for the womb and perhaps the torso and breasts, but repugnant in this one case? Even if that argument fails, I have to admit to not having initially read the come-face scene in the context of Baker’s career. Doesn’t the sequence change a bit when we recognize that Arno’s orgasm rides the same rhetorical thrust as Jim of Vox’s ejaculations? Hadn’t I stopped myself from considering what he might have been trying to passionately profess here? That was probably why Martin Amis and all the other hostile reviewers had a hard time reading these books: they had neither the space nor the inclination to link them to earlier work. And that’s why Catherine couldn’t read them either: she hadn’t read the earlier books, and the mistake was mine in thinking she could hop aboard my whitewater descent through the rapids of Baker’s career. For some, I’m sure, I’ve crossed a line, the line between “read” and “torturous read,” but I reject that—I reject the idea that a muscular, strenuous interpretation in any way amounts to torture. Because what I was feeling now was the opposite of torture: a sense of freedom, the same freedom that Sylvie feels once she craps out her inhibitions. I was having sex in Paris. I was having exactly the kind of Emersonian sex that had been my goal since the first moment I’d considered reading Nicholson Baker.
46
BUT THERE’S A PROBLEM WITH THIS SEX. IT’S EASY ENOUGH TO recognize that The Fermata’s beach scene juxtaposes writing and taboo sex for the purpose of mutual illumination. With a little mental effort we can recognize that Arno’s orgasm in the come-face scene contains the seed, if not the dirt, of an ideal writer-reader relationship: seeing your work put to exactly the kind of use you’d like to see it put to is kin to the most transgressive of sexual acts. The young woman is Arno’s ideal reader, and this aligns perfectly with Baker’s having once said that his ideal reader is probably a woman. The problem, of course, is that I’ve set out to be something of an ideal reader myself and I’m not a woman.
Compounding things, it’s not at all difficult to fathom a current of ambivalence toward male homosexuality in Baker’s work. It first appears in The Mezzanine with “Howie” ’s peculiar observation about men almost bumping into each other in bathroom doorways. “Average men,” he claims, excuse themselves with “Oop,” while gay men and women use the plural form, “Oops.” In U and I, a book about a man loving another man’s work, you might expect to find some ecstatic homoerotic play, but that thought gets tamped down before you even have it: Baker makes a somewhat derisive reference to Henry James as “William’s gay brother.” Arno’s girlfriend in The Fermata, the same one who chastised him for preferring helpless partners, forces him to consider the prospect of the time-stopping ability being used on him by a man. “I admit that’s not something that appeals to me,” Arno says. “But to be consistent I suppose I would have to say, fine, if the gay man means well, and he wants to give me a blowjob without my knowledge, it wouldn’t be the end of civilization.” This same strained sense of fair play is palpable in Baker’s review of homosexual British author Alan Hollinghurst’s The Folding Star, published just a few weeks after The Fermata appeared: Baker notes that “mutually baffling pornography” is the lone bridge spanning the “chasm” between the “gay cosmology” and the “prevailing straightgeist.”
And it’s not just gayness. Nicholson Baker doesn’t seem to like men much, gay or straight. This terrified me. Baker had repeatedly allowed that he was not particularly comfortable around men, and I was frightened because it suggested that he might not like me trying to be his ideal reader. And now there was a chance, an outside chance, that I would encounter him in Maine. The only solace I was able to take in the matter was in imagining the quandary Baker must have found himself in with the 1993 birth of his second child—a son. The boy was named Elias, and I wanted to believe—I had to believe—that the anagrammical similarity of his name to his sister’s was an admission that men can be Alices too.
