The Fermata (23 page)

13

I
WAS IN A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF PAIN WHEN THINGS ENDED WITH
Rhody. I had given her a glimpse of my inner life, and she had unambiguously rejected it. But I realize now, in putting Rhody down on paper, that good, tangible things grew out of our truncated relationship. If I had not seen and acted on that note about men and watches in the back of her copy of the Virago paperback, I would probably not have had the later idea of writing smutty expostulations in paperbacks just before women browsed them, and if I hadn’t thought of
that
, I probably wouldn’t have conceived of using the Fold as a rotter’s retreat and leaving the outcome where a woman might find it. In a way, Rhody’s spurning the glimpse I had
given her of my secret freed me to investigate its potential further.

After the time on the Cape, I wrote a little more: one story about a naked woman suspended above one lane of the Callahan tunnel on a black rope trapeze net during rush hour, looking down through its square mesh at the cars filing slowly beneath her and pissing generously on them as their moon-roofs slid open; one story about a man teaching a young woman to touch-type on his antique Oliver No. 9 manual typewriter, holding his hands over her hands and closing his eyes and feeling her fingers sink one by one into the deep counterweighted letters and knowing she was spelling H-I-P-S and being unable to resist putting his hands on her hips, then feeling her fingers type B-R-E-A-S-T-S on the round black cuplike keys and being unable to resist palming her breasts and pulling her back against him; one story about a group of scuba-diving Caribbean tourists corrupting the angelfish with aerosol cans of cheddar cheese, sometimes making cheese hearts in the water that the fish then momentarily echoed as they fed, sometimes squirting it on wet-suited arms or breasts and letting the fish nip it off; one about a woman letting her pet hermit crab walk lightly all over her back while she read
Barron’s
and dreamed of blue-eyed men with tons of money; one about several caves of stalagmites, each one a different color, that, when broken off and inserted into a vadge, glowed, their stumps releasing bidet-like streams of warm subterranean mineral water.

I spent some personal time with Ami Pro and a copier and saddle-bound a number of copies of these several stories, along with the one about Marian and the ridem lawn-mower, in pamphlet form, using as a cover the pale blue cover of something called
Tales of French Love and Passion
—a heavily
ironic reissue of a cheesy 1936 edition of several mildly risqué stories by Guy de Maupassant that I had ordered through the Archie McPhee catalog. I left my homemade booklet in lots of places—in copies of
Self
and
The American Scholar
just before they were shoved through mail-slots, in women’s bathrooms at dance clubs, under the Gideon’s Bible in several rooms of the Meridien Hotel, on coffee tables during cocktail parties, inserted in the library’s
Encyclopedia of Philosophy
in the article on “Life, Meaning and Value of”—but nothing resulted from all this effort that was anywhere near as exciting to me as the simple sight of Michelle, the Cape Cod woman, dunking her dildo in her bathwater and shaking it off.

The peak of my life-imitates-rot phase came on the Massachusetts Turnpike one Saturday. I was out for a drive. It was autumn and hormone levels were rising. I was idly thinking of following through on my Northampton idea—the one about stripping everyone on Main Street and, if not mounding their clothes all in a single mound and dancing on it, then at least putting each person’s clothes neatly in a plastic grocery bag in his or her hand—the idea of a naked town discovering that it was carrying its clothes around in plastic bags thrilled me. (The sight of naked middle-aged women in the steam rooms of certain country clubs carrying their jewelry around in droopy plastic bags, because they are afraid that it will be stolen from their lockers, thrills me, too; I have been in the steam rooms with them; I have touched their moist plastic bags of jewelry.) My ambitions are not global in scope—I don’t think of nude nations or metropolises; but totally topless Main Streets of small towns, especially small towns with classy women’s colleges in them, yes. I decided that if I lost my nerve and couldn’t go through with denuding the whole town, I could at least replace the
TV Guides
in the rack at the
supermarket with my personal
Tales of French Love and Passion
and watch how people reacted. But I never made it to Northampton. I got severely distracted by a woman in a car just past Worcester.

I was driving in the slow lane. My window was open; the car was booming with air noise. My left (wristwatched) arm was outside; I was making my hand into a wing shape to see whether I could create lift, and making it dive and climb against the wind. A woman driving a small blue car appeared in the rear-view mirror. No expression is as impassive as a woman’s seen in a rear-view mirror: it has an impassiveness so impartial and comprehensive that it cries out to be surprised. She was going faster than I was and impassively began to pass me; I lost sight of her for a minute as she entered that place where passing cars don’t exist—a kind of Fold-effect of the rear- and side-view mirrors. I accelerated very slightly, so that when she did pass, it would take longer. I had only seen her face for an instant, in fact I had only had time to notice that she was a woman of twenty or so with lots of thickly wavy multihued fair hair driving alone, but my very sketchy simplistic sense of her windshielded face merged with my equally simplistic sense of the headlights of her unflashy blue car to turn her instantly into a well-developed character in my imagination. As she invisibly pulled closer to me in the fast lane and I heard her tires singing and sensed how close she was to me, the idea that she was soon going to pass me became swoonsomely powerful: the steering wheel seemed to become flexible and expand in widening ripples; I felt that I was a glowing lump of something melting on the fly. I could not believe that in a matter of thirty seconds or so this person was going to pull up next to me and that I would be able to look over at her; when she did I felt I would shout or weep.

