Nicholson Baker: Vox

“Sounds sizzling hot.”

“It was.”

“You remember Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, when Marilyn Monroe tries to squeeze through a porthole on a ship, but her hips are too wide?”

“I don’t remember that. I better rent that.”

“It would be funny if Tinker Bell inspired old Marilyn,” she said. “You know, I found the Disney Peter Pan vaguely sexual, too.”

“Well, yeah — J. M. Barrie was a fudgepacker from way back, and clearly some of that forbiddenness sneaks into every version.”

“The girl floats around in her nightgown,” she said.

“That interested me quite a bit. And she’s too old to live in the room with the littler kids — I remember that. I must have been about twelve. I saw it with my friend Pamela, who I think has turned out to be a lesbian, bless her soul. We used to build tents in her bedroom and eat Saltines and read the medical encyclopedia together. It showed the dotted lines where the surgeon would cut cartilage from the ears if you were having an operation to make your ears flare out less. And at the end of each entry it would say, it was done in a question-and-answer format, it would say, ‘When can marital relations be resumed?’ And the answer always was four to six weeks. No matter where the dotted lines were, it seemed you could always resume marital relations after four to six weeks. I used to read the articles aloud to her. And once she read a whole romance novel aloud to me in one night. I fell asleep somewhere in the middle and woke up again later — Pamela was a little hoarse, but she was still reading. And once, maybe it was that same night, I told her a sexual fantasy I’d had a few times, in which I’m at a place where I’m told I have to take off all my clothes and get into this tube.”

“Sorry, get into what?”

“This tube, a long tube,” she said. “I slide in, feet first, and I begin moving down this very long tube, on some sort of slow current of oil. I’m sure you remember those water slides that you set up on the lawn, that destroyed the grass? This was not as fast-moving as that, much slower-moving, but no friction, and in a luminous tube. As I went along these pairs of hands would enter the tube a little ahead of me, waving around blindly, looking for something to feel, and then my feet would brush under them, and they would try to grasp my ankles, but their fingers were dripping with oil, and as I moved forward they slid up my legs, holding me quite hard, but without friction because of the oil, and then they pressed down as my stomach went under them, and then they sort of turned to encounter my breasts, the two thumbs were almost touching, and they slid very slowly over my breasts, pushing them up, and believe me, in this fantasy I had very large heavy breasts, it took a long time for the hands to slide over them.”

“Wow! What did old Pamela say when you told her that?”

“I finished describing it, and I asked her if she had thoughts like that and she said ‘No!’ in quite a shocked voice. She said, ‘No! Tell me another.’ You think maybe my tube was what turned her into a lesbian?”

“Well, it certainly would have turned me into a lesbian. But now — can you clarify one thing for me? Do you right now have the light on or off in the room you’re in, the combination living room dining room?”

“I have it on. It’s a table lamp. I could turn it off if you’d like.”

“Perhaps that, perhaps that would …”

“Listen.” There was a click.

“Now your silverware is glinting in the moonlight, right?” he said.

“I can’t see it.”

“Have you noticed that little juncture in movies, or I guess it’s more in TV shows, when somebody has some pensive thought, or peaceful thought, close-up of her face, and then she reaches over and turns out the bedside light, click, but of course this is a movie set, with elaborate lights all over the place, so her turning that little switch has to coincide with the shutting off of major flows of current, kashoonk, and the problem then is that movie film doesn’t work in the dark, so there has to be quite a high light level but with the impression of darkness, and so at the same instant the big imitation incandescent lamp lights are turned off, the imitation moonlight or streetlight lights have to come on outside the window, and yet there is often a problem, there is often a tiny millisecond delay while the filaments of the moonlight lights heat up and reach their peak, and so in this changeover you can see the second set of lights that are supposed to mean ‘dark peaceful room’ spread over the bed and the walls? Have you noticed that?”

“No,” she said. “But it sounds very interesting and I promise I will look for it next time I watch TV.”

