The Fermata (36 page)

“I’m not saying that it’s a guaranteed sure thing, but I do think it’s worth a try,” I said excitedly. “Are you with me?”

“When would this happen?” She had the same sideways smile she’d had when I first asked her out.

“We could set a date, if you like. Five minutes from now?”

“That seems soon,” she said.

“I’ve lost all conception of what ‘soon’ means. Don’t you want to lose all conception of what ‘soon’ means, too?”

“I do, kind of.” She lowered her eyes.

Suddenly I remembered birth control. “Shoot, that’s right. A condom is out, because there has to be total contact.” I
made popping sounds with my lips, thinking. “You’re not on the pill, are you?”

“There’s a man I see sometimes. So I still am technically, yes.”

“You are? Oh—
great!
Perfect.” I waved my hands. “Forget we talked about that. Let’s talk about something else for a while.” I asked her to tell me more about her botanical drawing class. She described the difficulties of rendering bark. She talked about her teacher. There was a nice moment when she finished saying something, and took a bite of bread, and noticed that I was looking at her with an odd, gleeful expression, and her face filled with friendly curiosity. It was time. “May I?” I said.

“May you what?”

“Snap my fingers?”

She drank the rest of her wine. “Okay.”

I snapped my fingers.

I carried her down the stopped escalator to a sofa in the lobby and found a rolling cart that the bellhops used for suitcases. I went into the back rooms and found several blankets and pillows and padded the cart with them. I put her down on the cart, on her side, with her legs bent. It took me less than an hour to push her to her apartment. I stayed mostly in the middle of the street. It had begun to rain, but we didn’t get very wet because we were only dampened by the drops that were suspended in our path, not by the ones above us, and even in a heavy rain, the number of drops per cubic foot is far fewer than it appears when the rain is in motion. I left the cart by the mailboxes and carried her upstairs and used her key. I laid her down in the sunporch, on her bed. I kept my eyes closed while I pulled off her clothes and my own. (I wanted to be able to tell her that I hadn’t looked at her.)
I arranged the covers of the bed over her and then got in next to her. She was very warm. I lay there for a while with my eyes closed, letting my heart calm down. Her mattress pad felt terrific. I was tired and sleepy. I had a nap of maybe half an Arno-hour. When I woke up I thought to myself, I’m lying in bed with the woman whom, above all others, I want to be in bed with. I snapped my fingers.

Joyce began to say something that began with “Although.” She stopped abruptly. “What happened here?”

“See how easy it is?” I said.

She turned her head on the pillow to look at me. “What did you do?”

“I brought you to your apartment and got in bed with you.”

Her arm moved under the covers. “I don’t have any clothes on.”

“That’s true,” I said. “But I assure you, I kept my eyes closed while I was taking them off. I haven’t done anything seedily voyeuristic. They’re over there. I just wanted to be totally naked in bed with you.” We were both lying on our backs. Our arms touched a little. The room was dim.

Joyce put her hands on her forehead and thought. “How did you get me here? Did you drive?”

I explained how difficult it was to drive during an estoppel, what with all the immobile cars. I described the luggage cart and the borrowed bedding. Then I said, “There’s one serious problem, though, having to do with time, which is that as we lie here talking, our entrees may be being served, and the waiter may wonder where we’ve gone. I left my jacket there to show that we haven’t skipped out, but I think we should find a way into the Fermata together as quickly as possible, before anyone notices that we’ve disappeared at the restaurant, and
then once we’ve done that we’ll have loads of time to talk, and we can stroll back in a leisurely way and finish dessert.”

“You mean—?”

“Yes, I think we have to make love right now, and we have to put off any foreplay until after we’ve Snapped out—assuming, that is, that we do successfully enter the Fermata together. But let’s try.”

“Couldn’t we at least kiss?”

“Are you kidding?” I said. “We
have
to kiss. It’s a necessity. We have to have a total mental and physical union for this to work. Try to feel as much love for me as you can.”

So we put our arms around each other and started kissing. I think we were both somewhat surprised by how good it felt. Her mouth was the best thing my mouth had felt in quite a while. I guess I had simply forgotten that there is no satisfactory autoerotic substitute for a kiss. Our lips cooperated; they understood each other. In fourth grade I had a rubber stamp that said
ARNOLD STRINE
. I didn’t like stamping it hard. I liked placing the fully inked stamp gently on the paper and rocking it back and forth as I pressed down, so that my name came out very dark, and the tops and bottoms of the letters flared. While Joyce and I made out, I closed my eyes and saw for an instant an image of my old rubber stamp being held in the air and brought together with a second well-inked stamp saying
JOYCE COLLIER
, so that our two names met face to face and rocked together, printing themselves on each other.

I’d also forgotten, I guess, that there is no substitute for the joy of first putting your arms around a woman’s nudity—when time is unfrozen and when she answers your embrace by actually
embracing you back
and you can’t believe how well naked seamless bodies can coincide, how accommodating they can be, even before erections have been manually confirmed and
clitorises tested or tasted. And it isn’t often that you
begin
making out with someone, for the very first time, in a state of total nudity, as Joyce and I did. As if it was all part of our kiss, as if our bodies were kissing, Joyce moved underneath me and opened her legs and as I let more of my weight press on her she brought me inside, past her lush black fur and into her hot Fermata.

I whispered to her how good she felt. “Ready?” I said.

“Yes.” I felt her breath on my neck.

“Hold me really tight. Snap your fingers when I do.” I counted off, “One, two, three.” Then we kissed again and we snapped our fingers in unison.

It was difficult to tell for a moment if anything had happened. We looked at each other inquiringly, our eyebrows raised. Our slightest movement made my cock squeak with pleasure.

“Did it work?” Joyce asked.

