The Fermata

17

THUS BEGAN MY LATEST AND LONGEST FERMATA PHASE, THE loose, easy, finger-snapping phase, the phase I remained in until quite recently. I would now like to take a moment to say a little prayerlike thing about my life. I am so very fortunate to have been able to see all the naked women’s breasts I have seen. That’s what it really comes down to. I am just shocked by how lucky I am. No life could be finer than mine. No compulsively promiscuous actor or pop singer, no photographer for a men’s magazine, has a better life, for I can take off a woman’s clothes en passant, as a momentary diversion, without my tender strippage interfering in any way with her life or with mine. The average woman, the unexceptional woman, the interestingly ugly woman, I can stare at in a state of sudden nudity (hers and/or mine) on a sidewalk, or in the unflattering light of a record store, and nobody else can. There are whole phyla of breast-shape that the public at large doesn’t know about, because the women who possess these breast-shapes do not ever bare them except to their lovers and spouses and radiologists. And these ever-hidden plenums, perfect in their indispensable imperfection, that by their hang-angle and scooped realism of curve sing out, “We two are quite modest breasts! We two breasts choose not to appear naked in public!” I get to fill my mind with until I understand them. I love modesty, or Modesty; I love to see and kiss Modesty and suck Modesty’s nipples and whisper to Modesty how arrestingly modest she is. And I have been able to do that.

I haven’t been punished for it, either. Dr. Jekyll, Faustus, Stravinsky’s soldat, the ballet dancer in The Red Shoes, Gollum, Wells’s invisible man and time traveler, Dr. Frankenstein, and a thousand more recent horror heroes, all master some quasi-supernatural power and are punished for it, worn out by it, destroyed by it. How false and wearisome this outcome is. Why should a life with some unusual metaphysical feature built into it inevitably end in unhappiness and early death? Why should all the heroes have some fatal flaw that causes them to overreach and hence to self-destruct? It’s too convenient. Even the two quieter (and surprisingly similar, one to another) literary artifacts that treat conditions of temporal halt which resemble my own private Foldouts — I am speaking here of Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and Borges’s “The Secret Miracle”—both punish their heroes severely: they end with military executions. I read these two stories in high school with a sense of deep personal dissatisfaction. Is this all a writer thinks a Fold-drop could be about? Putting off death at the last minute? Where are the supervenient hebephrenias? Where is the life? Where are the tits?

In reality, I’m here to report, people very often get away with things. I have not been caught and imprisoned for what I have done; and besides, I am not Dr. Jekyll or Dr. Frankenstein and don’t deserve torments and agonies. Even if I publish this memoir as a book, and someone recognizes herself in it and prosecutes me for a relevant sex-offense (I have gone through the manuscript, by the way, and altered a few names and fudged a few dates to decrease the possibility of this happening, but it still might), my life will still seem to me to have been a good life and I will seem to myself to have been a man who wanted to do no harm and who in fact did no harm.

In part I am self-righteous-minded at the moment because of some recent developments having to do with the all-important Joyce Collier, Joyce of the love-inspiring black pubic hair, whom I had to abandon early in these pages in my eagerness to get as much of my past interlife recorded as I could without new preoccupying interruptions. On a Friday at work two real-weeks ago, about the general time I was starting to write about taking my watch off for Rhody in the Thai restaurant, I looked over at the head of a certain squash-playing loan officer named Paul at MassBank and suddenly felt that I wouldn’t be able to stand going to work that coming Monday; moreover, I felt I wouldn’t be able to stand going to work at all until I had finished a good deal more of this memoir. I called my coordinator and asked her for a whole week off from the bank. (I couldn’t afford more than a week.) And I stretched that one unpaid week into twenty-three precious days (counting the final weekend) of autobiographical solitude, simply by upping from one to two the number of personal Snap-days I inserted between every real calendar day. This meant that I was aging three times as fast as a normal human being, but I wasn’t troubled by that. I did my errands every third “day,” and because I was working so hard on this book, I didn’t get as lonely as I would have expected in the interim; a moment of friendliness with a bank teller or a waitress on the calendar days was enough to carry me through the two interior Arno-days that followed. In taking that week off from MassBank, I was of course putting Joyce Collier off as well — I still wanted to ask her out, but I knew that any sudden hubbub or heartbreak concerning her would distract me from the Fold-adventures in my past. I also had a hope that if I was gone from Joyce’s office for a whole week, she might notice that her working days felt different with me not there doing her tapes, and maybe that she looked forward to going to work a little less in my absence — and from there I hoped that she would move closer to a conscious realization that she really liked me.

