The Fermata

15

THAT WAS WHAT I-FINALLY RECORDED ON THE CASSETTE THAT I put in the tape-player in Adele Junette Spacks’s Ford Escort in place of Suzanne Vega’s Solitude Standing. It — Part Two — was sixteen single-spaced pages long, and it took, in addition to the twelve long hours and two fiercely snuffling orgasms I devoted to its composition, another two hours to record on tape. (I let both of my comeshots hop out directly onto the hazily indeterminate Mass Turnpike, my bottom scooched forward on the hood of my car so that my richard made a sort of hood ornament. Unable to endure the physically paradoxical contact of a surface going sixty miles an hour faster than they were, the sperm-drops began to sizzle on the roadway after a few minutes; they had vaporized completely in less than half an hour.) When I was done recording I didn’t feel exhausted — I felt exhilarated. My right wrist hurt a lot — this marked, if I’m not mistaken, the beginning of my carpal-tunnel problem, which has bothered me on and off since. It isn’t clear to me now why Marian’s adventures ended up being so unremittingly ane-oriented in content — I like to think it was just a matter of mood. After all, I had never typed the word butthole before in my life. It isn’t a word that comes up much in business correspondence. Private coarseness is a known high. What was just as important, I wanted to minimize the chance that this Smith College woman would find my audiotaped company tame, and an anus or two livens up any gathering. I wanted my rotterly imagination to feed rather than limit hers, to extend without strain as far as hers would go; and I hoped that whatever she didn’t like she could filter out. I hoped that she would realize that I was an unusual man, possibly worth knowing.

I didn’t leave my gift in her player right away, not wanting to be seen driving right there, brazenly next to her, when it came on. I started up time, accelerated, and moved a few cars ahead, then jogged back on foot to her car with the universe on pause and switched the tapes. Consequently I didn’t get to see her initial reaction. But I drove annoyingly slowly, forcing the buffer cars behind me to pass; very soon I had Adele in my rear-view mirror again. I put on sunglasses so that she wouldn’t be able to see when my eyes were flicking up to the mirror at her. I saw her doing something, leaning, examining: I guessed that she had ejected my tape and was checking for identifying marks. (It said only MARIAN THE LIBRARIAN on the label.) Then there was a long period where she — I’m fairly sure — listened to some or all of it. She passed me again, paying no attention to me; I Dropped for a second to verify that my tape was in her player and then let her proceed. We drove for quite a while together, over an hour, although I don’t think she noticed that I was keeping discreetly close to her. She fluffed her hair several times. I looked for signs of arousal: weaving, sudden slowing. There were none. I hoped she would be so aroused that she would have to stop at a motel very soon.

To my surprise, she drove right past the turnoff for Route 91 and Northampton. She continued to drive west. Was she on her way to Chicago? That made sense. She was probably in graduate school there. (The University of Chicago sticker on her rear windshield was above the Smith sticker, arguing for Smith’s temporal priority.) I wasn’t sure that I wanted to drive all the way to Chicago with her, but presumably she would have to stop somewhere for the night. And even if she hated my tape, she was still driving, and driving allows for a great deal of idle thought, and idle thought is the perfect medium for the accelerated transmutation of remembered distastefulness. By the time she turned into a motel that evening, some image off my cassette might be soaring through her sensibility, robed in urgency and fire. And regardless of how she felt about my tape, she would almost certainly come in her motel room, since what else is there to do in motel rooms?

As I drove, I worked out an elaborate plan of how I would proceed if she did check into a motel. As soon as she entered the parking lot, I would stop time and pull in ahead of her and park in an out-of-the-way spot. I would restart time. She would park and go into the office for five minutes and then reappear and walk to a room, say room 23. As she was pointing her key at the doorknob, with a semi-blank set-mouthed face that no actress could duplicate because it was so wholly a product of the certainty of her unobseivedness, I would pause her, go back to the office and get the spare key for room 23 from the key drawer, and enter ahead of her. It wouldn’t be a bad room, a little on the brown side, but there would probably be no good place for me to hide to watch her undress. I would be deeply sleepy by this time. My yawns would be coming every thirty seconds. It would be about seven in the morning Strine-time, counting my lengthy on-the-road Foldout, but I would still be needing some moment of closeness with this total stranger, who had become my chosen traveling companion. I would notice that in her room there was a locked door that led to the adjacent room. This would suggest some possibilities to me.

Still fully fermational, I would leave her standing at the door with her key out and I would walk out and “buy” (in the usual informal manner) fourteen dirty magazines from a newsstand a quarter of a mile down the road. I like wandering around newsstands in the Fold and looking at people looking at magazines. Sometimes it’s just as you would expect: the thirteen-year-old kid with a fine little mustache looking at a shelf-ful of gory horror-film mags, etc. But often it isn’t so simple: it isn’t like the cartoon cliché about how people resemble their dogs. The man at the rack of computer magazines is someone you couldn’t have predicted would be there; likewise the woman looking at the sailing magazines and the man reading at the antiques rack. You can’t necessarily match people up with the periodicals they flip through. Perhaps this is because people who spend time in newsstands aren’t representative of the people who are deeply interested in a given hobby or subject — the real enthusiasts are out on sailboats or at antiques auctions, rather than reading about them; or more likely they are leafing through the magazines at home, where they can really study them, being subscribers. Some of the true hobbyists disdain the magazines because they have studied them for so long that the level of repetition in the how- to articles has begun to tire them. It might often be that the inhabitants of a newsstand are those who want a taste of what it would be like to have a certain interest without actually having it. But then again, some are probably true aficionados of their particular realm who are drawn to the newsstand precisely because here they can see their specialized sub-passion on display near all others: model rocketry right on an equal footing with Metropolitan Home; the science fiction magazines only a few feet from bodybuilding, or from those flimsy how-to-write-an-effective-query-letter writers’ magazines. Unlike a bookstore, a newsstand unifies its huge range of subject categories by its overriding sense of nowness. It is a Parthenon of the immediate present, a centrifuge of synchronicity. Each magazine is saying, This is what we think you want to know about our subspecialty right this second, in (you scan the covers) July July July July August July July July August August July. My Fold-powers are replenished by trips to newsstands; I find that the longer I spend in one, the more cleanly and responsively time stops for me the next time I trigger a Drop.

