Vox

“Quite possible. Anyhow, he sat in the kitchen and we talked rather formally while I made a spiral kind of pasta and microwaved a packet of creamed chipped beef — this is a great dish, incidentally, Stouffer’s creamed chipped beef over any kind of pasta noodles — I have it about once a week. Lawrence made an elaborate pretense of being impressed by this super easy recipe, and when I poured the spirals from the drainer into a bowl he came over to where I was standing and he said, ‘I have to see this.’ I was going to simply slice the packet of creamed chipped open and dump it over the spirals, which is what I normally do, but I was feeling sneaky, I’d just had a shower, and you know about me and showers, but I hadn’t dithered, despite the major striptease fantasy I’d had at the circus, because obviously I couldn’t, since a man was in my apartment, so I was feeling devious, and so I got out some olive oil and poured a little of it on the spirals, and he — he was definitely not in the know about cooking, and I’m certainly not much of a cook myself — but he said, ‘So that’s how you keep them from sticking and clumping.’ I stirred them up, and they made an embarrassingly luscious sexy sound, and I just decided, fuck it, I’ve dressed this person, I’m feeding this person, I’m going to seduce this person, right now, today, so I said, I said, ‘How very strange,’ I said, ‘I just remembered something I haven’t thought of in years. I just remembered this kid in my junior high — you remind me of him in some ways — I just remembered his commenting that a certain girl must have used olive oil to put on her jeans.’ Well, I saw Lawrence’s little eyeballs roll at this. He said something obvious about extra virgin cold pressed and he snuffied out a nervous laugh and I thought, yes, I am in charge here, I am going to see this person’s penis get hard, and even though I have a smoldering yeast problem and so can’t really have full-fledged sex I am going to have my way with this person somehow. It was probably that Venezuelan ball-twirling screamer that put me in that mood, now that I think back. I mean, I felt powerful and shrewd and effortlessly in control and everything else I usually don’t feel. I cut open the packet of creamed chipped and I said, musingly, ‘My grandmother was very careful about money — she always used to say that she was as tight as the bark on a tree. And I used to think about what that really would feel like, whether bark does feel tight to the inner wood of the tree. I used to put on my jeans and take them off, thinking about that.’ Lawrence said, ‘Really!’ I said, ‘Yeah, although actually I didn’t like my jeans to be at all tight, even then. I liked them loose. The appeal was the rough fabric, and the rough stitching, very barklike, the appeal was of being in this sort of complete male embrace, but then when you took them off, being all smooth and curved.’ Lawrence nodded seriously. So I said, making the leap, I said, ‘And when I started getting my legs waxed, which is quite an expensive little procedure, I also thought of that phrase, as tight as the bark on a tree, when Leona, my waxer, began putting the little warm wax strips on my legs and letting them solidify for an instant and ripping them off.’ I said, ‘In fact, I just had my legs waxed yesterday.’ Lawrence said, ‘Is that right?’ and I said, ‘Yes, it’s amazing how much freer you feel after your legs are waxed — it’s almost as if you’ve become physically more limber — you want to leap around, and make high kicks, cavort.’ I waited for that to sink in and then I said, ‘Leona’s a tiny Ukrainian woman, and she makes this growly sound as she rips the strips of muslin and wax off, rrr, and when she’s done both my legs and there’s no more hurting, she rubs lotion into them, and it’s a surprisingly sensual experience.’ Lawrence was silent for a second and then he said, ‘I’m inexperienced with depilatory techniques. I’ve never known anyone who had her legs waxed.’ I said, ‘Let’s have dinner.’ ”

“What a tactician!”

“Not really. Anyhow, we had dinner, which was pretty tame. Lawrence had many virtues, he had a kind of bony broad-shoulderedness, and a deliberate way of blinking and looking at you when you spoke, and he was quite smart — he was a patent lawyer.”

“Ah. Patent infringement?”

“Yes indeed. But he had no conversational skills at all. He was putty in my hands. No, I’m actually making myself seem more completely sure of my powers than I felt — but still, I was pretty much in control. I started asking him how electrical things worked — you know, like what shortwave radio was, and how cordless telephones worked, and why it is that at drive-ins now you can hear the movie on the FM radio in your car. And he was full of interesting information, once you jump-started him that way. But the thing was, I kept a faint racy undertone going in the conversation. For instance, I’d say, ‘What do you think those ham-radio bulls really talked about? Do you think some of them were secretly gay, and they left their wives asleep and crept down to their finished basements in the middle of the night to have long conversations with friends in New Zealand or wherever?’ He said, ‘I suppose it’s a possibility.’ And about the drive-ins I said things like, ‘It must be much more comfortable and private in drive-ins now, because you can close the window completely, you don’t have that metal thing hanging there with the tinny sound, covered with yellow chipped paint, like a chaperone, you’re not attached to anything around you, it’s much more like being in a car on the expressway.’ He said he didn’t know exactly how drive-ins supplied the FM sound, because he hadn’t been to a drive-in since he was eight years old, but he said that technically speaking it was an easy problem to solve, for instance there was a thing advertised in the back of Popular Science that picks up any sound in the room and broadcasts it to FM radios within several hundred yards, it’s called a Bionic Mike Transmitter. I said, ‘Ooo, a Bionic Mike Transmitter!’ He said, ‘Oh sure, it’s this device that you can leave in this room, for instance, and it will broadcast any sound in the room to any nearby FM radio, if it’s correctly tuned.’ He said, ‘Of course it’s advertised with a big warning about how it’s not meant for illegal surveillance. But probably that’s what it’s used for.’ I said, ‘You mean that whatever I did, whatever intimate private activity I engaged in, would be heard by the people swooshing by in the cars on the expressway?’ He said, ‘If they were tuned correctly, yes.’ I said, ‘Hmmm.’ You see, my living room is on the second floor, about three hundred feet from a raised part of the expressway.”

