Vox: a novel Part 5

"That's right, you told me that. Well?"

"Well, we did spend an evening in my apartment," he said.

"The usual? You draped your best c.u.mmerbund over the lamp shade? She toasted you with the Koromex tube?"

"Something like that. But anyway, that was what I thought of when you asked me to look straight at my c.o.c.k and talk about it. I have to say, that was one of the more unsettling questions I've been asked in my life."

"Would you like to know whether I would find a tracing of your c.o.c.k arousing?"

"I would be curious about that, yes."

"I suppose it would depend on my mood. I might like to perform the tracing. If you traced my whole body, I might in exchange trace your pale Ramone ... This mouthpiece I'm talking into? Of the telephone?"

"Yes?"

"It's like a sieve. It's like those little filters you put over the bathtub drain. Sometimes I think with the telephone that if I concentrate enough I could pour myself into it and I'd be turned into a mist and I would rematerialize in the room of the person I'm talking to. Is that too odd for you?"

"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. "G.o.d, 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 c.o.c.k 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 cafe across the street and she said, *Why don't we go in there?' So over a pair of up-signal caffe 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 said, *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. .h.i.tting 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 p.o.r.nographic 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 cla.s.sic 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 s.e.x words or French s.e.x 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 s.e.x and act. And no L.A. boudoir interiors, no L.A. fireplaces reflected in L.A. winegla.s.ses, 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 p.o.r.no, 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 G.o.d d.a.m.n 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 t.i.tle 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 m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e, 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 s.e.x 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 s.e.x 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s-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 phosph.o.r.escent 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 d.i.n.ky 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 a.r.s.enio 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 gla.s.s, 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 s.e.x 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 s.e.x 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 p.o.r.n, 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 p.o.r.n 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 p.o.r.n films, five or six of them, so on the screen there was this gigantic shot of somebody like Brigitte Monet sucking a huge horizontal c.o.c.k, 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 rea.s.sure 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 c.o.c.ksucking 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 c.o.c.k 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."

" *Oh, thank you, Popeye, for saving me from that large low-born c.o.c.k!' "

"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 s.e.x 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 s.e.x-music starts going, and then instantly: cut to half-naked woman and man with c.o.c.k, 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 f.u.c.king in various ways.' It was the same scene, in fact-this Italian guy, whose name turns out to be Mario, has his amazingly long c.o.c.k between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s-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. p.o.r.n movies are almost always done with very repet.i.tive 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 c.o.c.k, 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 s.e.x 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 t.i.ts swinging around and a woman's hairdo swinging around while she rises up and down on some expressionless Eurod.i.c.k 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 c.o.c.k with her mouth slack. When a s.e.x 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 s.e.x with the heroine. She says something like, *Don't play around, just f.u.c.k 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and the little circling rhythm was slightly less constrained."

"What were you doing?"

"Whenever we were in a s.e.x 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 s.e.x 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 f.u.c.king, 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 c.o.c.ks 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 watched 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s. 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 c.o.c.k 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-c.o.c.k images, and I looked down at her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s, 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 c.o.c.ks. 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 s.e.xual 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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."

"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 s.e.xual 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! G.o.d! 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 c.l.i.toris properly, you can't really concentrate on what it feels like to hold her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, 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 m.u.f.fled-it's as if I don't feel the perimeter of my c.o.c.k 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 c.o.c.k?"

"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 c.l.i.t-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 c.l.i.toris is suddenly in close conference with my v.a.g.i.n.a, and I'm out of the loop. I like to think about c.o.c.ks in me, though. Also, yeah, I do unfortunately tend to get yeast complications from real s.e.x, inside s.e.x, the friction seems to cause them."

"Exactly! See that? Who cares about my c.o.c.k? It'll fend for itself. We're talking about your o.r.g.a.s.m. We're talking about your strummed o.r.g.a.s.m, 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 m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.es 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 m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e. 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 m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e, 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 soph.o.m.ore 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 f.u.c.king years that secret o.r.g.a.s.m of hers was acc.u.mulating 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 o.r.g.a.s.m. That's what *simultaneous o.r.g.a.s.m' should really mean-the awareness of all those women's o.r.g.a.s.ms 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 n.o.body 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 p.o.r.n 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 o.r.g.a.s.ms, 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 o.r.g.a.s.m 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 o.r.g.a.s.m 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 o.r.g.a.s.m, 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 m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed 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 a.s.s with my fingers splayed and hold your a.s.s 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 b.a.l.l.s around very fast on long strings while two men played percussion behind her, and the b.a.l.l.s 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 f.u.c.k me, and the two percussionists played the drums the whole time, and then they stopped drumming and naturally they f.u.c.ked 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 h.e.l.l, 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."

"But separate showers, no nudity."

"No, very chaste," she said.

"What was he doing when you got out of the shower?"

"He was peering inside a Venetian paperweight."

"Cla.s.sic. He'd obviously heard your shower turn off, and then he'd stood there, holding the paperweight to his face for ten minutes, so that you would be sure to discover him in that casual pose, appreciating your trinket."