At the same time I felt a blip of self-irritable disgust at the astonishing potency of these car-crushes and at how much mental air-time they consumed when I drove. It was
insane
to think that someone was more wonderful and mysterious just because she was passing me in her car. What could be more common than two people driving nearly side by side on a highway, one drawing abreast of the other? Why couldn’t I just relax and let her pass me without falling in total temp-love with her? And yet that was what was going on—and maybe it was going on for her, too: maybe she was listening to Terry Gross on National Public Radio and barely registering that some car (me) was off to her right, but maybe her hopes were rising and crashing addictively each time she passed a lone man at the wheel—maybe she was trying just as I had done to piece together a sense of the lovability and marriageability of each person based on the ludicrously inadequate information available—that is, on the driver’s head, on the state of origin of the license plate, on the general personality of the car (all cars are classifiable as cute/perky or elegante/mysterioso or Camaro/vulgaro), on whether one hand or two was visible on the steering wheel, and on the condition of the sheet metal. As her door-handle came in line with mine I tried to fight the desire to turn toward her but I couldn’t; I looked blankly at her just as she was turning to look blankly at me; then we both turned back and looked straight ahead at our lanes. At that moment, we were driving at almost exactly the same speed. We were close. It seemed miraculous to me that we could be in such states of seated repose, and yet could be separated by the surface of the highway, which was moving between us so fast that if I opened my door and tried to walk over to her and get in her car, my feet and shin-bones would be sanded down to nothing. With tormenting leisureliness she
finally pulled ahead and put on her blinker and smoothed her blue car-butt over in front of me. (It turned out to be a Ford Escort, which always makes me think of escort services when I’m driving long distance.) Then I saw something riveting—a Smith College sticker on her rear window, with a University of Chicago sticker above it. I didn’t have to drive all the way to Northampton; Smith College was right here with me on the road! But I hesitated before I pushed up on my glasses, having never been through a full-blown chronvulsion in a moving car before. Would it be safe? Would my high rate of speed relative to the highway cause some unforeseen danger? Stopping the universe while driving at sixty miles an hour seemed an extremely rash and kinky thing to do.

I kept staring at her taillights. I saw her look up at me briefly in her rear-view mirror. Then she fluffed her massive coarsely wavy hair so that some of it fell over the whiplash projection on the back of her seat. The high small round chrome lock on the curve of her trunk looked a little like what I imagined her asshole might look like. I decided that I would survive whatever happened. I waited a polite interval and then pulled over into the fast lane and sped up to pass her. We were on a slight downgrade. As I came closer to her, the same swooning feeling as before swept over me, except that now I and not she was bringing about this unspoken thrill; when our profiles were even I didn’t look over, knowing that she knew that I was passing her and wouldn’t look at me, because the rule in highway flirtation was not to look on the second pass. Instead I hit the clutch pedal and glided freely for a second or two right next to her, setting myself up mentally for the disengagement of the temporal drive-train, and then very slowly I pushed my glasses up on the bridge of my nose; when I let go of them the Smith woman and I were still side by side on the
Mass Pike, but we weren’t moving forward. My radio was silent.

My door was not easy to get open. I had to push with my shoulder to displace the jellied wind-flow. And the road surface around my car presented a strange sight: though motionless, it looked slightly foggy and indeterminate, as if photographed through a Vaselined lens; you couldn’t focus on it properly. When I gingerly got out, leaving my door open, and tiptoed around the back of my car, I found that the asphalt was in fact somewhat resilient underfoot; its speed relative to the soles of my shoes apparently made it impossible for the two physical surfaces to interact normally, and gave the road the characteristics of some sort of dense, even spongy ground-cover, like moss. The other oddity was that I heard hooting and roaring noises in my ears when I walked into or away from the direction that I had been driving: I supposed it was something to do with vectors and frozen sound waves and the Doppler effect, but I didn’t trouble myself over it. Instead I straddled the white line between the Smith woman’s car and mine and extended my arms so that I touched both near doors, hers and mine, connecting us two. I held that quasi-crucifixional position for a time, looking out at the hills and the cars ahead, considering that if I pulled on my glasses right then to resume time, my car would race off driverless and would eventually crash, and I, left in the middle of the road, would almost certainly be hit by one of the cars behind ours. I looked through her window at her, my face inches away from her profile. I went around and opened her passenger door, which was fortunately not locked, and cleared off the junk on the seat (mostly cassettes and several Books on Tape from the library) and got in next to her.

I don’t have to point out that cars are extremely private
places; the feeling that I was doing something of questionable ethics by entering this woman’s small glossy blue Ford was more intense than I could remember in recent fermations. I was sweating with the almost horrified excitement of my wrongdoing. The soles of my feet were warm to the touch. I was in her car. “Well, here we are,” I said aloud to myself. I couldn’t bring myself to find out what was up with her breasts, or do anything more radical in fact than rest my hand lightly on her accelerator leg (she was wearing a huge thick pink sweater with roses woven into it, and faded jeans); I had a sense of being dangerously far away from home, perhaps because the steering wheel and brake pedal of my own speeding car were so nearby and yet so peculiarly out of my reach. What should I do? Should I simply jack in the passenger seat next to her? I don’t as a rule like masturbating in cars. I could get out and stand in the road and jack onto her trunk lock or her driver-side window, or, having rolled down that window beforehand, I could jack directly into the interior of her car. But it would be rude to get my hard sauce all over the flowers on her sweater, which looked expensive and hand-knit, perhaps a favorite sweater of hers. Besides, my shoes might melt or catch flame.

What I really wanted was just to be alive in this woman’s car for a second while she was driving it—so I climbed in the back seat and lay down and used my glasses to reactivate time for the quick count of five and then deactivated it again. It was wonderful to be riding in her car. She had some music going, something familiar, and I thought I could hear her humming quietly along with it. Her car was much quieter than mine. When my Drop was over I sat up and looked over at my empty car: it had drifted a little to the right (possibly the door’s “sudden” opening and consequent
slamming shut) but though driverless for a few seconds it had maintained course fairly well, just as I had expected.