Nicholson Baker - The Fermata

She said, “While we were making love, you reached in these pants and pulled out a piece of electrical equipment and held on to it? Why ?” Now she was sitting up, wanting very much to get an explanation from me that would clear everything up. Her breasts looked aggrieved.

“It’s hard to explain,” I said. “I guess I wanted to imagine that I was an android.” I laughed sheepishly to confirm my fabrication. “An invincible hard-body android. It’s stupid, I know.” I felt despair at how ridiculous this explanation sounded, but I couldn’t bring myself to launch into the truth, fearing that she would take it poorly. “I hate these stupid condoms,” I said fussily, tying a knot in the one we had just used.

Rhody shook her head. “I’m not very comfortable with this, Arno. I really didn’t plan to be fucked by an electric motor this afternoon.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

I hugged her guiltily. She lay on her back, thinking. “Let me ask you this,” she then said. “Is your idea of the perfect life to be able to stop time anytime you want and take off women’s clothes on the subway and feel their breasts?”

“I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “You think that I’m turning out to be some kind of techno-sex nutcase.”

“Well? No, I’m just a little surprised at all this. First you tell me this long story about a piano chord, insisting that I must find aspects of the idea sexually exciting, and now you hold this thing in your hand — what is it?”

“It’s just a plain-vanilla on-off switch, a rocker-switch,” I said. I tried mild indignation. “It’s nothing! Forget it. It’s just a little sixteen-amp rocker-switch.”

“Well, it seems a very strange thing to bring into the bedroom. You should have told me beforehand. If it excites you to make love to me pretending you’re a machine, fine. But you have to include me in it. What I don’t like is discovering that you’re doing this somewhat odd thing literally behind my back.”

“You’re right, I should have included you,” I said. “But you know — I tried to include you in something fairly important to me when I told you about the fermata chord, and I must say I got a pretty lukewarm reception.”

“Well, right, it was a loveless fantasy. It had no love in it.”

“But I meant it as an act of love to tell it to you!”

“No,” said Rhody. “What that fantasy says is that your idea of heaven is being able to hit the PLAY button on a Walkman and take off women’s clothes and feel their breasts. Right?”

“I don’t think it’s my idea of heaven, exactly,” I said, with some awkwardness. I had in fact briefly undressed a beautifully bloused woman wearing a yellow 32-B Lily of France bra on the Red Line just the previous day, so it was difficult for me to react with the right level of blanket disapproval. “As you yourself said, it’s hard to rule out completely the possibility of an occasional capitulation to curiosity.”

Rhody didn’t like being paraphrased. She got angry. She said she had been thinking over my story, about the fermata chord, and she had begun to feel that it wasn’t a fantasy that appealed to her at all. Here is when she dug up words like “necrophilia”—or perhaps, to be fair, she only said “implied necrophilia.” I felt as if my whole life were being called into question and I tried to defend myself: it’s just an idea, just a fantasy, etc.

“How would you feel,” Rhody asked, “if I stopped time one day, while we were waiting in line for a movie, pulled your pants down, and inserted a blue eraser in your anus? Think about it.”

“It would depend totally, totally on your intent,” I said. “If you put a blue eraser in my anus out of some combination of desire and curiosity, and you simply wanted to know what it would be like to do that, then I wouldn’t object. Go right ahead. But if you did it out of a desire to hurt me and rob me of dignity in your mind, then of course I would object.”

“That was a bad example,” Rhody said, waving it away. “How would you feel if a complete stranger stopped time on the street and pulled your pants down and took your shirt off and made a minute inspection of every inch of your body?”

“Well,” I said piously, “if all they were interested in was seeing what I looked like in greater detail, and the motive was attraction rather than hostility, I would be flattered and wouldn’t mind in the least. Maybe there are things about me that I don’t want complete strangers knowing at such close range, but as long as I knew that the person was doing it out of some kind of positive feeling towards me, so that whatever they saw would be interesting to them, rather than repellent, I would say fine, pull my pants down. Just so long as I don’t have to know about it.”

“Ah, but what if it was a man?” said Rhody. “What if a gay man stopped time, pulled your pants down, and gave you a long slow blowjob? What if he had a mustache? ”

This idea took me by surprise, but I pretended it didn’t. “I admit that’s not something that appeals to me. I was thinking of a woman doing the inspection. But to be consistent, I suppose I would have to say, fine, if the gay man means well, and he wants to give me a blowjob without my knowledge, it wouldn’t be the end of civilization. Let him. What you don’t know can’t hurt you.”

“That’s a ridiculously glib thing to say,” she said, pulling on her socks. She was angry again.

“Why is it glib?” I said hotly. “The point is, the real point is, forget strangers. When I told you that story about your piano teacher, I was talking not about some total stranger developing that ability to stop time by playing a certain chord, I was talking about you and you alone developing it.”

Rhody had finished getting dressed by now. “I think what you were really trying to do was to get me interested in your little dream of taking off women’s clothes in public places and doing various things to them and not getting criminally prosecuted for it. And I’m sorry — I don’t think it’s a good dream.” Saying this seemed to force her to some sort of decision. A week or two later we had another argument and she issued a fiat; soon we were no longer an item, which was too bad, since I did love her and really still do miss her, even now that (as I will go on to tell) I have gone out on a date with Joyce.

“INEED TO BE SEDUCED.” THE IRONY IN RHODY’S SAYING that, as an argument against fermation used for sexual kicks, is that I never would have gone out with her if I hadn’t been able to rely heavily on the Fold for help. Before I spoke one word to her I had already taken off her shirt and looked over her small dear breasts, which had faint triangles around them from the edges of the bra. Her skin was very pale. This happened in a Thai restaurant off Boylston. I sat down and looked around and noticed a woman with very short black hair and glasses with round black rims, studying the menu. Her lower lip was somewhat fuller than her upper lip, like a Hapsburg, which is a feature that attracts me — though I also like when the upper lip is fuller than the lower, too, come to think of it. She ordered dinner and asked the waiter to bring her a cup of hot water and unwrapped a yellow teabag.

While her tea was steeping, she pulled out a book. She seemed not to have a bookmark, and yet I noticed that she didn’t have to flip around to find her place. (I learned later that Rhody always automatically remembered her place in a book. She was not good with phone numbers, and even her Social Security number gave her trouble occasionally, but the page number of her current book would just come to her without effort as soon as she held it and saw the cover. Sometimes, she told me, the number would even occur to her at odd times during the day, and she would think, Two hundred fifty-four, what a mysterious and suggestive number! It would take her a second to realize that the number seemed unusually fine simply because it was where she was going to resume her reading. Nineteenth-century novels were all-important to her. It wasn’t a question of her liking them; they were a neurological necessity, like sleep. One Mrs. Humphry Ward, or a Reade, or a Trollope per week supplied her with some kind of critical co-enzyme, she said, that allowed her to organize social sense experience. It was nice if the novel was good, but even a very mediocre one would do; without a daily shot of Victorian fiction she couldn’t quite remember how to talk to people and to understand what they said. I miss her.)