Nicholson Baker: The Fermata

At first I thought it was worth losing the beauty of the world in order to look better to the world: I really was more handsome without glasses — the dashing scar on my left eyebrow, where I cut myself on a scrap of aluminum, was more evident. A girl I knew (and whose clothes I removed) in high school used to sing “Il faut souffrir pour être belle” in a soft voice, to a tune of her own devising, and I took that overheard precept seriously; I was willing to understand it not just in the narrow sense of painful hair-brushing or (say) eyebrow-tweezing or liposuction, but in some broader sense that suffering makes for beauty in art, that the artist has to suffer griefs and privations in order to deliver beauty to his or her public, all that well-ventilated junk. So I continued to wear contacts even when each blink was a dry torment. But then I noticed that my typing was suffering, too — and there, since I am a temp and typing is my livelihood, I really had to draw the line. Especially when I typed numbers, my error rate was way up. (Once I spent two weeks doing nothing but typing six-digit numbers.) People began bringing back financial charts that I had done with mistyped numbers circled in red, asking, “Are you all right today, Arno?” Contact lenses also, I noticed, made me feel, as loud continuous factory noise also will, ten feet farther away from anyone else around me. They were isolating me, heightening rather than helping rid me of my — well, I suppose it is proper to call it my loneliness. I missed the sharp corners of my glasses, which had helped me dig my way out into sociability; they had been part of what I felt was my characteristic expression.

When I started today, I had no intention of getting into all this about eyeglasses. But it is germane. I love looking at women. I love being able to see them clearly. I particularly like being in the position I am in this very second, which is not looking at Joyce, but rather thinking about the amazing fact that I can look up from this page at any time and stare at any part of her that calls out to me for as long as I want without troubling or embarrassing her. Joyce doesn’t wear glasses, but my ex-girlfriend Rhody did — and somewhere along the line I realized that if I liked glasses on women, which I do very much, maybe women would tolerate glasses on me. On naked women glasses work for me the way spike heels or a snake tattoo or an ankle bracelet or a fake beauty spot work for some men — they make the nudity pop out at me; they make the woman seem more naked than she would have seemed if she were completely naked. Also, I want to be very sure that she can see every inch of my richard with utter clarity, and if she is wearing glasses I know that she can if she wants to.

The deciding moment really came when I spent the night with a woman, an office manager, who, I think anyway, had sex with me sooner than she wanted to simply to distract me from noticing the fact that her contacts were bothering her. It was very late, but I think she wanted to talk for a while longer, and yet (this is my theory) she hurried to the sex because the extreme intimacy, to her way of thinking, of appearing before me in her glasses was only possible after the less extreme intimacy of fucking me. Several times as we talked I was on the point of saying, since her eyes did look quite unhappily pink, “You want to take out your contacts? I’ll take out mine.” But I didn’t, because I thought it might have a condescending sort of “I know everything about you, baby, your bloodshot eyes give you away” quality. Probably I should have. A few days after that, though, I resumed wearing my glasses to work. My error rate dropped right back down. I was instantly happier. In particular, I recognized the crucial importance of hinges to my pleasure in life. When I open my glasses in the morning before taking a shower and going to work, I am like an excited tourist who has just risen from his hotel bed on the first day of a vacation: I’ve just flung open a set of double French doors leading out onto a sunlit balcony with a view of the entire whatever — shipping corridor, bay, valley, parking lot. (How can people not like views over motel parking lots in the early morning? The new subtler car colors, the blue-greens and warmer grays, and the sense that all those drivers are leveled in the democracy of sleep and that the glass and hoods out there are cold and even dewy, make for one of the more inspiring visions that life can offer before nine o’clock.) Or maybe French-door-hinges are not entirely it. Maybe I think that the hinges of my glasses are a woman’s hip-sockets: her long graceful legs open and straddle my head all day. I asked Rhody once whether she liked the tickling of my glasses-frames on the inside of her thighs. She said, “Usually your glasses are off by then, aren’t they?” I admitted that was true. She said she didn’t like it when I wore my glasses because she wanted my sense of her open vadge to be more Sisley than Richard Estes. “But I do sometimes like feeling your ears high on my thighs,” she conceded. “And if I clamp your ears hard with my thighs I can make more noise without feeling I’m getting out of hand.” Rhody was a good, good person, and I probably should not have tried to allude even obliquely to my Fold experiences to her, since she found what little I told her of Fermation repellent; her knowledge of it contributed to our breakup.

Well! I think I have established that there is an emotional history to my wearing of glasses. So in saying that she liked them, tall Joyce — who as I sit typing this towers above me now in a state of semi-nudity — was definitely saying the right thing if she was interested in getting to my heart, which she probably wasn’t. You have to be extremely careful about complimenting a thirty-five-year-old male temp who has achieved nothing in his life. “Hi, I’m the temp!” That’s usually what I say to receptionists on my first day of an assignment; that’s the word I use, because it’s the word everyone uses, though it was a long time before I stopped thinking that it was a horrible abbreviation, worse than “Frisco.” I have been a temp for over ten years, ever since I quit graduate school. The reason I have done nothing with my life is simply that my power to enter the Fold (or “hit the clutch” or “find the Cleft” or “take a personal day” or “instigate an Estoppel”) comes and goes. I value the ability, which I suspect is not widespread, but because I don’t have it consistently, because it fades without warning and doesn’t return until months or years later, I’ve gotten hooked into a sort of damaging boom-and-bust Kondratieff cycle. When I’ve lost the power, I simply exist, I do the minimum I have to do to make a living, because I know that in a sense everything I want to accomplish (and I am a person with ambitions) is infinitely postponable.

As a rough estimate, I think I have probably spent only a total of two years of personal time in the Fold, if you lump the individual minutes or hours together, maybe even less; but they have been some of the best, most alive times I’ve had. My life reminds me of the capital-gains tax problem, as I once read about it in an op-ed piece: if legislators keep changing, or even promising to change, the capital-gains percentages, repealing and reinstating the tax, the rational investor will begin to base his investment decisions not on the existing tax laws, but on his certainty of change, which mischannels (the person who wrote the op-ed piece convincingly argued) in some destructive way the circulation of capital. So too with me during those periods when I wait for the return of my ability to stop time: I think, Why should I read Ernest Renan or learn matrix algebra now, since when I’m able to Drop again, I’ll be able to spend private hours, or even years, satisfying any fleeting intellectual curiosity while the whole world waits for me? I can always catch up. That’s the problem.