Nicholson Baker - The Fermata

“You know what really interested me about you?” she said several weeks later, after we had been on a harbor cruise and had had lunch twice. “You may not remember this, but while you were reading that time at Thai Star, you took your watch off and put it just above your book.”

“So you were watching me!” I said. “I was very aware of you.”

“Yes, I was watching you. You took your watch off, and you seemed to luxuriate in every tiny step of the process. I’ve always liked the sight of a man taking off his watch. It doesn’t need to be an expensive watch, though I prefer leather to metal bands.” She lowered her voice. “I like the rubbing of the wrist afterward.”

“How interesting,” I said. “It’s just a habit of mine — I guess I started doing it in study hall in high school. It seemed grown up.” (This was not altogether untrue.)

Rhody said, “I was enamored of this one guy, a physics major, in college who used to go through a ritual of getting set up to study at one of the tables in the library. He slipped off his shoes — he always had immaculate white sweatsocks on, and very clean pale jeans — and he arranged his watch next to his textbook, with one strap folded under the other.”

“He sounds like a real catch,” I said.

“But the interesting thing is that only a few days before I saw you take off your watch, someone at work did the same thing at a meeting, and I was reminded of how kind of … seductive it is, even though in that case I wasn’t at all interested in the person who did it. Just in his wrist. In fact, I even made a note in back of the book I was reading at the time about how sexy it is to watch a man do that. So there. Isn’t it weird the way things like that always happen in twos?”

I agreed that it was weird, and we got off into a discussion of Rupert Sheldrake and the morphic resonances that purportedly aid protein synthesis. That evening she brought me back to her apartment to show me the actual note in the back of Lady Audley’s Secret . We ended up having sex for the first time. (There was a memorable moment when my hands were flat against a Sierra Club wall calendar as I fucked slowly in and out of her mouth. And there was another memorable moment when she put a cucumber in the microwave for a few seconds to take the chill off and I twisted the corkscrew we had used on the bottle of Cabernet into one end of it and she let me watch her cuke herself with it, holding it by its blond wooden handle.) I am not saying that it is a total impossibility that the two of us could have gotten together at the Thai restaurant if I had simply walked over to her and struck up a conversation. I might have cruised her successfully without subterfuge. But it’s just as likely that she would have politely sent me away. I’m less suave with a woman when I haven’t had a preview of her breasts. So the moral is: Rhody was quite wrong in assuming that the Fermata was intrinsically antithetical to seduction. I used the Fermata to seduce her .

IWAS IN A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF PAIN WHEN THINGS ENDED WITH Rhody. I had given her a glimpse of my inner life, and she had unambiguously rejected it. But I realize now, in putting Rhody down on paper, that good, tangible things grew out of our truncated relationship. If I had not seen and acted on that note about men and watches in the back of her copy of the Virago paperback, I would probably not have had the later idea of writing smutty expostulations in paperbacks just before women browsed them, and if I hadn’t thought of that , I probably wouldn’t have conceived of using the Fold as a rotter’s retreat and leaving the outcome where a woman might find it. In a way, Rhody’s spurning the glimpse I had given her of my secret freed me to investigate its potential further.

After the time on the Cape, I wrote a little more: one story about a naked woman suspended above one lane of the Callahan tunnel on a black rope trapeze net during rush hour, looking down through its square mesh at the cars filing slowly beneath her and pissing generously on them as their moon-roofs slid open; one story about a man teaching a young woman to touch-type on his antique Oliver No. 9 manual typewriter, holding his hands over her hands and closing his eyes and feeling her fingers sink one by one into the deep counterweighted letters and knowing she was spelling H-I-P-S and being unable to resist putting his hands on her hips, then feeling her fingers type B-R-E-A-S-T-S on the round black cuplike keys and being unable to resist palming her breasts and pulling her back against him; one story about a group of scuba-diving Caribbean tourists corrupting the angelfish with aerosol cans of cheddar cheese, sometimes making cheese hearts in the water that the fish then momentarily echoed as they fed, sometimes squirting it on wet-suited arms or breasts and letting the fish nip it off; one about a woman letting her pet hermit crab walk lightly all over her back while she read Barron’s and dreamed of blue-eyed men with tons of money; one about several caves of stalagmites, each one a different color, that, when broken off and inserted into a vadge, glowed, their stumps releasing bidet-like streams of warm subterranean mineral water.

I spent some personal time with Ami Pro and a copier and saddle-bound a number of copies of these several stories, along with the one about Marian and the ridem lawn-mower, in pamphlet form, using as a cover the pale blue cover of something called Tales of French Love and Passion —a heavily ironic reissue of a cheesy 1936 edition of several mildly risqué stories by Guy de Maupassant that I had ordered through the Archie McPhee catalog. I left my homemade booklet in lots of places — in copies of Self and The American Scholar just before they were shoved through mail-slots, in women’s bathrooms at dance clubs, under the Gideon’s Bible in several rooms of the Meridien Hotel, on coffee tables during cocktail parties, inserted in the library’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy in the article on “Life, Meaning and Value of”—but nothing resulted from all this effort that was anywhere near as exciting to me as the simple sight of Michelle, the Cape Cod woman, dunking her dildo in her bathwater and shaking it off.

The peak of my life-imitates-rot phase came on the Massachusetts Turnpike one Saturday. I was out for a drive. It was autumn and hormone levels were rising. I was idly thinking of following through on my Northampton idea — the one about stripping everyone on Main Street and, if not mounding their clothes all in a single mound and dancing on it, then at least putting each person’s clothes neatly in a plastic grocery bag in his or her hand — the idea of a naked town discovering that it was carrying its clothes around in plastic bags thrilled me. (The sight of naked middle-aged women in the steam rooms of certain country clubs carrying their jewelry around in droopy plastic bags, because they are afraid that it will be stolen from their lockers, thrills me, too; I have been in the steam rooms with them; I have touched their moist plastic bags of jewelry.) My ambitions are not global in scope — I don’t think of nude nations or metropolises; but totally topless Main Streets of small towns, especially small towns with classy women’s colleges in them, yes. I decided that if I lost my nerve and couldn’t go through with denuding the whole town, I could at least replace the TV Guides in the rack at the supermarket with my personal Tales of French Love and Passion and watch how people reacted. But I never made it to Northampton. I got severely distracted by a woman in a car just past Worcester.

I was driving in the slow lane. My window was open; the car was booming with air noise. My left (wristwatched) arm was outside; I was making my hand into a wing shape to see whether I could create lift, and making it dive and climb against the wind. A woman driving a small blue car appeared in the rear-view mirror. No expression is as impassive as a woman’s seen in a rear-view mirror: it has an impassiveness so impartial and comprehensive that it cries out to be surprised. She was going faster than I was and impassively began to pass me; I lost sight of her for a minute as she entered that place where passing cars don’t exist — a kind of Fold-effect of the rear- and side-view mirrors. I accelerated very slightly, so that when she did pass, it would take longer. I had only seen her face for an instant, in fact I had only had time to notice that she was a woman of twenty or so with lots of thickly wavy multihued fair hair driving alone, but my very sketchy simplistic sense of her windshielded face merged with my equally simplistic sense of the headlights of her unflashy blue car to turn her instantly into a well-developed character in my imagination. As she invisibly pulled closer to me in the fast lane and I heard her tires singing and sensed how close she was to me, the idea that she was soon going to pass me became swoonsomely powerful: the steering wheel seemed to become flexible and expand in widening ripples; I felt that I was a glowing lump of something melting on the fly. I could not believe that in a matter of thirty seconds or so this person was going to pull up next to me and that I would be able to look over at her; when she did I felt I would shout or weep.