House of Holes

by Nicholson Baker

  “Indian-print scarves?”

  “Absolutely. Not tightly, but not loosely, either. You’re toying with your slobbering kitty, and he’s doing his bulldog—and your mouths are murmuring filthy nothings that neither of you can quite hear. Then he takes hold of your waist and tries to pull you toward him, and you hold his shoulders and try to pull him toward you. But no can do.”

  She frowned. “Why?”

  “Because of the scarves. His knees and your knees are made to share the same fate. You see? Their bony places and their soft places. The knees are your point of mutual contact. You’re kneecapping. The harder you try to pull toward him, and the harder he tries to pull toward you, the more it forces your legs apart. It’s sad, really. Then he sees your hand going fast and you start to go, ‘Ooh, mm, ah, mm, oh,’ and your brow goes all furrowy, and your eyes go all glittery, the way they are now, you throw your head back, exposing your swanlike neck, and just when you’re at that moment when you’re starting to feel yourself come, suddenly you really desperately need him inside you, and just at that moment the scarves come loose and Charles Dickens is there—I mean the bar pianist—and you feel his dick find you, and it starts to push and to muscle its way in, slowly at first, and then wom, oh shit, he’s slamming it up there, old twinkle fingers is in you, and his hips are humping, it’s out of his control.” Cardell did pelvisy things on the bar stool. “Ngong, bong, ung, fung!”

  Jackie closed her eyes and smiled. “Well,” she said, “you’ve made little missy pussy just a little bit horny, baby, because you talk dirty, and I sure do love a bar pianist.”

  “Good,” said Cardell. Jackie held her head still, averted, listening to the songs; then she relaxed and got a sad look. “They play their hearts out in hotel bars where nobody can hear the twelve clever things they’re doing with the harmony.” She pointed. “See the big brandy snifter for tips there on the top of the piano? Not much in it.”

  “So maybe we should casually drop a ten-spot in the snifter as we walk on by.”

  “When?”

  “When we leave together in about ten minutes to kiss and look into each other’s eyes while we fondle each other and tie colorful scarves around our knees. Oops, did I say that?”

  “Hold on.” Jackie squinted and grabbed his arm again. “I think it’s coming.” Again she pushed back on the bar stool and turned red. A vein stood out in her neck. “Get behind me again, and slide your hand in my pantyhose and hold it right at my pussyhole.”

  Cardell obliged, cupping her bush, which was slick and swollen.

  “Good,” she said, “this time it’s really happ—” Her throat squeezed to silence and she made a strained pushing sound, turning even redder. “Now! Uhhhhh!” Something heavy and smooth and warm fell into Cardell’s cupped hand. “There you go,” she said, straightening and sighing with relief.

  Cardell pulled his hand from under her skirt. He was holding an egg. It was silver in color.

  She handed him a bar napkin. “Wipe it down. Don’t let people see. Put it out of sight.”

  “Is it a silver egg?” he asked, pocketing it in his jacket.

  “Yes.”

  “Is it solid?”

  “No, there’s a tiny silver man and a tiny silver woman inside. You can watch them make love if you like that sort of thing.”

  “I do,” Cardell said.

  “Me, too,” said Jackie, and she giggled and shook herself. “Phew, egg laying takes it out of me.” She ate half of a pretzel. “Cardell, I’m sorry to be a tease, because you’ve been nice, but I’m buzzed now, and I’m going to have to say good-bye.”

  “Forever?”

  “No, of course not forever. I’m just going to make an excursion to the House of Holes, where I can be a total tramp for a day or two. They let you do what you want there, you know.”

  “And what is it you want?”

  She leaned forward confidingly. “I want two lovely Brazilian stonemasons in overalls, with huge smiles and warm hands—four warm strong hands that know how to fit stones together—and sad brown eyes.”

  “And they can offer you that kind of specificity at this so-called House of Holes?”

  Jackie moved her lips to her straw, remembering something good.

  Cardell asked, “Well, what are you going to do with these men? I like a woman who knows what she wants.”

