Nicholson Baker - The Fermata

But though I was, am, extremely single, and though I had suffered a serious attack of loneliness involving a tape gun only hours before, and was probably giving off the same rads of availability and generalized longing as she was, I didn’t strike up a conversation with her, because I was smart enough to know by now to spare a woman like this my tentative but occasionally successful pickup technique, since even if we did go out to dinner a few times and have a few nights in bed, it would all be essentially sad, essentially wrong. I wasn’t the sort of man that she really wanted, and she wasn’t for me, either — there would be a temporary wonder and excitement in those loose neck-holes, and then the differences between us would doom us — and why do any of that, when all I really wanted to know was how, exactly, she was naked beneath her clothes? I could imagine some of the unseen her in advance, having undressed so many women on the sly in my life — I’m aware of certain connoisseurial correlations between the type of face a woman has and the type of back she has: in fact, I felt that I had a fairly well defined sense of how her back would look and feel, how high her hidden waist was. But breasts were always a wild card, and the ass, too (I mean the real-world ass, not the dirty-magazine ass), was a thing of a billion unique variations.

I wanted, failing knowledge of her nakedness, simply to announce to her, in a quiet, serious voice, “I am, too.” And when she turned her face to me in sociable puzzlement, I would gesture at her book and say, clarifyingly, “I mean that I’m naked, too, beneath. Really, I am.” Maybe she would roll with this lameness. One of the very first times I ever made out with a girl was in a park when I was fifteen: we lay on a slight slope, among many short conifer trees. Eventually her hand undid my pants and went into my underpants, and she hoisted my moist troika out into the world and left it there. Neither of us looked down for a long time — I was concentrating on making her come without taking off her jeans, which was not all that easy. Finally we gave up, needing real privacy to make any headway, and then we both looked down, and there was a sight of my naked self that I had never seen, or never paid attention to — an almost shockingly awful sight: the ultra-pale skin of my horizontalized balls was stretched very tight, stretched to a state of egg-glaze glossiness (because the waistband of my too-small underpants was underneath them, pushing my balls up), and it was overwritten with many delicate, infantile blood vessels, as in a Lennart Nilsson photograph of the head of a developing fetus. And — adding considerably to the overall obscene effect — sparse hair follicles made little white bumps in the stretched skin. Though it was highly unpleasant, or at least unromantic, to look at (my girlfriend flinched, I think, seeing more of me than she had been prepared for just then), I couldn’t help noting to myself with some satisfaction how surprisingly spermatious the ball-hairs themselves appeared, with their long wispy tails and their ovoid follicle heads: hair-sperms surrounding the egglike testicles, trying to fertilize them, as if my body were offering to anyone who cared to look its own magnified, three-dimensional representation of the task that my gonads were programming their product to perform.

The woman in front of me at the library, it now occurred to me, was older than that sixteen-year-old girlfriend of so long ago, and she might be willing to have the strange resemblance between ball-hair and spermatazoa pointed out to her — but then again she might not. So much depended, of course, on how you presented the information — a tone of self-surprised irrepressibility often worked best. My ex-girlfriend Rhody once had a barbecue and invited six or seven friends over. My job was to get the charcoal to light. Standing with my feet planted far apart, leaning over the small hemispherical grill, I fanned the coals so strenuously and rapidly with the Arts section of the Globe that my balls started flapping backward and forward in exactly the same rhythm as my arms. It was a unique experience, to be able to feel those cocktail onions to-ing and fro-ing with such gusto. I stopped to get my breath and as the flames grew looked up at the woman standing near me holding a drink (one of Rhody’s friends from work), and I said to her, in an amazed voice, “My balls are actually flapping . It’s a new experience.” She nodded sideways, smiling, and sipped her drink; she didn’t seem to mind my telling her that. I fanned the coals some more and then we talked briefly of barbecue starter-coils. “But you seem to like flapping,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to deprive you of that.” God, how I treasure those little flirtatious moments.