“In some eastern city,” he said.

“That’s right,” she said.

“So what did Lawrence do when you expressed a keen interest in his description of the Bionic Mike Transducer?”

“Transmitter. He asked if he could have a fourth helping of creamed chipped beef. Then we were finished and I started to clear the table and he said, ‘I’ll wash up.’ I said, ‘No, forget it, I’ll do it later,’ but he said, ‘No no really, I like washing up.’ So I said fine, and he cleaned the kitchen, quite efficiently, while I told him the plot of Dial M for Murder, really lingering over the hot letter that’s found on the body of the man with the pair of scissors in his back. You know? Lawrence listened carefully — he’d never seen the movie, if you can believe it. He said he didn’t like black-and-white movies. I said, ‘Fine, don’t like them, Dial M for Murder is in color.’ He said, ‘Oh.’ And then he said, ‘Well, I think Hitchcock was a fairly sick individual anyway.’ I said, ‘You’re probably right.’ Then he dried his hands with a paper towel and turned toward me holding the glass bottle of olive oil and he said, ‘Now, where does this go?’ I said, ‘Well, where would you like it to go?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know.’ So I said, ‘Well sometimes, after I get my legs waxed, the day after, they’re still a little tender, and I’ve found that olive oil really helps them feel better.’ Which wasn’t true, they feel fine the day after, but anyway.”

“Erotic license.”

“Exactly. He said, ‘But that would be terribly messy!’ I said, ‘So I’ll stand in the bathtub.’ And he said, ‘But won’t it be cold and clammy?’ So I turned the bottle of oil on its side and put it in the microwave for twenty seconds. He felt it and he shook his head and said, ‘I think it needs a full minute.’ So we leaned on the counter, looking at the microwave, while it heated the oil. When the five beeps beeped, Lawrence took it out, and we went to the bathroom together. I stood in the bathtub and pulled my shorts up high on my legs, and very solemnly he poured a little pool of olive oil on his fingers and rubbed it just above my knee.”

“He was kneeling himself?”

“Yes. The bathtub wasn’t really wet anymore — I mean it was still humid from both the showers, but we didn’t have the water running or anything. He said, ‘You’re very smooth.’ I said, ‘Thank you.’ A rather powerful smell of olive oil surrounded us, and I began to feel quite Mediterranean and Bacchic, and honestly somewhat like a mushroom being lightly sautéed. He stared at his hand going over my skin, blinking at it. I pulled the sides of my shorts up higher so he could do more of my thighs, and I said, ‘Leona is very thorough. No follicle is left unmolested.’ Then, whoops, I wondered whether that was maybe too kinky for him and whether he might think that I was trying to give him the idea that Leona had gone over the edge and waxed off all my pubic hair, horrifying thought, so I said, ‘I mean, within limits.’ He just kept on dolloping oil on his fingers and rubbing it in. After a while I turned around and held on to the showerhead and he did the backs of my legs. He wasn’t artful at all, he didn’t know how to knead the deep muscles, but I could feel the intelligence and interest in his fingers when they came to each new dry curve. His hands went right up underneath the bagginess of my shorts. I liked that. He didn’t say anything. Once I think he cleared his throat. Finally he said, ‘Okay, I think that’s everything.’ I turned around and looked down at him: he was sitting with his legs crossed, looking at my legs, very closely, really letting his eyes travel over them. He had curly hair — he needed a haircut, in fact. He had the top of the olive oil in one hand and the bottle in the other, and before he stood up he pressed the circle of the plastic top back and forth up the inside of both my legs, in a zigzag. Then he stood up and handed me the bottle. He was blushing. I smiled at him and I said, ‘Are you suffering from any sticking or clumping?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, some.’ So I pulled on the waistband of his shorts and poured about a tablespoonful of oil in there.”

“No kidding!”

