Nicholson Baker - Traveling Sprinkler

Roz and I are — I don’t want to say we’re finished, because we’re really not. We’re still good friends and we talk on the phone and I sometimes send her postcards when I’m lonely in hotel rooms. I still hold out hope. She’s promised to make me an egg salad sandwich on my birthday, after all. But it doesn’t look good. She’s very busy with her radio show. She produces a medical radio show called Medicine Ball in the expensive new NPR building in Concord, where everything is carpeted and hushed and all the microphones are state-of-the-art, even if monophonic. It’s a successful show, it’s syndicated, it’s good. Every week they discuss the side effects and potential harmful outcomes of at least one pill or medical procedure. They did an extremely good show on Lipitor. Who knew that Lipitor could be so interesting? A totally useless drug, it seems. You take it for years and it makes you dizzy and forgetful and you fall down and break your hip.

Roz has taken up with this very articulate doctor from Dartmouth who has strong contrary opinions about the medical establishment. He’s a doctor who reads — not just research papers on Lipitor, but books. He fancies himself a sort of Oliver Sacks, I think. Last time I talked to her she said they were reading Tony Hoagland’s poetry together. What a horrible thing to imagine. I like Tony Hoagland’s poetry. I want to be reading it with her. The doctor has a low, growly radio voice. Apparently he “makes her laugh.” I know that kind of laughter. Sexual laughter.

• • •

MY BASSOON WAS a Heckel bassoon, made of maplewood, stained very dark, almost black, with a nickel-plated ring on top. I loved it because it looked like a strange undersea plant, something that would live in the darkness of the Marianas Trench, near a toxic fumarole. My wonderful grandparents bought it for me, and I performed Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade on it, and Ravel’s Bolero , and Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite , and Vivaldi’s A minor bassoon concerto. I put in thousands of hours of practice, shredding my lips, permanently pushing my two front teeth apart. And then I decided I wasn’t going to be a musician, because I wasn’t that good, and my jaw was hurting badly and I had headaches from too much blowing. I was going to be a poet instead. I sold my beloved Heckel to Bill, my bassoon teacher, for ten thousand dollars. Suddenly I felt free and very rich. I quit music school and flew to Berkeley, California, and took a poetry class with Robert Hass, who was a good teacher.

In Berkeley I heard Robert Hass read his somewhat famous and presumably autobiographical poem about an almost affair he’d had with an Asian woman who’d had a double mastectomy. She leaves a bowl of dead bees outside his door. It’s quite a poem when read aloud.

• • •

BACK LAST FALL, when I wasn’t writing much of anything — not because I was “blocked,” but because what I wrote wasn’t any good — I signed up for Match.com and I answered the questionnaire and I went out on a date. It didn’t feel like a date, exactly, because a date is such a fifties notion, but it was a date. In other words, I was out wearing a corduroy jacket one evening, sitting in a restaurant with a folksinger named Polly. Paul and Polly.

That’s all I’ll tell you about it. I was sitting at the same table with Polly, near the fireplace, over which hung an enormous blue-green fish. That’s all you need to know. She was my “date.” You don’t need to know anything more about her. We were not in any sense together, nothing like that — that beautiful word, “together.” We were talking about Marvin Gaye’s tragic death and cider doughnuts and how amazing it is that we can both speak English. We were describing all the things we had to know in order to speak this crazy messed-up language.

There was a little round moderno light above our table, sending down rays of electric energy onto our salads, and I could see the lightbulb reflected in Polly’s lipstick, and suddenly I told her that I was so happy to be sitting at the table with her that I wanted to get up and embrace the light and say thank you for lighting up our dinner. Because we are enjoying ourselves, and we’re covering a lot of ground, and we’re ranging wide over the field of human aspirations, and this is what we’ve got right now, is this single date in a restaurant.

I wanted to say more to Polly because I knew it was going well, even though she didn’t like me as much as I liked her, and I knew that was because she was smarter and more sensible and mainly prettier than I was smart or sensible or good-looking. I said, “Polly, let me ask you this. Do you think all of our selves are pointed at this moment right here in this restaurant?” I tapped the bread in the breadbasket. It was a basket of bread, tucked in with a white cloth like a newborn child. I said, “Do you think that the bread in this breadbasket is the only thing in life right now?”

She said, “In a way I do. But in a way I think of the whole city stretched out, and of other cities, and of distances between cities, and of long train rides or plane rides to get from one city to another, so I try to keep mindful of the fact that my moment isn’t the entire moment, but it’s difficult especially when I’m having fun and when I’m talking to a nice man in a restaurant.”

Wow, I felt a glow when she said that. Then a little later she said how much she liked Philip Glass’s movie soundtracks. Well, all right, I thought, with some effort I can learn to like Philip Glass’s soundtracks. They’re insanely repetitive, but I can come around. Then I made a dumb move. We were on the topic of Mark Rothko, and for some inexplicable reason I was moved to say critical things not only about Mark Rothko but also about Pablo Picasso. Why, why, why? I said Picasso would be all but forgotten in a hundred years, that he was a coattail-rider and a self-trumpeter, and that his kitschy blue guitars made me want to scream with boredom and rage at the moneyed injustice of the international museum establishment. And that those awful demoiselles from Avignon were nothing but a hideous cruel joke. And that he consistently ripped off Matisse. And not only that, but his daughter’s jewelry designs for Tiffany’s were just god-awful. There were, I said, innumerable Sunday painters who could paint better than shirtless old Pablo — and at some point we’d have to face that stark, appalling fact. I could see Polly flinch. I quickly apologized for being stupidly opinionated and said that I didn’t know anything about art and that actually I liked Picasso’s flashlight painting and his steer’s head made of bicycle parts, although Duchamp, et cetera, and we got back on track. Later she said, “I’m having fun.” But I knew she was just being nice because the wine was red and she was so very pretty and such a kindly person and she didn’t want me to know that she was never going to go out with me again because I’m a rogue mastodon who dismisses Picasso with an annoying wave of his trunk. She wanted me to think that the world is a place in which somebody like me could go out with somebody like her. She wanted me to think that she was a person who didn’t become infatuated with bad standoffish married men who dressed in leather car coats. But it turned out she was.

• • •

I COULD SEE the dismissal in the corners of Polly’s eyes. I could see that she was interested in talking to me, interested in knowing an anthologist of minor notoriety, and maybe in being my friend, all that junk — but that she probably wasn’t going to be my girlfriend. And that’s the thing I wanted. I wanted that little jingly bell in front of the word “friend”: girlfriend. I’m a boy — a boy in his mid-fifties — and here is my friend, who is a girl. I wanted to have her next to me when we were walking and to be able to put my arm around her shoulder and draw her to me so that she stumbled a bit, happily, smiling at her stumbling. This was not in the cards.