So I would go down the road from Adele’s motel and buy fourteen men’s magazines at a newsstand, and I would walk back and arrange them on one of the beds in her room, room 23, covering its objectionable pink and brown coverlet with a superior quilt of plush womanflesh. I would get a washcloth from the bathroom and drape it on the edge of the bed, as if to catch the scumsquibs that were imminent from my bloated factotum. I would make sure that I had stroked past the point of caring at the moment I adjusted my glasses. Immediately thereafter, I would hear Adele’s revitalized key in the lock.

When, on the threshold of her own motel room, she caught sight of me inside, looking up at her with surprise, she would say, “Oh, sorry!” and close the door. It would not be too difficult for me to act flustered and embarrassed. I would genuinely be flustered and embarrassed. “I’m terribly sorry — one moment!” I would call loudly. “Sorry, sorry!” I would hurry outside, doing up my belt. She would already be on her way back to the office. “It’s my mistake,” I would say. “I think I was given the wrong key.”

“No problem,” Adele would say crisply. “I’ll get a different room.” She wouldn’t want to meet my eye.

“What I mean is,” I would hastily explain, “I think I’m in your room. The man said room twenty-four, but then when I looked at the key he gave me it said twenty-three, so I just assumed that it was the room I was meant to have. Obviously I was very wrong. But if you hang on thirty seconds I’ll be totally out of your room.”

Adele would say, “That’s all right — you’re obviously already all settled in there.” She would make a little laugh.

But I would be full of sincerity. “You mean the magazines? I can pile those up in half a second, really. I think that you should have the room you were meant to have, since it’s my mistake. I haven’t even used the bathroom. Well, no — I did use it.” I would put my hand on my chest. “This is mortifying.”

Adele would reassure me. “Don’t worry about it, honestly. I’ll get a different room. You stay in that room, and I’ll get a different one. It’s fine.”

But I wouldn’t want that to happen, of course. I would hand her my key to her room, the one I borrowed from the office while in the Fold. “Here’s the key to your room,” I would say. You get your suitcase or whatever, and I’ll get the right key for my room, and then I’ll be out of your room in two seconds. Okay?”

She could so very easily not go along with this and insist on talking to the man in the motel office herself, and it would not be at all good for me if she did: I would have to use the Fold to escape, and I would have to abandon her while she was in the middle of telling the person at the desk that there was someone in her room, and then he would tell her that nobody was checked into room 24, and she would be left with a mysterious and disturbing sexual event that she could not; explain. The police would possibly get involved — awful to contemplate. But because I always mean well, despite my sneakiness, I would be flustered enough and genuine enough that she would believe me and accede.

I would check in at the office and request room 24 and get the key. Adele would be standing outside room 23 when I returned. The door would be ajar — I would have left it ajar — so she would have been able to glance at the arrangement of magazines and the washcloth on the end of the bed during my brief absence if she wanted to.

“There, all set,” I would tell her. I would noisily slap all the magazines in a big pile and cover the top one with the washcloth and carry them out to my new room. Again I would say, “I’m terribly sorry for the dreadful mix-up.”

“That’s quite all right,” she would say. She would be very unflappable and pleasant. We would wave good-night.

In my room, I would throw myself on the bed and sigh with relief — nothing bad had happened! I would think that I should ask her out for a bite to eat, since it was dinner time. I better ask her out right now, I would say to myself, before she gets undressed or has a shower, while we are both still in the ceremonially friendly mood-envelope. I would hop up — and then I would think better of it. The problem would be that I was right on the brink of being perceived as a threat by her, and I wouldn’t be able to risk seeming sinister or sleazy by making any advances now. And I wouldn’t have to. The fact that we were in side-by-side rooms would feel increasingly relevant as the evening progressed: time would be on my side. I would lie back on the bed with my hands on my forehead, listening to the sounds from her room. Despite the doors connecting us, her room would turn out to be surprisingly uneavesdroppable-on. I would hear her water run for a while — perhaps a very quick shower, more likely a face-wash and a toothbrushing. Fifteen minutes would pass. I would hear her unlock several locks and go outside. She would be on her way to dinner. I would wait and then Drop and hide behind a corner and watch her. She would decide to dine at the lugubrious woodgrain-Formica-and-waitresses-with-Early-American-bonnets restaurant that was linked to the motel, just because she was tired and it was close by. I would buy a local paper from a machine and go inside and take a menu and sit down somewhere, ignoring the PLEASE WAIT FOR HOSTESS TO SEAT YOU sign, and then I would stop meddling with time. I would be deep into menu-parsing when Adele walked in. There would be very few folks in the restaurant. The hostess would seat Adele at a nearby table. When Adele said, “Thanks,” I would look up with pleased surprise. I would say hello. She would be carrying a copy of Mirabella, still wearing the pink sweater. When she sat down, I would lean over and ask her, “After you’ve read your magazine and I’ve read my newspaper, will you join me for dessert?”

