The Fermata

11

I’VE GOTTEN INTO A NEW AND BETTER WORK RHYTHM. I NOW spend every other twenty-four-hour period in Fold-furled isolation. I wake up at seven-thirty, and if it’s going to be a Fold day I thick-fingeredly snap time off, shake my watch to unfreeze it, and spend the whole next twenty-four hours enclosed within the quiescent seven-thirtyness of my room, working on this book. I have weaned myself from high-volume earbuds; I can think now without hearing music on the radio. Rarely, I take short walks. I eat lunch and dinner and go to bed exactly as I would were time in effect, and yet I have a whole stilled writing day funded with early-morning qualities of light that help me concentrate. After a “night’s” sleep, I wake the world with a second snap and have a shower and go to my continuing temp assignment at MassBank. It is not such a good thing for me to be spending half my life in the Fold, doubling my rate of aging, but I only plan to keep up this alternating schedule until I finish a little more of my autobiography. An unexpected benefit of the regimen is that real life, the life I spend in time’s flow, feels not unpleasantly elongated, as if I were ten years old again; my privately interpolated “yesterdays” push real events of only two or three days ago into the middle-distant past.

Am I an alienated person? Some who have read this far might say so — some might say that a man who comes onto an unknown woman’s ecstatically squinting orgasm-face without her being aware of it is definitely an alienated person — or worse. And temps are prima facie alienated by virtue of their vocational rootlessness. But I don’t see that nasal, sociological-sounding word applying in any useful way to me. I get along well with people. I haven’t perhaps done such a good job of establishing my sanity in this sketch of my life, since I have had to concentrate on the episodes of temporal distortion that make my experience unique, and they almost always embrace the controlled mental disorder known as sexual arousal, but I’m not by any means a crazy person. I don’t have a flat affect. I’m friendly and likable. I go out on the occasional date. I have several male friends, even. I have had long-term relationships with three women, Rhody being the most recent. The only major difference between me and any number of residents of the greater Boston area is that I have been able to invent and make use of several sorts of chronoclutch. No, there is a difference, I think: I’m arrogant enough to believe, at least to believe sometimes, that the reason that I have been chosen over any other contemporary human to receive and develop this chronanistic ability (if there is indeed some supernatural temp agency doing the choosing) is maybe that I can be trusted with it — trusted at least not to do any real harm. Morals depend in part on consequence; consequence on time; and since my amoralities flourish and expire entirely in momentary pico-states of timeless inconsequence, the usual rules just don’t have the same prohibitive force. Nobody else should be entitled to take off women’s clothes at will, at the snap of a finger or the flip of a switch, but I think I should be, because, for one thing, my curiosity has more love and tolerance in it than other men’s does. Before Rhody broke up with me, she once told me that the attraction to having an affair with a painter (a figurative painter, she meant) was the possibility that he would really see her and know all that was to be known about the shape of her body — when she undressed for him there would be a thrilling completeness to her undressing. To nobody else would her physical self mean as much as it meant to his eye, and so her own nudity would feel sexier with him than with anyone else. I’m not a painter, I’m only a temp and an occasional creative rotter, and yet I do contend that when I strip a passing woman on the street because her face or body calls out to me, I see more in her than others do. Of course there is plenty of self-deception possible here. But I can truthfully say that I’m never disappointed, never — I’m never able to feel anything but love and gratitude toward a woman when I secretly take off her clothes. Say there is a low cesarean scar that nobody but her husband has seen at close range. Say there is some part of her body that I will see that she isn’t very proud of. In seeing it, I feel the goodness in me blossom—I know that she would be embarrassed about my having seen this feature, whatever it is, and I turn the knowledge of her imputed embarrassment into an upwelling of affection for her and her vulnerabilities.

