Nicholson Baker: U and I: A True Story

I felt myself to be stylistically influenced — deeply so. Even in the matter of skin I was his plagiaristic follower: a short time after I finished the book, finally joining the ranks of novelists, my psoriasis got suddenly much worse. It covered my entire buttock region, as Day-Glo-colored as a baboon’s, and most of my legs, much of my back, my neck, my arms. My navel was a disaster. I Vaselined myself like a Channel swimmer. I did not want to be touched or seen. There were grease stains and blood spots on all my pants and on all the pillowcases — my ears bled. I had to wipe off the receivers of pay phones on my shirttail after I used them. And truly no man has ever itched like I itched — it was a hyper-itch, a deep, swarming sort of interior toothpick sculpture, a subcutaneous “blooming buzzing confusion.” I had bloody skin under my fingernails from compulsive scratching that I cleaned out as I read by drawing the corner of a ten-page chunk of Of the Farm or Hugging the Shore under the rim of the nail and brushing the pink profligacy away. I put off the trip to the dermatologist that I knew was imminent, though, because I wanted to see whether my disease had it in itself to be worse, more consuming, than Updike’s disease — not only in the structural arthritic symptoms, which I had learned to live with, but right on the surface. Whose prose cells divided more uncontrollably? Whose canvas of visible self was more erythematously elaborated? I wanted to reach that mystical moment he describes, when “I couldn’t turn my head without pain.” And I did reach it. One afternoon I stood naked in the middle of my study with my arms extended and realized that I did not want to walk, sit down, dress, read, think, or live. I was becoming a giant lesion. I went to the doctor. He offered me the choice of going to Mass General or Beth Israel for phototherapy; I chose Beth Israel, because it was slightly closer, but as I was driving home I groaned, because I remembered that Updike had written that he went to Mass General: I might have sprung out at him again as he showed up for a treatment, wearing the prescribed pair of comically zooty, wraparound, retinally protective NoIr sunglasses. But I thought no, by this time (1988) he surely had bought his own home PUVA booth for thirty thousand, avoiding the long drive and unpleasant interaction with other people’s skin flakes that mark these visits. I loved going, though, at least for the first year: since quitting my job I had no professional obligations, no jotted meetings in a time management system, no schedule of any kind, and my thrice-a-week irradiations were a welcome bit of external bustle. By the time I moved away from Boston and bought Self-Consciousness , where the psoriasis essay appears in revised form, Updike had pulled ahead of me again: he had switched to the grandmaster drug methotrexate, the liver-witherer, while I hung fire with PUVA; so that even if I had chosen Mass General, I realized, I never would have run into him and become his friend and swapped repellent plaque-tectonic anecdotes at the Harvard Gardens on Cambridge St. and finally reached that inconceivable eventuality when, inspired by phototherapy’s clubby locker-room atmosphere of goggles, towels, sunscreen ointments, and hasty dressing, he might have asked, “Do you golf?”

But that’s all right. I don’t need to be his psoriatic friend and fellow sufferer. I have, in at least one tiny and characteristically dermal instance, communicated with him in a permanent way. I’m not referring to my half-nuts theories that I am Dale in Roger’s Version or that he is really talking about me in a book review of The Pigeon. In that 1981 story about musicians on the West Coast that he told me he liked, I wrote:

The first violinist … began inspecting his left index finger, pressing it tenderly with his right thumb.

“How’s your callus doing?” the cellist asked.

“Professor Belanyi said to file it down, so I just took a nail file and zapped the hard part off.” He extended the finger. There was a yellowish area on the end that had been flattened by a file. “It hurts when I start playing, then the skin warms up and it gets flexible.”

The cellist said, “You know that Miriam’s callus on her middle finger split once just before a concert, and she had to play the whole Lalo concerto with a Band-Aid on?”

In Updike’s 1984 novel, The Witches of Eastwick , in a passage that I can finally look up and quote exactly, because my book is nearly done, Darryl praises Jane’s cello playing:

“You have precision.… Without precision,

beaucoup de rien

, huh? Even your thumb, on your thumb position: you really keep that pressure on, where a lot of men crump out, it hurts too much.” He pulled her left hand closer to his face and caressed the side of her thumb. “See that?” he said to Alexandra, brandishing Jane’s hand as if it were detached, a dead thing to be admired. “That is one beautiful callus.”

Laughably tiny, you say? Hard to credit? Maybe. Still, I suspect that Updike would not have written about Jane’s beautiful cello-callus unless I had first written about a musical callus that I had once seen and touched in Southern California. Because I exist in print, Updike’s book is, I think, ever so slightly different. For a minute or two, sometime in 1983, the direction of indebtedness was reversed. I have influenced him. And that’s all the imaginary friendship I need.