Nicholson Baker - The Fermata

Whenever I hesitated and needed inspiration, I simply rested my hand on the ass of the sunbathing woman beside me, sometimes sliding the fingers under her leg-hole, sometimes resting my hand on the fabric; sometimes squeezing, sometimes lightly slapping. I tried putting the typewriter on her ass but found it was too unsteady to proceed. Once, though, I pulled her bikini bottom off and sat right down on her softness, looking out past her brown legs at the tableau vivant of the waves, ass to ass with my reader-to-be. It was pleasant to wiggle and circle around, feeling our massed loose-muscled ass-flesh move as one over our deep bones: it was almost a form of communication. And if I knelt beside her and pushed outward on her asscheeks, I could expose her ane, and I did this more than once, getting a great deal of pleasure out of feeling my own plein-air Arnality bared to the sky and holding hers open at the same time. Hers was a fine brown dot, like a tiny asteroid-impact crater, which repaid close study. Women’s anes never used to interest me in my teens and early twenties — I think that they are one of the true acquired tastes. They are discrete, singular, clearly bounded, focused, in contrast to the bounteous plied gyno-confusion of the vadge.

When I had finished a fair copy of the story, I put it in a plastic food-storage bag and closed the bag with a twist-tie. I excavated the sand below her right hand, where she had been digging, and I buried the bagged story there, packing the sand as tightly as I could and restoring the hole she had dug to the smooth contours that her idleness had given it. Her arm was warm. Her hair, by the way, was bobby-pinned up, blond with dark roots. I positioned myself behind a nearby sand dune and took hold of my glasses at the bridge and pulled them down, restarting the present for the first time since I had rediscovered my powers. Through the binoculars, I watched her imperturbably dig, as if nothing had happened. It is always a kick to see a woman come alive again after I’ve paused her for an extended period: she has no way of knowing that an instant of time has just passed that was hugely richer in content than any of the instants that immediately preceded it. An immense pale-blue Norwegian cruise ship of a millisecond has just docked and stout tourists have disembarked from it and bought straw hats and trinkets and they have all reboarded and the ship has backed its tonnage away, its propeller doming the water — and yet she thinks that all the milliseconds of her recent past are equivalently in scale, little skiffs and junks floating here and there in the harbor. And I, who have lived consciously through, even piloted, that enormous single millisecond, have forgotten to some extent how much better a woman is when she is not motionless, when her shoulder blades, for instance, can move subtly around in her back; her aliveness is always something of a revelation to me as well.

This woman’s sand-thinned fingertips felt the unexpected slidey movement of the plastic bag after a minute or so. She raised her head to look over at what she had found, trying not to lift her upper body off her towel and expose too much Jamaica. She pulled my bagged story out of the sand and brushed it off and undid the twist-tie. And then she began reading it. I am not kidding— she actually began reading what I’d written . When I saw her slide the first page of my double-spaced typescript to the back of the pile, still lying on her stomach but with her elbows out, her chin on her hands, I wormed my fist into my swimsuit and took hold of my stain-stick. (I had of course put my suit back on, since the world was with me now.)

Here follows what I had given her to unearth and read, slightly edited (as op-ed pages say) for space and clarity:

MARIAN, A RARE-BOOKS LIBRARIAN, WAS MARRIED TO David, who taught journalism classes at the local rural state college. His own journalistic days were over and he had become kind of pathetic. He was addicted to a certain brand of nasal decongestant, and had to squirt up noisily every few hours, which Marian didn’t really mind except when they had guests. She was an early riser, while her husband stayed up until two-thirty and three, reading magazines he had once written features for with groans of scorn. They didn’t have a whole lot of money, because they were paying for David’s son by an earlier marriage to go to Wesleyan. One Saturday they had a big argument after David went out to buy some plants and came back with a two-thousand-dollar ridem lawn-mower in his van. It was the neighbor kid’s job to mow their lawn, twenty-five dollars each time, which wasn’t unreasonable since there was a lot of lawn, so there was no need at all for this huge expense. David said that he had been compelled to buy it because it was a new model whose engine incorporated some innovation of the cylinder head that he’d read about in Popular Mechanics and it was their duty to support companies that continued to fund research and try new things. Marian was very angry and upset. It was like the time he had bought two pyramid-shaped beehives and a complete kit of beekeeping equipment for four hundred dollars. There had been engulfing flows of honey for one year, and then both hives had mysteriously and depressingly died. Also the honey had been “somewhat gamey,” to use David’s euphemism — meaning it tasted distinctly of cow. On the new ridem mower David defiantly mowed half the back yard (they had two useless acres), maneuvering around the two tarp-shrouded beehives, and then he came in to make some iced tea and kick back. Marian told him she wanted to be separated from him for a while, so he packed the top layer of papers in his office and some clothes and moved out.

Immediately Marian felt happier. Over the next few days, she got rid of the gigantic television, which had always bothered her, and she put away the two primitivist portraits of David’s Connecticut ancestors. She dressed with more care, and when a man at the bank picked up a deposit receipt that she had dropped, she smiled at him in a way she hadn’t smiled at anyone in a long time. She felt available.

The new ridem lawn-mower had to go back, of course. But because David had already used it, it was now officially a used lawn-mower. The guy at the dealer quoted her a derisorily low buyback price, and out of defiance she told him to forget it and walked out. Fortunately, when she told her mother that she had finally kicked David out, her mother promptly came through with a check for three thousand dollars. Money worries eased for the moment, she hired the neighbor kid to mow the rest of the lawn using the new green ridem mower. His name was Kev. She watched him from various windows as he jounced around on her lawn. He had ostentatiously deliberate rips in the legs of his jeans from which his brown knees protruded, and he was wearing brown work boots. His shirt was off. He was wiry; he had that adolescent ability to bend at the waist and not produce a little bloomp of waist fat. The small side muscles in his upper arms had a sort of a sideways S shape that called out to her. They were the muscles he would use if he were supporting his own weight over her.

She watched him lean into a turn up the slight slope toward the tractor tire in the middle of the front yard. The previous owner had put it there, painted it white, and planted peonies in it. David had insisted on keeping it as it was, he being one of those non-gay would-be camp enthusiasts who rave automatically over anything tacky, and now Marian, too, had grown to like it. She had never expected to be living in a house like this, on a rural highway a mile out of a town one town over from the town the college was in, getting sexed up watching a seventeen-year-old neighbor kid drive her lawn-mower around. His chest muscles were indisputably square and flat; the cord of his Walkman headphones looked frail and kinky against his skin. How could he possibly be hearing any music with the mower going? She thought of gently removing his headphones and his pants, and then of making some sort of herbal wreath for his young penis, mainly of Sweet Genovese Basil (a kind she had recently planted), like a laurel crown; perhaps as a final touch she could insert a short sprig of curly parsley into the opening of his urethra, so that when she slid and stroked his soft newborn sex-skin twistingly up and down, murmuring to him not to worry, that it was just nature’s way, and he finally whimpered the conclusive whimper, the sprig of parsley would flip right in the air from the force of his clotted sperm. But wait, wait — she didn’t really want to have sex with a seventeen-year-old kid; moreover she didn’t like the boy’s mother, who was a complainer and a conspiracy theorist and none too bright. So Marian just paid the boy the twenty-five dollars, plus a two-dollar tip.