Vintage Baker

by Nicholson Baker

  “The same jeweler who fixes silverware restrings beads?” he asked.

  “Yes!”

  “How did your beads get broken?”

  “They seem to break in the morning when I’m rushing to get dressed. They catch on something. The jade ones, my favorite set, which my father gave me, caught on the open door of the microwave when I was standing up too quickly after picking a piece of paper up off the floor. That was the latest tragedy. And of course my sister’s babe yanked one set off my neck. But they can all be repaired and they will all be repaired.”

  “Good going.”

  “Anyway, this apartment is transformed, I mean it, not just superficially but with new hidden pockets of order in it, and I waited until the midafternoon to have a shower, and I did not masturbate, because the illicitness of calling in sick without justification made me want to be pure and virtuous all day long, and I had an early dinner of Carr’s Table Water crackers with cream cheese and sliced pieces of sweet red kosher peppers on them, just delicious, and I did not turn on the TV but instead I turned on the stereo, which I haven’t used much lately. It’s a very fancy stereo.”

  “Yes?”

  “I think I spent something like fourteen hundred dollars on it,” she said. “I bought it from someone who was buying an even fancier system. It was true insanity. I had a crush on this person. He liked the Thompson Twins and the S.O.S. Band and, gee, what were the other groups he liked so much? The Gap Band was one. Midnight Star. And Cameo. This was a while ago. He was not a particularly intelligent man, in fact in a way he was a very dimwitted narrow-minded man, but he was so infectiously convinced that what he liked everyone would like if they were exposed to it. And good-looking. For about four months, while I was in his thrall, I really listened to that stuff. I gave my life up to it. My own taste in music stopped evolving in grade school with the Beatles, the early early Beatles—in fact I used to dislike any song that didn’t end—you know, end with a chord, but simply faded out.”

  “But then you met this guy,” he said.

  “Exactly!” she said. “All of the songs he liked faded out, or most of them did. And so I became a connoisseur of fadeouts. I bought cassettes. I used to turn them up very loud—with the headphones on—and listen very closely, trying to catch that precise moment when the person in the recording studio had begun to turn the volume dial down, or whatever it was he did. Sometimes I’d turn the volume dial up at just the speed I thought he—I mean the ghostly hand of the record producer—was turning it down, so that the sound stayed on an even plane. I’d get in this sort of trance, like you on the rug, where I thought if I kept turning it up—and this is a very powerful amplifier, mind you—the song would not stop, it would just continue indefinitely. And so what I had thought of before as just a kind of artistic sloppiness, this attempt to imply that oh yeah, we’re a bunch of endlessly creative folks who jam all night, and the bad old record producer finally has to turn down the volume on us just so we don’t fill the whole album with one monster song, became for me instead this kind of, this kind of summation of hopefulness. I first felt it in a song called ‘Ain’t Nobody,’ which was a song that this man I had the crush on was particularly keen on. ‘Ain’t nobody, loves me better.’ You know that one?”

  “You sing well!” he said.

  “I do not. But that’s the song, and as you get toward the end of it, a change takes place in the way you hear it, which is that the knowledge that the song is going to end starts to be more important than the specific ups and downs of the melody, and even though the singer is singing just as loud as ever, in fact she’s really pouring it on now, she’s fighting to be heard, it’s as if you are hearing the inevitable waning of popularity of that hit, its slippage down the charts, and the twilight of the career of the singer, despite all of the beautiful subtle things she’s able to do with a plain old dumb old bunch of notes, and even as she goes for one last high note, full of daring and hope and passionateness and everything worthwhile, she’s lost, she’s sinking down.”

  “Oh! Don’t cry!” he said. “I’m not equipped … I mean my comforting skills don’t have that kind of range.”

  There was another sound of ice cubes. She said, “It’s just that I really liked him. Vain bum. We went dancing one night, and I made the mistake of suggesting to him as we were on the dance floor that maybe he should take his pen out of his shirt pocket and put it in his back pocket. And that was it, he never called me again.”

