Nicholson Baker: The Fermata

BUT — I DO LIKE TRANSCRIBING MICROCASSETTES. I MENTION this because only a few days after I wrote that very first sur le vif chunk about Joyce’s exuberant pubic hair, I was immersed in one of her tapes, dog-paddling along in the moonlit scum-less lily pond of her consciousness, my eyes fixed on the green letters that she called forth from my fingertips, when I glanced up to see her walking briskly toward me, wiggling a pen and looking to one side as if preoccupied. I made a move to take off my headphones, but she held up her palms, indicating that I should continue transcribing, evidently feeling a twinge of the guilt which considerate people often feel when they drop off an unusual amount of work for a temp to do in a short interval of time. Obedient, I kept on transcribing. “Subject indicated that high credit was in the low six figures,” etc. Joyce meanwhile wrote something on a scrap of paper and affixed it with one of the rubber bands from my rubber-band tray to the cassette and put it on top of my monitor. It said, “No rush, thanks.” I nodded, making my mouth into a downward U of conspiratorial assent. I didn’t tell her that I was typing her own earlier tape. I let her walk away. And the sight of her diminishing figure, while at the same time her voice talked so tiredly and yet evenly in my ear of high credit and low credit (this bank job was beneath her, surely), made my interest in her, my love for her, flare up. I loved her, for instance, for not writing “Thanx” on her note and not using an exclamation point. I watched her go back to her desk and sit down and pull in her chair and pick up the phone. She was a woman . Though I’m thirty-five, as I seem to want to point out on every page, I am often surprised by the simple observation that there are women, that they wear rustly layers of clothing, that they have lips and teeth which on occasion they employ to smile at me. They take their existence for granted, but I don’t, by any means. I think, too, in all modesty, that I have an unusually good instinct for detecting when an average-looking woman senses herself entering a new phase of attractiveness. I can detect better than others when a woman feels that she is looking unusually good that day, or when something like a new haircut, or the discovery of a store that has the kind of clothes that she looks best in, reminds her of the fact that romance and flirtation are part of life, too. Joyce is perhaps not, objectively considered, stunning, though she is pretty — but these happen to be, I think, miracle weeks for her, as she learns to her surprise how she can be beautiful in a thirty-year-old rather than a twenty-three-year-old sort of way. The French braid is part of it. I doubt very much that anyone at work has said that to her—“You are entering a new phase of beauty, Joyce”—but some of them must have noticed it, too.

Joyce had been eating something — yogurt, probably — as she dictated. Normally I am not fond of this practice. But when she said the word “unplanned” and I heard one of those odd palatal moments, most often associated with yogurt, in which the tone of her voice changed suddenly, went nasal on me, I simply could not believe I was this close to her. My head was practically in her mouth! I had a great deal of work left to do, though, so I snapped time off in order to have a few minutes of freedom to think about what I might do with Joyce if I switched off time in a big way. (I often do this: I Drop just to itemize all the neat things I could do if I did Drop right at that moment.) I could stay in the Fold for several years, mastering carpentry and other building trades, and construct an entire alternate city for her, a city with irregular spires and elevated walkways, where I would transport her, and then, turning time back on, I would wait in one of the deserted buildings I had built until she discovered me, and I would profess total bewilderment at how we had gotten there and why we had been left to fend for ourselves, and eventually she would get desperate and we would fuck sitting up at twilight, looking into each other’s eyes, in the middle of a cobblestone street, each cobble of which I had laid by hand.

Or I could write her a short, immoderate, uncool letter telling her how wonderful it was to do her credit memos and how little I had expected to meet someone of her charm on this floor of the MassBank building, and how extremely glad I was that she liked my glasses, and I could paper-clip the note to the back of the papers I gave back to her. Or I could borrow her keys from her purse and go see what her apartment looked like. (I used to hang around cafés in Cambridge on Sundays, reading women’s handwritten poetry journals while in the Fold, but the surprising thing was how little you learned about what the women were actually like, what their manner was like, by reading their poetry journals — though their handwriting told you something. Eventually I found that a more dependable way to get an idea of a particular woman without actually talking to her was by hitting PAUSE, finding her address, and borrowing her keys to see how she lived.) Or I could put one of my special homemade editions of a pamphlet called Tales of French Love and Passion in a trash can just as Joyce was tossing something out, so that she would find it and perhaps read it. Or I could ask her out to dinner. That seemed the most reasonable thing to do.

But in the end, needless to say, I borrowed her keys and checked out her apartment. I dropped into the Fold at around four-thirty. Fortunately for me she lived on Garden Street, one of the streets that slopes down Beacon Hill, a fifteen-minute walk, and not out in Brookline or somewhere, though I would have been willing to walk to Brookline, or at least borrow a courier’s bicycle to get there, something I have done often enough when I have needed to get around while the universe is off. (The stopped traffic makes driving a car in the Fold impractical.) Joyce lived on the fifth floor, in a small oddly shaped studio attached to an incongruously long narrow sunporch, where she apparently slept. There were a number of flat canvas shoes, floral, turquoise, in front of her sofa, which was a faded blue foldout and looked second-hand. The floor was painted gray. A plastic tampon wrapper crinkled underfoot in the bathroom. Her makeup was thrown haphazardly in a metal box that had once held some sort of French biscuit. A Piazzetta poster was on one wall; a small framed illustration taken from some eighteenth-century textbook of perspective was on another. Her alarm was set to seven-forty. She was reading several books; the only ones I recall now were Mary Midgley’s Wickedness and D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form . There was a bottle of maple syrup and a copy of a Dover book, 500 Small Houses of the Twenties , on the kitchen table. A cat, a lithe adolescent whose sex I didn’t bother to determine, was estoppeled in the middle of jumping from a counter onto a chair. I tried to get some notion of what Joyce wore when she wasn’t wearing work clothes, but as usual, when I hit the clutch to snoop, I couldn’t: it is not intuitively obvious what items go with what others. But her mess was good — I love messy women. (On the other hand, I love neat women.)

The best thing about her apartment, though, in my opinion, was the mattress pad. It was one of those bumpy therapeutic ones, made of hundreds of rounded inch-high hillocks or pingos of foam, that people use to dampen the pressure points of too firm a mattress. I had never known anyone personally who used one. It gave me great pleasure to slip my hand under the disorderly blankets to feel it under the sheet. My fingers looked as if they were playing the piano as they passed over its repetitively dimpled surface. I pulled up a corner of the fitted sheet. The foam pad was a dark-yellow color; when I stared at it, the pattern of identical shadows tricked my eyes with false dimensionalities. I felt as if I were looking at a rough approximation, in foam, of time’s true geometry. Everyone else stayed at the level of the sheet, and only I could drop below it.