I would condemn in the strongest terms anyone else who did what I have done. But the thing is, I did it, I did it, and I know myself, I know that I mean no harm, I mean well. I want simply to know what every woman looks like and feels like. I mean only to appreciate what the ribs of a complete stranger feel like under my hands, or to hold some hair I haven’t held before, or to come in someone’s face while she is paused in her own orgasm. And since in the Fermata I happen to be able to act on these wants without troubling her — without shaming or frightening her or interrupting what she is doing or thinking, simply by stopping the entire known universe for a few minutes or hours, I feel that what I’m doing isn’t wrong enough for me to override my irresistible desire to do it. In fact, maybe what I’m doing is straightforwardly right and good! I never ogle or leer on sidewalks. The Fold has permitted me to perfect my surreptitiousness. Maybe every single woman I have stripped, if she knew me, if she could know now what my thoughts had been as I unzipped her dress and undid her bra, would want me to have stripped her and sucked her breasts and understood her body as it truly deserved to be understood.

Rhody, however, didn’t view it that way. When I tried the idea out on her (on the plane home from our beach vacation), she was interested at first, and then later she turned against it, using awful and, in my opinion, off-base words like “necrophilia” to characterize it. Let me say that I am not a necrophile. The notion has no appeal. Liaisons among the undead are fashionable, but I don’t have a drop of vampiric blood in me. (I did, however, once put a pair of “nipple nooses” on the famous Anne Rice at Barnes & Noble some years ago, when I was at the height of my mechanical-pencil Fold-phase. I clicked time on for a minute or two so she would have a chance to feel them while she signed my copy of her book, which was going to be a birthday present for somebody. Then I removed them. If she noticed anything, she was extremely cool about it and didn’t let on.) The Fermata allows something to occur that is the exact opposite of the necrophilic ideal: it allows me enough time to take in a particular lived second of one woman’s life, the incremental outcome of so many decisions and misfortunes and delights and griefs, while she is in the very midst of fleetingly bringing it into being. The ability to investigate all aspects of her careless aliveness, where her clothes stretch, her body’s textures, her expression, her smells, the way she happens to be standing or moving, as they are fused in a single total instantaneous female delta-self, is the great lure of the Fold. The Fold allows me to do sexual justice to times when she is fully conscious, but not in the least self-conscious; “stalls,” Hopkins might have called them, in the daily fluidity of her life whose specific complex of qualities would have otherwise gone unseen by anyone — unphotographed, uncelebrated, unvalued, unloved. It is their randomness and, often, their very lack of overt sexiness that makes these instants so erotically precious. My sense of sight is infinitely and lovingly promiscuous, and each time I Drop I get another chance to love a chosen body as it really is: to see a woman’s ass, for example, when its owner-operator is talking at a pay-phone and thinking about other things than the fact that she has an ass, and her ass can therefore be completely itself.

(For example, once I noticed a woman washing the long stretch of glass in front of the freezer-counter in the ice cream place where she worked, in a mall — she worked the cloth so vigorously over the glass that her ass circled unrestrainedly clockwise to counterbalance her hard work. She was wearing extremely tight stretchy jeans of a sort I can’t fully understand but can forgive, and I wrote out the equation I used back then to get into the Fold — an equation adapted from one I saw in a journal of mathematics — and I pulled her pants down and came into a sugar cone staring at the cleavage of her ass. But I see now that this isn’t in fact a good example of my appreciating an ass while it is unselfconsciously itself, since the reason I was attracted to her was that I had been observing her for a few minutes beforehand, as she served a customer, and I had sensed how relatively unproud of her face and upper body she was, and how certain she was that her ass was her best feature, and how much therefore she had wanted to wash the glass boldly in front of her store, though it was quite clean, with her back to all the mall-boys. As their representative, on their behalf, I came.)

The point is, in any case, that I could never get interested in a woman who was passed out drunk, or was sedated, in a coma, or dead; for then she is unconscious of me, and what I want is to be with her when she would be conscious of me but for the fact that I have interjected myself into a chink of her day so infinitesimally brief that she can’t know that I have come and gone.