Towards the end of this final three-week retreat, as I recreated for the record my magnetic-resonance scan with Dr. Orowitz-Rudman, I was visited by a little realization of my own. It will seem ludicrously obvious to the reader, but to me it felt like real progress. My realization was that I would have to tell Joyce about the Fold right at the outset, before I tried to fuck her even once. There could be no more secrets: if I was going to shock Joyce with my chronanism, I had to shock her from the start, and if I was going to seduce her with the Fold’s help, she would, unlike Rhody, have to be a knowing party to the seduction. That decided, I discovered I liked the idea of finally telling someone. It might make me, “just a temp,” a little more glamorous in her eyes.

The night before I was to see Joyce again, I couldn’t sleep for about two hours early in the morning. I Dropped during most of my insomnia, because I didn’t want to waste the night in sleeplessness. I wanted to be fresh for her. I lay in bed in a paused universe with my hand cupped over my troika; every time I thought of telling her that I had tied her knit dress around her waist in the middle of the afternoon and touched her hips and felt her sparkling vafro, I could feel my malefactor come alive. I wanted to tell her the shocking thing that I had done. I wanted her to forgive me and love me for it.

Here is how I asked her out the next day. Around eleven-thirty, she came by to drop off a tape and waved. I whipped off my phones. “How were things here last week?” I asked. Joyce was wearing a green dress I’d never seen before; her black hair was loosely tied in back with the Cyrillic scarf. I took this as a good omen.

“I’m swamped with various disasters,” she said. “We missed you. The person they sent to fill in for you was none too speedy.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” I held out my hand and Joyce gave me the microcassette. “I’ll have this done in no time,” I said. “I’ve missed these tapes, you know. I like being in the middle of typing something you’ve just said into my ear and looking up and seeing you walk across the floor.”

This took Joyce a tiny bit by surprise. “How was your vacation?”

“It was good, quite good. Long, though.”

“What have you been up to?”

“I’ve been — this sounds insane — but I’ve been writing my autobiography,” I said.

“Have you led an interesting life?” Joyce asked.

I leaned forward. “Well, you know — I have! I have. What about you?”

“No.”

“That’s unfortunate,” I said. “What can I do to help?”

“Find someone to sweep me away somewhere. The problem is that I have no time to do interesting stuff, because I’m so busy doing stuff that’s uninteresting. Actually, on Saturdays I go to a botanical drawing class at the Arnold Arboretum.”

“Oh, well there, that’s a positive step,” I said. “I haven’t drawn a plant in years. Is it fun?”

“Yes,” said Joyce. “Plants sit still. It’s like meditation, but it’s better, because you’re thinking about the plant, and not about yourself.”

I shook my head sadly. “I wish I had more art in my life right now. I did allow some medical researchers to paint reflective paint on several parts of my body a few months ago. Does that count as an artistic experience?”

“I should think so,” said Joyce. She asked what the researchers were trying to find out.

I told her it had to do with my carpal-tunnel problem. “They were trying to figure out how much of my problem was due to typing and how much was due to other factors.”

“Like what other factors? You know I have a touch of carpal, too,” she confided.

“I’m sorry. The other main factor was — well — it’s this hobby of mine, something I do in my spare time.”

“Oh?” she said.

“In fact,” I said, “I have to talk to you about it.”

“About—?”

