Nicholson Baker - The Fermata

In my idleness I had of course the option of letting my thinking drift in a number of mildly erotic directions at any time, but it seemed important to resist that lure for the moment. It would have been so easy to imagine three women in white bathing suits lying on white deck chairs on a pale-blue cruise ship with their heads poised in different directions, each with one knee up and with her eyes closed, each holding a forgotten bottle of sunscreen that was the color of those older Tercels and Civics whose owners had used their garages for storing other things than their cars and whose paint had consequently oxidized into states of frescoesque, unsaturated beauty, like M&Ms sucked for a minute and spit back out into the palm for study. It would have been so easy to think hard about those leggy thighs flowing into the leg-holes of those white bathing suits; about one of the women straightening one thighy leg and bending the other; about how good the sun made them feel. But I wanted to steer clear of the leg-holes until at least twelve-thirty, preferably one-thirty if possible, because it was so very delightful out in the sun, and there was, after all, an infinitude of complicated and intellectually rewarding ideas in the world that I might use my morning of otium liberate to consider, helped toward states of scholarly attentiveness by the intrinsic good of the blue sky, and if I gave my hindbrain the slightest opportunity to work up a comely sexual shape, my meditative range would inevitably narrow, the sex-thoughts would replicate busily, they would begin to polymerize, forming short, slippery narrative chains which would bind with other formerly innocent images and voluptualize them, contorting themselves like lipoproteins into self-contained masturbatory sub-realities, and from there into fully realized frigments of my invagination, and I would find that I had turned over onto my back to let the sweat on my chest declare itself, and I would bend one knee and perhaps reach tentatively inside my bathing suit to make sure everything was shipshape, and five minutes later I would be inside my apartment, where my eyes weren’t adjusted to the dimmer light, and where it was dissatisfyingly cool and unsunny, and I would send forth four gray stripes of fatherhood and fatherhood by-products onto a tree-patterned paper towel that was guaranteed to be made with more than seventy-five percent post-consumer waste, each stripe shorter and more albuminous than the last. And after that, the rest of the day would itself take on a post-consumer-waste sort of tone, an after-the-grand-fact tone, as when, on Saturdays, the mail was delivered unusually early and I would drive home from an errand in the late afternoon looking forward to it in error, thinking, Well, this was certainly a dud day, but at least there’s still the mail to come, until I slumpingly remembered that the mail had already come — the usual bulk-rate packets saying “To Be Opened by Addressee Only” or “Sexually Oriented Material Inside” or “Over 70 Brand Spanking New Items!! We Command You to Order Today.”

So I tried to draw an impermeable mental oval around myself with a kind of fantasidal foam, meaning to keep all sex-pixxxels, all prelewds, all floptical jillusions, outside its perimeter — much the way a lovely double-bass player I once knew in Santa Cruz practiced all one afternoon in her apartment in cutoffs with a big white circle of anti-bug foam sprayed on the carpeting around her so that sugar ants would not keep crawling up her tanned and defiantly unshaved legs and up the pin of her instrument and up the tripod of her music stand. She had been very nice, very nice — a nice person to know, with a pair of gorgeously autonomous Jamaicas. I had spent one afternoon lying beside her on the beach eating vanilla cookies with her, and at one point I impulsively put one round cookie on each full turquoise cup of her bikini top. She made a tolerant warning sound, lifting her head for a moment, and ate both the cookies; I then brushed a crumb lightly from a breast, saying simply, “A crumb.” But we had never had sex, she and I. And when I brushed away that crumb, I did it with such a light, shy touch that I’d felt only an inanimate bikini seam, and none of the insurgent nipple-crowned weight beneath. Such a tragic loss of a chance! (This was when I was in my junior year, a Foldless time for me.) But that of course was why I remembered her now with such longing, rather than remembering any of the women with whom I had had sex or the hundreds I had surreptitiously undressed. So I should feel thankful that I’d been so shy in brushing away her crumb, since I had her to think about and miss and want now — except that, I reminded myself, I was not supposed to be thinking in sexual directions at all.

I tried to concentrate on the brain-muffling texture of the towel against my ear and cheek, and on its clean smell, and on how little I required female nudity in order to be happy with my life. Just the idea of how clean this beach towel was, how fast it had spun for me in the laundromat’s washing machine a few days earlier so that I could lie on it now, was more than enough for me. I recalled John Lennon announcing to the world that he could get high just looking at a flower. I didn’t need big breasts, big jeroboams of titflesh, big hot fleshpots shaking in their self-serve tit-boosting black breastiers — no, I could get high just lying on a towel. Towels, though, were unfortunately not an entirely uncharged subject for me: they were closely associated with my second successful fermation, a year after I had employed the time-transformer in Miss Dobzhansky’s class — and perhaps I should describe that early episode for the record right now.

(I have to say, as I spring around this way, that I can’t understand how real autobiographers like Maurice Baring or Robert Graves do it. How are they able to move so smoothly and so casually from a to b to c ? I’m humbled by the difficulty of presenting one’s life truly without seeming to be a proponent of overfamiliar nonlinear orthodoxies. It isn’t that I think my disorder so far is in any way swanky or artistic; it’s that when I try to be a responsible memoirist and arrange my experiences in their proper places on a timeline, my interest in them dies and they altogether refuse to allow themselves to be told. I find that I have to submit to every anecdotal temptation just as it arises, regardless of temporal priority, in order for it, for me, to flower adequately into words.)

So: chronofugation. The summer after fifth grade I used to go down the clothes-strewn stairs to the basement (the basement stairway was our dirty-clothes hamper) and spend major portions of the afternoon observing my family’s sheets and towels and clothes toil and spin. There was a safety interlock, a hinged inward-swinging tab, that cut the motor if the lid was opened during the spin cycle, but it was a simple matter to disable it: I just jammed it open with a pen. I stood at the washing machine for many hours, refining my appreciation of centrifugal force.

At its peak speed, the basket of a clothes-washer turns at something like six hundred revolutions per minute. Towels, which are ordinarily the very soul of magnanimous absorbency,are at six hundred r.p.m. compressed into loutish, wedge-shaped chunks of raw textility, apotheoses of waddedness, their folds so conclusively superimposed, and their thousands of gently torqued turf-tassels so expunged, or exsponged, of reserve capacity, that I feel, after the last steady pints of blue-gray water have pulsed from the exit hose and the loud tick from within the machine signals some final disengagement of its transmission, and the spinning slows and stops, as if I am tossing boneless hams or (in the case of washcloths) little steaks into the dryer, rather than potential exhibits in a fabric-softener testimonial. Often the spun goods display on removal a pattern of raised dots, where the fabric has vainly tried to pour itself out of the holes in the spinning basket in the wake of the water it has just reluctantly released.