And of course she would say yes.

The two of us would pretend that we didn’t exist for half an hour. While I ate my pot roast, I would rattle the newspaper with a serious air and read it more thoroughly than I’ve read a newspaper in years. Finally there would come an indecisive moment after our dinner plates were removed. I would look up again and say, “Dessert time?”

She would get up and come over. “I shouldn’t, but I will,” she would say. “The list looks interesting.” We would discuss what an apricot crumble might in reality be, pretending to be more in the dark than we were. Then I would apologize again for the mix-up with the rooms. I would say that it was pure absent-minded stupidity on my part.

She would say, “It’s the second weird thing that has happened to me today.”

“Oh?” I would prompt. “The second?”

Yes, she would reply. She would tell me that she had been driving along the Mass Pike a few hours earlier, minding her own business, listening to a Suzanne Vega tape, when all of a sudden this voice had come on the speakers saying that he was someone in a car that she had recently passed and that he had used his powers to replace the tape in her cassette player with the one she was hearing. She would report that the tape had turned out to be, as you might expect, pornographic. “Really kind of strong stuff in places,” she would tell me. “Kind of disgusting, actually.”

“How very lurid and suggestive and mysterious,” I would say in reaction, making perplexed noises. I would question her further: did she have any idea how such an audiocassette could have made its way into her tape-player?

She would say that she had no idea. I would tell her that I was convinced that there were still one or more major phenomena in the universe that were as yet unknown or were radically misunderstood. “Are you a scientist?” she would inquire. I would say no, with a light laugh, and tell her that I was a temp in Boston, returning from seeing relatives in Pittsburgh. She would say that she was doing linguistics at the University of Chicago. She would be interested in language acquisition in children from bilingual families. We would talk quite happily about language acquisition in children from bilingual families for a long while, since I am interested in that subject myself. She would let me pay for her dessert.

Before we left, I would take a deep breath and say, “You have to forgive me. I’m desperately curious to know what sort of stuff was on that pornographic cassette. Was it just him huffing and puffing?”

“Nothing like that,” Adele would reply. “It was fairly elaborate. It was a whole story.”

I would lean forward, intrigued. “Really?” I would watch her think over what she remembered of it. I would notice her mentally putting aside the first images that came to her from it because she didn’t want to discuss them with me.

She would say, “It was about this woman who — well, there was a UPS man …”

“Figures,” I would say dismissively.

“And a neighbor boy,” she would continue, “and the boy’s girlfriend. And a lawn-mower.”

I would look alarmed. “Not something violent with a lawn-mower.”

She would shake her head.

“So just your standard porn, basically,” I would say.

She would think that one over. “I guess so. There were a great many dildos, which is fine, I guess — whatever. But then — I don’t know — golden showers? Actual out-and-out defecation?”

“Yuck,” I would exclaim.

“I don’t mean,” she would add, “that they were defecating all over the place. It was done with some taste and refinement. But still, there was a general overemphasis on the anal side of things, in my view.”

“Fascinating,” I would say.

“And I’m not saying,” Adele would open-mindedly go on, “that there isn’t some merit to checking in on that part of the world from time to time. I know that it’s richly furnished with nerve-endings. But to give it top billing …”

I would agree wholeheartedly and shake my head at the error of laying too much stress on that area. Then, however, I too would be forced to demonstrate my open-mindedness. “I mean, it certainly doesn’t hurt to include it in the festivities from time to time, occasionally. But it’s more to reawaken one’s appreciation of the usual avenues than as an end in itself.”

Adele would suddenly start laughing.

I would look inquiringly at her.

“Nothing, nothing,” she would say. “Something just popped into my head and struck me as funny. It’s nothing — it’s not funny at all. It’s just that ancient expression ‘Hershey highway.’ ” Having said it, Adele would lean forward, her hands on her face, laughing hard. “Oh boy, sorry.” She would lift her water glass an inch off the table and then set it down, clearing her throat, still laughing a little. “Sorry. It’s just that if you could have heard this tape, on and on about ‘up her butt’ and ‘in her ass’ and ‘show me that tight little ass,’ God. Sorry.”

I would laugh politely. “What sort of voice did the man on the tape have?” I would ask.

“A very sort of straight-arrow voice,” Adele would say. “No Boston accent or anything. Maybe a bit like your voice. Quite deep, though.” She would give me a look and I would have a feeling that she was on the verge of asking me if I had made the tape. (The stately pace of sound-waves in the Fold would further explain my altered timbre.) But she wouldn’t ask. Possibly she wouldn’t want to know that I was the Arno Van Dilden behind Marian the Librarian. She wouldn’t want me to be a liar and a trickster and a sneak, but a genuine, somewhat-fun-to-talk- to one-time dessert companion, which is what I would genuinely want to be for her as well. We would walk back up the slope to the motel. Our respective keys would make jingly sounds. I would be so sleepy by this time that I would hardly be able to stand.

