Nicholson Baker - Vox

“My gracious, ” he said. “And that’s what you came to in the shower?”

“One of the things. I mean — it takes a while to describe it, but it was just a quick succession of images, among many. It takes me a good long time to come.”

“Tell me others.”

“Well, hm. The idea I actually finally came to was — it was really two ideas. Excuse me for a second.”

There was a pause.

“What did you do?” he asked.

“I just got a towel so that I can have it whenever I need it to mop myself up. I don’t want to come yet, and I seem to be getting awfully wet.”

“Does that mean you’ve taken off your black pants and your sneakers?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Underpants?”

“No.”

“And what color is the towel?”

“Green,” she said.

“Where is it?”

“It’s bunched in my hand, held in my unders where I need it. Now I’ve put it aside.”

“Why don’t you want to come yet? I won’t object, you know.”

“Because if I do, I’ll crash, I’ll want to stop talking to you this way, and I like talking to you this way. My clitoris is duplicitous: it always tries to trick me when I’m with someone, or when I’m alone, even — it says, ‘Go on and come, Abby, no problem, you can come a second time in a few minutes, this feels real good, come on, don’t be so conservative, I’m good for three or four!’ But I know better. I’m not a multiple-orgasm sort of person. The second after I’ve come, no matter how foaming and frothing my level of arousal was, that’s it, my clit is already starting to creep back into its clit-cloister and I’m thinking about other things. Two or three hours after that generally I’ll top myself off in the shower, but not before.”

“I see. Well then by all means keep that towel handy. I’m in for the long pull.”

“Good. Where were we?”

“You were just about to tell me the exact thing that was in your mind when you came in the shower yesterday evening.”

“Right, but do you mean the image that made me come, or do you mean the image that I had in my head when I came?”

“I — don’t know.”

“There’s a big difference,” she said. “I mean, the actual images that I have when I’m coming are things like, I don’t know, elephant seals dozing on rocks, a carousel selection of greeting cards, a painting tightly wrapped in canvas, porch furniture — my brain is going so wild that there’s no way to predict what sort of oddment will be there when all the flashbulbs go off. They’re almost never sexual images. But before that, when I’m getting close, you mean, right?”

“I guess, yes.”

“Yesterday I think there were two ideas, combined. I’m embarrassed.”

“You’re embarrassed, after just telling me about a triple-cock blowout?”

“But that’s nothing, that’s just a picture. The thing that made me come, I’ve acted on, to a degree, indirectly.”

“I told you about buying the romance novel, didn’t I?” he said. “I even told you about making obscene fingerings on the roof of my car. I’ve let my hair down!”

“Tell me what you look like erect.”

“You mean from memory?”

“No.”

“You mean undo my bathrobe etcetera?”

“Yes.”

There was a pause.

“Welp. Um. What can I tell you?”

“Is it hard?”

“Yes.”

“Was it already hard, or did you just make it hard?”

“It was somewhat hard, I just made it somewhat harder.”

“Talk to me about it. Look at it and talk to me about it.”

“Well, it’s this thing. I don’t know. Gee.”

“Are you stroking it?”

“I’m — truthfully?”

“Yes.”

“I’m pinching the underpeening skin in the fingers of my right hand, and I’m jostling my balls nervously with my left hand.”

“Stroke it now, slowly,” she said.

“All right. God, each time I pull on it, its muscle clenches. I mean, of course it’s always done that, but now, with you telling me to look at it, this seems the most noteworthy feature, this clench.”

“Go faster.”

“Just for a second, though, right?”

“Right, no spontaneous human combustion yet.”

“Right. Eee, that feels pretty good.”

“I can hear your strumming in your voice, you nasty boy.”

“Nastybation. I don’t want to come, though. I’m going to stop.”

“Prudent.”

“Funny,” he said. “When I was going fast, I pictured something that I’ve pictured for years and yet never noticed. I pictured doing an impossible thing — I thought that if I got too close to coming, I could somehow angle my leg and contort it so that I caught hold of my cock in my bent knee and squeezed it like a nut in a nutcracker until it stopped wanting to come.”

“You’re a strange case,” she said. “It was fun getting imperious with you for a moment, though.”

“Hah! Frightening, too. There are different rules on the telephone. You want to know what I actually thought of when you asked me to quote ‘talk’ to you about my cock? After the thrill and the terror had passed?”

“What?”

“This time I had a crush on a woman at work,” he said. “She had beautiful long arms, of which she was very proud. I don’t think she had a single dress with full sleeves. She had a hopeless thing for a man named Lee, who was a smugly flirtatious married guy, whom I personally disliked intensely. This woman knew I had a crush on her, in fact I used to send her a memo with a single asterisk in the middle of the page on the day after any night I’d masturbated thinking mainly about her. I don’t know if she thought this was charming or not. On the whole I think it pleased her. I was not completely serious myself anyway. One time she even held her arms out in perplexity and said, ‘What, no asterisk today?’ She knew I loved her arms. I tried to get her to send me a memo with a pound sign on it the day after any night she had masturbated thinking about Lee, but she never did. One night I was working late and I started to need to jerk off. The place was absolutely deserted, it was a holiday weekend. I went past this woman’s door, her name was Emily, and it was like I was passing a huge vulva, so big it had a desk inside, and I decided that what I should do is make an actual photocopy of my dick, in fact two copies, one before coming, one after, and leave these, along with an asterisk memo, on her desk.”

“What did you hope to accomplish by doing that?”

“Well, I was very interested in having her see my cock, but of course I wasn’t ever going to just flip it out in front of her, I needed some … distancing step, so that ho ho ho yes we’re civilized adults here, it’s all on paper. Well it’s harder than you may think to make a copy of your dick. I know it’s done in offices all the time, but I found it to be quite a project. Maybe if I’d been able to do some kind of planche, like your painter friend did on your … back, it would have been easy, but what I had to do was first try to get something akin to an erection standing at the copier of a deserted office on a holiday, I had to think of her seeing the copy of my cock on Monday, I had to think of her first thinking, Golly, what a nut, and then finding she had to stare uncontrollably at the specific image of my cock, boyoing, had to file that image away in a secret file folder where she filed away all my asterisk memos, and that some night, working late, she’d reach her long arms down to that drawer and bring out the asterisk file and go through the pages, asterisk after asterisk, until she found my cock. So I got hard, that was one hurdle. Then I had to place my cock down on the glass, but the way this copier is designed — I disliked this copier, by the way, that place is too cheap to lease a decent brand of copier — the way it’s designed is that a normal eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper is oriented sideways in the middle of the glass between two marks, you know how that works, right?”