It was definitely time to ask Joyce out. Her expression had identifiable elements of puzzled, provoked interest. Her eyes were — I think this is the only word for what they were doing — they were shining. Yet what would the look on her face be when she learned that I had already Dropped in on her apartment?I needed a moment to collect my thoughts. Without blinking, I softly snapped my fingers. I relaxed. The easy thing to do would be to undress her now: if I undressed her now and stood on the desk and touched the tip of her nose with my erect stain-stick or stroked her cheek with it in a friendly way, I knew that I would phrase my request for a date more confidently. But I didn’t want to cheat and do that. I could go back to her apartment and lie on her bed and gain strength and confidence from having been there again. But no — the whole point of this date was for me not to trespass unasked. I needed a distraction.

Still enFolded, I walked briskly all the way to the Gap clothing store in the Copley Place Mall and took off the shirt of every woman in it (there were eleven women), singing the country-western Gap jingle from the seventies: “Fall — in — to — the — Gap.” I draped their bras over their shoulders. With no pants on, I walked around the racks of braided belts and along the walls of folded shorts and overdyed jeans. I knew from previous experience that there would be sand in some of the pants pockets — not because that particular pair had been worn to the beach and then returned, as I had once thought, but because the pants were sand-washed before they were sold. They came pre-supplied with their own memories of the Cape. I twirled slowly like a compass needle in the middle of the store, both hands on my tiller. I let my eye be surprised by each topless woman in turn, saying, “And you! And you! I’d forgotten about you! Wow, those are nice! Hi, how are you?” Having filled my brain with a multiplicity of naked Jamaicas (without coming, however), I redressed my wrongs, putting everything back where it had been, and made my way back to the MassBank building. At my desk, I snapped and emerged from my personal Gap full of self-assurance, fortified by secret acts of vulgarity, looking at Joyce, who, needless to say, hadn’t moved during my absence.

“Would you like to have a snack with me sometime?” I asked her.

“What kind of a snack do you mean?” she asked.

“A dinner sort of snack.”

“Oh.” She smiled sideways.

“I need to talk to you. I’ve done you a wrong, and I need to unburden myself.”

“I see,” she said.

“Tonight?”

“Hm.” She almost went for it. But then she said: “No, tonight is bad. I wish I could, but I’m probably going to have to stay late. I’m going to have to go over the stuff in that tape when you get it back to me. Thomas needs to look at it tomorrow morning.”

“If I have it back to you in ten short minutes,” I said, “will you go out with me tonight?”

“There’s an hour of stuff on that tape!”

“I know that. I’m just saying, if I get it back to you in ten minutes, will you go out with me tonight? I know it’s a little strange, but it has to do with what I want to talk to you about.”

“Okay, yes, sure,” she said.

I took her to the restaurant at the Meridien. As we walked there, we followed some deep unwritten law adapted from business practice, a law that enjoins against any discussion of the main subject until a certain number of random-seeming conversational topics have arisen and been dealt with and a context of cool detachment thereby established. We talked about the rise and fall of shoe-store chains and the merits of various kinds of women’s shoes and whether women’s shoe salesmen were invariably fetishists. (Joyce’s own shoes were great-looking gray flats with sexy side-buckles.) But as soon as we got some wine, Joyce said. “Now: I want you to explain to me in detail how you did that tape so fast.”

“If I tell you, will you tell anyone?” I asked.

“You can’t know this about me,” Joyce said, “but I never, ever tell anyone anything that was revealed to me in confidence.”

“Good — I want to believe you. I’ve listened to your voice so much transcribing your tapes that I think I have unusual insights into your character.”

“You should believe me,” said Joyce.

“I do. No — I think the problem really is whether you will believe me.”

“The only way to find out is to try me,” said Joyce.

So I told her that at various periods in my life, starting way back in fourth grade, I’d been able to disengage myself from time. I told her briefly about the race-track transformer, the thread going through my callus into the washing machine, about the rubber-band stretcher and the mechanical pencil, and about pushing up my glasses.

Joyce laughed. “And this morning? How did you do it this morning?”

