Nicholson Baker: Vox

“That’s an impossibility.”

“I will feast on that revelation for weeks to come.”

“It’s a secret, though, so …”

“ Up, it doesn’t go beyond this conversation. Out here we say everything, but in our lives, nothing. Out here you can tell me, just request me, to pull on the knot of my bathrobe until it falls open.”

“What kind of bathrobe is it?”

“White terry cloth. And you can just tell me, you can just say, ‘Jim, please lift the waistband of your gray underpants up to its extreme limit of stretch so that it clears your erection and then bring it around and hook it under your balls, and then take that Juggs magazine and use it to fan your overheated pop stand.’ And you know what? I would do it.”

“Well, yes, I could tell you to do all that, but I don’t know, those are important decisions you maybe ought to make for yourself.”

“And I could probably ask you to tell me anything about yourself and you will tell me.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“You told me the secret word you have for the adult male cock, anyway. Not for my cock, leave me out of it. For the one you think about on your own. See, see, this is what I need. I need to know secrets and have secrets and keep secrets. I need to be confided in. Each time you come alone and you don’t tell anybody, that’s a sexual secret. The event has taken place and only you know about it and you have ministered to yourself in exactly the way you wanted to and thought of exactly what you wanted to think about. And each of these thousands of times you have come alone constitutes a perfectly unique moment, with precisely this order of images and that fold of yourself being moved by your middle finger in just that way and that biting of lower lip with exactly that degree of force, all entirely private. I almost think that each one of the times a woman comes in private in her life has to continue to exist as a kind of sphere, a foot-and-a-E-cuhalf-wide sphere, in some ideal dimension, sort of like all the ovums you’ve got queued up in you, except these are … ovums of past orgasms, weird as that sounds, and I am this one viable spermazoid lurking around among them, and I would happily spend my life floating up to one after another of these unique orgasm spheres and looking inside and I’d be able to watch you make yourself come that one time.”

“I bet each one of these mystical spheres has a little window in it with a little Levelor blind that’s down almost but not quite all the way, right, that you creep up to and peer into, am I right?”

“Exactly, as if it’s a stylized cartoon bubble with a curved window drawn on it, and you’re naked in there, strumming like there’s no tomorrow. But no, actually it isn’t like simple voyeurism, I don’t think — it’s holier or more reverent than that, because when I’m in that mood I don’t want to exist. I don’t mean I want to kill myself, I mean that I’m a man and a man is a watcher and a watcher disturbs the purity of the event, so I don’t want to exist, I want to be faded away to almost nothing. And of course all other men are completely foreign, they aren’t allowed in this at all. When I’m very aroused I almost hate all other men. Sometimes when there’s a kissing scene in a movie, and the camera shows the actor and actress chomping away on each other’s gums, moyong, moyong, and then there’s this sudden folded-up piece of shaven male jaw skin, I feel a wave of disgust — what the fuck is he doing there, get him off the set! That’s not even to mention the bestial idiots in porn movies: this nice woman donating her perfect self to these horrible lascivious dumb fucks, with their suggestive evil laughs, and their intent lustful expressions, and their single-mindedness, and their constant diverting of the conversation around to sex. Get rid of them. One time I was in a store at the dirty-magazine rack and it was a little congested there and I reached sort of over this guy’s shoulder to get a copy of the magazine I wanted to look at— E-Cup or something — didn’t touch him, just reached over him, and the guy half turned his head and said in this psychopathic voice, but very soft, he said, ‘Stay away from me or I’ll cut you up.’ I said, ‘Sorry, sorry, I was just trying to get the magazine!’ And he said, ‘Well just stay the fuck away from me, okay?’ Now I’d never say that or threaten that but that guy’s reaction, when you’re at the magazine rack and you want to be the only one there, among all these lovely kindly wonderful naked women, is a reaction I can at least understand. These groups of buddies who go out and drink beer together at strip clubs — it’s totally mystifying to me that they would want to do that, have male company.”

“But women like men from time to time.”

“I know that, I realize that, and that’s how I trick myself into accepting men’s existence: women often imagine men when they come, so men have a reason to exist. In fact, this secondary deductive twist allows me to get aroused by stuff that doesn’t really arouse me, like for instance when you went into that catalog thing earlier about the row of male models in the warehouse with their cream horns popping out of their shorts, I could think to myself, okay, her arousal is supremely arousing to me, and this image she’s describing is the source or current expression of her arousal, and I could imagine your face thinking of those images, and therefore I was able to make them somewhat arousing to me. Like the religious nut who embraces the devil because it shows his utter humility before God — except I don’t go that far. Oh! I know what I meant to tell you.”

“What?”

“You know you mentioned that friend of yours reading you a romance novel all night? Okay, this is a good example of what I’m talking about. I went into this used bookstore one time, just to browse around, called Bonnie’s Books. But it wasn’t really the kind of place I thought it was going to be, it had hardly any old books, what it had was recently published pre-enjoyed books. A de-facto library. Shelf after shelf of these things, big thick historical romances, super neatly shelved, sometimes five or six copies of the same book side by side, Love’s Hurry, Love’s Eager Trial, Love’s Tender Fender Bender, all that kind of material, but even though there were multiple copies of these books, they weren’t identical, because every one of them had been read. They looked handled. All of their pages were turned. And turned by whom? Turned by women. My heart started going. I had entered this enchanted glade. I took a historical romance off the shelf, and I felt as if I were lifting a towel that was still damp from a woman’s shower. The intimacy of it! But it was long — no way I could ever read a book that long. So I put it back. There was a woman at the counter, maybe thirty-eight or forty, perhaps Bonnie herself. She’d read some of these books! I think I was the only one in the store — I knew she was aware of me — I’d smiled at her when I went in. I wanted her to see me looking at the historical romances. And then I went a little further up this one aisle, and I came to a huge trove of romance novels — hundreds and hundreds of them — all organized by the specific subseries, some of which are slightly softer core or harder core, you know, in some they’re allowed to say ‘he frisked his tongue over her navel’ and some they can’t. And I got to this set of red books, only about maybe fifty of them, called the Silhouette Desire series, and ‘desire’ is written in this luscious sloppy longhand, in a diagonal — Desire. Alarm bells started going off in my head, and I thought of going over to Bonnie and saying, ‘Um, do you know those Silhouette Desire books? Can you tell me which title in that series is the most arousing of all of them, in your judgment?’ But I could never have done that. And it didn’t matter anyway, because hundreds of female orgasms could be inferred from the books themselves — you didn’t need to harass any particular woman, you didn’t need to invade anybody’s privacy, you could just hold any copy and think of a woman holding it open with one hand, with her thumb and little finger. It was all there in the pliability and the thumbedness of the book itself — it practically shouted at you, ‘I have been near a clit as it underwent two orgasms.’ ”