B & Me Read online

  14

  WHICH TURNED OUT TO BE OKAY, BECAUSE CATHERINE AND I HAD to move. This had been our plan for a while now. We’d been keeping our ears to the rails, on the lookout for better working conditions (better pay and graduate students), and during the year of waiting we kept most of our belongings wrapped up in figurative kerchiefs and remained poised to break into a sprint along the tracks at the first sight of an engine that might let us hoist ourselves to a better fate. But when a locomotive came belching around the bend, we hesitated: It wasn’t clear whether the train was chugging toward better pastures or purgatory. It looked like the latter. We spent dispiriting evenings soaring through low-res satellite imagery of the new land’s real estate listings. Local architecture was a desiccated extrapolation of the brutal dirtscape. The new state was shaped like a butcher knife, and imagining living there was an ongoing nightmare of that fat, jagged blade chopping off our fingers, one by one. In literary terms, we would move—if we moved—from Fitzgeralds to Joads. Even the diplomatic hardship post we once contemplated pursuing to spring ourselves from academia seemed a tonic by comparison.

  Then we stumbled on a buried treasure: a one-hundred-and-twenty-five-year-old farmhouse for rent a few miles south of the university that offered me a job. The place had an actual pasture, populated with a menagerie of retired petting zoo animals—a fleet of miniature donkeys, a duet of hypercompetitive goats, a pig obese even by the forgiving standard of “potbellied”—and beyond the rail-posted property there were rolling fields, some woods, and a lake the size of a small airport. The house itself had antique hardwood, warping pocket doors, and an extra room for what Catherine called her “chemistry,” the toxic chemicals that had blinded or driven insane many early photographers. All this for a fraction of what we paid for our dinky apartment, the apartment whose heat we didn’t control, whose laundry was four stories down, and whose lone bathroom sometimes, after a long drive, left us racing down the hallway, arguing over which of us had the greater need to “go.” Best of all—and this sealed the deal—the farmhouse, until a year or two past, had been a functioning bed and breakfast.

  We needed a bed and breakfast by then. The year of waiting had been a year of slowly growing resentments, of tensions tiny as germs slipping in through unprotected ducts. The wait for the official sanction to write about Nicholson Baker left me surly and exhausted, in as deep a state of crisis as the crisis from which it was supposed to rescue me. The anxiety of not yet being able to begin the book that would improve my negative mood left me floundering in a pessimism that caused Catherine, too, to wilt. It’s possible to liken literary relationships, which are temporary in nature, to real romance because real romance—to invert the metaphor—is subject to the same sorts of fluctuations of arousal that we might feel when a book takes a wrong turn. Real passions flutter too, can even be snuffed out like the brief candle of the agent-writer relationship. That’s what happened to Catherine and me: We’d begun to flicker like a flame in high winds. Where once we had slyly chuckled at other couples around bed and breakfast morning tables—couples tethered by children rather than love, couples whose only intimacy came at orchestrated annual retreats—we now found ourselves similarly blighted. One night, just before we moved, we noticed that it had not happened overnight. At first the lull had been easy to dismiss as just that: a sacrifice as I taught and dedicated reading time to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 and William Gass’s The Tunnel, and as Catherine furiously printed images and fielded an endless influx of editing work. Initially, the nondaily couplings had a palpable upside in that there was the heightened intensity of having waited for it, the backup of fluids resulting in more satisfying discharges, just as a kink in a garden hose builds a pressure that makes for a more profound stream once the kink is removed. The problem did not make itself apparent until nondaily lagged into weekly, and weekly frittered away into biweekly, and when I say problem what I really mean is that the body is smarter than a garden hose, which under pressure finds its weakest spot and dumbly bulges there until it ruptures. Rather than this, rather than burst, what the body does is recognize that something has interrupted the flow of supply and demand, business is down, and what do you do when business is down? You slow production, cut a shift, and lay off the part-time help. We slowed production.

