Vintage Baker

by Nicholson Baker

  “Yes.”

  “In a way it’s like the radio. Do you know that I’ve never actually gone to a store and bought a record? That’s probably why I never learned to appreciate the fade-out, as you describe it, since on the radio, one song melts into the next. But it seems to me that you really need the feeling of radio luck in listening to pop music, since after all it’s about somebody meeting, out of all the zillions of people in the world, this one other nice person, or at least several adequate people. And so, if you buy the record, or the tape, then you control when you can hear it, when what you want is for it to be like luck, and like fate, and to zoom up and down the dial, looking for the song you want, hoping some station will play it—and the joy when it finally rotates around is so intense. You’re not hearing it, you’re overhearing it.”

  “On the other hand,” she said, “if you own the tape, you show you’ve got some self-knowledge: you know what you like, you know how to make yourself happy, you’re not just wandering in this welter of chance occurrences, passively hoping the disc jockey will come through. Maybe when you’re a little kid you find yourself out on a balcony in the sun and you think, My oh my, this feels unexpectedly nice.

  But later on you think, I know that I will feel a particular kind of pleasure if I walk out onto this balcony and sit in that chair, and I wish to experience that pleasure now.”

  “Well, right, and so the reason I called this line was that the pleasures I’d sought out weren’t doing it for me and there was this hope of luck, that I, that there would be a conversation …”

  “You never said what it was about the Disney Tinker Bell exactly, at the video store.”

  “Well, in the scene I saw, and this is the first time I’ve seen any of this particular Disney by the way, and you have to remember that I’m in an altered state there in the movie store, with my three orange movies and my men’s magazine in my briefcase, but in the scene, Tinker Bell zips around in a sprightly way, with lots of zings of the xylophone and little sparkly stars trailing her flight, and you think, right, typical fairy image, ho hum. And she’s tiny, she’s a tiny suburbanite, she’s about five inches tall. This insubstantial, magical, cutely Walt Disneyish woman. But then this thing happens. She pauses in mid-air, and she looks down at herself, and she’s got quite small breasts—”

  “I thought you didn’t like that word.”

  “You’re right, but sometimes it seems right. Actually most of the time it’s the right word. Anyway, she’s got quite small breasts but quite large little hips, and large little thighs, and she’s wearing this tiny little outfit that’s torn or jaggedly cut and barely covers her, and she looks down at herself, a lovely little pouty face, and she puts her hands on her hips as if to measure them, and she shakes her head sadly—too wide, too wide. Oh that got me hot! This tiny sprite with big hips. And then a second later she gets caught in a dresser drawer among a lot of sewing things and she tries to fly out the keyhole but—nope, her hips are too wide, she gets stuck!”

  “Sounds sizzling hot.”

  “It was.”

  “You remember Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, when Marilyn Monroe tries to squeeze through a porthole on a ship, but her hips are too wide?”

  “I don’t remember that. I better rent that.”

  “It would be funny if Tinker Bell inspired old Marilyn,” she said. “You know, I found the Disney Peter Pan vaguely sexual, too.”

  “Well, yeah—J. M. Barrie was a fudgepacker from way back, and clearly some of that forbiddenness sneaks into every version.”

  “The girl floats around in her nightgown,” she said. “That interested me quite a bit. And she’s too old to live in the room with the littler kids—I remember that. I must have been about twelve. I saw it with my friend Pamela, who I think has turned out to be a lesbian, bless her soul. We used to build tents in her bedroom and eat saltines and read the medical encyclopedia together. It showed the dotted lines where the surgeon would cut cartilage from the ears if you were having an operation to make your ears flare out less. And at the end of each entry it would say, it was done in a question-and-answer format, it would say, ‘When can marital relations be resumed?’ And the answer always was four to six weeks. No matter where the dotted lines were, it seemed you could always resume marital relations after four to six weeks. I used to read the articles aloud to her. And once she read a whole romance novel aloud to me in one night. I fell asleep somewhere in the middle and woke up again later—Pamela was a little hoarse, but she was still reading. And once, maybe it was that same night, I told her a sexual fantasy I’d had a few times, in which I’m at a place where I’m told I have to take off all my clothes and get into this tube.”

