The Fermata

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.

At first I thought it was worth losing the beauty of the world in order to look better to the world: I really was more handsome without glasses — the dashing scar on my left eyebrow, where I cut myself on a scrap of aluminum, was more evident. A girl I knew (and whose clothes I removed) in high school used to sing “Il faut souffrir pour être belle” in a soft voice, to a tune of her own devising, and I took that overheard precept seriously; I was willing to understand it not just in the narrow sense of painful hair-brushing or (say) eyebrow-tweezing or liposuction, but in some broader sense that suffering makes for beauty in art, that the artist has to suffer griefs and privations in order to deliver beauty to his or her public, all that well-ventilated junk. So I continued to wear contacts even when each blink was a dry torment. But then I noticed that my typing was suffering, too — and there, since I am a temp and typing is my livelihood, I really had to draw the line. Especially when I typed numbers, my error rate was way up. (Once I spent two weeks doing nothing but typing six-digit numbers.) People began bringing back financial charts that I had done with mistyped numbers circled in red, asking, “Are you all right today, Arno?” Contact lenses also, I noticed, made me feel, as loud continuous factory noise also will, ten feet farther away from anyone else around me. They were isolating me, heightening rather than helping rid me of my — well, I suppose it is proper to call it my loneliness. I missed the sharp corners of my glasses, which had helped me dig my way out into sociability; they had been part of what I felt was my characteristic expression.

When I started today, I had no intention of getting into all this about eyeglasses. But it is germane. I love looking at women. I love being able to see them clearly. I particularly like being in the position I am in this very second, which is not looking at Joyce, but rather thinking about the amazing fact that I can look up from this page at any time and stare at any part of her that calls out to me for as long as I want without troubling or embarrassing her. Joyce doesn’t wear glasses, but my ex-girlfriend Rhody did — and somewhere along the line I realized that if I liked glasses on women, which I do very much, maybe women would tolerate glasses on me. On naked women glasses work for me the way spike heels or a snake tattoo or an ankle bracelet or a fake beauty spot work for some men — they make the nudity pop out at me; they make the woman seem more naked than she would have seemed if she were completely naked. Also, I want to be very sure that she can see every inch of my richard with utter clarity, and if she is wearing glasses I know that she can if she wants to.

The deciding moment really came when I spent the night with a woman, an office manager, who, I think anyway, had sex with me sooner than she wanted to simply to distract me from noticing the fact that her contacts were bothering her. It was very late, but I think she wanted to talk for a while longer, and yet (this is my theory) she hurried to the sex because the extreme intimacy, to her way of thinking, of appearing before me in her glasses was only possible after the less extreme intimacy of fucking me. Several times as we talked I was on the point of saying, since her eyes did look quite unhappily pink, “You want to take out your contacts? I’ll take out mine.” But I didn’t, because I thought it might have a condescending sort of “I know everything about you, baby, your bloodshot eyes give you away” quality. Probably I should have. A few days after that, though, I resumed wearing my glasses to work. My error rate dropped right back down. I was instantly happier. In particular, I recognized the crucial importance of hinges to my pleasure in life. When I open my glasses in the morning before taking a shower and going to work, I am like an excited tourist who has just risen from his hotel bed on the first day of a vacation: I’ve just flung open a set of double French doors leading out onto a sunlit balcony with a view of the entire whatever — shipping corridor, bay, valley, parking lot. (How can people not like views over motel parking lots in the early morning? The new subtler car colors, the blue-greens and warmer grays, and the sense that all those drivers are leveled in the democracy of sleep and that the glass and hoods out there are cold and even dewy, make for one of the more inspiring visions that life can offer before nine o’clock.) Or maybe French-door-hinges are not entirely it. Maybe I think that the hinges of my glasses are a woman’s hip-sockets: her long graceful legs open and straddle my head all day. I asked Rhody once whether she liked the tickling of my glasses-frames on the inside of her thighs. She said, “Usually your glasses are off by then, aren’t they?” I admitted that was true. She said she didn’t like it when I wore my glasses because she wanted my sense of her open vadge to be more Sisley than Richard Estes. “But I do sometimes like feeling your ears high on my thighs,” she conceded. “And if I clamp your ears hard with my thighs I can make more noise without feeling I’m getting out of hand.” Rhody was a good, good person, and I probably should not have tried to allude even obliquely to my Fold experiences to her, since she found what little I told her of Fermation repellent; her knowledge of it contributed to our breakup.

