Vox

by Nicholson Baker

  “No, I think that sometimes,” he said.

  “But the interesting part,” she said, “is that the trip itself would take a while. I think a lot about what it would feel like to be turned into some kind of conscious vapor. You know those trucks that come around on streets and grind up the brush on the curb? Those droning trucks? The guy throws a branch in, and it goes mmmmn-yooonnnng-mmmmmm, and all these tiny chips fly out of a high pipe? I think of that, except of course it wouldn’t be painful—I think of the part where I’m just this spume of wood chips and pieces of leaves. Or you know what else? You remember those birds that were getting sucked into the jet engines? Sometimes I lie in bed at three or four in the morning and I imagine myself flying miles above the earth, very cold, and one of those black secret spy planes is up there with the huge round engines with the spinning blades in it, the blades that look like the underside of mushrooms? The black plane’s going very fast and I’m going very fast in the opposite direction and we intersect, and I fly right through one of those jet engines, and I exit as this long fog of blood. I’m miles long, and, because it’s so cold, I’m crystalline. Very long arms, you’ll be pleased to hear. And then I recondense in bed, sshhp, as my short warm self. It must have something to do with my estrogen level. But that’s what telephone travel would be like out there, I think. What am I saying, that’s what it is like.”

  “Ooh, I love you, you tell me everything.”

  “I do seem to, don’t I? It’s very unlike me.”

  “It is?” he said. “God, I’m a compulsive confessor. But it’s rare for me to cast my bread on the waters and have it return tenfold like this.”

  “Tell me the rest of what happened with your friend Emily.”

  “Why? No, no, it’ll make me seem like too much of a type-”

  “You are a type,” she said.

  “You’re right, I am.”

  “Don’t feel bad about it—I am too. I just want to know what you’re like when you’re physically holding a woman. As opposed to calling up catalogs and strangers named Klein and that sort of thing, worthwhile pursuits though they may be. What did you and Emily end up doing?”

  “I never actually held her, that’s the first thing I’ll say. So it’s certainly going to disappoint you. It’s a very common story, really, and I’m starting to want to impress you a little.”

  “Impress me with your candor—that seems to be your style.”

  “Well here’s what happened, anyway,” he said. “After I showed her my cock tracing and all that, it marked some kind of conclusion, and we were more reserved with each other. After all, what was there to say? I’d laid it right out on the table and she’d basically rejected me. But then there was a big good-bye party for somebody, and at it Lee flirted with her in his perky cool way. Boy I dislike the way he funnels peanuts into his mouth. He’ll never see forty-eight again, and yet he throws his whole head back after he’s been asked a question, drops in a hopperful of nuts, and then he answers the question while he’s crunching. He tries to be sardonic eating peanuts! This is some TV convention that has gotten people in its clutches. Of course there are times when you are so full of something you want to say that you talk with your mouth full, I have no problem with that. What I find fault with is when you are deliberately using the act of talking with your mouth full to demonstrate just how totally relaxed and spontaneous you really are as a conversationalist. It’s from growing up watching all those salted-snack commercials. Bugles. So I hate him, clearly, and he’s at the party, and midway through, something bad happens between Emily and him, basically it’s just that he makes it clear that he likes flirting with her but forget it, he’s married. She tells me about it in the parking lot, she’s near tears, and then she squats and holds on to the side mirror of my car and looks in it and she says, ‘Well well—I look convincingly haggard.’ That was her best line—in fact it probably makes her seem more vulnerable and lovable than she really is. That’s not fair— she’s very nice. So anyway, for the next full week I talked with her about Lee and talked with her about Lee, every possible angle on the situation, though I avoided telling her that I found him repulsive and childish, but otherwise we ventilated the topic fully. Finally I couldn’t stand to talk about him anymore, and I said, ‘Look, I have to ask your advice.’ Because what she obviously needed was to have her mind off her own troubles. It was six, we were again leaving work. And somehow, by pure luck, this was the perfect exact second to ask her advice: she just about crumpled with relief and helpfulness, and she pointed to a café across the street and she said, ‘Why don’t we go in there?’ So over a pair of up-signal caffè lattes, I told her the problem. I pulled out a piece of newspaper, and I unfolded it, and I looked at it, and I looked at her, and then I looked at it again, and then I told her that I was thinking of running a personals ad requesting something very specific. And she was politely curious about this, so I said, ‘This is what I was thinking of saying,’ and I handed it to her. It was the personals ad form, which I’d filled out. The ad went—this is going to disappoint you, though.”