  She thought, then frowned. “I’m going to idolize their cockpoles,” she said. “I’m going to slide their foreskins back, so that the heads of their cocks pop out all pink and heart shaped. I’m going to gorge myself on as much of their deliciousness as I can stuff into my mouth without gagging. I don’t enjoy gagging. I’m going to look up into their eyes and feel them pump their come down my throat.”

  “Yee.” Cardell tried not to look shocked, although he was a little. “Maybe I could tag along and sort of—watch? We could get some dinner first?” He touched a menu.

  Jackie heard the brokenness and despair, but also the excitement, in his voice. She took pity on him. “Everybody’s got to find their own porthole,” she said. “It’s harder for men to get in than women unless they pay and pay. Although you’re pretty cute—you’ll have a chance.”

  “Any hints on where to find a porthole?”

  “Try the fourth dryer from the left at the laundromat at the corner of 18th Street and Grover Avenue,” said Jackie. She waved. “Bye.”

  Her face began to blur and liquefy, and then she poured herself down into her straw and was gone.

  Cardell picked up the straw and looked through it. There was no blockage. “Jackie?” he said. The bartender stood watching him, holding a glass.

  “What just happened?” Cardell said.

  “Your lady friend seems to have been sucked into her straw,” the bartender said.

  “That’s what I think, too,” Cardell said.

  The bartender shrugged. “It happens, man.”

  “Well,” Cardell said, “I guess I’ll be heading out.”

  “Have a good night.”

  Cardell dropped a twenty in the brandy snifter and waved at the pianist, humming along to Hoagy Carmichael.

  In the elevator down, Cardell smelled his fingers. Then he felt in his pocket. Yes, the silver egg was still there.

  Marcela Admires Koizumi’s Sculpture

  Marcela, an art critic, was in the sculpture garden. Koi-zumi, the well-known Japanese artist, was mounting one of her newest wooden sculptures onto its base. The sculpture was of a woman resting on all fours—large thighed and stylized, with a wide bottom and a moon face. She was carved out of black wood with yellow streaks.

  Marcela wore a boatneck shirt and white Bermuda shorts. She brushed her hair from her face, watching Koizumi bolt both of the wooden woman’s knees to her pedestal. Then the sculptress pulled out a big manual drill with a kink in it where the handle was.

  Marcela opened her notebook. “And what are you going to do with that?” she asked.

  Koizumi, a slight woman with a small mouth, said, “Once I get the sculptures mounted, I do the last step, which is to drill this auger bit into their asses.”

  “Can I watch?”

  Koizumi almost said no. She preferred to work in private. But then, struck by Marcela’s fresh, curious face and generous hips, she changed her mind. She took a metal poker and tapped it lightly into the wooden seam of the sculpted woman’s bottom. Then she removed it and fitted the tip of the auger into the tiny guide hole she had made.

  “Now I will drill her asshole,” Koizumi said simply.

  She pressed against the handle and began slowly turning the crank of the hand drill. Curls of wood came twirling up off the spirals of the bit.

  Marcela walked around to look at the wooden woman’s face. “She looks like she’s enjoying that pressure,” she said.

  “She likes to get her ass drilled,” said Koizumi. “All my women do. It’s the very last thing I do with each sculpture.”

  Marcela looked around the sculpture garden, and,
sure enough, each of the four Koizumi women had a small hole drilled in her bottom. One had a drill bit left in place.

  Marcela looked from the moon face of the sculpture to the thin, intent face of the sculptress.

  Koizumi saw her and smiled. “Would you like to give it a few turns?”

  “Can I?”

  “Just apply steady pressure while you turn the crank—not too hard.”

  Koizumi put her hands on Marcela’s hands and showed her how to hold the pommel and the handle of the drill.

  Marcela leaned and turned the drill and it ground into the wooden woman. A long curl of wood peeled up and fell away.

  “It’s rather straightforwardly erotic, isn’t it?” said Marcela. “Are you her, in this case, or are you the drill?”

  “Both, neither, I don’t know,” said Koizumi. She raised her hand. “That’s probably deep enough.”

  Marcela pulled the drill out, and Koizumi bent and blew away the sawdust. Then she took a rag with some linseed oil on it and pushed the rag into the hole with her pinkie and worked it around. “Do you want to try oiling the hole, too?” she asked.

