Nicholson Baker - The Fermata

“That’s rape,” I said again.

“Right,” he said.

“Okay, but now, say it was someone you knew.”

“A chick I knew?”

“Right,” I said. “Someone you really thought was beautiful.”

“Someone I’d always wanted to fuck and she’d turned me down?”

“Okay, yeah,” I said.

“I’d probably kiss her before I hosed the shit out of her. I’d hit the remote and I’d say, ‘You turned me down, but you’re my puppet now.’ ” Then he had a further thought. “No, okay, say if she was a nice girl, a really nice girl. Say I go after her, thinking I’m going to hose her, and I hit the button on the remote and freeze her, and then I’m starting to grab her tit or something, and something comes over me, and I can’t go through with it, even though I want to so bad, and a big tear runs down my face, and I say, ‘I could have had you, but I let you go.’ Right? That would be a real tearjerker. And I take off. But first— mint! — this would be mint! — first I write my phone number on her tit. Right? That’s what I would do in my imagination, but I’m telling you what I would do for real, right? I’d go after somebody I always thought was great-looking, like this chick I know from high school, Christine — her mother is fucking fantastic. Her mother is nice . Yeah, Wheelers’ is probably the first house I’d go to — I’d hose the shit out of Christine’s mother, then I’d hose the shit out of Christine.”

I was distressed by this conversation with the security guard. I felt that he and I were radically different sorts of people (a realization that can be in itself dispiriting, because you want the rest of randomly encountered humanity to be comprehensible), but at the same time I felt that a case could be made for our fundamental likeness, and I really didn’t want to be like him. Morally, I am different from that security guard — no, let’s not mess around: morally, I’m a little better than he is. I am. But I acknowledge that some of the things I have done are — let me just say it — rape-like acts that some observers would condemn more vehemently than they would condemn the security guard’s offhand remote-control fantasies, because I should know better, and because, in my own case, they really happened.

But I mention the security guard, and Arlette the paralegal, and my friend Bill Asplundh, not so as to raise the fretful subject of rape theory. I just want to point out what I think is my own oddity: unlike any of those I questioned, what I want to do, and what I in fact end up doing, in the Fold is to live out my perennial wish to insert some novelty into the lives of women. Arlette wanted to mash her clit-folds into the life of a woman; the security guard wanted to insert his small-minded dick into the lives of women; but I don’t want to be quite that direct. Instead I replace the white chalk in Miss Dobzhansky’s hand with blue; I put the fortune-cookie fortune under one of Joyce’s bottles; I leave the vibrator where the woman in the library can find it. I am still imposing my will on their lives, of course — but I want to arrange things so that they discover my imposition, and I want the imposition, however calculated, to have an element of simulated fortuity. I’m captivated by the simple idea of putting something in the path of a woman, so that she can choose to look at it or read it, or, on the other hand, choose to walk on by. In college I bought four brand-new copies of Kinflicks and left them one by one on a sidewalk near a gingko tree in front of one of the freshman dorms so that women on their way to class would see them and bend to pick them up and take them off with them. (A woman in my own dorm had told me that the book was very “orgasmy”—I hadn’t read it then, and still haven’t.)

Which brings me at last to my own self-published erotica, or “rot.” A while back, while I was lying out in the sun in my yard on a beach towel, I became interested in the idea of using the Fold to have a woman encounter my very own words. Too undisciplined to write simply for the pleasure of writing, I nonetheless felt able to write as long as it served some specific sexual end. At first I imagined hovering at a bookstore a few shelves away from a woman who appealed to me: as she pulled a book off the shelf and began to flip through it (something like Eva Figes’s Light ), I would fermate and inscribe dirty messages in the margins, like “I need a big jumping clit under my tongue right now!” Then I’d watch her read my annotation and shake her head with disgust and replace the book. But maybe she wouldn’t replace the book; maybe she would buy the book anyway; maybe she was in fact in the bookstore looking not for a copy of Eva Figes’s Light but for a live nude tongue on her jumping clit; maybe my marginalia would be taken by her as a portent of sexually fructifying times to come.

Oddly enough, I didn’t act on this rather crude idea until quite recently, because the thought of vandalizing a trade paperback with pornographic graffiti made me sad: a wheelchair-bound art-history teacher in college once gave an impressive sermon out of the unparalyzed side of his mouth on the viciousness of writing in books one didn’t own, and I took it to heart. A few months ago, however, I tried the idea out one evening at the Waterstone’s bookstore on Exeter. A finely constructed woman of thirty in a black curl-necked cotton sweater with gray sleeves stood in the fiction section and pulled a copy of something called Paradise Postponed by John Mortimer off the shelf. It was a red paperback. I hadn’t read it, though I’d heard of John Mortimer. She glanced at the back, then flipped to the first page, then skipped to somewhere in the middle, where a scene caught her eye. She read for a few seconds, and then she did what I was hoping she would do: she curled the corner of the page under her fingertip so that she would be able to turn to it immediately when she needed to — thus signaling to me that she was definitely going to look at the next page. I snapped my fingers to invoke the Clutch and gently removed the Mortimer novel from her hands and wrote on the page that she would be turning to, in as elegant a cursive as I could muster, I need to pop my nuts on a pair of small sexy tits right this second!! I snapped out of the time-clutch and watched her from a safe distance as she turned the page and read what I had written. She did an almost imperceptible double take, then flipped around in the book to see if there was anything else handwritten. She looked about her, noticed me absorbed in a copy of The Princess of Cleves , and, because (though somewhat rough-hewn) I look “intellectual” (the glasses), she was reassured that whoever had written that desideratum in the book she had picked up had done so a while ago, perhaps months ago, and was in any case no longer in the store. Then she sighed conclusively and put the book back on the shelf and inspected something by Muriel Spark called Loitering with Intent . Titles are so important to lonely browsers. I could of course have written something dirty in that book, too, but I resisted the urge, not only because it would have made her fearful that someone was singling her out somehow, but also because I couldn’t for some reason make myself write nasty things in a book written by a woman. I could deface John Mortimer without compunction, but not so Muriel Spark. I hovered there until the woman in black cotton finally left (with Breakfast at Tiffany’s ), and then I bought the Mortimer myself, since I had ruined it. I still have it; I mean to read it someday.

Many, most of my fold-adventures are like that — inconclusive; wastes of time by some standards. But I like when my little schemes don’t really work out — I still feel that I have created some bond between myself and the woman with whom I have decided to meanwhile away the time. The woman in black will eventually forget about the writing I did for her at the top of the page of Paradise Postponed , since it is difficult to retain the active memory of minor incidents which are in a small way inexplicable and random-seeming, and yet for a short time that evening, for a few hours, she might possibly have entertained herself by speculating about what sort of person would browse Waterstone’s writing apostrophes of smut in modern English novels. She might have brought it up that weekend at a dinner party — maybe someone was talking about the history of the Waterstone’s building and she would be reminded of the oddity I had given her and start to tell the story and realize that she would be slightly embarrassed to repeat in company what I had written, and then someone else at the table, a catty gay man, would say, “Oh, come on, Pauline, you can’t bring us this far and not finish us off, we’re grown-ups after all,” and she would repeat to the dinner party, in her own thoughtful, even voice, surprising herself that she did in fact remember the text, “Well, I believe that it said, ‘I need to pop my nuts on a pair of sexy little tits right now.’ Exclamation point.” And there would be whooplets of mock-shocked mirth. All because of me, all because of me.