A conviction began to grow in me that as soon as I put my glasses back on (the side-pieces and nose-pods would be quite hot by now—I liked being burned this way) I would again have control over time. Whenever I pushed them up on my nose with my index finger, time would immediately go idle. My wish to look more closely at something through them would be enough of a trigger. So sure was I that my glasses had become, through my having finally simply seen them, Fold-actuators, that I didn’t even try them out at first: I lay instead recalling a time when I was at a beach with Rhody. I went out in the surf with her with my glasses on so that I could for once see the Hokusai trim-work on the waves. I knew that I was risking a major loss (I did still have my contacts, unwearably moldy, no doubt), but I foolishly thought that I would know how to keep above the breakers. Rhody said, “Are you sure about wearing them?” I said I would be very careful. After twenty minutes, the second of two big unexpected waves tumbled us both. When it withdrew, my glasses were not on my face. They were somewhere in the ocean. I was blind, standing in five feet of cold choppy salt water. Rhody and I groped in the sandy turbidity, laughing hopelessly. I began to adjust to the fact that I had been very stupid and had lost my beloved eyewear. But seconds later, amazingly, Rhody felt them brush past her leg, and she caught them and waved them in the air. I put them on and liftingly embraced her, as in a travel poster. It was the best moment of the trip; we fought on the plane ride home—mostly because I felt, like Tolstoy when he showed his rakish journals to Sonya after they got engaged, that I had to try out the idea of time-perversion on her (presenting it only as fantasy, of course). She took it very badly—and we broke up a month later.
I rose from the towel onto my knees and put on my glasses and my watch. I looked down at the shadow of my semi-stiff richard against the blue stripes. What else was there in the world beside masturbation? Nothing. I pushed up on the bridge of my glasses and verified that the wind and the clouds had stopped. In the Fold, singing “Back in the Saddle Again,” I got my Casio typewriter and went out to Storrow Drive and pulled a guy off his motorcycle and drove it out to the Cape, between the lanes of halted cars. The beaches were not crowded at all, which was just fine; I walked for about twenty minutes until I found a woman, fairly nice-looking, lying on her stomach on a towel in a two-piece bathing suit the gray-green color of the plant called dusty miller. She was in the process of blindly digging two diagonal down-ramps into the sand on either side of her towel, which was what I wanted. Her top was undone, the straps lying endearingly untautly with their inner surface visible; her back was not very tanned, and in her application of sunblock she had missed a triangular place near one of her very expressive, well-made shoulder blades, which was going to be painful in a few hours unless I put a little lotion on it for her, which I did. I sat cross-legged next to her in my bathing suit and turned on my typewriter and began to write a story that I hoped would interest her on some more or less debased level.
Naturally I had no idea what she liked, whether she was a particularly sexual person, but she happened to be the person on the beach who was idly digging in the sand, and that was all I required from her. The rest was up to me. I wrote a story about vibrators and dildos. I worked for about seven hours (seven personal Strine-hours), perhaps longer. It was one thirty-eight the whole time. I didn’t worry about getting sunburned; you can’t tan or burn efficiently in the Fold. Whenever I thought that my glasses were starting to slip down the bridge of my nose, I hurriedly pushed them up in place, not wanting my perspiration to restart time by mistake. I only took a few breaks; one to press her breasts gently from the side to be sure she had no implants (the knowledge that a pair of breasts are fake unfortunately kills my lust); and one to go for a swim in the motionless surf. Swimming in the Fold was something I hadn’t done up to that point: the water’s viscosity varied, areas of paused turbulence in a crashing wave dissolving like lumps in batter as I swam through them. Shells and pebbles were suspended in the undertow like forest underbrush. I ran my finger along the quiet sharp crest of wave and flicked a hanging drop of seawater into vapor with my fingernail. It was very tiring breast-stroking my way up and down the stiff-peaked pectinaceous swells. But I found the “swim” refreshing (I wore my glasses this time as well, since I was in no danger of being thrown by any surf), and I further cleared my mind as I came ashore by pulling on the front of a bathing suit of a woman of fifty or so who was standing in an inch of water regarding her feet; I peered down it to see her fat low white breasts in the filtered light of her suit.