  “Sure.” Marcela moved her pinkie finger in the wooden woman’s new hole and felt a strange tingling clench deep in her bottom. “When I push the rag I feel my muscles tighten,” she said. “Is that normal?”

  “Which muscles?”

  Marcela patted her behind. “These. The back ones.”

  “Yes,” said Koizumi, solemnly, “that happens to me, too.”

  “Oof, I’m all confused,” said Marcela in a small voice. “I feel like I want to fuck a football team.”

  “Put your finger in the hole for a moment and wait, and you will be taken to a place where you can be made love to any way you like, by anyone you choose,” said Koizumi.

  “Okay.” Marcela pushed with her finger and waited. She felt herself turning sparkly and growing narrower. Her finger, and then her hand, and then her arm flowed into the carven woman’s asswood, and then she found herself swimming deep into the wooden woman’s body. She smelled the smells of linseed oil and cherry bark. Things went dark for a moment.

  When she became solid again, she was facedown on a wooden rolling table with a soft, thin mattress, moving down a dimly lit hall. Two nice-looking naked men with towels around their necks were pushing the table by its railing. To the first naked man, Marcela said, “Where is this?”

  “This is the House of Holes, where you can do whatever you want.”

  “Whatever I want? For instance, I can just reach out and hold your penis right now if I want?”

  “Bono, wait up,” the boy called. “She wants to hold my peeny wanger.” He paused and stood with his hips canted forward, his peeny wanger close to her hand. “Go ahead.”

  She rose on one elbow and held the cock like the handle of a trowel and pulled slowly on it. She felt it thicken and was filled with longings in various directions.

  “What’s your name?” the nice-looking young man asked, gasping slightly.

  Marcela decided to make a name up. “My name is Lucky Eyes,” she said. She pointed his cock up and then kissed its tip and filled her mouth once with it.

  “Oh, please don’t do that cause I’ll shoot for sure in two seconds. I’m real full of come cause your tits make me hot.”

  Marcela lay down and breathed. “Where are we going?”

  “Into the massage room.”

  “Oh. Who will be massaging me?”

  “Lanasha, the head masseuse, while Bono and I watch in the other room.” He pointed to a one-way mirror. “Then we’re supposed to take you to the groanrooms.”

  “Oh.”

  In the massage room there were Japanese screens and a pile of folded cloths, and bowls of water and liquids. “Is it okay to leave my bra on?” said Marcela.

  “Lanasha will take care of everything,” said the boy. Then he shyly squeezed her and said, “Thank you for holding me. It felt really good. I’m Ross.” Some trance music came on, and Marcela lay on her stomach feeling very peaceful, still in her bra, with a towel covering her butt and throbbing cuntspot. Soon she heard the sound of a sliding paper door.

  Lanasha, a large Filipina woman in a red dress, came in and sat in a chair next to her table.

  “I am here to give you a teaching massage,” Lanasha said. “What would you most like to learn?”

  “Everything, I think,” said Marcela. “I’ve not been to a sex resort before. Last week I let a man hold my breasts, but besides that I’ve been pretty darned nonsexual lately. It’s been almost a year. I’ve started to worry about it, actually.”

  Lanasha unhooked Marcela’s bra and tickled her back with the loose ends of it. Then she began making odd paddling motions over her shoulder blades and down the small of her back. Once, she lifted the towel. “You have a very lovely bottom—all men will like it,” the masseuse said.

  “Thank you.”

  Lanasha squirted oil on Marcela’s bottom.

  “Do you know what the Gumuz boys sing in the Sudan?” she said.

  “No, what?”

  “They sing, ‘My girl’s got big boobies and a big soft ass; she is the shapeliest woman in the world.’ ”

  “Catchy song,” said Marcela. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you enjoy having a man behind you? Because I miss seeing his face make those nice twisty expressions that I see men make in dirty movies.”

  Lanasha smiled. “What you do is you send your whole self back to your bottom. Your bottom has a lot to say to him, by its shape. To him it doesn’t feel cold. It feels as if you are talking to him in a new round soft language.”