  “I fully expect to be disappointed.”

  “Good. It said something like, ‘You and me are sitting side by side on my couch, watching X-vid, not touching. You are short or tall, etc., you want me to see pleasure transform your features. I am SWM, 29.’ ”

  “Was this an ad you really planned on running?”

  “I think so, possibly. No, I probably never would have. I’d carried it around in my pocket for a while, it was starting to get that folded-for-a-long-time look.”

  “How did she react?”

  “Emily said, ‘Well, you can try, but I seriously doubt anyone’s going to respond to that.’ Which was quite true.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “Even if she was wrong, I don’t think I really wanted what I said I wanted. Meeting strangers, the awkwardness. It would take such a huge effort of will to get over the pure chit-chat socialness of the context. My erection would never survive it. What I really wanted was to hand that folded piece of newsprint to Emily and watch her read it. I said, ‘What about if I took out the lame line about pleasure transforming their features?’ And she said, ‘But that’s the only thing in it that’s any good.’ So I asked her, if she were me—I said, ‘I know you’re not me, but if you were me and you wanted to achieve this objective, how would you word it?’ She said, ‘Well, tell me what your objective really is, in your own words, so I get a better sense of it.’ So I told her that I, well er um, I was interested, you know, in sitting on my couch, next to a woman, with an X-rated tape on, and the woman’s looking only at the movie and I’m looking only at the movie, and she’s well, um, masturbating, and as she starts to come she says, ‘Look at my face,’ and I look at her face, and she looks at the TV, and we both come. So she says, Emily says, ‘All right, good, now we have something to work from.’ She takes out a pen and starts drafting the ad on the place mat, she writes, ‘You and me are sitting,’ and she goes, ‘Good, okay so far, nice colloquial note, that’s fine.’ I think she was really delighted not to be talking about Lee. And then she taps the pen on the place mat and she looks up at me and she says, ‘No, look, you need to make the situation a lot clearer. You need to make her feel that it’s all right. You need to talk about some kind of a blanket.’ Out of the blue, a blanket! No, wait, I know what she said, before the blanket, she said something like, ‘You need to make the woman reading it understand that some sense of what is right and fitting coexists alongside your depravities.’ Not those exact words, but close to that. You believe it? Then she brings up this blanket. This was a whole new side to her. I said, ‘All righty, what kind of blanket? You think we should specify the actual kind of blanket?’ And she nods and goes, ‘Yes, absolutely, the specific kind of blanket, the size, the thickness, the color, that’s all they have to go on.’ I said, ‘Okay, well, what do you think? Army surplus green blanket, Mormon quilt, what?’ She thought for a second, and then she said, she sai
d, ‘I think you should mention a blanket with a fringe.’ I said, ‘But I do not have a blanket with a fringe.’ And she said, ‘You’re right, that’s a problem.’ And then she starts hitting me with all these questions. She goes, ‘How far is the TV from the couch?’ She’d never been to my apartment, of course. I said, ‘Well it’s on a rolling table, so there’s no fixed distance, but then, the cable cord limits the range, so I guess it’s probably about six feet from the couch.’ She noted this down and she goes, ‘Because the woman skimming these personals may need to know that. That little fact might be of the highest importance. Now, is the couch two pillows wide or three pillows wide or four pillows wide?’ I said it was three pillows wide. She said, ‘Like this?’ and on the place mat she started drawing a couch and a TV, so I said, ‘No no, like this,’ and I sketched the layout of the room. Just the couch, the walls, the doors, the electrical outlets. I drew two stick figures with two arrows to indicate where they’d be sitting on the couch. She looked at this, and nodded, and said, ‘Okay, now, the other thing is, you can’t just say “X-vid.” What tape will actually be playing when this is happening?’ I said ‘Wulp, it would be a pornographic movie of some sort, I guess I’d rent a bunch before she showed up, six or ten, and there’d be some trial and error.’ She said, ‘Well I just don’t think you’ll get a response with that kind of vagueness. You have to commit yourself to a situation.’ And I said, ‘But you know there are thousands upon thousands of dirty tapes.’ She said, ‘That’s just it. Is it a classic that she may well have seen, or will it be something she probably hasn’t seen? Will it be new to you or not? These little distinctions are crucial.’ And she said, ‘And also—if you specify a certain tape, then, you see, she reads the ad and she rents the tape and while she’s watching it, the ad may become more and more interesting to her.’ So I said, ‘Golly, you’re absolutely right. I do have to say which tape.’ But I said, ‘But I don’t know which it should be. I know what tapes I like, but I don’t know which particular tape would potentially be interesting to her.’ And much to my surprise, she had a suggestion. She said, ‘Let me make a suggestion. A dubbed tape. A foreign dubbed tape.’ And she explained why. She said it’s because you’ve got more layers—you’ve got the graphic stuff going on, but you’ve got mouths saying Italian sex words or French sex words, and then American actors going ooh and ah, and usually the American actors who do the dubbing are somewhat better than the American actors who’ve got to both have sex and act. And no L.A. boudoir interiors, no L.A. fireplaces reflected in L.A. wineglasses, no Ron Jeremy. Again, that’s not exactly what she said, but that was what she was getting at. And then she said, still in a very pragmatic way, she said, ‘For instance, Atom Home Video distributes a few good dubbed ones.’ So I clanked down my coffee and I said, ‘Okay. I accept everything you say. I’ll specify the couch size, I’ll specify high-end dubbed Italian-import porno, but still I just don’t trust myself to buy the right blanket. That’s what worries me. And I see now that I really need the right blanket to complete this. Will you help me pick out a blanket?’ And she said, ‘Tonight?’ And I said, ‘Yeah it has to be tonight, it really does, because tomorrow I’ll want to send in the ad, and as you say I have got to include the size, the color, everything, if I want this to work. I need your help with this.’ And she said okay.”