I would ask her, “Are you leaving at the crack of dawn or will you be able to have some breakfast?”

She would say that she would probably just get something at a drive-through.

“Well,” I would say, shaking her hand, “good luck with your bilingual research.” We would go into our rooms. I would take a shower and get in bed and fall asleep thinking about light-switches that go up and down without making a clicking sound. It would only be about eight-thirty, real time. The effort involved in trying to be likable, on top of the lack of sleep, would have completely wiped me out. Two hours later, the phone would ring.

It would be Adele. “Did I wake you up?”

I would say no.

She would say, “The reason I’m calling is, you know what? I think you unintentionally made off with my washcloth.”

I would pretend to think back. I would remember. “Right, of course. I was flustered.”

Adele would say, “I believe that you had it on top of that pile of reading material.”

“You’re right,” I would say. “Do you need it? I’ll bring it right over.”

“Well,” she would explain, “I’m thinking of taking a bath, and a bath is just not a bath without a washcloth.”

I would indicate that I agreed wholeheartedly with this statement. “The washcloth is one of the more versatile things you can bring with you to the bathtub,” I would say. I would tell her how much I liked it when I got soap in my eyes and I squeezed out the washcloth and scrubbed my eyes really hard with it, making the sting of the soap miraculously go away. Adele would tell me how as a child she had arranged her dolls at the foot of the tub and used wet washcloths as blankets, tucking them in. I would ask her whether she had raised her dolls bilingually. She would say that in fact she had developed several doll languages. We would share a few more thoughts on this rich and interesting subject.

“Well,” she would finally say.

“How do you want to work this?” I would tentatively ask. “I could just bring one over. You’ll hear a knock and I’ll just hand you one. I took a shower earlier, but I only used one.”

“I took a shower earlier, too,” Adele would say. “But I can’t sleep now.” She would hesitate. “If you’re not decent, or you don’t want to go outside in the cold, I was thinking that there seems to be a door leading directly from your room to my room. I’ll keep the chain on my side hooked on, because I’m not … well … anyway, you could just hand it through the gap in my door.”

I would tell her what a good idea I thought that was. “Let me see if my side opens.” I would undo the chain and the slide-lock on my side and open my door, revealing a second, knobless door on her side. “My side is open now,” I would say. “I’ll hang up and get the washcloth.”

“Okay, see you in a second,” she would say.

The white square of fabric would still be resting on top of the pile of dirty magazines. I would fold it up neatly, like a blank business letter, and knock once on her inner door. After a series of unbolting noises, the door would open a crack. Adele’s eye and the corner of her mouth would appear. “Surprise,” she would say.

“I’m so very glad to have found you at home,” I would gallantly offer.

Adele would put her hand to the gap and I would stuff the washcloth through. “Have a good bath,” I would say.

She would thank me and apologize for disturbing me so late.

“Don’t be silly,” I would say. “Do you read in the bath? I have the local paper. But I guess newspapers are not really bath matter. I do have, though, as you saw, a stack of dirty magazines. Ah, I forgot — you have Mirabella, so you’re all set.”

“I’ve already read everything in Mirabella except the horoscope page,” she would say. “I suppose I could read it again. I do love to read in the bath. In that … pile,” she would innocently ask, “are there any magazines that you could recommend?”

I would be taken aback by the idea of a recommendation. “To be quite honest,” I would say, “I had just laid them out on your — on the bed in your room there, pretty much at random, when you unlocked the door and found me. I haven’t really studied them. Why don’t I drag them over now, and we can take a look.”

“Okay,” she would say, elongating the second syllable with a trace of doubt.

I would exaggerate the “oofs” of lifting the weight of fourteen magazines. It is remarkable, though, how heavy a pile of men’s magazines can be. They would make a deep heavy rectangular sound when I let them drop from a few inches above the brown carpeting, a sound that would momentarily remind me of newspaper-recycling efforts and the closing of car doors. (It would make sense that dropped newspaper bundles and car-door-closings would be related, since car doors are in fact filled with old newspapers as sound-damping insulation.) With an air of bemused superiority, though with a distinct undertone of boyish excitement, I would read off the names of the magazines. “Let’s see. There’s Celebrity Sleuth and Leg Show, Max, Fox, Lips. What’s this one? Ah, Best of High Society, Assets, Club, Hooters, Velvet, High Society, Swank, Tail Ends, Gent …”

She would ask, “Why in the world do you need so many?”

“I only do this in motels,” I would explain. “I have to have the entire bed covered with open magazines. Ideally I’d have twin beds covered, and be able to pivot back and forth between both pictorial bedspreads.”

“It seems a little excessive,” Adele would say, justifiably.

“Does it?” I would ask.

“Expensive, anyway,” she would say.

“This pile cost eighty-five dollars,” I would tell her. “So it would make me feel much better, much less wasteful, if someone else besides me got some use out of them. It’s like not wanting to drink alone.” I would tell the story of how, when I was packing to leave for college and I had to get rid of all the dirty magazines of my adolescence, I couldn’t bear to throw them away, so I took them to the park in a paper bag and left them in a place where drunks sometimes slept, figuring that they might have a second life there. “Now I know that there are bookstores that buy used magazines,” I would say. “Avenue Victor Hugo on Newbury. Now that’s a great store. Have you been there?”