  “Sorry, get into what?”

  “This tube, a long tube,” she said. “I slide in, feet first, and I begin moving down this very long tube, on some sort of slow current of oil. I’m sure you remember those water slides that you set up on the lawn, that destroyed the grass? This was not as fast-moving as that, much slower-moving, but no friction, and in a luminous tube. As I went along these pairs of hands would enter the tube a little ahead of me, waving around blindly, looking for something to feel, and then my feet would brush under them, and they would try to grasp my ankles, but their fingers were dripping with oil, and as I moved forward they slid up my legs, holding me quite hard, but without friction because of the oil, and then they pressed down as my stomach went under them, and then they sort of turned to encounter my breasts, the two thumbs were almost touching, and they slid very slowly over my breasts, pushing them up, and believe me, in this fantasy I had very large heavy breasts, it took a long time for the hands to slide over them.”

  “Wow! What did old Pamela say when you told her that?”

  “I finished describing it, and I asked her if she had thoughts like that and she said ‘No!’ in quite a shocked voice. She said, ‘No! Tell me another.’ You think maybe my tube was what turned her into a lesbian?”

  “Well, it certainly would have turned me into a lesbian. But now—can you clarify one thing for me? Do you right now have the light on or off in the room you’re in, the combination living room dining room?”

  “I have it on. It’s a table lamp. I could turn it off if you’d like.”

  “Perhaps that, perhaps that would …”

  “Listen.” There was a click.

  Chapter One

  from THE FERMATA

  I am going to call my autobiography The Fermata, even though “fermata” is only one of the many names I have for the Fold. “Fold” is, obviously, another. Every so often, usually in the fall (perhaps mundanely because my hormone-flows are at their highest then), I discover that I have the power to drop into the Fold. A Fold-drop is a period of time of variable length during which I am alive and ambulatory and thinking and looking, while the rest of the world is stopped, or paused. Over the years, I have had to come up with various techniques to trigger the pause, some of which have made use of rocker-switches, rubber bands, sewing needles, fingernail clippers, and other hardware, some of which have not. The power seems ultimately to come from within me, grandiose as that sounds, but as I invoke it I have to believe that it is external for it to work properly. I don’t inquire into origins very often, fearing that too close a scrutiny will damage whatever interior states have given rise to it, since it is the most important ongoing adventure of my life.

  I’m in the Fold right now, as a matter of fact. I want first to type out my name—it’s Arnold Strine. I prefer Arno to the full Arnold. Putting my own name down is loin-girding somehow—it helps me go ahead with this. I’m thirty-five. I’m seated in an office chair whose four wide black casters roll silently over the carpeting, on the sixth floor of the MassBank building in downtown Boston. I’m looking up at a woman named Joyce, whose clothes I have rearranged somewhat, although I have not actually removed any of them. I’m looking directly at her, but she doesn’t know this. While I look I’m using a Casio CW-16 portable electronic typewriter, w
hich is powered by four D batteries, to record what I see and think. Before I snapped my fingers to stop the flow of time in the universe, Joyce was walking across the carpeting in a gray-blue knit dress, and I was sitting behind a desk twenty or thirty feet away, transcribing a tape. I could see her hipbones under her dress, and I immediately knew it was the time to Snap in. Her pocketbook is still over her shoulder. Her pubic hair is very black and nice to look at—there is lots and lots of it. If I didn’t already know her name, I would probably now open her purse and find out her name, because it helps to know the name of a woman I undress. There is moreover something very exciting, almost moving, about taking a peek at a woman’s driver’s license without her knowing—studying the picture and wondering whether it was one that pleased her or made her unhappy when she was first given it at the DMV.

  But I do know this woman’s name. I’ve typed some of her tapes. The language of her dictations is looser than some of the other loan officers’—she will occasionally use a phrase like “spruce up” or “polish off” or “kick in” that you very seldom come across in the credit updates of large regional banks. One of her more recent dictations ended with something like “Kyle Roller indicated that he had been dealing with the subject since 1989. Volume since that time has been $80,000. He emphatically stated that their service was substandard. He indicated that he has put further business with them on hold because they had ‘lied like hell’ to him. He indicated he did not want his name mentioned back to the Pauley brothers. This information was returned to Joyce Collier on—” and then she said the date. As prose it is not Penelope Fitzgerald, perhaps, but you crave any tremor of life in these reports, and I will admit that I felt an arrow go through me when I heard her say “lied like hell.”