I listened. “Hear that? It’s totally quiet. That’s the way the Fermata always sounds. It worked.”

She sighed with relief and started lifting her hips up against me. “Good news,” she murmured. “Good news. Can we do this for a while, though?”

“We can take as long as we want now,” I said.

Several Arno-and-Joyce-hours later, we walked back to the Meridien, wheeling the luggage cart with us. I showed her the negative black paths our bodies left behind in the constellations of hanging, glinting raindrops. “So—while you’re out on walks like this,” Joyce said, “you just take off a woman’s clothes, if she attracts you?”

I said I sometimes did.

Joyce tried it. She undid the black jeans of a motionless man in a leather jacket and pulled on his underpants and peered
inside. She also unbuttoned a businessman’s raincoat and reached her hand into his jacket and felt his chest. “Hey, I could learn to like this,” she said. We took our seats at the restaurant and counted to three and snapped our fingers. The waiter appeared shortly after with our entrees. “The plates are very hot,” he said importantly, holding them with a cloth. We had been gone for no more than five minutes; nobody had missed us. Joyce and I talked for another hour, and we drank some more and then had some coffee, and then I walked her home and kissed her good-night at her door.

18

M
Y FINGER-SNAPPING PHASE IS NOW OVER, MY FOLD-
POWERS
are currently gone. I assume I’ll get them back sooner or later, but I’m never sure. What happened, as far as I can piece it together, is that one night, when Joyce and I were having sex, I unknowingly transferred all my fermational proficiencies
to her
. I had jokingly trotted out the penis pump and the Goddess Athena vibrator with the clit-stimulating fork-flamed torch of wisdom and told her that I’d bought them with her in mind, before we’d started going out. “I’m not a big vibrator person,” Joyce warned. But she did pump enthusiastically away at my penis with the penis pump, sucking it up into the clear plastic vacuum chamber and watching its veins
pop out. When my penis had had more than enough of that treatment, I pulled it out and substituted the Athena vibrator in its place. Joyce and I then pumped the vibrator with the penis pump for a while, sucking it in as far as it would go. And finally, after some cajoling, Joyce turned on the Athena vibrator and slipped it inside herself. The fork-flamed torch of wisdom took her polytheistic clit to new heights.

But what we didn’t realize at the time was that the penis pump had somehow sucked all of my temporal powers out of me. Then, when the Athena vibrator went into the penis pump, the same powers were apparently transferred to it, and when the Athena vibrator muttered its way deep into Joyce, the powers entered her. As a result, the next time I snapped my fingers, nothing at all happened—or rather, everything kept on happening. But the next time Joyce clicked on the switch of her Athena vibrator, time dutifully halted for her.

I find I don’t miss the Fold too terribly much at present. My self-discipline has improved. I’m still temping, but I’ve begun going over some of the notes for my master’s thesis. (It’s a history of Dover Books.) Joyce, meanwhile, is having a good time. She carries her vibrating Cleft-Goddess around with her in her purse and turns it on at will, as when she has an important deadline at MassBank that she can’t otherwise meet. She strips pedestrians and tells me about strange genitalia she has seen and known. She talks of taking a jaunt down to Washington and sucking the presidential dick. Sometimes she uses Fold tricks while we’re having sex: for instance, she will alternate her mouth and her vadge on my richard so fast that I feel as if I’m in both places at once—as if she’s twirling over me. We’ve mentioned marriage as a possibility.

The other day I was in her apartment. I did some pushups on the floor. Then I sat on her bed. I called out, “Can I tell
you about this great dream I once had about how you saved the two of us with your flying blue brassiere?”

“Briefly,” said Joyce from the bathroom. She was unbraiding her hair.

“We were in a boat in the middle of this lake of sulfuric acid,” I happily began, “and you were wearing your flying blue brassiere …”

Joyce has saved me, for the time being. I haven’t taken a stranger’s clothes off in weeks now. I’m trying to interest a publisher in my autobiography. But even if nobody wants to publish it, I could still have, say, a hundred copies made up. I’ll typeset them myself. I’ll get Copy Cop to bind them. I’ll design a jacket that uses the logo of some flush, big-name publisher like Random House. Yes, I’ll put that little stylized house on the bottom of the spine of my book. I’ll use a color copier to make the cover. It will look like a real book! And then, assuming I get my Fold-powers back, I’ll go to Waterstone’s or the Avenue Victor Hugo and Drop and put this book in people’s hands just as they think their fingers are closing on some other, real, book. They will read me. Word will spread. The Fermata, my Fermata, the keeper of all my secrets, will be a secret no longer.

“It’s hard to find an analogue for Baker’s combination of intellectual playfulness and lyricism. The music of Erik Satie comes to mind. Also peanut butter and bacon sandwiches—something weird and wonderful about which you can only say, Try it. You’ll like it.’ ”

—Philadelphia Inquirer

THE FERMATA

Outrageously arousing, acrobatically stylish,
The Fermata
is a graphic, but good-natured peep deep into the ethical interstices of time, testosterone, and the furtive male imagination.

Fiction/0-679-75933-6

THE MEZZANINE

Startlingly inventive and filled with offbeat wit, this wondrous novel turns a ride up the escalator of an office building into a dazzling meditation on our most familiar relationships with objects and people we usually take for granted.

Fiction/0-679-72576-8

ROOM TEMPERATURE

Nicholson Baker transforms a young father’s feeding-time reverie with a newborn baby into a dazzling catalog of the minutiae of domestic love.

Fiction/0-679-73440-6

U AND I

Baker constructs a splendid edifice that is at once a tribute to John Updike and a disarmingly, often hilariously frank self-examination—a work that lays bare both the pettiest and the most exalted transactions between writers and their readers.

Nonfiction/Literature/0-679-73575-5