The way the discussion came up with Rhody was that she announced, on the plane, apropos of tiny Latino swimsuits, that more and more she was interested in seeing naked men and their penises. She said she liked the idea of semis—by which she meant penises that weren’t totally hard, since a hard straight line was unbeautiful against the human body, nor totally soft and wrinkly either, but rather loungingly, curvingly full and interested and ready to be teased straight — like (she explained) Jimmy Cliff’s penis in The Harder They Come. I got animated, because I love talking about sex, and I impulsively decided that this was the right moment to begin to confess my Fold history to her, couching it first as a hypothetical case. All right then, I said to her, what did she think of the idea of some sort of chord on the piano that whenever you played it, stopped time? Say back when she was at Tufts, her piano teacher (someone on whom she’d told me she’d had a crush) had been working on a conclusive edition of a piece called Map, by a once forgotten but now increasingly respected twentieth-century composer named Mascon Albedo. Say that, in comparing the microfilmed manuscripts with the 1903 Yates and Boling edition of the work, Rhody’s piano teacher, Alan Sparkling, discovered a surprising number of significant errors and righted them. As his corrections accumulated, he began to feel not only that Map was a much greater work than anyone could have known, but also that he, Alan Sparkling, was developing a sure instinct for Albedo’s style. And his instinct told him that there was one chord which, even though it checked out as correct against several of the relevant manuscripts, still sounded quite wrong, or at least incomplete. It didn’t sound at all like the chord Albedo would have written at that moment in the piece. And it was a chord of crucial importance to the meaning of the work — a very soft chiming that arrived after a long stretch of murkier pianism that should have come off as strange and triumphant, but as it stood did not. The chord was surmounted by a fermata.

Sensing a major discovery that would crown his new edition, Sparkling went back to Sewanee University, where Albedo’s manuscripts were kept, and looked again through some of the notebooks that the Master had kept during the time he was composing that particular movement of Map. Albedo’s later life had been decorated with odd incidents and minor scandals — there had been actual rumors of insanity. In the notebooks there were tantalizing annotations over certain motivic scraps — things like “Oh God, yes!” and “And here the Field develops greater potency.” Alan began to have the sense that Map had been more than a piece of piano music to Albedo; that it had constituted some sort of magic sonic recipe or spell for him. He also began strongly to suspect that the errors in the Yates and Boling edition had not been the fault of the publisher but had been intentional last-minute alterations on Albedo’s part, meant to disable whatever powers Map gave its performer, so that he, Albedo, could remain in sole possession of them. Finally, in one of the notebooks he came across a heavily erased part of a page under a large fermata and, with the help of a magnifying glass, was able to read the chord written there. It was an incomparably finer variant of the wrong-sounding fermata chord in Map.

Deeply impressed with himself, Professor Sparkling took the last plane to Boston, sure now that he had a masterwork of twentieth-century music in his briefcase, polished, cleaned, restored, awakened from its dodecaphonic slumber by his profound scholarship and delicate musicological instinct. The next day was his day of giving piano lessons. Rhody was his very best student; and that morning she tore through the Tombeau de Couperin with such verve that, on a whim he didn’t himself quite understand, he turned toward her with an expression of great seriousness and seized her shoulders and told her that she alone must work up the new authorized version of Map. He made a copy of his own corrections for her so that she could incorporate them into her score. A week passed. Alan, gloating over his discoveries, played bits and pieces of Map for himself, and listened to it skimmingly in his head, but he devoted most of his time to finishing his article about it for The Quarterly of New Music. Since it was a formidably difficult work, he did not make any attempt to play the whole composition through, even sloppily, from beginning to end. That was what gifted students like Rhody were for, he felt.

