There — that was a typical early Drop. I know that I could probably make much better use of my gift than I do. For me it is just a sexual aid. Others might put it to fuller avaricious or intellectual use: government secrets, technological espionage, etc. Surely over the centuries a few individuals have developed this ability and used it to consolidate power or to liquidate enemies. J. S. Bach, for instance, could not have cranked out a cantata a week without some sort of temporal trickery: he was probably seventy-five when he died, not sixty-five, but he had borrowed the last decade of his life and used it up piecemeal in earlier Drops. I was reading Cardano’s autobiography not long ago, to see how one is supposed to write one’s autobiography (it’s harder than I thought!), and I had a suspicion at one point that he had discovered a way into the Fold, but was not going to reveal that fact to us. Something he said about preferring solitude is what alerted me. He said, “I question the right of anyone to waste our time. The wasting of time is an abomination.” In my place, some would toggle time and cheat on their Ph.D. orals or simply take money from open cash registers. Cheating and stealing don’t tempt me, though.
Or maybe I just think it is wrong to cheat and steal and so don’t do it. When I was desperate for money a few years ago and I found a way to drop into the Fold by writing a certain mathematical formula on a scrap of paper, I gave serious thought to walking around the city stealing one dollar from every open cash register. It would have taken me months to amass a few thousand dollars, so I would have worked for my loot in a sense, and I would have been stealing a trifling amount from each business. But I found that there was something horrible about the sensation of pulling a dollar bill that was not mine from under that springy clamp that held it down with its own species. There was misery in it, not excitement. I was behind the glove counter at Filene’s trying to steal my very first dollar and I could not do it. Instead, I stood behind the motionless glove salesperson, a woman of twenty or so, very close to her, and squeezed her 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 14K 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 singling out 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 caused anyone 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 down a stick every fortnight, so full were her lips. She also had one of those wide soft tongues that just naturally like to rest a little way out of the doorstep of the mouth, beyond the teeth. (Not that it lolled!) She always smiled with her mouth open. She wore long, droopy, soft-looking navy-blue cardigan sweaters over sleeveless dresses. I listened to her with great attention as she described the system of locks on a nineteenth-century canal and the Indian technique of manufacturing a dugout canoe. In sharp contrast to Mrs. Blakey, my talented and demanding third-grade teacher, whose loose arm-flesh flapped around in chaotic rhythms as she wrote on the board, Miss Dobzhansky’s chalkboard arm was revealed to be fine and firm, gracefully fitted at the shoulder with a flame-shaped muscle, when in the afternoons she removed her sweater and draped it over the back of her chair.