  The correlate to reading here is only too familiar. Irrepressibly hectic modern life, the multitasking that makes us feel efficient even as studies indicate compromised performance, the resulting exhaustion that is the by-product of modernity and that is colored with the paints of an ever-expanding palette of diagnoses (e.g., hysteria, neuralgia, melancholia, anhedonia, repression, depression, ADHD, chronic fatigue, etc.)—who in the face of all this would think to invest in the slow-growth stock of reading? Why read when you can buy short and day-trade? And reading was something else Catherine and I had sacrificed. When she first moved in we read together often; it was practically foreplay. We read all of The Lover to each other, which is a less sexy book than you’d think but which is still quite wonderful, and we read portions of Grégoire Bouillier and Bonjour Tristesse, and I read to her sections from Gass (“Books made me masturbate!”—exclamation mine), and the part of 2666 in which two men in Dracula’s castle masturbate to the peephole view of the coupling of Baroness Von Zumpe and General Entrescu, whose foot-long cock is the pride of the Romanian army. We stopped doing that, we stopped reading together—and just as with our coupling, it was less guillotined than trailed off. At first, we had traded reading back and forth, but after some months it became clear that Catherine enjoyed being read to more than she enjoyed reading, which was fine because I enjoyed reading. It was similar to talking to myself. But what I was probably doing was staving off the pain of not reading Nicholson Baker by making Catherine listen to works that gave full-throated voice to my poisonous negativity. So of course she began to lose interest, and soon enough our sessions became less and less frequent. When I would tentatively ask whether Catherine might like to read together this evening, when I made a “pass” at her in this way, her face would droop and her shoulders would collapse as though constricted by a straitjacket. No, tonight she just wanted to shut down, turn off. Couldn’t we just watch a movie or something? Of course we can, my sweet, my love. We snuggled before the screen of my laptop. I told myself that we’d never be one of those couples who took up sentry posts on either end of oversized sofas, but even though we twined our limbs together there grew a film—film—between us, and this film instructed our bodies to hold their horses, stop the presses. We traded streaming orgasms for streaming video. Instead of porn that inspired us to coupling, we watched movie stars who coupled for us. Catherine’s secretions, which had come from her like the full-body poisons of jungle frogs, stopped entirely, and I shut down too, and started to worry that my cock was the pride of no army, nor a battalion, nor a platoon, nor even some lowly private.

  So the former bed and breakfast offered the promise of renewal. It also enabled us to commit to Paris for the holidays, which would give me a chance to settle an old score with myself and give Catherine a chance to relive the days when she had been serially engaged to enough Frenchmen that conversations about them required the plural form: “the fiancés.” Actually, Catherine had begun saving money for the trip months before she agreed to chase me into the waste, and what the waste really enabled was my tagging along, which I was thrilled to do because by then I knew—from his Paris Review interview, which was published during the year of waiting—that Nicholson Baker had spent time in Paris too. I planned to read his sex books there.

  15

  WASTE
IT SURELY SEEMED WHEN IN A FLASH OUR MOVE WAS OVER. I’d visited the new land in January, when the place was merely post-apocalyptic; by July it was the circle of hell reserved for conservative politicians and armadillos. Driving south we marveled when the car’s thermometer ticked past one hundred degrees—in a month it would twitch up to one hundred and seventeen. We drifted through an endless diorama of garbage and roadkill, streaking past bloody visions of skunks, turtles, and domestic cats caught midstride and dissected on the highway as though truckers swerved their rigs at night for sport. The Junkyard of America, Catherine called it, there being so much space here that when something was used up or broken—a car, a barn—the best option was to leave it there and plow around it. There were actual junkyards too, as common as diners in New Jersey, great mountains of rusting metal fed upon by Jurassic cranes, and it was all oil land, the country’s pipeline crossroads meeting just a few miles east, the hard earth seemingly pounded to its rocky crust by the mallet heads of seesawing derricks erected on every spare plot. It all would have been wonderful for Catherine’s photography if only she didn’t rightly worry that images of the poor and forlorn were a form of victim exploitation. Anyway, we were the victims.

  The former bed and breakfast was a buried treasure in that after we arrived we had to dig it up. Everything was caked with a century’s worth of petrified earth. Okay, that’s going a bit too far—but what doesn’t go too far is that the former bed and breakfast turned out to be a nexus of plagues. The first was simply heat, July setting a record for the hottest month of any state in recorded history. Next were slugs, phalanxes of gummy, thumb-sized worms with prehensile eyestalks that happily breached the century-old floor and fanned out across the kitchen. Then there were tornadoes, a mile off, pruning forests and swiping away the roofs of houses. Flash fires hopscotched the nearby countryside, and forty yards from the kitchen window a bolt of lightning etched a self-portrait along the trunk of a weary old oak. Fracking earthquakes, the result of chthonic greed, concussed the land from below and cracked the farmhouse drywall. It’s clear, I hope, that I’m collapsing weeks and months here, but I don’t really have to: in October, we crouched together behind the sofa during a tornado watch until the greenish eye-of-the-storm stillness was broken not by gentle rain, but by aftershocks cast down by an angry god, doubly jealous.

  We tried bucking our spirits with humor. Where once, back in our dinky apartment, we had made serene proclamations like “How about we visit the local internationally renowned museum of modern art!” and “Let’s grab a gourmet beer at our walkable neighborhood’s friendly pub!” we now pushed through our teeth halfhearted one-liners like “Honey, I’m taking the trash to the burn pit!” and “Let’s brave the blistering heat to hand-feed the llamas!” I’ve probably made the former bed and breakfast sound remote, but a recently expanded four-lane highway with a national reputation for vehicular death lay only seventy yards from the porch, and just a quarter-mile off stood a forward operating base of the imperial army of sprawl. I took most of this in stride—I had to, it was my job and my idea—but for Catherine it wasn’t so easy. In August I seized on a stray remark she made about Cole Porter and ordered a sampler collection so that I could woo her with “Too Darn Hot.” But not only was it too darn hot for such a wooing, I played the song too darn loud while Catherine was trying to get some work done. Anyway, she meant Nat King Cole. Catherine was left stricken, splattered with the many colors of sadness, a regular Pollock of modernity by-products, and all that dried paint, fired to a crust in the kiln of our new home, left her paralyzed, clogged.

