Vox (12 page)

“What were you doing?”

“Whenever we were in a sex scene, I mean in the middle of watching one, I would slip my hand under my belt and press on myself, through my underpants. When the sex scene was over, I took my hand out and rested it decorously on my leg. Anyway, this scene with the man with the yellow tie with the dollar signs really aroused her, and when it was over she took the blanket out of her teeth and wiped her mouth with the back of her right hand, spitting out some of the blanket fuzz, and in the TV light I could see that her two fingers were all shiny from stroking herself. We waited through the filler stuff, we didn’t care about dialogue or cars driving or any of that, now we both wanted to see fucking, period. The next scene was two women and a man. Halfway through,
it threatened to be a lesbo scene, and I saw Emily’s blanket vibrate with less conviction and then stop. She needed to see cocks at work. Fortunately it didn’t turn out to be a lesbo scene—one of the women was content to strum quietly on the sidelines. Emily’s blanket began moving fast. But this time she didn’t have it in her teeth, it was loose over her, so her movements began to pull it down. I watched the fringe say good-bye to her throat, and begin to travel slowly over her bunched-up sweater, and over the bunched-up bra under that, and then the individual fringe things fanned out and conformed to her breasts and slipped off them. The slow descent finally stopped at the waist of her skirt. I was a little hesitant to watch her directly now; I watched her more out of the corner of my eye: I saw her squeeze one nipple with a finger-do-the-walking kind of movement, and then her hand moved to the other breast. This was her left hand. And no oohs and ahs, everything quiet, just breathing, sometimes her mouth open slightly, sometimes closed. Once she pressed her lips together and bit them. Certain signs also made me think that at times she was biting the insides of both her cheeks. I could tell now exactly how her legs were positioned—they were somewhat apart, the blanket drooped between them, and the back of her hand was making the blanket move freely—but that wasn’t the thing that got me. What got me was, her whole arm was now visible, her whole right arm, and the fringe intersected with it just at the wrist, which was arched, reaching
down, circling, and the thing was that I could see her long beautiful forearm tendon pulling and pulling, controlling her fingers. I just kept watching this. Then the scene ended; I pulled my hand out of my pants, Emily crossed her arms over her breasts. She whistled a little, mock casually. Three wet fingers rested on her arm. We waited. More filler. The heroine goes into an office with two men we haven’t seen before, both in business clothes. They think she is charging them with cheating her in the payment for the counterfeit money. She says something like ‘Gentlemen, I’m talking about my own needs.’ And suddenly two men with ties on are standing on either side of her, and she’s sitting in a straight-back chair wearing white stockings, and she’s sucking one and then the other. Emily whispered, ‘
That’s
it,’ and her hands both now slid under the fringe. And then she whispered, ‘Do you want some blanket?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ so she held on to her half so that it didn’t slide off her any more and I pulled some of it over me, so we were both covered from the waist down. I undid my belt and pants and pushed off my clothes. We were both stroking ourselves, and I could feel against the back of my hand the blanket pulling with her little movements as I made mine. I sort of clamped the blanket against the top of my cock with my thumb so that I’d stay decent and yet have my left hand free, and I looked over at Emily’s face, and watched her eyes traveling over those double-cock images, and I looked down at her breasts. I wanted to touch them, but I knew this
would complicate things, it would have been a mistake. I could have come anytime. But suddenly the scene ended—one man suddenly comes on the woman’s face and breasts, the other pulls out and comes on her bush, with strikingly white sperm. Emily wasn’t fazed. She said, ‘Do you mind if I rewind a little?’ I said no, so she rewound it and replayed some of the two cocks. When it started playing, she said, kind of softly, ‘I think I want to come to this scene.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ But again the scene ended too quickly for her, and she had to rewind it a third time. This time, I just looked at her, she was flushed, her cheeks were shiny, she looked so transformed and sexual and elegant, and I looked down and both her hands were converging under the blanket, both wrists arched, so that her arms sort of pushed her breasts in from the sides, and I said, ‘Can I touch your arm?’ and she nodded, and I put my fingertips very lightly on the inside of her forearm, just above her wrist, and I felt her tendon going and going as she stroked herself, and this indirect feeling of being able to take the pulse of her masturbating was too much, I said, ‘I think I’m going to come,’ and I started to come into the blanket, and when the first guy in the movie came on the heroine, Emily closed her legs and started to come herself, and when the second guy came on the heroine, Emily was still coming, but not with any thrashing around, very focused, but I could hear the shaking of her legs slightly in her breathing. It was really a wonderful experience. She picked up
her panty hose and after I’d stowed myself away she wrapped the blanket around herself and I escorted her to the bathroom, holding the spermy corner like a footman so that it wouldn’t fall against her skirt. Then I drove her back to her car. We kissed ceremonially, and she said, ‘Thanks, Mario.’ I sent her an asterisk memo the next day. And that was it. A perfect evening, perfect.”

