Nicholson Baker - House of Holes

“Mm, mm, better.”

“Think about me kissing the head of your dick like this — mwah! — and slapping at your cockhead hard, like this!” Mindy slapped. “And splashing your precum foam all over the place!”

This excited Dennis. “Oh, kiss my cockhead!” he said. “Oh, you’re so fucking tiny. I wish you could free up your breasts.”

“You’re getting slippery enough now I think I can.” She shook out her hair and then with some effort she scooped a tit out of the well of his cockhole. “There’s one. And here’s the other. Do you like?”

Dennis had a new, lower note in his voice. “Ooh, shit, tease the nipples for me, tease them, I’m real hard now. You’re like a pretty mermaid coming out of my volcano.” He started working long, steady dickstrokes, sliding the skin so it bunched up and then went smooth. He extended his tongue, and Mindy reached up for it but couldn’t catch hold of it.

“Jack me out right into your hand,” Mindy said. “Pump your lovely Lincoln Stiffins. Jack me!”

Dennis made a mooing sound, standing up, with his feet planted apart like an action figure. “You want to feel this come push you right out? You want a come ride? You want a flume ride of my burning jizz? Huh? I’ve never jerked a beautiful woman out of my hot dick before. I want to see your big sexy hips blow out of my cock.”

“Oh, this is getting good,” said Mindy. “Hold on just a second, I want to catch up. I want to come with you.” She bit her lip again and frowned, her breasts shaking as she urgently frigged her tooter. She hummed a few notes of a wordless Estonian song, then she said, “I’m almost there, Dennis, I’m going to come, I’m going to come. Ohh, make me shoot out of you, shoot me out, SQUIRT ME! AAAAH!”

Dennis grabbed his balls and made five smooth cock-pumpings, and then he felt the pulse of his come bulbing below Mindy’s legs. It pushed her out of his screaming penis on a blast of jizz force. She fell slickly into his hand and lay panting in the puddle of his cumshot.

“Whew!” said Dennis.

“That was a man-jack adventure,” said Mindy, shaking come off her arms. “I think if you rub me gently on my stomach I’ll grow back to the right size.”

Dennis moved his fingertip gently over her, and she began to get heavier. He had to set her down, and she got bigger and bigger, and then she was a naked smiling documentary filmmaker sitting on the floor in front of him.

“You are so fucking sexual,” Dennis said. “Raugh!”

They went to the restaurant and the gift shop and got a House of Holes T-shirt. Dennis wrote his number in Mindy’s address book.

Polly’s boyfriend Jeff said, “We can have a conversation about that if you want.” So they did. It was one of those “conversations” where both people are just steaming, just fuming, fighting each other for dear life — but even so they are doing everything they can to sound reasonable and fair-minded.

The cause of the disagreement was that Jeff had liked a play they’d seen together and Polly hadn’t. Polly thought it was an hour and a half of insults, ill humor, and spurious profundities, while Jeff thought it was a work of cryptic, discombobulating genius. And what was worse, during the intermission Jeff had flirted openly with Polly’s friend Helena.

The next morning when Polly woke up, she looked at Jeff in bed. His hair was curly — she’d always liked how thick and curly his hair was. But now his hair did nothing for her. Well, very little. What she was thinking was: If he liked that awful, awful play, then they were unsuited for each other.

That was a Sunday, and they had a lot of laundry to do, so they went to the laundromat. Polly was trembly inside because she was pretty sure that she wanted to break up with Jeff, and he kind of knew a major thunderstorm was coming. But still they had laundry to do.

So they were there sitting in the orange chairs, and Jeff was reading The Rooster, and Polly was looking around at people, as she did. Suddenly she saw a girl with long flaxen hair get in the dryer and close the door after herself. She thought, That’s odd. The girl didn’t reappear. Polly got up and looked in the dryer window. No girl. She went back to Jeff and she said, “Huh.”

Jeff didn’t look up. He was reading a review of a rock concert. He never wanted to go to concerts, but he read all the reviews. “Jeff,” Polly said, “a girl just got in that dryer.”

He looked up and frowned.

“Will you please take a look?”

They walked over and Jeff pulled open the dryer door. There was a pile of hot clothes inside — hot summery women’s clothes — and an oven mitt, and that was it. She noticed a little card taped next to the dryer’s controls. “HOH,” it said.

“What’s ‘HOH’ stand for?” she asked Jeff.

Jeff shrugged. “Hard of hearing? Water?”

She said: “I’m not kidding, two seconds ago a girl with long straight hair climbed into this dryer.”

“I really don’t see how she could have,” he said. He sat back down and began reading his free paper again.

Polly shook her head in exasperation and climbed into the dryer. It was quite hot, but she could breathe okay. She pushed against the back, and she thought she felt it move. She grabbed a T-shirt from the heap of clothes, so that she wouldn’t burn her hand, and she pushed as hard as she could against the back. It made a sound like a tight rusty spring and swung open. She climbed through and fell out on some grass near a lilac bush. She was lying topless on a hill, surrounded by wildflowers. There were women walking around with backpacks and hiking boots on and no shirts on. She thought she could hear murmured sounds of sex in the air: Suck it, pound me, squeeze it, that’s it. Fortunately, she still was holding the long T-shirt she’d used to push out the back of the dryer. She put it on.

A minute later, Jeff tumbled out of the hole in the wall behind her. He was wearing just his shirt and underpants. He sat up in the grass and looked around. It was a beautiful day, with one tiny cloud and some bunched trees off in the distance near a creek.

“I told you,” said Polly.

Jeff looked around. “Lots of interesting seminudity here,” he said, pleased.

A woman appeared from behind a bush. She was wearing a very pretty long skirt — an I-want-to-go-out-on-a-wildflower-walk-with-you-and-fuck-you-later skirt — that was in kind of a forties style, with blue polka dots. She had a cute little mouth and friendly but calculating eyes and breasts shaped like breakfast muffins. She said, mostly to Jeff, “Do you need assistance?” Very sweet voice.

“Sort of,” Polly said. “We’ve just popped on over from the laundromat.”

The woman nodded and smiled, and then she looked down at Jeff, who was still sitting on the grass in his underpants.

“You bad boy, you lost your pants, and I can see your dickybird,” she said. Jeff smiled goofily, looking up at her.

Polly felt a toxic wave of jealousy and hatred and disgust, and she turned away. And that’s when she saw the most gorgeous cream-colored Cape house she’d ever seen. It had a huge wraparound porch, and it had dormer windows that reflected the sun, and it had big, softly sighing trees in front of it. Polly pointed. “I think we should go up there, Jeff,” she said.

“I think I should stay here,” Jeff said dreamily, “so we know how to get back to the other side.” He lay back on the grass and looked up at the sky, smiling. Then he looked over at the girl in the polka-dot skirt. She was cutting bunches of white lilacs.

“You sit out here on the grass in your underpants,” said Polly. “I’m going up to that house and investigate. We’ll meet in about an hour and a half.”