The Fermata

  “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.

  12

  “I NEED TO BE SEDUCED.” THE IRONY IN RHODY’S SAYING that, as an argument against fermation used for sexual kicks, is that I never would have gone out with her if I hadn’t been able to rely heavily on the Fold for help. Before I spoke one word to her I had already taken off her shirt and looked over her small dear breasts, which had faint triangles around them from the edges of the bra. Her skin was very pale. This happened in a Thai restaurant off Boylston. I sat down and looked around and noticed a woman with very short black hair and glasses with round black rims, studying the menu. Her lower lip was somewhat fuller than her upper lip, like a Hapsburg, which is a feature that attracts me—though I also like when the upper lip is fuller than the lower, too, come to think of it. She ordered dinner and asked the waiter to bring her a cup of hot water and unwrapped a yellow teabag.