Nicholson Baker - The Fermata

“Next time,” she said to him, a little shyly, “I’d like you to show me how to drive that thing.” She noticed that he had been careful to put his shirt on before he came to the door to be paid — a considerate touch. He was a good kid. He said, “Sure.”

When he had left, Marian did the dirtiest thing she could think of, which was to drive fast to the supermarket, buy a copy of Cosmopolitan , drive home, pull the shades, and squat naked on her living-room floor directly over the magazine, opened to a full-page head shot of Patrick Swayze. “Look at what I’m showing you, Patrick,” she said, stroking the underside of her open thighs and pulling on a few pubic hairs to add a piquant sensation. Patrick’s eyes gazed unblinkingly up at her from between her legs, half obscured by her bush. “That’s right, look at what you’re making me do to my big clit,” she said. “Do you want to see my big fat cunt come? Do you?” Soon her eyes locked with Patrick’s and she sat suddenly down on his nose and half-smiling mouth, making the doubly slick magazine buckle. It was all so out of character for her that she felt glowing and refreshed afterward.

The next week had a day and a half of rain, and the lawn needed a mow badly by Saturday. Kev couldn’t come by until three-thirty because of soccer practice. Marian spent the day pruning several overgrown lilacs and reading some more of the new biography of Jean Stafford. She felt, by the time Kevin showed up, that her sexual energy was very much under control and that she wouldn’t make some sort of regrettable pass at him. He explained how to drive the mower, with many apologies for the fact that he knew how to drive his own family’s mower better, saying that basically you did this and that and you had to watch out for this and that. She paid him fifteen for the lesson, which he at first wouldn’t take and then did take with fairly good grace, and she waved and began mowing. It was exhilarating to churn through the grass, especially when she drove up the slight grade toward the house and heard the engine strain a little. At first she mowed in a kind of boustrophedon pattern, back and forth, and then she changed to an Aztec square spiral pattern, homing in on the white tractor tire. As she got more confident about turning sharply and using the accelerator, she began to understand why David had wanted to own this machine — the feeling of being in control of it, cutting this wide swathe, was really terrific.

Over time, though, she noticed that there was a powerful distraction from the mere feeling of twelve-point-five-horsepower empowerment, which was that the constant vibration of the machine had gradually won over her clit-shaft — in fact it had enlisted her entire perineum. She began to think of two long, lithe men lying back with hiked-up T-shirts in Dying Slave poses over the tractor tire, looking up at the sky and slowly pulling on their Michelangelesque penises. She imagined herself lying naked on the fresh cool grass with a huge slow wooden wheel suspended above her, and twelve nude men tied securely to the spokes of the wheel, their heads pointing toward the center, all of their testicle-sacks hanging halfway down their unsnipped cocks, all of them masturbating languorously with their one free hand. As the Catherine wheel turned above her, she felt the gaze of all twelve pairs of eyes admiring her hips and pubic hair, seeing her pressing her thighs together, which were right in the center, and as each man’s cock ticked into position over her face, she opened her mouth and held her tongue out and closed her eyes and felt warm semenous splashes fall on her lips and neck.

By this time she was in reality driving around and around the white tractor tire, mowing grass that had already been mowed, near coming but not quite able to. She was glad young Kev wasn’t in sight right now, or she might not be able to contain herself. She went inside, had a shower, and finally came harder than she had in quite a while, lying on her bedroom floor with her legs up on her bed, one finger polishing her nug, the other hand reaching around her leg and rudely giving herself the finger. She prolonged the aftergasms by squeezing her clit gently as if it were her nipple.

But when she thought it over an hour later, she was not perfectly satisfied. The orgasm itself, though it had unquestionably had a beginning, a middle, and an end, had lacked, despite its intensity, the lush greenery and winding roads and hot, fruit-filled bazaars that her hour of ridem mowing had led her to expect almost as her right. Perhaps she needed to do something to pep up her masturbational technique; perhaps her clitoris was simply tired of her own fingers after all these years. The vibration of the mower had felt so unexpectedly good. A year earlier, David’s car had developed a problem with wheel alignment, so that the steering wheel started wobbling dramatically at about sixty-three miles an hour, and she now remembered that before he had gotten it fixed she had been obliged once or twice to pull over to the shoulder and get her orgasm out of the way so that she wouldn’t be a hazard to others on the road. She simply needed more vibration, faster vibration, in her life — it was that simple. The idea of sexual devices had seemed faintly ludicrous in previous years, and when it stopped seeming ludicrous it began seeming too trendy — she couldn’t escape the suspicion that the majority of vibrators were still given as joke gifts at office good-bye parties. But why shouldn’t she at least try a toy of some kind? She had gotten rid of David, she was beginning her life afresh. She went back to her Cosmo , avoiding Patrick Swayze (who looked a little the worse for wear anyway), and found in the back pages an ad for a company in San Francisco, “women owned and operated.” They rushed her a catalog, sensing her breathlessness, and a week and a half later the good old UPS man was asking her to sign on line 34 for a large white box that Marian expected to contain four hand-held devices and a container of Astroglide. The UPS man, she noticed with relief, was, though handsome, not perfect — with a slight double chin and a pleasant asymmetrical smile and a hint of David’s incipiently stocky shape.

When she opened the box, however, she discovered that she had gotten only three toys, not the full four she had ordered. There was the startlingly realistic hand-painted slightly curving Arno Van Dilden Heavydick, with movable balls and suction-cup base; there was the Swiss-made TorqueMaja Desnuda, with its twelve special “power-frig” torque settings; there was the mixeresque Oster plug-in coil model with its little cabinet of attachments; but she was missing the forty-dollar, four-foot-long, double-headed Royal Welsh Fusilier with dual slidable foreskins — it was on back order, to be shipped in several days. At first Marian was irritated, wanting to have all four artifacts to try one after another, but then she found that the ones she had at hand were more than enough to get her through the next forty-eight hours. She became especially fond of the fast-humming and refreshingly un-penile Oster. She pirated the surge protector from her neglected PC and plugged it in below the plug from her washing machine (safety first), and plugged the clit-knobbed Oster into it, and, using it, came with mystical intensity sitting naked on the cold lid of the washing machine with the door to the nearby garage wide open, looking down at her trembling titfat, as all her bras and underpants spun around in damp darkness underneath her. And when the clock radio woke her at six-thirty on weekdays, she unplugged it from its extension cord and plugged in the Oster in its place, relishing the illusion that time could be stopped while she started the day right with a brisk coil-driven clasm.