  “What kind of blanket did you get?”

  “We went to this discount place, kind of a seedy place, blinding fluorescence, in a strip right near where we work, and we went to the blanket department, and there were all these big blankets stuffed into clear plastic containers with snaps, some awful-looking, but some not so bad, and it was very strange, it was as if the two of us were a real couple shopping for a blanket. She poked around, looking at this and that, and I’d go, ‘What about this?’ and she’d feel it, make a judicious face, nod. But then, when she’d covered both aisles, she said, ‘No, I just don’t see any blanket with a fringe, I mean a real fringe. I think I better get back.’ I said, ‘No, we’ll go to another store!’ and she said, ‘Nah, the good stores will be closing by the time we get there. If there’d been a decent fringe available here, I could have helped you with the selection, but I think you’re on your own now.’ I went nuts. I started really hunting through those blankets, I was ready to call the manager over and have him go in the back. And god damn it if I didn’t find this little acrylic blanket, jammed behind on a high shelf, kind of a standard green-and-blue plaid thing, no beauty, let me tell you, but with a long thick twisted fringe. She looked at it, she touched it, and she blushed, and she said, ‘This one will do.’ So I marched right over to the register and bought it. There was a cardboard insert saying, you know, SEEDYCREST FIRST QUALITY ACRYLIC BLANKET, and there was this stock picture of a woman smilingly asleep under a blanket, and as we’re waiting for the woman to enter in the SKU number Emily and I both looked at this picture, and I’m telling you, nothing, anywhere, was as obscene as that picture on the blanket insert.”

  “How much was it?”

  “Ten bucks, something like that, I can’t remember. On an impulse, I bought a People magazine, too. So then we went back to the car, and the great lucky thing was, I’d been able to park craftily not right in front of the discount store, but to one side, a little ways down—we were driving in my car—and I’d parked almost directly in front of this video spot. The place hadn’t been too noticeable when we’d driven in, but now that it was darker it had the flashing lights on, video video video, it was the brightest thing in the whole mall. So I opened the door for her, and she got in, and I handed her the blanket in this enormous bag, and I said, ‘Hang on, I’ll be right back,’ and I darted into the video place and went to the adult section that they had sequestered away and I started looking over the boxes. I was out of breath, and my senses were so hyper-alert, I was scanning the boxes for ‘Atom’ ‘Atom’ ‘Atom.’ I knew I had to get only one single film, the right film, which seemed impossible, but I could feel myself surging forward on this irresistible surge of luck, and I found a couple of ‘Atom’ productions among all the Caballero Controls and the Cal Vistas and all the other little companies, and I rented this thing called Pleasure So Deep. I mean the title reeked of translation, it was perfect. I signed up for membership, rented the movie, was back in the car in five minutes. Emily was there leafing calmly through the People magazine. She said, ‘What did you get?’ and I said, ‘It’s called Pleasure So Deep.’ She made this little ‘Oh!’ and she said, ‘And you’re going to watch that tonight?’ I said, ‘Yes, I have to, I need to commit myself to a situation, you’ve totally convinced me.’ And she said, ‘Tell me again, so I have it clear in my mind. What you’re advertising for is a woman who wants to sit on the couch next to you and watch this movie and masturbate, right?’ She put her hand lightly on the box holding the tape. I said ‘Yep’ and she said, ‘Just that, nothing else, only that, nothing beside that, right?’ And I said, ‘Yes, just that. And I think I really have a shot at formulating the ad that will find someone who wants to do that, thanks to you. You helped me pick out the right blanket, and I think now I’ve got the right tape …’ Then I hesitated, and I said, ‘I think I’ve got the right tape, but still—that’s worrying me now. How will I know that the tape is really right, and which specific scenes on it are the ones …?’ By this time we’d pulled in the company parking lot right behind her car. She was either going to get out or not get out. I said, ‘Look, I’m at sea. I don’t know anything about imported sex movies. I really need your advice on this. I won’t be able to judge on my own. I won’t be certain.’ And I looked at her, and she looked at me, and, remember, I’d spent hours listening to her think out loud about Lee, and she said, ‘Okay.’ So we went to my apartment.”

