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Authors: Nicholson Baker

The Fermata

Acclaim for Nicholson Baker’s
THE FERMATA

“Inventive, graphically erotic … lovely re-enactments of voyeuristic activity interlaced with satirical takes on high-tech lifestyle—imagine an X-rated Donald Barthelme.… Sparkling.”


San Francisco Chronicle

“Baker is a brilliant observer and describer, clever, occasionally disarming with his insights and always entertaining.”

—Diane Johnson,
Vogue

“Mixes astonishing creativity with scenes of energetic eroticism.… [Baker] has elevated pornography to a literary level.”


Chicago Sun-Times

“Baker is like no other writer when it comes to sex. His musings … are adult in their knowingness, adolescent in their energy.…‘Originality’ is an overused word, considering how seldom we encounter the real things in life, but it applies here.”

—Joanne Trestrail,
Chicago Tribune

“Funny … 
The Fermata
has a brio and speculative ingenuity.”

—Richard Eder,
Los Angeles Times

“ ‘Hot’ doesn’t even begin to describe it.… His use of language is extraordinary. I have never read anything quite like it.
The Fermata
should be celebrated.”

—Mary Gaitskill,
San Francisco Focus

“Despite all the sexual hoopla, Baker’s deeper subject is consciousness; the concept of
The Fermata
is actually the natural culmination of his style … all the pleasures of reading him are available here.”


The New Yorker

“The Fermata
is so weird, so extremely dirty, so funny … and above all, so well written, that no one will be able to ignore it.”

—Robert Rossney,
Wired

Nicholson Baker
THE FERMATA

Nicholson Baker was born in 1957 and attended the Eastman School of Music and Haverford College. He has published seven novels—
The Mezzanine
(1988),
Room Temperature
(1990),
Vox
(1992),
The Fermata
(1994),
The Everlasting Story of Nory
(1998),
A Box of Matches
(2003), and
Checkpoint
(2004)—and three works of nonfiction,
U and I
(1991),
The Size of Thoughts
(1996), and
Double Fold
(2001), which won a National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1999 he founded the American Newspaper Repository, a collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century newspapers.

B
OOKS BY
N
ICHOLSON
B
AKER

The Mezzanine

Room Temperature

U and I

Vox

The Fermata

The Size of Thoughts

The Everlasting Story of Nory

Double Fold

A Box of Matches

Checkpoint

Vintage Baker

First Vintage Contemporaries Edition, January 1995

Copyright © 1994 by Nicholson Baker

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Random House, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1994.

The fictional product names in this book are the property of the author and may not be used as names for real products or services without his prior written permission.

The Library of Congress has cataloged
the Random House edition as follows:
Baker, Nicholson
The Fermata / Nicholson Baker
p.   cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-80749-6
I Title.
PS3552.A4325F47    1994
813′.54–dc20         93-26492

v3.1

FOR MY FATHER

Contents
1

I
AM GOING TO CALL MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY
THE FERMATA
, EVEN
though “fermata” is only one of the many names I have for the Fold. “Fold” is, obviously, another. Every so often, usually in the fall (perhaps mundanely because my hormone-flows are at their highest then), I discover that I have the power to drop into the Fold. A Fold-drop is a period of time of variable length during which I am alive and ambulatory and thinking and looking, while the rest of the world is stopped, or paused. Over the years, I have had to come up with various techniques to trigger the pause, some of which have made use of rocker-switches, rubber bands, sewing needles, fingernail clippers, and other hardware, some of which have not. The power
seems ultimately to come from within me, grandiose as that sounds, but as I invoke it I have to believe that it is external for it to work properly. I don’t inquire into origins very often, fearing that too close a scrutiny will damage whatever interior states have given rise to it, since it is the most important ongoing adventure of my life.

I’m in the Fold right now, as a matter of fact. I want first to type out my name—it’s Arnold Strine. I prefer Arno to the full Arnold. Putting my own name down is loin-girding somehow—it helps me go ahead with this. I’m thirty-five. I’m seated in an office chair whose four wide black casters roll silently over the carpeting, on the sixth floor of the MassBank building in downtown Boston. I’m looking up at a woman named Joyce, whose clothes I have rearranged somewhat, although I have not actually removed any of them. I’m looking directly at her, but she doesn’t know this. While I look I’m using a Casio CW-16 portable electronic typewriter, which is powered by four D batteries, to record what I see and think. Before I snapped my fingers to stop the flow of time in the universe, Joyce was walking across the carpeting in a gray-blue knit dress, and I was sitting behind a desk twenty or thirty feet away, transcribing a tape. I could see her hipbones under her dress, and I immediately knew it was the time to Snap in. Her pocketbook is still over her shoulder. Her pubic hair is very black and nice to look at—there is lots and lots of it. If I didn’t already know her name, I would probably now open her purse and find out her name, because it helps to know the name of a woman I undress. There is moreover something very exciting, almost moving, about taking a peek at a woman’s driver’s license without her knowing—studying the picture and wondering whether it was one that pleased her or made her unhappy when she was first given it at the DMV.