  She pushed the cheeks of Marcela’s bottom together as she said this, and then she released them. Then she pushed her thumbs deep into the muscles.

  “Wow, that’s a deep massage,” said Marcela, pressing her delta bone into the thin mattress.

  Lanasha made a growly sort of sound, and then her hands went back to Marcela’s back, and she began kneading the younger woman slowly down each side of her spine.

  “Tell me a sexy thing a man did to you,” said Marcela.

  Lanasha’s hands paused for a moment. “One time I was giving a massage to this short man who was very fit,” she said. “He was like a little Egyptian statue. He wanted a happy ending, and when I turned him over his penis had already half filled, and it was almost too big to seem like a penis, until I got used to it. It had a vein that forked off in two directions about halfway up. I took a little dipperful of oil, and I poured it on the underside of it and watched it trickle down, and then I put both my hands around his cock, and I began moving my fists around and together and apart, and he began making an odd, snorting sound and then he said, in a strong accent, ‘I want to push it in you.’

  “I said okay, but I showed him how to put his hand around his penis at the base so that he wouldn’t go so far inside me that he would hurt me in my cervix.”

  Marcela said, “Boy, he must have been big.”

  “He was really huge, and glorious,” said Lanasha, “but with a delicate, shy face and long eyelashes. That was what was so interesting about him.”

  “So what did you do, you got up on your knees?” asked Marcela. “Would you mind if I did that?”

  “Go ahead,” said Lanasha. “I’ll massage you that way.”

  So Marcela put her bottom up as high as it could go. She felt Lanasha’s strong hands squeezing the oil into her ass muscles.

  “So I was pretty much just like you are now,” said Lanasha.

  “Wide-open?”

  “Yes. And I felt his hands on my hips. I said, ‘Don’t forget to hold the base of your penis because I can’t take all of you.’ Because I’ve been with men sometimes who are big and it’s quite uncomfortable. One of his hands went away from my hips and he found me, and he began to push himself in. It was a combination of wide and deep, and I’ve never felt so full of anything in my life, it was like a complete Thanksgiving d
inner of cock. Then I felt his fist coming up against me, and he said, ‘Would you like to have a thumb ride?’ I said sure, because I was ready to say yes to anything. And then every time he drove his dick in, he let his thumb push, at my bungee hole. Not in, just pressure here, pushing, moving, like this.”

  “Oofy. Feels like a meteor shower. Did you like it?”

  “I had three little tiny orgasms and then suddenly I had this huge shuddering orgasm that was bigger than anything I’d had before. It was like the god of pleasure had punched me in the pussy.”

  Marcela whimpered and pulled the hair out of her face. “Mmm, I’m almost ready to be fucked now,” she said.

  “Do you want me to squeeze the Magic Kentucky Lime fruit on your pussy? It will make you feel extreme cravings for stiff cock.”

  “Is it safe?”

  Lanasha said it was. “Some people call it the Purple Cometwat, but its real name is Magic Kentucky Lime.”

  “Go right ahead,” said Marcela.

  Lanasha took a large yellow-and-green fruit and cut it in half on the side table. It didn’t look anything like a lime to Marcela. Lanasha gently helped Marcela turn over so that she lay face up. She gently massaged Marcela’s stomach and around her hip bones, and then she drew her knees up, and she said, “Hold your labia open.” Marcela held herself open and Lanasha pressed the fruit between her hands.

  Cold drops fell on Marcela’s little thumper bean and trickled down. And then Lanasha took the whole half of the fruit, and she pushed it down over Marcela’s mound so that the pulp of it was mashed into her folds. Marcela felt an incredible almost burning warmth flow back into her body and down her legs.

  “Ooooh,” Marcela groaned. “I don’t just want to be full of a cock, I also want to have a cock. I want a cock of my own. Can you arrange that for me?”

  “Ah, no,” said Lanasha. “That’s called a crotchal transfer. You’ll have to ask Lila about that.”

  “Oh, okay. Well, can you put a trickle of the Kentucky Lime on my bottom, too?”

  “Yes,” said Lanasha, “but if I do, I warn you, you’re going to want to have something in there.”