Vox

by Nicholson Baker

  “ ‘Oh, thank you, Popeye, for saving me from that large low-born cock!’ ”

  “Exactly. Anyway—do you still want to hear this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Anyway, there was the preview, which was for some terrible-looking post-Caligula post-Devil in Miss Jones kind of movie, with lots of gratuitous grotesquerie, stuff I hate, torchlit sets, dwarves, but in the midst of that stuff of course there were, bang, these shocking pure normal sex scenes, whose abruptness I felt through Emily, because Emily was my guest on my couch watching them. Then the preview was over, and the ATOM logo came on and focused itself again, and I looked over at her. She was looking straight at the TV—the light from the kitchen was behind her profile—and she had her legs crossed, and one of her forearms was resting on her stomach, and her tea was in her left hand. Her skirt was pleated. She looked so exceedingly clothed. She lifted the mug, and I could see her lips meet it—the water was still too hot, so she had to do one of those long inward sips that makes the liquid lift off from the surface into a tea aerosol, and her eyes narrowed when she felt the fine hot spray of it touch the tip of her tongue. And then the movie began—Pleasure So Deep. It starts with a maid who hears a tinkling bell and takes something on a tray to a man and they talk for a second and then she walks away.”

  “Have you rented this movie since then?” she asked.

  “Twice. It’s also one of the three I rented tonight, which I’m probably not going to watch. Much more fun telling it to you. Anyway, the maid walks away, and then this thin Europop electronic sex-music starts going, and then instantly: cut to half-naked woman and man with cock, with dubbed moans. The woman is in her late thirties maybe, very attractive, with her hair pinned back. Emily watched this for maybe a minute, and then she looked over at the windows and she said, ‘Are you sure people can’t see in?’ I do have curtains, but I honestly wasn’t sure if people could possibly see in or not, and my apartment is on the first floor, on the side of the building, so it was a legitimate concern, so I hopped up again and got my keys and said I’d be back in a second, and I went outside and tried to look in my windows, and it was surprisingly secure: not only could you not see Emily or anything in the room, you couldn’t even tell the TV set was on, I guess because it’s a small set. So I went back in and sat down, slightly out of breath, and told her that you couldn’t see a thing from outside. She said, ‘Great, thanks.’ I said, ‘What’s happened so far?’ and she said, in a slightly unnatural voice, ‘The woman and her lover have been fucking in various ways.’ It was the same scene, in fact—this Italian guy, whose name turns out to be Mario, has his amazingly long cock between her breasts—I remember seeing that image and immediately turning to Emily and watching her eyes: every time there was a cut, I could see her eyes make a tiny movement to find the center of gravity of the next image. Porn movies are almost always done with very repetitive cuts back and forth between two or three camera positions, so I knew what the images were and yet I could watch Emily’s eyes: say the alternation was between a close-in shot of the woman’s head bobbing as she was sucking the cock, and then a farther-back shot showing that she was kneeling on the bed holding her hair out of the way of the camera and he was lying on his back, A B A B, and I could see the mixture of colors change on Emily’s iris, and I could see it make these exact little adjustments. The miracle of sight. She had an expression of very alert frowning amused distaste. When that scene was over, I said, ‘What do you think so far?’ I just wanted to hear her voice. And she said, ‘As it happens, I’ve seen this movie before, about a year ago.’ Then we watched maybe three sex scenes silently. Maybe more. Once I asked some question like ‘Is that one of the counterfeiters?’ And she said, ‘Yes.’ Otherwise we were totally silent, while these hardworking Europeans struggled and jacked and sucked and moaned and came in English in front of us. The men came, anyway. It’s still a rarity to see a woman, really come on a video, as opposed to thrashing around. There was more of the dimensionless electronic Europop music. After one giant come-shot Emily put her tea down and took a deep breath and puffed out her cheeks and smiled. I laughed with relief. I said, ‘Is it as you remembered it?’ And she said, ‘I’m a little chilly.’ So I unsnapped the plastic cover of the blanket and unfolded this big acrylic plaid thing and put it over her, but l did it wrong, evidently, because she said, ‘Could you turn it this way?’ and she showed me how she wanted it. So I tucked her in with the fringe of the blanket running under her neck. Then I sat down again, focused on the movie, and again there was the jolt—you have a moment of two fully clothed work friends in a living room adjusting a blanket, and I’m stuffing two of its corners behind her shoulders, probably the first time I’d ever touched both of Emily’s shoulders at the same time, absolute coziness, we should have been talking about the very first birthday we could remember or something, and then we turn to the TV and there are tits swinging around and a woman’s hairdo swinging around while she rises up and down on some expressionless Eurodick and we’re hearing ‘Oh Mario Mario!’ After a little while there were some movings around under the blanket, and then it started to shake, sort of. She didn’t say anything, she didn’t even change her breathing, she was keeping it very steady. Her mouth was closed. She said, ‘Could you do me a favor and hold the blanket for a second so it doesn’t slide down?’ So I held it in place while she lifted her hips and moved around some more, frowning. Her face was fairly close to mine but we didn’t have eye contact. Then her panty hose appeared from under the bottom of the blanket, with her underpants still nested in it, and then her feet disappeared again. She said, ‘Thanks,’ and took hold of the top of the blanket. Again the slight fast movement underneath. Her mouth opened slightly, and I could see her tongue pushing against her lower teeth, and she made these very subtle little movements with her lip—not twitches, that sounds too obvious and uncontrolled, just these very controlled barely perceptible sudden movements, as if several times she were on the verge of saying something that began with the word ‘you.’ On the TV a woman was making her fist go up and down on a cock with her mouth slack. When a sex scene ended, Emily’s blanket would stop. We got to the scene where the guy with the wide yellow tie with a dollar sign on it has sex with the heroine. She says something like, ‘Don’t play around, just fuck me,’ and so he does. This scene really got to Emily, and she took the blanket in her teeth so she could have both hands free and yet have it over her, so now there were these loomings as her left hand moved back and forth between breasts, and the little circling rhythm was slightly less constrained.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “Whenever we were in a sex scene, I mean in the middle of watching one, I would slip my hand under my belt and press on myself, through my underpants. When the sex scene was over, I took my hand out and rested it decorously on my leg. Anyway, this scene with the man with the yellow tie with the dollar signs really aroused her, and when it was over she took the blanket out of her teeth and wiped her mouth with the back of her right hand, spitting out some of the blanket fuzz, and in the TV light I could see that her two fingers were all shiny from stroking herself. We waited through the filler stuff, we didn’t care about dialogue or cars driving or any of that, now we both wanted to see fucking, period. The next scene was two women and a man. Halfway through, it threatened to be a lesbo scene, and I saw Emily’s blanket vibrate with less conviction and then stop. She needed to see cocks at work. Fortunately it didn’t turn out to be a lesbo scene—one of the women was content to strum quietly on the sidelines. Emily’s blanket began moving fast. But this time she didn’t have it in her teeth, it was loose over her, so her movements began to pull it down. I watched the fringe say good-bye to her throat, and begin to travel slowly over her bunched-up sweater, and over the bunched-up bra under that, and then the individual fringe things fanned out and conformed to her breasts and slipped off them. The slow descent finally stopped at the waist of her skirt. I was a little hesitant to watch her directly now; I wat
ched her more out of the corner of my eye: I saw her squeeze one nipple with a finger-do-the-walking kind of movement, and then her hand moved to the other breast. This was her left hand. And no oohs and ahs, everything quiet, just breathing, sometimes her mouth open slightly, sometimes closed. Once she pressed her lips together and bit them. Certain signs also made me think that at times she was biting the insides of both her cheeks. I could tell now exactly how her legs were positioned—they were somewhat apart, the blanket drooped between them, and the back of her hand was making the blanket move freely—but that wasn’t the thing that got me. What got me was, her whole arm was now visible, her whole right arm, and the fringe intersected with it just at the wrist, which was arched, reaching down, circling, and the thing was that I could see her long beautiful forearm tendon pulling and pulling, controlling her fingers. I just kept watching this. Then the scene ended; I pulled my hand out of my pants, Emily crossed her arms over her breasts. She whistled a little, mock casually. Three wet fingers rested on her arm. We waited. More filler. The heroine goes into an office with two men we haven’t seen before, both in business clothes. They think she is charging them with cheating her in the payment for the counterfeit money. She says something like ‘Gentlemen, I’m talking about my own needs.’ And suddenly two men with ties on are standing on either side of her, and she’s sitting in a straight-back chair wearing white stockings, and she’s sucking one and then the other. Emily whispered, ‘That’s it,’ and her hands both now slid under the fringe. And then she whispered, ‘Do you want some blanket?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ so she held on to her half so that it didn’t slide off her any more and I pulled some of it over me, so we were both covered from the waist down. I undid my belt and pants and pushed off my clothes. We were both stroking ourselves, and I could feel against the back of my hand the blanket pulling with her little movements as I made mine. I sort of clamped the blanket against the top of my cock with my thumb so that I’d stay decent and yet have my left hand free, and I looked over at Emily’s face, and watched her eyes traveling over those double-cock images, and I looked down at her breasts. I wanted to touch them, but I knew this would complicate things, it would have been a mistake. I could have come anytime. But suddenly the scene ended—one man suddenly comes on the woman’s face and breasts, the other pulls out and comes on her bush, with strikingly white sperm. Emily wasn’t fazed. She said, ‘Do you mind if I rewind a little?’ I said no, so she rewound it and replayed some of the two cocks. When it started playing, she said, kind of softly, ‘I think I want to come to this scene.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ But again the scene ended too quickly for her, and she had to rewind it a third time. This time, I just looked at her, she was flushed, her cheeks were shiny, she looked so transformed and sexual and elegant, and I looked down and both her hands were converging under the blanket, both wrists arched, so that her arms sort of pushed her breasts in from the sides, and I said, ‘Can I touch your arm?’ and she nodded, and I put my fingertips very lightly on the inside of her forearm, just above her wrist, and I felt her tendon going and going as she stroked herself, and this indirect feeling of being able to take the pulse of her masturbating was too much, I said, ‘I think I’m going to come,’ and I started to come into the blanket, and when the first guy in the movie came on the heroine, Emily closed her legs and started to come herself, and when the second guy came on the heroine, Emily was still coming, but not with any thrashing around, very focused, but I could hear the shaking of her legs slightly in her breathing. It was really a wonderful experience. She picked up her panty hose and after I’d stowed myself away she wrapped the blanket around herself and I escorted her to the bathroom, holding the spermy corner like a footman so that it wouldn’t fall against her skirt. Then l drove her back to her car. We kissed ceremonially, and she said, ‘Thanks, Mario.’ I sent her an asterisk memo the next day. And that was it. A perfect evening, perfect.”