Well! I think I have established that there is an emotional history to my wearing of glasses. So in saying that she liked them, tall Joyce — who as I sit typing this towers above me now in a state of semi-nudity — was definitely saying the right thing if she was interested in getting to my heart, which she probably wasn’t. You have to be extremely careful about complimenting a thirty-five-year-old male temp who has achieved nothing in his life. “Hi, I’m the temp!” That’s usually what I say to receptionists on my first day of an assignment; that’s the word I use, because it’s the word everyone uses, though it was a long time before I stopped thinking that it was a horrible abbreviation, worse than “Frisco.” I have been a temp for over ten years, ever since I quit graduate school. The reason I have done nothing with my life is simply that my power to enter the Fold (or “hit the clutch” or “find the Cleft” or “take a personal day” or “instigate an Estoppel”) comes and goes. I value the ability, which I suspect is not widespread, but because I don’t have it consistently, because it fades without warning and doesn’t return until months or years later, I’ve gotten hooked into a sort of damaging boom-and-bust Kondratieff cycle. When I’ve lost the power, I simply exist, I do the minimum I have to do to make a living, because I know that in a sense everything I want to accomplish (and I am a person with ambitions) is infinitely postponable.

As a rough estimate, I think I have probably spent only a total of two years of personal time in the Fold, if you lump the individual minutes or hours together, maybe even less; but they have been some of the best, most alive times I’ve had. My life reminds me of the capital-gains tax problem, as I once read about it in an op-ed piece: if legislators keep changing, or even promising to change, the capital-gains percentages, repealing and reinstating the tax, the rational investor will begin to base his investment decisions not on the existing tax laws, but on his certainty of change, which mischannels (the person who wrote the op-ed piece convincingly argued) in some destructive way the circulation of capital. So too with me during those periods when I wait for the return of my ability to stop time: I think, Why should I read Ernest Renan or learn matrix algebra now, since when I’m able to Drop again, I’ll be able to spend private hours, or even years, satisfying any fleeting intellectual curiosity while the whole world waits for me? I can always catch up. That’s the problem.

People are somewhat puzzled by me when I first show up at their office — What is this unyoung man, this thirty-five-year-old man, doing temping? Maybe he has a criminal past, or maybe he’s lost a decade to drugs, or: Maybe He’s an Artist? But after a day or two, they adjust, since I am a fairly efficient and good-natured typist, familiar with most of the commonly used kinds of software (and some of the forgotten kinds too, like nroff, Lanier, and NBI, and the good old dedicated DEC systems with the gold key), and I am unusually good at reading difficult handwriting and supplying punctuation for dictators who in their creative excitement forget. Once in a great while I use my Fold-powers to amaze everyone with my apparent typing speed, transcribing a two-hour tape in one hour and that kind of thing. But I’m careful not to amaze too often and become a temp legend, since this is my great secret and I don’t want to imperil it — this is the one thing that makes my life worth living. When some of the more intelligent people in a given office ask little probingly polite questions to try to figure me out, I often lie and tell them that I’m a writer. It is almost funny to see how relieved they are to have a way of explaining my lowly work status to themselves. Nor is it so much of a lie, because if I had not wasted so much of my life waiting for the next Fermata-phase to come along I would very likely have written some sort of a book by now. And I have written a few shorter things.

I’m typing this on a portable electronic typewriter because I don’t want to risk putting any of it on the bank’s LAN. Local area networks behave erratically in the Fold. When my carpal-tunnel problem gets bad, I use a manual for my private writing; it seems to help. But I don’t have to: batteries and electricity do function in the Fold — in fact, all the laws of physics still obtain, as far as I can tell, but only to the extent that I reawaken them. The best way to describe it is that right now, because I have snapped my fingers, every event everywhere is in a state of gel-like suspension. I can move, and the air molecules part to let me through, but they do it resistingly, reluctantly, and the farther that objects are from me, the more thoroughly they are paused. If someone was riding a motorcycle down a hill before I stopped time “half an hour” ago, the rider will remain motionless on his vehicle unless I walk up to him and give him a push — in which case he will fall down, but somewhat more slowly than if he fell in an unpaused universe. He won’t take off down the hill at the speed he was riding, he will just tip over. I used to be tempted to fly small airplanes in the Fold, but I’m not that stupid. Flight, though, is definitely possible, as is the pausing of time on an airplane flight. The world stays halted exactly as it is except where I mess with it, and for the most part I try to be as unobtrusive as possible — as unobtrusive as my lusts let me be. This typewriter, for instance, puts what I type on the page because the act of pressing a letter makes cause and effect function locally. A circuit is completed, a little electricity dribbles from the batteries, etc. I honestly don’t know how far outward my personal distortion of the temporary timelessness that I create measurably spreads. I do know that during a Fermata a woman’s skin feels soft where it is soft, warm when it is warm — her sweat feels warm when it is warm. It’s a sort of reverse Midas touch that I have while in the Fold — the world is inert and statuesque until I touch it and make it live ordinarily.

