Nicholson Baker - The Fermata

At the same time I felt a blip of self-irritable disgust at the astonishing potency of these car-crushes and at how much mental air-time they consumed when I drove. It was insane to think that someone was more wonderful and mysterious just because she was passing me in her car. What could be more common than two people driving nearly side by side on a highway, one drawing abreast of the other? Why couldn’t I just relax and let her pass me without falling in total temp-love with her? And yet that was what was going on — and maybe it was going on for her, too: maybe she was listening to Terry Gross on National Public Radio and barely registering that some car (me) was off to her right, but maybe her hopes were rising and crashing addictively each time she passed a lone man at the wheel — maybe she was trying just as I had done to piece together a sense of the lovability and marriageability of each person based on the ludicrously inadequate information available — that is, on the driver’s head, on the state of origin of the license plate, on the general personality of the car (all cars are classifiable as cute/perky or elegante/mysterioso or Camaro/vulgaro), on whether one hand or two was visible on the steering wheel, and on the condition of the sheet metal. As her door-handle came in line with mine I tried to fight the desire to turn toward her but I couldn’t; I looked blankly at her just as she was turning to look blankly at me; then we both turned back and looked straight ahead at our lanes. At that moment, we were driving at almost exactly the same speed. We were close. It seemed miraculous to me that we could be in such states of seated repose, and yet could be separated by the surface of the highway, which was moving between us so fast that if I opened my door and tried to walk over to her and get in her car, my feet and shin-bones would be sanded down to nothing. With tormenting leisureliness she finally pulled ahead and put on her blinker and smoothed her blue car-butt over in front of me. (It turned out to be a Ford Escort, which always makes me think of escort services when I’m driving long distance.) Then I saw something riveting — a Smith College sticker on her rear window, with a University of Chicago sticker above it. I didn’t have to drive all the way to Northampton; Smith College was right here with me on the road! But I hesitated before I pushed up on my glasses, having never been through a full-blown chronvulsion in a moving car before. Would it be safe? Would my high rate of speed relative to the highway cause some unforeseen danger? Stopping the universe while driving at sixty miles an hour seemed an extremely rash and kinky thing to do.

I kept staring at her taillights. I saw her look up at me briefly in her rear-view mirror. Then she fluffed her massive coarsely wavy hair so that some of it fell over the whiplash projection on the back of her seat. The high small round chrome lock on the curve of her trunk looked a little like what I imagined her asshole might look like. I decided that I would survive whatever happened. I waited a polite interval and then pulled over into the fast lane and sped up to pass her. We were on a slight downgrade. As I came closer to her, the same swooning feeling as before swept over me, except that now I and not she was bringing about this unspoken thrill; when our profiles were even I didn’t look over, knowing that she knew that I was passing her and wouldn’t look at me, because the rule in highway flirtation was not to look on the second pass. Instead I hit the clutch pedal and glided freely for a second or two right next to her, setting myself up mentally for the disengagement of the temporal drive-train, and then very slowly I pushed my glasses up on the bridge of my nose; when I let go of them the Smith woman and I were still side by side on the Mass Pike, but we weren’t moving forward. My radio was silent.

My door was not easy to get open. I had to push with my shoulder to displace the jellied wind-flow. And the road surface around my car presented a strange sight: though motionless, it looked slightly foggy and indeterminate, as if photographed through a Vaselined lens; you couldn’t focus on it properly. When I gingerly got out, leaving my door open, and tiptoed around the back of my car, I found that the asphalt was in fact somewhat resilient underfoot; its speed relative to the soles of my shoes apparently made it impossible for the two physical surfaces to interact normally, and gave the road the characteristics of some sort of dense, even spongy ground-cover, like moss. The other oddity was that I heard hooting and roaring noises in my ears when I walked into or away from the direction that I had been driving: I supposed it was something to do with vectors and frozen sound waves and the Doppler effect, but I didn’t trouble myself over it. Instead I straddled the white line between the Smith woman’s car and mine and extended my arms so that I touched both near doors, hers and mine, connecting us two. I held that quasi-crucifixional position for a time, looking out at the hills and the cars ahead, considering that if I pulled on my glasses right then to resume time, my car would race off driverless and would eventually crash, and I, left in the middle of the road, would almost certainly be hit by one of the cars behind ours. I looked through her window at her, my face inches away from her profile. I went around and opened her passenger door, which was fortunately not locked, and cleared off the junk on the seat (mostly cassettes and several Books on Tape from the library) and got in next to her.

I don’t have to point out that cars are extremely private places; the feeling that I was doing something of questionable ethics by entering this woman’s small glossy blue Ford was more intense than I could remember in recent fermations. I was sweating with the almost horrified excitement of my wrongdoing. The soles of my feet were warm to the touch. I was in her car. “Well, here we are,” I said aloud to myself. I couldn’t bring myself to find out what was up with her breasts, or do anything more radical in fact than rest my hand lightly on her accelerator leg (she was wearing a huge thick pink sweater with roses woven into it, and faded jeans); I had a sense of being dangerously far away from home, perhaps because the steering wheel and brake pedal of my own speeding car were so nearby and yet so peculiarly out of my reach. What should I do? Should I simply jack in the passenger seat next to her? I don’t as a rule like masturbating in cars. I could get out and stand in the road and jack onto her trunk lock or her driver-side window, or, having rolled down that window beforehand, I could jack directly into the interior of her car. But it would be rude to get my hard sauce all over the flowers on her sweater, which looked expensive and hand-knit, perhaps a favorite sweater of hers. Besides, my shoes might melt or catch flame.

What I really wanted was just to be alive in this woman’s car for a second while she was driving it — so I climbed in the back seat and lay down and used my glasses to reactivate time for the quick count of five and then deactivated it again. It was wonderful to be riding in her car. She had some music going, something familiar, and I thought I could hear her humming quietly along with it. Her car was much quieter than mine. When my Drop was over I sat up and looked over at my empty car: it had drifted a little to the right (possibly the door’s “sudden” opening and consequent slamming shut) but though driverless for a few seconds it had maintained course fairly well, just as I had expected.

I lay there in the Smith College woman’s back seat for quite a while, my head resting on her overnight bag, playing with a wavy sprig of her hair and trying to think of some way that I could possibly become a part of her life. Some of her hair was held with a large toothed clamp. I grew curious about what she was listening to and climbed back up beside her and popped the tape: it was a Suzanne Vega called Solitude Standing . She had gotten only halfway into the first cassette of the audio version of Gulliver’s Travels before abandoning it for some music. All at once I had conjured up a little plan. It would take time, but I wanted it to. She was worth it.