  “That little scum-twirler! Tell me his address, I’ll fade him out, I’ll rip his arms off.”

  “No. I got over it. Anyway, that wasn’t what I meant to talk about. I just mean I was here in my wonderfully orderly apartment after dinner and I saw this big joke of a stereo system and I switched it on, and the sky got darker and all the little red and green lights on the receiver were like ocean buoys or something, and I started to feel what you’d expect, sad, happy, resigned, horny, some combination of all of them, and I felt suddenly that I’d been virtuous for long enough and probably should definitely masturbate, and I thought wait, let’s not just have a perfunctory masturbation session, Abby, let’s do something just a little bit special tonight, to round out a special day, right? So I brought out a copy of Forum that I rather bravely bought one day a while ago. But I’d read all the stories and all the letters and it just wasn’t working. So I started looking at the ads, really almost for the first time. And there was this headline: ANYTIME AT ALL.”

  “MAKE IT HAPPEN.”

  “That’s right. And I like the sound of the pauses in longdistance conversations—the cassette hiss sound. And yet I didn’t really want to talk to anyone I knew. So that’s more or less why I called. Now I’ve answered your questions, now you tell me something.”

  “Do you want to hear something true, or something imaginary?”

  “First true, then imaginary,” she said.

  “Once,” he said, “I was listening to the stereo with the headphones on, I was about sixteen, and the stereo receiver was on the floor of a little room off the living room, I don’t know why it was on the floor, I guess because my father was repainting the living room—that must have been it—and the headphone cord was quite short, but I was very interested in learning how to dance. It was winter, it was maybe eight o’clock at night, very dark, I hadn’t turned on the light in the room. And I was trying to learn all these moves, but tethered to the stereo, so I was almost completely doubled over, like I was tracking some animal, but I was really ecstatic—dancing, sweating, out of breath, flailing my arms, doing little jumps … once I got a little too excited and did a big sideways bob of my head and the headphones came off and pulled my glasses off with them—but no problem, I just stylized the motions of picking up my glasses and putting them on and repeated them a few times, incorporated them in. And then suddenly I hear, ‘Jim, what are you doing?’ in this horrified voice. My younger sister had heard all this breathing and panting coming from me in the darkness and thought of course that I was …” “Right.”

  “I said, ‘I’m dancing.’ And she went away. I danced for a while longer, but with somewhat less conviction. That was my year of heavy stereo use. Unlike you I didn’t have a big crush on anyone at the time. I think it was more that I had a crush on the tuner itself, frankly. I used to imagine that the megahertz markings were the skyline of a city at night. The FM markings were all the buildings, and the AM markings were their reflection in water …”

  “Ah,” she said, “but you’re supposed to be telling me something true, not imagined.”

  “Yes, but the true thing is shading into the imagined thing, all right? And the little moving indicator on our stereo was lit with a yellow light, and I knew where all the stations were on the dial, and I’d spin the knob and the yellow indicator would glide up and down the radio cityscape like a cab up and down some big central boulevard, and each station was an intersection, in a neighborhood with a different ethnic mix, and if the red sign came on saying STEREO I migh
t idle there for a while, or the cabbie might run the light, passing the whole thing by as it exploded and disappeared behind me. And sometimes I’d thumb the dial very slowly, sort of like I was palming a steering wheel, and move up, move up, in the silence of the muted stretches, and then suddenly I’d pierce the rind of a station and there would be this crackling hopped-up luridly colored version of a song that sounded for a second much better than I knew the song really was, like that moment in solar eclipses when the whole corona is visible, and then you slide down into the fertile valley of the station itself, and it spreads out beneath you, in stereo, with a whole range of middle and misty distances.”

  “That’s true!” she said.

  “It is true? That’s bad, because it means that I still have to come up with an imaginary thing, right?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “But my imagination doesn’t work that way,” he said. “It doesn’t just hop to at the snap of a finger. What do you want the imaginary thing I tell you to be about?”

