Vox: a novel Part 3

"All right, well this kid apparently spontaneously human combusted, but the combustion was confined to his genitals. Boom! He was very uncomfortable. But see, I understand perfectly how that could happen. I fear for my own genitals sometimes. I get so fricking h.o.r.n.y ... now there's another inadequate word ... so p.o.r.ny, so gorny, so yorny ... I get so yorny that I look down at my c.o.c.k-and-b.a.l.l.s unit, and it's like I could take the whole rigid a.s.sembly and start uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g it, around and around, and it would come off as one solid thing, like a cotterless crank on a bicycle, and I would hand it over to you to use as a d.i.l.d.o."

"Okay then, hand it over. Although I've never cottoned to d.i.l.d.os particularly. I used one once, to oblige someone, and I got a yeast infection. I think it was called a *Mighty Mini Brute.' "

"That's a fair description of my ... crank."

"I know what you mean, though. Sometimes I get the same way, so worked up. My c.l.i.t gets hard and it feels like this discrete wedge item, like a piece of candy corn, and I feel as if I should put it in a little wooden box for safekeeping. I usually like to come in the shower."

"Mm! Shouldn't that bra come off, really?"

"No it really should not, and I'll tell you why. When I dither myself off ... no, I don't want to tell you."

"Please, yes you do, please tell me, yes you do, please, right now."

"When I m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e and I'm not in the shower, I need my b.r.e.a.s.t.s to be tended to, but, boo-hoo, there's n.o.body to tend to them, so what I do is I pull my bra down so that the edge of it catches under my nipples, and then they're all taken care of, and I can use both hands to tend to matters below."

"This is a miracle," he said.

"It's just a telephone conversation."

"It's a telephone conversation I want to have. I love the telephone."

"Well, I like it too," she said. "There's a power it has. My sister's little babe has a toy phone, which is white, with horses and pigs and ducks on the dial, and a blue receiver that has no weight to it at all, and I find there is an astonis.h.i.+ng feeling of power when you pretend to be talking to someone on it. You cover the mouthpiece with your hand and you say in this dramatic whisper, *Stevie, it's Horton the Elephant on the phone. He wants to speak to you!' and you hand it over to Stevie and his eyes get big and you and he both for that second believe that Horton the Elephant really is on the phone. And then you get two phones going. Stevie's on the white phone with the ducks and pigs, and I'm on the yellow phone with the wheels and the eyes that move when you pull it along the Floor, and I ask how Stevie's doing and have a little conversation with him and then I say, *Stevie, would you like to speak to Paul?' And Stevie says yes. Paul is a relative-this happened last time I was back home-and Paul, who's sitting right there, gets this startled look, his hand automatically flies up to take the tiny plastic phone that I'm handing to him, he interrupts whatever real conversation he's been having and he says, *h.e.l.lo?' and his smile is very complicated-he almost believes."

"That's right!" he said. "And here I am talking to you, and you truly are somewhere on the East Coast, and you're wearing a bra!"

"Amazing as it may seem. What other words do you have for the things I'm looking down at right now and admiring?"

"Other words for b.r.e.a.s.t.s? Frans is the main one. Sometimes ... frannies. Frans, nans, and Kleins. And I never thought *a.s.s' fit. Sometimes I think of a woman's a.s.s as a *tock.' "

"So then it follows that she has a *tockhole' as well?"

"I never pushed it that far."

"Kleins is strange. *I'm squeezing my big fleshy Kleins'? You sure?"

"I don't know, I think Patsy Cline is a s.e.xy name. I don't even know who she is."

"She's a singer."

"I know that much. Once I looked down the list of Kleins in the phone book and found one with a woman's name spelled out, and G.o.d, it was everything I could not to call that number. In fact, I did call the number, and she answered, and I said, *Oh gosh, I must have the wrong number.' And yet the Kleins I've known in real life haven't been surrounded by a mysterious s.e.xual power."

"It's that telephone."

"Your last name isn't Klein?"

"No," she said. "But I will tell you something."

"What? What? What?"

"Occasionally when I'm just about to reach an o.r.g.a.s.m I ... I think of it as a *Delgado.' "

"Think of what as a Delgado?" he asked.