“Yes, well, he looked at me with shock. And I know I wouldn’t have been able to do it if they hadn’t really been my own shorts that I’d lent him. I said, ‘I’m awfully sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking. Take those off and I’ll see if I have another pair.’ So he marched that peculiar march that men do as they are taking off their pants. He was not erect by any means, but he wasn’t dormant either. I said, ‘Did the olive oil feel warm?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ So I said, ‘Would you like some more?’ and he said, ‘Maybe.’ So I held the mouth of the bottle right where his pubic hair bushed out, high on his cock, I mean near the base, not near the tip, because he was still drooping down, and I tipped it as if to pour it over him, but I didn’t actually let any come out. I just held it there. And the expectation of the warmth of the oil made his cock rise a little. I tipped the bottle even more, so that the olive oil was right in the neck, ready to pour out, but still I didn’t actually pour it. And his erection rose a little more, wanting the oil. It was like some kind of stage levitation. His hands were in little boyish fists at his sides. When he was almost horizontal, but still angling slightly downward, suddenly I poured the entire rest of the bottle over him, just glug glug glug glug glug, so that it flowed down its full cock length and fell with a buzzing sound onto the bathtub. And this was not a trivial amount of oil, this was about maybe a third of the bottle. The waste was itself exciting. It was like covering him in some amber glaze. He hurriedly moved his legs farther apart so he wouldn’t get oil spatter on his feet. By the time there were only a few last drips falling from the bottle, he was totally, I mean totally, hard. And of course with this success I had second thoughts. I almost wanted him to leave right then so that I could come in the shower by myself. I stepped out of the tub and I said, ‘Sorry, I got carried away. And the problem is, I have this darn yeast situation, so I can’t really do anything with that magnificent thing, much as I’d like to.’ He said, ‘Ah, that’s all right, I’ll just go home and take care of that myself, that’s no problem,’ he said, ‘but your tub, on the other hand, is a mess. Ask me to clean it and I will.’ I said, ‘Oh don’t worry about that, it’s just oil, it’s nothing.’ But he was on his own private trajectory, and he said, ‘That’s right, it’s oil, plus I have to say the tub is not terribly clean to begin with.’ I said, ‘No no no, don’t even think of it, really.’ He picked up an old dry Rescue pad that was in a corner and he held it up and he said, ‘Look, tell me to clean your tub.’ He’s standing there, a pantless patent lawyer, semierect, wearing my Danger Mouse T-shirt, holding the tiny curled-up green Rescue pad with a fierce expression. He wanted to clean my tub. I said, ‘Well, great. Please do. Sure.’ He asked for some Ajax, so I brought some from the kitchen, along with a folding chair so I could sit and watch. Well, this Lawrence turned out to be some kind of demon scrub-wizard. He hands me my bottles of shampoo, one by one. My tub is now naked! He squats in it, so that his testicles are practically gamboling in the giant teardrop of oil that’s on the bottom, and he takes the Ajax and he taps its rim against the edge of the tub, all the way around, so that these curtains of pale blue powder fall down the sides, kind of an aurora borealis effect, and then he moistens his Rescue pad and he starts scrubbing and scrubbing, every curve, every seam, talk about circling motions, my lord! He did the place where the shampoo bottles had been, that I’d simply defined as a safe haven for mildew, he was in there, grrr, grrrr, twisting and jamming that little sponge. Not that my tub is filthy, it isn’t, it’s just not sparkling, and there is a faint rich smell of mildew or something vaguely biological, which I kind of like, because it’s so closely associated by now with my private shower activity. But here I was watching this guy in my shower! He took down the Water Pik massage head and he rinsed off the parts he’d done, and he began to herd all the oil down the drain with hot water, and the oil and the Ajax had mixed and formed this awful stuff, like a roux first, and then when the water mixed in it became this yellow sort of foam, which didn’t daunt him, he took care of it. And then he started scrubbing his way toward the fittings, using liberal amounts of Ajax alternating with hot water. He said, ‘You don’t worry about scratching, do you?’ I said I didn’t. So he gnarled around the cold-water tap and he gnarled around the hot-water tap and he circled fiercely around the clitty thing that controls the drain, and then when the whole rest of the tub was absolutely gleaming, he went to the drain itself — he set aside the filter thing, and he reached two fingers way in, and he pulled out this revolting slime locket and splapped it against the side of the tub, and then he really went to work on that drain, around and around the rim of chrome, and deeper, right down to those dark crossbars, that I’d never gotten to, he worked the scrubber sponge in there, grrr, more Ajax, more circling, more hot water. I mean I was in a transport!”

“I bet.”

