Vox

by Nicholson Baker

  “Not to be repeated, or to be repeated?”

  “Not to be. A work friendship probably can’t handle more than one evening of parallel blanket masturbation without things flying out of control. I think that’s what Miss Manners would say, anyway. She did get over Lee—in fact, maybe Pleasure So Deep was what finally did it. She’s now going out with an academic and seems very happy. I haven’t told her that I’ve rented the movie twice since then on my own and relived that buildup. I was surprised to find that we’d actually only watched about half of it. And I also found, when I watched it through to the end, that it wasn’t as good later on—the movie was only good because she’d seen it, so the parts she hadn’t seen seemed flat. Well, not flat, there was some hot stuff, but I rewound and came to the scene where the woman says, ‘I’m talking about my own needs’ to the two men. Since we’re being truthful with each other, since we’re being truthful, I’ll tell you that that evening with Emily was probably the best sexual experience I’ve had, or at least one of the elite few. The sound of her breathing while she was biting the inside of her cheeks! God! And the sight of that blanket slowly sliding off her. And when she put her knees together. And it’s not like I haven’t done normal stuff here and there. But I don’t know, you slip inside, and that first moment is paradise, incomparable, but then you’re there working away, and you can’t see the clitoris properly, you can’t really concentrate on what it feels like to hold her breasts, what they look like when they move, you’re distracted, your brain is moving your hips, moving your torso, holding her soft hips—hey, it sounds good! But you know? When I come inside it feels mystical but muffled—it’s as if I don’t feel the perimeter of my cock anymore, because that’s merged with her, it’s melted away and all I feel is the technical interior conduit structure of the thing and the bulb of come swelling and all that—I lose a sense of outer boundaries. You know? Or do you prefer the physical presence of a cock?”

  “Well,” she said, “I mean, if one is in there, I’m not going to tell it to go away. But actually, it’s funny, it’s another little bit of clit-trickery. As I’m starting to get close to coming, and I’m with a man, I get this intense wish at a certain point to have him in me, but if I pull him up from what he’s doing and guide him in, that first moment is great, but then my whole area becomes, as you say, distracted—my clitoris is suddenly in close conference with my vagina, and I’m out of the loop. I like to think about cocks in me, though. Also, yeah, I do unfortunately tend to get yeast complications from real sex, inside sex, the friction seems to cause them.”

  “Exactly! See that? Who cares about my cock? It’ll fend for itself. We’re talking about your orgasm. We’re talking about your strummed orgasm, the joy of it, the triumph of it, the greatness of it. I think of that moment you described of you coming in the shower after swimming, with the hot and cold water, and it’s like I can hold out my hands and something tremendous and valuable is being dropped in my arms to hold.”

  “A folded blanket,” she said.

  “That’s it!”

  “I think it’s fair to say that you are interested in women masturbating,” she said.

  “Any woman masturbates anywhere, I want to know about it. No woman is anything but beautiful when she is masturbating. Any plainness or overweightness or boniness or even a character flaw, an ungenerousness or something, everything is part of the recipe of her particular transfiguration, everything bad is pressed out of her when she shuts her eyes tight and comes. There used to be a tiny ad that ran in a lot of men’s magazines, a half-inch-high ad, that had a shot of a woman lying back with what seemed to be, and it was very hard to tell at that scale, but what seemed to be her two middle fingers inside herself, and the headline was, I LOVE TO MASTURBATE. I probably came fifty times to that little ad. I’d look through at the full-page shots, but then when I was almost there, I would find this ad. You were supposed to send money to Mrs. Somebody in Van Nuys, and she would send you six hot photos and a pair of panties. Right, sure—I never sent off for them. But the ad was a tiny window onto something, onto an idea: because there is a Mrs. Somebody in Van Nuys, California, who does love to masturbate, there are lots of Mrs. Somebodys in fact, and she is not advertising herself in men’s magazines, she isn’t wasting her time with that, she is simply masturbating, right now, and that idea fills me with energy, it’s all I need from life, the notion that women are masturbating, and I don’t know when or where, but it’s going on. One time I drove all night back from college my sophomore year, and I shared the ride with this girl who was on my hall in the dorm who had a car, and it started to rain this mysterious warm rain … no, but I really did share a ride with her, totally uneventful, but just this past year, ten years later, we had a sort of reunion of the people who’d been on that hall that year, because it had been kind of a funny nice group, and this same woman sat next to me at dinner and told me in a low voice at one point that on that all-night trip, at six in the morning, while I was driving, and she was supposed to be fast asleep, that she’d made herself ‘comfortable’ in the back seat, just as we were going past the big GE plant in Syracuse. I said, Thank you, thank you, thank you for telling me. Ten fucking years that secret orgasm of hers was accumulating interest. Sometimes I think of myself up in a satellite, and I’m looking down at America, or anywhere, really, but I usually imagine America, and all these little lights are blinking on and off, and each one represents a woman’s orgasm. That’s what ‘simultaneous orgasm’ should really mean—the awareness of all those women’s orgasms simultaneously going on. Maybe the women who are reading while they come create a slightly different flare of infrared color than the ones who are imagining something or coming in their sleep. I see them all. There is the woman who put the anchovies on my pizza tonight, there is Jill at work, who I got the tights for, there is an overweight rural woman with greasy hair and a missing front tooth, but she doesn’t care about keeping her lip down over the gap, it feels too good to care, there’s nobody to feel self-conscious in front of and therefore she’s beautiful, and there is the thruway woman who hands you your ticket, and there’s Blair Brown coming, and Elizabeth McGovern, and that woman in the John Hughes movies, what’s her name, with the lovely mouth, and Jeane Kirkpatrick, and the porn stars too, but off-camera, Keisha and Christy Canyon—all these flares. Maybe it’s not a satellite, maybe it’s really a big black spy plane I’m in, and what’s this, you’re up here too, flying toward my fan-jet, surprise surprise.”