"The erect male c.o.c.k."

"Oh, oh. Sorry."

"It's because I was infatuated with a boy named Delgado in high school. So when you said something about, something about your *sperm-dowel' earlier, I misheard for a second, and I felt this rush of blood-I thought you were using my secret word."

"Now see that is what I live for, for someone to tell me something like that. I need that to happen to me every minute, every second."

"That's an impossibility."

"I will feast on that revelation for weeks to come."

"It's a secret, though, so ..."

"Up, it doesn't go beyond this conversation. Out here we say everything, but in our lives, nothing. Out here you can tell me, just request me, to pull on the knot of my bathrobe until it falls open."

"What kind of bathrobe is it?"

"White terry cloth. And you can just tell me, you can just say, *Jim, please lift the waistband of your gray underpants up to its extreme limit of stretch so that it clears your erection and then bring it around and hook it under your b.a.l.l.s, and then take that Juggs magazine and use it to fan your overheated pop stand.' And you know what? I would do it."

"Well, yes, I could tell you to do all that, but I don't know, those are important decisions you maybe ought to make for yourself."

"And I could probably ask you to tell me anything about yourself and you will tell me."

"Maybe," she said.

"You told me the secret word you have for the adult male c.o.c.k, anyway. Not for my c.o.c.k, leave me out of it. For the one you think about on your own. See, see, this is what I need. I need to know secrets and have secrets and keep secrets. I need to be confided in. Each time you come alone and you don't tell anybody, that's a s.e.xual secret. The event has taken place and only you know about it and you have ministered to yourself in exactly the way you wanted to and thought of exactly what you wanted to think about. And each of these thousands of times you have come alone const.i.tutes a perfectly unique moment, with precisely this order of images and that fold of yourself being moved by your middle finger in just that way and that biting of lower lip with exactly that degree of force, all entirely private. I almost think that each one of the times a woman comes in private in her life has to continue to exist as a kind of sphere, a foot-and-a-E-cuhalf-wide sphere, in some ideal dimension, sort of like all the ovums you've got queued up in you, except these are ... ovums of past o.r.g.a.s.ms, weird as that sounds, and I am this one viable spermazoid lurking around among them, and I would happily spend my life floating up to one after another of these unique o.r.g.a.s.m spheres and looking inside and I'd be able to watch you make yourself come that one time."

"I bet each one of these mystical spheres has a little window in it with a little Levelor blind that's down almost but not quite all the way, right, that you creep up to and peer into, am I right?"

"Exactly, as if it's a stylized cartoon bubble with a curved window drawn on it, and you're naked in there, strumming like there's no tomorrow. But no, actually it isn't like simple voyeurism, I don't think-it's holier or more reverent than that, because when I'm in that mood I don't want to exist. I don't mean I want to kill myself, I mean that I'm a man and a man is a watcher and a watcher disturbs the purity of the event, so I don't want to exist, I want to be faded away to almost nothing. And of course all other men are completely foreign, they aren't allowed in this at all. When I'm very aroused I almost hate all other men. Sometimes when there's a kissing scene in a movie, and the camera shows the actor and actress chomping away on each other's gums, moyong, moyong, and then there's this sudden folded-up piece of shaven male jaw skin, I feel a wave of disgust-what the f.u.c.k is he doing there, get him off the set! That's not even to mention the b.e.s.t.i.a.l idiots in p.o.r.n movies: this nice woman donating her perfect self to these horrible lascivious dumb f.u.c.ks, with their suggestive evil laughs, and their intent l.u.s.tful expressions, and their single-mindedness, and their constant diverting of the conversation around to s.e.x. Get rid of them. One time I was in a store at the dirty-magazine rack and it was a little congested there and I reached sort of over this guy's shoulder to get a copy of the magazine I wanted to look at-E-Cup or something-didn't touch him, just reached over him, and the guy half turned his head and said in this psychopathic voice, but very soft, he said, *Stay away from me or I'll cut you up.' I said, *Sorry, sorry, I was just trying to get the magazine!' And he said, *Well just stay the f.u.c.k away from me, okay?' Now I'd never say that or threaten that but that guy's reaction, when you're at the magazine rack and you want to be the only one there, among all these lovely kindly wonderful naked women, is a reaction I can at least understand. These groups of buddies who go out and drink beer together at strip clubs-it's totally mystifying to me that they would want to do that, have male company."