I had this idea of writing my life story while within a typical chronanistic experience just yesterday. It’s almost incredible to think that I’ve been Dropping since fourth grade and yet I’ve never made the effort to write about it right while it was going on. I kept an abbreviated log for a while in high school and college — date and time of Drop, what I did, how long in personal minutes or hours or days it took (for a watch usually starts up again in the Fold if I shake it, so I can easily measure how long I have been out), whether I learned anything new or not, and so on. You would think, if a person really could stop the world and get off, as I can, that it would occur to him fairly early on to stop the world in order to record with some care what it felt like to stop the world and get off, for the benefit of the curious. But I now see, even this far into my first autobiographical Fermata, why I never did it before. Sad to say, it is just as hard to write during a Fermation as it is in real time. You still must dole out all the things you have to say one by one, when what you want of course is to say them all at once. But I am going to give it a try. I am thirty-five now, and I have done quite a lot of things, mostly bad, with the Fold’s help (including, incidentally, reciting Dylan Thomas’s “Poem on His Birthday” apparently from memory at the final session of a class in modern lyric poetry in college: it is a longish poem, and whenever nervousness made me forget a line, I just paused the world by pressing the switch of my Time Perverter — which is what I called the modified garage-door opener that I used in those days — and refreshed my memory by looking at a copy of the text that I had in my notebook, and no one was the wiser) — and if I don’t write some of these private adventures down now, I know I’m going to regret it.

Just now I spun around once in my chair in order to surprise myself again with the sight of Joyce’s pubic hair. It really is amazing to me that I can do this, even after all these years. She was walking about thirty feet from my desk, across an empty stretch of space, carrying some papers, on her way to someone’s cube, and my gaze just launched toward her, diving cleanly, without ripples, through the glasses that she had complimented, taking heart from having to pass through the optical influence of something she had noticed and liked. It was as if I traveled along the arc of my sight and reached her visually. (There is definitely something to those medieval theories of sight that had the eye sending out rays.) And just as my sighted self reached her, she stopped walking for a second, to check something on one of the papers she held, and when she looked down I was struck by the simple fact that today her hair is braided.

It is arranged in what I think is called a French braid. Each of the solid clumps of her hair feeds into the overall solidity of the braid, and the whole structure is plaited as part of her head, like a set of glossy external vertebrae. I’m impressed that women are able to arrange this sort of complicated figure, without too many stray strands, without help, in the morning, by feel. Women are much more in touch with the backs of themselves than men are: they can reach higher up on their back, and do so daily to unfasten bras; they can clip and braid their hair; they can keep their rearward blouse-tails smoothly tucked into their skirts. They give thought to how the edges of their underpants look through their pocketless pants from the back. (“Panties” is a word to be avoided, I feel.) But French braids, in which three sporting dolphins dip smoothly under one another and surface in a continuous elegant entrainment, are the most beautiful and impressive results of this sense of dorsal space. As soon as I saw Joyce’s braid I knew that it was time to stop time. I needed to feel her solid braid, and her head beneath it, in my palm.

So, just as she started walking again, I snapped my fingers. This is my latest method of entering the Fold, and one of the simpler I have been able to develop (much more straightforward than my earlier mathematical-formula technique, or the sewn calluses, for instance, both of which I will get into later). She didn’t hear the snap, only I did — the universe halts at some indeterminate point just before my middle finger swats against the base of my thumb. I got out my Casio typewriter and scooted over here to her on my chair. (I didn’t scoot backwards, I scooted frontwards, which isn’t easy to do over carpeting, because it is hard to get the proper traction. I wanted to keep my eyes on her.) She was in mid-stride. I reached forward and put my hands on her hipbones. It felt as if there were cashmere or something fancy in the wool, and it was good to feel her hipbones through that soft material, and to see my hands angling to follow the incurve of her waist, which the dress had to an extent hidden. Sometimes when I first touch a woman in the Fold I tense up my arms until they vibrate, so that the shape of whatever is under my palms keeps on being sent through my nerves as new information. I never know exactly what I will do during a Drop. To get her dress out of the way, I lifted its soft hem up over her hips and gathered it into two wingy bunches and tied a big soft knot with them. It had seemed as if she had a tiny potbelly with the dress on (this can be a sexy touch, I think, on some women), but if she had, it disappeared or lost definition as soon as I pulled her panty-hose and underpants down as far as I could get them, which wasn’t that far because her legs were walkingly apart. (Also, before I pulled down her pantyhose, which is a smoky-blue color, I touched an oval of her skin through a run in the darker part high on her thigh.) And then I was given this sight that I have before me now, of her pubic hair.