“Then I held out the trash can, and he threw out the drain slime and the Rescue pad, and he rinsed his hands, and he stood, and in the midst of this newly cleaned tub he started to rinse off his cock and his legs, where a little oil had fallen, and I watched the water go over him, I watched the way the even spray of the showerhead in his hand made all the hairs on his legs into these perfect perfect rows, like some ideal crop, and he was quite hairy, and so I slipped off my shorts and unders and sat on the far end of the bathtub and propped my left foot against a washcloth handle and I hung my right leg out over the edge of the bathtub, so I was wide open, and I said, ‘I’m a bit rank, too, do me,’ so he started playing the water over my legs and then directly on my … femalia, and I held my lips open so that he could see my inner wishbone, and the drops of water exploding on it, and as he sprayed me, he began to get hard again. But I can’t come with just water, so I started strumming myself, while he sprayed my hand, which was a lovely feeling, and I held out my left hand and he maneuvered closer to me and I took hold of his cock and tried to begin to jerk it off, but I didn’t do very well, because my own finger on my clit felt so good, and I couldn’t seem to keep the two kinds of masturbating motion going with my left and right hand independently, I was making big odd circles with his cock, so instead I took the showerhead from him and I said, ‘You’re on your own,’ and I sprayed his cock and some of his Danger Mouse T-shirt, that is, my Danger Mouse T-shirt, while he began stroking away, staring at my legs and my pussy, and I liked spraying him quite a lot, I liked aiming the water at his fist, I liked the sight of his wet T-shirt, and he had, this is rather bad of me to say, but he had a kind of gruesome-looking cock, a real monster, and the relief of not having that girth in me was itself almost enough to put me over the top, and it looked quite a bit more distinguished through the glint of the spray. But I also wanted the water on me — I wanted to spray him, but I wanted the water flowing on me as well — and suddenly it seemed like the most natural thing in the world, I remembered the elephant woman lifting her knee, and so I reached forward and pulled his hips toward me so that his legs straddled my left leg, and I lifted my knee, and he clamped his thighs around it, and I let my other leg sprawl so that I was absolutely wide open, and now, when I sprayed his cock and his hand the water streamed down his thighs and then down my thigh and on me. And it was exactly what I wanted, and it started to feel so good, and I said so, and suddenly he started stroking himself incredibly fast, it was this blur, like a sewing machine, and he produced this major jet of sperm at a diagonal right into the circular spray of the water, so that it fought against all the drops and was sort of torn apart by them, and he was clamping my leg, my smooth leg, extremely tight with those perfectly watergroomed thighs, and I shifted adroitly so that the poached sperm and hot-water runoff wouldn’t pour directly into me and possibly cause trouble, but so that it still poured over me. And then he took the showerhead again, and still holding his cock and still clamping my knee very tight, he sprayed slowly across my hand and my thighs very close with the water until I closed my eyes and came, imagining I was in front of a circus audience. So that was nice.”

“God of mercy, I am so jealous!”

“Don’t be,” she said. “I think my offhand talk of yeast unnerved him, and his subservient streak unnerved me. Anyway, the point is, that story is connected to this very call between you and me, because when I was in the shower yesterday, and close to coming—”

“Thinking about the three painters.”

“No, after the three painters, when I was very close to coming, I was thinking of that time with Lawrence, as I occasionally do, I imagine him handing me my bottles of shampoo with a serious expression, or some fragment of it, anyway yesterday I thought of the Bionic Mike Transmitter that he’d described, and I started to make these very theatrical moans, like ‘oh yeah, oh yeah baby, ooh yeah, pump it deep, pump it deep, oooh yeah’ and I imagined that someone had left a Bionic Mike Transmitter in my bathroom and that random men on the expressway were driving by with their radios scanning the stations and suddenly they would pick me up, they’d hear me moaning exaggeratedly in the shower. I started to feel myself beginning to come, and I filled my mouth with water, and I thought of the men on the expressway hearing my mouth fill with water, and as I started to come I pushed the water from my mouth so that it poured from my chin over me, which is what I usually do, and I said, and this was not theatrical, this was heartfelt, I said, ‘Oh, shoot it, shoot it, you cocksuckers!’ I guess that in my ecstasy I was a trifle confused.”

“Perfectly understandable. So then you called tonight …”

“I called tonight I think out of the same impulse, the idea that five or six men would hear me come, as if my voice was this thing, this disembodied body, out there, and as they moaned they would be overlaying their moans onto it, and, in a way, coming onto it, and the idea appealed to me, but then, when I actually made the call, the reality of it was that the men were so irritating, either passive, wanting me to entertain them, or full of what-are-your-measurements questions, and so I was silent for a while, and then I heard your voice and liked it.”

“Thank you. Yours is nice, too, you know. Very smooth.”

“Thanks. I just had it waxed yesterday. Shall we, do you think, should we perhaps come soon?”

“Yes. You’re absolutely right. Are you naked?”

“Wait a sec. Yes, I am now officially naked, except for the bra.”

“Are your legs apart?”

“My toes are holding on to the edge of the coffee table.”

“Is your right hand touching your clitoris?”

“How impertinent! But yes, the answer is yes. My clitoris is in fact squeezed between my two index fingers, left and right, which are on either side of it.”

