The Fermata (28 page)

I didn’t leave my gift in her player right away, not wanting to be seen driving right there, brazenly next to her, when it came on. I started up time, accelerated, and moved a few cars ahead, then jogged back on foot to her car with the universe on pause and switched the tapes. Consequently I didn’t get to see her initial reaction. But I drove annoyingly slowly, forcing the buffer cars behind me to pass; very soon I had Adele in my rear-view mirror again. I put on sunglasses so that she wouldn’t be able to see when my eyes were flicking up to the mirror at her. I saw her doing something, leaning, examining: I guessed that she had ejected my tape and was checking for identifying marks. (It said only
MARIAN THE LIBRARIAN
on the label.) Then there was a long period where she—I’m fairly sure—listened to some or all of it. She passed me again,
paying no attention to me; I Dropped for a second to verify that my tape was in her player and then let her proceed. We drove for quite a while together, over an hour, although I don’t think she noticed that I was keeping discreetly close to her. She fluffed her hair several times. I looked for signs of arousal: weaving, sudden slowing. There were none. I hoped she would be so aroused that she would have to stop at a motel very soon.

To my surprise, she drove right past the turnoff for Route 91 and Northampton. She continued to drive west. Was she on her way to Chicago? That made sense. She was probably in graduate school there. (The University of Chicago sticker on her rear windshield was above the Smith sticker, arguing for Smith’s temporal priority.) I wasn’t sure that I wanted to drive all the way to
Chicago
with her, but presumably she would have to stop somewhere for the night. And even if she hated my tape, she was still driving, and driving allows for a great deal of idle thought, and idle thought is the perfect medium for the accelerated transmutation of remembered distastefulness. By the time she turned into a motel that evening, some image off my cassette might be soaring through her sensibility, robed in urgency and fire. And regardless of how she felt about my tape, she would almost certainly come in her motel room, since what else is there to do in motel rooms?

As I drove, I worked out an elaborate plan of how I would proceed if she did check into a motel. As soon as she entered the parking lot, I would stop time and pull in ahead of her and park in an out-of-the-way spot. I would restart time. She would park and go into the office for five minutes and then reappear and walk to a room, say room 23. As she was pointing her key at the doorknob, with a semi-blank set-mouthed face that no actress could duplicate because it was so wholly
a product of the certainty of her unobseivedness, I would pause her, go back to the office and get the spare key for room 23 from the key drawer, and enter ahead of her. It wouldn’t be a bad room, a little on the brown side, but there would probably be no good place for me to hide to watch her undress. I would be deeply sleepy by this time. My yawns would be coming every thirty seconds. It would be about seven in the morning Strine-time, counting my lengthy on-the-road Foldout, but I would still be needing some moment of closeness with this total stranger, who had become my chosen traveling companion. I would notice that in her room there was a locked door that led to the adjacent room. This would suggest some possibilities to me.

Still fully fermational, I would leave her standing at the door with her key out and I would walk out and “buy” (in the usual informal manner) fourteen dirty magazines from a newsstand a quarter of a mile down the road. I like wandering around newsstands in the Fold and looking at people looking at magazines. Sometimes it’s just as you would expect: the thirteen-year-old kid with a fine little mustache looking at a shelf-ful of gory horror-film mags, etc. But often it isn’t so simple: it isn’t like the cartoon cliché about how people resemble their dogs. The man at the rack of computer magazines is someone you couldn’t have predicted would be there; likewise the woman looking at the sailing magazines and the man reading at the antiques rack. You can’t necessarily match people up with the periodicals they flip through. Perhaps this is because people who spend time in newsstands aren’t representative of the people who are deeply interested in a given hobby or subject—the real enthusiasts are out on sailboats or at antiques auctions, rather than reading about them; or more likely they are
leafing through the magazines at home, where they can really study them, being subscribers. Some of the true hobbyists disdain the magazines because they have studied them for so long that the level of repetition in the how- to articles has begun to tire them. It might often be that the inhabitants of a newsstand are those who want a taste of what it would be like to have a certain interest without actually having it. But then again, some are probably true aficionados of their particular realm who are drawn to the newsstand precisely because here they can see their specialized sub-passion on display near all others: model rocketry right on an equal footing with
Metropolitan Home;
the science fiction magazines only a few feet from bodybuilding, or from those flimsy how-to-write-an-effective-query-letter writers’ magazines. Unlike a bookstore, a newsstand unifies its huge range of subject categories by its overriding sense of nowness. It is a Parthenon of the immediate present, a centrifuge of synchronicity. Each magazine is saying, This is what we think you want to know about our subspecialty right this second, in (you scan the covers) July July July July August July July July August August July. My Fold-powers are replenished by trips to newsstands; I find that the longer I spend in one, the more cleanly and responsively time stops for me the next time I trigger a Drop.

