Nicholson Baker - Vox

“So did you buy one of these Silhouette Desire books?” she asked. “ Love’s Tender Gender Bender? ”

“Can you hold on for just a second? I have to get it.”

“I guess so, sure.”

There was a pause.

“It’s called Beginner’s Luck, ” he said, “by Dixie Browning, and it’s singled out by the publisher as a quote ‘Man of the Month’ volume. Not only is it heavily thumbed, but the woman who owned it before I did spilled water or gin or something on it, so that it’s all wavy. It’s got a permanent wave. You can imagine.”

“Whew.”

“As I was driving home I was so still from owning this pre-enjoyed book that once when I was stopped at a stoplight and I saw a woman in my rearview mirror I made a very small clit-circling motion with my fingers on the roof of my car, despite the bird droppings up there— the idea that she might notice and understand what this motion meant made me feel faint with excitement — but she was expressionless. Anyway, I took the book home and read it, and you know what? It was good! Not only did it give me a partial erection on two occasions, I actually got tears in my eyes toward the end! It’s about a man and a woman in a cabin in the woods. He’s a klutzy scientist, she helps him get less klutzy and finally gets him to shave off his beard and it turns out that when he’s cleaned up he’s irresistible and despite being unschooled in the ways of love he is successful in bringing her to a fever pitch. Good stuff. I mean I probably won’t reread it very soon, but when you think of some of the stuff that passes for highbrow these days, you’ve got to admire it for hanging back so humbly in the genre category. But never mind that. I finished the book, and I pictured the woman who owned the book finishing the book, with her normal flannel nightgown on — she switches out the light, she closes her eyes, she switches on the alarm — and then I turned the last page of the book, and there were more pages, there were four or five pages of promotion, upcoming titles, etcetera, and I turned to this one page. You ready? I’m going to read it to you. It says, ‘You’ll flip … your pages won’t! Read paperbacks hands-free with BOOK MATE I. The perfect “mate” for all your romance paperbacks. Traveling, vacationing, at work, in bed, studying, cooking, eating.’ Did you hear that ‘in bed’ in the middle there? It’s squirreled away in a nonsexual list, legitimized, like those gigantic massager wands that are always accompanied by catalog copy that talks about relieving aching muscles and lower back pain, when what we’re all really talking about is women making themselves come in bed. What this Book Mate is is this rigid-backed thing to which you strap the book using this quote ‘see-through strap.’ There’s nothing the book can do, it’s powerless — it’s strapped wide open — open for all the hungry eyes of the world to admire. The ad says, ‘This wonderful invention makes reading a pure pleasure! Ingenious design holds paperback books OPEN and FLAT so even wind can’t ruffle pages — leaves your hands free to do other things.’ And that’s the page of this book Beginner’s Luck that I finally masturbated to: the thought of a woman reading that this invention will leave her hands free to do other things, and the thought of her ordering it and then maybe holding the strapped-open book between her bent knees so she can read the crucial page of pleasure while she goes to town down there … needing to have both her hands free to do other things … ho God! The problem is, though, that you yourself almost certainly don’t find any of this arousing.”

“No, well,” she said, “I find it mildly arousing, for the very reason you already said — it’s something that’s arousing to you.”

“But there’s the thing,” he said. “If you only find it mildly arousing because I found it exceedingly arousing, then I have to cancel my strong arousal and replace it with mild arousal, since the degree of your arousal is the primary source of my arousal. And then, the problem is, you’ll find it only infinitesimally arousing and I’ll then have to discard it as a total turnoff. That’s the problem.”

“We have to find a middle way,” she said.

“The middle way is for you to tell me the last thing you thought of that made you pay some attention to your candy corn.”

“I liked the story you told about the jeweler pretty well.”

“No no, before tonight. Whenever the last time was you made yourself come.”

“Last night. I really don’t remember. These are fleeting things.”

“Oh, you do remember.”

“I was in the shower.”

“Wait a second. Okay. You were in the shower.”

“What did you just do?” she asked.

“Nothing. My underpants were starting to bug me. Go on.”

“I was in the shower, which is almost always the place I come best. In college there were very nice marble showers, with high showerheads, and the water, the shape of each drop of water, was exactly right, fat soothing generous drops, but billions of them. I came many many times in those showers.”

“Public showers, you mean?”

“No no, private,” she said. “This little high marble box, with a marble foyer. It was very loud, and sometimes when the water collected and flowed together down my arm and between my legs and then fell from there it made this almost clacking noise on the tile. The dorms were coed, so potentially there was a man from my hall in the next shower over, but that didn’t interest me. I used to take showers at odd times of the day anyway, when the bathrooms were deserted. One-thirty in the afternoon. I’d go to class, and I’d start drawing in the margin of my notebook, and I’d draw a little curve, and I’d think, hm, a curve, and then I’d turn it into a breast, and I’d make it a bit larger, and then I’d make another one, and then I’d draw a pair of hands holding the breasts from behind — that was always an idea that interested me, that I’d be sitting in some class or auditorium, dimly lit, an architectural history lecture, with slides, and a person sitting behind me would reach his hands forward and take hold of my breasts, pulling me back against the chair. So by the time I’d drawn those hands and those large breasts I really had to come, and I’d walk briskly back to my brown marble shower. I read something about river gods that excited me, too. Really, back then I’d put out for any body of water at all — a pool or a bath or a pond, or an ocean. We rented a house on the Carolina coast for several summers, this was when I was in junior high school, and I’d go swimming in the ocean, and as soon as I was in the water I’d want to dither, I’d swim far out and I’d think of the tons and tons of water underneath my legs, but of course I couldn’t because there were lots of people swimming, so I’d come in the shower — oh, and that was an especially good kind of shower too because it was outdoors, in this wooden shed, and I had this freezing cold bathing suit on, which I would take off in the shower, and because the suit was cold my nipples were erect, as in your wet T-shirt contest, and I was stripping in the warm shower water, I’d slowly strip off this cold bathing suit, very pleasant to have the warm mingle with the cold, so that sometimes I could feel cold rinsing down my legs and sometimes warm, and I could hold the suit open and let the water fill it so that warm was just pouring out around my legs, that was nice, so my skin was all confused and very aware of itself, with the steam rising — oh, and there was a little metal mirror, I guess it was a shaving mirror, in this shower enclosure, which would get steamed up, even though I was outside. It was on the left wall as you faced the showerhead, which in this case was quite low. And after I’d taken off my swimsuit I’d hang it up on the nail next to the shaving mirror, and the sight of it all crumpled and dangling there was exciting, because it implied my complete full nudity, and when the shaving mirror got steamed up, I used to draw a pair of breasts on it in the fog with my fingers. The glass was cold. I wanted to press my breasts against the mirror, but it was too high for that, but I imagined myself pressing my breasts against this little mirror, so first squeezing them together and then pressing them against the mirror, and I’d just seen something on TV about one-way mirrors, so I thought of men in the garden being able to see my breasts stuffed flat against the foggy mirror. Once I even brought in some lip gloss after my swim and spent a long time putting lip gloss around my nipples and soaping it off.”