"Quite possible. Anyhow, he sat in the kitchen and we talked rather formally while I made a spiral kind of pasta and microwaved a packet of creamed chipped beef-this is a great dish, incidentally, Stouffer's creamed chipped beef over any kind of pasta noodles-I have it about once a week. Lawrence made an elaborate pretense of being impressed by this super easy recipe, and when I poured the spirals from the drainer into a bowl he came over to where I was standing and he said, *I have to see this.' I was going to simply slice the packet of creamed chipped open and dump it over the spirals, which is what I normally do, but I was feeling sneaky, I'd just had a shower, and you know about me and showers, but I hadn't dithered, despite the major striptease fantasy I'd had at the circus, because obviously I couldn't, since a man was in my apartment, so I was feeling devious, and so I got out some olive oil and poured a little of it on the spirals, and he-he was definitely not in the know about cooking, and I'm certainly not much of a cook myself-but he said, *So that's how you keep them from sticking and clumping.' I stirred them up, and they made an embarra.s.singly luscious s.e.xy sound, and I just decided, f.u.c.k it, I've dressed this person, I'm feeding this person, I'm going to seduce this person, right now, today, so I said, I said, *How very strange,' I said, *I just remembered something I haven't thought of in years. I just remembered this kid in my junior high-you remind me of him in some ways-I just remembered his commenting that a certain girl must have used olive oil to put on her jeans.' Well, I saw Lawrence's little eyeb.a.l.l.s roll at this. He said something obvious about extra virgin cold pressed and he snuffied out a nervous laugh and I thought, yes, I am in charge here, I am going to see this person's p.e.n.i.s get hard, and even though I have a smoldering yeast problem and so can't really have full-fledged s.e.x I am going to have my way with this person somehow. It was probably that Venezuelan ball-twirling screamer that put me in that mood, now that I think back. I mean, I felt powerful and shrewd and effortlessly in control and everything else I usually don't feel. I cut open the packet of creamed chipped and I said, musingly, *My grandmother was very careful about money-she always used to say that she was as tight as the bark on a tree. And I used to think about what that really would feel like, whether bark does feel tight to the inner wood of the tree. I used to put on my jeans and take them off, thinking about that.' Lawrence said, *Really!' I said, *Yeah, although actually I didn't like my jeans to be at all tight, even then. I liked them loose. The appeal was the rough fabric, and the rough st.i.tching, very barklike, the appeal was of being in this sort of complete male embrace, but then when you took them off, being all smooth and curved.' Lawrence nodded seriously. So I said, making the leap, I said, *And when I started getting my legs waxed, which is quite an expensive little procedure, I also thought of that phrase, as tight as the bark on a tree, when Leona, my waxer, began putting the little warm wax strips on my legs and letting them solidify for an instant and ripping them off.' I said, *In fact, I just had my legs waxed yesterday.' Lawrence said, *Is that right?' and I said, *Yes, it's amazing how much freer you feel after your legs are waxed-it's almost as if you've become physically more limber-you want to leap around, and make high kicks, cavort.' I waited for that to sink in and then I said, *Leona's a tiny Ukrainian woman, and she makes this growly sound as she rips the strips of muslin and wax off, rrr, and when she's done both my legs and there's no more hurting, she rubs lotion into them, and it's a surprisingly sensual experience.' Lawrence was silent for a second and then he said, *I'm inexperienced with depilatory techniques. I've never known anyone who had her legs waxed.' I said, *Let's have dinner.' "

"What a tactician!"

"Not really. Anyhow, we had dinner, which was pretty tame. Lawrence had many virtues, he had a kind of bony broad-shoulderedness, and a deliberate way of blinking and looking at you when you spoke, and he was quite smart-he was a patent lawyer."

"Ah. Patent infringement?"

"Yes indeed. But he had no conversational skills at all. He was putty in my hands. No, I'm actually making myself seem more completely sure of my powers than I felt-but still, I was pretty much in control. I started asking him how electrical things worked-you know, like what shortwave radio was, and how cordless telephones worked, and why it is that at drive-ins now you can hear the movie on the FM radio in your car. And he was full of interesting information, once you jump-started him that way. But the thing was, I kept a faint racy undertone going in the conversation. For instance, I'd say, *What do you think those ham-radio bulls really talked about? Do you think some of them were secretly gay, and they left their wives asleep and crept down to their finished bas.e.m.e.nts in the middle of the night to have long conversations with friends in New Zealand or wherever?' He said, *I suppose it's a possibility.' And about the drive-ins I said things like, *It must be much more comfortable and private in drive-ins now, because you can close the window completely, you don't have that metal thing hanging there with the tinny sound, covered with yellow chipped paint, like a chaperone, you're not attached to anything around you, it's much more like being in a car on the expressway.' He said he didn't know exactly how drive-ins supplied the FM sound, because he hadn't been to a drive-in since he was eight years old, but he said that technically speaking it was an easy problem to solve, for instance there was a thing advertised in the back of Popular Science that picks up any sound in the room and broadcasts it to FM radios within several hundred yards, it's called a Bionic Mike Transmitter. I said, *Ooo, a Bionic Mike Transmitter!' He said, *Oh sure, it's this device that you can leave in this room, for instance, and it will broadcast any sound in the room to any nearby FM radio, if it's correctly tuned.' He said, *Of course it's advertised with a big warning about how it's not meant for illegal surveillance. But probably that's what it's used for.' I said, *You mean that whatever I did, whatever intimate private activity I engaged in, would be heard by the people swooshing by in the cars on the expressway?' He said, *If they were tuned correctly, yes.' I said, *Hmmm.' You see, my living room is on the second floor, about three hundred feet from a raised part of the expressway."

"In some eastern city," he said.

"That's right," she said.

"So what did Lawrence do when you expressed a keen interest in his description of the Bionic Mike Transducer?"

"Transmitter. He asked if he could have a fourth helping of creamed chipped beef. Then we were finished and I started to clear the table and he said, *I'll wash up.' I said, *No, forget it, I'll do it later,' but he said, *No no really, I like washing up.' So I said fine, and he clean