So I would go down the road from Adele’s motel and buy fourteen men’s magazines at a newsstand, and I would walk back and arrange them on one of the beds in her room, room 23, covering its objectionable pink and brown coverlet with a superior quilt of plush womanflesh. I would get a washcloth from the bathroom and drape it on the edge of the bed, as if to catch the scumsquibs that were imminent from my bloated factotum. I would make sure that I had stroked past the point of caring at the moment I adjusted my glasses. Immediately thereafter, I would hear Adele’s revitalized key in the lock.

When, on the threshold of her own motel room, she caught sight of me inside, looking up at her with surprise, she would say, “Oh, sorry!” and close the door. It would not be too difficult for me to act flustered and embarrassed. I would genuinely
be
flustered and embarrassed. “I’m terribly sorry—one moment!” I would call loudly. “Sorry, sorry!” I would hurry outside, doing up my belt. She would already be on her way back to the office. “It’s my mistake,” I would say. “I think I was given the wrong key.”

“No problem,” Adele would say crisply. “I’ll get a different room.” She wouldn’t want to meet my eye.

“What I mean is,” I would hastily explain, “I think I’m in
your
room. The man said room twenty-four, but then when I looked at the key he gave me it said twenty-three, so I just assumed that it was the room I was meant to have. Obviously I was very wrong. But if you hang on thirty seconds I’ll be totally out of your room.”

Adele would say, “That’s all right—you’re obviously already all settled in there.” She would make a little laugh.

But I would be full of sincerity. “You mean the magazines? I can pile those up in half a second, really. I think that you should have the room you were meant to have, since it’s my mistake. I haven’t even used the bathroom. Well, no—I did use it.” I would put my hand on my chest. “This is mortifying.”

Adele would reassure me. “Don’t worry about it, honestly. I’ll get a different room. You stay in that room, and I’ll get a different one. It’s fine.”

But I wouldn’t want that to happen, of course. I would hand her my key to her room, the one I borrowed from the office while in the Fold. “Here’s the key to your room,” I would say. You get your suitcase or whatever, and I’ll get the right key for
my room, and then I’ll be out of
your
room in two seconds. Okay?”

She could so very easily not go along with this and insist on talking to the man in the motel office herself, and it would not be at all good for me if she did: I would have to use the Fold to escape, and I would have to abandon her while she was in the middle of telling the person at the desk that there was someone in her room, and then he would tell her that nobody was checked into room 24, and she would be left with a mysterious and disturbing sexual event that she could not; explain. The police would possibly get involved—awful to contemplate. But because I always mean well, despite my sneakiness, I would be flustered enough and genuine enough that she would believe me and accede.

I would check in at the office and request room 24 and get the key. Adele would be standing outside room 23 when I returned. The door would be ajar—I would have left it ajar—so she would have been able to glance at the arrangement of magazines and the washcloth on the end of the bed during my brief absence if she wanted to.

“There, all set,” I would tell her. I would noisily slap all the magazines in a big pile and cover the top one with the washcloth and carry them out to my new room. Again I would say, “I’m terribly sorry for the dreadful mix-up.”

“That’s quite all right,” she would say. She would be very unflappable and pleasant. We would wave good-night.

