Vox (13 page)

“I’m just trying to feel my wrist tendon,” she said, “to see what it might have felt like for you. Actually, you know, there is a little muscle high up on the
outside
of my forearm that is moving, almost at my elbow. That’s the one that’s more visible in my case. Feels kind of interesting.”

“Ooh, don’t say that or I’ll shoot.”

“Hah hah! I like a man who knows what he likes. Do you want to hear what I thought about when I came in the shower yesterday?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll tell you. No, I know what I’ll tell you. First I’m going to tell you something else. First I’m going to tell you about how I masturbated in front of somebody. It’s short.”

“By all means, tell me.”

“Shall I tell you every nasty thing that comes into my head?”

“Yes.”

“I will then,” she said. “We went to the circus. It’s funny, it excites me quite a bit just to tell you that I’m going to tell you. Doing that is probably the best part. It’s just like that moment when you’re lumbering around on the bed to get into opposite directions to do sixty-nine,
that feeling of parting my legs over a man’s face,
before
you put your hands on my back and pull me down, and my legs remember the feeling from the last time, the feeling of being locked into a preset position that is right for human bodies to be in, like putting a different lens on a camera, turning it until it clicks.”

“And I,” he said, “would feel the mattress change its slope, first on one side of my head, and then the other, as the weight of one of your knees and then the other pressed into it, and I’d look up at you and open my mouth and I’d slide my hands over your ass with my fingers splayed and hold your ass and pull you down to my tongue.”

“Kha.”

There was a pause.

“You there?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Tell me about the circus.”

“Okay. Excuse me. I’m going to have to get a fresh towel pretty soon. This guy took me to the circus.”

“The guy with the fancy stereo?”

“Another guy,” she said. “It wasn’t Ringling Brothers, it was some smaller-scale South American circus, with lots of elephants, and lots of women in spangles riding the elephants. It was incredibly hot in the tent, and everything had this reddish tint, because the sun was bright enough outside to make it through some of the tent seams, and I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt but I was
soaked, and so was Lawrence, who was also wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and so was everyone around us, including the performers. There was some Venezuelan act in which a woman spun hard balls around very fast on long strings while two men played percussion behind her, and the balls smacked against the floorboards in interesting rhythms around her legs, and she was
streaming
with sweat, and quite beautiful, but in a way that I thought was vaguely like me, and suddenly the two men would stop hitting the drums and she would freeze and make this kind of trilling scream, a beautiful strange wild sound. She was just covered with sweat, she looked really wild, and the two men behind her were exceedingly good-looking, wearing wide-brimmed black hats with chin straps, and I momentarily wanted to be her, and while they were taking their bows I adapted my time-tested striptease fantasy, and I thought that I was this woman in the black spangles, and I was spinning these balls very fast, faster than she could, so they were a blur, so fast that somehow, like in a cartoon fight when it’s just a blur from which things, pieces of clothing, fly outward, somehow my whole outfit was torn in pieces from my body, and flung out into the audience, so that when the drumming stopped and I froze suddenly and made my trilling scream, I was totally naked, and all these pieces of my costume were still floating aloft in all directions, and each man who caught some damp shred of costume was overpowered and took his place in line to fuck me, and
the two percussionists played the drums the whole time, and then they stopped drumming and naturally they fucked me too. But that’s just an aside. The elephant acts were what were interesting. I’ve ridden on an elephant once or twice in my life, when I was small, and I remember touching the big lobes of its head, and let me tell you, the skin is not smooth, it’s warm and dry and quite bristly—that’s how I remember it, anyway. And these were not little elephants, these were big old elephants, with big tusks. Well, these women were sliding down the side of the elephants, riding on the elephants heads, with their legs between the elephants’ eyes, and repeatedly pivoting around on their bottoms on the elephants’ backs, and they were wearing flesh-colored stockings, or tights, so it was not skin to skin, but even so, those little leotards are cut extremely high in the back, and I really started to be concerned about their bottoms, about whether they were more uncomfortable than their smiles let on, and I started thinking about whether if I were dressed in a very high-cut leotard I would like the sensation of the elephant’s dry living skin on my bottom, and then, during the beginning of the very last big elephant promenade, one of the women was riding on the elephant’s back with one leg in the air, and as the elephant turned I saw this woman’s bottom, and even through the tights I could see that it was in fact red! She was the main elephant woman, I think. Anyhow, for the big finale she rode around on this elephant’s tusks for a
minute or two, sat on his trunk, fine fine, all gracefully executed but surprisingly suggestive, and then she did this thing that really shocked me. She took hold of one of the tusks and one of the ears, or somehow swung herself up, and then she lifted one of her knees so that it went right
into
the elephant’s mouth, and she waited for a second for the elephant to clamp on to it, and then she threw her head back, and arched her back, and spread her arms wide, so she was held in the air suppprted entirely by her knee, which was stuffed in the elephant’s mouth! I mean, think about the saliva! Think about those elephant molars that are gently but firmly taking hold of your upper calf and your mid-thigh, while this elephant tongue is there lounging with its giant taste-buds against your knee! The elephant did a full turn while she was swooning like this. Then she got down and took a bow and patted the elephant under his eye.”

“Wow, that’s better than
King Kong
.”

“Well I was impressed. Lawrence had come up with the idea of going to the circus—this was our very first time out, by the way, though I’d known him for a while—so he was careful not to be too impressed. While we were walking out to the car he said, ‘I guess those elephants really respond to training.’ He thought the elephant wasn’t biting the woman’s leg, but rather that its tongue was actually hooked under her knee. I was dubious, but it was an interesting idea. It was touching to see how pleased Lawrence was that I’d liked the circus. We
were standing out by my car in the parking lot, just drenched with sweat, he was plucking at his shirt and squinting at me, and we were supposed to go to this clam-shack place and have an early dinner on a picnic table outside, and I just didn’t want to do that. So I thought what the hell, and I said, ‘You look hot. Why don’t you come back to my apartment and you’ll have a shower, and I’ll have a shower and then I’ll make some dinner and we’ll do the clam shack another time, okay?’ He agreed instantly—he was delighted to have the responsibility for the success of this date taken out of his hands. So he had a shower, and I happened to have a pair of very baggy shorts with an elastic waistband that fit him fine, and a big T-shirt, and then I had a shower, and I put on a pair of shorts and a dark red T-shirt, and everything was fine.”

“But separate showers, no nudity.”

“No, very chaste,” she said.

“What was he doing when you got out of the shower?”

“He was peering inside a Venetian paperweight.”

“Classic. He’d obviously heard your shower turn off, and then he’d stood there, holding the paperweight to his face for ten minutes, so that you would be sure to discover him in that casual pose, appreciating your trinket.”

“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 snuffled 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 grandmpther 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 in
fringe
ment?”

“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 buffs 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.”