The Fermata

The Fermata by Nicholson Baker Page B

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Authors: Nicholson Baker
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would be fun.”
    “Would that be classed as an act of revenge, or an act resulting from sexual attraction?” I asked her.
    “Both. Mark is sex on wheels, in a way. His wife is sex on wheels, too.” She looked at me significantly.
    “Yes?” I said, stretching the word out.
    “Yes. I don’t really like Mark, I like Mark’s wife. Well—I like them both. She has the best
mouth
. It’s sort of like Leslie Caron’s mouth. No—here’s what I would do if I had a remote that freezes the world. I’d be in a florist’s shop, and Kari Thalmeiser would come in to get some cut flowers. She dresses beautifully, in an expensive loungey way—yellow pants and that kind of thing—but she pulls it off. She would lean into the flower-cooler to smell a bunch of flowers, coldflowers, and I would pause her as she’s smiling, with her eyes closed, breathing in the scent of some really filthy-looking flower. Or no, better yet, some bunch of nice simple pretty flowers, like carnations. Whatever the flower is, I move it aside after hitting the remote, because it’s
my
turn, Kari Thalmeiser, and I adjust the wire shelf on the cooler so that it’s just below her chin, and I like climb up on it, get up on my heels, and spread my big solid mega-thighs wide open for her, so she’s half an inch from this giant, sopping, sloppy, juicy, dripping flowerbox of mine. I can feel that I’m dripping all over the blossoms that are in the vases on the floor of the cooler. The metal is cold on my ass. I see her mouth, that Leslie Caron mouth, smiling at the smell of the flowers, her eyes closed, and that makes me jill at myself really fast. When I’m just about to flip and I can’t stop myself, I hold the back of her head and I jam her face into my juice-box and I hit the remote so that time flashes on for her for just a half a second. Too quick for her to know. As I start coming I’m merciful and I pause her again and I just come and come and come against her beautiful lips—and even against her nose, her nose would be just right for my clit. Yeah, I’d hold her earlobes and pull her face into me until I’d humped every little come-kick out of my hips, and then I’d climb out of the cooler and put everything back where it was, all the nice pretty carnations and baby’s breath and shit, and I’d carefully dab at her pretty face with some floral tissue, because we wouldn’t want pretty Kari to look like she’d been eating a watermelon. I’d spend a couple of minutes fixing her lipstick. Then I’d start things up again and I’d go, ‘Wull, Kari Thalmeiser, how are you!’ ”
    “Interesting!” I said, enjoying Arlette’s filth. “Couldn’t you spread those thighmasters for me? Show me that big fat Georgia O’Keeffe?”
    “Never,” said Arlette. We laughed because it was so obvious an impossibility. Neither of us wanted the other, but we did want to get close to what we really wanted by talking about it. I pushed my glasses up on my nose Clark Kentishly, forgetting that I was in a period where pushing my glasses up actually did trigger a time-stopping Drop. Out of curiosity, realizing I’d triggered a Drop, I slipped my hands under immobile Arlette’s skirt to see if talking about Kari Thalmeiser had made her detectably wet. It had not. Her idea was to her at that moment no more than a verbal flourish, a rhetorical bit of self-display—her exuberant pleasure was in being cheerfully shocking as much as it was in really feeling the sexual charge of her flowershop-idyll. But I had the strong suspicion that there would be a residual effect—that when she got home from work she would think again about Kari and the flower-cooler and, without the distraction of my being there as an audience,
would
allow herself to become worked up by it, and I found that I wanted very much to see that happen.
    So I followed her home, pushing up on my glasses when it was necessary, as when I slipped past her as she was frozen in the act of opening

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