Nicholson Baker: Vox

“No.”

“And I don’t eat lots of meatball subs. I mean I do enjoy a meatball sub occasionally, with mushrooms — I just want to differentiate myself from, you know …”

“Oh don’t worry about that,” she said. “Your accent is very different from his, your voice is quite … compelling.”

“I’m glad to hear that. I was nervous when I called. My temperature dropped about fifteen degrees as I was deciding to dial the number.”

“Really. Where did you see the ad?”

“Ah, a men’s magazine.”

“Which one?” she asked.

“This is oddly embarrassing. Juggs. Juggs magazine. Where did you see the ad?”

There was a pause. “ Forum. ”

“What does your ad say?” he asked.

“Let me see,” she said. “There’s a line drawing of a man and a woman, each holding a telephone, and the headline is anytime at all. I liked the drawing.”

“I’ve seen that one,” he said. “That’s very different from my ad. My ad has a color shot of a woman with a phone cord wrapped around her leg and one arm kind of covering her breasts, and the headline over the phone number is, make it happen. But there is something intangibly classier about this ad than the other ads, something about the layout and the type that the phone number is in, despite the usual woman-plus-phone image, and I thought that maybe it might attract a different sort of caller. Although, boy, that flurry of assholic horniness from the men on the line when you first spoke was not exactly cucumber sandwich conversation. That one guy that kept interrupting—‘You like to sock on a big caulk? ’ ‘How big and brown are your nips?’ But then, I suppose we aren’t calling for cucumber sandwich conversation.”

“I wouldn’t object — cucumber away. But I guess not. Anyhow, here we are, ‘one on one,’ as they say, in the famous fiber-optical ‘back room.’ ”

“True enough.”

“So go on,” she said. “You were telling me how you were on the Floor rolling your head back and forth?”

“Oh, right. Well, I was on the floor with the catalog facedown on my chest, entranced by those tights, and a conception, this conception of thrilling wrongness, took shape in my brain stem. I had a vision of myself jerking off while I ordered that pair of tights, specifically the vision was of, of, of …”

“Of?”

“Of being in the bathtub, but on the phone with the order-taker from Deliques, who’s got, you know, this nice innocent voice, a mistaken but lovable overfrizzed perm, a hint of twang, bland face, freshly laundered jeans, cute socks, but probably wearing a pair of Deliques finest ‘fusion panties’ with a chevron of lace or something over her mound, which she’s bought at the employee discount, while I’m in my bathtub, which is ridiculous since I never take baths, but I’m in my bathtub moving so carefully so she won’t hear any aquatic splips or splaps and know that I’ve taken the portable phone into the bathroom and that I’m semi-submerged, and she says, ‘Let me check to be sure we have that in stock for you, sir,’ and during the pause, I arch myself up out of the water and sort of point the phone at my Werner Heisenberg so she can see it somehow or get its vibes, and at the moment she says, ‘Yes, we do have the pointelle tights in faun,’ I come, in perfect silence, making a Smurf grimace.”

“That’s awful.”

“I know, but I don’t know, I was there on the living-room floor. I don’t often lie down there.”

“Were you actually … playing with yourself as you envisioned this?”

“Certainly not! I had one hand on the telephone, just toying with the number keys, teasing them, and the other hand was lying on the facedown catalog on my chest. Anyway, then I thought I would be embarrassed to order a pair of tights for myself — maybe the order-taker would assume that I was a transsexual, when in fact I am not a transsexual at all, I’m a telephone clitician.”

“An obscene phone caller.”

“Exactly. And I started to think of who I could order them for, and I thought of this woman at work, a very nice woman, some might say plain, but very nice, who once startled me and this other guy by telling a story out of the blue about some friends of hers who’d just had a large wedding at a museum during which some thieves backed a van up and loaded all the wedding gifts in and drove away.”

“The wedding gifts were on display?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Ah, well, that was their mistake.”

“Well, they were punished for it. Anyway, one of the gifts, this woman from work told us, was one of those sex slings that I guess you bolt to a stud in the ceiling, so that the woman is …”

“Yeah, I know,” she said.

“And this woman from work had joked about the difficulty of trying to fence the stolen sex sling, and the memory of her talking about this oddball device came back to me and I wanted to order the tights for her, so she’d come home from work one day, and she’d go, ‘Hey, what’s this, a slim little package for me from Deliques?’ She’d open it up and slip out this plastic packet with tights in it, and there’s the order slip in her hand, and somehow I’ve convinced the order-taker that I don’t want my name on the slip.”

“Sure, sure.”

“So she knows she’s got a secret admirer. And there on the packing slip is the line of printout that says, all in abbreviations, 1 pr ptl tights, fn, sm, $12.95, and I just thought of her looking at the packing slip and thinking, Well, gee, I suppose I should at least see if they fit.”

“Ah, but wait,” she said. “No, what catches her eye, what catches her eye is …”

“Tell me,” he said.

“Is that on the packing slip, over the numeral one, for one pair of tights, is this check mark, in blunt pencil.”

“That’s right, there is.”

“And she looks closely at that check mark, and she imagines a male hand making it, a surprisingly refined hand, because there has been a strike at the Deliques warehouse, and what’s happened is that Deliques management has had to hire the male models from the catalog on an emergency basis to fill in for the normal pickers and packers, who are of course mostly middle-aged Laotian women. And they were right in the middle of a catalog shoot, all these male models, when the walkout took place, so they’re wearing exactly what they were wearing on the shoot, which are the usual aubergine paisley boxer shorts, and Henri Rousseau bathrobes, and Erté pajamas, and that sort of thing, but there was no time for them to change, they had to be herded barefoot into this giant warehouse because the company was bombed with orders. April was their biggest month. So — one male model takes this woman’s order slip, and studies it, looks at her name on it — what’s her name?”

“Jill.”

“Looks at her name, Jill Smith, and then takes the order slip and crumples it against the piece of horseradish in his foulard silk boxer shorts, and he hands it to the next male model, a gorgeous peasant with strange slitty nipples, who smooths it out, studies it, duh, Jill Smith, squeezes his asscheeks together, and passes it to the next guy, who smooths it out, studies it, bites one corner, and hands it to the next guy, and so on down this row of male models, each one broader-shouldered and sinewier-stomached than the last, until finally the order slip gets to the last guy, who’s fallen asleep sitting on one tang of the forklift, a much slighter gentleman, with a beautiful throat with a softly pulsing jugular you just wanted to eat it looked so good, and of course wearing a green moiré silk codpiece, pushed forward and upward by the one tang of the forklift. This male model rouses himself, smacks his lips sleepily, studies the slip of paper, gets in the forklift, and drives off, weaves off, toward the distant vault where they keep the pointelle tights.”