As a novice porniste, I meant only to dash something off that would have a reasonable chance of arousing the sun-bather beside me when she found it. (I knew at least that she could read—there was a James Clavell novel and a book on how to get a job in her beach-bag.) But as I wrote onward (about a librarian, a youthful next-door neighbor, and a UPS man, since, being a beginner, I thought I should at least make an attempt to follow the conventions), picking the setting and the physical traits of my few characters pretty much at random, I got interested in what I was doing and found that it was making me want very much to make myself come. In fact, for the first twenty minutes or so, every time I typed the word “she” or “her” I slowed way down to press the component letters, overcome in the act of placing a feminine pronoun on the page by an almost irresistible need to whale on my bone. But I denied myself; instead I took off my bathing suit and knelt, crouched over before the typewriter as if I were on a prayer rug, showing the ocean my open ass and udderously self-juggling balls. I was not then used to nude sunbathing, as I have said, and I discovered that the sensation of the halves of my upraised ass being out of contact with each other—the sensation of a slight evaporative outdoor coolness on my very asshole, and on the usually damp stretched skin high up on the sides of my balls—was most interesting. I didn’t want anything to go in my asshole, no, no, I just wanted it out in the open, sunlit for once, flaunting wavewards its showered cleanness, exposed in a way that was both lewd and vulnerable. In this devotional position I worked for several intense hours, writing.
Not that I thought what I was writing was necessarily by external standards good: it was simply that I was positioned right next to a woman who would be my audience, though she didn’t know it right then, and I was in her immediate presence creating for her alone an alternative “she” character, who, in thinking exactly as I wanted her to think about dildos and vibrators, would possibly entertain the real random “she” beside me. Basically I was feeling for the first time that heady paired combination of satisfactions that the sexual proseur can encounter at the outset of a new enterprise, as his long-neglected artistic ambition, however tentative or internally scoffed at—the wish to create something true and valuable and even perhaps in a tiny way beautiful—combines with basic grunting cuntlapping lust, the two emotions reinforcing each other and making you, or rather me, feel almost insane with a soaringly doubled sense of mission. At one point, finishing a paragraph, I shouted, “I am a writer of fucking erotica!” into the still close air. It was then, in fact, that the first twinges of dissatisfaction with the word erotica asserted themselves. I ditched the word permanently for its abbreviated replacement, rot, and I have never regretted it. Yes, I was out on the beach on a rotter’s retreat, with my cool and drying Arnus exposed to the sun, my cock as hard as an empty Calistoga bottle, but untouched for hours and hours. I was denying myself for my rot.
Whenever I hesitated and needed inspiration, I simply rested my hand on the ass of the sunbathing woman beside me, sometimes sliding the fingers under her leg-hole, sometimes resting my hand on the fabric; sometimes squeezing, sometimes lightly slapping. I tried putting the typewriter on her ass but found it was too unsteady to proceed. Once, though, I pulled her bikini bottom off and sat right down on her softness, looking out past her brown legs at the tableau vivant of the waves, ass to ass with my reader-to-be. It was pleasant to wiggle and circle around, feeling our massed loose-muscled ass-flesh move as one over
our deep bones: it was almost a form of communication. And if I knelt beside her and pushed outward on her asscheeks, I could expose her ane, and I did this more than once, getting a great deal of pleasure out of feeling my own plein-air Arnality bared to the sky and holding hers open at the same time. Hers was a fine brown dot, like a tiny asteroid-impact crater, which repaid close study. Women’s anes never used to interest me in my teens and early twenties—I think that they are one of the true acquired tastes. They are discrete, singular, clearly bounded, focused, in contrast to the bounteous plied gyno-confusion of the vadge.