Adele would say she thought she had, once. Encouraged, I would tell her another story, about a time when I was in the Avenue Victor Hugo one Sunday afternoon when a very serious Lebanese-looking man brought in three heavy boxes of old Penthouses. The used-book buyer looked at the boxes, but he didn’t issue store credit for them right away. Instead he called out to an assistant, a woman of twenty, black hair, glasses, who had been in the back shelving some old mint Frederik Pohl paperbacks, each one in a protective plastic collector’s sleeve, and told her there were three boxes of Penthouses. The assistant sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of the boxes. I thought she was just going to count the magazines. And she did count them. But as she lifted each one, she flipped through it, opening it to its center-spread, glancing at the picture, and then closing it back up and putting it in a neat pile. I hovered near the fancy slipcased editions of Poe, observing all this, trying to puzzle out her behavior. The woman didn’t seem to be motivated by a desire to get a look at each Penthouse pet. (“Pet” is offensive, in my opinion.) She sighed in a bored or perhaps resigned way as she did it. Her movements repeated themselves automatically. She didn’t mind opening these magazines, baring them right down to the bent ends of their center-spread staples in the front of the store, in the presence of anyone who happened to be there, but she did it not out of interest but because it was simply part of her job. What exactly, though, was she looking for? I wondered. And then I understood. The store was not going to accept any magazine onto which someone had come. Having been burned in the past by greedy unprincipled men who tried to unload their utterly unresellable porn-libraries, they now had instituted a firm policy of flipping through every issue to make sure that none of its pages were stuck together. The Lebanese man had stood uncomfortably by while all this was going on. Fortunately, he had not personalized a single page of his entire collection.

“Nor have you, I take it,” Adele would say when I finished telling her my Avenue Victor Hugo story.

“That’s right,” I would answer. “Each of these magazines is as impersonal as the next. Which ones do you want to look at?” I would tell her that Swank was said by insiders to be temporarily in the ascendant and that Leg Show was interesting and funny at times. I would pretend to be more of a connoisseur than I am. Showing someone your pornography collection was, I would reflect to myself, a very straightforward form of exhibitionism: Here are my private sexual things, it said. Look at them, like them, hold them.

As I fed magazines through the gap in the door, Adele would leaf through them, at first attentively, then less so. She wouldn’t react as I had hoped. “I don’t know,” she would say several times with different intonations. I would push a few more through to her. Finally she would say, “No. I don’t go for this. The skin has an unreal look. All the women look the same. Why do men need so many identical pictures in one month?” She would finish flipping through the last magazine. “No. I just don’t think I can take any of these to the bath with me; I don’t think I can take seeing any more pictures of women’s vaginas. I’ve never seen so many vaginas in my life. Here.”

She would slip the magazines back through the gap in the door to me. I would pile them up neatly as they reappeared, two by two. I would try to recoup through explanation. I would tell her that bringing out all your magazines and arranging them on the bed was sort of like getting an erection. First your periodical pornography is folded away in darkness in a drawer or a bag or a box, stored in its most compact form, and then you bring it out, you flap it around in the light, you increase its two-dimensional surface area. I would grant her that there was a feeling of sameness at times, that sometimes I got surfeited, that my interest went through phases. (Which would be a true statement: I rarely used porn when I had Fold-powers, since all the world was a dirty magazine then.) But in general, I would say, men unfortunately do want the same thing over and over — a different woman identically posed is the only difference they need. I would tell her that each tiny variation between two women’s bodies constituted a huge difference from a sexual point of view. The same body wearing different clothes or with different-colored hair didn’t read as sexually different; it had to be a different body. I would tell her this not as if I were pleased about it, but as if it were simply the way it was. For some women like when men tell the truth about themselves.

“Since we’re letting our hair down,” Adele would say, “can I ask you something?” I would see one of her eyes peering in at me. Because she would be leaning from behind the door, it would be impossible for me to tell for sure what she was or was not wearing. I would have a strong suspicion that she had a towel wrapped around under her arms, and I would be glad if she did, because it was such a marvelously simple extension of the towel’s utility (despite its visual overuse in made-for-TV movies), relying on the slightly moist post-shower plush of the towel and the swell of the Jams to keep the folded-under corner from slipping and freeing the entire wrap: its very tightness kept it tight.

I would put my face close to the door as well, and she and I would regard each other eye to eye. “What’s your question?” I would say.

She would ask, “Is the washcloth you handed me just now the one that was sort of hanging on the edge of the bed when your magazines were all spread out in here?”

I would admit that it was.

Adele would blink carefully. “Why was it on the bed that way? What were you planning to do with it?”

I would tell her that I had been planning to shoot onto it. “Or maybe I would have bundled my penis in it and muffled the explosion,” I would say. I would reveal to her that my orgasms were almost always better when shot into cotton than into tissue paper. Then I would add: “I would have rinsed the washcloth out afterward. I don’t think whoever does the room when I check out should have to deal with that sort of relic.”

She would tell me that I was a considerate person.

I would lower my voice to a whisper and tell her how much I wanted to see her ass.

“That may or may not happen,” she would say.

I would ask her what she had been planning to do with the washcloth in her bath.

“Wash with it,” she would say. She would now be kneeling very close to the door. She was, I would verify, wearing a white towel. My face would be so close to hers that I would be able to hear every detail of her breathing, and yet we would not comfortably be able to kiss. She would be smiling, pleased that I was so obviously hers. I would be able to smell her lipstick. She would finally say, “I suppose I should take my bath now. The water is going to get cold.”

