B & Me Read online

  Basically I was feeling for the first time that heady paired combination of satisfactions that the sexual proseur can encounter at the outset of a new enterprise, as his long-neglected artistic ambition, however tentative or internally scoffed at—the wish to create something true and valuable and even perhaps in a tiny way beautiful—combines with his basic cuntlapping lust, the two emotions reinforcing each other and making you, or rather me, feel almost insane with a soaringly doubled sense of mission.

  In other words, Baker’s sex writing has always been an elaborate double entendre as much about literature as about our intimate lives.

  Dig in the sand a bit deeper than that and worlds open up. Marian the Librarian’s adventures begin when she kicks her husband, David, out of the house. Her first adventure finds her combining the erotic possibilities of mail-order purchases and delivery men, but for now it’s David who is most worth considering: David the embittered teacher of journalism who has a peculiar preoccupation with mechanical innovations. David not only adheres to a Jim of Vox–style worldview, he completes an intra-Fermata trajectory that begins with the story of how Arno originally created his time-stopping power.

  43

  ARNO FIRST BEGAN TO SENSE THAT HE HAD SOME KIND OF CONTROL over time when he was in the fourth grade (the same age as Mike of Room Temperature, when he got hot for the bagpipes). His fumbling initial experiments into how to stop and restart time focused on bits of mechanical hardware: toggle switches, rubber bands, mechanical pencils. He remained frustrated until the summer after fifth grade when he had a revelation associated with his family’s basement washing machine. And where am I when I read this scene, a scene pivotal not only to The Fermata but to Baker’s career in that it amounts to his realization that simplistic faith in machines—faster is better, progress is inevitable—is the thing he needs to outgrow? A French Laundromat, of course.

  Catherine had shuttled off to Versailles again, and I’d been left with the clothes-washing duties, which I actually didn’t mind because I get a little thrill out of being seen in public folding Catherine’s colored bras. I’d brought The Fermata along, even though I find it impossible to read while washing clothes. Some kind of puzzle-solving reflex is triggered by washers and dryers with glass doors, and the subtly altered consciousness that results from the search for pattern amid the chaos of tumbling laundry always winds up dragging at my attention, leaving me reading poorly if I attempt it at all. But for whatever reason I did wind up reaching for The Fermata at the French Laundromat, and good thing too: I experienced at once a version of Arno’s doubled sense of mission as, against his own better judgment, he launched into an extended explanation of his own origin.

  Arno’s attraction to the washing machine—a belief that “untapped temporal powers resided in the spin cycle,” leading to a “refining [of his] appreciation of centrifugal force”—initially sounds a whole lot like Abby of Vox’s hole fetish: The pattern of raised dots left on a towel wadded up against the inside of a washing machine at the end of a spin cycle made it appear as though the towel had “tried to pour itself out of the holes of the spinning basket.” The young Arno had concluded from this that he needed to spin, and as he attempted a backyard tumble dry, he imagined projectile hemorrhaging from his fingertips, à la Abby’s fog of blood. But it was no good—time didn’t stop. What Arno really needed to do, he thought next, was connect himself to the washing machine. He achieved this by running a thread through holes carefully punched through calluses at the ends of his fingers, and then he tied the thread to the machine’s upright agitating post. When the machine hit its spin cycle, the thread was pulled maniacally through Arno’s fingers. Time stopped!

  Now this didn’t recall Abby at all—but it did recall film feeding through a movie projector. And Baker’s “The Projector” appeared in The New Yorker just seven weeks after The Fermata was published. Notably, then, it’s this cyborg-projector sequence that leads to Arno’s realization that “to write [his] life” properly he needs the “entire receptacle of [his] consciousness spun.” What follows next is his theory of knowledge:

  And everything in the mind—that final triumph of protein chemistry—is likewise in helpless motion, afloat, diffuse, impure, unwilling to commit to precipitation: only an artificially induced pensive force of hundreds of thousands of gravities can spin down some intelligible fraction of one’s true past self, one’s frustratingly poly-disperse personality, into a pellet of print.

  What’s notable about this is the centrifuge action itself. The centrifuge, I saw now, as I was surrounded by centrifuges in the French Laundromat, was the classic Baker machine, employed as readily at the frontiers of science as for household chores. What does a centrifuge do? Extract fluid.

  This explained a bevy of watery images in The Fermata. Arno likens transcribing a tape for Joyce to “dog-paddling along in the moonlit scumless lily pond of her consciousness.” He claims to appreciate pre-Raphaelite painter Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s scenes of languishing postmasturbatory Victorian ladies for their depictions of “clear water and wet tulle.” And after he uses his time-stopping power to follow home the woman from the beach, he watches her masturbate in the bathtub to the recollection of his story, fixating all the while on the water flowing over her body in “riverine trails.”

  Of course it’s this scene that culminates in the infamous come-face sequence: Arno stops time so that he can masturbate onto the woman’s face, and it takes him a “good ten minutes” to clean his sperm from the woman’s eyelashes and eyebrows. Once he’s finished he attests to an odd feeling of companionship with Henry James and claims that he has now become “a modestly successful amateur pornographer.”

