B & Me Read online

  “Playing Trombone” is not, however, the Disneyfied Wonderland that gave us Alice blue. Rather it offers advance warning to would-be musicians, much in the same way Carroll’s muted cautionary tale, a jolly dystopia, alerts children to the cruel and nonsensical world of adults that they are fated to enter.

  Mike’s étude assignment in chapter eight of Room Temperature ends much as the trombonist’s career does. He succeeds in playing the étude in a single breath, but his professor only nods and says, “All right, it’s physically possible.” He reaches for a pencil and puts the breath mark, “a beautiful deliberate, dark comma!” back where Mike first placed it. Mike is jubilant at first, but soon recognizes the lesson to have been an exercise in empty virtuosity. Within weeks he decides to transfer to Swarthmore, “where commas could be stuck in and taken out without the risk of physical injury.”

  So Mike, it can be said, expresses a hope that language might succeed where music fails. Room Temperature presents us too with études in the form of long, billowy sentences, and Mike offers the idealistic argument that the nature of modern life reinforces the need for a virtuosity of thought, as conveyed by words and punctuation creatively combined:

  In our desire for provincial correctness and holy-sounding simplicity and the rapid teachability of intern copy editors we had illegalized all variant forms [of punctuation]—and, as with the loss of subvarieties of corn or apples, this homogenization of product was accomplished at a major unforeseen cost: our stiff-jointed prose was less able . . . to adapt itself to those very novelties of social and technological life whose careful interpretation and weighing was the principle reason for the continued indispensability of the longer sentence.

  This is what Baker, abandoning one kind of comma for another, smuggled from music to literature.

  A link between writing and music is of course nothing new. We compose music and prose; we read both too. But does that mean that reading a book is like listening to Mahler, or J. J. Johnson, or the Talking Heads? No. When musicians read music, they are playing it. When I started reading aloud to myself—and when, in my hammock, I found myself reading aloud Baker’s étude sentences, using commas as breath marks—I recognized the sensation at once: sight-reading. Written language is like a score: Before you learn to read, it looks like gibberish, difficult and strenuous, but eventually you make a breakthrough and you can read the words and sentences without sounding out each and every letter. Many stop there, but those who don’t find that after a great deal of study and practice they can sight-read even difficult books with impossibly long sentences that twist and writhe like complicated melodies. Then, and only then, do you get it: the almost occult ability to tap into an author’s mind, to hear the characteristic hum of their voice whispering breathless in your ear.

  31

  THAT’S WHAT, IN THE DEPTH OF MY CRISIS, I’D FORGOTTEN HOW to do—take pleasure in the careful study of a challenging book. I discovered it again in Nicholson Baker, and as a result I’d grown energized. Thinking forward to all the Baker books I hadn’t read, I felt like a perfect lever or a well-calibrated tool, maybe like one of those adjustable wrenches that amplify torque. Baker was in my blood now, which meant that I’d begun to dream and fantasize about him, and now that I thought about it I wondered whether my elaborate vision of the fields around my hammock teeming with joyriding Baker-babies was not the result of actual reading, but was the even deeper product of a reading-addled brain at work in the in-between, just right, Alice blue of human consciousness.

  In any event it was this sense of vigor and renewal that explains why I responded poorly when, nearly finished with Room Temperature (I was at a boil now, dying to get my schoolwork done so I could ride out to the hammock and finish it), I came home from school one day and found Catherine wearing those shoes. Those shoes were the shoes she’d worn late one night when we’d still been courting by mail and a sexy bedtime exchange compelled me to forgo sleep and complete the six-hour drive to her house in four and a half hours, and she answered the door in shoes with ribbony straps that tied around her ankles and climbed partway up her calves. I’d taken a great deal of pleasure in untying those shoes, and ever since they had served as an informal signal that we might soon be intimate. But now I was so keyed up by Nicholson Baker that I didn’t even look at her shoes, even though that morning we had discussed the possibility of having sex later in the day, which is how we’d come to manage the ongoing deterioration of our intimate life. Our conversation went something like this:

  “How long do you teach today?”

  “’Til four, depending.”

  “Are you coming home right away?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “What are you doing then?”

  “When I come home? Reading Baker, probably.”

  “Maybe we can find time to—”

  “Sure!”

  This was quite lovely of Catherine because as I’d found a renewed sense of purpose in Nicholson Baker, she had continued feeling clogged. She watched admiringly as I scribbled wild annotations in the margins of books like an insane mathematician trying to keep up with inspired equations, and she listened dutifully whenever I stumbled across a passage that I just had to read aloud to someone beside myself. But even this was a strain. She’d had no luck making a home for herself in the former bed and breakfast, and while for me the vision of Catherine shoe-smacking her way across the kitchen floor in pursuit of a wily and ultimately evasive scorpion was the stuff of light comedy, for her it was only a detail cropped from a much larger canvas depicting the world fallen into ruin. In short, it was harder for her to muster intimate energies than it was for me, yet she had managed it. And what did I do? I walked briskly past her and stuffed Room Temperature into a shoulder bag.