Of course they can! And I’ll go even farther than that—farther than Baker. Not only is the thought of a man having sex with another man not the end of civilization, it may well be the beginning of it—and I don’t just mean boring old Greek cultural homosexuality. If what civilization has been trying to say by making the study of literature an important spoke in the wheel of humanist and liberal arts educations—part of the curriculum of society, as it were—is that books serve an important cultural function, and if literature really is a kind of intimacy that echoes what we’re supposed to feel during physical love-making, and if “ejaculate” really does mean that you feel something very deeply and are compelled to shoot it ecstatically forth into the world, then how can I possibly avoid the conclusion that what I’ve been hoping for all the while I’ve searched for a new sense of literary purpose is for Nicholson Baker to spray his literary come all over my face? Yes! That is what I want, and not in some glib, halfhearted Arno way either. Metaphorically speaking, I want Nicholson Baker to come on my face, and to keep coming on my face, again and again—and isn’t that all any reader should want, isn’t that the explicit lodged way deep down in the implicit? Wouldn’t that—same-sex trust and acceptance, particularly among aggression-prone men—amount to the beginning of a better civilization? I want Nicholson Baker to ejaculate all over my face, and I don’t care if it’s about power, and I don’t care if I’m left puffing and spluttering to keep it out of my mouth. I want Nicholson Baker to keep spewing all over my face until I can’t possibly take it anymore.
47
WHICH INFORMED MY REREAD OF HOUSE OF HOLES IN PARIS. Rereading the book in light of Baker’s earlier career let me tap into its seamless snatching up of threads dropped eighteen years earlier. In its first few pages there is another clear instance of shit intimacy. A short time later a character fwooshes into a gaseous, semiconscious vapor. And on page eleven a man groans like one of Baker’s critics (“Just plain disgusting”) at another man banging his erect penis against a woman’s face.
And then there are the holes. One character streams down into a straw that is practically a citation of the lengthy description of straws in The Mezzanin
e. Another climbs into a Laundromat clothes dryer to have his consciousness centrifugally spun. The pleasure of rereading is discovering how incomplete your pleasure was the first time around. Like sex it gets even better when the participants know each other a little.
House of Holes is a book of stories as Arno of The Fermata might have written them. But, as with Wonderland, there is no clumsy attempt to explain its origin this time. House of Holes is a simpler machine. Unlike Vox, it has a setting, a zany combination of a free love commune and a voc-tech college, but like Vox there is a background dystopia populated with lonely people who find it hard to be truthful about what they really like. The world outside the House of Holes, our world, is overrun with pornography that is “depressing and drowns out good porn,” the kind of porn House of Holes aspires to be. That “good porn” exists is perhaps proved by the book’s reception. It was not a best seller (it spent a couple weeks on the extended list), but reviewers struck a far more pleasing chord:
The New York Times Magazine: It’s as funny as it is filthy and breathes new life into the tired, fossilized conventions of pornography in a way that suggests a deep, almost scholarly familiarity with the ancient tropes.
The Boston Globe: Brilliant, absurd, puerile, depraved, and completely enthralling.
The Toronto Star: After more than a decade as a reviewer . . . I thought it was safe to assume that I’d experienced every type of literary pleasure. . . . House of Holes proved me wrong.
Where had this come from, all of a sudden? It wasn’t, I thought, that the world had spontaneously changed between The Fermata and House of Holes. It was that Baker helped change the world, through those who had read his books and understood them and those who had read only imitators, like me—those who had surmised only remotely that such writing was now possible and necessary.
Which is not to say that House of Holes proposes an easy solution to the broken world from which it offers relief. That broken world is embodied in the book by a litany of broken figures: the manless arm of page one, and later headless men and jars full of stolen clitorises, all evidence of how modernity and bad porn chop us up into objects. The book’s bad porn subplot climaxes when a brave young woman—another Alice, if we’re paying attention—confronts the bagpipe pornmonster. The pornmonster is a giant assemblage of parts, a seething, oozing chimera, a motile blob of dirtiness. The pornmonster can speak, and it is sad. It knows no better than to immediately water-cannon its visitor with “sexual splatterment,” head to toe. The young woman refuses to be disgusted. She even likes it a little. And from there it’s the most innocent of associations that leaps from the pornmonster to Humpty Dumpty and the scattered shards of a shattered cultural sexuality, and hence a suggestion that a fantasy book ought to be able to put a fantasy egg back together again. The pornmonster repents, the stolen clitorises are returned, the arm finds its man, and we are all reborn as House of Holes ends with a young man and a young woman making love in a tiny silver egg: the womb of a better world.
