Nicholson Baker - Vox

“Anyway.”

“Right. Anyway, I looked through my brand-new Juggs magazine with high hopes, but I don’t know — again, the sexiest woman was in a poolside setting, and I find poolside settings unerotic — that is to say, in general I find them unerotic, since God knows I’ve certainly come to an enormous number of poolside layouts in magazines, but there’s something about the publicness of its being outside, in the sun — it’s not as bad as a beach setting, which is a complete turnoff — I mean, again, if I were exiled to a desert island with nothing but some pages of a men’s magazine showing a nude woman on a desert island, with the arty kidney shapes of sand on the ass- cheeks and all that, I would probably break down and masturbate to it … what do you think of that word?”

“ ‘Masturbate’? I don’t hate it. I don’t love it.”

“Let’s get a new word for it, ” he said.

“To myself, I sometimes call it ‘dithering myself off.’ ”

“Okay, a possibility. What about just ‘fiddle’? Fiddlin’ yourself off? The dropped g is kind of racy. No, no. Strum. ”

“Strum.”

“That’s it. I looked through the Juggs, and even though it was a poolside scene, I tried to strum, and there was one shot where the woman was looking straight at me, on her elbows on a yellow pool raft, and her frans were at their point of perfect beauty, not erect nipples but soft rounded tolerant nipples, which you have to have in a poolside photo set because as soon as you see those erect nipples in a poolside layout you think cold water, you don’t think arousal. I want you to know, by the way, that I am not one of these sad individuals who hang out at the frozen fried-chicken section of the supermarket where it’s extra cold just to see women’s nipples get hard. I don’t get the least thrill from wet T-shirt contests either, because I have to have an answering arousal there in the woman, and cold water is anti-sexual, except if in the case of the wet T-shirt contest I can convince myself that this woman is using the shock of the cold water, the giggliness and the splutteriness of it, to make something possible that otherwise wouldn’t be possible and yet is arousing to her: I mean if she wants to show off her breasts, if she’s proud of them and yet knows she’s not the kind of person who’s going to go off and become a stripper or whatever, and the douse of cold water is distracting enough to keep her sense of its all being in innocent fun in the end, then I can get turned on by shots of a wet T-shirt contest. You know?”

“I can see how that works. So you’re looking at the woman in Juggs. ”

“Yes, and she was looking right at me, so appealingly, with such a lucid joyful amused look and her elbows were really digging into the pillow of the yellow raft, so it looked as if it might burst, and I could almost imagine strumming myself off to this, but then, no, there were too many things wrong — the photographer had put her hair in pigtails, tied with some kind of thick purply pink polyester yarn, and it just seemed so awful somehow, the age-old thing of men wanting to pretend that twenty-eight-year-old women are little girls by forcing this icon of girlishness, pigtails, on them, when really, when was the last time you saw a real little girl wearing pigtails? Not to mention the incidental fact that little girls are a turnoff. Here’s this beautiful, alert, lovely woman, of at least twenty-seven, and all I could see was the dickhead photographer handing her some polyester yarn and saying, ‘Uhright, now tie this purple stuff in your hair.’ And I felt at that moment that I wanted to talk to a real woman, no more images of any kind, no fast forward, no pause, no magazine pictures. And there was the ad.”

“But you’ve called these numbers before, haven’t you?” she asked.

“A few times, but with no real success. And I don’t think I’ve ever called this very number before—2vox.”

“What do you mean by ‘success’?”

“No women with any kind of spark. Or, actually, honestly, few women at all, period, except the ones who are paid by the phone service to make mechanical sexual small talk and moan occasionally. It’s mostly just men saying ‘Hey, any ladies out there?’ But then once in a while a real woman will call. And at least with this, as opposed to pictures, at least there’s the remote possibility of something clicking. Perhaps it’s presumptuous of me to say that we, you and I, click, but there is that possibility.”

“Yes.”

“In a way it’s like the radio. Do you know that I’ve never actually gone to a store and bought a record? That’s probably why I never learned to appreciate the fade-out, as you describe it, since on the radio, one song melts into the next. But it seems to me that you really need the feeling of radio luck in listening to pop music, since after all it’s about somebody meeting, out of all the zillions of people in the world, this one other nice person, or at least several adequate people. And so, if you buy the record, or the tape, then you control when you can hear it, when what you want is for it to be like luck, and like fate, and to zoom up and down the dial, looking for the song you want, hoping some station will play it — and the joy when it finally rotates around is so intense. You’re not hearing it, you’re overheating it.”

“On the other hand,” she said, “if you own the tape, you show you’ve got some self-knowledge: you know what you like, you know how to make yourself happy, you’re not just wandering in this Welter of chance occurrences, passively hoping the disk jockey will come through. Maybe when you’re a little kid you find yourself out on a balcony in the sun and you think, My oh my, this feels unexpectedly nice. But later on you think, I know that I will feel a particular kind of pleasure if I walk out onto this balcony and sit in that chair, and I wish to experience that pleasure now.”

“Well, right, and so the reason I called this line was that the pleasures I’d sought out weren’t doing it for me and there was this hope of luck, that I, that there would be a conversation …”

“You never said what it was about the Disney Tinker Bell exactly, at the video store.”

“Well, in the scene I saw, and this is the first time I’ve seen any of this particular Disney by the way, and you have to remember that I’m in an altered state there in the movie store, with my three orange movies and my men’s magazine in my briefcase, but in the scene, Tinker Bell zips around in a sprightly way, with lots of zings of the xylophone and little sparkly stars trailing her flight, and you think, right, typical fairy image, ho hum. And she’s tiny, she’s a tiny suburbanite, she’s about five inches tall. This insubstantial, magical, cutely Walt Disneyish woman. But then this thing happens. She pauses in midair, and she looks down at herself, and she’s got quite small breasts—”

“I thought you didn’t like that word.”

“You’re right, but sometimes it seems right. Actually most of the time it’s the right word. Anyway, she’s got quite small breasts but quite large little hips, and large little thighs, and she’s wearing this tiny little outfit that’s torn or jaggedly cut and barely covers her, and she looks down at herself, a lovely little pouty face, and she puts her hands on her hips as if to measure them, and she shakes her head sadly — too wide, too wide. Oh that got me hot! This tiny sprite with big hips. And then a second later she gets caught in a dresser drawer among a lot of sewing things and she tries to fly out the keyhole but — nope, her hips are too wide, she gets stuck!”