I’m not normally a pubic-hair obsessive — I really have no ongoing fetishes, I don’t think, because each woman is different, and you never know what particular feature or transition between features is going to grab you and say, “Look at this — you’ve never thought about exactly this before!” Each woman inspires her own fetishes. And it isn’t that Joyce has some ludicrous Vagi-fro or massive Koosh-ball explosion of a sex-goatee — in fact her hair isn’t thicker really than most. It’s just that it covers a wider area, maybe, and its blackness sparkles, if you will — its curving border reaches a little higher on her stomach. A little? — what am I saying? It’s the size of South America. To think that I could have died and not seen this — that I could have picked a different temp assignment when Jenny, my coordinator, told me my choices a few weeks ago. What is exciting about its extent is maybe that, because it reaches higher than other women’s pubic hair, it becomes less and more sexual at the same time — the slang for it, like ‘pussy hair” and “cunt hair” (I flinch at both those words, except when I’m close to coming), doesn’t apply because it is no longer, strictly speaking, “pubic” hair at all — its borders are reaching out into soft abdominal love-areas, so love and sex mix. I wanted to feel it, the dense sisaly lush resilience of it, which makes that whole hippy part of her body look extraordinarily graceful. It is a kind of black cocktail dress under which her clit-heart beats — it has that much dignity.

But rather than holding it immediately, I deprived myself of the sight of it for a little while and instead gently placed my hand on her braid, which was cool and thick and smooth and dense, a totally different idea of hair, so different that it is strange to think of the two orders of hair as sharing the same word, but which follows the curve of her head in the same way that her pubic hair follows the curve over her mound-bone, and when I felt the French-braid sensation sinking into the hollow of my palm, which craves sexual shapes and textures, I then went ahead and curled the fingers of my other hand through her devil’s food fur, connecting the two kinky handfuls of home-grown protein with my arms, and it felt as if I were hot-wiring a car; my heart’s twin carburetors roared into life. That’s all I did, then I started typing this before I forgot the feeling. Maybe that’s all I will do. That sexy, sexy pubic hair! I’m noticing now that its contours are similar to those of a black bicycle seat: a black leather seat on a racing bicycle. Maybe this is why those sad sniffers of comic legend sniff girls’ bicycle seats? No, for them it isn’t the shape, it’s the fact that the seat has been between a girl’s legs. They are truly pathetic. I have no sympathy to spare for compulsions other than my own. I would, though, like to rescue the correspondence between pubic hair and narrow black-leather bicycle seats from them.

All right, I think that is enough for now. I’ve been in the Fold for, let’s see, almost four hours and written eight single-spaced pages, and the problem is that if I stay in too long I’ll have jet lag tomorrow, since according to my inner clock it will be four hours later than it is. Usually I don’t spend nearly this long in a Drop. I am going to put Joyce’s clothes back in order and smooth out her dress (I would never have tied a knot in it if she wore a cotton dress, because the wrinkles would show up too much and puzzle her) and I’m going to scoot back to my desk and finish out the day. The good thing is that if she brings me a tape to do later this afternoon, I will be much more relaxed and therefore likable than if I hadn’t partially stripped her without her knowledge or consent. I will jest knowingly and winningly with her. I will compliment her on today’s scarf — which isn’t, honestly, quite as nice as the Cyrillic one. (Maybe when she was getting dressed this morning she put on this knit dress and then remembered that I had admired her scarf, and maybe she thought that wearing it again as well would be too direct a Yes from her; but then again maybe the reason she was wearing the dress, this soon again was that she had liked my complimenting her on her scarf and wanted to allude to that compliment indirectly by wearing the same dress with another scarf.) This new one is a Liberty pattern of purply grays and greens, definitely worth smiling at and even acknowledging outright. But I don’t want to get into one of those awful running-compliment patterns, where I have to mention her scarves every time she wears one.

The other thing I should say is that under normal circumstances I would probably give serious thought to “poaching an egg” at this point, but because I have written all this, and because this is, I believe, going to be the very beginning of a sort of autobiography, I can’t. What a surprise, though, to find this Casio typewriter acting as chaperon! (Maybe what I will do is go ahead, but not mention it.)