"But women like men from time to time."

"I know that, I realize that, and that's how I trick myself into accepting men's existence: women often imagine men when they come, so men have a reason to exist. In fact, this secondary deductive twist allows me to get aroused by stuff that doesn't really arouse me, like for instance when you went into that catalog thing earlier about the row of male models in the warehouse with their cream horns popping out of their shorts, I could think to myself, okay, her arousal is supremely arousing to me, and this image she's describing is the source or current expression of her arousal, and I could imagine your face thinking of those images, and therefore I was able to make them somewhat arousing to me. Like the religious nut who embraces the devil because it shows his utter humility before G.o.d-except I don't go that far. Oh! I know what I meant to tell you."

"What?"

"You know you mentioned that friend of yours reading you a romance novel all night? Okay, this is a good example of what I'm talking about. I went into this used bookstore one time, just to browse around, called Bonnie's Books. But it wasn't really the kind of place I thought it was going to be, it had hardly any old books, what it had was recently published pre-enjoyed books. A de-facto library. Shelf after shelf of these things, big thick historical romances, super neatly shelved, sometimes five or six copies of the same book side by side, Love's Hurry, Love's Eager Trial, Love's Tender Fender Bender, all that kind of material, but even though there were multiple copies of these books, they weren't identical, because every one of them had been read. They looked handled. All of their pages were turned. And turned by whom? Turned by women. My heart started going. I had entered this enchanted glade. I took a historical romance off the shelf, and I felt as if I were lifting a towel that was still damp from a woman's shower. The intimacy of it! But it was long-no way I could ever read a book that long. So I put it back. There was a woman at the counter, maybe thirty-eight or forty, perhaps Bonnie herself. She'd read some of these books! I think I was the only one in the store-I knew she was aware of me-I'd smiled at her when I went in. I wanted her to see me looking at the historical romances. And then I went a little further up this one aisle, and I came to a huge trove of romance novels-hundreds and hundreds of them-all organized by the specific subseries, some of which are slightly softer core or harder core, you know, in some they're allowed to say *he frisked his tongue over her navel' and some they can't. And I got to this set of red books, only about maybe fifty of them, called the Silhouette Desire series, and *desire' is written in this luscious sloppy longhand, in a diagonal-Desire. Alarm bells started going off in my head, and I thought of going over to Bonnie and saying, *Um, do you know those Silhouette Desire books? Can you tell me which t.i.tle in that series is the most arousing of all of them, in your judgment?' But I could never have done that. And it didn't matter anyway, because hundreds of female o.r.g.a.s.ms could be inferred from the books themselves-you didn't need to hara.s.s any particular woman, you didn't need to invade anybody's privacy, you could just hold any copy and think of a woman holding it open with one hand, with her thumb and little finger. It was all there in the pliability and the thumbedness of the book itself-it practically shouted at you, *I have been near a c.l.i.t as it underwent two o.r.g.a.s.ms.' "

"So did you buy one of these Silhouette Desire books?" she asked. "Love's Tender Gender Bender?"

"Can you hold on for just a second? I have to get it."

"I guess so, sure."

There was a pause.

"It's called Beginner's Luck," he said, "by Dixie Browning, and it's singled out by the publisher as a quote *Man of the Month' volume. Not only is it heavily thumbed, but the woman who owned it before I did spilled water or gin or something on it, so that it's all wavy. It's got a permanent wave. You can imagine."

"Whew."