  44

  I THOUGHT TWO IMPORTANT THINGS AS I READ THIS STRETCH, cycling through the forty-five pages from the washing machine revelation to the come-face scene.

  First, I noted that Arno’s story about Marian the Librarian was a whole lot better than his autobiography: Arno’s writing was better than his writing about writing. What do I mean by better? Time stopped. That is, I stopped having the impulse to glance down at the page numbers as I read, I stopped peeking at the pages ahead for hard breaks, and I even stopped pausing to feverishly scribble the rough drafts of what I would later write about The Fermata in the margins. Marian was all-engrossing. I just read. That was the most important lesson of The Fermata. Literature has always been a time-stopping technology.

  Of course that goes the other way as well. After the centrifuge revelation, when I was not reading about Marian, I didn’t hesitate to stop time in The Fermata by setting it aside to check the laundry machines or move a load from a washer to a dryer. Truth be told, in books that don’t divert me I almost never force myself through to a convenient stopping place before getting up to do chores or whatever. I don’t wait for chapter breaks, those moments when a writer signals that it might be a good time to check e-mail or pee. In fact, in books that do divert me I often don’t pause at those moments at all: I blow through text breaks like they’re commas or colons. And whenever I start to feel a flagging of attention, and I’m sure that it’s not just a failure of will, I’ll just stop reading whenever, midsentence even, and what that means is that time in the book stops completely, everyone stands where they are, waiting for me to return, and that might be a very brief moment as I give in to a minor distraction, or it might be a much longer period as I attend to some pressing task and don’t return to the book until an hour or a week or a month has passed. When I do come back I restart time by backing up a sentence or two, or sometimes a page, and I’m always surprised by
how little it takes to get back into the groove of a book, to realign my consciousness with its ongoing stream of events and images. This mutual, time-stopping phenomenon of books was what The Fermata had been saying all along about the literature I’d realized it was about.

  The second thing I thought about while I read through this stretch was that appreciation of a book does not mean you go the whole nine yards with it. If only Arno had stuck with “cuntlapping”! Sadly I have to admit to being among those who first read the come-face scene with flagging appreciation. Ditto the book’s preoccupation with anuses. Arno readily admits that his autobiography is unduly preoccupied with “anes,” as he says, and while I can understand the anus as a universalizing feature of physiology—among the non-gender-specific body parts put to use sexually (e.g., fingers, earlobes, lips, etc.), the anus is the only common feature routinely withheld from public view, which grants it the draw of the forbidden—I have to admit that I’d always thought of the anus as a fetish for small-cocked men, men who maybe otherwise can’t achieve that wonderful sensation of feeling gripped. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve licked my share of anuses, and one of the things I’ve thought about as I’ve run my tongue over the spot that has a pretty uniform texture, person to person—something like a soggy walnut—is that I’ve got one too, I’ve got a soggy walnut that others have licked. (For the record I once licked Catherine’s anus, which she seemed to like okay though it wasn’t anything special, and while she hasn’t licked mine, I did once ask her to “fuck my butt” with her finger, which she agreed to do until the noises I made in reply, probably hammed up a bit, reminded her too much of pain and she started to cry.) So anuses do offer a common frame of reference, albeit a sort of tasteless one, and I suppose all this is really just my way of saying “Not interested!” which I acknowledge is problematic because I’ve certainly known women who attest to the joys of anal sex, and I imagine the homosexual community would want to have a general approval registered as well. But in any event, in The Fermata, it’s not that big a deal because while there’s certainly a good deal of “anal play” in the book it’s not nearly as stressed or infamous as the come-face scene.

  When I first read this scene in the French Laundromat, I actually stopped murmuring the words of the book under my breath and murmured “Ugh!” instead. To be fair I’d been waiting to get to this scene for more than a year, creating unrealistic expectations, and Arno himself has second thoughts about the whole thing (“I wasn’t crazy about the way my come looked on her closed eyes”). Furthermore, plenty of room in the book is given over to a girlfriend of Arno’s, who argues that intimacy of any kind with a time-stopped woman is loveless, at best, and at worst, necrophilic. But even so, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking that The Fermata double-crosses itself on this point. As will be reiterated in House of Holes, Arno insists on a distinction between good porn and bad porn, and he assures us that he’s not like the men of bad porn. But isn’t a man coming on a woman’s face, immobile or no, more or less a central theme of bad porn, by which I mean isn’t it an exciting activity to some men precisely because most women don’t want their faces came on? Isn’t there just no way around the fact that it’s more about power than intimacy? As I dug back into my mental archive of Nicholson Baker, the only relevant tidbit seemed to come from The Mezzanine, when “Howie” describes his solution to public urinal stage fright. To get his juices flowing, he imagines peeing on the head and face of men whose only crime happens to be that they have sidled up beside him. One poor imagined sap “fend[s] the spray off with his arm, puffing and spluttering to keep it from getting in his mouth.” This clearly is about power, and nakedly so. That in mind, a careful reader seems invited to conclude that The Fermata’s come-face scene tips the book’s balance toward Arno’s monstrousness, pushing him beyond redemption.