All that week Rhody devotedly practiced Map, conscious of what an honor it was to be the first person to reanimate the cleaned-up version. It soon became clear to her that Professor Sparkling’s enthusiasm was justified: Mascon Albedo stood revealed as no mere minor-league friend of Luciano Berio, but as a leaping titan of pianism. Though the surface of the piece had struck her ear at first as knotty and over-intellectual, as she perfected her performance of it she found that on the contrary it had an almost disturbing secondary sensual appeal: it made her exceedingly aware of the physical reality of her own playing. If the piece required her to play a simple A-flat-major triad with her left hand, she would feel in doing so as if the black A-flat and E-flat keys were soft, low, tree-covered hills, smoothed by forgotten glaciers, and the C between them a fog-filled valley, over which her poised fingers were parachuting very early in the morning; an ordinary pile of perfect fourths and fifths would slice through her like the stave of a hard-boiled-egg slicer; she could sense the felt-covered hammers thumping against the piano wires as gently as the noses of sheep in pens or fish against glass; she felt with extraordinary vividness her right foot making its little jumps on the sustain pedal, hosing off any recent blendings and allowing a new concord to rise up clean from its mud-wrestling past. The piece seemed to rediscover the amazement every pianist should properly feel at the invention of the piano. Moreover, playing it did very odd things to her perception of time, though it did so only when she began right at the beginning and went straight through.

Another piano student, Paul Mackey, knocked on her practice-room door on the eve of her lesson with Professor Sparkling. He asked her what she was up to. She was evasive, saying only that she was doing an Albedo piece for Sparkling. Paul seemed impressed and asked if he could hear some of it. Reluctantly at first, Rhody began playing it. Paul paced in the tiny room as he listened; he had the distracting habit of doing laps around the piano while he listened to his friends play. But the music was so powerful that Rhody found that she could successfully ignore him, at least until something unexpected happened. She came to the emended chord, the soft one dangling like a trumpet vine under the fermata, and played it, holding the sustain pedal down, and glanced up at him to get his reaction, and saw that Paul was completely motionless, halted in mid-step in some sort of trance. The chord slowly faded; when it was inaudible, Paul ajbruptly looked at her and said, “Why did you stop?”

“Why did you stop?” said Rhody.

“What do you mean?” said Paul. “You just hit that weird staccato chord and then stopped playing.”

“It was hardly a staccato chord,” said Rhody. “It had a fermata over it, in fact. Look.”

Paul examined the music and raised his eyebrows. “Well, you certainly played it like a staccato chord.”

Rhody pondered Paul’s reaction for a second and then began a few bars back and finished the piece. This time there was no unusual behavior from Paul.

That night she had a dream in which she did Kegel exercises with a vaginal barbell until her PC muscles were so strong that when she went onstage under black-light and inserted a red Swingline 99 hand-held stapler in her vagina, she could staple a glowing airplane ticket with it. Professor Sparkling was in the audience, watching her staple the airplane tickets that the other men shyly brought up and held between her legs. He had a tube of phosphorescent motionlotion that he squeezed on the shaft of his penis so that, as he began to stroke it, it glowed with a pale blue light. He walked up the side stairs onto the stage and knelt before where she sat on a black Thonet chair. He held in one hand the manuscript of his paper on the history of Mascon Albedo’s deliberate disimprovement of Map. He was almost invisible except for his semi-soft glowing penis, although the EXIT sign cast a faint reddish tint on his wild Dershowitz-for-the-Defense hair and hairy shoulders; he placed a corner of the manuscript between her thighs and she lifted herself off the seat of the chair and positioned the jaws of the Swingline around the paper and groaned like a weight-lifter and tightened her vaginal muscles as hard as she possibly could and successfully got the stapler to force a staple through all nine pages. There was applause. Professor Sparkling bowed and walked away, stroking his penis in a scholarly way. In the background, the whole time, the fermata chord from Map chimed and faded, chimed and faded.

