Nicholson Baker - Vox

“God, car washes must have driven you wild.”

“Car washes. I did like that one part at the end, where the felt flappers drag over you, but no, not really — it was very rare that my family took the car to the car wash. Almost never. Oh, but I do remember one thing I used to imagine — I imagined that I shared a ride back home from college with someone I didn’t know, and we get caught in a terrible tropical monsoon of some kind, and his windshield wipers don’t work, and so I have to go out on the hood of the car and take off my top and kneel there and hold on to the antenna and kind of sop my breasts over the windshield just so he can drive. Actually, that wasn’t something I thought of very much, that was just a one-shot deal.”

“There are strong evolutionary pressures on fantasies, aren’t there?” he said. “If it doesn’t work, and if it doesn’t metamorphose itself into something that does work, it doesn’t survive.”

“Yeah, even in the buildup to one orgasm, it’s a kind of bake-off. You think: two cocks, each one poking from under one of my armpits, sperm squirting from them? Yes or no. No. I’m a geometry teacher measuring boys’ penis length? Yes or no. No. Am I a nurse at a fertility clinic and my job is to strip for clients who have difficulty coming and then suck their cocks and let their sperm drip from my tongue into a test tube? No. I’m in a dressing room and some native-Hawaiian security guard is watching me try on blue jeans over the video monitor? Ooh, maybe yes. In fact it’s kind of like getting dressed for a party, and being unsure of what to wear right up to the last minute, and frantically trying on one image after another like clothes, not knowing which combination looks really good, and it’s getting later and later, and then finally you pull out this wonderful dress, with some rich pattern, and you slip it on, and ah, you can come.”

“Jesus. But what about if you’re reading and the images are not under your control? Say maybe with a Book Mate thing holding the book open?”

“Hah hah! You mean with my hands free to do other things? ”

“For instance, yes.”

“Well, I have a whole system if I’m reading.”

“Say you’re reading your copy of Forum, ” he said.

“Right, what I do is I read a little of it, whatever it is, the story or the letter or the novel, to see whether it’s something I do want to masturbate to or not. If it’s something that looks promising, I read it all through very fast, to find out exactly what happens and locate the spot in it where I’m going to want to be coming, and what spots I’ll want to skip because they’re whatever — violent or boring or somehow irrelevant. Then I go back, not always to the beginning, but I backtrack, and the distance I backtrack from the point where I’ve scheduled my orgasm I have to gauge exactly, depending on how close to coming I think I am — so if I’m very close to coming I only go back a paragraph, but if it looks like it’ll be a while I may even read the whole scene or the whole letter that’s before the letter I’m interested in and then go on and read the letter I’m interested in. And sometimes I misjudge, and I start to get close to coming when the big moment of the story is still on the next page, and I have to race ahead looking for the words I need, or sometimes the opposite happens and I’m crowding up to the big moment of the story and my orgasm is dawdling, not all the precincts are reporting yet, and so I have to read the chosen come-sentence very slowly, syllable by syllable, ‘up … and … down … on … his … fuck … pole.’ ”

“So if you walked into a room,” he said, “and there was an armchair, and a table, and on one end of the table was a TV and a VCR and an X-rated tape, and at the other end of the table was some book of Victorian pornography, what would you choose?”

“The Victorian pornography, no question.”

“That’s incredible to me.”

“You’d choose the tape, right?” she asked.

“That or possibly the armchair itself. Not the book.”

“The classic opposition,” she said.

“True, but no — actually, it’s interesting. Because I’ve heard for so long about those studies that say that women like stories and men like pictures I’ve started to feel lately that stories represent women and are therefore sexually charged for me, and in fact that’s what got me so hot at Bonnie’s Books that time, the idea that I was peeping in on a women’s preserve. I think I am slowly starting to understand why in general people would prefer written porn. It gives your brain a vaginal orgasm rather than a clitoral orgasm, so to speak, whatever that means. I read one story in some men’s magazine once, years ago, in the first person, written by a woman, or probably not, but written at least with the pretense that a woman was telling the story, about a sixteen-year-old girl who goes swimming in a neighbor’s pool and of course her frans are still somewhat new and unfamiliar to her, and she’d forgotten that her top from last year was flimsy and inadequate to the demands that were made on it, and presto it comes off after she’s swum a lap, and she’s so embarrassed and apologetic, but Mr. Grunthole reassures her that she needn’t be ashamed, he doesn’t mind if she swims without her top, and so on and so on, and even though it was a totally conventional and undistinguished story, the fact that it was written in the voice of this girl, so I could peep in on her mixed feelings when her top came off, did give me a huge … an unexpectedly large return on my investment. I guess insofar as verbal pornography records thoughts rather than exclusively images, or at least surrounds all images with thoughts, or something, it can be the hottest medium of all. Telepathy on a budget. But still honestly I need the images. For instance of you there in the shower. I mean, when you come are your legs slightly apart?”

“Yes.”

“And do you have one of those legendary Water Pik shower-massage showerheads?”

“I do, but I don’t use it with any of the special settings. It was installed already when I moved in. It’s useful for cleaning the tub. But when I’m — I don’t hold it or put it between my legs or anything, I just treat it as a regular showerhead. What I do is …”

“Yes?”

“When I start to come?”

“Yes?”

“I—”

“Yes?”

“I open my mouth and let it fill with water. The feeling of the water overflowing my mouth … You there?”

“ Don’t stop talking.”

“But that’s all,” she said.

“You were in the shower, yesterday night, and the water was coursing onto your face and falling down from one part of you to another, like balls in a pinball machine, and your eyes were closed. What was in your mind? Oh I’d like to …”

“Excuse me? You’re murmuring.”

“I said I’d like to clk, ” he said.

“ What? ”

“Sorry, I occasionally have a problem with involuntary swallowing. I said I’d like to … put my hands on your thighs, very high up, and hold them apart and cover your whole mound with my mouth and just breathe on you, through the fabric of your underpants.”

“Ooch.”

“Are your legs apart right now?”

“They’re crossed at the ankle on the coffee table.”

“That will have to do,” he said. “Tell me what was in your mind in the shower last night.”

“I honestly don’t think I remember. And anyway the things I think of go by so fast. And it’s not like all I do is come and come. Very often in the shower I remember some embarrassing moment, or some dumb thing I’ve said, and I curse it out, I say, ‘Get away from me, stinker.’ For instance, I might remember this time after I’d come back from a party when I was quite drunk, so drunk that I started to feel that I was going to be sick, but this person was in my bathroom, washing their face, brushing their teeth, humming happily away, and I moaned, I was leaning against the door, I knocked politely, I made these feeble scrabbling sounds, but this person had used the hook and eye on the inside because the latch didn’t work on that door, and he was just too pleased with the world to hear me, or thought I was joking, saying hello by knocking, and so I was sick on my own bathroom door.”