  “Was it a good movie?” she asked. “Were there any statues?”

  “Statues? Ah, you mean statues? I don’t know if it was set in Rome or not. It was about this woman who seemed to be managing some kind of counterfeiting operation that stored the fake
money in caskets. In one scene she has sex with this guy who has a huge clownish yellow tie on with a U.S. dollar sign on it. Pointless, silly-but never mind, Emily was right, the fact that it was dubbed was outstandingly erotic. And the breasts really looked European somehow: not quite so corn-fed and symmetrical, but again maybe that was an illusion of the sound track.”

  “So you watched the movie, or you watched Emily? What was Emily wearing, by the way?”

  “She was wearing a skirt, and a short-sleeved sweatery thing, I think it was dark red, some kind of dark red with thin vertical gold stripes. Lovely small, proud, elegant breasts—I mean in the sweater.”

  “And you were in a jacket and tie?”

  “Yes. I let her into the apartment, and the way my apartment is laid out, there is a very short entryway with a kitchen that opens on the left, and then you’re immediately in the living room—so she walked ahead of me into the living room, and even though I was careful not to turn on any lights in there, still, there was the couch against one wall and there was the VCR on a table against another wall, and it was as if there was this phosphorescent dotted line connecting the two things, they were linked, nothing else in the room counted, and I saw her turn quickly toward me so as not to face the living room quite yet, and she put down the bag with the blanket—oh, I forgot one other important thing that happened in the car. I parked the car in back of my apartment building, and I went around and opened the door for her, and she handed me the bag with the blanket and People magazine in it, and then she got out, and then—and for some reason this seemed exactly right—she held her arms out for me to hand her the blanket bag again. It had become somehow hers to carry. I held the tape, she held the blanket. Anyway, she put the bag down in the middle of the living room, and she said, ‘So, will you give me the grand tour?’ And the conventionality of ‘grand tour’ showed how nervous she was, but she was one of those people who are improved by being nervous, you know?—who are nervous in a way that makes your detection of their nervousness seem like a privilege. So I showed her the kitchen, the bedroom, the bathroom—she nodded knowingly at the magnets on my refrigerator—beautifully nervous. I listed off what I could offer her to drink, and she said she wanted orange herb tea and she went in the bathroom. So I put two cups of orange herb tea in the microwave. Normally I make only one cup, of course, and I put it on two minutes, but I figured four minutes to handle the extra volume of water, but it was a bit too long, and the water was very hot. I walked out with the two teas and saw her again in the living room, with her back to me: she had been looking at the TV—it’s just a dinky Malaysian TV, somehow everybody still thinks that if you have a VCR, that means you’ve got to have a TV worthy of it—but I don’t know, I think maybe even the smallness was right for that evening. But anyway she slid her purse off her arm and put it on the rug next to an armchair on the wall farthest away from the couch, and took off her shoes and put them next to her purse—establishing a little separate non-couch locus for herself. I went into the bathroom for a second, and when I came out, she was sitting on the couch leafing through People in the dim light coming from the kitchen. I still hadn’t turned on any of the lights in the living room, because it would have been so uncomfortable to have to turn them off later. She half pretended to be startled out of reading an article when I clicked the TV on, with no volume, and she said something about Arsenio Hall. But the irrelevance of what she said made her smile, because she was sitting on the couch, and now the TV was on, and that tiny super high-pitched sound of electrically charged picture-tube glass, that sound that you can sometimes hear even if you’re walking along the street, if windows are open, that is the TV giving itself away, declaring itself, even with the volume off, that sound that your ear seems to be able to hear better and better in the evening, or appreciate better, that means privacy and at-homeness and closed curtains and secrecy too, because it’s like when you snuck downstairs at six in the morning to watch The Three Stooges and kept the sound extremely low so your parents wouldn’t detect it, but you always worried that even though super high-pitched sounds don’t carry well at all, you thought it might travel upstairs and the knowledge that you were up and watching The Three Stooges would trouble their dreams—that sound was in the room with me and Emily, and even though it was just faces at a press conference on C-SPAN, we knew what it really meant. She pointed at her tea and she said, ‘On second thought, could you maybe plop a little bourbon or something in this?’ So I did. I put the tape in, and the VCR made its little swallowing sound, and I turned the sound up, and then there was, without even an FBI warning or anything, there was the logo, this blue word ATOM, with this wow-wow-wow-wow sine-wave kind of music that focused in on a note while the word ATOM focused too. There was a little stylized spirograph atom even—it was kind of moving to see this symbol which once meant progress and science fiction and chemistry and then the evils of radiation, and now it just means ‘Hey, you’re going to have to take this sex film very seriously, as seriously as anything that requires a linear accelerator to discover, I mean you can pretend to laugh, and think how funny and ridiculous, but you aren’t really going to laugh, because no matter how many times you see X-rated filmed sex in your apartment, just by renting a tape, it still will have the power to shock you a little bit, it’s still always miraculous, always a blessing.’ And then there was a preview. I handed her the controller and I said, ‘Fast-forward anytime something bores you.’ I’d forgotten about previews—all that fast editing, without any progression, and the sudden jolt of bouncing frans, then a sudden come-shot. I remember once going to an arty movie with Richard Dreyfuss in it, I think, a long time ago, called Inserts, that had an X rating, and wasn’t very good, by the way, full of the grimness that films get into when they try to make art out of porn, so uncheerful, but the thing about the experience was that it was a legitimate movie, but because of the X rating, it was playing in a porn theater, this was sometime in the seventies, and I remember seeing a man and a woman walking up the slight slope from the ticket booth ahead of me, holding containers of popcorn, because the popcorn stand, which normally was completely shut down, had been reopened in honor of this legit, name-star film, and the couple went through the opening so they could hear the bad electronic music, and they turned the corner, and then bang, they were in the darkness of the theater looking out over all those seats during the previews, which were of course previews of standard porn films, five or six of them, so on the screen there was this gigantic shot of somebody like Brigitte Monet sucking a huge horizontal cock, with loud squelching noises, and electronic octaves thumping away, and I saw the woman stop and flinch and grab her date’s arm and look at him pleadingly—‘You told me it wasn’t going to be this kind of thing!’—and her date made this awful horrified ‘I’m sorry’ face, and behind them I went ‘Tut tut tut’ in refined disapproval at what was on the screen, because I wanted both of them not to think they’d made a terrible mistake, I wanted her to still like him, I wanted women then, this was when I was maybe eighteen, to see why X-rated films were so wonderful, I still do in some ways, and it has happened, over the last fifteen years, with video, to a limited extent, though as you say you would still reach for the Victorian paperback if given the choice, and probably you are right—but I wanted to reassure this woman that it was okay, people like me were showing up at this theater, nonviolent normal intelligent men, it wasn’t the end of civilization—I made the disapproving sound even though the sight of the cocksucking wouldn’t have bothered me in the slightest if it were just me seeing it: I felt her tentativeness, and I wanted, sort of like a real estate agent who takes a special route to the house he’s showing that goes through the nicer, fancier streets, I wanted her to be squired gently toward the graphic image of a come-shot, and to have a good experience here, not to leave disturbed by male tastes, the same feeling I have sometimes when I see foreign tourists in some city I know walking around bewildered in some downtown area, and I can tell that they’re disappointed,
and l want to go up to them and say, ‘I know this is the standard guidebook thing you are doing, but forget it, this isn’t our city really, go see this neighborhood and that neighborhood’—I wanted chivalrously to save that woman from the giant crude cock of the coming attraction, just the same way I used to think when I was little of swimming up toward the surface holding a woman in trouble and letting her use my scuba mouthpiece, and carrying her up on the boat and taking off her wet cold wetsuit and toweling her off as she got her breath and shook her head at her close call.”