“You’ve had the bath ready this whole time?” I would say, distressed. “I had no idea. And here I’ve been stuffing all of this month’s pornography through the door at you.”

“I’ll add some warm if it’s gotten cold,” Adele would say. Then: “It’s not that I hate those magazines, it’s just that they didn’t do anything for me.”

“You know what I wish?” I would say. “I wish you would wash right here at the door.”

“You do, do you,” Adele would say. She would think. “Let me see you for a second.”

Up until then, I would have been leaning so that my body was out of her sight-line. I would shift so that one of my knees was against the door, and one was just outside the door-frame. I would be sitting on my feet. All I would have on would be a pair of venerable 1984 red Calvin Klein underpants that had gone loose around the leg. I would pull one leg-hole sideways over my dick-bundle so that I was free to shake my yokel a little for her as it stiffened. “Will you wash your breasts for me while I activate this?” I would ask.

“You know that I’m not opening this door,” she would say firmly. “The chain stays on.”

“I know,” I would say.

She would relax then, because she would see that we were both content to play by the same rules. “You’d be interested in seeing me wash my breasts?” she would ask. She would run her tongue over her lips. I would see her eyes go down my chest to my handful of dick. The speed of my fist-shuttle would say yes.

“Here’s a suggestion,” I would then offer, abandoning my cockwork to raise a finger. “Don’t waste the bath, since it’s already there. Sit in the bath for a minute or two, wash the lower part of your body or whatever, do half the job, not that it needs it. And then get something … do you have anything that can hold some water?” I would look around my room doubtfully and spot an ice bucket. “The ice bucket!” I would cry. “Perfect. You could get your ice bucket and fill it with some of that warm bathwater and bring it over here and wash your breasts for me. You could dunk the washcloth in the bucket and hang your breasts over it and squeeze that warm water all over them. I want to see that so much. Please? I’ll just wait here patiently stroking my cock.” I would give her a querying look. “Do you have an ice bucket?”

She would crane her head momentarily. “Yes, oddly enough I happen to have an ice bucket. Tell you what. If I’m not back here in, oh, ten minutes, it means that I’m shy and I don’t want to wash my breasts for you, in which case you’ve got plenty of magazines to tide you over. That’s one thing I want to get clear, by the way. My body isn’t exactly like the ones in those magazines.”

I would tell her that she was absolutely right: her body was three-dimensional. “That third dimension can be pretty nice sometimes,” I would say. I would tell her that I could already see some hints of her shape under the white towel, that I knew she was magnificent, that I was super-keen to see more, etc.

“Give me a few minutes,” she would say. She would disappear from the doorway. I would put my ear to the gap and listen as hard as I could. I would hear her towel fall and some watery sounds.

“Are you in?” I would call, loudly.

“Sssh!” she would answer. There would be more watery sounds. I would let my forehead rest against the door, imagining her sitting in the bath. I would repose that way for a long time. Then there would be the unmistakable sound of someone rising up out of the bath. More watery sounds would ensue. The ice bucket would appear on the carpeting near the opening in the doorway. “I’m back,” Adele would say.

I would ask her if she had had a nice bath.

“A little rushed, but yes,” she would reply. On peering in at me, she would be somewhat startled. “We’re rather rock hard, aren’t we?”

“Are you still toweled?” I would ask rhetorically, since I could see that she was.

“I can not be if you want,” she would say. She would pull near her shoulder; the tucked-in corner would give way and she would gather the collapsing towel in her hands in front of her, still shielding herself from my sight. Then, with grace, she would set it aside and look at the gap in the door where my eye was. She would have high round medium breasts and broad shoulders and smooth, solid arms and thighs. Her tan lines would be very faint, almost unnoticeable. Her thick disorderly hair would be just right for her body. To get herself over her embarrassment, she would say, “Now where did I put that washcloth? Ah, yes.” She would hold the dry washcloth indecisively.

With my mouth very close to the door-frame, I would tell her that she was beautiful, perfect, amazing. I would tell her that I loved her breasts.

“Well, thank you,” she would say, pleased. Her legs would be folded underneath her; she would be sitting on her feet (as I still was). Half seductively, half uneasily, she would run her hands up and down the tops of her long thick thighs. The way her squeezed thigh-flesh made an outward curve just above her knees, like the lid of a grand piano seen from above, would endear her to me.

“Why not put the ice bucket between your legs?” I would suggest.

“That’s a thought,” she would say. She would part her thighs and pull the bucket between them. I would see a brevity of light-brown hair. The ice bucket would be round and black. She would remove its top. A little steam would plume up from the water inside. She would gather her hair and throw its mass behind her shoulders. “Shall I?” she would ask me, lifting the washcloth.

“It’s the right thing to do,” I would say. “Dunk it”

She would push the washcloth in the water. She would lift it, squeeze it, submerge it again. The second time she squeezed it out, she would let it fall open in her hand. It would be a fairly thin washcloth, as hotel washcloths often are — you would almost be able to see her shadowy fingers through it. She would look at me. Then she would bend forward and watch her hand as it surrounded her soft breast with the warmth of the white cloth. She would steady her breast from underneath with her other hand as she gently held it and circled it with the compress.