Still under the influence of her dream, she went to her nine o’clock lesson in a state of disoriented, stumbling horniness. “This is a momentous occasion,” Professor Sparkling said archly. He sat as he usually did on a low couch with one ankle on the opposite knee, a copy of the piece open beside him. “All right,” he said and gestured to her to begin. She played. When she came to the fermata chord, she splayed her fingers to play it and brought her hands gently down and felt both middle fingers descend into the low white key-vales, curved as ballet dancers curve their middle fingers when they stand in second position. Relying on the sustain pedal, she looked over at Sparkling: like Paul the day before, Sparkling was frozen, staring, stopped dead in the act of scratching his upper thigh. She could make out the profane, broccoli-shaped outline of his cock and balls under his loose cuffed pants. Hurriedly, before the chord wore out, she lifted her skirt and slid first her left and then her right middle finger high up into her slot and tickled her cervix. Then she resumed playing the piece. When she finished, Sparkling applauded, as much for himself as for her. “Wonderful, wonderful,” he said, standing. “It’s a strange and moving piece, don’t you think?”

“I do,” said Rhody, looking down at her two middle fingers, which were still slick from her juicy insertions.

“My only question is about the fermata,” said Sparkling. “I don’t understand why you cut it so short. It’s the highlight of the whole work. Let’s try it like this.” He put his fingers over her fingers and played the chord with her. He took note of something. “Why, may I ask, are your two middle fingers perspiring so?” he asked.

“They do that,” she said.

“Ah.”

He requested that she play the work through from the beginning, and this time he stood behind her, his arms crossed. When she reached the fermata chord, she came down on it a little harder than she had the first time, to give herself a longer fade interval. She twisted around to face Alan behind her, taking care to keep her foot firmly down on the sustain pedal. He was as still as a statue. She unzipped his fly and deftly hauled out his taciturn musky handful. She gave his cock three long stretching sucks. It was big and luncheon-meaty in her mouth; sucking on it was like sucking on a carnalized version of his voice or mind. She fully intended to put his dick away before the Map chord ran out on her, but her sucking took a little longer than she planned and she barely had time to turn back to the keyboard and continue playing to the end. She heard a little cry of surprise behind her and some hasty zippering.

When she was done she turned again toward Sparkling and waited silently for his reaction. He looked greatly disconcerted; he was trying to figure something out that couldn’t be figured out; his obvious mystification and flusterment, so unusual for him, was endearing.

“Was the fermata a little better this time?” said Rhody.

“Yes, I think it was.”

“It’s a very powerful work,” said Rhody, relishing Professor Sparkling’s speechlessness. “It’s quite different in effect from the published version.”

“Yes, it is,” Sparkling said.

And let’s say that that was the end of the lesson (I told Rhody). And say that she made a tape of herself playing the fermata chord, shaking the tape recorder to get it to work, and say that she went to the sound lab and sampled this sound (which did indeed appear to be a staccato chord to the listener) and regenerated it, so that simply by hitting the PLAY button on a Walkman she could stop time for up to thirty “minutes.” Wouldn’t she, I asked her, take advantage of her freedom by hitting PLAY whenever she had the slightest inclination to check out the indolent dick-specifics of any man who caught her eye?

At first I thought she really liked the idea, because she said “Hmm!” to this with a certain amount of enthusiasm. At one or two places during my hypothetical story (which I have jazzed up here a little for posterity, although it is in its main outlines as I presented it to her), she had gotten an interested glint in her eye. But to my dismay, the more she considered the whole concept of time-perversion, the more she seemed to turn against it. I tried to win her over to it with more examples: wouldn’t it be even slightly interesting to her to be in some public place like Park Street Station, waiting for the train, and to be able to hit PLAY and go right through the crowd of men in their ties and jackets and briskly pull their pants down, so that their idiosyncratic idols peeped shyly out from behind their shirttails, available for all sorts of casual assessments and comparisons and cursory fondlings? Surely she would do that if she had the fermational power, wouldn’t she? If she were in a certain mood?