“Do,” he said. “Meanwhile you’ll be glad to know that the real streetlight outside my window is beginning to come on. It’s the most amazing effect. It doesn’t come on all at once, it’s nothing like what I just described. It comes on very very gradually, over about twenty minutes. It starts off in a very deep orange phase. I very seldom have time to watch it, of course, with my hectic schedule. But when I do, it really is quite beautiful. It’s so gradual that you’re not quite sure whether it’s the light coming on and shining a little more brightly, or if the sky has darkened — of course it’s both, but you can’t tell which is overtaking the other, and then there’s this moment, about five minutes from now, when the streetlight is exactly the same color as the sky, I mean exactly the same green-violet-yellow whatever, so that it seems as if there’s a hole in the middle of the tree across the street, in the branches, where the sky, which is really the light on this side of the street, shows through.”

There was a pause.

“Listen,” she said. “This is getting expensive, at a dollar a minute or whatever it is.”

“Ninety-five cents per half minute, I think.”

“So give me your number and I’ll call you back,” she said.

“All right. But.”

“Yes?”

“But then you’ll have to turn your light on again to write my number down,” he said.

“What do you mean? I have a good memory for numbers.”

“Oh, I’m sure it’s much better than mine. But what if in this one isolated case the number slips your mind?”

“Okay, to be safe I’ll turn on the light and write it down.”

“But what if you write it down wrong, just because this is such an unusual sort of occasion, and you reverse two numbers, the first time you’ve ever done it?”

“Sexual dyslexia.”

“Right! Or what if you hang up and you get another Diet Coke and then you decide, no, this is crazy, I don’t want to call him back? How do I know you won’t just not call?”

“I’m going to call you back,” she said. “I’m enjoying this. I’m going to call.”

“Okay, but what if you do call, but because of the break, even that one-minute break, when we aren’t connected, what if fate shifts, and we’re suddenly awkward with each other, and we’re never quite able to resume the intimacy that we seemed to hit so easily the first time?”

“All right, you convinced me. Don’t give me your number.”

“Really I think two dollars a minute is cheap for this. I need this. I’d spend twenty dollars a minute for this. And there isn’t a time limit on this line, either — at least my ad says no time limit in big letters.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay, and in return for your indulgence, I’m going to try to do something with your heirlooms there, on your dining-room table. Let me see. All right, once there was a guy who had a big party, a big dinner party for a dozen people, which really wasn’t his style, but he did it anyway, and when all of his friends had left, he began cleaning up, feeling slightly depressed. He took the plates in, the glasses in, the cutlery in, man, he’d never seen the basket in his dishwasher so stuffed with silverware. He jammed the last fork in, but in his impatience to close the dishwasher door and go to bed, he didn’t check that the fork was all the way in the basket, and as it happened it was not, because the forks were so tightly squeezed in there that he would have really had to work it down for it to stay put. This was one of the older-style dishwashers, and when that fork was tossed aloft by the first powerful spray of water up from the impeller, it fell, and it happened to fall so that it was caught dangling somehow between a plate and the little loop on the handle of a saucepan, with the points up, and the handle dangling far enough down that the sprayer in the bottom swung into it at full speed and notched it, and made it swing up again but not completely out of the way, and so it swung down into the path of the sprayer thing again and again, and got very messed up, and by the time this guy was able to get back to the kitchen and turn off the dishwasher, which sounded awful, the fork was badly injured. He dried the fork with a paper towel, and the rough places on the fork tore the paper, and that was too much for him, he almost felt like throwing the fork away, and he went to bed very dejected, wondering what the point of it all was. Okay? Now in this same city there was a jewelry store, that some might say was a little bit too trendy, but that was still a very nice place — they didn’t sell diamonds or emeralds or conventional big-ticket items like that, in fact it was called ‘Harvey’s Semi-Precious,’ after Harvey, the owner-and mostly it sold artisan stuff and collectibles. And you got a job there.”