“I just snapped my fingers. I won’t do it now, but whenever I snap my fingers, the entire universe immediately pauses for me, like a stretch limo waiting for me on the street while I run some errand. I spent probably, oh, an hour and a half doing your tape, with the universe in pause-mode, and then I snapped my fingers to turn it back on again and I went over to your desk and delivered the work. And before that I’d snapped and taken over an hour to go for a walk. I went down to the Gap and browsed a little. So it’s really around ten o’clock at night for me.”

“You must be starving,” said Joyce. “I know I am. Some bread?”

“Thanks.”

Chewing, she regarded me. “Do you have more to say?”

“Yes.” I had felt confident, even cocky, moments before, but I now noticed that my hands were unsteady as I stuffed a piece of bread in my mouth. “I’ve never told anyone what I’m telling you,” I said. “I tried to tell someone obliquely, but it wasn’t a success.”

Joyce said, “Why are you telling me, then? I mean, I’m delighted that you are — I think. But don’t you want to continue to keep all this to yourself if you’ve kept it to yourself for this long?”

I said, “I’m tired of having this big secret life and not being able to tell anyone.” And suddenly I did feel enormously tired of it. I felt as if I was going to get slightly weepy, but fortunately I didn’t. “I like you and I just want to tell you. I’ve written about it in the memoiry thing that I’ve been working on, and though I haven’t shown that to anyone, having done that, gone public on the page, I seem able to accept more easily the fact that people will know. It feels inevitable now, though of course it isn’t. It’s the next step. Also, I’ve used the Fold to do things that might make you uncomfortable, if you knew about them, and if they are going to make you uncomfortable, I’d rather that happened now and not later.”

“The Told’?”

I went into the terminology in some detail. We ordered. I told her about the equation with the garment-care symbols, and about colliding with the parking meter and stealing two shrimp. I gave her a bowdlerized account of my experience in the electromagnet. Finally I worked up the nerve to mention that at selected times in the past I had used the Fold to take off women’s clothes without their knowledge.

“Ah—now I see where we’re going,” Joyce said. “That’s not so good. That is not so hot.”

“I know, I know, I know, I know,” I said, shaking my head. “But when I’m doing it it doesn’t seem bad. It seems wonderful, good, positive — it seems like the most constructive thing I could possibly be doing. I just don’t understand why it should be so bad and wrong for me to take a woman’s clothes off, as long as she doesn’t know about it. I mean really, what’s the big deal?”

“How much of their clothing do you take off?” She sipped some wine, looking at me intently. Her eyes were the color of peat moss; her pupils were dilated.

“Oh, it depends,” I said. “Sometimes I don’t take any off, sometimes I go down to the bra, sometimes I do go a touch further.”

“You’ve never told anyone about this practice of yours?”

“Not directly. I’ve come close several times, but no.”

She touched her mouth with her napkin. Then she narrowed her eyes. “But now you’ve decided to tell me. And you know why? I know why. You’re telling me because you took my clothes off, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

She let her hand fall to the table. Now she looked sad — sad rather than shocked. “I can’t believe you did that.”

To draw her attention away from her disappointment in me, I asked, “You mean you can’t believe that I am telling the truth, or you can’t believe that I would do something that rude and crude?”

“Both,” she said. “God, I’m so fucking sick of liars and sneaks and cheats and weirdos. God.” She wiped her eyes and sniffed. “Last year I was in a relationship with a guy for two months, and it turned out that he was married. He simply forgot to tell me that he had a nuclear family in Washington, D.C. And now this.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But can I say that right now I’m the opposite of the married guy? I’m trying not to deceive you. I’m telling you right out that, yes, I took some of your clothes off. I assumed you wouldn’t mind. If I had known as a definite fact beforehand that you would have minded, I wouldn’t have done it. I know I was probably deluding myself. You looked wonderful. Your pubic hair was like a bicycle seat.”

“Oh Jesus. When was this?” She looked up at me, as if establishing the date would help.