  “I think it should be about … my beads and my silverware, since they’re all laid out for us.”

  “Well,” he said. There was a pause. “Once there was a guy who, um, needed his fork repaired. No, I can’t. I’m sorry. You tell me something more.”

  “It’s your turn.”

  “I need more confidences from you first. I need to be charged up with a stream of confidences flowing from you to me.”

  “Come on now,” she said. “Give it a try.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t think I can just be handed an assignment like that. I’m pedestrian. I think I have to stay with the truth.”

  “All right, tell me what the most recent thing or event was that aroused you.”

  “The idea of making this call,” he said.

  “Before that.”

  “Let me think back,” he said. “The Walt Disney character of Tinker Bell. I was just leaving the video store, and I came to this big cardboard display of Peter Pan, the Walt Disney cartoon Peter Pan, which has just been rereleased, with a TV beside it playing the movie.”

  “When was this?”

  “This was today, about an hour and a half ago, I guess. I rented three X-rated tapes”

  “And you’re going to play them later this evening?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not, I don’t know. I was going to play them when I got home.”

  “The second you got home.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What about dinner?”

  “I ate at a pizza place.”

  “What kind?”

  “Small mushroom anchovy.”

  “All right. So you got home with the tapes …”

  “Yeah, and I put them on top of the TV and got out of my work clothes and put on a bathrobe …”

  “Just a bathrobe?”

  “Well, I have my T-shirt and underwear on underneath, of course.”

  “White underwear?”

  “Gray, white, somewhere in that range. Anyway, I came out and saw the pile of X-rated tapes on top of my TV, and they’re in these orange boxes. The store uses brown boxes for their normal tapes, like adventure, comedy, slasher, etcetera, and then they use a whole different color, an orange box, for the adult tapes. It’s to avoid confusion, because now there are so many X-rated Christmas tapes and X-rated versions of Cinderella and all that. And I’d never seen two of these particular tapes before, but of course I knew what was in them anyway, and I heartily approved of it, I’m enthusiastically pro-pornography, obviously, but suddenly I foresaw my own crude arousal—I saw myself fast-forwarding through the numbing parts, trying to find some image that was good, or at least good enough to come to, and the sound of the VCR as it fast-forwards, that industrial robot sound, and I suddenly thought no, no, even though one of the tapes has got Lisa Melendez in it, who I think is just … delightful, I thought no, I don’t want to see these right now. Fortunately, I’d also bought a Juggs magazine, because this anti-orange-tape reaction has hit me before. There are just times when you want a fixed image.”

  “There’s always the pause button,” she suggested.

  “Well, but then you get those white sawtooth lines across the screen.”

  “Four heads are better than two, as they say. Of course, the resolution is better on the magazine page, I imagine.”

  “It certainly is,” he said. “But it’s much more than that! Don’t laugh, really. No movie still is ever as good as a photograph. A photograph catches a woman at a point where her frans are at their perfect point of expressiveness—the soul of her frans is revealed, or rather the souls are revealed, because each has a separate personality. Nipples in still pictures are as varied and as communicative as women’s eyes, or almost.”

  “Frans?”

  “Yeah, sometimes I don’t like the word ‘breasts’ and all those slangish synonyms. I mean, just look at the drop in arousingness between Playboy magazine and the exact same women when they’re moving from pose to pose on the Playboy channel. It’s true that I don’t actually get the Playboy channel, so I see everything on it through those hounds-tooth and herringbone cycles of the scrambling circuit, and I keep flipping back and forth between it and the two channels on either side of it because sometimes for an instant the picture is startled into visibility just after you switch the channel, and you’ll catch this bright yellow torso and one full fran with a fire-engine-red nipple, and then it teeters, it falters, and collapses—and I’ve noticed that the scrambling works least well and you can see things best when nothing is moving in the TV image, i.e., when it’s a TV image of a magazine image, sort of as if the scrambling circuitry is overcome in the same way I am sometimes overcome by the power of fixed pictures. I once stayed up until two-thirty in the morning doing this, flipping.”