“All right. You do whatever you want with those index fingers, and I’ll tell you about a kind of sensing device that I own. What it does, it doesn’t eavesdrop, it doesn’t pick up sounds, it simply senses the presence nearby of any intelligent strumming woman. It looks like an antique pocket watch, it’s gold, with a cover, but when you open it, instead of the dial, there is this mysterious fluid, this very special fluid in there that glows in several colors when the right conditions are met, for reasons that are not clear, except that of course a woman masturbating is so important an event in the physical universe that elemental relations in matter are affected as it occurs, and there are these sort of currents in the fluid that slowly move in a certain direction, like lines of force, which give you some sense of where the masturbation signals are coming from, although it takes years of practice, and of course a great deal of native skill as well, to learn how to read the fluid correctly. It’s called the Bionic Mmmm-Detector, as you might suspect. Well, I’m driving down the expressway of an eastern city one evening around ten o’clock, in town on business, in my rented midsize car, my Ford Topaz, with the radio going, a classics oldie station, playing ‘Ain’t Nobody,’ and I’m just driving along, and as usual I have my Mmmm-Detector open on the seat beside me, but the fluid is dark, and then I start curving through this residential area, very close to the buildings on either side, and I glance down at the seat beside me, and my God, I’m getting a very strong signal, I’m getting wave patterns I’ve never seen before, from very near and to my right, and craning my neck I catch sight of a lighted window, and I know that behind it you are in process, you are beginning. My years of practice in reading the flux patterns in the watch tells me this is something very special, something I cannot pass by, and so I palm the steering wheel around suddenly and veer onto the off ramp and scoot back through the narrow streets, swearing at all the oneway signs, and when I come to the door where the Mmmm-forces are flowing from, I park in a place that is sure to get me a ticket, and I leave my flashers on, and I go into the foyer. There’s a row of buttons with names beside them: I hold the detector to each one until one, the third one down, makes the Mmmm-Detector glow with strange colors, and I hesitate, I know that I am interrupting you, and I don’t want to do that, that’s the last thing I want to do, but it seems so clear to me, reading the force waves, that there is a strong possibility that you would want me to interrupt you, if you knew me, and the conviction that this is true grows in me, and my finger trembles at your button, and there is a huge interior war between reticence and attraction, between the fear that I will inspire fear and the certainty that I should not inspire fear and that we would like each other if I could simply push that button, and I look down at the Mmmm-Detector and I see that you are going to come in less than four minutes if you keep on at that rate, you’re really moving, the colors are increasingly intense, and I’m trembling, I’m shivering, but I’m compelled, and I push the button, bzzzzt. You’re on your bed, and you’re wearing a blue long-sleeved pullover sort of shirt, and black pants and black sneakers, but your black pants are around your ankles, and you’ve got that tattered, disintegrating issue of Forum in your left hand, and you’re reading about a job interview in which the woman interviewer is sucking the interviewee’s cock, and you’re right in the middle of things, when bzzzzt, the doorbell. Who could that be?”

“So I do up my pants and I go to the speaker and I say, ‘Hello?’ ”

“And I say, ‘Hi, this is Jim. I know it’s late, but I wonder if I could use your phone. My car’s engine has seized up, and all the oil lights on the dash are glowing, and I don’t dare drive it any further, and the pay phone down the street isn’t working.’ ”

“I say, ‘Why did you buzz my apartment?’ ”

“And I say, ‘The others don’t answer. You’re right to be hesitant, but this isn’t a normal situation, this is urgent, I’ve got to get back to my hotel, I’ve got a whole day of appointments tomorrow, I just have to get seven and a half hours of sleep or I won’t function, and I need to use your phone, and I assure you that I’m reasonably sane and peaceable, and I would not normally do this, invade your privacy, but I’m telling you nothing could be more important than this. Please.’ And you hear the conviction in my voice, and you buzz me in.”

“Well, no, first I hold the talk button in and to my empty apartment I call out, ‘Jeff? Jeff? Enough with the weights! Do you and Mojo Cartilage-Popper mind if someone comes up to use the phone for a second?’ Then I buzz you in downstairs, knowing that I can look at you through the peephole in my door, and call Bobby the super if you look strange.”

“Exactly. I run up to the second floor, and I find your door, and before I stand right in front of it, I check the Mmmm-Sensor and find that your arousal has suffered some decline, you are now ten or more minutes away from an orgasm, though the glow faintly persists. I knock, and I begin pacing back and forth in front of the door, distractedly, like a guy impatient to make a phone call. You look through the peephole and you see this guy, middle height, black hair, not bad-looking, somewhat frazzled, pacing back and forth in front of your door, checking a pocket watch. You let me in. And I introduce myself, I apologize for bothering you, I smile at you, and immediately I can sense the alertness and intelligence in your face, and I see that we understand each other, and I know my Mmmm-Sensor hasn’t misled me. Ah, but I’ve lied my way into your apartment, which is a problem.”

“It is, because if I knew!”

“Curtains. So you bring me the phone, and I sit on the edge of a dining-room chair, and I call my answering machine, and I start telling it about the oil lights on my dashboard, I really have to have someone take care of it, I need the number of a cab company, etcetera, and then all of a sudden I stop, in midsentence, and I click off the phone and I say, ‘Nah, I can’t.’ ”

“ ‘You can’t what?’ ”

