Nicholson Baker - The Fermata

I would exaggerate the “oofs” of lifting the weight of fourteen magazines. It is remarkable, though, how heavy a pile of men’s magazines can be. They would make a deep heavy rectangular sound when I let them drop from a few inches above the brown carpeting, a sound that would momentarily remind me of newspaper-recycling efforts and the closing of car doors. (It would make sense that dropped newspaper bundles and car-door-closings would be related, since car doors are in fact filled with old newspapers as sound-damping insulation.) With an air of bemused superiority, though with a distinct undertone of boyish excitement, I would read off the names of the magazines. “Let’s see. There’s Celebrity Sleuth and Leg Show, Max, Fox, Lips . What’s this one? Ah, Best of High Society, Assets, Club, Hooters, Velvet, High Society, Swank, Tail Ends, Gent …”

She would ask, “Why in the world do you need so many?”

“I only do this in motels,” I would explain. “I have to have the entire bed covered with open magazines. Ideally I’d have twin beds covered, and be able to pivot back and forth between both pictorial bedspreads.”

“It seems a little excessive,” Adele would say, justifiably.

“Does it?” I would ask.

“Expensive, anyway,” she would say.

“This pile cost eighty-five dollars,” I would tell her. “So it would make me feel much better, much less wasteful, if someone else besides me got some use out of them. It’s like not wanting to drink alone.” I would tell the story of how, when I was packing to leave for college and I had to get rid of all the dirty magazines of my adolescence, I couldn’t bear to throw them away, so I took them to the park in a paper bag and left them in a place where drunks sometimes slept, figuring that they might have a second life there. “Now I know that there are bookstores that buy used magazines,” I would say. “Avenue Victor Hugo on Newbury. Now that’s a great store. Have you been there?”

Adele would say she thought she had, once. Encouraged, I would tell her another story, about a time when I was in the Avenue Victor Hugo one Sunday afternoon when a very serious Lebanese-looking man brought in three heavy boxes of old Penthouse s. The used-book buyer looked at the boxes, but he didn’t issue store credit for them right away. Instead he called out to an assistant, a woman of twenty, black hair, glasses, who had been in the back shelving some old mint Frederik Pohl paperbacks, each one in a protective plastic collector’s sleeve, and told her there were three boxes of Penthouses . The assistant sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of the boxes. I thought she was just going to count the magazines. And she did count them. But as she lifted each one, she flipped through it, opening it to its center-spread, glancing at the picture, and then closing it back up and putting it in a neat pile. I hovered near the fancy slipcased editions of Poe, observing all this, trying to puzzle out her behavior. The woman didn’t seem to be motivated by a desire to get a look at each Penthouse pet. (“Pet” is offensive, in my opinion.) She sighed in a bored or perhaps resigned way as she did it. Her movements repeated themselves automatically. She didn’t mind opening these magazines, baring them right down to the bent ends of their center-spread staples in the front of the store, in the presence of anyone who happened to be there, but she did it not out of interest but because it was simply part of her job. What exactly, though, was she looking for? I wondered. And then I understood. The store was not going to accept any magazine onto which someone had come. Having been burned in the past by greedy unprincipled men who tried to unload their utterly unresellable porn-libraries, they now had instituted a firm policy of flipping through every issue to make sure that none of its pages were stuck together. The Lebanese man had stood uncomfortably by while all this was going on. Fortunately, he had not personalized a single page of his entire collection.

“Nor have you, I take it,” Adele would say when I finished telling her my Avenue Victor Hugo story.

“That’s right,” I would answer. “Each of these magazines is as impersonal as the next. Which ones do you want to look at?” I would tell her that Swank was said by insiders to be temporarily in the ascendant and that Leg Show was interesting and funny at times. I would pretend to be more of a connoisseur than I am. Showing someone your pornography collection was, I would reflect to myself, a very straightforward form of exhibitionism: Here are my private sexual things, it said. Look at them, like them, hold them.

As I fed magazines through the gap in the door, Adele would leaf through them, at first attentively, then less so. She wouldn’t react as I had hoped. “I don’t know,” she would say several times with different intonations. I would push a few more through to her. Finally she would say, “No. I don’t go for this. The skin has an unreal look. All the women look the same. Why do men need so many identical pictures in one month?” She would finish flipping through the last magazine. “No. I just don’t think I can take any of these to the bath with me; I don’t think I can take seeing any more pictures of women’s vaginas. I’ve never seen so many vaginas in my life. Here.”

She would slip the magazines back through the gap in the door to me. I would pile them up neatly as they reappeared, two by two. I would try to recoup through explanation. I would tell her that bringing out all your magazines and arranging them on the bed was sort of like getting an erection. First your periodical pornography is folded away in darkness in a drawer or a bag or a box, stored in its most compact form, and then you bring it out , you flap it around in the light, you increase its two-dimensional surface area. I would grant her that there was a feeling of sameness at times, that sometimes I got surfeited, that my interest went through phases. (Which would be a true statement: I rarely used porn when I had Fold-powers, since all the world was a dirty magazine then.) But in general, I would say, men unfortunately do want the same thing over and over — a different woman identically posed is the only difference they need. I would tell her that each tiny variation between two women’s bodies constituted a huge difference from a sexual point of view. The same body wearing different clothes or with different-colored hair didn’t read as sexually different; it had to be a different body. I would tell her this not as if I were pleased about it, but as if it were simply the way it was. For some women like when men tell the truth about themselves.

“Since we’re letting our hair down,” Adele would say, “can I ask you something?” I would see one of her eyes peering in at me. Because she would be leaning from behind the door, it would be impossible for me to tell for sure what she was or was not wearing. I would have a strong suspicion that she had a towel wrapped around under her arms, and I would be glad if she did, because it was such a marvelously simple extension of the towel’s utility (despite its visual overuse in made-for-TV movies), relying on the slightly moist post-shower plush of the towel and the swell of the Jams to keep the folded-under corner from slipping and freeing the entire wrap: its very tightness kept it tight.

I would put my face close to the door as well, and she and I would regard each other eye to eye. “What’s your question?” I would say.

She would ask, “Is the washcloth you handed me just now the one that was sort of hanging on the edge of the bed when your magazines were all spread out in here?”