  “I’m headed to the hammock!”

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “Don’t know! ’Til I’m done.”

  I left her to care for the remaining farm kitten—by now simply called Baby. More and more Baby had been venturing down from the roof, and we had started letting her sleep in the laundry room on coyote-likely evenings. Apart from planning for our Paris trip—we’d rented a charming atelier, a converted photographer’s studio—Baby was Catherine’s lone daily comfort. Out in the hammock, as I approached the end of Room Temperature, I found myself thinking of Baby and the family that Catherine and I were determined not to have. At the beginning of chapter fifteen, the Bug finally finishes her twenty-minute meal and fades off to sleep with a breath like “a sob played backward,” a thought that puts Mike in mind of an old Eastman classmate, a mezzo-soprano whose laugh made him pity her. This was what life was like, he realizes, for people who were without families, without Bugs. Nicholson Baker felt sorry for us! This was perfect, because as jubilant as I had become, I’d begun to feel a little sorry for Baker. Something was missing in his life, as evidenced by the claim he would soon make: U and I was a test of whether he should go on being a writer. What was bugging him? I thought back on Baker’s two author photos, taken not far apart in time but nevertheless charting a decline from a Cheshire grin to the flat, dumb gaze of a lizard:

  I wasn’t the first to have had thoughts like these. Martin Amis beat me to that too. In the years after Amis panned Vox (“I found I was genuinely sorry as opposed to hypocritically sorry, that the book wasn’t better”), Nicholson Baker had come to Amis’s mind with surprising regularity as he continued filing reports on literature. The most recent reference I’d found, in a review of someone else’s book, characterized Baker’s literary aloofness as leonine in nature. Amis was wrong about Bake
r in almost every other respect, and I may have more to say about that, but on this point he was on to something. The Mezzanine was reviewed quite well but did not sell particularly well. Room Temperature did significantly worse. Could that have been causing Baker’s decline? Amis quoted an unflattering remark from Baker’s editor—“Don’t let Nick fool you. He wants to be rich and famous”—but I really didn’t think that was it. If “Playing Trombone” documented Baker’s realization that he was not a musical prodigy, then it has to be allowed that his first three books, read carefully, tell the story of his realization that he’s not a literary prodigy either (The Mezzanine: “You realize that you are no prodigy . . .”).

  There were other disappointments too. The Mezzanine and Room Temperature are tiny wonderlands in which cogs in the corporate system and reviewers of television commercials can recite Pope and Hopkins from memory. But what happens when Baker tries spontaneous quotation in U and I? Faulty memory.

  Language, too. A quick flip through the Baker books I’d not yet read turned up the occasional étude sentence, but later in his career they are far more the exception than the rule. Despite the “indispensability” of long sentences, Room Temperature marks the high point of Baker’s punctuarial ambition.

  Perhaps most important, right around this time in his career, 1991, he published a short piece in The New Yorker that was ostensibly about an ice storm that killed many old trees in Rochester. Really it was about two more important things. Overtly, it contained a surge of feeling wholly absent in his other work to this point, a deep abiding anger over the bombing campaign that the United States had begun in Iraq six weeks earlier: “We deserve at least this much ice after that much fire.” And accidentally, because the piece was published anonymously even though Baker was already a regular contributor to the magazine, it expressed awareness that a guru of minutiae, a writer who toys with model warplanes rather than flies the real thing, like James Salter, might not be able to authoritatively address the broader strokes of history. As a writer, Baker had been typecast as a kitten in a world that was just then beginning to slouch toward lions.

  Not long after I finished Room Temperature, something happened that made me doubt my newfound reading enthusiasm, something that made me radically empathize with Baker’s own emerging doubtfulness. Catherine and I woke early on the morning of a trip. We were headed out on a ten-hour drive to one city to retrieve a series of her prints at the end of a show, and the next day we would drive them to another city for another show. As we gathered our bags in the living room, Baby hopped up onto the exterior sill of a window, mewing through the screen. “She can’t come in,” Catherine said, snuggling a good-bye to her own pampered kitty. “She has to learn to be a farm cat.” Baby disappeared, and it was still dark a few minutes later as we packed the car. We checked our map, programmed the GPS, and departed. At the end of the driveway the car’s headlights fell on something in the road. It was Baby, out in the middle of the dangerous four-laner, her body crumpled and bloody, having since the moment we’d seen her followed her curiosity as far from the house as she’d ever gone in her life. She had wandered onto the alien blacktop, into the path of a car that didn’t swerve to avoid her.

  “Oh, no,” I said.

  Catherine was reorganzing the contents of her bag. “What?”

  I nodded toward Baby, and Catherine looked out the windshield, hesitated. Then she wailed, wild with sobs, a horrid unclogging. It was her fault, she cried. It wasn’t, I said—it was mine for our having moved here, it was ours, it was neither. It was this plague-lousy world that punished every effort to make it bearable. More cars zoomed past Baby’s body, each a wincing threat to hit her again. In the next hectic interval I dodged the traffic to scrape Baby into a cardboard coffin, and Catherine trained the car’s headlights on a spot in the yard so I could dig a hole for her. We both cried a little as we finally hit the road. For me it all turned to rage a mile away when we stopped at a convenience store for coffee and a few seedy cowboys leered at Catherine as we passed.