“ ‘I can’t do it. I can’t pretend.’ And I confess to you that I’ve lied, that my car is fine, that I was driving on the expressway, and I got this highly unusual, if not unique, reading on my Mmmm-Sensor, or Mmmm-Detector, whatever I’m calling it, and I pull it out of my pocket and open the finely scratched gold top and show it to you, and I explain, hesitantly, that it, um, picks up the flux currents from intelligent, um, masturbating women, and I show you how it glows, and I point out the wavy flow lines as they move in your direction, and I say, ‘They’re somewhat fainter now, but they’re definitely still there, and they really look great. Now, let’s see what happens if I do this.’ And I stand next to you, so you can see the Mmmm-Detector as I hold it a foot or so from your face, and then I lower it and slowly pass it a few inches in front of each breast, and the pattern makes these complicated shifts. And I say, ‘But as you may be able to see, I’m getting other readings, interference fringes,’ and I hold the thing up and I walk slowly to the walls of your hall, where there is a faint rural pattern showing through the paint, and I say, ‘For instance, the walls, very curious,’ and I shake my head in perplexity, and then I follow the flow lines to a drawer in the kitchen, filled with silverware — very odd — and I follow it into the bathroom, and you follow me in, and I lean into the shower and move the Mmmm-Detector past the fixtures, the drain, the shampoo bottles — beautiful color changes and convergences of flow waves — and I shake my head and I say, ‘Gosh, I’ve never seen anything as rich as this,’ and I follow its lead into the bedroom, and you follow me, and I say, ‘Wow, very high flux levels in here,’ and I pass it over your chenille bedspread and I say, ‘Your feet must have been here and here,’ pointing to two places quite far apart on the bed, and I know that everything I’m doing is forward, is really inexcusable, but in a way you’re curious, and I’m just relaying facts, and I sense your willingness to have this happen, and I push the Mmmm-Detector into the pillow and then reach under it and find your disintegrating copy of Forum, and I sit down on the bed and page through it slowly, holding the device to each page, until I reach a certain page, and I peer very closely at the sensor, and then I hold it close to the button on your pants, and I inspect it again, and I look up smiling, and I hold the magazine out to you, pointing at something on the page, and I say, ‘You were reading this sentence, this phrase right here in this sentence, when I buzzed your apartment.’ ”

“And,” she said, “I take the Forum and read what you’re pointing at, and you’re pretty close, it’s not exactly the right phrase, but you’ve found the right paragraph, anyway. And I don’t know quite what to do. I probably should be calling the cops, because you seem to know all this stuff about me, but on the other hand, there you are, and I am still feeling all puffy down below, and you have a certain amount of charm, and an intriguing pocket watch, and so I offer you a, a what? A dry Vermouth on the rocks. And you accept.”

“I do, you’re right,” he said, “and now I’m sitting on an armchair when you come toward me with the drinks, a low sort of armchair, and I have my legs sprawled open in a fairly innocent way, and I just dust off the area of the armchair that’s between my legs, indicating that if you want to, you could sit there with no problem and lean back against me, and you do turn and sit there, but you don’t lean back, you’re leaning forward, and so I have this warm back, covered in loose blue shirt material, in front of me, this miracle of a back, and I take a sip of the drink, and put it down on the table, on a napkin, so it won’t leave a ring, and I reach up and click off the table lamp so it’s a bit darker, and I close my eyes and find your shoulders with my hands and you ask where I found the Mmmm-Detector and I describe the table of junk I found it on in a flea market in Anaheim, a hundred and forty bucks, without any manual, and how I taught myself over several years what it was for and how to read it, and as I’m telling you this I’m moving my thumbs in two little arcs back and forth above your shoulder blades, which is as much of a back rub as I can handle, because the notion of something called a back rub tires my mind out instantly, and I can’t do anything that has to do with that, even though your back and my hands are interested in each other. What interests me is your bra, quite honestly, and so I relax my left hand and let it slide down the middle of your back, just let the fingers slide very lightly down over the material of your shirt, until I come to the place where your bra is fastened, and with my eyes closed, and with your ass warm between my legs, but still innocently there, I feel the three possible places for the hooks on the little fastener to hook, and that you’ve used the third setting, because of shrinkage probably, and I take my fingers and I follow the upward curving edge of the bra as it rises toward your shoulders, and I ride this curve up a little way over your shoulders and then back down your back and in to the middle again. It’s like driving over the Bay Bridge. Then I follow the bottom edge horizontally around, under your arms, until I just reach the seam where a cup begins, and you feel all this somewhat dimly, because it’s through your shirt and through the bra, but you are more aware now of the shape of the bra that you’re wearing, and then I go back to the fastener and I make that time-honored pinching move and release the hooks through your shirt, and each side pulls away, and now I feel that I have this perfect central stretch with no interruption, and I press my left palm between your shoulder blades and slide slowly down, moving your shirt, feeling wrinkles in it form and pass, and I can feel some slight bumps of your backbone — what a beautiful back, so warm. I want very much to feel your skin. So I put both hands on your hips and hook my two thumbs and index fingers under the bottom edge of your shirt, or no, I grab hold of it on either side and pull it, because it was tucked into your pants, and I pull it out, and then I hook my hands underneath, and I can feel your skin move slightly as my fingers first touch it, just above your hips, and I run my fingers back along the inside of your waistband, and I can feel the warmth of your ass, and then I flatten my hands against your back and slide them up under your shirt, ah, all the way up so the fingers come out and go a little way along the nape of your neck into your hair before subsiding. It’s a loose shirt, don’t worry. Am I going too slow for you?”

“No no, keep going, that’s fine.”

“Oh, I love moving my hands over you under your loose shirt, I love that. I’d slide my hands around over your stomach, so that my fingertips met, and feel it pull in, and slide up slowly along your ribs, and when I got to where the curves of your breasts started, I would trace them around, out to the sides, back to the middle, and I would pass just my fingertips up between your breasts, up along your breastbone, pushing under the loose bra, and then one finger even higher, along your voice box, to where your chin starts, and you’d lean your head back and I would be able to smell your hair, and then I’d pull back down, deliberately avoiding your breasts.”

“And I would stand up,” she said, “and turn around so I’m facing you, with my shins touching the armchair, and I’d undo the button of my pants.”