“What a beautiful sight,” I would say. “Is it warm?”

“Very warm,” Adele would say, squeezing and circling. “Very warm. I always wanted to do this with those hot towels they hand out in Japanese restaurants. Just lift my shirt at the table, you know? ‘Why thank you! How very kind of you!’ Mmm. Or at the end of airplane flights.”

“The other one,” I would breathe. “The other one’s looking left out.” Then I would have an inspiration. “Hang on, what am I thinking? I’ll get the other washcloth! Don’t move!” I would leap up and retrieve my washcloth from the bathroom. “It’s still a little wet from my shower,” I would tell her. “You won’t mind?”

She would shake her head. I would poke the washcloth through the door. She would drop it into the ice bucket, squeeze it, and, leaning forward again, cup her other breast with it. Two hands on two washcloths on two breasts. I would make sounds of wonder and praise.

“I bet they’ll stay on by themselves,” she would say. She would straighten and let her hands fall to her sides. The washcloths would indeed remain in place. She would pull at their corners, neatening away the wrinkles. They would look like oversized pockets on a very sheer shirt.

I would ask her what it would feel like to hold her nipples through them.

“Probably it would feel pretty good,” Adele would say. She would gently pinch her nipples through the wet plush. Still holding them, she would bow forward and shake her breasts so that the washcloths peeled off her skin and fell over her pinching fingers. Then she would drop both washcloths into the bucket. “You know how I might like to wash my breasts if I were by myself?” she would ask me, shaking the water from her fingers.

“How?” I would ask.

She would slide the ice bucket forward and lean her torso lower and lower over it, supporting some of her weight on one hand. She would allow one of her breasts to descend into the round opening of the bucket and then let it dip silently in the water. This would get me crazy. The chain on the door would start rattling.

“Oh, shit, that’s so fine,” I would say, thumping my fist up and down my gender-beam. “So efficient, so sensible. Can you do the other now? Can you dunk it for me?”

Adele would have both her hands on the rug now, and she would continue her wonderful alternating breast-dipping session: dipping one breast, lifting it, letting it drip a little, moving laterally, dipping the other breast. Watching her, I would get into such a froth of desire that I would find myself unable to say anything more than “Dunk that tit, dunk that tit, you’re so fucking sexy, dunk that tit!” which wouldn’t bother her. After a while she would bring her face close to the door-gap and look through at my jaction.

“It looks like that feels good,” she would say.

“It really, really does,” I would say.

“My nipples are all clean and hard,” she would say. “Would you like to touch one?”

She would hold her breast to the opening and I would kneel forward and let my richard nose into it. Though this would be the first time we had touched, aside from shaking hands, it wouldn’t feel wildly momentous, just part of the escalation. She would pull that breast away and would bring the other nipple close to the gap. The farther my yokel poked through the door, the more I would be able to feel the air of her room on it. The air would seem cooler. My dick, I would realize with surprise, was in her motel room! Her other hand would have found its way between her legs and would be unpretentiously polishing her Gummi Bear.

“I wish that I could give you a kiss,” I would say. “I don’t mean that you should unchain the door, I just mean I wish we could kiss.”

“Let’s see what we can do,” she would say. We would get our heads as close together as they could be and we would stick out our tongues. Their tips would touch; the sensation would flow crotchwards. The chain on the door would continue to make its audible presence known.

“I wish I could see your ass,” I would croak.

“Hmm.” She would tilt her head. “I don’t think our relationship is at a point where you can see my ass.”

“No?” I would say, surprised.

“No,” she would say. “Because you know what? Something tells me you want to see my asshole. Right?”

I would equivocate. “Not just your asshole. Ass and asshole together. In context.”

“Right,” she would say, “but I don’t really want you looking at my asshole tonight.”

I would not argue with this. I would say, “I accept that. An asshole is a very personal thing. I’d be perfectly happy just to see your ass. You could keep your cheeks together.”

But she wouldn’t go for that either. “I think not,” she would say. “I don’t trust myself. If I turned around and showed you my ass, my cheeks might fly open, and we wouldn’t want that. What if I washed my breasts some more?” She would brush some of her hair over one of her nipples for emphasis. “Hmm?”

I would say, “That would be fantastic, of course, but — here’s an idea. What if you took one of the washcloths and just placed it on your ass? Just placed it there. It would be a white square, a helicopter landing pad, but it would follow your shape.”

“You mean like this?” She would wring out a washcloth and hold it as a loincloth over her bottom, and she would turn with her back to me.

“Yes,” I would say, “in a way, but I guess I didn’t mean quite so free-hanging. I think it might need to be wetter, so that it really clings, just the way it clung to your breasts. The way you have it now it’s a little bit … centerfielderesque.”

“Ah.” Adele would dip her hands in the water and hold them on her ass to wet it, and then she would apply the washcloth to her skin and turn to show me.

“Perfect, perfect!” I would whisper-hiss. “Now I can see your sex-shape and yet your ass observes all the proprieties.” I would shuffle my way as close to the door-opening as possible and I would begin to jack frantically, my knuckles rapping smartly on the door. The lock’s chain would clank and rattle with every stroke of my fist. “Can you back up towards the door a little more?” I would ask.

On her knees, Adele would back the white square on her ass towards me. It would follow the seam of her open peach faithfully; it would look oddly like an open book.