  “All that is somewhat indiscriminate of you, you know. You’re using me as a proxy for all women who are masturbating at this very moment.”

  “Well, that may have been the original motive for calling this number, but I have never talked like this to any woman before. You’re right, though, I can see that the idea of me suspended ten miles up over a dark twinkling continent, taking in the totality of female orgasms, might seem a bit indiscriminate. The fact is, I am indiscriminate. If I had called this number, and there had been a woman of extremely limited intelligence who responded to my voice, like say that one woman, Carla, who was on the line after you first came on, and she and I had entered our private code numbers and been transferred together into this ‘back room,’ and if she’d come, if I could have talked her through coming, that would have been a wonderful privilege and I would have come too and I would have hung up after twenty minutes feeling great. But that’s why talking to you seems like such a miraculous once-in-a-lifetime thing, because you are smart and funny and aroused and delightful—you are not representative. We’re actually talking! If you come on this phone with me, it will be, as far as I’m concerned, it will be the top item on Washington Week in Review, it will be bigger than anything your bearded friend who eats the meatball subs has ever experienced, it will be really something, because you get it, you understand, you have a complicated response to things, and, I mean, an orgasm in a complicated mind is always more interesting than one in a simple mind—maybe that’s not true, maybe sometimes
a simple mind is made subtler and finer as it comes, since that’s the most mental activity that’s gone on in there for a while—but I mean an orgasm in an intelligent woman is like a volcano in a mountain with a city built on the slope—you feel the alternative opportunity cost of her orgasm, you feel the force of all the other perceptive things she could be thinking at that moment and is not thinking because she is coming, and they enrich it. You still there?”

  “I’m just trying to feel my wrist tendon,” she said, “to see what it might have felt like for you. Actually, you know, there is a little muscle high up on the outside of my forearm that is moving, almost at my elbow. That’s the one that’s more visible in my case. Feels kind of interesting.”

  “Ooh, don’t say that or I’ll shoot.”

  “Hah hah! I like a man who knows what he likes. Do you want to hear what I thought about when I came in the shower yesterday?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll tell you. No, I know what I’ll tell you. First I’m going to tell you something else. First I’m going to tell you about how I masturbated in front of somebody. It’s short.”

  “By all means, tell me.”

  “Shall I tell you every nasty thing that comes into my head?”

  “Yes.”

  “I will then,” she said. “We went to the circus. It’s funny, it excites me quite a bit just to tell you that I’m going to tell you. Doing that is probably the best part. It’s just like that moment when you’re lumbering around on the bed to get into opposite directions to do sixty-nine, that feeling of parting my legs over a man’s face, before you put your hands on my back and pull me down, and my legs remember the feeling from the last time, the feeling of being locked into a preset position that is right for human bodies to be in, like putting a different lens on a camera, turning it until it clicks.”

  “And I,” he said, “would feel the mattress change its slope, first on one side of my head, and then the other, as the weight of one of your knees and then the other pressed into it, and I’d look up at you and open my mouth and I’d slide my hands over your ass with my fingers splayed and hold your ass and pull you down to my tongue.”

  “Kha.”

  There was a pause.

  “You there?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me about the circus.”

  “Okay. Excuse me. I’m going to have to get a fresh towel pretty soon. This guy took me to the circus.”

  “The guy with the fancy stereo?”

