B & Me Page 15

  Catherine’s problem began, she wrote, when she pulled the chain on the wall reservoir on her first day—a Friday—and took note, thankfully before she shut the door, that what she’d been trying to flush was not, as they say, going down. There ought to be a particular word for this by-now-known-the-world-over dread, a terrible dropping sensation that flushes through you when you realize that what you’ve dropped and flushed might be coming back at you—apoopalypse comes to mind—and what Catherine did, heroically, when she recognized the severity of the tornadically swirling, ever-rising waters, was scurry up the spiral wrought-iron staircase to the other half of the atelier’s bathroom, also known as the kitchen, and retrieve a set of implements that permitted her to ladle out—her phrase, ladle out—a generous enough helping of raw sewage such that the emergent crisis, at least, was averted.

  But that was just the beginning because the toilet remained clogged, impervious to vigorous plunging, and it was right at the beginning of the weekend, and our ornery Parisian concierge, unimpressed with Catherine’s atrophied French, made the assumption that the clog was the result of Catherine’s having flushed something inappropriate down the toilet—an American-sized tampon probably—and so Catherine had to suffer for a couple days until a French plumber could be found, and in that period, she wrote, she wound up having to use not a formal chamber pot, but a makeshift chamber pot, and her e-mails did not specify which piece of the atelier’s cookware she conscripted into this service. Nor did I ever ask.

  On Sunday, a friendly French plumber finally arrived and took one look at Catherine’s chic Parisian frame and explained to the concierge that there was no way this American caused this clog. Much more likely was that an animal of some kind, grown weary of life in Paris, had decided to end it all and in the process leave behind enough of a mess so that it could feel that its life had amounted to something. It was probably a pigeon. Everyone in Paris hates pigeons. The pigeons, in turn, hate everyone except the homeless—everyone, that is, with plumbing—and this mutually ferocious scorn keys off a kind of avian existential ennui. In some cases, near the desperate end, the birds’ ennui turns aggressive and vengeful. What Catherine suffered, then, was a suicide pigeon, a bird that had decided to go out not with a bang but a gurgle, entombing itself in the plumbing of a youngish couple hoping to be Parisians, if only for the holidays.

  From a continental remove this episode had a jaunty romance, and it went a long way toward alleviating the anxiety I’d begun to feel over visiting Paris for the first time after having years before missed an opportunity to shape my worldview there, as both Catherine and Nicholson Baker had done. I was nervous, I had some peace that needed to be made, but Catherine’s expertly rendered drama kept me from brooding too long or too deep. The episode fit perfectly with my ever-growing understanding of Baker, too. If it’s fair to say that a couple’s history of intimacy aligns with the evolution of the plumbing with which they outfit their homes, that relationship stages ranging from the raging honeymoon of youth to the sedate partnership of old age correspond to living arrangements that initially compel attendance to body matters at close quarters but change over time with the addition of a second sink or perhaps an entire additional bathroom, each permutation alleviating certain interpersonal tensions, surely, but each also resulting in corresponding drops-off in physical familiarity and activity, then Nicholson Baker’s sex books, which I’d packed in my satchel for the flight to France, were perhaps best described as an attempt to replumb the house of human intimacy, to yank out all the corroded metal and replace it with state-of-the-art piping such that we might once again become acquainted with what goes on behind closed bathroom doors. Or at least that was my suspicion before I actually read the books. Because even though it might seem strange that a writer who broke onto the literary scene with philosophical musings on escalators, fatherhood, and the mind chugging from idea to idea would suddenly start thinking a whole lot about sex and masturbation, it actually makes perfect sense, given the earlier work. On page six of The Mezzanine, “Howie” admits to being a “steady customer” of men’s magazines and he indulges, in a footnote, in a “helpful vignette” about a convenience-store counter girl. Mike of Room Temperature ups the ante from there by claiming that pictures of floppy-titted noble savages in National Geographic were his “pornography between the ages of seven and nine.” And later, Mike launches into an evocative description of a fifth-grade encounter with an instructional female anatomy manikin. This scene goes on for quite some time. It’s the first full-blown tongue-in-cheek sex scene in Baker’s work. And it follows Mike’s explanation that he and Patty had consummated their engagement not with sex (they’d been having sex for a while) but with a new way to refer to their gastrointestinal goings-on. Patty offered up “going big job” as a substitute for what polite company calls “number two” or “have a B.M.” To Mike’s mind, “going big job” amounts to a “further upward cranking of intimacy,” and the passage, in which the engaged couple playfully conjugate their private verb, was one of those that I found so diaphragm-grindingly funny that I read it aloud to Catherine. She liked it too, and actually we did more than just read the passage. We started to employ Mike and Patty’s phrase, and not just in the contexts that Mike and Patty had exhausted.

  Of the many miraculous things about Catherine, the most miraculous was that she’d been a miracle baby. As an infant, she had been afflicted with a horrible illness, and it was only an experimental treatment that saved her life. The illness left no scars, but her bowels had been a problem ever since, and “going big job,” for a time, gave us a way to refer to her indelicate troubles. Stuck in Paris with a malfunctioning toilet, Catherine made no mention of her bowels in her letters, but my awareness of her difficulties eventually encouraged me to read between the lines and recognize just how god-awful the adorable atelier had turned out to be.

