The Fermata Read Online Free Page B

The Fermata
Book: The Fermata Read Online Free
Author: Nicholson Baker
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hard, so that I fancied I could feel the tiny cysts in her breasts as well as the ribs beneath her shirt. (I always find that it is good for me to hug a woman like this because when I feel her ribs I know she is human. Ribs inspire pity and tenderness and the sense that we are all in the same sparred boat.) She was an Italian woman, I think, who looked as if she had taken a few courses in beauty school and had had her natural esthetic sense injured by the experience. She wore a big engagement ring with an oblong diamond. She was a person who would never be physically attracted to a person like me, just as I would never be physically attracted by a person like her. This total incompatibility made me able to feel a surge of momentary sympathy for her which was almost like an infatuation.
    I pushed the diamond on her finger back and forth. (Her nails were cut short, but polished—perhaps short because she liked trying on the gloves she sold?) Then I slipped her engagement ring off and looked through it. It said 14 K on the inside. On a whim, I knelt and held her hand and slipped the ring gently back on. “Will you?” I said. I had not been aware before that moment of the straightforward erogenousness of a ring: it suddenly occurred to me that the sides of the fingers are sensitive in an upper-thigh sort of way, and that the singlingout of that fourth vulnerable shy finger, the planet Neptune of fingers, which otherwise gets no unique treatment in life and does very little on its own except control the C on the high school clarinet or type the number two and the letter X, to be held and gently stimulated forever by an expensive circle of gold is really quite surprisingly sexual. The resistance of this Filene’s woman’s slender finger-joint, where her skin bunched momentarily before giving way and allowing the band I held to slide home, was in an inverted way like the moment of resistance or dry fumbling before the groom’s unpracticed richard moved smoothly in. Getting engaged was thus an obscenity. “If you fingerfuck this ring for me now, darling, I vow that I will fuck you regularly for the rest of your life.” That’s basically the arrangement. Why does it take me so long to understand such obvious things, things everyone else probably picks up on right away?
    Another more pertinent question might be, If I think that it is wrong to steal a dollar bill from an open cash register, and if I feel guilty about stealing two fresh shrimp from a hotel restaurant, why don’t I have qualms about hugging an otherwise engaged glove saleswoman at Filene’s? She doesn’t know me; she doesn’t know that I’m hugging her and mock-proposing to her. Do I really think I have the right to hike Joyce’s wool dress up around her hips and tie a knot in it? How can I be sure that she would want me to have my fingers in her pubic hair? The question of my wrongdoing is a fair one, but I’m going to table it for the time being and instead sketch in a few more of my early Fold experiences—not because they will explain anything, but because when I try to imagine defending my actions verbally I find that they are indefensible, and I don’t want to know that. I honestly do not feel as if I have done anything wrong. I have never deliberately causedanyone anguish. In fact I have with the Fold’s help saved a few women from small embarrassments, adjusting the occasional awry slip before an important sales meeting and pushing a vagrant underwire in a bra back in place, that kind of thing. I mean well. But I know that meaning well is not any kind of satisfactory defense.
    I first stopped time because I liked my fourth-grade teacher, Miss Dobzhansky, and wanted to see her with fewer clothes on. She might not seem beautiful to me now, but I certainly thought she was beautiful then. Everyone did. She had shorter hair than was usual for elementary-school teachers in 1967, and she was an enthusiast of stop-sign-red lipstick—she must have worn

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