An intensity in my gaze may have unsettled her slightly. The more her enthusiasm for the whole idea appeared to diminish, the eagerer I was to convince her that it had to be attractive to her. Any tiny Latino swimsuit was fair game, I said. Any penis-bulge in the world that she wanted to inquire into and even heft was hers to inquire into and heft. Right? But despite her having clearly said at the beginning of the plane ride that the idea of seeing naked beautiful men held more and more appeal, she now began to contend that really the sight of a penis per se didn’t do all that much for her. Yes, possibly, she would investigate a crotch or two hands-on, if the crotch-context was truly extraordinary, but what she really needed was the possibility that a given penis could become aware of her and could grow and develop with the help of this knowledge. She needed to be in some sort of unfolding dramatic relationship with a specific penis for it to become a full-blown sex-object.

“But you’re such a voyeur,” I countered. “When we go for walks, you’re always trying to get a look in the windows.”

“It’s foyerism, not voyeurism,” she replied. “I want to look in windows because I like to see how people arrange their rooms, how they have decided to live. If I had a magical Tristan chord on tape that stopped time, I probably would wander through people’s houses, if they were unlocked.”

“Ah! Okay!” I said wildly. “Now we’re getting somewhere. And if in your wandering you came across a paused couple having Sunday-afternoon sex, wouldn’t you at least walk up and touch the man’s flexed butt-muscle between her parted legs as he drives that dick home? Or if you happened upon a guy doing himself up right, pumping his fluke with two fists, his eyes closed, his face all slack from the pleasure, wouldn’t you pull his hands away and give that fucking girder of a dick a suck or two, if it looked extra good and suckable? You would!”

Rhody thought. “I’m not ruling it out. But I need movement. What you’re talking about is so static. I need to be seduced. That’s what I really want. I want to be seduced.” She said this with such conviction that I dropped the whole subject. It was obvious to her that if the universe were stopped, any form of seduction would be impossible. I resisted the temptation to itemize the manifold ways in which a Fold-effect could make certain kinds of seduction possible, because I didn’t want to seem to have given it a lifetime’s thought. I just dropped it. I thanked her again for finding my glasses.

A week after that I had a revelation while browsing in Kibbeson’s Discount House of Electricity on Mass Ave. after work. I realized that all I had to do was buy a handful of really cheap remaindered switches — perhaps the one-hundred-milliamp push-button switches with the twelve-millimeter bushings, which looked especially promising — and carry them around in my pants pocket. I had a hunch that if I held one tightly and pressed it with my thumb while thinking as hard as I could of an hourglass being spun in a centrifuge, I could easily force a minor concession from the elemental forces and descend into the temporal Cleft that way. Even if the switches burned out after only one Drop, as the race-track-transformer toggle had, they were cheap enough that I could afford it. I bought a bunch of different microswitches and tested them out on the street, fumbling with them in my pocket as I frowned out at the traffic. None of the momentary-connection push-buttons worked, to my surprise, but an undistinguished-looking plastic sixteen-amp spade-terminal rocker-switch did beautifully. I bought a dozen for five dollars.