“Not to be repeated, or to be repeated?”

“Not to be. A work friendship probably can’t handle more than one evening of parallel blanket masturbation without things flying out of control. I think that’s what Miss Manners would say, anyway. She did get over Lee—in fact, maybe
Pleasure So Deep
was what finally did it. She’s now going out with an academic and seems very happy. I haven’t told her that I’ve rented the movie twice since then on my own and relived that buildup. I was surprised to find that we’d actually only watched about half of it. And I also found, when I watched it through to the end, that it wasn’t as good later on—the movie was only good because she’d seen it, so the parts she hadn’t seen seemed flat. Well, not
flat
, there was some hot stuff, but I rewound and came to the scene where the woman says, ‘I’m talking about my own needs’ to the two men. Since we’re being truthful with each other, since we’re being truthful, I’ll tell you that that evening with Emily was probably the best sexual experience I’ve had, or at least one of the elite few. The sound, of her breathing while she was biting the inside of her
cheeks! God! And the sight of that blanket slowly sliding off her. And when she put her knees together. And it’s not like I haven’t done normal stuff here and there. But I don’t know, you slip inside, and that first moment is paradise, incomparable, but then you’re there working away, and you can’t
see
the clitoris properly, you can’t really concentrate on what it feels like to hold her breasts, what they look like when they move, you’re distracted, your brain is moving your hips, moving your torso, holding her soft hips—hey, it sounds good! But you know? When I come inside it feels mystical but muffled—it’s as if I don’t feel the perimeter of my cock anymore, because that’s merged with her, it’s melted away and all I feel is the technical interior conduit structure of the thing and the bulb of come swelling, and all that—I lose a sense of outer boundaries. You know? Or do you prefer the physical presence of a cock?”

“Well,” she said, “I mean, if one is in there, I’m not going to tell it to go away. But actually, it’s funny, it’s another little bit of clit-trickery. As I’m starting to get close
to
coming, and I’m with a man, I get this intense wish at a certain point to have him in me, but if I pull him up from what he’s doing and guide him in, that first moment is great, but then my whole area becomes, as you say, distracted—my clitoris is suddenly in close conference with my vagina, and I’m out of the loop. I like to
think
about cocks in me, though. Also, yeah, I do unfortunately tend to get yeast complications from real sex, inside sex, the friction seems to cause them.”

“Exactly! See that? Who cares about my cock? It’ll fend for itself. We’re talking about your orgasm. We’re talking about your strummed orgasm, the joy of it, the triumph of it, the greatness of it. I think of that moment you described of you coming in the shower after swimming, with the hot and cold water, and it’s like I can hold out my hands and something tremendous and valuable is being dropped in my arms to hold.”

“A folded blanket,” she said.

“That’s it!”

“I think it’s fair to say that you are interested in women masturbating,” she said.

