Vox (3 page)

“What did she say?”

“She just said, in a more official voice, but still a friendly voice, ‘I don’t think I’m going to answer your question.’ And I said, ‘Fine, I understand, okay, sure.’ And she said ‘Bye.’ Not ‘Good-bye,’ you notice—still the slight vestige of amused intimacy there. If she’d said ‘Good-bye’ I would have felt absolutely crushed.”

“What did you do then?”

“I sat up and ordered a pizza and read the paper. So you see, I’m not an obscene phone caller, really. I can’t smother an orgasm.”

“Ho ho. I can,” she said.

“Can you? Well, I mean I can physically do it.”

“
I
know what you mean.”

There was a pause.

“I hear ice cubes,” he said.

“Diet Coke.”

“Ah. Tell me more things. Tell me about the room you’re in. Tell me the chain of events that led up to your calling this number.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’m not in the bedroom anymore. I’m sitting on the couch in my living room slash dining room. My feet are on the coffee table, which would have been impossible yesterday, because the coffee table was piled so high with mail and work stuff, but now it is possible, and the whole room, the whole apartment, is really and truly in order. I took a sick day today, without being sick, which is something I haven’t done up to now at this job. I called the receptionist and told her I had a fever. The moment of lying to her was awful, but gosh what freedom when I hung up the phone! And I didn’t leave the apartment all day. I just organized my immediate surroundings, I picked up things, I vacuumed, and I laid out all the silver that I’ve inherited—three different very incomplete patterns—laid it out on the dining-room table and looked at it and I gave some serious thought to polishing it, but I didn’t go so far as to polish it, but it looked beautiful all laid out, a big arch of forks, a little arch of knives, five big serving spoons, some tiny salt spoons, and a little grouping of novelty items, like oyster
forks. No teaspoons at all. One of the dinner forks from my great aunt’s set fell into the dishwasher once when I was visiting her and it got badly notched by that twirly splasher in the bottom, and someone at work was telling me he knew a jeweler who fixed hurt silverware, so I’m planning to have that fixed, it’s all ready to go. And I even got together all my broken sets of beads—I sorted them all out—the sight of all those beads jumbled together on my bedside table was making me unhappy every morning, and now they’re ready to be restrung, the pink ones in one envelope, and the green ones in one envelope, and the parti-colored Venetian ones in one envelope—and I have them on my dining-room table too, ready to go.”

“The same jeweler who fixes silverware restrings beads?” he asked.

“Yes!”

“How did your beads get broken?”

“They seem to break in the morning when I’m rushing to get dressed. They catch on something. The jade ones, my favorite set, which my father gave me, caught on the open door of the microwave when I was standing up too quickly after picking a piece of paper up off the floor. That was the latest tragedy. And of course my sister’s babe yanked one set off my neck. But they can all be repaired and they will all be repaired.”

“Good going.”

“Anyway, this apartment is transformed, I mean it,
not just superficially but with new hidden pockets of order in it, and I waited until the midafternoon to have a shower, and I did
not
masturbate, because the illicitness of calling in sick without justification made me want to be pure and virtuous all day long, and I had an early dinner of Carr’s Table Water crackers with cream cheese and sliced pieces of sweet red kosher peppers on them, just delicious, and I did
not
turn on the TV but instead I turned on the stereo, which I haven’t used much lately. It’s a very fancy stereo.”

“Yes?”

“I think I spent something like fourteen hundred dollars on it,” she said. “I bought it from someone who was buying an even fancier system. It was true insanity. I had a crush on this person. He liked the Thompson Twins and the S.O.S. Band and, gee, what were the other groups he liked so much? The Gap Band was one. Midnight Star. And Cameo. This was a while ago. He was not a particularly intelligent man, in fact in a way he was a very dimwitted narrow-minded man, but he was
so
infectiously convinced that what he liked everyone would like if they were exposed to it. And good-looking. For about four months, while I was in his thrall, I really
listened
to that stuff. I gave my life up to it. My own taste in music stopped evolving in grade school with the Beatles, the early early Beatles—in fact I used to dislike any song that didn’t end—you know, end with a chord, but simply faded out.”

“But then you met this guy,” he said.