But I do know this woman’s name. I’ve typed some of her tapes. The language of her dictations is looser than some of the other loan officers’—she will occasionally use a phrase like “spruce up” or “polish off” or “kick in” that you very seldom come across in the credit updates of large regional banks. One of her more recent dictations ended with something like “Kyle Roller indicated that he had been dealing with the subject since 1989. Volume since that time has been $80,000. He emphatically stated that their service was substandard. He indicated that he has put further business with them on hold because they had ‘lied like hell’ to him. He indicated he did not want his name mentioned back to the Pauley brothers. This information was returned to Joyce Collier on—” and then she said the date. As prose it is not Penelope Fitzgerald, perhaps, but you crave any tremor of life in these reports, and I will admit that I felt an arrow go through me when I heard her say “lied like hell.”

Last week, Joyce was wearing this very same gray-blue hipbone-flaunting dress one day. She dropped off a tape for me to do and told me that she liked my glasses, and I’ve been nuts about her since. I blushed and thanked her and told her I liked her scarf, which really was a very likable scarf. It had all sorts of golds and blacks and yellows in it, and Cyrillic letters seemed to be part of the design. She said, “Well thank you, I like it, too,” and she surprised me (surprised us both possibly) by untying it from her neck and pulling it slowly through her fingers. I asked whether those were indeed Cyrillic letters I saw before me, and she said that they were, pleased at my attentiveness, but she said that she had asked a friend of hers who knew Russian what they spelled, and he had told her that they meant nothing, they were just a jumble of letters. “Even better,” I said, somewhat idiotically, anxious to show how completely
uninterested I was in her mention of a male friend. “The designer picked the letters for their formal beauty—he didn’t try to pretend he knew the language by using a real word.” The moment threatened to become more flirtatious than either of us wanted. I hurried us past it by asking her how soon she needed her tape done. (I’m a temp, by the way.) “No big rush,” she said. She retied her scarf, and we smiled quite warmly at each other again before she went off. I was happy all that day just because she had told me she liked my glasses.

Joyce is probably not going to play a large part in this account of my life. I have fallen in love with women many, many times, maybe a hundred or a hundred and fifty times; I’ve taken off women’s clothes many times, too: there is nothing particularly unusual about this occasion within which I am currently parked. The only unusual thing about it is that this time I’m writing about it. I know there are thousands of women in the world I could potentially feel love for as I do feel it now for Joyce—she just happens to work at this office in the domestic-credit department of MassBank where I happen to be a temp for a few weeks. But that is the strange thing about what you are expected to do in life—you are supposed to forget that there are hundreds of cities, each one of them full of women, and that it is most unlikely that you have found the perfect one for you. You are just supposed to pick the best one out of the ones you know and can attract, and in fact you do this happily—you feel that the love you direct toward the one you do choose is not arbitrarily bestowed.

And it
was
brave and friendly of Joyce to compliment me that way about my glasses. I always melt instantly when I’m praised for features about which I have private doubts. I first got glasses in the summer after fourth grade. (Incidentally, fourth grade is also the year I first dropped into the Fold—my
temporal powers have always been linked in a way I don’t pretend to understand with my sense of sight.) I wore them steadily until about two years ago, when I decided that I should at least try contact lenses. Maybe everything would be different if I got contacts. So I did get them, and I enjoyed the rituals of caring for them—caring for this pair of demanding twins that had to be bathed and changed constantly. I liked squirting the salt water on them, and holding one of them in an aqueous bead on the tip of my finger and admiring its Saarinenesque upcurve, and when I folded it in half and rubbed its slightly slimy surface against itself to break up the protein deposits, I often remembered the satisfactions of making omelets in Teflon fry-pans. But though as a hobby they were rewarding, though I was as excited in opening the centrifugal spin-cleaning machine I ordered for them as I would have been if I had bought an automatic bread baker or a new kind of sexual utensil, they interfered with my appreciation of the world. I could see things through them, but I wasn’t
pleased
to look at things. The bandwidth of my optical processors was being flooded with “there is an intruder on your eyeball” messages, so that a lot of the incidental visual haul from my retina was simply not able to get through. I wasn’t enjoying the sights you were obviously meant to enjoy, as when you walked around a park on a windy day watching people’s briefcases get blown around on their arms.

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