"As I was driving home I was so still from owning this pre-enjoyed book that once when I was stopped at a stoplight and I saw a woman in my rearview mirror I made a very small c.l.i.t-circling motion with my fingers on the roof of my car, despite the bird droppings up there- the idea that she might notice and understand what this motion meant made me feel faint with excitement-but she was expressionless. Anyway, I took the book home and read it, and you know what? It was good! Not only did it give me a partial erection on two occasions, I actually got tears in my eyes toward the end! It's about a man and a woman in a cabin in the woods. He's a klutzy scientist, she helps him get less klutzy and finally gets him to shave off his beard and it turns out that when he's cleaned up he's irresistible and despite being unschooled in the ways of love he is successful in bringing her to a fever pitch. Good stuff. I mean I probably won't reread it very soon, but when you think of some of the stuff that pa.s.ses for highbrow these days, you've got to admire it for hanging back so humbly in the genre category. But never mind that. I finished the book, and I pictured the woman who owned the book finis.h.i.+ng the book, with her normal flannel nightgown on-she switches out the light, she closes her eyes, she switches on the alarm-and then I turned the last page of the book, and there were more pages, there were four or five pages of promotion, upcoming t.i.tles, etcetera, and I turned to this one page. You ready? I'm going to read it to you. It says, *You'll flip ... your pages won't! Read paperbacks hands-free with BOOK MATE I. The perfect "mate" for all your romance paperbacks. Traveling, vacationing, at work, in bed, studying, cooking, eating.' Did you hear that *in bed' in the middle there? It's squirreled away in a nons.e.xual list, legitimized, like those gigantic ma.s.sager wands that are always accompanied by catalog copy that talks about relieving aching muscles and lower back pain, when what we're all really talking about is women making themselves come in bed. What this Book Mate is is this rigid-backed thing to which you strap the book using this quote *see-through strap.' There's nothing the book can do, it's powerless-it's strapped wide open-open for all the hungry eyes of the world to admire. The ad says, *This wonderful invention makes reading a pure pleasure! Ingenious design holds paperback books OPEN and FLAT so even wind can't ruffle pages-leaves your hands free to do other things.' And that's the page of this book Beginner's Luck that I finally m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed to: the thought of a woman reading that this invention will leave her hands free to do other things, and the thought of her ordering it and then maybe holding the strapped-open book between her bent knees so she can read the crucial page of pleasure while she goes to town down there ... needing to have both her hands free to do other things ... ho G.o.d! The problem is, though, that you yourself almost certainly don't find any of this arousing."

"No, well," she said, "I find it mildly arousing, for the very reason you already said-it's something that's arousing to you."

"But there's the thing," he said. "If you only find it mildly arousing because I found it exceedingly arousing, then I have to cancel my strong arousal and replace it with mild arousal, since the degree of your arousal is the primary source of my arousal. And then, the problem is, you'll find it only infinitesimally arousing and I'll then have to discard it as a total turnoff. That's the problem."

"We have to find a middle way," she said.

"The middle way is for you to tell me the last thing you thought of that made you pay some attention to your candy corn."

"I liked the story you told about the jeweler pretty well."

"No no, before tonight. Whenever the last time was you made yourself come."

"Last night. I really don't remember. These are fleeting things."

"Oh, you do remember."

"I was in the shower."

"Wait a second. Okay. You were in the shower."

"What did you just do?" she asked.

"Nothing. My underpants were starting to bug me. Go on."

"I was in the shower, which is almost always the place I come best. In college there were very nice marble showers, with high showerheads, and the water, the shape of each drop of water, was exactly right, fat soothing generous drops, but billions of them. I came many many times in those showers."

"Public showers, you mean?"