I took off my glasses and put my hands over my eyes to think. “It’s hard for me to get dates right, because I’ve been spending so much time lately in the Fold, writing. It was the first week I worked at MassBank. You were walking across the floor one time wearing that blue-gray knit dress.” I put my glasses back on, which made me remember that she had said back then that she liked my glasses. I felt there was still hope. “That is a really nifty dress. You had your hair in a French braid, if that’s what they’re called. You were carrying some files. And I just wanted to see more of you. What can I say?”

“Arno, wouldn’t it have been just as easy to ask me out?”

“No! It was very, very hard to ask you out today. It’s just not something I do lightly.”

“Tell me exactly what happened,” she said.

“When I took off your clothes? Do you really want to hear this?”

“No, it’s hideous, but go on.”

“Well — I just snapped my fingers and got everything to stop and I scooted over to you in my chair and lifted up your dress. It was so light, it felt so good, the knit. I lifted it up over your pantyhose and over your hips and made a sort of knot in it at your waist. Your legs felt really warm through the pantyhose. Pantyhose material is strange stuff, like a substance from another planet, unpleasant when you first touch it, and yet the warmth of your skin radiates through it and humanizes it. So I kind of whisked my hands over your legs and I felt your hipbones, and before you know it, I had pulled your pantyhose down and I had my hand in your pubic hair.”

“ ‘Before I know it’ is right,” said Joyce, pointing her knife at me. “I didn’t know it, Arno. I didn’t have a clue that your hand was in my pubic hair. Doesn’t that trouble you?”

“No, because I fell in love with you with my hand in your pubic hair.”

Joyce made an exasperated sound. “Everything’s ruined and out of order! I was really pleased that you asked me out for dinner tonight. Really pleased. And now it’s all confused.”

“I also went to your apartment. I borrowed your keys.”

“No.” Joyce was incredulous. “No.”

“Yes. I’ve seen your mattress pad.”

“Arno, this is terrible. I don’t know what to think. First of all, I don’t believe a word of it.”

“Under an antique bottle in your sunporch, I put a fortune-cookie fortune I found in a bowl on top of your refrigerator. It says, ‘Smile when you are ready.’ ”

“You need help.”

“I beg your pardon! I’m not a bad person. If you ask me to go away now, I’ll go away. I’m harmless. I’m just a temp! I was curious about your apartment, that’s all.” I waited for Joyce to say something, but she didn’t. “All right. This evening has nosedived. Still, I’m glad to hear that you were pleased to be asked out. That’s something. Would you like some more wine?”

“Just a touch, thanks. Ope, ope, that’s plenty.” She drank a little of it. I let her think things over. We were silent for a stretch.

“I should go,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

Then she said, “Prove it to me. I want you to do what you say you can do right now.”

“You want me to stop time?”

“Yes, I do.”

“All right. I’ll do it right now. Ready?”

She nodded.

I snapped my fingers. I sat still for a while, breathing softly, nearly as motionless as the rest of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Then I began tapping my hand on my napkin. I refilled Joyce’s water glass. I went to the bathroom and checked how I looked. I looked fine — a little sheepish and worried about the eyes. I sat down again and poked around at my plate, but I didn’t want to eat anything without Joyce “there.” I didn’t enjoy the enveloping silence this time, as I usually did; it was like sitting at a table with someone who wasn’t speaking to me. In fact, it wasn’t like that, it was that. I didn’t want to be under the Fermata at all just then; I wanted time to be rolling forward at a nice brisk clip, so that Joyce would get used to the things that I had told her and forgive me for them, if forgiveness was still a possibility. It might take weeks.

I snapped my fingers. “I just did it,” I said.

“What did you do?” She looked quickly down at her dress and back at me. “I had absolutely no sense of anything happening.”

“I didn’t do that much. I was chastened by your reaction, so I took it easy. I refilled your water glass.”

Joyce looked at her water glass suspiciously, “It was already that high.”

“No, really, it was about a quarter full,” I said.

