B & Me Read online

  [ . . . What is wrong with me?]

  Good question! That might have made a good book.

  It’s probably clear by now that I was no longer playfully bumping up against the logs that clogged my Baker stream. No—I was maniacally pounding against them. “That’s insane,” I said to myself, out loud, every time Baker tried and failed to remember another Updike passage. I was just as annoyed by the try-to-meet-Updike tactic. True, I had met Salter, and I was happy to have done so because of his saintly off-page presence. But that was luck. My long-held suspicion is that ever since Dickens came to America for his groundbreaking reading tour in 1867, literature has been on a steady slouch away from actual reading. If the point of books is only to befriend authors, then why read them when you can just walk down the street and meet them? Baker was right to say that books offered imaginary friendships, but don’t they need to remain imaginary? Just go to the reading! Just get the book signed! This was pretty much directly related to my crisis: Books, it seems to me, are inching closer and closer to ontological obsolescence, to not needing to be. The “best” books these days—from a publishing perspective—are not books that need to be books, books that require the passion of a serious reader to complete them. They are books that transmute seamlessly to film. The impulse to meet an author before you’ve read their work is a close relative of the dreaded phrase “I’ll wait for the movie,” and these days it’s perfectly reasonable to speculate that the book, the codex, might prove in the end to have been little more than a deceleration in storytelling’s fall from epic poem to Hollywood epic.

  Of course, I was thinking all this because I’d begun to wonder whether embarking on my Nicholson Baker project meant that I should try to meet him. Of course not. We’re already in love, goddammit! What could I possibly hope to consummate with a live meeting that couldn’t be consummated with a good book fuck? I was glad I’d been out of town when Nicholson Baker was creeping around our city, peddling his wares. That would have ruined everything, because there was no way Nicholson Baker could have successfully followed onto the stage a sparkling off-page presence like James Salter. I would have seen him, and thought, “What a chump! I’ll never read that book.” And I never would have lunged for U and I and been saved as a result. It was then that I resolved to never sully my deep-felt unconditional passion for Nicholson Baker by actually encountering him.

  Having made this ironclad resolution, I calmed down enough to recognize that my public display of affection for a beloved writer had twisted into a public display of annoyance. I’d prematurely come full circle. I’d once been annoyed by what Nicholson Baker seemed to be hiding, and now I was annoyed by what he’d revealed. How did Nicholson Baker and I suddenly become that couple who snarl and spit at each other in public, in full view of strangers? “Quit whining, Nicholson Baker!” I whispered, when Catherine was nearby and might hear me. “Everything you write should be a test of whether you should be a writer!” Maybe it was the hubris that got to me. I mean, Baker was all of thirty-two years of age and he had the gall to imagine what attending Updike’s funeral would be like, and then to speculate on what he might say when The Paris Review got around to interviewing him. And it all happened! Even before I read U and I, Baker spoke at Updike’s funeral—became his actual friend, in the end—and I’d heard that there was a Paris Review interview in the works, too. I was actually grateful for the interview, because it meant I’d soon have access to the “interview of record,” but was that really all you had to do to get interviewed by The Paris Review? Say they should interview you? Well, me too!

  That was actually my greatest fear, assuming that my Nicholson Baker project was on its way to becoming a book about Nicholson Baker: it would be dismissed as a me too book. For what it’s worth, Baker fears the same thing in U and I: he reminds himself that he can’t do only what Frederick Exley did in Pages from a Cold Island. Baker must “take the next step.” Taking the next step was even harder for me, though, because I had already anthologized some of the writers who had taken the next step on Baker. I had to take the next step on them, too.

  All this annoyance wound up being tempered by a single redemptive thought. No one was sitting around trying to figure out how to turn U and I into a movie. Evaluated with that rubric, U and I is a terrible book. But it was just this kind of book, I reminded myself, a naked, throbbing-ego book that drives insane your own throbbing ego—outrage is a form of arousal—that absolutely needs to be a book. Or to put it slightly differently, if we really mean love when we say that we love an author, then the story that we tell of that love cannot limit itself to the erotic first flush of the relationship, to simple lust, it must include too that which it might be uncomfortable to consider, the spats, the snarling, and the spitting. What did I have to tell Nicholson Baker? We can’t just remember books. No, memory criticism overlooks the fact that the innovation of the book was the invention of the ability to reread, to research. Reading becomes a craft and an art only as a function of our ability to look things up—again. If all anyone were ever to do was remember books, then that’s what we would all wind up doing, remembering the once important tool of human thought, the book.

  12

  IT WAS THEN THAT MY STUDY OF NICHOLSON BAKER LOLLED into a state of hibernation, a painful period of waiting that lasted almost a year. I taught a lot and wrote a little, and Catherine made many photographs in our bathroom and left the book-editing business where she’d worked for six years and launched her own even more successful business, and we waited without knowing we were waiting. It was during this time that I finally read A Lover’s Discourse, which is about waiting.