  “Another guy,” she said. “It wasn’t Ringling Brothers, it was some smaller-scale South American circus, with lots of elephants, and lots of women in spangles riding the elephants. It was incredibly hot in the tent, and everything had this reddish tint, because the sun was bright enough outside to make it through some of the tent seams, and I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt but I was soaked, and so was Lawrence, who was also wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and so was everyone around us, including the performers. There was some Venezuelan act in which a woman spun hard balls around very fast on long strings while two men played percussion behind her, and the balls smacked against the floorboards in interesting rhythms around her legs, and she was streaming with sweat, and quite beautiful, but in a way that I thought was vaguely like me, and suddenly the two men would stop hitting the drums and she would freeze and make this kind of trilling scream, a beautiful strange wild sound. She was just covered with sweat, she looked really wild, and the two men behind her were exceedingly good-looking, wearing wide-brimmed black hats with chin straps, and I momentarily wanted to be her, and while they were taking their bows I adapted my time-tested striptease fantasy, and I thought that I was this woman in the black spangles, and I was spinning these balls very fast, faster than she could, so they were a blur, so fast that somehow, like in a cartoon fight when it’s just a blur from which things, pieces of clothing, fly outward, somehow my whole outfit was torn in pieces from my body, and flung out into the audience, so that when the drumming stopped and I froze suddenly and made my trilling scream, I was totally naked, and all these pieces of my costume were still floating aloft in all directions, and each man who caught some damp shred of costume was overpowered and took his place in line to fuck me, and the two percussionists played the drums the whole time, and then they stopped drumming and naturally they fucked me too. But that’s just an aside. The elephant acts were what were interesting. I’ve ridden on an elephant once or twice in my life, when I was small, and I remember touching the big lobes of its head, and let me tell you, the skin is not smooth, it’s warm and dry and quite bristly—that’s how I remember it, anyway. And these were not little elephants, these were big old elephants, with big tusks. Well, these women were sliding down the side of the elephants, riding on the elephants heads, with their legs between the elephants’ eyes, and repeatedly pivoting around on their bottoms on the elephants’ backs, and they were wearing flesh-colored stockings, or tights, so it was not skin to skin, but even so, those little leotards are cut extremely high in the back, and I really started to be concerned about their bottoms, about whether they were more uncomfortable than their smiles let on, and I started thinking about whether if I were dressed in a very high-cut leotard I would like the sensation of the elephant’s dry living skin on my bottom, and then, during the beginning of the very last big elephant promenade, one of the women was riding on the elephant’s back with one leg in the air, and as the elephant turned I saw this woman’s bottom, and even through the tights I could see that it was in fact red! She was the main elephant woman, I think. Anyhow, for the big finale she rode around on this elephant’s tusks for a minute or two, sat on his trunk, fine fine, all gracefully executed but surprisingly suggestive, and then she did this thing that really shocked me. She took hold of one of the tusks and one of the ears, or somehow swung herself up, and then she lifted one of her knees so that it went right into the elephant’s mouth, and she waited for a second for the elephant to clamp on to it, and then she threw her head back, and arched her back, and spread her arms wide, so she was held in the air supported entirely by her knee, which was stuffed in the elephant’s mouth! I mean, think about the saliva! Think about those elephant molars that are gently but firmly taking hold of your upper calf and your mid-thigh, while this elephant tongue is there lounging with its giant taste-buds against your knee! The elephant did a full turn while she was swooning like this. Then she got down and took a bow and patted the elephant under his eye.”

  “Wow, that’s better than King Kong.”

  “Well I was impressed. Lawrence had come up with the idea of going to the circus—this was our very first time out, by the way, though I’d known him for a while—so he was careful not to be too impressed. While we were walking out to the car he said, ‘I guess those elephants really respond to training.’ He thought the elephant wasn’t biting the woman’s leg, but rather that its tongue was actually hooked under her knee. I was dubious, but it was an interesting idea. It was touching to see how pleased Lawrence was that I’d liked the circus. We were standing out by my car in the parking lot, just drenched with sweat, he was plucking at his shirt and squinting at me, and we were supposed to go to this clam-shack place and have an early dinner on a picnic table outside, and I just didn’t want to do that. So I thought what the hell, and I said, ‘You look hot. Why don’t you come back to my apartment and you’ll have a shower, and I’ll have a shower and then I’ll make some dinner and we’ll do the clam shack another time, okay?’ He agreed instantly—he was delighted to have the responsibility for the success of this date taken out of his hands. So he had a shower, and I happened to have a pair of very baggy shorts with an elastic waistband that fit him fine, and a big T-shirt, and then I had a shower, and I put on a pair of shorts and a dark red T-shirt, and everything was fine.”