  45

  I DIDN’T START RETHINKING THIS UNTIL THE BOOK RETURNED to Marian the Librarian, and this was long after I’d come to terms with the fact that I wasn’t going to be having Baker-inspired sex in Paris. It wasn’t an unhappy time though, because Catherine and I had settled on two weeks in a Maine beach cottage for the coming June, to be followed by a week in South Berwick’s lone bed and breakfast, and even though we weren’t having sex, Catherine was letting me lotion her entire body every morning, head to toe, after she sit-down showered. Her cold had cleared up, and I’d cleared up too, though not as a function of my codeine prescription, but as a function of what the hole in my back represented: the removal of an affliction of which I’d only ever been spectrally aware. Even Catherine seemed aware of this, and one morning after I’d sit-down showered and descended the spiral staircase naked, she glanced at me walking across the room and said, a little slowly and thoughtfully, “Paris seems to agree with you!” This instantly made me think of The African Queen, and all journey romances like it, in which two completely incompatible people are thrust into a wandering adventure that first sets them raging against each other, but then there’s always some kind of pause in the action, a hesitation of reflection when Hepburn begins to appreciate Bogart, or Bogart begins to appreciate Hepburn, and one of them says to the other, “Africa seems to agree with you!” Love is blossoming! I was so overwhelmed at Catherine’s comment that I could think of no better reply than “Well, I agree with it!” We nodded awkwardly and I kissed her on the cheek and headed to Montmartre to read more about Marian the Librarian.

  Marian’s second adventure—David is now a forgotten memory—finds her luring a young neighbor and his girlfriend into a threesome in Marian’s garden. The two young lovers approach the garden in all innocence, and Marian is surely playing a faint serpent role here. There are two central points to the seduction. First, language. Marian appeals to the young lovers with an explanation of what she calls “dildo talk.” Simply put, dildo talk is how human beings employ language when lust so addles the mind that elegant phrasing and sophisticated sentence structure become neurologically impossible. “It’s dildo talk, frankly,” Marian explains, and it’s the “frankly” that is of interest because it suggests that we’re only rarely capable of being honest about this particular use of words. “‘God, I wish I could show you what I have up my ass right now. It feels fucking hot.’ She paused. ‘See, that’s a sample of dildo talk.’”

  What’s in the pause? For me, the pause is filled with my history of dildo talk, recollections of moments when I risked “talking dirty,” as is more commonly said. Catherine, actually, is particularly receptive to this kind of language, though timing is everything. Start in too soon with things like “Fuck that cock, I love you!” or “Jesus God, your big witchy tits!” (Catherine delivered her Catholic college valedictorian speech as a practicing Wiccan) and she shrivels up like a salted snail. But time it right, and it’s exactly what she needs to vault past her sexual tipping point. (This, of course, is the only real tipping point, and I imagine it was just this sort of tipping point that had earned Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, the rare honor of becoming a dick synonym in House of Holes: “Dave angled out his Malcolm Gladwell . . .”) I liked it that Baker avoided the word “dirty” in his discussion of dildo talk (though he indulges in it elsewhere), because I’d always thought that “dirty” was a counterproductive term. Consult any soil expert, and what he or she will tell you is that “dirt” describes no actual category or state of earth (e.g., sand, clay, mud, etc.). “Dirt” is a judgment—and hence a danger. Ought it not be possible to arouse ourselves without risking a term that, once the spell of lust has faded, may trigger retroactive shame? One of the more difficult truths of Baker’s sex books is that
no matter how much we enjoy the études of James or Bach, there will always be a part of us that responds to a simple, vulgar, primal beat. Hence, dildo talk.

  Marian doesn’t put it quite like that, but it’s an argument along these lines that first draws in her neighbor and his girlfriend. But that’s not the only hurdle that the youths need to clear before they can open themselves up to desire. The young neighbor’s girlfriend, Sylvie, in particular, needs more—and that’s the second point to the seduction.

  A convenient happenstance offers the solution. After the encounter is well under way, Sylvie claims that she “need[s] to use the bathroom”—defecate. Marian refuses to let her rush into the house for privacy. The case Marian makes for being permitted to watch and even assist with Sylvie’s bowel movement builds off her earlier claim that if her young neighbor, Kevin, were to piddle in front of the two women it “would help Sylvie relax.”

  Both Kevin and Sylvie have difficulty with this, and the difficulty is the whole point. Virtually all of the body’s holes—the Baker hole theme returns—are controlled by muscles that are both voluntary and involuntary. That is, they are linked biochemically to whatever constitutes the conscious and unconscious minds and therefore offer a kind of theoretical nexus if what you truly hope to address is the negative effect of modernity’s hatchet job on thought and sensation—the so-called mind-body problem. This is Marian’s argument. The fact that we have difficulty exerting our will over muscles that ought to respond to voluntary mental command—call it emotional constipation—reveals the inhibitory impact that cultural values may exert over the pursuit of pleasure. Marian’s solution is to become a kind of biofeedback coach. “Once you do that,” she tells Sylvie, meaning shit semipublicly, “you’ll feel free to do anything that feels good, anything you want, and you’ll come extra hard.”