Nicholson Baker - The Fermata

Feeling Joyce’s mattress pad made me want to kiss her. I not only wanted to kiss her, which I could do easily using time trickery — I wanted her to know I was kissing her and to want me to be kissing her, which was a great deal harder to bring about. I turned on one of her kitchen taps; a trickle of water came out (water pressure is never good in the Fold), and I drank a little from one of her kitchen glasses. Just before I left her apartment and walked back to work, I placed, under an antique glass bottle on the sill of her sunporch-bedroom, entirely out of sight, without knowing exactly why I was doing it, a folded fortune-cookie fortune that I had found in a bowl of forgotten things on top of her refrigerator. It said, “Smile when you are ready.” Then I walked back to work. When I had put on my headphones and reassumed the lost, somewhat spiritual expression of the concentrating transcriber, I snapped everything back to life.

But I had entirely misjudged my capacity to handle the sound of Joyce’s abruptly resumed business voice in my ears so soon after I had gotten such a huge and illicit idea of her apartment. The fact that she had no notion of what I had just done, that she did not know the full extent of my knowledge of her mattress pad, pained me much more than I expected — not because my unlawful entry was wrong, exactly, but because I felt that my fuller sense of her life was going to make it more difficult for me to ask her out, rather than easier. The more I learned about her, the more I liked her, with a friendly, almost marital sort of well-wishing affection; but also the harder it was to imagine my having dinner with her and pretending that I knew nothing except what she was willing to tell me. Her pubic hair, her braid, I could handle just fine: they were graphic sights and textures whose memories wouldn’t get in the way of any later, more preliminary flirtation, but still-lifes like the maple syrup and the Dover book on the kitchen table made me imagine spending my life with her, and how could I possibly spend my life with her if I had to keep the secret of my Fold-proficiencies and activities from her? This sort of doubt was not entirely unfamiliar, but in the past I had simply concluded (most recently after Rhody broke up with me over this very issue) that I was never going to get married, and I was content with that conclusion. This time, though, I found it depressing to think that I had just been in her apartment, in her life, sitting on her bed, and yet that if I didn’t act on my love — or whatever such a hybrid emotion should be called when you learn important things about a woman all in the wrong order — by asking her out, then I might not, in a year or so, if I ran into her on the street, even remember her name: I would have to use the Fold then simply in order to be polite to her.

OBVIOUSLY I WAS MISTAKEN IN PREDICTING EARLIER IN these pages that Joyce would play a minor role in my autobiography. I finished doing her tape and walked over to her office to deliver it, intending to ask her out. But she was talking to a witty charming SVP whom I found intimidating and didn’t want to compete with. Instead, I just nodded at them both and gave her the papers. At five o’clock I left. I got to my place feeling extremely sad, hopeless, almost tearful. On my desk were three vibrating dildos of varying degrees of stylization, along with a woman-designed vibrating butterfly, and a Jeff Stryker penis pump. They were all “mint-in-box,” as toy collectors say. I sat down in my chair and looked at them, feeling great waves of misery. I had ordered them from a company in San Francisco, paying extra for Federal Express delivery, in the momentary grip of the idea that I would be able sometime soon to watch Joyce use one or more of these devices on herself. I bought the penis pump as an afterthought, so that I would have it in reserve as a bargaining tool: “You go ahead and use these vibrating dildos for me, and I’ll pump my penis for you with this penis pump.” But I couldn’t afford these machines — almost two hundred dollars’ worth of sexual hardware — and it seemed pathetic and undignified for me to have them in storage in my life when I would never be able to use them with someone like Joyce. Sipping wine, with the radio playing some progressive jazz construct with the usual cleanly miked bongos and synthesized tribal flutes and pre-enjoyed Steely Dan chords, I filled out the return slip, wrote, Nobody to use these with, unfortunately , next to the REASON FOR RETURN line, and one by one I tucked them back in the carton they came in (they had been responsibly packed in recycled styrene), my self-pity mounting to impossible heights. I wanted … I wanted to tell Joyce my dream of a flying blue brassiere: that we would be stranded in a rowboat in the middle of a sulfur lake, and the only way we could escape is if she took off her shirt and removed her flying blue brassiere and kneeled in its cups and took strong hold of the straps and pulled up on them for lift, using them as a steering-bridle. I would ride piggyback, and she, noble bare-breasted horsewoman of Lycra, would lift us and swoosh us to verdant safety. I also wanted to tell her the dream I had many mornings just before I woke up, that my mouth was filled with an enormous wad of decayed Bazooka chewing gum: I had stuffed in eight or nine loaves of gum because the first taste was so attention-gettingly tart, but now it was changed for the worse — sticky and oppressive, almost doughy, almost friable, and I tried to hook its unpleasant mass out of my mouth with my finger and couldn’t remove it, but on waking I discovered that the gum-mass was in reality just my tongue, which as I moved up toward consciousness had made its sluggish presence known against the reviving nerves of the roof of my mouth. I wanted to tell Joyce these dreams. But she wasn’t my lover, and lovers are the only people who will put up with hearing your dreams.

I don’t think that loneliness is necessarily a bad or unconstructive condition. My own skill at jamming time may actually be dependent on some fluid mixture of emotions, among them curiosity, sexual desire, and love, all suspended in a solvent medium of loneliness. I like the heroes or heroines of books I read to be living alone, and feeling lonely, because reading is itself a state of artificially enhanced loneliness. Loneliness makes you consider other people’s lives, makes you more polite to those you deal with in passing, dampens irony and cynicism. The interior of the Fold is, of course, the place of ultimate loneliness, and I like it there. But there are times when the wish for others’ voices, for friendliness returned, reaches unpleasant levels, and becomes a kind of immobilizing pain. That was how it felt as I finished packing up the box of sex machines. I used a “tape gun” to tape it back up, just like the pros at Mailboxes USA. A tape gun is a triggerless machine with a handle that enables you to dispense tape from thick rolls one-handed. It has a set of sharp metal teeth that cut the tape at will, like the row running along a box of plastic wrap that can hurt your finger if you rummage overhastily in a drawer, but its whole function stands in swords-into-plowshares opposition to the gun — it is meant to seal, to mend, to hold together, rather than to injure and rend. I bought it at an office-supply store as a reward after an awful week working for the Department of Social Services typing Social Security numbers in boxes that were not spaced to fit either of the type sizes of the typewriter. Now, in my moment of despair, taping up the carton of sex toys, I lifted this nicely balanced tape gun and held it to my temple, and investigated my wish to die — and in doing so I immediately realized how laughably far I was from actual suicide, and how good, happy, lucky, fundamentally, my life was. The idea of trying to commit suicide over a box of vibrating dildos with a tape gun held at my temple struck me as almost comic. It got me over the hump of Joyce-loneliness. I decided that what I really needed to do was go to the library and get out some more autobiographies and read them, so that I would have a better idea of how to write this one properly. Before I left, I cut open the carton that I had just sealed up with tape and took out one of the vibrating dildos ( not the Pleasure Pallas, a medium-sized Japanese-made one in the shape of Athena holding an oddly flamed torch of wisdom in her hands, the torch being in fact a pliant clitoris-stimulating projection; but rather the Monasticon, which was a large twisting Capuchin monk holding a clit-nuzzling open manuscript), and put it in my briefcase. I brushed my teeth. Then I reconsidered, and put the hot-pink vibrating Butterfly in my briefcase as well. It would be a waste of life’s possibilities to send them dolefully back, I thought, just because I might never use them with Joyce. Much more sensible to distribute them free at the library.