  “Anyway.”

  “Right. Anyway, I looked through my brand-new Juggs magazine with high hopes, but I don’t know—again, the sexiest woman was in a poolside setting, and I find poolside settings unerotic—that is to say, in general I find them unerotic, since God knows I’ve certainly come to an enormous number of poolside layouts in magazines, but there’s something about the publicness of its being outside, in the sun—it’s not as bad as a beach setting, which is a complete turnoff—I mean, again, if I were exiled to a desert island with nothing but some pages of a men’s magazine showing a nude woman on a desert island, with the arty kidney shapes of sand on the ass-cheeks and all that, I would probably break down and masturbate to it … what do you think of that word?”

  “ ‘Masturbate’? I don’t hate it. I don’t love it.”

  “Let’s get a new word for it,” he said.

  “To myself, I sometimes call it ‘dithering myself off.’ ”

  “Okay, a possibility. What about just ‘fiddle’? Fiddlin’ yourself off? The dropped g is kind of racy. No, no. Strum.”

  “Strum.”

  “That’s it. I looked through the Juggs, and even though it was a poolside scene, I tried to strum, and there was one shot where the woman was looking straight at me, on her elbows on a yellow pool raft, and her frans were at their point of perfect beauty, not erect nipples but soft rounded tolerant nipples, which you have to have in a poolside photo set because as soon as you see those erect nipples in a poolside layout you think cold water, you don’t think arousal. I want you to know, by the way, that I am not one of these sad individuals who hang out at the frozen fried-chicken section of the supermarket where it’s extra cold just to see women’s nipples get hard. I don’t get the least thrill from wet T-shirt contests either, because I have to have an answering arousal there in the woman, and cold water is anti-sexual, except if in the case of the wet T-shirt contest I can convince myself that this woman is using the shock of the cold water, the giggliness and the splutteriness of it, to make something possible that otherwise wouldn’t be possible and yet is arousing to her: I mean if she wants to show off her breasts, if she’s proud of them and yet knows she’s not the kind of person who’s going
to go off and become a stripper or whatever, and the douse of cold water is distracting enough to keep her sense of its all being in innocent fun in the end, then I can get turned on by shots of a wet T-shirt contest. You know?”

  “I can see how that works. So you’re looking at the woman in Juggs.”

  “Yes, and she was looking right at me, so appealingly, with such a lucid joyful amused look and her elbows were really digging into the pillow of the yellow raft, so it looked as if it might burst, and I could almost imagine strumming myself off to this, but then, no, there were too many things wrong—the photographer had put her hair in pigtails, tied with some kind of thick purply pink polyester yarn, and it just seemed so awful somehow, the age-old thing of men wanting to pretend that twenty-eight-year-old women are little girls by forcing this icon of girlishness, pigtails, on them, when really, when was the last time you saw a real little girl wearing pigtails? Not to mention the incidental fact that little girls are a turnoff. Here’s this beautiful, alert, lovely woman, of at least twenty-seven, and all I could see was the dickhead photographer handing her some polyester yarn and saying, ‘Uhright, now tie this purple stuff in your hair.’ And I felt at that moment that I wanted to talk to a real woman, no more images of any kind, no fast forward, no pause, no magazine pictures. And there was the ad.”

  “But you’ve called these numbers before, haven’t you?” she asked.

  “A few times, but with no real success. And I don’t think I’ve ever called this very number before—2VOX.”

  “What do you mean by ‘success’?”

  “No women with any kind of spark. Or, actually, honestly, few women at all, period, except the ones who are paid by the phone service to make mechanical sexual small talk and moan occasionally. It’s mostly just men saying ‘Hey, any ladies out there?’ But then once in a while a real woman will call. And at least with this, as opposed to pictures, at least there’s the remote possibility of something clicking. Perhaps it’s presumptuous of me to say that we, you and I, click, but there is that possibility.”