  Last week, Joyce was wearing this very same gray-blue hipbone-flaunting dress one day. She dropped off a tape for me to do and told me that she liked my glasses, and I’ve been nuts about her since. I blushed and thanked her and told her I liked her scarf, which really was a very likable scarf. It had all sorts of golds and blacks and yellows in it, and Cyrillic letters seemed to be part of the design. She said, “Well thank you, I like it, too,” and she surprised me (surprised us both possibly) by untying it from her neck and pulling it slowly through her fingers. I asked whether those were indeed Cyrillic letters I saw before me, and she said that they were, pleased at my attentiveness, but she said that she had asked a friend of hers who knew Russian what they spelled, and he had told her that they meant nothing, they were just a jumble of letters. “Even better,” I said, somewhat idiotically, anxious to show how completely uninterested I was in her mention of a male friend. “The designer picked the letters for their formal beauty—he didn’t try to pretend he knew the language by using a real word.” The moment threatened to become more flirtatious than either of us wanted. I hurried us past it by asking her how soon she needed her tape done. (I’m a temp, by the way.) “No big rush,” she said. She retied her scarf, and we smiled quite warmly at each other again before she went off. I was happy all that day just because she had told me she liked my glasses.

  Joyce is probably not going to play a large part in this account of my life. I have fallen in love with women many, many times, maybe a hundred or a hundred and fifty times; I’ve taken off women’s clothes many times, too: there is nothing particularly unusual about this occasion within which I am currently parked. The only unusual thing about it is that this time I’m writing about it. I know there are thousands of women in the world I could potentially feel love for as I do feel it now for Joyce—she just happens to work at this office in the domestic-credit department of MassBank where I happen to be a temp for a few weeks. But that is the strange thing about what you are expected to do in life—you are supposed to forget that there are hundreds of cities, each one of them full of women, and that it is most unlikely that you have found the perfect one for you. You are just supposed to pick the best one out of the ones you know and can attract, and in fact you do this happily—you feel that the love you direct toward the one you do choose is not arbitrarily bestowed.

  And it was brave and friendly of Joyce to compliment me that way about my glasses. I always melt instantly when I’m praised for features about which I have private doubts. I first got glasses in the summer after fourth grade. (Incidentally, fourth grade is also the year I first dropped into the Fold—my temporal powers have always been linked in a way I don’t pretend to understand with my sense of sight.) I wore them steadily until about two years ago, when I decided that I should at least try contact lenses. Maybe everything would be different if I got contacts. So I did get them, and I enjoyed the rituals of caring for them—caring for this pair of demanding twins that had to be bathed and changed constantly. I liked squirting the salt water on them, and holding one of them in an aqueous bead on the tip of my finger and admiring its Saarinenesque upcurve, and when I folded it in half and rubbed its slightly slimy surface against itself to break up the protein deposits, I often remembered the satisfactions of making omelets in Teflon fry-pans. But though as a hobby they were rewarding, though I was as excited in opening the centrifugal spin-cleaning machine I ordered for them as I would have been if I had bought an automatic bread baker or a new kind of sexual utensil, they interfered with my appreciation of the world. I could see things through them, but I wasn’t pleased to look at things. The bandwidth of my optical processors was being flooded with “there is an intruder on your eyeball” messages, so that a lot of the incidental visual haul from my retina was simply not able to get through. I wasn’t enjoying the sights you were obviously meant to enjoy, as when you walked around a park on a windy day watching people’s briefcases get blown around on their arms.