  Our landlord, a gentle Vietnam vet who told us stories of close combat with pythons (and who, in teaching me the operation of the farm’s riding mower, admitted that its controls reminded him of the tank he had steered over the bodies of Viet Cong soldiers), gambled that a pair of kittens recruited as mousers for the farm might salve our general sense of trauma. The kittens charmed us but had to contend with their own lineup of plagues: the heat, a different species of worm, and coyotes that put me in mind of the allegorical dog packs that wander the plague summer of Kenneth Patchen’s The Journal of Albion Moonlight. Jackals in all but name, the coyotes swarmed the hills around the farm, their howls like the battle cries of some lunatic clan. They did not descend to the former bed and breakfast until one night when the power failed. They took one kitten with them, and the other climbed onto the roof and stayed there for months.

  That’s when Nicholson Baker’s House of Holes was released in hardcover.

  16

  HOUSE OF HOLES BEGINS WITH A HOLE AND ENDS WITH ONE, A grave and a womb respectively. Or more accurately, it begins with a disembodied arm disinterring itself at a site where granite is quarried for tombstones, and it ends with two miniature people completing a gestation inside a magical egg. In saying this I am breaking the implied pact of this book, which is that in really reading a writer what you should do is start with their earliest work and move through their career, as they did. But of course that’s not always possible. Most of the time, it’s safe to say, we land at a midpoint in a writer’s career, and that’s no more a sin than flipping to the end of a book to see how it all turns out. Indeed it’s only in books—actual printed books—that you can easily start and stop your reading, that you can preread and reread, and, these days, as the book itself suffers from a cluster of plagues, it seems only right to pause and assert that the books that ought to be rescued these days are not the books that require a “spoiler alert”—such books are already spoiled—but books that aren’t spoiled even if you know what’s going to happen, even if you peek at the end, even if you’re reading them for a second, or fifth, or dozenth time.

  Of course, I had practical reasons for reading out of order. I was writing a book proposal. Even as I was striving to maintain my Nicholson Baker innocence, I had to figure out how to appeal to an audience of editors who, due to the thigh-high stacks of other book proposals beside their desks, all equally deserving of attention, were likely cynical. So, first, I skimmed The Anthologist on our porch swing. The heat was terribly fierce, average daytime temperatures were hovering around one hundred and nine degrees, and a great orchestra of insects lurked in the grass and shade trees, sawing their bowlegs. It wasn’t all that long before I spotted William James peeking out from Nicholson Baker yet again. The narrator of The Anthologist, Paul Chowder, says, “The thing about life is that life is an infinite subject matter. At any one moment you can say only what’s before your mind just then.” This is a slightly diluted version of another quotable James moment, when James refutes Herbert Spencer and insists that thought is not only reflexive, but subject to will: “My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.” I closed The Anthologist at once.

  Next I read House of Holes, under quite different circumstances. I had been following the press coverage of the release—the “splash”—for a while, and when fall rolled around my agent insisted that our proposal should at least touch on what I might say about the book. So one day I drove to a bookstore and bought a first edition. When I got home I found Catherine crammed in on one end of the sofa, studying scanned negatives on her computer. I sat at the other end and started reading, silently. House of Holes is a series of improbable erotic scenes that play out at a slightly fantastic commune called the House of Holes. Thinly drawn characters from regular life find themselves magically atomized and sucked down into everyday sorts of holes—pen tips, straws, pepper grinders—and then they are reconstituted on the campus of what the book’s revi
ewers called a “sexual utopia,” though none of them mentioned the fact that Baker had grown up in Rochester, New York, just a stone’s throw from Oneida, the real sexual utopia. Quite obviously, I thought, the book continued The Anthologist’s interest in the work of the mind: To get to the House of Holes, characters have to transcend rigid mental states, “fwoosh” to “off-limits” “mind-zones” where they can express true consciousness.

  But it’s also a book about come faces. Baker had come a long way since The Fermata. An alarming number of scenes in House of Holes end in come faces, or with women shrieking to be soaked in come. Critically speaking, this was both exciting and troubling. Might Baker be rubbing Updike’s face in it, as it were? One of the very first characters in House of Holes is an Updikian golfer-type who gets sucked down through the pin of a golf course’s seventh hole. This character is not named Rabbit, nor is he given features that resemble Updike’s, but the link was there to be made, I thought. This was troubling because I made the link while sitting directly opposite Catherine, whose distaste for the whole come-face idea made her quite possibly the worst potential reader for House of Holes. So I said nothing of it. But soon enough that was a problem too, because House of Holes, like U and I and all good literature, understood that its job was to trigger physiological change in its readers. It might have been any of a whole clutch of chuckles, groans, and strategic leg shiftings to disguise arousal that left me needing to offer Catherine an explanation with a quote from the book.