48
IT WAS NOT, I’M FAIRLY SURE, JUST AS I REREAD THE END OF House of Holes that I one day returned a bit earlier than planned to the adorable atelier. I know that it was our third week in Paris, because we’d hit a dull rhythm of living in Paris sometime before, and after I’d begun having my hole stuffed in the mornings, we had stopped taking our walks together along the Seine and had settled into separate routines. Even the street market salmon dinners we had enjoyed sharing so much in our first days—candlelight, wine, quiet music—had become perfunctory: We ate silently, musing over solitary adventures. And I know too that on this particular occasion I failed to text Catherine to let her know that I was headed home. It was, however, in the spirit of House of Holes, its general ebullience, that I rode up the waggly elevator, earlier than planned, and strode toward the studio. I surprised Catherine before she had a chance to react. She was on the half toilet, plywood door open as wide as a child’s smile! She squinted at me but couldn’t quite figure out how to blame me for the intrusion.
“I was hoping,” she groaned, “to take care of all this before you got home.”
She twisted sideways on the seat so she could crimp shut the door.
We said nothing more of this. But that night, halfway through dinner, Catherine spotted a drop of wine sliding down the outside of our seven-euro bottle, and in one fluid rattlesnake motion she snatched up the bottle and caught the trickling drop with her tongue, licking its mauve trace from the bottle’s shoulder to its neck and letting the very tip of her tongue flick at the raised rim of the bottle mouth where the drip had first dribbled out the top. Oh, glory day! She set the bottle down again and glanced at me, silent and aslant, and in an instant our mood was no longer a bad habit.
In response I thought of two separate scenes from books: a quite similar interval in Madame Bovary (“She bent back to drink, her head thrown back, her lips pouting . . . while with the tip of her tongue passing between her small teeth she licked drop by drop the bottom of her glass”), and a moment in Lolita when Humbert Humbert uses his tongue to pluck a speck from Lolita’s eye (“Gently I pressed my quivering sting along her rolling salty eyeball”). This was terribly exciting, but I knew better than to act on this new momentum. The next day we went to Parc de Sceaux and to the Louvre again, and then on the ride home, veiled as an afterthought, Catherine commented on how happy I seemed, a positivity that was in large part a result of having read Nicholson Baker well, though she attributed it to my codeine prescription. She suggested the possibility of trying one of the pills herself, perhaps later, perhaps back at the atelier.
“You mean codeine sex?” I said.
“Maybe,” she said.
Back at the atelier we played music for a while and Catherine took one of my pills and we nibbled on the macaroons that we had splurged on at Paris’s famous macaroon store. Earlier in the day, the store had been crammed with Parisians, but somehow we had slipped to the front of the line, which added to the sense of its being a very special day indeed. Then, after the macaroons, during the wine, Catherine said, a little sheepishly, “So—do you want to try?” Yes, I wanted to try. She disappeared downstairs, and I wasn’t allowed to descend until she was ready, and when I did she was wearing the lacy red bra that I’d washed and folded for her—that was part of the excitement, recollecting that in the French Laundromat I had carefully nested one of the bra cups inside the other—and as well she had on a pair of the heavy dangly earrings favored by French women, which she had purchased even before I arrived in Paris. We kissed for a long time, and while we were kissing I thought of Arno’s observation that there is no good autoerotic substitute for kissing. True, true. And then I thought, while I was in the process of making Catherine come with my mouth, that it was exactly these kinds of moments that we’re not supposed to talk about in books about writers, except, I guess, if our goal is Rabelaisian abandon, which is monumentally sad because that too cleaved the work of the mind from the work of the body. Yes, of course, an orgasm is a sort of stoppage in time, a rejuvenating period in which we seem to relinquish consciousness—which Catherine did now at my touch, not with fanfare and great quantities of fluid production, but with a kind of blessed absence, a hole that opened in her self—but it’s also true that thinking of sex only in this way ignores all the time around orgasms when our minds are at work both reflexively and voluntarily, as we wade through thoughts that arouse us, thoughts that are every bit as important as the thoughts we think when we’re not under the intoxicating influence of being part of an organic machine, one body joined to another. It occurred to me,
