Nicholson Baker - Vox

“I don’t think it really was,” she said. “It was just interesting, an interesting sexual fact, like something in Ripley’s. I’m not, by the way, to get back to your story for a second, I’m not wearing a black undershirt under my shirt.”

“What are you wearing under your shirt?”

“A bra.”

“What kind of bra?”

“A nothing bra. A normal, white bra bra.”

“Oooo!”

“It’s shrunk slightly in the wash but it was my last clean one.”

“It’s always impressive to me that bras have to be washed like other clothes. Does it clip on the front or on the back?”

“The back.”

“Shouldn’t it come off?”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“Oh, I can hear in your voice the sound of you frowning and pulling in your chin to look down at them! Oh boy.”

“Hah hah!”

“The idea of women looking down at their own breasts drives me nutso. They do it while they’re walking. Some walk with their arms sort of hovering in front of their breasts, or awkwardly crossed in front of them, or they pretend to hold the strap of their pocketbook so their hands are bent in front of them, or they pretend to be adjusting their watch, or their bracelets, and the fact that even fully clothed the helpless obviousness of their breasts is embarrassing to them drives me absolutely nutso. ”

“They see you staring, with your eyes sproinging out of your skull, of course they’re embarrassed.”

“No, I’m very discreet. And this is only in certain moods, of course. Once I got into a wild state just standing at a bus stop. It was rush hour, and there were all these women driving to work, and they would drive by, and I would get this Hash, this briefest of glimpses, of the wide shoulder strap of their safety belt crossing their breasts. That thick, densely woven material, pulling itself tight right between them. That’s all I could see, hundreds of times, different colors of dresses, shirts, blouses, over and over, every bra size and Lycra-cotton balance imaginable, like frames of a movie. By the time the bus came, I was literally unsteady, I could barely get the fare in the machine. What’s that noise?”

“Nothing. I was just changing the phone to the othe ear.”

“Oh,” he said. “Did you see that thing about the Chinese kid who suffered an episode of spontaneous human combustion?”

“No.”

“You really missed something. It was originally in one of the tabloids, I think, but I heard about it on the radio. You know about spontaneous human combustion, right?”

“I’m familiar with the general concept.”

“All right, well this kid apparently spontaneously human combusted, but the combustion was confined to his genitals. Boom! He was very uncomfortable. But see, I understand perfectly how that could happen. I fear for my own genitals sometimes. I get so fricking horny … now there’s another inadequate word … so porny, so gorny, so yorny … I get so yorny that I look down at my cock-and-balls unit, and it’s like I could take the whole rigid assembly and start unscrewing it, around and around, and it would come off as one solid thing, like a cotterless crank on a bicycle, and I would hand it over to you to use as a dildo.”

“Okay then, hand it over. Although I’ve never cottoned to dildos particularly. I used one once, to oblige someone, and I got a yeast infection. I think it was called a ‘Mighty Mini Brute.’ ”

“That’s a fair description of my … crank.”

“I know what you mean, though. Sometimes I get the same way, so worked up. My clit gets hard and it feels like this discrete wedge item, like a piece of candy corn, and I feel as if I should put it in a little wooden box for safekeeping. I usually like to come in the shower.”

“Mm! Shouldn’t that bra come off, really?”

“No it really should not, and I’ll tell you why. When I dither myself off … no, I don’t want to tell you.”

“Please, yes you do, please tell me, yes you do, please, right now.”

“When I masturbate and I’m not in the shower, I need my breasts to be tended to, but, boo-hoo, there’s nobody to tend to them, so what I do is I pull my bra down so that the edge of it catches under my nipples, and then they’re all taken care of, and I can use both hands to tend to matters below.”

“This is a miracle,” he said.

“It’s just a telephone conversation.”

“It’s a telephone conversation I want to have. I love the telephone.”

“Well, I like it too,” she said. “There’s a power it has. My sister’s little babe has a toy phone, which is white, with horses and pigs and ducks on the dial, and a blue receiver that has no weight to it at all, and I find there is an astonishing feeling of power when you pretend to be talking to someone on it. You cover the mouthpiece with your hand and you say in this dramatic whisper, ‘Stevie, it’s Horton the Elephant on the phone. He wants to speak to you!’ and you hand it over to Stevie and his eyes get big and you and he both for that second believe that Horton the Elephant really is on the phone. And then you get two phones going. Stevie’s on the white phone with the ducks and pigs, and I’m on the yellow phone with the wheels and the eyes that move when you pull it along the Floor, and I ask how Stevie’s doing and have a little conversation with him and then I say, ‘Stevie, would you like to speak to Paul? ’ And Stevie says yes. Paul is a relative — this happened last time I was back home — and Paul, who’s sitting right there, gets this startled look, his hand automatically flies up to take the tiny plastic phone that I’m handing to him, he interrupts whatever real conversation he’s been having and he says, ‘Hello?’ and his smile is very complicated — he almost believes. ”

“That’s right!” he said. “And here I am talking to you, and you truly are somewhere on the East Coast, and you’re wearing a bra!”

“Amazing as it may seem. What other words do you have for the things I’m looking down at right now and admiring?”

“Other words for breasts? Frans is the main one. Sometimes … frannies. Frans, nans, and Kleins. And I never thought ‘ass’ fit. Sometimes I think of a woman’s ass as a ‘tock.’ ”

“So then it follows that she has a ‘tockhole’ as well?”

“I never pushed it that far.”

“Kleins is strange. ‘I’m squeezing my big fleshy Kleins’? You sure?”

“I don’t know, I think Patsy Cline is a sexy name. I don’t even know who she is.”

“She’s a singer.”

“I know that much. Once I looked down the list of Kleins in the phone book and found one with a woman’s name spelled out, and God, it was everything I could not to call that number. In fact, I did call the number, and she answered, and I said, ‘Oh gosh, I must have the wrong number.’ And yet the Kleins I’ve known in real life haven’t been surrounded by a mysterious sexual power.”

“It’s that telephone.”

“Your last name isn’t Klein?”

“No,” she said. “But I will tell you something.”

“What? What? What?”

“Occasionally when I’m just about to reach an orgasm I … I think of it as a ‘Delgado.’ ”

“Think of what as a Delgado?” he asked.

“The erect male cock.”

“Oh, oh. Sorry.”

“It’s because I was infatuated with a boy named Delgado in high school. So when you said something about, something about your ‘sperm-dowel’ earlier, I misheard for a second, and I felt this rush of blood — I thought you were using my secret word.”

“Now see that is what I live for, for someone to tell me something like that. I need that to happen to me every minute, every second.”