“I’m sure it was that high. I’ve been drinking mostly wine.”

“Should we debate water levels?” I said. “Or should you simply tell me what you want me to do, what will prove to you that I really can stop time, so that I can Snap out right now and do it?”

“You could … “Joyce looked around the room for inspiration. I saw her eyes alight on the waiter. “I don’t know. Anything. What would you want to do?”

I leaned forward. “See those two men? I could switch their ties. But I don’t really want to do that. I hate practical jokes. It’s hard enough to tie my own tie. The Fold is sexual for me.” I looked pensive for a moment, then brightened. “I could take off your bra and put it in your briefcase in the coatroom. I’d be happy to do that. Would that convince you?”

“Yes, it probably would,” said Joyce. “But hold off.”

I said, “If you could snap your fingers right now and stop time, suspend all cause and effect, what would you do?” I leaned forward again and began speaking in a soft coaxing urgent voice. “There’s the waiter there. I saw you check him out. He’s got a nice butt, right? Think about it. This entire room is filled with cock. There is cock in every direction. Prosperous cock, arrogant cock, dumb cock, smart cock, old-regime cock, new-age cock. What would you do?”

“At the moment, if I could stop time, I’d stop time and use the facilities. Excuse me.”

While Joyce was gone I stared at the flower in the bud vase and felt up the table under the tablecloth to discover what sort of surface it had. It had a rough surface. I didn’t think; I just waited. Our salads came.

Eventually Joyce returned. “Hi.” She swept her hand over the back of her dress as she sat down, so that she wouldn’t make wrinkles. “You didn’t follow me in there, snapping your fingers, did you?”

“No, I was out here the whole time.”

Joyce’s mood seemed to have shifted slightly. “I was thinking that this power you say you have would open up some interesting possibilities,” she said. “At the bank, for instance, I could think of lots of things you could find out.”

I told her I wasn’t all that wild about white-collar crime.

“Or,” she continued, holding up her hand, “it would be very handy for working mothers. Or forget working mothers. It would be very handy for me. I could take a whole day to catch up. A silent paradise. No phones. I need it bad. I’d fill four tapes.”

“That’s true,” I said. “It’s funny, though. The idea of having time to catch up sounds so luscious. But in reality I’ve found that big chunks of raw time don’t help that much. Parkinson’s Law becomes the dominant force. Parkinson’s Law and loneliness. You have to time the time-outs, and mix them in with life — that’s were the art comes in.”

“Still,” said Joyce, “I’d love to know what it was like, to wander around Boston when it was totally still. Nothing moving but me. Everyone like a statue. Are you really serious that you can do this?”

I nodded.

She put her napkin on the table and sat up straight in her chair with her hands in her lap. “Tell me what color bra I’m wearing. Don’t take it off. Just tell me the color and the make.”

“Frankly I feel a little weird now doing it,” I said, flapping my arms to signal uncertainty and moral confusion.

“Go ahead!” she said. “I’m letting you. I’m still not sure I believe you anyway. You have to demonstrate you’re not lying to me.”

I snapped my fingers and went around to Joyce’s side of the table and, after some groping, tore the small label off her bra. I also kissed her lightly on the mouth, so that I could tell her I had. I took my chair and turned everything back on. “You’re wearing a red bra,” I reported. “It is”—I peered at the label—” an ‘Olga Christina.’ It says, ‘Gentle machine wash warm, wash with like colors, no bleach, line dry, no iron.’ ”

“It’s my favorite bra.”

“All I did was unzip the back of your dress and reach in. I want you to know that I didn’t really grope at your breasts or do anything in any way proactive.” I held out the bra label between my two fingers. She took it and set it down beside her bread plate. “I did also kiss you briefly,” I added.

“Really? Where?”

“On the lips.”

She made an mmm-expression with her mouth to see if she could detect any residual sensations.

“No after-tingle?” I said, feigning incredulity.

“Nothing,” said Joyce. “How did it go, the kiss?”

I said that it had gone very well.