In my room, I would throw myself on the bed and sigh with relief—nothing bad had happened! I would think that I should ask her out for a bite to eat, since it was dinner time. I better ask her out right now, I would say to myself, before she gets undressed or has a shower, while we are both still in the ceremonially friendly mood-envelope. I would hop up—and
then I would think better of it. The problem would be that I was right on the brink of being perceived as a threat by her, and I wouldn’t be able to risk seeming sinister or sleazy by making any advances now. And I wouldn’t have to. The fact that we were in side-by-side rooms would feel increasingly relevant as the evening progressed: time would be on my side. I would lie back on the bed with my hands on my forehead, listening to the sounds from her room. Despite the doors connecting us, her room would turn out to be surprisingly uneavesdroppable-on. I would hear her water run for a while—perhaps a very quick shower, more likely a face-wash and a toothbrushing. Fifteen minutes would pass. I would hear her unlock several locks and go outside. She would be on her way to dinner. I would wait and then Drop and hide behind a corner and watch her. She would decide to dine at the lugubrious woodgrain-Formica-and-waitresses-with-Early-American-bonnets restaurant that was linked to the motel, just because she was tired and it was close by. I would buy a local paper from a machine and go inside and take a menu and sit down somewhere, ignoring the
PLEASE WAIT FOR HOSTESS TO SEAT YOU
sign, and then I would stop meddling with time. I would be deep into menu-parsing when Adele walked in. There would be very few folks in the restaurant. The hostess would seat Adele at a nearby table. When Adele said, “Thanks,” I would look up with pleased surprise. I would say hello. She would be carrying a copy of
Mirabella
, still wearing the pink sweater. When she sat down, I would lean over and ask her, “After you’ve read your magazine and I’ve read my newspaper, will you join me for dessert?”

And of course she would say yes.

The two of us would pretend that we didn’t exist for half an hour. While I ate my pot roast, I would rattle the newspaper
with a serious air and read it more thoroughly than I’ve read a newspaper in years. Finally there would come an indecisive moment after our dinner plates were removed. I would look up again and say, “Dessert time?”

She would get up and come over. “I shouldn’t, but I will,” she would say. “The list looks interesting.” We would discuss what an apricot crumble might in reality be, pretending to be more in the dark than we were. Then I would apologize again for the mix-up with the rooms. I would say that it was pure absent-minded stupidity on my part.

She would say, “It’s the second weird thing that has happened to me today.”

“Oh?” I would prompt. “The second?”

Yes, she would reply. She would tell me that she had been driving along the Mass Pike a few hours earlier, minding her own business, listening to a Suzanne Vega tape, when all of a sudden this voice had come on the speakers saying that he was someone in a car that she had recently passed and that he had used his powers to replace the tape in her cassette player with the one she was hearing. She would report that the tape had turned out to be, as you might expect, pornographic. “Really kind of strong stuff in places,” she would tell me. “Kind of disgusting, actually.”

“How very lurid and suggestive and mysterious,” I would say in reaction, making perplexed noises. I would question her further: did she have any idea how such an audiocassette could have made its way into her tape-player?

She would say that she had no idea. I would tell her that I was convinced that there were still one or more major phenomena in the universe that were as yet unknown or were radically misunderstood. “Are you a scientist?” she would inquire. I would say no, with a light laugh, and tell her that I
was a temp in Boston, returning from seeing relatives in Pittsburgh. She would say that she was doing linguistics at the University of Chicago. She would be interested in language acquisition in children from bilingual families. We would talk quite happily about language acquisition in children from bilingual families for a long while, since I am interested in that subject myself. She would let me pay for her dessert.

Before we left, I would take a deep breath and say, “You have to forgive me. I’m desperately curious to know what sort of stuff was on that pornographic cassette. Was it just him huffing and puffing?”

“Nothing like that,” Adele would reply. “It was fairly elaborate. It was a whole story.”

I would lean forward, intrigued. “Really?” I would watch her think over what she remembered of it. I would notice her mentally putting aside the first images that came to her from it because she didn’t want to discuss them with me.