Rhody and I had sex that evening — not outré toothbrush-driven avocado sex, but not all that bad sex either. While I was fucking into her slowly from behind, she began to come, muff-finger flying. I still had a ways to go. I never liked coming after she did, because I could not convince myself that she was still interested. Hastily I fished one of the rocker-switches out of my pants pocket (fortunately my pants were right there on the bed) and envisioned a spinning hourglass while I tripped it. There was a smarting spark against my palm as time’s fuse blew. I pulled out and looked at the alluringly open negative shape in Rhody’s vadge where my cock had just happily been — it didn’t close on itself as it would have out of the Fold. I went and stood in the other room, looking through the frame of the open door at what she looked like as she was fucking me. Her glasses were on. Folds of the sheet were clutched in her hands. Though she was supporting her weight on her elbows and knees, her breasts weren’t hanging straight down, as they would have been if she had posed herself in this position, but were shaped on the fly, the centers of gravity looming forward, because we had been slapping against each other quite hard and she had just begun a drive back onto my richard. She was looking down past her breasts at her own thighs or perhaps at my ballions swinging just below her tuft. Her face was very flushed, in part because her head was held down the way it was — there was a vein in her forehead that I could clearly see. My girlfriend! I pulled off my condom, disliking the wrinkly sounds it made as I mastur-worked myself. The coolness of the open air on my richard made it remember how good it was to be hard. I lay next to her on the bed, looking at her slung-forward drones and flushed face, and I imagined her imagining sucking her piano teacher’s languid elutriator, or thinking about somebody or — bodies a great deal sexier to her than I was doing something nice and kinky, and in my anxiousness to catch up with her I almost went too far and came all alone — I clenched once in a false-dawn sort of pre-orgasm, which is a spasm (if I may be pardoned for an inelegant simile) very similar to the false flush-moment that can occur in a toilet tank if you don’t hold the handle down quite long enough for the mechanism to confirm your unambivalent wish for it to go through a full flush cycle. I let my cock settle down for a minute, and then began driving up the grade again. It was now so mindlessly hard that the sensation of a pinchingly new condom being unrolled down its length was a matter of complete indifference to it. I pointed myself back inside Rhody and pressed the rocker-switch and, slapping against her as if there had been no break in the action, came just when she did. I felt a little guilty about having thus engineered a simultaneous orgasm (and what if by some mischance she found the second condom later?) and I lay there in the otherwise happy post-coital calm, seriously weighing whether I should just go ahead and tell her my entire history of time-perversion.

“What do you have in your hand?” she asked, undoing my fingers.

“This thing? It’s just a sort of charm.”

She looked at the burned-out rocker-switch, which I stupidly hadn’t gotten rid of during our orgasm. “You were holding on to this the whole time?” she said, looking at me uncomprehendingly.

“I don’t think the whole time,” I said.

“Where did it come from? I don’t understand.”

“Well,” I said, playing for time, “it’s just that — I remembered I had a bunch of rocker-switches in my pants pocket and grabbed one when I was going at you from behind. That was great, by the way.” I needed twenty minutes or so to think about how I should answer her, and whether I should tell her about the Fold, but I couldn’t very well reach for another rocker-switch while she lay on her side, propped on one elbow, looking at me with such a troubled expression. I had to go with my flash assessment, which was that this was not in fact the time to tell her about my Fold-life after all. I disliked how strange I must be appearing to her.

She said, “While we were making love, you reached in these pants and pulled out a piece of electrical equipment and held on to it? Why?” Now she was sitting up, wanting very much to get an explanation from me that would clear everything up. Her breasts looked aggrieved.

“It’s hard to explain,” I said. “I guess I wanted to imagine that I was an android.” I laughed sheepishly to confirm my fabrication. “An invincible hard-body android. It’s stupid, I know.” I felt despair at how ridiculous this explanation sounded, but I couldn’t bring myself to launch into the truth, fearing that she would take it poorly. “I hate these stupid condoms,” I said fussily, tying a knot in the one we had just used.

Rhody shook her head. “I’m not very comfortable with this, Arno. I really didn’t plan to be fucked by an electric motor this afternoon.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

I hugged her guiltily. She lay on her back, thinking. “Let me ask you this,” she then said. “Is your idea of the perfect life to be able to stop time anytime you want and take off women’s clothes on the subway and feel their breasts?”

“I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “You think that I’m turning out to be some kind of techno-sex nutcase.”

“Well? No, I’m just a little surprised at all this. First you tell me this long story about a piano chord, insisting that I must find aspects of the idea sexually exciting, and now you hold this thing in your hand — what is it?”

“It’s just a plain-vanilla on-off switch, a rocker-switch,” I said. I tried mild indignation. “It’s nothing! Forget it. It’s just a little sixteen-amp rocker-switch.”