  I tried to look on the bright side—to see the toilet as half full, rather than overflowing. The atelier may have represented a step backward for us in a domestic engineering sense, but maybe because it was a step backward it could amount to a step forward in an intimate sense. Our intimacy had been rudely interrupted by Nicholson Baker, the former bed and breakfast, my irrepressible negativity, and the loss of Baby. Yet hope loomed in the form of lazy atelier upkeep: We would pretty much have to come to know each other in new and intimate ways. Of course, not having lived through the clog experience meant that I had a healthy critical distance on it, a distance Catherine lacked, and that’s how I explained our first night in Paris, which, despite a perfect meal in a perfect French restaurant with perfect foie gras, amounted to a failure in that back at the atelier we failed to consummate France. There were other hurdles too—Catherine was menstruating, I was jet-lagged—and it was all too much, and we gave up after a short period of rolling around on the futon. Then Catherine climbed up to the kitchen so that I could try for a jet-lagged job in the half toilet before we called it a night. Ideally Catherine would have stayed downstairs so we could get right to the business of compulsory intimacy, but I didn’t protest as the task I had to perform was an ugly one. My confused body was contending with a new continent and rich food, and what that meant was that my labor was conducted without proper focus. As any office manager knows, such work tends to produce sloppy results, and I was left struggling to clean up after myself with scratchy tissue paper and a toilet of suspect efficacy. Once I was finished, I flushed and gave the relevant body region a final swipe, and, as with light-colored household surfaces, it was the observed purity of the daubing mechanism that established the cleanliness of the thing daubed
. What I was left with was a not exactly soiled, but decidedly not reusable, bit of wadding material. And that was my dilemma. Should I flush again to get rid of it, risking another clog (for the duration of our stay, each yank on the chain felt like the lever pull of a demonic slot machine), or should I simply dump the tissue into the bowl to await a future flush? For safety’s sake I decided on the latter course, and it was only when Catherine’s own nighttime preparations took her partway into the half toilet that I got a real sense of the robustness of her post-traumatic clog mood.

  “Did you use too much toilet paper?”

  “No, I—”

  “You can’t use too much paper. I’m not living through that again.”

  “I didn’t, I can—”

  “You do this at home. All the time.”

  “I’m trying to—”

  “You don’t know what it was like. I know I made it sound sweet and charming in e-mails, but it was not. It was horrible. Horrible. And if it happens again, it’s your problem. I’ll go take photographs.”

  Our next day in Paris was better. An early-morning walk along the Seine became our routine for a time, and that evening we ceremonially consummated France. But this was the mood I took with me on the Métro when I headed to a brasserie in Saint-Germain-des-Prés to begin reading Vox, Baker’s all-dialogue “phone-sex novel.”

  33

  NOW SEEMS LIKE A GOOD TIME TO ASK AN IMPERTINENT QUESTION: What do I know about Nicholson Baker’s penis? A good bit, actually:

  The Mezzanine: “Howie” reveals that he had once stolen his mother’s sanitary napkins, punctured them, and then “push[ed] [his] crayon-sized penis through the hole, and urinate[d] into the toilet.” (An earlier footnote makes passing reference to “Howie” ’s “miniature dick.”)

  Room Temperature: Mike excitedly tells a dorm-roomful of college girls, Patty among them, that his “genitalia were constructed on a humble scale.”

  U and I: Baker revels in the discovery that he has psoriasis, which links him to Updike, but he worries because his affliction is less serious: “Phase 1 involved only the scalp and penis.”

  It was opening Vox for the first time that got me thinking about all this. There was no dedication page this time around (“For M. W. B.” appears in very small type in the front matter), and there was no author photo and there wouldn’t be for The Fermata, either. What got me thinking about his penis was that for a couple books now Baker had stopped mentioning Eastman and music in his author’s notes. The author’s note of the first edition of U and I is extremely spare (year of birth, previous books, general location of residence), and Vox’s is about the same though it lists the magazines he’d been writing for and—here was the clue—it specifies that in addition to two novels he had produced “a work of autobiographical criticism entitled U and I.”

  Why not “memory criticism” here? It’s odd because even though U and I toys with other names for its technique (“phrase filtration,” “closed book examination”) it’s “memory criticism” that sticks and reappears throughout the book. “Autobiographical criticism” is a phrase never associated with Nicholson Baker before the author’s note of Vox.