“I’m glad to hear it,” she said.

By the time we had finished our salads there was a definite feeling of amity in the air.

“You know,” I said, “while I was snapped out just now,tearing the label off your bra, I thought of something. I bet there is a way you could experience the Fold-cleft with me.”

“I doubt it,” she said.

“Well, this is what I’m thinking, anyway. The Fermata seems to know that I am physically one individual, and it exempts me from the general freeze. But what if we confuse it? What if my naked penis is in your vagina when I snap my fingers?”

Joyce laughed a this-is-all-just-a-little-too-much laugh, but I could see that the notion wasn’t inconceivable to her.

I went on. “I think there’s a good chance, if we did that, that the Fermata would read us both as one single entity. We would have to be in a real state of union, though. I’d have to be way in there, and your legs would have to be really locked around me. We’d have to be holding each other extra tight, and probably we’d have to be kissing, too. We’d probably have to be in love. Our tongues would have to be chasing each other around, and your hands would have to be gripping my thrusting buttcheeks—”

Joyce raised her hands. “Okay, I got it, I got the general idea.”

“I’m not saying that it’s a guaranteed sure thing, but I do think it’s worth a try,” I said excitedly. “Are you with me?”

“When would this happen?” She had the same sideways smile she’d had when I first asked her out.

“We could set a date, if you like. Five minutes from now?”

“That seems soon,” she said.

“I’ve lost all conception of what ‘soon’ means. Don’t you want to lose all conception of what ‘soon’ means, too?”

“I do, kind of.” She lowered her eyes.

Suddenly I remembered birth control. “Shoot, that’s right. A condom is out, because there has to be total contact.” I made popping sounds with my lips, thinking. “You’re not on the pill, are you?”

“There’s a man I see sometimes. So I still am technically, yes.”

“You are? Oh—great! Perfect.” I waved my hands. “Forget we talked about that. Let’s talk about something else for a while.” I asked her to tell me more about her botanical drawing class. She described the difficulties of rendering bark. She talked about her teacher. There was a nice moment when she finished saying something, and took a bite of bread, and noticed that I was looking at her with an odd, gleeful expression, and her face filled with friendly curiosity. It was time. “May I?” I said.

“May you what?”

“Snap my fingers?”

She drank the rest of her wine. “Okay.”

I snapped my fingers.

I carried her down the stopped escalator to a sofa in the lobby and found a rolling cart that the bellhops used for suitcases. I went into the back rooms and found several blankets and pillows and padded the cart with them. I put her down on the cart, on her side, with her legs bent. It took me less than an hour to push her to her apartment. I stayed mostly in the middle of the street. It had begun to rain, but we didn’t get very wet because we were only dampened by the drops that were suspended in our path, not by the ones above us, and even in a heavy rain, the number of drops per cubic foot is far fewer than it appears when the rain is in motion. I left the cart by the mailboxes and carried her upstairs and used her key. I laid her down in the sunporch, on her bed. I kept my eyes closed while I pulled off her clothes and my own. (I wanted to be able to tell her that I hadn’t looked at her.) I arranged the covers of the bed over her and then got in next to her. She was very warm. I lay there for a while with my eyes closed, letting my heart calm down. Her mattress pad felt terrific. I was tired and sleepy. I had a nap of maybe half an Arno-hour. When I woke up I thought to myself, I’m lying in bed with the woman whom, above all others, I want to be in bed with. I snapped my fingers.

Joyce began to say something that began with “Although.” She stopped abruptly. “What happened here?”

“See how easy it is?” I said.

She turned her head on the pillow to look at me. “What did you do?”

“I brought you to your apartment and got in bed with you.”

Her arm moved under the covers. “I don’t have any clothes on.”

“That’s true,” I said. “But I assure you, I kept my eyes closed while I was taking them off. I haven’t done anything seedily voyeuristic. They’re over there. I just wanted to be totally naked in bed with you.” We were both lying on our backs. Our arms touched a little. The room was dim.