  A Lover’s Discourse is a quicker, sexier version of I and Thou. It reads less like Buber’s sullen theologian gravely sermonizing from the ship-prow pulpit of his mind than like a series of absinthe-soaked aphorisms sorrowfully blurted by a hip scholar out drinking way too late with his students. Both books boil away at love, and both attempt to brew a medicine up to the task of curing the alienation of modern civilization. What’s Barthes’s solution? Waiting. Waiting, he writes, is a delicious suspension between “languor” and “satyr.”

  Didn’t I know it. It was only a short time after Catherine moved in that a peculiar dynamic of waiting evolved between us. Whenever we decided to go someplace—for oysters, say—we each embarked on separate sets of prejourney preparations and rituals that had initially formed before we were together. In performing these, neither of us wanted to finish first, to be the one “ready to go.” There were two reasons for this: one, once we were ready to go we would have nothing left to do but sit there and wait; and two, once we were left sitting and waiting, all we would be able to do was sigh heavily and fidget so that our partner would feel rushed and pressured through their prejaunt ablutions. Our solution to this caused only deeper problems. Rather than sit and wait, whenever one of us broke down and was ready to go, we would embark on a time-killing activity of some kind that looked exactly like an essential procedure. For example, if Catherine needed to pee before we walked out the door, I would sit down and begin playing a game of chess on my laptop. When she was done peeing, Catherine would see me stuck deep in thought and begin futzing with her Mamiya, looking quite intent. Game completed and not wanting to interrupt her photographic work, I would find a news story that would hold my interest well past the moment when she was finished futzing. And so on.

  Finally, one of us would say, “Are you ready?”

  “Yes, I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “No, you haven’t. You were doing something, you looked busy.”

 
“I was killing time.”

  “So was I.”

  “You always do that.”

  “You always do that.”

  Waiting, in other words, was the way in which our relative insanities stood in wary regard of each other. When these scenes did not descend into battles that caused us to abandon our plans completely, Barthes helped to explain them. He explained our orgasms too. He had a lot to say about gifts and giving—“The amorous gift is sought out, selected, and purchased in the greatest excitement—the kind of excitement which seems to be of the order of orgasm”—and by the time of our year of waiting, Catherine had thoughtfully given me so many Nicholson Baker books I’d become multiply orgasmic. Catherine was not so lucky. It was during this time of waiting that her orgasms began to trouble her. One day we sat down to talk about them. It wasn’t that they were either absent or unsatisfying. Quite the opposite. As we’d gone about adulterating each other, Catherine’s orgasms had become more and more intense, had grown by orders of magnitude, and now, seismically speaking, they were eruptive, volcanic orgasms, orgasms in which every one of her pores seemed to open up and ejaculate. They were less screaming orgasms than streaming orgasms, orgasms of roof joist–shattering intensity, orgasms that did, in fact—because we traveled a fair bit during the year of waiting—damage the structural integrity of an untold number of bed and breakfasts all across the Midwest, and at least one in New Hampshire, all of them classic robber baron–style mansions, some made of stone, and each needing to be reassessed for insurance purposes after we left. These were the orgasms causing her stress. The stress was this: What if she stopped having them?

  I spied the literary analogy in this at once. That was the problem with reading, one of the many problems of life as a serious reader. Literature tends to excite as a function of driving the imagination forward, consistently getting better and better. But what happens when you read a book that produces a heretofore-unimaginable spew of ego-escaping thrill? These books, great books, cause as much stress as they relieve because they raise the bar for every book that follows them, and once you’ve read a really great book, you naturally start to worry that you’ve peaked. It will never again be quite so good. Of course, I didn’t mention this to Catherine as we imagined the end of her orgasms. Instead, I called on Barthes. “‘I perceive an infatuation of being,’” I quoted, “‘which is not so far from what Sade would have called an effervescence of countenance (“I saw the sperm shooting from his eyes”). . . . ’” Or maybe I only poorly summarized this, because for Catherine it sounded way too much like something we’d glimpsed while watching pornography together: men masturbating themselves and ejaculating on women’s faces. Catherine always flinched and turned away at this, and in my sessions of prescreenings of possible porn for us to watch, I’d had to enforce a deal-breaker rule on this particular encounter-ending trope. That was fine with me as I’d much rather watch people kiss and embrace as they come, or maybe occasionally watch a man spill onto a woman’s stomach or breasts. Catherine seemed to agree on this point, though it didn’t prevent her, whenever we mistakenly glimpsed a so-called “glazed” face, from shooting her Sade-like gaze directly at me, as though my simply being male made me an accomplice to the crime and perhaps an adequate scapegoat for whatever Hammurabi-style punishment might restore justice to an unfair universe. But thankfully, and generously, Catherine said nothing in reply to my stray Barthes summary. Perhaps she could tell I already regretted it, and I’m sure she knew that I, more than anyone, hoped her orgasms would continue indefinitely.