“Exactly!” she said. “All of the songs he liked faded out, or most of them did. And so I became a connoisseur of fade-outs. I bought cassettes. I used to turn them up very loud—with the headphones on—and listen very closely, trying to catch that precise moment when the person in the recording studio had begun to turn the volume dial down, or whatever it was he did. Sometimes I’d turn the volume dial up at just the speed I thought he—I mean the ghostly hand of the record producer—was turning it down, so that the sound stayed on an even plane. I’d get in this sort of trance, like you on the rug, where I thought if I kept turning it up—and this is a very powerful amplifier, mind you—the song would not stop, it would just continue indefinitely. And so what I had thought of before as just a kind of artistic sloppiness, this attempt to imply that oh yeah, we’re a bunch of endlessly creative folks who jam all night, and the bad old record producer finally has to turn down the volume on us just so we don’t fill the whole album with one monster song, became for me instead this kind of, this kind of summation of hopefulness. I first felt it in a song called ‘Ain’t Nobody,’ which was a song that this man I had the crush on was particularly keen on.
‘Ain’t nobody, loves me better.’
You know that one?”

“You sing well!” he said.

“I do not. But that’s the song, and as you get toward the end of it, a change takes place ip the way you hear it,
which is that the knowledge that the song is going to end starts to be more important than the specific ups and downs of the melody, and even though the singer is singing just as loud as ever, in fact she’s really pouring it on now, she’s fighting to be heard, it’s as if you are hearing the inevitable waning of popularity of that hit, its slippage down the charts, and the twilight of the career of the singer, despite all of the beautiful subtle things she’s able to do with a plain old dumb old bunch of notes, and even as she goes for one last high note, full of daring and hope and passionateness and everything worthwhile, she’s lost, she’s sinking down.”

“Oh! Don’t
cry
!” he said. “I’m not equipped … I mean my comforting skills don’t have that kind of range.”

There was another sound of ice cubes. She said, “It’s just that I really liked him. Vain bum. We went dancing one night, and I made the mistake of suggesting to him as we were on the dance floor that maybe he should take his pen out of his shirt pocket and put it in his back pocket. And that was it, he never called me again.”

“That little scum-twirler! Tell me his address, I’ll fade
him
out, I’ll rip his arms off.”

“No. I got over it. Anyway, that wasn’t what I meant to talk about. I just mean I was here in my wonderfully orderly apartment after dinner and I saw this big joke of a stereo system and I switched it on, and the sky got darker and all the little red and green lights on the receiver were like ocean buoys or something, and I started
to feel what you’d expect, sad, happy, resigned, horny, some combination of all of them, and I felt suddenly that I’d been virtuous for long enough and probably should definitely masturbate, and I thought wait, let’s not just have a perfunctory masturbation session, Abby, let’s do something just a little bit special tonight, to round out a special day, right? So I brought out a copy of
Forum
that I rather bravely bought one day a while ago. But I’d read all the stories and all the letters and it just wasn’t working. So I started looking at the ads, really almost for the first time. And there was this headline:
ANYTIME AT ALL.”

“MAKE IT HAPPEN.”

“That’s right. And I
like
the sound of the pauses in long-distance conversations—the cassette hiss sound. And yet I didn’t really want to talk to anyone I knew. So that’s more or less why I called. Now I’ve answered your questions, now you tell me something.”

“Do you want to hear something true, or something imaginary?”

“First true, then imaginary,” she said.

“Once,” he said, “I was listening to the stereo with the headphones on, I was about sixteen, and the stereo receiver was on the floor of a little room off the living room, I don’t know why it was on the floor, I guess because my father was repainting the living room—that must have been it—and the headphone cord was quite short, but I was very interested in learning how to dance. It was winter, it was maybe eight o’clock at night, very
dark, I hadn’t turned on the light in the room. And I was trying to learn all these moves, but tethered to the stereo, so I was almost completely doubled over, like I was tracking some animal, but I was really ecstatic—dancing, sweating, out of breath, flailing my arms, doing little jumps … once I got a little too excited and did a
big
sideways bob of my head and the headphones came off and pulled my glasses off with them—but no problem, I just stylized the motions of picking up my glasses and putting them on and repeated them a few times, incorporated them in. And then suddenly I hear, ‘Jim,
what
are you doing?’ in this horrified voice. My younger sister had heard all this breathing and panting coming from me in the darkness and thought of course that I was …”

“Right.”