When I had finished a fair copy of the story, I put it in a plastic food-storage bag and closed the bag with a twist-tie. I excavated the sand below her right hand, where she had been digging, and I buried the bagged story there, packing the sand as tightly as I could and restoring the hole she had dug to the smooth contours that her idleness had given it. Her arm was warm. Her hair, by the way, was bobby-pinned up, blond with dark roots. I positioned myself behind a nearby sand dune and took hold of my glasses at the bridge and pulled them down, restarting the present for the first time since I had rediscovered my powers. Through the binoculars, I watched her imperturbably dig, as if nothing had happened. It is always a kick to see a woman come alive again after I’ve paused her for an extended period: she has no way of knowing that an instant of time has just passed that was hugely richer in content than any of the instants that immediately preceded it. An immense pale-blue Norwegian cruise ship of a millisecond has just docked and stout tourists have disembarked from it and bought straw hats and trinkets and they have all reboarded and the ship has backed its tonnage away, its propeller doming the water—and yet she thinks that all the milliseconds of her recent past are equivalently in scale, little skiffs and junks floating here and there in the harbor. And I, who have lived consciously through, even piloted, that enormous single millisecond, have forgotten to some extent how much better a woman is when she is not motionless, when her shoulder blades, for instance, can move subtly around in her back; her aliveness is always something of a revelation to me as well.
This woman’s sand-thinned fingertips felt the unexpected slidey movement of the plastic bag after a minute or so. She raised her head to look over at what she had found, trying not to lift her upper body off her towel and expose too much Jamaica. She pulled my bagged story out of the sand and brushed it off and undid the twist-tie. And then she began reading it. I am not kidding—she actually began reading what I’d written. When I saw her slide the first page of my double-spaced typescript to the back of the pile, still lying on her stomach but with her elbows out, her chin on her hands, I wormed my fist into my swimsuit and took hold of my stain-stick. (I had of course put my suit back on, since the world was with me now.)
Here follows what I had given her to unearth and read, slightly edited (as op-ed pages say) for space and clarity:
9
MARIAN, A RARE-BOOKS LIBRARIAN, WAS MARRIED TO David, who taught journalism classes at the local rural state college. His own journalistic days were over and he had become kind of pathetic. He was addicted to a certain brand of nasal decongestant, and had to squirt up noisily every few hours, which Marian didn’t really mind except when they had guests. She was an early riser, while her husband stayed up until two-thirty and three, reading magazines he had once written features for with groans of scorn. They didn’t have a whole lot of money, because they were paying for David’s son by an earlier marriage to go to Wesleyan. One Saturday they had a big argument after David went out to buy some plants and came back with a two-thousand-dollar ridem lawn-mower in his van. It was the neighbor kid’s job to mow their lawn, twenty-five dollars each time, which wasn’t unreasonable since there was a lot of lawn, so there was no need at all for this huge expense. David said that he had been compelled to buy it because it was a new model whose engine incorporated some innovation of the cylinder head that he’d read about in Popular Mechanics and it was their duty to support companies that continued to fund research and try new things. Marian was very angry and upset. It was like the time he had bought two pyramid-shaped beehives and a complete kit of beekeeping equipment for four hundred dollars. There had been engulfing flows of honey for one year, and then both hives had mysteriously and depressingly died. Also the honey had been “somewhat gamey,” to use David’s euphemism—meaning it tasted distinctly of cow. On the new ridem mower David defiantly mowed half the back yard (they had two useless acres), maneuvering around the two tarp-shrouded beehives, and then he came in to make some iced tea and kick back. Marian told him she wanted to be separated from him for a while, so he packed the top layer of papers in his office and some clothes and moved out.
Immediately Marian felt happier. Over the next few days, she got rid of the gigantic television, which had always bothered her, and she put away the two primitivist portraits of David’s Connecticut ancestors. She dressed with more care, and when a man at the bank picked up a deposit receipt that she had dropped, she smiled at him in a way she hadn’t smiled at anyone in a long time. She felt available.
