Nicholson Baker - The Fermata

(For example, once I noticed a woman washing the long stretch of glass in front of the freezer-counter in the ice cream place where she worked, in a mall — she worked the cloth so vigorously over the glass that her ass circled unrestrainedly clockwise to counterbalance her hard work. She was wearing extremely tight stretchy jeans of a sort I can’t fully understand but can forgive, and I wrote out the equation I used back then to get into the Fold — an equation adapted from one I saw in a journal of mathematics — and I pulled her pants down and came into a sugar cone staring at the cleavage of her ass. But I see now that this isn’t in fact a good example of my appreciating an ass while it is unselfconsciously itself, since the reason I was attracted to her was that I had been observing her for a few minutes beforehand, as she served a customer, and I had sensed how relatively unproud of her face and upper body she was, and how certain she was that her ass was her best feature, and how much therefore she had wanted to wash the glass boldly in front of her store, though it was quite clean, with her back to all the mall-boys. As their representative, on their behalf, I came.)

The point is, in any case, that I could never get interested in a woman who was passed out drunk, or was sedated, in a coma, or dead; for then she is unconscious of me, and what I want is to be with her when she would be conscious of me but for the fact that I have interjected myself into a chink of her day so infinitesimally brief that she can’t know that I have come and gone.

The way the discussion came up with Rhody was that she announced, on the plane, apropos of tiny Latino swimsuits, that more and more she was interested in seeing naked men and their penises. She said she liked the idea of semis —by which she meant penises that weren’t totally hard, since a hard straight line was unbeautiful against the human body, nor totally soft and wrinkly either, but rather loungingly, curvingly full and interested and ready to be teased straight — like (she explained) Jimmy Cliff’s penis in The Harder They Come . I got animated, because I love talking about sex, and I impulsively decided that this was the right moment to begin to confess my Fold history to her, couching it first as a hypothetical case. All right then, I said to her, what did she think of the idea of some sort of chord on the piano that whenever you played it, stopped time? Say back when she was at Tufts, her piano teacher (someone on whom she’d told me she’d had a crush) had been working on a conclusive edition of a piece called Map , by a once forgotten but now increasingly respected twentieth-century composer named Mascon Albedo. Say that, in comparing the microfilmed manuscripts with the 1903 Yates and Boling edition of the work, Rhody’s piano teacher, Alan Sparkling, discovered a surprising number of significant errors and righted them. As his corrections accumulated, he began to feel not only that Map was a much greater work than anyone could have known, but also that he, Alan Sparkling, was developing a sure instinct for Albedo’s style. And his instinct told him that there was one chord which, even though it checked out as correct against several of the relevant manuscripts, still sounded quite wrong, or at least incomplete. It didn’t sound at all like the chord Albedo would have written at that moment in the piece. And it was a chord of crucial importance to the meaning of the work — a very soft chiming that arrived after a long stretch of murkier pianism that should have come off as strange and triumphant, but as it stood did not. The chord was surmounted by a fermata.

Sensing a major discovery that would crown his new edition, Sparkling went back to Sewanee University, where Albedo’s manuscripts were kept, and looked again through some of the notebooks that the Master had kept during the time he was composing that particular movement of Map . Albedo’s later life had been decorated with odd incidents and minor scandals — there had been actual rumors of insanity. In the notebooks there were tantalizing annotations over certain motivic scraps — things like “Oh God, yes!” and “And here the Field develops greater potency.” Alan began to have the sense that Map had been more than a piece of piano music to Albedo; that it had constituted some sort of magic sonic recipe or spell for him. He also began strongly to suspect that the errors in the Yates and Boling edition had not been the fault of the publisher but had been intentional last-minute alterations on Albedo’s part, meant to disable whatever powers Map gave its performer, so that he, Albedo, could remain in sole possession of them. Finally, in one of the notebooks he came across a heavily erased part of a page under a large fermata and, with the help of a magnifying glass, was able to read the chord written there. It was an incomparably finer variant of the wrong-sounding fermata chord in Map .

Deeply impressed with himself, Professor Sparkling took the last plane to Boston, sure now that he had a masterwork of twentieth-century music in his briefcase, polished, cleaned, restored, awakened from its dodecaphonic slumber by his profound scholarship and delicate musicological instinct. The next day was his day of giving piano lessons. Rhody was his very best student; and that morning she tore through the Tombeau de Couperin with such verve that, on a whim he didn’t himself quite understand, he turned toward her with an expression of great seriousness and seized her shoulders and told her that she alone must work up the new authorized version of Map . He made a copy of his own corrections for her so that she could incorporate them into her score. A week passed. Alan, gloating over his discoveries, played bits and pieces of Map for himself, and listened to it skimmingly in his head, but he devoted most of his time to finishing his article about it for The Quarterly of New Music . Since it was a formidably difficult work, he did not make any attempt to play the whole composition through, even sloppily, from beginning to end. That was what gifted students like Rhody were for, he felt.

All that week Rhody devotedly practiced Map , conscious of what an honor it was to be the first person to reanimate the cleaned-up version. It soon became clear to her that Professor Sparkling’s enthusiasm was justified: Mascon Albedo stood revealed as no mere minor-league friend of Luciano Berio, but as a leaping titan of pianism. Though the surface of the piece had struck her ear at first as knotty and over-intellectual, as she perfected her performance of it she found that on the contrary it had an almost disturbing secondary sensual appeal: it made her exceedingly aware of the physical reality of her own playing. If the piece required her to play a simple A-flat-major triad with her left hand, she would feel in doing so as if the black A-flat and E-flat keys were soft, low, tree-covered hills, smoothed by forgotten glaciers, and the C between them a fog-filled valley, over which her poised fingers were parachuting very early in the morning; an ordinary pile of perfect fourths and fifths would slice through her like the stave of a hard-boiled-egg slicer; she could sense the felt-covered hammers thumping against the piano wires as gently as the noses of sheep in pens or fish against glass; she felt with extraordinary vividness her right foot making its little jumps on the sustain pedal, hosing off any recent blendings and allowing a new concord to rise up clean from its mud-wrestling past. The piece seemed to rediscover the amazement every pianist should properly feel at the invention of the piano. Moreover, playing it did very odd things to her perception of time, though it did so only when she began right at the beginning and went straight through.