  At first I thought it was worth losing the beauty of the world in order to look better to the world: I really was more handsome without glasses—the dashing scar on my left eyebrow, where I cut myself on a scrap of aluminum, was more evident. A girl I knew (and whose clothes I removed) in high school used to sing “Il faut souffrir pour être belle” in a soft voice, to a tune of her own devising, and I took that overheard precept seriously; I was willing to understand it not just in the narrow sense of painful hair-brushing or (say) eyebrow-tweezing or liposuction, but in some broader sense that suffering makes for beauty in art, that the artist has to suffer griefs and privations in order to deliver beauty to his or her public, all that well-ventilated junk. So I continued to wear contacts even when each blink was a dry torment. But then I noticed that my typing was suffering, too—and there, since I am a temp and typing is my livelihood, I really had to draw the line. Especially when I typed numbers, my error rate was way up. (Once I spent two weeks doing nothing but typing six-digit numbers.) People began bringing back financial charts that I had done with mistyped numbers circled in red, asking, “Are you all right today, Arno?” Contact lenses also, I noticed, made me feel, as loud continuous factory noise also will, ten feet farther away from anyone else around me. They were isolating me, heightening rather than helping rid me of my—well, I suppose it is proper to call it my loneliness. I missed the sharp corners of my glasses, which had helped me dig my way out into sociability; they had been part of what I felt was my characteristic expression.

  When I started today, I had no intention of getting into all this about eyeglasses. But it is germane. I love looking at women. I love being able to see them clearly. I particularly like being in the position I am in this very second, which is not looking at Joyce, but rather thinking about the amazing fact that I can look up from this page at any time and stare at any part of her that calls out to me for as long as I want without troubling or embarrassing her. Joyce doesn’t wear glasses, but my ex-girlfriend Rhody did—and somewhere along the line I realized that if I liked glasses on women, which I do very much, maybe women would tolerate glasses on me. On naked women glasses work for me the way spike heels or a snake tattoo or an ankle bracelet or a fake beauty spot work for some men—they make the nudity pop out at me; they
make the woman seem more naked than she would have seemed if she were completely naked. Also, I want to be very sure that she can see every inch of my richard with utter clarity, and if she is wearing glasses I know that she can if she wants to.

  The deciding moment really came when I spent the night with a woman, an office manager, who, I think anyway, had sex with me sooner than she wanted to simply to distract me from noticing the fact that her contacts were bothering her. It was very late, but I think she wanted to talk for a while longer, and yet (this is my theory) she hurried to the sex because the extreme intimacy, to her way of thinking, of appearing before me in her glasses was only possible after the less extreme intimacy of fucking me. Several times as we talked I was on the point of saying, since her eyes did look quite unhappily pink, “You want to take out your contacts? I’ll take out mine.” But I didn’t, because I thought it might have a condescending sort of “I know everything about you, baby, your bloodshot eyes give you away” quality. Probably I should have. A few days after that, though, I resumed wearing my glasses to work. My error rate dropped right back down. I was instantly happier. In particular, I recognized the crucial importance of hinges to my pleasure in life. When I open my glasses in the morning before taking a shower and going to work, I am like an excited tourist who has just risen from his hotel bed on the first day of a vacation: I’ve just flung open a set of double French doors leading out onto a sunlit balcony with a view of the entire whatever—shipping corridor, bay, valley, parking lot. (How can people not like views over motel parking lots in the early morning? The new subtler car colors, the blue-greens and warmer grays, and the sense that all those drivers are leveled in the democracy of sleep and that the glass and hoods out there are cold and even dewy, make for one of the more inspiring visions that life can offer before nine o’clock.) Or maybe French-door hinges are not entirely it. Maybe I think that the hinges of my glasses are a woman’s hip sockets: her long graceful legs open and straddle my head all day. I asked Rhody once whether she liked the tickling of my glasses frames on the inside of her thighs. She said, “Usually your glasses are off by then, aren’t they?” I admitted that was true. She said she didn’t like it when I wore my glasses because she wanted my sense of her open vadge to be more Sisley than Richard Estes. “But I do sometimes like feeling your ears high on my thighs,” she conceded. “And if I clamp your ears hard with my thighs I can make more noise without feeling I’m getting out of hand.” Rhody was a good, good person, and I probably should not have tried to allude even obliquely to my Fold experiences to her, since she found what little I told her of Fermation repellent; her knowledge of it contributed to our breakup.