Nicholson Baker - The Fermata

This is what I did: I walked for almost an hour until I came to a mall with a discount store, where I bought a fairly high-quality tape recorder and some cassettes and batteries. (Bought: that is, left roughly the cash to pay for it in the appropriate cash register along with a note saying that this money was in payment for item number, etc., etc.) I also assembled a festive picnic lunch for myself at a deli and left money there. Several Arno-hours later, I got back to my car and pulled out my Tales of French Love and Passion and sat in the Smith woman’s passenger seat. The name I got from her wallet was Adele Junette Spacks.

“Hello and excuse me,” I said into the tape recorder in a lower voice than I usually have, looking right at Miss Spacks. “With the help of my benevolent autokinetic powers, I have taken the liberty of popping the Suzanne Vega cassette in progress and placing it on the seat beside you. I have replaced it with a tape of my own, the very tape that you are listening to now. I would prefer to remain anonymous, but I will tell you that I too am currently driving west on the Mass Turnpike,and that you passed me a little while ago, and that, though you may not have been aware of it, during those few seconds when we were driving side by side, I developed one of the more intense car-to-car infatuations I have ever experienced. I’ve decided that this time I will act on my feelings for once by offering you this homemade tape for your diversion. Please feel free to listen to it or not as you wish. Feel free to press the eject button at any time if anything on it distresses you. It does contain nudity and sexual situations — in fact, it contains a great deal of nudity and sexual situations. But it’s only words. I only mean to divert you while you drive. If my tape offends, please feel free to toss it out the window and accept my apologies. Please feel free, please feel free.”

After this introductory spiel, I read aloud the story that I had written while kneeling next to the woman in the gray-green bathing suit on the Cape. Sitting so close to Miss Spacks in her car, in a silence thicker than any recording studio’s, I started to feel a little style-crampingly self-conscious as I got into the more graphic sections of the text, and my narrator’s voice began to lose authority; finally I had to transfer myself and the tape recorder from Miss Spacks’s car back to my own, where, with a confidence born of distance, I finished reading the rest of it in one take, more or less, without too many flubs. It was good to be making a tape for once, rather than having to transcribe someone else’s. Still, when I was done I was not completely satisfied. The one-hundred-and-ten-minute Memorex tape was not full, for one thing. And I felt ungenerous in offering this brand-new person my old rot. Indeed, I felt unfaithful to her, just as I had felt unfaithful to the Cape Cod woman when I had sprinted down the beach in the Cleft and checked out that girl. The old story had been part of an old seduction, and Adele Junette Spacks, who was unwittingly spending so much time “with” me, deserved something fresh in return, something rash, something more representative of what I was capable of coming up with right at that very moment on the road in her company. I ate lunch on the trunk of my car, thinking kink, kink, kink. Then I got out the Casio, which I had packed in my trunk, and in just twelve straight hours I wrote a second set of adventures for Marian the Librarian. I worked in a few of the sights I had witnessed in the Cape Cod bathroom. Here’s how Part Two went.

TOWARD THE MIDDLE OF SEPTEMBER, MARIAN’S SEXUAL INTEREST inexplicably abated. She put all her dildi and appliances in the drawer that had once held David’s sweaters. The last two toys she had ordered — a tiny vibe, teasingly canine in appearance but molded from an impeccably comme il faut piece of pickled okra, and a giant Armande Klockhammer Signature Model — she didn’t even bother to try out before putting them in storage. She felt a mild snobbish contempt for people who devoted so much of their free time to solo sex-play. Her perennial garden, for example, was far more satisfying than a bunch of pastless, futureless orgasms. She read bulb catalogs avidly. After much study she ordered several hundred tulip bulbs from Mack’s. When they arrived, via UPS, she gently deflected the eagerly scrotal leer of her friend John in the brown truck. It felt exciting and strange to be more than a sexual being, to have interests. As she looked over the boxes of bulbs, however, she realized that she would need help cutting the beds and planting them all, so she hired the neighbor kid, Kevin.

Ever since she had been mowing her own lawn, she had lost touch with young Kevin. He seemed to have grown an inch or two. He had gone out for the high jump, and he had acquired a girlfriend named Sylvie, whom he said was “a really special person.” For a whole weekend and three cool late afternoons he and Marian worked together preparing the soil in the beds with bags of peat and then setting in the bulbs. The dirt was cool through Marian’s gloves. After shyly asking whether she would mind, Kevin brought over his radio. At first she was a little irritated by the sound, which disturbed her bucolic alpha-state — but over time several of the songs separated themselves from the others. In one, a woman sang something about Solitude standing in the doorway. She sang, “Her palm is split with a flower with a flame.” Marian kept time to this song, first with her troweling, and then with her chin. When she had heard it the second time, she asked Kevin (feeling a little shy herself), “Who does this song?”

Kevin looked up. “Suzanne Vega.”

“Ah,” said Marian. “I like it.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty good,” said Kevin. He was impossible to read. He dropped another dark bulb in a hole and gently mounded soil around it. Marian glanced at him several times. He had a gray track-and-field T-shirt over a gray sweatshirt. When he pushed on the earth over one of her bulbs, she imagined the muscle in the side of his arm, as she had seen it when he had had his shirt off that day, long ago, at the beginning of summer, before she had learned to mow. And later, when the song came on again, he looked up at her and smiled and then went back to planting — and Marian noticed that his ears were quite red.

She watered the bulbs in and forgot about them. The ground began to look cold — three long beds of very cold bulbs. As winter hit, Marian became caught up in a battle with a developer who wanted to build another mall outside of town. It was going to be enormous and in its own way wonderful — but there was already a shopping center with a discount chain in it that was working under chapter eleven, and the downtown would suffer, as it always did. She went out on several dates with a man she met at the mall meetings, and while she enjoyed talking to him (he was one of those men who have a passionate interest in some particular writer which at first seems sincere, and then finally ends up seeming almost arbitrary — in his case it was Rilke: he seemed to be getting things from Rilke that he could have gotten from any number of poets, while missing whatever it was that Rilke had uniquely), she nonetheless didn’t want to do anything more than kiss him cordially in her driveway.

When spring finally came, she went out every day to her tulip beds to watch for activity. It was an unusually dry hot spring, and she felt that she should water to give her beds a good start, but she despaired at her hose. The faucet still leaked tiresomely. The sprayer was rusty. What would make her bulbs really happy, it suddenly occurred to her, was if she could get a plumber to adapt her own Pollenex showerhead so that it would fit on the end of the hose. She needed a very light, very delicate but insistent spray for her tulips — no garden sprayer could offer that. She also thought that the hose water was much too cold — she felt that the bulbs would do better with warmer water. She realized that she wasn’t thinking all that rationally, but her idea nonetheless was: hook up the garden hose to the shower-pipe, run the hose out the bathroom window, and fix the Pollenex showerhead onto the terminal end. Other ideas of interest followed on this one; she called a plumber.