"No no, private," she said. "This little high marble box, with a marble foyer. It was very loud, and sometimes when the water collected and flowed together down my arm and between my legs and then fell from there it made this almost clacking noise on the tile. The dorms were coed, so potentially there was a man from my hall in the next shower over, but that didn't interest me. I used to take showers at odd times of the day anyway, when the bathrooms were deserted. One-thirty in the afternoon. I'd go to cla.s.s, and I'd start drawing in the margin of my notebook, and I'd draw a little curve, and I'd think, hm, a curve, and then I'd turn it into a breast, and I'd make it a bit larger, and then I'd make another one, and then I'd draw a pair of hands holding the b.r.e.a.s.t.s from behind-that was always an idea that interested me, that I'd be sitting in some cla.s.s or auditorium, dimly lit, an architectural history lecture, with slides, and a person sitting behind me would reach his hands forward and take hold of my b.r.e.a.s.t.s, pulling me back against the chair. So by the time I'd drawn those hands and those large b.r.e.a.s.t.s I really had to come, and I'd walk briskly back to my brown marble shower. I read something about river G.o.ds that excited me, too. Really, back then I'd put out for any body of water at all-a pool or a bath or a pond, or an ocean. We rented a house on the Carolina coast for several summers, this was when I was in junior high school, and I'd go swimming in the ocean, and as soon as I was in the water I'd want to dither, I'd swim far out and I'd think of the tons and tons of water underneath my legs, but of course I couldn't because there were lots of people swimming, so I'd come in the shower-oh, and that was an especially good kind of shower too because it was outdoors, in this wooden shed, and I had this freezing cold bathing suit on, which I would take off in the shower, and because the suit was cold my nipples were erect, as in your wet T-s.h.i.+rt contest, and I was stripping in the warm shower water, I'd slowly strip off this cold bathing suit, very pleasant to have the warm mingle with the cold, so that sometimes I could feel cold rinsing down my legs and sometimes warm, and I could hold the suit open and let the water fill it so that warm was just pouring out around my legs, that was nice, so my skin was all confused and very aware of itself, with the steam rising-oh, and there was a little metal mirror, I guess it was a shaving mirror, in this shower enclosure, which would get steamed up, even though I was outside. It was on the left wall as you faced the showerhead, which in this case was quite low. And after I'd taken off my swimsuit I'd hang it up on the nail next to the shaving mirror, and the sight of it all crumpled and dangling there was exciting, because it implied my complete full nudity, and when the shaving mirror got steamed up, I used to draw a pair of b.r.e.a.s.t.s on it in the fog with my fingers. The gla.s.s was cold. I wanted to press my b.r.e.a.s.t.s against the mirror, but it was too high for that, but I imagined myself pressing my b.r.e.a.s.t.s against this little mirror, so first squeezing them together and then pressing them against the mirror, and I'd just seen something on TV about one-way mirrors, so I thought of men in the garden being able to see my b.r.e.a.s.t.s stuffed flat against the foggy mirror. Once I even brought in some lip gloss after my swim and spent a long time putting lip gloss around my nipples and soaping it off."

"G.o.d, car washes must have driven you wild."

"Car washes. I did like that one part at the end, where the felt flappers drag over you, but no, not really-it was very rare that my family took the car to the car wash. Almost never. Oh, but I do remember one thing I used to imagine-I imagined that I shared a ride back home from college with someone I didn't know, and we get caught in a terrible tropical monsoon of some kind, and his winds.h.i.+eld wipers don't work, and so I have to go out on the hood of the car and take off my top and kneel there and hold on to the antenna and kind of sop my b.r.e.a.s.t.s over the winds.h.i.+eld just so he can drive. Actually, that wasn't something I thought of very much, that was just a one-shot deal."

"There are strong evolutionary pressures on fantasies, aren't there?" he said. "If it doesn't work, and if it doesn't metamorphose itself into something that does work, it doesn't survive."

"Yeah, even in the buildup to one o.r.g.a.s.m, it's a kind of bake-off. You think: two c.o.c.ks, each one poking from under one of my armpits, sperm squirting from them? Yes or no. No. I'm a geometry teacher measuring boys' p.e.n.i.s length? Yes or no. No. Am I a nurse at a fertility clinic and my job is to strip for clients who have difficulty coming and then suck their c.o.c.ks and let their sperm drip from my tongue into a test tube? No. I'm in a dressing room and some native-Hawaiian security guard is watching me try on blue jeans over the video monitor? Ooh, maybe yes. In fact it's kind of like getting dressed for a party, and being unsure of what to wear right up to the last minute, and frantically trying on one image after another like clothes, not knowing which combination looks really good, and it's getting later and later, and then finally you pull out this wonderful dress, with some rich pattern, and you slip it on, and ah, you can come."

"Jesus. But what about if you're reading and the images are not under your control? Say maybe with a Book Mate thing holding the book open?"