“Just a little more!” I would say. I would tell her how close my cock was to her ass, and how fucking incredible her ass looked. Just below the edge of the washcloth, I would be able to see four of her fingers fretting against the flushed cowling of her clit. I would let go of my cock and extend my hand through the door-gap as far as it would go; I would almost be able to reach her with my middle finger. “Back up just a teensy bit more,” I would say. “I’m going to touch you.”

She would let her knees slide farther apart on the rug and would push back with her hands, bringing her ass right up against the edge of the door. My fingertips would make contact with the rough damp texture of the washcloth. I would pull on one of the upper corners, which would have slipped down a little.

“Is everything still in place?” she would ask, looking back over her shoulder. “You’re not seeing anything you shouldn’t be seeing?”

I would let my fingers brush lightly down into her terry-cloth vale. Then I would go up the opposite slope a little way, then back down, tracing parabolas of shape-appreciation. I would know more or less where things were underneath, but I wouldn’t be able to see them. “All is in order for the time being,” I would say. “I’ll keep a close eye on it, though.”

“Thanks,” she would say.

“Do you want to frig your pussy real fast?” I would inquire huskily.

Adele would answer that she was frigging her pussy real fast. We wouldn’t speak for some time, mewing antiphonally.

The washcloth would be looser now. I would essentially be holding it up for her with my finger. “It doesn’t seem to want to stay put entirely,” I would warn. “But I think I know a good way to keep it from falling. Shall I?”

“Yes, do it. Oh yeah. Do it.” Adele would be lost in her onan-world.

“I’m going to push into the washcloth with my middle finger,” I would then say. “Okay? Just half an inch. That will keep it in place.”

I would find the right spot and I would push. White wrinkles would form in the fabric — a sort of plush white terry-cloth sphincter would gather around my stiff middle finger as I forced my way in.

“Eeeeeyeah!” Adele would say. “The texture of it!”

Carefully I would withdraw my finger, leaving the washcloth in place. “Now tighten it and make yourself come,” I would say.

“It really tingles in there,” she would say.

I would lean all my weight against the door and aim my cock through the gap. Adele would begin pushing against the doorjamb in a steady rhythm. This movement would finally make the washcloth slide off her ass-curves and hang down; but it would not fall to the floor, since it was still held tightly by her asshole. She would sense something amiss. “Oh no!” she would say breathlessly, alarmed.

“It’s all right!” I would reassure her. “It’s hanging there! I still can’t really see anything. Just hold it in there real tight, don’t let it fall, okay? I’m going to deliver a whole candygram of come right through this doorway any second.”

“Ooh, you are?” Adele would say. She would be pushing against the door with her ass so hard now that she would practically be shutting it in my face. “Come on my washcloth!” she would call. “Squeeze it off on my washcloth!”

In my frenzy, I would aim wrong and release my first two smut-schnapps on the carpet and the door, but with the third I would manage to fling some fertile distillate on her upper thigh. Feeling it, she would give her commotion the final go-ahead — and the limply hanging washcloth, tightly cinched in her raving sphincter, would begin to move hypnotically, pulling in and out several times where it disappeared, making the free end gently lift and wag, like a handkerchief waved in farewell from an ocean liner.

She would turn and sit and look in at me. We would describe how pleasant it had been. “And see?” I would say. “The washcloth did not fall. Your modesty was maintained.”

“Now I can sleep,” she would say. I would refocus on her hair, which would look beautiful and thick and tossed around. Though we wouldn’t be able to shake hands properly through the door, we would hook index fingers and shake good-bye that way. Her door would close and I would hear the lock on the knob turn and the bolt slide spftly into place. I would close my door, too, and lock it, but I wouldn’t reinstate the chain lock on my side — for it would seem to me that the sound of my chaining would constitute a faint rudeness after what we had done together.

The next morning, when I opened the door to the outside, I would find a small white bundle at my feet. It would be the Suzanne Vega tape wrapped in one of the now-stiffened washcloths, with a note saying, Take care of yourself — A.J.S. I wouldn’t be sure if this gift was meant to show that she knew that I was the one who had switched the tapes in the car, or whether it was simply a friendly gesture. But I would take care of myself, at least twice, before driving back to Boston.

That was what I planned to happen. What did happen, though, is that after an hour and a half or so of steady driving on the Mass Pike, an hour and a half full of hope and keyed-up concentration, I saw a small twirling rectangular shape fly out of Adele’s car window.

She hadn’t liked it. How very sad and disappointing. Had she listened to all of it and then decided she didn’t like it, or had she hated it so much that she had tossed it halfway through? I pushed up on my glasses and checked her car stereo: yes, Suzanne Vega was back in place. Nor were Adele’s nipples noticeably erect under her pink floral sweater. Was she made of stone? Imagine her chucking my cassette right out the window! Hours and hours of work, all custom joinery, all for her, dismissed. Of course I had said that she should feel free to do that, but still, I hadn’t expected her to do it. My pride was hurt. I paced around in the tall grass where I thought I had seen the tape land, but I couldn’t find it. And I didn’t want to spend much time out of the car, because the grass I walked in had the same disturbingly blurred quality that the road had — I felt I would inflict some rending injury to the network of cosmic wormholes if I walked on the median strip for too long. I started up time and drove slowly, until Adele was way ahead of me. At the next exit, I turned around and drove home. When I woke up the next morning, my Fold-powers were gone.