The new ridem lawn-mower had to go back, of course. But because David had already used it, it was now officially a used lawn-mower. The guy at the dealer quoted her a derisorily low buyback price, and out of defiance she told him to forget it and walked out. Fortunately, when she told her mother that she had finally kicked David out, her mother promptly came through with a check for three thousand dollars. Money worries eased for the moment, she hired the neighbor kid to mow the rest of the lawn using the new green ridem mower. His name was Kev. She watched him from various windows as he jounced around on her lawn. He had ostentatiously deliberate rips in the legs of his jeans from which his brown knees protruded, and he was wearing brown work boots. His shirt was off. He was wiry; he had that adolescent ability to bend at the waist and not produce a little bloomp of waist fat. The small side muscles in his upper arms had a sort of a sideways S shape that called out to her. They were the muscles he would use if he were supporting his own weight over her.
She watched him lean into a turn up the slight slope toward the tractor tire in the middle of the front yard. The previous owner had put it there, painted it white, and planted peonies in it. David had insisted on keeping it as it was, he being one of those non-gay would-be camp enthusiasts who rave automatically over anything tacky, and now Marian, too, had grown to like it. She had never expected to be living in a house like this, on a rural highway a mile out of a town one town over from the town the college was in, getting sexed up watching a seventeen-year-old neighbor kid drive her lawn-mower around. His chest muscles were indisputably square and flat; the cord of his Walkman headphones looked frail and kinky against his skin. How could he possibly be hearing any music with the mower going? She thought of gently removing his headphones and his pants, and then of making some sort of herbal wreath for his young penis, mainly of Sweet Genovese Basil (a kind she had recently planted), like a laurel crown; perhaps as a final touch she could insert a short sprig of curly parsley into the opening of his urethra, so that when she slid and stroked his soft newborn sex-skin twistingly up and down, murmuring to him not to worry, that it was just nature’s way, and he finally whimpered the conclusive whimper, the sprig of parsley would flip right in the air from the force of his clotted sperm. But wait, wait—she didn’t really want to have sex with a seventeen-year-old kid; moreover she didn’t like the boy’s mother, who was a complainer and a conspiracy theorist and none too bright. So Marian just paid the boy the twenty-five dollars, plus a two-dollar tip.
“Next time,” she said to him, a little shyly, “I’d like you to show me how to drive that thing.” She noticed that he had been careful to put his shirt on before he came to the door to be paid—a considerate touch. He was a good kid. He said, “Sure.”
When he had left, Marian did the dirtiest thing she could think of, which was to drive fast to the supermarket, buy a copy of Cosmopolitan, drive home, pull the shades, and squat naked on
her living-room floor directly over the magazine, opened to a full-page head shot of Patrick Swayze. “Look at what I’m showing you, Patrick,” she said, stroking the underside of her open thighs and pulling on a few pubic hairs to add a piquant sensation. Patrick’s eyes gazed unblinkingly up at her from between her legs, half obscured by her bush. “That’s right, look at what you’re making me do to my big clit,” she said. “Do you want to see my big fat cunt come? Do you?” Soon her eyes locked with Patrick’s and she sat suddenly down on his nose and half-smiling mouth, making the doubly slick magazine buckle. It was all so out of character for her that she felt glowing and refreshed afterward.
The next week had a day and a half of rain, and the lawn needed a mow badly by Saturday. Kev couldn’t come by until three-thirty because of soccer practice. Marian spent the day pruning several overgrown lilacs and reading some more of the new biography of Jean Stafford. She felt, by the time Kevin showed up, that her sexual energy was very much under control and that she wouldn’t make some sort of regrettable pass at him. He explained how to drive the mower, with many apologies for the fact that he knew how to drive his own family’s mower better, saying that basically you did this and that and you had to watch out for this and that. She paid him fifteen for the lesson, which he at first wouldn’t take and then did take with fairly good grace, and she waved and began mowing. It was exhilarating to churn through the grass, especially when she drove up the slight grade toward the house and heard the engine strain a little. At first she mowed in a kind of boustrophedon pattern, back and forth, and then she changed to an Aztec square spiral pattern, homing in on the white tractor tire. As she got more confident about turning sharply and using the accelerator, she began to understand why David had wanted to own this machine—the feeling of being in control of it, cutting this wide swathe, was really terrific.