  I noted an odd device at the store’s coffee station. Someone had invented a simple mechanism to solve the hassle of nested plastic coffee cup lids, the kind that once you’ve poured your coffee you can’t just pluck single-handedly from the stack because they tend to stick to one another. Instead you have to set your coffee down and pry at them multifingeredly as though you’re working out a knot in a shoelace, because that’s the only way to come away with just one lid and not six or seven. The new device was an old-style knife switch, a lever that extracted the lids one at a time and practically handed them to you. Of course, I noted this because it was the kind of thing that Baker, early in his career, would have seen as a hopeful advance. The Mezzanine even briefly addresses coffee cup lids—“Howie” describes driving while holding “a Styrofoam cup of coffee with a special sipmaster top”—but that was decades old at this point, and no one drinks from Styrofoam anymore, and more important there never has been any kind of successful “sipmaster top.” You always wind up either burning your tongue or the roof of your mouth, and the edges of the plastic holes, or the little plastic flaps that are supposed to seal the opening at not-drinking moments, always wind up cutting little surgical incisions in your lip or your tongue.

  Catherine and I ran the reverse gauntlet past the sleazy cowpokes, and on the drive I let myself muse over several decades of history of disposable coffee cup lids. The evolution seemed to have drawn inspiration from everything from the Bauhaus to NASA, yet the simple truth seemed to be that no matter how complicated a lid you devise, the simple problem of drinking hot liquid while driving is insurmountable. You just can’t design a good hole. No washer or gasket completely solves the problem of what’s not there. Figuratively, that was maybe what was bothering Nicholson Baker. We’re not all born with silver spoons in our mouths. Some of us are bombed, and some of us are born into tragic circumstances, witness brutality, and die at the hands of those who can’t be bothered to swerve, perhaps because they’re struggling to drink from a disposable coffee cup. Baker was years from House of Holes, but he already knew that some holes can’t be filled, not with memories or commas or regret. A hole is negative space.

  32

  WHEN WE DELIVERED CATHERINE’S PRINTS TO THE SECOND CITY of our trip, the curator who solicited her work decided on the spot to buy all of them, every last damn piece. We were so excited on the long drive home we stopped at a motel for a quiet, road-style tryst, in and out in four hours. It was only a temporary respite, as back at the former bed and breakfast the stain of Baby’s blood and what of her I’d been unable to scoop up with my hands on a dark, busy road was still there, not yet harvested by insects. The stain remained visible for some time, and Catherine’s general feeling of cloggedness did not begin to improve until a few weeks later when she left for Paris and had to contend with the mother of all clogs.

  Thankfully, because our plan called for her to begin photo expeditions through the city as I finished up my last week of classes, I heard about the ordeal only via e-mail. On her first night Catherine wrote that our atelier in the sixth arrondissement was “adorable,” but adorable in this context was euphemistic plumbing-speak for primitive and horrific. The former bed and breakfast was similarly charming, actually. Defying a long-standing architect’s rule that the opposing ends of the human digestive tract should be structurally accommodated at as great a distance as is humanly possible, the former bed and breakfast’s only fully functional bathroom sat immediately adjacent to its kitchen. True, this was a step up from our dinky apartment, which as I’ve said sometimes requir
ed on-the-fly calculations of deep plumbological calculus, but the bed and breakfast’s practically cubist juxtaposition of intake and outflow facilities led to aerosol mixtures that were novel even to us, scents that brought me into full appreciation of Catherine’s long-standing, Franco-based passion for the history and art of perfumery. To be fully honest, I failed to recognize at first that Catherine’s characterization of the atelier—“downright adorable” were her exact words—was ironical, insincere. I figured it out only as her letters chronicled her crisis.

  The atelier’s bathroom, you see, was not adjacent to its kitchen, it was in it. Early French studios, it seemed, were designed to demonstrate the flexibility of staple products (e.g., brushes, baking powder, scouring pads, etc.), and the atelier’s seated-shower/vanity/sink combo unit had been installed so close to the stove that the random jumblings of not-put-away items that are common in both kitchens and bathrooms overlapped such that your bread knife might wind up lying alongside your toothpaste, and your coffee cup got chummy with your deodorant. But this was mere inconvenience compared to the atelier’s toilet, which was downstairs in the bedroom. Everyone knows that the maximalist history of French gastronomy is matched by its minimalist history of hygiene (e.g., peeing in sinks, Josephine’s wash habits, etc.), and that the atelier even had a toilet seemed to have been an idea that came to its owners only late and when they happened to be strapped for cash for renovations. Some apartments have “half baths.” The atelier had a “half toilet” that remained hidden as long as no one was sitting on it. Then it wasn’t hidden at all.