“And I would reach out,” he said, “and take hold of your zipper and push it slowly down, so that I’m pushing against your mound with it, not at your clitoris, but above it, and I’d slide my fingers under your waistband and guide your pants off over your hips and ass, and when they fell to your knees I’d put my foot on the inside of the crotch so you could step out of them easily, and I’d smell how wet you are, and I’d slide my hands up your legs and slip my fingers under the waistband of your underpants, and pull them down a little, and then I’d roll them under my palms, so the fabric just rolled up, and they fell and you stepped easily out of them, too. And then …”

“And then,” she said, “you’d undo your belt and the top button of your pants, and the clink of your belt buckle would be like the little bell signaling the start of something serious, and I would slowly move the zipper over the high lump of your erection, and you’d lift your hips and I’d pull your pants off, but not your underpants, and then I’d slide one knee on the cushion of the armchair, between your legs, against your balls, and the other outside your legs, and I’d let my weight settle on your thigh, so we’re close but facing each other.”

“And first,” he said, “my leg would feel the roughness of your pubic hair, I’d feel it scratching against itself, and then I’d feel you open and I’d feel this wet oval of heat on the muscle of my thigh, and I’d look down at your folded legs straddling my leg, and run my hands up them, and scoop up your shirt again, and this time I’d lift it with me as my hands moved up, and I’d watch them, I watch your shirt rising, the seam of your shirt is over my wrists, and then I reach your breasts and I lift your shirt and your loose bra up just a little more, and, ah, there they are your nipples, finally, and you see my hands reveal them, and I see your breasts moving slightly as you breathe, and I sit up and bend toward them, and then on second thought straighten and lick my lips and kiss you, and your tongue is very warm and very friendly.”

“Whoo!”

“And I bend back down toward one of your breasts, and I open my mouth, which now finally remembers how to kiss from just kissing you, and I just breathe on your nipple, and the shirt starts to fall down over it, and I nudge it aside with my tongue and then hold it out of the way with my hand, and now I have your breast entirely surrounded with both my palms, and you feel your breast held this way, completely under my care, and I just touch the tip of my tongue once to the almost flat top of your nipple, which is hard, and then I open my mouth quite wide, and draw my tongue way back, and you arch your back slightly, and so my lips make contact with your breast, surrounding your nipple but not touching it, and I suck on it without touching it also, so that you feel the pulling as it’s being drawn into my mouth, and even becoming soft, or losing its definition, from being drawn in that way, and wanting to be directly touched, and then you feel the tip of my tongue just touch the base of your nipple and then paint a warm vertical stripe up over it, and then back down, and then my whole tongue, much wider and fatter, pushes and moves against your nipple, and then I hold my mouth and tongue still and a little looser and with my hands I move your whole breast in circles and back and forth under them, so that you feel its whole size in my hands, ho, I’m sucking on your breasts …”

“And I’d hold on to your head as you sucked my breasts, and feel your tongue doing all those nice things to me through your cheeks. I am so wet.”

“Oh, and I’d tighten my thigh muscle where your pussy was pressing down on it and feel your wetness slide against me, and I’d look up at you and kiss you again, and slide my hands down to your hips and push down, so that there was more pressure still against your notch, and I’d feel your hips move slightly, adjusting themselves so that it felt best …”

“And while we were kissing I’d reach down and catch my fingers under one leg hole of your underpants and pull it up and over your cock and balls and then I’d hold your balls in my hand for a second and then I’d bring my hand up and squeeze the head of your cock in my fist and kind of pull and push on it while I was squeezing it tightly.”

“And you’d feel my lips making an oh shape while we were kissing, with the pleasure of your hand doing that, and, ho, I’d need to suck your clit soon, because I’d feel the come in me starting to want to spurt out, and so we’d shift positions so that you were sitting on the armchair and I was kneeling on the floor, and you’d scoot your hips forward so that your ass was just at the edge of the pillow, and when you glanced down you could see your own breasts, and your pubic hair, and your knees held together, with my hands on them, and you’d see the glossy wet place on my thigh, and then I’d encircle your legs with one arm, holding them together, and bend toward your bush and breathe on it, the little of it I can see, and I run my fingers just down the long place where the insides of your thighs touch, all the way to your knees, and then I’d let go of your legs, and they’d fall slightly apart, and as my hands started to move up inside them, with my fingers splayed wide, they’d move farther and farther apart, and then I’d lift your knees and hook them over the arms of the armchair, so that you were wide open for me, and in the darkness your bush would still be indistinct, and I’d look up at you, and I’d move on my knees so I’m closer, so I could slide my cock in you if I wanted, and I touch your shoulders with my hands, and pass my fingertips all the way down over your breasts and over your stomach and just lightly over your bush, just to feel the hair, and then I say, ‘I’m going to lick you now,’ and I lick both your nipples once very briefly goodbye, and I breathe my way down, and I pass over your bush this time with my mouth, and I see where the tan stops, and where the hair begins, and I keep going, and your legs are spread wide, and so I kiss inside one knee, and then across to the other, and up, back and forth, and at the end of each kiss I give a little upward lick with my tongue, up lick, lick, lick, back and forth, moving closer and closer to where your thighs meet. And then the last time I turn my head, there’s nothing I can do, my mouth is just buried in your pubic hair, and I breathe through it, I fill it with warmth, and I open my mouth more, and I bring my tongue out, and I start low, and the underside of my tongue is touching my lower teeth, and I lick slowly upwards, until I reach the place where the skin is more folded, and I find that beautiful clitoris, and I move over it with my tongue, and then when I’ve found it I close my mouth and sort of burrow my way into you so that all your pubic hair is away from my mouth, and my mouth is entirely around your clit, and I hold my hands very high on the insides of your thighs, feeling those stretched tendons, so you feel how wide apart you are, and I suck the skin around your clitoris into my mouth, like I did with your nipple, so that you feel it drawn into my mouth, and when you feel it drawn in I take my tongue, very high, right at the base of your clitoris, where I can feel that little ridge beginning, and I start to go back and forth over it, back and forth slowly over it, and you feel the tip of my tongue traveling down toward the part where it’s hotter, and then I reach the very full part of your clitoris, and you pull your hips in slightly and readjust to that feeling, and I cup my hands under your ass and lift you into my mouth and just suck on you, and I shake my whole head back and forth very fast, as if I’m saying, no, no, no, but I’m saying yes to your clit with my tongue.”