“Well, it seems a very strange thing to bring into the bedroom. You should have told me beforehand. If it excites you to make love to me pretending you’re a machine, fine. But you have to include me in it. What I don’t like is discovering that you’re doing this somewhat odd thing literally behind my back.”

“You’re right, I should have included you,” I said. “But you know — I tried to include you in something fairly important to me when I told you about the fermata chord, and I must say I got a pretty lukewarm reception.”

“Well, right, it was a loveless fantasy. It had no love in it.”

“But I meant it as an act of love to tell it to you!”

“No,” said Rhody. “What that fantasy says is that your idea of heaven is being able to hit the PLAY button on a Walkman and take off women’s clothes and feel their breasts. Right?”

“I don’t think it’s my idea of heaven, exactly,” I said, with some awkwardness. I had in fact briefly undressed a beautifully bloused woman wearing a yellow 32-B Lily of France bra on the Red Line just the previous day, so it was difficult for me to react with the right level of blanket disapproval. “As you yourself said, it’s hard to rule out completely the possibility of an occasional capitulation to curiosity.”

Rhody didn’t like being paraphrased. She got angry. She said she had been thinking over my story, about the fermata chord, and she had begun to feel that it wasn’t a fantasy that appealed to her at all. Here is when she dug up words like “necrophilia”—or perhaps, to be fair, she only said “implied necrophilia.” I felt as if my whole life were being called into question and I tried to defend myself: it’s just an idea, just a fantasy, etc.

“How would you feel,” Rhody asked, “if I stopped time one day, while we were waiting in line for a movie, pulled your pants down, and inserted a blue eraser in your anus? Think about it.”

“It would depend totally, totally on your intent,” I said. “If you put a blue eraser in my anus out of some combination of desire and curiosity, and you simply wanted to know what it would be like to do that, then I wouldn’t object. Go right ahead. But if you did it out of a desire to hurt me and rob me of dignity in your mind, then of course I would object.”

“That was a bad example,” Rhody said, waving it away. “How would you feel if a complete stranger stopped time on the street and pulled your pants down and took your shirt off and made a minute inspection of every inch of your body?”

“Well,” I said piously, “if all they were interested in was seeing what I looked like in greater detail, and the motive was attraction rather than hostility, I would be flattered and wouldn’t mind in the least. Maybe there are things about me that I don’t want complete strangers knowing at such close range, but as long as I knew that the person was doing it out of some kind of positive feeling towards me, so that whatever they saw would be interesting to them, rather than repellent, I would say fine, pull my pants down. Just so long as I don’t have to know about it.”

“Ah, but what if it was a man?” said Rhody. “What if a gay man stopped time, pulled your pants down, and gave you a long slow blowjob? What if he had a mustache?”

This idea took me by surprise, but I pretended it didn’t. “I admit that’s not something that appeals to me. I was thinking of a woman doing the inspection. But to be consistent, I suppose I would have to say, fine, if the gay man means well, and he wants to give me a blowjob without my knowledge, it wouldn’t be the end of civilization. Let him. What you don’t know can’t hurt you.”

“That’s a ridiculously glib thing to say,” she said, pulling on her socks. She was angry again.

“Why is it glib?” I said hotly. “The point is, the real point is, forget strangers. When I told you that story about your piano teacher, I was talking not about some total stranger developing that ability to stop time by playing a certain chord, I was talking about you and you alone developing it.”

Rhody had finished getting dressed by now. “I think what you were really trying to do was to get me interested in your little dream of taking off women’s clothes in public places and doing various things to them and not getting criminally prosecuted for it. And I’m sorry — I don’t think it’s a good dream.” Saying this seemed to force her to some sort of decision. A week or two later we had another argument and she issued a fiat; soon we were no longer an item, which was too bad, since I did love her and really still do miss her, even now that (as I will go on to tell) I have gone out on a date with Joyce.