The book-checkout line was not short, so I had plenty of time to think as many sexual thoughts as I wanted to while I looked at the blue shoulder strap and freckled skin of Ms. Henna in front of me. The title of her book was exerting ever more roentgenizing power over my state of mind; I was almost out of control. Naked, naked, naked, naked, naked . I wanted so very much to see her back and big soft buttcheeks. I imagined her face-down on a massage table, with her soft hair pinned out of the way, her eyes half closed, dreamy from the steam room, a white towel over her legs. I would walk in bearing a large white bowl with a green rim that was filled with quarts of semi-cool tropical oil and a dozen or so stone eggs of various marbled colors. I would set the bowl on a small rolling table very near her head and begin to stir and tumble the stone eggs slowly with my hands in the oil, like a sedated saladier , so that they clicked and clocked against one another and against the sides of the bowl, and then I would let my hands close around two of them, a reddish one and a black one with gray and violet markings, and I would press these into the muscles of her back, on either side of her spine, cupping them in my palms. I would work my hands alternately as a purring cat works its paws, so that the stone eggs would palpate themselves slowly down her back, carrying their own oil with them. When they threatened to go dry, I would drop them back in the bowl, and jostle their submerged forms again with my fingers, and I would select two others; these I would again hold against her, manipulating them with my hand muscles so that they turned end over end under my slippery palms. She would try to guess by feel alone what colors they were: “Hmm, I think the left one is gray and white stone shot with pink,” she would say. But no, it was a quartzy blue. I would help her turn over so that she was on her back and I would turn the slippery eggs on her high thigh muscles and on either side of her mound, and then I would have her choose which two she wanted inside her. She would pick two and I would palm the stone eggs in, so that I could hear the muffled clocking sounds as one hit the other, and as I pulled my hand away, she would bear down with her muscles and I would see the skin of her vadge stretch as she gave birth to one of them, like those wonderful midnight sea-tortoise egg-laying scenes on Nature , where you can see the tortoise’s vagina swell and stretch over the sand pit as another egg appears, and it would fall out all slick in my hand.

The more graphic and specific my sexual imagery grew, the more the relatively simple idea of strapping the vibrating Butterfly onto her became, by contrast, tame and gentle and uninvasive — the very least I could do for her. Her neck-holes, her back, had the definite look of a vibrator-lover, anyway. I let her check out her book (she and the library man had a moment of feeling eye contact, as I had expected) and walk out onto the street, and then I brought the universe down and got out the Butterfly. My plan was to put it on her as she walked home, because I thought that she would feel it less, perhaps, if she was in a state of movement than if she was sitting down. But I had to be sure that it wouldn’t startle her — I wasn’t interested in disturbing her or making her feel she was losing her sanity. Consequently I had to test the product out on myself: I kicked off my pants and underpants, and, placing a Handi Wipe between the pleasure-nubbins of the machine and my scrotum so that I wouldn’t be exposing Ms. Henna to any of my germs when I did finally strap it on her, I stepped into its straps and pulled it snugly in place. I walked around the lobby of the library with it on, looking at the high corners of the room and concentrating on what it felt like. I was surprised to find that, though fairly tight, the black straps around my ass and thighs weren’t perceptible at all as I walked. What was perceptible, unfortunately, was the width of the Butterfly itself between my thighs. Perhaps if the bulk of my genitalia weren’t in the way the device would have nestled more comfortably, but even then it might be instantly apparent to the woman that something was there. I recalled reading a news item about a large woman who shoplifted portable TVs by walking out with them between her legs; but it wouldn’t do here to have a shape that the woman could feel as she walked. But all was not lost — I found that when I was sitting down, even with my legs crossed, it was as if the rubbery shape of the Butterfly didn’t exist. My body adjusted instantly to its presence. I put the two free Sonic-brand batteries in the pink plastic battery case and turned the dial until the vibration started. On full, the noise was appallingly loud. She would hear it. Even at the lowest level, which is where I would have it when I put it on her (so that it would remain below the threshold of consciousness, would be a vibration that was perceptible only as a change of mood, not as an actual physical signal), it made a sound that was not so much a buzz as a kind of low chuckling. My only hope now, I realized, was that she wasn’t going to walk home, but was going to take the bus or the subway, where the transit noise would mask its noise. As for the feeling of the Butterfly on my own equipment: it was not positively unpleasant, but didn’t feel at all wonderful, either (maybe the Handi Wipe was part of the problem), which I was on the whole pleased about, since it made the fact that women come so hard with vibrators all the more mysterious and womanly and different from male pleasure.