“Oh, I’m going to come soon. Put your cock in me, I want to think about your cock in me.”

“Are your legs spread apart?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, and you’re stroking that clit?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, so I’d take one last long up-lick on your pussy and then I’d straighten up, and I’d still be cupping your ass in my hands, and you’d be completely visible by now, wide open, sopping wet, and I’d take my cock in one hand and kind of vibrate it over your clit, and you’d slide your hands down and hold your lips apart with your fingers, and then I’d push my cock down and I’d feel how hot you were and I’d have to slide myself slowly all the way in, and then I’d pull almost all the way out again and slide in, into that nice nasturtium, and each time I pulled out I’d be able to see your hand circling your clit, and I’d slide in until my pubic bone thumped against you, and I’d watch your breasts move each time I reached this limit, and we would be fucking, sliding in and out …”

“Oh!”

“And your finger would be flying over your clit, your hand would be lifted and your finger would be flying back and forth, and I’d have your asscheeks cupped in both my hands, so you could feel a pulling on your asshole, and I would be sliding with long strokes out, and in, and out, and in, and I’d see your tits moving each time …”

“Oh! Oh!”

“Oh, I’m starting to come for you, my cock is pumping inside you …”

“Oh! Nnnnnnnn! Nnn! Nnn! Nnn! Nnn! Nnn! Nnn!”

“It’s spurting out! I can’t help it! Ah! Ah! Oooooo.”

There was a pause.

“Oh man,” she said. “Wow. You there?”

“I think so.” He swallowed. “Let me catch my breath.”

“That was — that was—man,” she said. “I saw the great seal of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts when I came.”

“I heard you come and I came,” he said.

“Whoo! How long have we been talking?”

“Hours and hours.”

“Hours and hours and hours,” she said. “My mouth is chapped. Too much making out.”

“Is your voice sore?”

“It really is. Whoo! Gee, I’m going to have to call in sick again. I’ll sleep all day, mm, sounds delightful. The hiss on the phone is very loud now, isn’t it? That companionable hiss. It’s always louder at the end of conversations.”

“Oh, is it the end already?” he said. “Couldn’t we just fade out somehow, talking and talking? I can’t think of a better way to invest my life savings. Not that I’m much of a saver.”

“You’re quite a telephoner, though.”

“You are too! I mean it! I think really this is one of the nicest conversations I’ve ever had.”

“I liked it too,” she said. “I don’t know, though — do you think we talked enough about sex?”

“Not nearly enough. I—”

“Yes?” she said.

“Do you think our … wires will cross again?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. What do you think?”

“I could give you my number,” he said. “I mean if you still want it. I’ll avoid a possibly awkward moment by not asking for yours. Or we could meet out here again, if you’d rather do that.”

“Out here under the stars? I can’t afford it. Where’s a pencil? Ah, a nice blunt pencil. Tell me your number.”

He told her. She read it back to him.

“Call me soon,” he said. “In fact, call me in a few hours, after you’ve topped yourself off in the shower.”

“You know me too well.”

“I like you a lot.”

“I wonder what you look like,” she said.

“Surprisingly normal. Maybe someday you’ll know.”

“It’s a possibility.”

“We’d probably be a little nervous at first, if we met. But then …”

“Then we’d start masturbating like ferrets,” she said, “and that would quickly break the ice.”

“That’s right. I hope you will call. You remember I have this pair of cotton pointelle tights. Unopened.”

“Size small?”

“Size small. In faun. Put Leona to work, get those legs waxed, I’m on my way. No. But call me soon. Soon soon soon. I hope you will.”

“All right,” she said. “Let me think about things. Let me absorb the strangeness.”

“What’s strange?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I guess nothing. I think I should probably sign off now, though. I have to put a load of towels in the laundry.”

“Certainly. Okay. Thank you for calling this number.”

“Thank you. Bye Jim.”

“Bye Abby. Bye.”

They hung up.