Nicholson Baker - The Fermata

But happily, I’m good at remaining undetected in close quarters with a woman. I have never yet scared anyone. And this particular woman’s place was perfect, since it was all open and loft-like, with a bedroom supported by columns up a spiral flight of stairs. I sat on her bed listening intently to her putterings below, and when I heard her steps on the stairway, I stopped time and went down and past her (ducking under her arm) and sat on a chair in the kitchen. The tops of my ears were getting a little sore from all the time-pervertive pulling and pushing on my glasses, but it was a tiny price to pay. The water began running in the pipes, always a good sign. I pushed my triune crotch-lump against the cool Corian edge of the countertop.

Eventually I Dropped and went up to see whether it was the sink or a shower or a bath and found her bent over, naked, rummaging around in the back of a drawer, while the lower tap filled her tub. I studied her profile for half a minute: she had a lively, somewhat thin face, oily from sunscreen, with a high nose bridge, a nose that was more intelligent-seeming than her eyes, if that makes sense. (Though I have to be careful about evaluating the intelligence of women’s eyes in the Fold, since a person’s look varies so radically from instant to instant, and I could just be catching her at a moment of unflattering inattention.) The corners of her mouth were tight as she reached in her drawer. I couldn’t see what her hands were searching for under her folded sweatshirts and leggings, but I had my hopes.

Just before a woman takes a bath, as the water is running, her nudity suddenly releases all of its charged ions of lewdness and becomes wholly artistique: she is naked in order to bathe herself, and bathe is such a smooth-surfaced, wide-voweled, modest word that you can appreciate the particulars of her beauty without any of your own erectile fierceness getting in the way. She is suddenly a modern dancer, a water-sprite, a wood-nymph, a naturist, her tits are not conceivably tits but breasts, and no matter how funkily they are shaped they appeal to the lovingly appreciative Ansel Adams in us rather than to the groper and pocket-pool player. This despite her manifest protosexual charms, her softly domey areolae, the Moorish arch her ass made in giving way effortlessly to her thighs, all of which I was able to review thoroughly for the first time with her up and on her feet. I didn’t spend too long in that early Fold, though, eager for her to get on with her intention, whatever it might be. I got out of sight and turhed time on and distracted myself by reading half an article in Conde Nast Traveler on a lake system in Canada (my bather’s name, given on the magazine’s address label, was Michelle Hoffman), and then, when I heard the water stop, I checked in on her again.

Her bath had begun. Her knees were above the surface of the water, the kneecaps flat and square, and the water was clear (no genitally irritating bubble bath for this woman), and she had just lifted one arm, so that long pale-green streamers and trailers of water poured stilly off of it. Her hand loosely held a red washcloth, soft with a surround of unfailing water. I could easily have knelt in the bathtub with her and jacked looking at the way the riverine trails of water joined at her elbow and fell off her, a little like those festive triangular vinyl flags hung around used-car lots.

(Actually no — they didn’t make me think of a used-car lot at all at that moment; they made me think of the way a woman’s urine falls from between her legs, confusedly, in a stegosaurian fan of hard-to-source cockscomb-triangles. I used to think that the reason why women’s urination sounded so intricately different from men’s had only to do with the end-points of this splayed outflow, since there were so many separate points of collision with toilet water, as opposed to the single focused plunge of the continuous male stream — but the other day, listening to Joyce pee in the ladies’ room from the next stall, I realized that it isn’t only that. The more important difference is that male urine makes no noise as it flies out of the penis-knob, because it has become, due to the inordinate length of the male urethra, a coherent, laserlike flow. The only noise that men make, then, is the noise their departed urine produces later, in colliding with whatever texture and substance it collides with. But women’s urethras are not stealthy. They are short, since they are not needed to help pulse out a comeshot (I ignore the touchy subject of fejaculation, or ejillulation, here); their urine wings excitedly out rather than releasing itself in a single laminar column, and this exit-spraying itself makes a distinct noise, a likable, high whistle-warble-hissing that you can hear over the broadcast of complex terminal splashings. “Making water” as a euphemism applies much better to what women do than what men do.)

But I didn’t want to come yet with Michelle — I was curious about whether she had any sexual plans herself. To be honest, my feelings had been a little hurt that she had not brought home the story I had written for her to keep forever — although I consoled myself by thinking that maybe she was just being considerate in reburying it, not wanting to interfere with some top-secret interlover dropoff. I did feel a little rejected, and I was hoping to restore my cheer by watching her do something all by herself that would serve as real concrete proof that I had gotten to her in an actively crotchy sense. Just a bath was not enough. Kneeling by the edge of the tub, I spotted something dark in the water near her feet. Her toes were curled around it. When I put my head very close to the surface of the lavishly chlorinated water, steadying myself on one of her knees, I determined that the object was, as I had of course hoped but hadn’t really allowed myself to expect, a large black realistic rubber dildo. She was bathing with her rubber dildo — oh poetry! She was relaxing, letting her eyes close, not thinking about that single-minded submarine cruising around out of sight, beyond her bent knees, but because it was unquestionably there in the water with her, it was working under her thoughts and keeping her just on the edge of conscious arousal. It was time to take some chances with her.

I removed all the clothes from the tall wicker laundry hamper that stood under the bathroom window and piled them on her bed and got inside the hamper with a wrinkly dark-gray linen shirt of hers tied loosely over my face; though I was in something of a fetal position, and though I could not see all that well through the linen, I could at least get some notion of what was going on as she proceeded with her bath. I used my glasses to Unfold; at once her hand tightened on the red washcloth and lots of water fell along her arm. Then nothing much happened for a long time. She wiped beads of sweat off her forehead with the washcloth several times, and she sighed a total of three long sighs. There were splashes whose nature I couldn’t determine. She shaved her legs for a while. She ran some more hot water and stirred it around. Once or twice she whispered aloud, going over fragments of remembered conversation, as far as I could tell. She did what looked to be a set of leg lifts. When the pain in my knees became too acute I Dropped, climbed out, and took a break downstairs, finishing the article on the Canadian lakes. I sang the Beatles song “Here, There and Everywhere,” walking around in her living room. I left my clothes in a little mound on her coffee table and went back upstairs and stuffed myself back in her hamper with the linen shirt over my head; I knew good things were going to happen. After ten or fifteen minutes she stood, letting the water pour off her, and toweled herself. I was on alert to push up my glasses at any second if she decided to throw the towel into the hamper, but she didn’t. After she dried her hair, she put the towel around her shoulders, and then she planted her hands on the edge of the bathtub and knelt with one leg in the bathwater and one outside on the floor. “Ooh that’s so cold,” she said, when her vadge touched the rounded edge of the tub.