after Catherine’s orgasm was complete and we rearranged ourselves on the futon so that I could enter her, that it might seem odd that I’d have borderline analytical thoughts during intercourse, but that’s wrong, I thought, that’s part of the problem, both with how we think about books and how we think about the world. And for me, anyway, some of those borderline analytical or even critical thoughts are among the most exciting of thoughts, like the thought I sometimes have of my sperm shooting up into a womb and beginning a grand doomed quest—I think of Lucian’s True History and envision little Argonauts. Exciting! Or I think about how it’s possible to insert fingers in a woman’s vagina and anus at the same time and almost touch them together through an impossibly thin membrane between the two passages. On this particular occasion, as I moved slowly in and out of Catherine, I held on to both her earrings in my fists because they were heavy on her earlobes and pulled more than she thought they would when she bought them, so it was a favor I was doing her, I suppose, but the earrings in my palms felt like gathered-up rosaries, fistfuls of sharp pebbles, and it wasn’t really irreverence that accounted for my excitement at this so much as the trust Catherine was showing me because of course I could have just ripped the earrings from her ears—even accidentally, if I wasn’t careful. I recognized this to be a much more Updike-style thought than a Baker-style thought, but even that was kind of exciting because it got me thinking back on Baker’s claim that Updike’s writing about literature wasn’t ecstatic enough and of that snarky comment that had been made about autobiographical criticism: I pee, therefore I am. No, no, no, I thought. I come, therefore I am. It’s only such an existential motive that can explain the success of everything from traditional aphrodisiacs to the latest spectrum of erectile dysfunction cures, as pleasure alone can’t possibly account for the wild calisthenics that people—okay, men—will perform so that they can go on being able to come. That seemed completely true to me. And it was this thought, not the thought about being able to come, but the thought that I might really be onto something true, that got me close to coming with Catherine. That and the fact that she was now moving her hips in concert with mine: I love looking down at her little hula wriggles, and the resulting puckering and unpuckering of her stomach, which always makes me think of the muscles of a snake moving in ripples as it tugs itself along. This, I always conclude, is the best explanation for why there’s a snake in Eden, but that’s not what made me come, now. This time the thought that sent me over the orgasmal edge was one I often have during sex about how the penis and the clitoris in the pregendered fetus start out as pretty much the same thing, so that coitus is a sort of romantic return to a common origin. That did it! And this time, because Catherine had told me that lately she’d been having some pain when I came inside her—a hard truth made beautiful by its confession—I pulled out and spilled onto her stomach. She held me in her hands as I came, and there was something about how she stroked me during this orgasm, something that she’d never done before, and which I never do when I masturbate because when I masturbate I always just go for the best spurting sensation I can muster, but whatever it was made my orgasm particularly prolonged. Not only that, but toward the end of it, my entire penis attained for a good fifteen seconds a wildly intense sensitivity, and what I thought about during that period, in some deep part of me—it felt almost as though my consciousness and unconsciousness had swapped places—was how women describe their clitorises during orgasm, a point of prolonged, intense sensitivity, and now my own prolonged intense sensitivity was prolonged further by the deep background thought that my cock felt like a big vibrating clitoris. Catherine was stroking my big clit! A Baker-style thought if there ever was one. And I didn’t share it with Catherine after I’d rolled off her and collapsed onto the futon for the deep-breathing postsprint interval we always observe before one of us, usually me, gets up to retrieve the necessary tissue. I didn’t say anything because my thought was already transforming into this: That’s what we should be when we read, not some passive receptacle, not some spurting lecturer, but a precise point of prolonged and intense sensitivity, caught in time and reading.
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