Nicholson Baker - The Fermata

I was too crumpled in the hamper even to think of doing anything physical with my richard, but all I wanted in any event was the sight I was seeing; the sight of her leaning forward on her hands and rocking the weight of her hips down against the edge of the tub. “Where is that cock?” she said. “I want to see that cock.” She fished around in the water and pulled out the dildo and looked at it. She dipped it several times in the water and pulled it out, shaking it each time, evidently liking the way it glistened. Then she worked herself down the edge of the tub and suctioned the black dick onto the tiled shower wall at about her eye level. She moved her face over it, kissing it in the most wonderfully fetishistic way, and biting on it. “You like when I suck that big dick, don’t you?” she said. She put two fingers down on the edge of the tub and rocked forward on them, so that her clit was straddled. She let the head of the rubberdick pass over her closed eyelids, and then she stood up a little, one leg still in the bathtub and one out, and stroked her slit very fast while she circled the wall-mounted dick with her nipples. When she had straightened her legs completely, she was able to lean herself against the tile wall with the rubberdick between her legs and move its resilience over her clit-lump. Her forehead and nipples touched the cold green tile. She kissed the towel on her shoulders once. I was dying with visual happiness.

“You want this ass?” she asked the dildo and seemed to get an affirmative answer, for she turned away from it with her hands on the edge of the tub, wiggling her ass back and forth in front of it. The suction base lost suction and the cock fell suddenly onto a scallop-shell soap dish. “Aw, did I shock you, honey?” she said. “Am I going too fast for you?” She dipped it in the bathwater again, shook it off, and, straddling the tub, stuck it back on the edge of the tub and sucked it. “See how easy it is to get you hard again?” she said. She stood over it, pulling up on her pubic hair so that she could see her clit, and she said to the dildo, “You ready to fuck this nice clean cunt? Because I sure am ready for you. I bet you are. Are you big and stiff enough to fill this hungry cunt?” She bent her knees until its rubber head found her, and then she sat down hard on it. She fucked it bouncingly for a little while and then got off of it and went to get a mirror and propped it up so she could watch her rubberman going in and out. She fucked it some more. In the haze of the shirt of hers that I was wearing I watched her finger orbit her clit-folds until I was ready to weep at the lyricism of it. Was Michelle this nasty on a regular basis? Maybe not. She’d really had to grope to find the dildo in her dresser in the first place. This was not an everyday sort of autofuck for her, I didn’t think. My UPS truck might have had something to do with it.

I kept perfectly still, hardly breathing, while she came closer and closer to coming. She would stop suddenlyjust before she came, fucking slowly up and down on the dildo some more, then frigging for a while. She started making some incredible clenched-teeth noises, followed by pheasanty sounds so superb that I was surprised I had been able to live without them. Her little finger went into her asshole and she squinted, cleared for takeoff. She started saying, “Oh fuck this cunt, baby, fuck it, fuck this cunt,” over and over. Then her face wrenched itself into a squinting accelerated grimace and I pushed up on my glasses, stopping her right in the middle of her dildorgasm.

I climbed out of the hamper, very slowly because I was stiff. I studied her climax-face from every angle, trying to record its transient extremity in my memory. I held her perky little finger, which was still hooked in her ane. I rested my ear on the edge of the tub about three inches from her open boat and stared at the finger that was bestirring itself around her bright-pink pumped-up nerve; and beyond it at the very soft inner skin stretched tight around my fellow American, my fellow rubber hider-in-her-house. I loved what I saw. I licked her knuckles; I tapped my dick against her breasts to see how they quivered; I straddled the tub just as she was straddling it, facing her, and beat my richard savagely until I was almost there. When I was ready I stood and said, “Let me be there with you, honey, you’re so sexy, please let me come on your face,” in a strange almost singsong pleading voice, and without waiting for an answer from her I let all of my burning bechamel jump out onto her tightly closed eyes, unable to resist doing so even though I knew that I would probably regret it afterward — not least because it would be so much trouble to get all of it off her eyelashes and eyebrows. When I was done I sat down on the tub for a second to rest. “Thank you,” I said. I wasn’t crazy about the way my come looked on her closed eyes, but the beauty of her ecstatic expression survived it; in fact the existence of the outcome of my orgasm on her still-coming face seemed entirely irrelevant, as it should have. I turned time on for the tiniest fraction of a second, so that she would have a tactile flash of the sensation of liquid warmth, in case it would add a novel touch to her clasm, and then I spent a good ten minutes tamping and gently rinsing every sign of my sperm off of her. I put her dirty clothes back in her hamper. I took a last look around to be sure I had left everything in order. I stood behind her and flashed time on again for a second or two to be sure that, post-orgasm, she didn’t suspect that she had had company, and when I was convinced that she felt safe and unviolated I went downstairs and got dressed and let myself quietly out. It hadn’t really happened.

I intended to leave my UPS story buried in the sand where she had marked it with three shells, in case she wanted it at some future date, but as I mounted my borrowed motorcycle, vanity overcame me and I hustled back to dig it up. Then, still in the Fold, I drove slowly home. I kept thinking of Michelle’s bath as I cruised down the shoulder of Route 3; I ardently wished I had a picture of Michelle’s come-face (before I had come on it myself, I mean): it was the kind of sight that could enhance your life for a decade. Sadly, Polaroid pictures taken in the Fold don’t develop properly — I know because I’ve tried. There was a woman in an airplane bathroom once: I saw her flipping through a Playboy “Girls of Summer” issue at the airport gift shop and then kept tabs on her in the plane, and when she went to the bathroom I knew she would probably be coming and I Dropped and got a key from a pocket of one of the flight attendants and opened the door and found her with one heel in the steel sink and the other propped in the air where the door had been, coming stunningly, and I borrowed a passenger’s Polaroid and took her picture, but through some oddity of Fold-chemistry that I will never understand, the greens appeared only very faintly, and the oranges and reds did not show up at all, so my own visual memory was all I had. It surprises me, incidentally, that nobody has launched a men’s magazine called O-Shots , devoted exclusively to close-up photographs of women’s faces in the midst of orgasm. At the end of each photo layout would be a little official-looking certificate of authenticity, signed by the model, that said, “I hereby certify and swear that I did reach one or more female orgasms during the photo shoot herein pictured and that my expressions are neither fiction nor semifiction but are the true, unsimulated result of my own pleasure and amusement.” I would subscribe. Or perhaps an O-shot calendar — the March orgasm-face, the November orgasm-face?

The guy whose motorcycle I had borrowed was sitting sullenly against a tree near where I had dismounted him. The note that I had pinned to his leg was crumpled in his hand; it said, I have borrowed your bike. Wait here and I will return it to you shortly . Sensibly, he had waited, but he wasn’t happy about it. I parked the bike in front of him and walked home and lay down on the grass. I took off my glasses and rubbed my eyes. Time turned back on everywhere. I was exhausted. The total elapsed Strine-time had been almost eleven hours; elapsed real time, a little over two hours. In the space of a single “day” I had become a modestly successful amateur pornographer. “Rot makes life,” I sighed happily to myself, thinking of lonely old Henry James, and then I dozed for a while on the blue striped towel.