Joyce put her hands on her forehead and thought. “How did you get me here? Did you drive?”

I explained how difficult it was to drive during an estoppel, what with all the immobile cars. I described the luggage cart and the borrowed bedding. Then I said, “There’s one serious problem, though, having to do with time, which is that as we lie here talking, our entrees may be being served, and the waiter may wonder where we’ve gone. I left my jacket there to show that we haven’t skipped out, but I think we should find a way into the Fermata together as quickly as possible, before anyone notices that we’ve disappeared at the restaurant, and then once we’ve done that we’ll have loads of time to talk, and we can stroll back in a leisurely way and finish dessert.”

“You mean—?”

“Yes, I think we have to make love right now, and we have to put off any foreplay until after we’ve Snapped out — assuming, that is, that we do successfully enter the Fermata together. But let’s try.”

“Couldn’t we at least kiss?”

“Are you kidding?” I said. “We have to kiss. It’s a necessity. We have to have a total mental and physical union for this to work. Try to feel as much love for me as you can.”

So we put our arms around each other and started kissing. I think we were both somewhat surprised by how good it felt. Her mouth was the best thing my mouth had felt in quite a while. I guess I had simply forgotten that there is no satisfactory autoerotic substitute for a kiss. Our lips cooperated; they understood each other. In fourth grade I had a rubber stamp that said ARNOLD STRINE. I didn’t like stamping it hard. I liked placing the fully inked stamp gently on the paper and rocking it back and forth as I pressed down, so that my name came out very dark, and the tops and bottoms of the letters flared. While Joyce and I made out, I closed my eyes and saw for an instant an image of my old rubber stamp being held in the air and brought together with a second well-inked stamp saying JOYCE COLLIER, so that our two names met face to face and rocked together, printing themselves on each other.

I’d also forgotten, I guess, that there is no substitute for the joy of first putting your arms around a woman’s nudity — when time is unfrozen and when she answers your embrace by actually embracing you back and you can’t believe how well naked seamless bodies can coincide, how accommodating they can be, even before erections have been manually confirmed and clitorises tested or tasted. And it isn’t often that you begin making out with someone, for the very first time, in a state of total nudity, as Joyce and I did. As if it was all part of our kiss, as if our bodies were kissing, Joyce moved underneath me and opened her legs and as I let more of my weight press on her she brought me inside, past her lush black fur and into her hot Fermata.

I whispered to her how good she felt. “Ready?” I said.

“Yes.” I felt her breath on my neck.

“Hold me really tight. Snap your fingers when I do.” I counted off, “One, two, three.” Then we kissed again and we snapped our fingers in unison.

It was difficult to tell for a moment if anything had happened. We looked at each other inquiringly, our eyebrows raised. Our slightest movement made my cock squeak with pleasure.

“Did it work?” Joyce asked.

I listened. “Hear that? It’s totally quiet. That’s the way the Fermata always sounds. It worked.”

She sighed with relief and started lifting her hips up against me. “Good news,” she murmured. “Good news. Can we do this for a while, though?”

“We can take as long as we want now,” I said.

Several Arno-and-Joyce-hours later, we walked back to the Meridien, wheeling the luggage cart with us. I showed her the negative black paths our bodies left behind in the constellations of hanging, glinting raindrops. “So — while you’re out on walks like this,” Joyce said, “you just take off a woman’s clothes, if she attracts you?”

I said I sometimes did.

Joyce tried it. She undid the black jeans of a motionless man in a leather jacket and pulled on his underpants and peered inside. She also unbuttoned a businessman’s raincoat and reached her hand into his jacket and felt his chest. “Hey, I could learn to like this,” she said. We took our seats at the restaurant and counted to three and snapped our fingers. The waiter appeared shortly after with our entrees. “The plates are very hot,” he said importantly, holding them with a cloth. We had been gone for no more than five minutes; nobody had missed us. Joyce and I talked for another hour, and we drank some more and then had some coffee, and then I walked her home and kissed her good-night at her door.