  In all this I could sniff a coming storm. The storm that would arrive when the year of waiting was over. It was during this time that I did a little online searching to see whether Updike had ever responded to having been the subject of U and I. He had, in an awkward interview. Updike praised U and I (he had anonymously reviewed it too on its release, though I didn’t learn this until much later) and he recognized that it was “not exactly about [him].” But he took a swipe at Baker anyway: “The nerds of the world buy Baker.” His most curious reaction came in response to The Fermata. “It was pretty fierce,” he said, “fiercer than anything you’ll find in any of my fictions. Some of those sex scenes (laughs) . . . wiping your sperm out of a woman’s eyelashes is kind of . . . new.”

  This infuriated me. Wasn’t that what writers were supposed to do? Make it new? And was it really new to Updike, or was he chuckling (“(laughs)”) because he suspected that Nicholson Baker had only ever imagined wiping sperm from women’s eyelashes while Updike himself had been glazing housewives for decades? I doubted it. It was new to Updike either because he’d never had a good Internet connection, or because he was unable to recognize how Baker was taking the next step on him. I was happy that my subject, Nicholson Baker, was quite possibly the only writer to have ever made John Updike blanch. Yet as thrilled as I was, I was fearful of what might happen to Catherine and me when I finally read The Fermata.

  13

  IN U AND I, WHEN BAKER SETTLES IN TO HIS PLAN TO WRITE something about Updike, his first order of business is to phone a magazine editor and pitch an idea for a longish article to be called “U and I.” The editor worries that that “U and I” sounds a little creepy. Baker muscles out a contract anyway. He produced the piece, but it was too long—it was destined to become U and I—and the magazine wound up publishing only a fifteen-hundred-word excerpt, the scene that concludes with Baker’s streaming William James revelation.

  Similarly, it was during the year of waiting that I decided I was writing B & Me, and that I’d been writing it for some time. But I didn’t call an editor—I called my agent instead. I liked my agent. He was a good guy, and we had done some excellent things together. And I liked calling him, because he generally answered his phone—which is rare for agents these days. Oddly, my agent did not answer his phone on this occasion, even though I took care to call during regular business hours. Generally, my agent picked up shortly after the second ring, as though his phone sat near at hand, but he wished neither to appear too eager by picking up after the first ring, nor risk a hang-up by waiting for the third. But this time he didn’t answer at all. I had to leave a message. In publishing jargon, this meant I had a call “in” to him. There was nothing more to be done. I had to wait.

  That’s what I mean about a period of waiting. These days writers must wait not only for the arrival of their fickle muse, they must wait for editors and agents to “get back” to them. Of course editors and agents are waiting too, for marketing people and publicists and the art department, and it’s a practically impossible situation with everyone being so busy. A writer’s only real hope is that all those he waits for, even his muse, check their voice mail regularly and that everyone’s schedules are not already so clogged as to make impossible the kind of cosmic conference call that might result in something actually getting done.

  When my call happened—actually an e-mail—I discovered that my muse and my agent had begun to grow apart. They’d lost that loving feeling. In all honesty, it was the agent more than the muse who had strayed. A long exchange ensued. I did more than my share of groveling on behalf of the good and wise Nicholson Baker, but I managed only a light chink in the shiny armor of the profit motive. My agent claimed that I was being difficult for suggesting that a book ostensibly about Nicholson Baker might prove to be “commercial” if it was done right. He hit a sour and slightly poignant note when he admitted that he spent his whole life watching publishing houses reject books as not commercial enough when they were a million times more commercial than a book about the state of modern literat
ure as viewed through the lens of a “mildly successful novelist.” The unavoidable conclusion was that my agent had come to believe that I should write what publishers already believed was commercial, rather than try to convince publishers of the possible commercial value of a book that needed to be written, a book that, as publishers liked to say, I was “born to write.”

  So I fired my agent. Which was both a relief and a delay. More waiting! After several weeks of hyperventilation and a frantic search for a new agent, I began to grow accustomed to the bizarre sensation of free fall that is agentlessness. At first the impact of rock bottom seemed only a second or two away, but then I stopped panicking and realized that I was actually in a kind of orbit: falling, yes, but happily floating, and after a time a kind of weird peace came over me, a whooshing glimmer of what it might be like to not pursue a serious literary life. Then I got an e-mail. An agent said she loved my writing. And even better, after a perfunctory courtship and the formal launch of a new agent-writer relationship, she disappeared. Perfect! Now I had a serious agent, one so busy attending conferences and nurturing professional relationships that she had no time to take my calls or work on what would become the book proposal for B & Me: A True Story of Literary Arousal.

  Before she vanished, my agent and I agreed that our ­proposal—the business plan of B & Me—would amount to the Holy Grail of nonfiction book proposals. For the same reasons it’s widely believed that teachers of literature and writing ought to be versed in their subjects before they walk in the classroom, so is it generally held that writers should acquire a significant body of foundational knowledge on the topics they propose to write books about. The proposal for B & Me would say little more than “I will write a book of some kind about a noncanonical author I haven’t yet read.” Try making that sound like a winner! I was anxious to begin—I couldn’t wait, though wait was just what I was going to do—but my agent wasn’t anxious in the least because she knew that if we were going to have any chance at all, we had to wait until the fall. So with my best interests at heart she ignored me for the entire summer.