  What does this have to do with his penis? Well, when I said that U and I was the first book of writerly criticism to have been published in some time, that wasn’t strictly true. Or at least it’s debatable, as the broad range of work that fits into what is, at best, a loosely defined category makes it a difficult history to track. I’d borrowed “creative criticism” from critic J. E. Spingarn, who coined the term in a 1910 essay inspired by a remark from Goethe: “There is a destructive and a creative or constructive criticism.” When Spingarn published the idea in book form—Creative Criticism appeared in 1917, and again in 1931—it caused enough of a stir that H. L. Mencken and T. S. Eliot weighed in, but that was about the end of it. That’s why, in the 1980s, when a number of critics, mostly feminist, grown weary of sublimating their identities to masculine pronoun–rich academic prose, set out for something new, something that would let them emphasize the self rather than stifle it, they called the technique not “creative criticism” but “autobiographical criticism.” (“Confessional criticism,” “personal criticism,” “impressionistic criticism,” “sequestered criticism,” “autocritography,” and “plebeian autobiography” also got bandied about, but “autobiographical criticism” won the day.) This too caused a stir. Traditional critics refused to regard the work of autobiographical critics as true scholarship, and the fact that it became a debate over “scholarship” probably explains why it too petered out. What’s worth considering now is the nature of the traditional critics’ objections. “Naked display of one’s personal feelings,” one critic claimed, “more often than not falls into a complacent exhibitionism.” Even that was oblique. A few years later another critic took wry note of “the recent turn toward autobiography in literary criticism and the proclivity to mention things like peeing and penises.”

  Actual examples of this were tame and rare. One autobiographical critic titled a chapter “My Father’s Penis.” Another likened his penis to a chainsaw. Particular attention was given to Jane Tompkins’s 1987 essay “Me and My Shadow,” often cited as the manifesto that set the autobiographical criticism ball rolling. For one unsympathetic critic, Tompkins’s brief stream of consciousness sequence culminating in a thought about “going to the bathroom” demonstrated everything that was wrong with autobiographical criticism:

  The urinary motif might appeal, I suppose, to those who are searching for a whiff of the carnivalesque within the desiccated routines of scholarly argument. But there’s nothing here of the Rabelasian abandon that might fulfill such a desire. . . . The mention of going to the bathroom functions as a conventional instance of the vraisemblable. [But] there is no point to this, it is only mentioned to inscribe the reality of the story. . . . Or, to say it better, this is the kind of reality Tompkins values for herself, precisely as an avoidance of the problem of theorizing selfhood, about which going to the bathroom has absolutely nothing to say, for or against—as if one could say, for instance “I pee, therefore I am.”

  In other words, what one should do is ignore reality so as to understand the self that exists in reality, the self that must be theorized about. A general lack of enthusiasm for excretory activity perhaps explains why traditional critics often wind up just so full of shit.

  Anyway, the trend line merged with Baker. Autobiographical criticism appeared in 1987, and U and I specifies that Baker began taking notes on perhaps writing something “vaguely autobiographical” about Updike in 1987 and 1988. Then, after U and I, Baker appeared to offer a retroactive nod to autobiographical critics with the author’s note of Vox, a book that, along with The Fermata, which appeared two years later, outgrew the casual descriptions of Baker’s penis from his early books by making the entire spectrum of taboo subjects the central focus of his first books that were not autobiographical in nature. The question I had, as my espresso arrived and I looked out onto the French vraisemblable teeming with happy little cars and impossibly well-dressed holiday shoppers—­the very model of a society seething beneath with forbidden truths—was whether Baker’s sex books could accurately be described as appealing only to those looking for “Rabelasian abandon.”

  Hardly.

  34

  VOX BEGINS WITH “‘WHAT ARE YOU WEARING?’ HE ASKED,” AND from this alone we can begin to guess at the basic situation: an intimate voice exchange conducted between persons unable to view each other. That’s shortly confirmed: a man and a woman, strangers, on the phone. By page
nine—after the man offers a detailed description of his orgasms, which I will return to shortly—we begin to get hints as to how this conversation came about, the man and woman each describing how they stumbled across the advertisement for the phone service they have dialed. This is the only real fantasy in the book—if that can be said of a book composed almost entirely of fantasy—in that most books have settings, they are set in glorious cities, countries in turmoil, apocryphal counties, places that sometimes loom as large as the characters themselves. Vox has no setting at all.

  Or perhaps there’s an implied setting. We come to know just a few things about the world outside the spoken exchange. The man and woman call themselves Jim and Abby. Jim is from a “western city,” Abby is from an “eastern city,” and each had stumbled across an advertisement placed by a company called 2VOX, a seemingly automated social networking organization that the jacket copy of Vox calls a “party line,” but which is closer to what in a few years’ time would come to be known as a “chat room.” When you call 2VOX you land in a virtual arena of competing voices. Male callers attempt to get themselves invited by female callers into private “rooms,” and that’s where Jim and Abby “are.” That’s where the bit of fantasy is too because even though 2VOX has monetized its product—all callers pay two dollars per minute—­nothing stops a couple from simply exchanging phone numbers and conducting their business on ordinary lines. At one point, Jim and Abby contemplate this but decide against it, preferring to enthusiastically patronize a business they wish to support. But could such a company survive a real marketplace? No way. And what’s the service anyway? Vox pretty much underscores that the only truly necessary provider of telephonic sex aid devices is AT&T. All 2VOX supplies is virtual proximity. The enterprise’s success, then, suggests a kind of background dystopia in which even engaging, intelligent people like Jim and Abby, as we find them to be, have difficulty discovering each other.