Nicholson Baker: Vox

“Yes?”

“And he reaches the mountain of crates marked faun, and he slides the forklift into the highest pallet and lifts it off and, vvvvvvvv, brings it down, and he pries it open …”

“Probably with his dick.”

“No, no, with his powerful refined hands,” she said.

“The packing tape goes pap! pap! pap! as he tears the mighty box asunder. But now that you mention it, as he’s reaching in, deep into the box filled with … with one metric ton of cotton pointelle, his cock is pressing against the cardboard, pressing, pressing, and it starts to fight against the tethers of that codpiece. So he climbs back in the forklift, puts the pair of tights in his lap, and drives back. Well, while he was gone, Todd, Rod, Sod, and Wadd, the other male models, all heterosexual, of course, who’ve been standing in a row waiting for him, have been thinking about Jill Smith wearing those tights and by now their bobolinks have all gotten thoroughly hard, and even the sleepy forklift driver, perhaps because of the faun tights in his lap, is embarrassed to get out because there’s this frank erection that has now gotten so big and bone-hard that it’s angling right out of his codpiece. He takes his place in the row of male models, his cock swaying slightly, and he holds the tights to his face and exhales through them, then nods, takes a pencil with a surprisingly sharp point, and makes a check mark over the numeral one on the packing slip. He hands it to the next guy — by this time all the male models have abandoned their shame in each other’s presence and they are all standing there in a row with their various organs pronging at various angles out of their various robes and boxers and sex-briefs. So the forklift guy hands it to the next guy, who almost ritualistically takes the tights and winds them around and around his cock, pulls once hard, and then unwinds them and makes a check mark exactly superimposed over the first check mark on the numeral one on the packing slip. And he hands the tights to the next guy, who also winds the tights around his cock, many winds, it’s very long, and he pulls, and he makes a superimposing check mark, too, and so on down the row, wind unwind check, wind unwind check, and the final guy folds the tights up with neat agile movements that belie his enormous forearms and slides them into the sheer plastic envelope and puts the last check mark over the numeral one, so that it now looks as if only one blunt pencil check-marked over it, when really there were nine check marks. And so together, humming ‘The Volga Boatman’ in unison, they seal the package up with Jill Smith’s address on it and send it off to her.”

“Well, maybe that is what happened,” he said. “No, in reality, there wasn’t any strike at Deliques when I called. Their computer was down, though.”

“Oh, so you really did call?” she said. “That’s very wicked of you. In the bath?”

“No, in the end that seemed like too much trouble. I called from the living-room floor. First I worked myself up to a creditable state of engorgement, then I dialed the 800 number.”

“All right …”

“A woman answered and said something like ‘Hello and welcome to Deliques Intimates, this is Clititia speaking, how may we help you today?’ She had a young high voice, exactly the sort of voice I’d imagined. Well, my fourteen-and-a-half-inch sperm-dowel instantly shrank to less than three inches. Which is the opposite of what was supposed to happen. I told her what I wanted to order, and she said the computer was down, but she would take the order ‘by hand,’ right? Why wasn’t I enough of a leerer to come back with something insinuating? Just something basic, like ‘Heh heh, honey, I hope you do take it all by hand.’ But instead I just said, ‘Boy oh boy, that must be a lot of trouble for you.’ I gave her my address, my card number, and she said, ‘I’ve got that, sir, now, is there anything else you would like to order this evening?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m torn, there is one other thing I’d like to get this person, just a pair of very simple panties, but I’m torn.’ I said, ‘Now you see the so-called Deliques minimes on page thirty-eight? You see those? Do you have the catalog there right in front of you?’ She said she did. I said, ‘Okay. I’m not sure I can tell the difference between these minimes and the so-called nadja pants on page, ah, forty-six. To the naked eye they seem identical.’ She said, ‘Just one moment,’ and I heard her flipping through the catalog, and I made a last valiant attempt to stroke myself off, because the idea of her looking carefully at those pictures of women in those tiny weightless panties, with the darkness of pubic hair visible right there through the material, at the very same time I was looking at those same cuppable curves of pubic hair on my end, should have been enough to make me shoot instantly, but I don’t know, she sounded so well-meaning, and I knew that there was a very good chance that she would not like to know that I was there trying to … I mean, she didn’t want to work at a job where men called her and ordered a few items of merchandise just so they could … right? That wasn’t what she’d had in mind at all in taking the job, or possibly wasn’t, at least, so even when she said, finally, ‘Well, the nadja pants ride a little lower on the hip,’ which is a statement that any normal jacker-offer should be able to come to easily, because what does it imply? It implies her own hip, it implies that the nadja panties have ridden her own hip. But even then I could not achieve and maintain. So I said, ‘Oh well, no, thanks, I’ll see how the tights go over and then order the minimes later.’ And a week afterward, I was the owner of a pair of tights. I still have them, unopened. Give me your address and I’ll be glad to forward them to you.”

“Why don’t you give them to Jill?” she asked.

“Oh, a million reasons. But that’s not quite the end. I hung up from making the order and instantly I got hard again, naturally, and I thought for a second, and I hit the redial button, and a different woman answered, with a much lower and smarter voice, with some name like Vulva, and I said, ‘Vulva, I have what may sound like an unorthodox question, and you don’t have to answer it if you don’t want to. But what I’m curious about is, well, of the men who order from your catalog, do you think some of them are in a subtle or maybe not-so-subtle way obscene phone callers?’ She laughed and she said, ‘That’s a good question.’ And then there was a long pause, a very long pause. I said, ‘Hello?’ And right there I knew I’d blown it — I knew the tone of my hello, that slight reediness in my voice that betrayed sexual tension, blew away the potential rapport I might have had with Vulva. See, I’d sounded quite confident when I actually asked her the question.”

“What did she say?”

“She just said, in a more official voice, but still a friendly voice, ‘I don’t think I’m going to answer your question.’ And I said, ‘Fine, I understand, okay, sure.’ And she said ‘Bye.’ Not ‘Good-bye,’ you notice — still the slight vestige of amused intimacy there. If she’d said ‘Good-bye’ I would have felt absolutely crushed.”

“What did you do then?”

“I sat up and ordered a pizza and read the paper. So you see, I’m not an obscene phone caller, really. I can’t smother an orgasm.”

“Ho ho. I can,” she said.

“Can you? Well, I mean I can physically do it.”

“ I know what you mean.”

There was a pause.

“I hear ice cubes,” he said.

“Diet Coke.”

“Ah. Tell me more things. Tell me about the room you’re in. Tell me the chain of events that led up to your calling this number.”