"Hah hah! You mean with my hands free to do other things?"

"For instance, yes."

"Well, I have a whole system if I'm reading."

"Say you're reading your copy of Forum," he said.

"Right, what I do is I read a little of it, whatever it is, the story or the letter or the novel, to see whether it's something I do want to m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e to or not. If it's something that looks promising, I read it all through very fast, to find out exactly what happens and locate the spot in it where I'm going to want to be coming, and what spots I'll want to skip because they're whatever-violent or boring or somehow irrelevant. Then I go back, not always to the beginning, but I backtrack, and the distance I backtrack from the point where I've scheduled my o.r.g.a.s.m I have to gauge exactly, depending on how close to coming I think I am-so if I'm very close to coming I only go back a paragraph, but if it looks like it'll be a while I may even read the whole scene or the whole letter that's before the letter I'm interested in and then go on and read the letter I'm interested in. And sometimes I misjudge, and I start to get close to coming when the big moment of the story is still on the next page, and I have to race ahead looking for the words I need, or sometimes the opposite happens and I'm crowding up to the big moment of the story and my o.r.g.a.s.m is dawdling, not all the precincts are reporting yet, and so I have to read the chosen come-sentence very slowly, syllable by syllable, *up ... and ... down ... on ... his ... f.u.c.k ... pole.' "

"So if you walked into a room," he said, "and there was an armchair, and a table, and on one end of the table was a TV and a VCR and an X-rated tape, and at the other end of the table was some book of Victorian p.o.r.nography, what would you choose?"

"The Victorian p.o.r.nography, no question."

"That's incredible to me."

"You'd choose the tape, right?" she asked.

"That or possibly the armchair itself. Not the book."

"The cla.s.sic opposition," she said.

"True, but no-actually, it's interesting. Because I've heard for so long about those studies that say that women like stories and men like pictures I've started to feel lately that stories represent women and are therefore s.e.xually charged for me, and in fact that's what got me so hot at Bonnie's Books that time, the idea that I was peeping in on a women's preserve. I think I am slowly starting to understand why in general people would prefer written p.o.r.n. It gives your brain a v.a.g.i.n.al o.r.g.a.s.m rather than a c.l.i.toral o.r.g.a.s.m, so to speak, whatever that means. I read one story in some men's magazine once, years ago, in the first person, written by a woman, or probably not, but written at least with the pretense that a woman was telling the story, about a sixteen-year-old girl who goes swimming in a neighbor's pool and of course her frans are still somewhat new and unfamiliar to her, and she'd forgotten that her top from last year was flimsy and inadequate to the demands that were made on it, and presto it comes off after she's swum a lap, and she's so embarra.s.sed and apologetic, but Mr. Grunthole rea.s.sures her that she needn't be ashamed, he doesn't mind if she swims without her top, and so on and so on, and even though it was a totally conventional and undistinguished story, the fact that it was written in the voice of this girl, so I could peep in on her mixed feelings when her top came off, did give me a huge ... an unexpectedly large return on my investment. I guess insofar as verbal p.o.r.nography records thoughts rather than exclusively images, or at least surrounds all images with thoughts, or something, it can be the hottest medium of all. Telepathy on a budget. But still honestly I need the images. For instance of you there in the shower. I mean, when you come are your legs slightly apart?"

"Yes."

"And do you have one of those legendary Water Pik shower-ma.s.sage showerheads?"

"I do, but I don't use it with any of the special settings. It was installed already when I moved in. It's useful for cleaning the tub. But when I'm-I don't hold it or put it between my legs or anything, I just treat it as a regular showerhead. What I do is ..."

"Yes?"

"When I start to come?"

"Yes?"

"I-"

"Yes?"

"I open my mouth and let it fill with water. The feeling of the water overflowing my mouth ... You there?"

"Don't stop talking."

"But that's all," she said.

"You were in the shower, yesterday night, and the water was coursing onto your face and falling down from one part of you to another, like b.a.l.l.s in a pinball machine, and your eyes were closed. What was in your mind? Oh I'd like to ..."

"Excuse me? You're murmuring."

"I said I'd like to clk," he said.