“I said, ‘I’m dancing.’ And she went away. I danced for a while longer, but with somewhat less conviction. That was my year of heavy stereo use. Unlike you I didn’t have a big crush on anyone at the time. I think it was more that I had a crush on the tuner itself, frankly. I used to imagine that the megahertz markings were the skyline of a city at night. The FM markings were all the buildings, and the AM markings were their reflection in water …”

“Ah,” she said, “but you’re supposed to be telling me something true, not something imagined.”

“Yes, but the true thing is shading into the imagined thing, all right? And the little moving indicator on our stereo was lit with a yellow light, and I knew where all the
stations were on the dial, and I’d spin the knob and the yellow indicator would glide up and down the radio cityscape like a cab up and down some big central boulevard, and each station was an intersection, in a neighborhood with a different ethnic mix, and if the red sign came on saying
STEREO
I might idle there for a while, or the cabbie might run the light, passing the whole thing by as it exploded and disappeared behind me. And sometimes I’d thumb the dial very slowly, sort of like I was palming a steering wheel, and move up, move up, in the silence of the muted stretches, and then suddenly I’d pierce the rind of a station and there would be this crackling hopped-up luridly colored version of a song that sounded for a second much better than I knew the song really was, like that moment in solar eclipses when the whole corona is visible, and then you slide down into the fertile valley of the station itself, and it spreads out beneath you, in stereo, with a whole range of middle and misty distances.”

“That’s true!” she said.

“It
is
true? That’s bad, because it means that I still have to come up with an imaginary thing, right?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“But my imagination doesn’t work that way,” he said. “It doesn’t just hop to at the snap of a finger. What do you want the imaginary thing I tell you to be about?”

“I think that it should be about … my beads and my silverware, since they’re all laid out for us.”

“Well,” he said. There was a pause. “Once there was
a guy who, urn, needed his fork repaired. No, I can’t. I’m sorry. You tell me something more.”

“It’s
your
turn.”

“I need more confidences from you first. I need to be charged up with a stream of confidences flowing from you to me.”

“Come on now,” she said. “Give it a try.”

“Yeah, but I don’t think I can just be handed an assignment like that. I’m pedestrian. I think I have tp stay with the truth.”

“All right, tell me what the most recent thing or event was that aroused you.”

“The idea of making this call,” he said.

“Before that.”

“Let me think back,” he said. “The Walt Disney character of Tinker Bell. I was just leaving the video store, and I came to this big cardboard display of
Peter Pan
, the Walt Disney cartoon
Peter Pan
, which has just been rereleased, with a TV beside it playing the movie.”

“When was this?”

“This was today, about an hour and a half ago, I guess. I rented three X-rated tapes.”

“And you’re going to play them later this evening?”

“Maybe. Maybe not, I don’t know. I was going to play them when I got home.”

“The second you got home.”

“That’s right.”

“What about dinner?”

“I ate at a pizza place.”

“What kind?”

“Small mushroom anchovy.”

“All right. So you got home with the tapes …”

“Yeah, and I put them on top of the TV and got out of my work clothes and put on a bathrobe …”

“Just a bathrobe?”

“Well, I have my T-shirt and underwear on underneath, of course.”

“White underwear?”

“Gray, white, somewhere in that range. Anyway, I came out and saw the pile of X-rated tapes on top of my TV, and they’re in these orange boxes. The store uses brown boxes for their normal tapes, like adventure, comedy, slasher, etcetera, and then they use a whole different color, an orange box, for the adult tapes. It’s to avoid confusion, because now there are so many X-rated Christmas tapes and X-rated versions of
Cinderella
and all that. And I’d never seen two of these particular tapes before, but of course I knew what was in them anyway, and I heartily approved of it, I’m enthusiastically pro-pornography, obviously, but suddenly I foresaw my own crude arousal—I saw myself fast-forwarding through the numbing parts, trying to find some image that was good, or at least good enough to come to, and the sound of the VCR as it fast-forwards, that industrial robot sound, and I suddenly thought no, no, even though one of the tapes has got Lisa Melendez in it, who I think is just …
delightful, I thought no, I don’t want to see these right now. Fortunately, I’d also bought a
Juggs
magazine, because this anti-orange-tape reaction has hit me before. There are just times when you want a fixed image.”