Nicholson Baker - House of Holes

The beach curved back into a small bay where the House of Holes condominiums were, and as Cardell turned the corner he saw a distant figure wearing a hat. He increased his pace, still stepping in her footsteps. With each step he took, he learned more about the arch of her foot, the ball of her foot, and her small, strong toes. He was almost loping now.

Finally, he caught up to her. She was wearing a loose, faded dress and a hat, and she held her sandals hooked on her fingers. Her hat was woven of pale fine straw and made her face glow like a classy tangerine. He recognized her.

“Hi, I bought the pen,” he said.

“Oh, good,” said Betsy.

“I’ve been walking in your footsteps,” he said. “It was the most intimate experience. Did you feel my feet pressing against your feet?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “Let me try walking in your footsteps, and you can see what you feel.”

“Okay.”

Cardell walked a few paces ahead and stopped.

“Don’t turn around,” she said.

He didn’t. She walked up to him.

“Did you feel the ball of my foot pressing into your footprint?” she asked.

“Some,” he said. “More I felt the arch. But yes, I feel I know you better now.”

“And I know you better. We’re old friends, in fact.”

Cardell paused, full of indecision. “But we’re very different.”

“That’s true. I collect beach glass, and you don’t.”

“You seem rich.”

“I’m not poor. My husband’s father was rich. He was sup-posedly a ruthless businessman, but he was always nice to me.” She smiled.

“I’d love to see you come,” Cardell said thickly.

She laughed. “Ah, but I’m married, as you know. I don’t cheat. Much.”

“Does your husband have a friendly sex organ that treats you well?” he asked.

“He does,” she said, in a distant voice. “It’s got a knobby end that fits me just right. But I suppose that’s private information.”

Cardell looked out at the ocean. “I wish I had a cold iced tea right now.”

Betsy’s voice was very small. “I have cold Snapple in my condo, if you want to come back.”

So they went back to her condo where there was a tall vase filled with carved canes and a Chinese ceramic pig on a side table, its head resting on a red pillow. There were also many jars of shells and beach glass. Betsy pulled the sliding door half open so that they could still hear the sound of the sea.

“My husband is at his office,” she said after a moment. “I–I can call him. Should I?”

“Absolutely, yes, give him a call.”

She flipped out her cell phone. “Honey,” she said, “I’ve met a nice-looking young man on the beach who says he wants to watch me come.” She paused. “I know. I know. Okay. I know. Okay.”

She held the phone away from her ear. Cardell raised his eyebrows questioningly.

“He’s kind of angry,” she whispered. Then she listened some more to the telephone. “He wants to talk to you.”

Cardell took the phone. “Hello, sir?”

There was a strong voice in his ear. “I don’t know who you are, but stay away from my wife. Leave the condo immediately.”

“I will leave the condo, but I would really like to see her come first, and I know that’s a problem for you, but I also know she wants to see my mandingo. I’m just going to shuck my boxers off, and my mandingo will be sticking out, and she’ll get a good look at it. She wants to, I know it. Do you say yes?”

“No, you will not bring out any such mandingo!” the husband choked. “You will absolutely do nothing of the sort! You are out of line!” He hung up.

Cardell handed the phone back to Betsy, shaking his head.

“Oh, he’s such an old poke-in-the-dough,” she said. “Are you disappointed?”

He nodded.

“You poor thing, you wanted to see me come, didn’t you?”

He nodded again.

She looked at him appraisingly. “And then you’d come, wouldn’t you? You probably have a cock that you’d jerk off big-time, wouldn’t you? I know you just love jerking off that proud nasty cock.”

“That I do,” he said. “Hard as a ship’s biscuit, but fresher.”

She had an idea. “I’ll tell you what we’ll do. Let’s go out on the back deck and I’ll pretend to have sex with my husband, and I’ll tell you all about it, and you’ll watch me pretending. Will that work?”

“That sounds like a good fallback,” Cardell said.

So they went out to the back deck, and she started with the running commentary.

“Usually I’m in bed first,” she said. “He stays up doing the crossword — he’s good at it, but it takes him a long time sometimes, and I read a book.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, maybe something a little frisky, a little naughty,” said Betsy. “And sometimes I just turn my light off and go to sleep, and sometimes I’m still reading when I hear him washing up and sniffing. He hangs up his pants carefully and puts on his pajamas, which are on a hook on the back of the closet door. We have two hooks. Am I boring you?”

Cardell was smiling, watching her tell the story, lying back on a lounge chair and feeling perfectly happy. He shook his head.

“Good. Then he gets in bed, and if I’m awake and I stir he says, ‘Good-night, hon,’ and I say, ‘Good-night, darling.’ And often we go to sleep.”

“But sometimes you don’t.”

“Right, sometimes we’ve made a prior arrangement to do the triple-X dirty nasty.”

“I see.”

“And we both know that there’s the appointment. So I lie there, and he rubs my back for a while.” She lay with her eyes closed as she said this, rubbing her hands on her thighs. “Sometimes he teases under my ears, and that makes me shrug, whoo! And then I reach back behind me, and I find his bulgy bits in his pajamas, and I hold them a moment to figure out what’s what. Then I reach my hand in and grab a handful, and then usually he shifts and pulls his pajamas down. And then everything begins to make itself known.”

She was reaching behind herself as she said this.

“Do you like feeling him get hard?”

“Love feeling him get hard, yes. He says, ‘Can I tweak your titties?’ And I lift so he can get at them, and he knows just how to play with my nipples so that the two jagged lightning lines go dingalinging straight down. And then I have to turn toward him—” Here she turned in the chaise longue and held her invisible husband. Her hand slid under her blouse. “He kisses me all over me and puddles up one of my tits so that the nipple is aiming straight up. Mmm.”

Cardell, watching her tell this, found that his hips had slid forward on the chair and his knees had straightened. “And then he pushes that big cockhead inside you?”

“Yes, he does,” she said. “He’s quite talkative sometimes when we get going, like if we’ve been out to dinner at our little Mexican place. There’s a nice little Mexican place we go to. And he doesn’t know it, nor should he know it, but when he really gets down to fucking me I’m sometimes thinking of sucking off the Mexican busboys. I’m thinking they’re tied down on tables after the restaurant closes, and they need me to give them handjobs and blowjobs to relieve all the terrible stresses that come with the job of being a busboy, and I can feel their come boiling up the length of their cocks, and I swallow it all.”

“Cocks on the boil, eh?”

“Yes, often I think about jerking off well-knit young men whose dicks are out.” Betsy looked pointedly at Cardell when she said this. “But he doesn’t know what I’m thinking. Except once I told him and he came so hard afterward. That’s why I thought maybe he’d say yes to letting you watch me.”