“Any woman masturbates anywhere, I want to know about it. No woman is anything but beautiful when she is masturbating. Any plainness or overweightness or boniness or even a character flaw, an ungenerousness or something, everything is part of the recipe of her particular transfiguration, everything bad is pressed out of her when she shuts her eyes tight and comes. There used to be a tiny ad that ran in a lot of men’s magazines, a half-inch-high ad, that had a shot of a woman lying back with what seemed to be, and it was very hard to tell at that scale, but what seemed to be her two middle fingers inside herself, and the headline was, I
LOVE TO MASTURBATE
. I probably came fifty times to that little ad. I’d look through at the full-page shots, but then when I was almost there, I would find this ad. You were supposed to send money to Mrs. Somebody in Van Nuys, and she would send you six hot photos and a pair of panties.
Right, sure—I never sent off for them. But the ad was a tiny window onto something, onto an idea: because there
is
a Mrs. Somebody in Van Nuys, California, who
does
love to masturbate, there are lots of Mrs. Somebodys in fact, and she is not advertising herself in men’s magazines, she isn’t wasting her time with that, she is simply masturbating, right now, and that idea fills me with energy, it’s all I need from life, the notion that women are masturbating, and I don’t know when or where, but it’s going on. One time I drove all night back from college my sophomore year, and I shared the ride with this girl who was on my hall in the dorm who had a car, and it started to
rain
this mysterious warm rain … no, but I really did share a ride with her, totally uneventful, but just this past year, ten years later, we had a sort of reunion of the people who’d been on that hall that year, because it had been kind of a funny nice group, and this same woman sat next to me at dinner and told me in a low voice at one point that on that all-night trip, at six in the morning, while I was driving, and she was supposed to be fast asleep, that she’d made herself ‘comfortable’ in the back seat, just as we were going past the big GE plant in Syracuse. I said, Thank you, thank you, thank you for telling me. Ten fucking
years
that secret orgasm of hers was accumulating interest. Sometimes I think of myself up in a satellite, and I’m looking down at America, or anywhere, really, but I usually imagine America, and all these little lights are blinking on and off, and each one
represents a woman’s orgasm. That’s what ‘simultaneous orgasm’ should really mean—the awareness of all those women’s orgasms simultaneously going on. Maybe the women who are reading while they come create a slightly different flare of infrared color than the ones who are imagining something or coming in their sleep. I see them all. There is the woman who put the anchovies on my pizza tonight, there is Jill at work, who I got the tights for, there is an overweight rural woman with greasy hair and a missing front tooth, but she doesn’t care about keeping her lip down over the gap, it feels too good to care, there’s nobody to feel self-conscious in front of and therefore she’s beautiful, and there is the thruway woman who hands you your ticket, and there’s Blair Brown coming, and Elizabeth McGovern, and that woman in the John Hughes movies, what’s her name, with the lovely mouth, and Jeane Kirkpatrick, and the porn stars too, but off-camera, Keisha and Christy Canyon—all these flares. Maybe it’s not a satellite, maybe it’s really a big black spy plane I’m in, and what’s this, you’re up here too, flying toward my fan-jet, surprise surprise.”

“All that is somewhat indiscriminate of you, you know. You’re using me as a proxy for all women who are masturbating at this very moment.”

“Well, that may have been the original motive for calling this number, but I have never
talked
like this to any woman before. You’re right, though, I can see that the idea of me suspended ten miles up over a dark twinkling
continent, taking in the totality of female orgasms, might seem a bit indiscriminate. The fact is, I
am
indiscriminate. If I had called this number, and there had been a woman of extremely limited intelligence who responded to my voice, like say that one woman, Carla, who was on the line after you first came on, and she and I had entered our private code numbers and been transferred together into this ‘back room,’ and if she’d come, if I could have talked her through coming, that would have been a wonderful privilege and I would have come too and I would have hung up after twenty minutes feeling great. But that’s why talking to you seems like such a miraculous once-in-a-lifetime thing, because you are smart and funny and aroused and delightful—you are
not
representative. We’re actually talking! If you come on this phone with me, it will be, as far as I’m concerned, it will be the top item on
Washington Week in Review
, it will be bigger than anything your bearded friend who eats the meatball subs has ever experienced, it will be really
something
, because you get it, you understand, you have a complicated response to things, and, I mean, an orgasm in a complicated mind is always more interesting than one in a simple mind—maybe that’s not true, maybe sometimes a simple mind is made subtler and finer as it comes, since that’s the most mental activity that’s gone on in there for a while—but I mean an orgasm in an intelligent woman is like a volcano in a mountain with a city built on the slope—you feel the
alternative opportunity cost of her orgasm, you feel the force of all the other perceptive things she could be thinking at that moment and is not thinking because she is coming, and they enrich it. You still there?”