Vox (8 page)

“God, car washes must have driven you wild.”

“Car washes. I did like that one part at the end, where the felt flappers drag over you, but no, not really—it was! very rare that my family took the car to the car wash. Almost never. Oh, but I do remember one thing I used to imagine—I imagined that I shared a ride back home from college with someone I didn’t know, and we get caught in a terrible tropical monsoon of some kind, and his windshield wipers don’t work, and so I have to go out on the hood of the car and take off my top and kneel there and hold on to the antenna and kind of sop my breasts over the windshield just so he can drive. Actually, that wasn’t something I thought of very much, that was just a one-shot deal.”

“There are strong evolutionary pressures on fantasies, aren’t there?” he said. “If it doesn’t work, and if it doesn’t metamorphose itself into something that does work, it doesn’t survive.”

“Yeah, even in the buildup to one orgasm, it’s a kind of bake-off. You think: two cocks, each one poking from under one of my armpits, sperm squirting from them? Yes or no. No. I’m a geometry teacher measuring boys’ penis length? Yes or no. No. Am I a nurse at a fertility clinic and my job is to strip for clients who have difficulty
coming and then suck their cocks and let their sperm drip from my tongue into a test tube? No. I’m in a dressing room and some native-Hawaiian security guard is watching me try on blue jeans over the video monitor? Ooh, maybe yes. In fact it’s kind of like getting dressed for a party, and being unsure of what to wear right up to the last minute, and frantically trying on one image after another like clothes, not knowing which combination looks really
good
, and it’s getting later and later, ancj then finally you pull out this wonderful dress, with some rich pattern, and you slip it on, and ah, you can come.”

“Jesus. But what about if you’re reading and the images are not under your control? Say maybe with a Book Mate thing holding the book open?”

“Hah hah! You mean with my hands free to
do other things
?”

“For instance, yes.”

“Well, I have a whole system if I’m reading.”

“Say you’re reading your copy of
Forum,
” he said.

“Right, what I do is I read a little of it, whatever it is, the story or the letter or the novel, to see whether it’s something I do want to masturbate to or not. If it’s something that looks promising, I read it all through very fast, to find out exactly what happens and locate the spot in it where I’m going to want to be coming, and what spots I’ll want to skip because they’re whatever—violent or boring or somehow irrelevant. Then I go back, not always to the beginning, but I backtrack, and the distance I backtrack
from the point where I’ve scheduled my orgasm I have to gauge exactly, depending on how close to coming I think I am—so if I’m very close to coming I only go back a paragraph, but if it looks like it’ll be a while I may even read the whole scene or the whole letter that’s
before
the letter I’m interested in and then go on and read the letter I’m interested in. And sometimes I misjudge, and I start to get close to coming when the big moment of the story is still on the next page, and I have to race ahead lopking for the words I need, or sometimes the opposite happens and I’m crowding up to the big moment of the story and my orgasm is dawdling, not all the precincts are reporting yet, and so I have to read the chosen come-sentence very slowly, syllable by syllable, ‘up … and … down … on … his … fuck … pole …’ ”

“So if you walked into a room,” he said, “and there was an armchair, and a table, and on one end of the table was a TV and a VCR and an X-rated tape, and at the other end of the table was some book of Victorian pornography, what would you choose?”

“The Victorian pornography, no question.”

“That’s incredible to me.”

“You’d choose the tape, right?” she asked.

“That or possibly the armchair itself. Not the book.”

“The classic opposition,” she said.

“True, but no—actually, it’s interesting. Because I’ve heard for so long about those studies that say that women like stories and men like pictures I’ve started to feel lately
that stories
represent
women and are therefore sexually charged for me, and in fact that’s what got me so hot at Bonnie’s Books that time, the idea that I was peeping in on a women’s preserve. I think I
am
slowly starting to understand why in general people would prefer written porn. It gives your brain a vaginal orgasm rather than a clitoral orgasm, so to speak, whatever that means. I read one story in some men’s magazine once, years ago, in the first person, written by a woman, or probably not, but written at least with the pretense that a woman was telling the story, about a sixteen-year-old girl who goes swimming in a neighbor’s pool and of course her frans are still somewhat new and unfamiliar to her, and she’d forgotten that her top from last year was flimsy and inadequate to the demands that were made on it, and presto it comes off after she’s swum a lap, and she’s
so
embarrassed and apologetic, but Mr. Grunthole reassures her that she needn’t be ashamed, he doesn’t mind if she swims without her top, and so on and so on, and even though it was a totally conventional and undistinguished story, the fact that it was written in the voice of this girl, so I could peep in on her mixed feelings when her top came off, did give me a huge … an unexpectedly large return on my investment. I guess insofar as verbal pornography records thoughts rather than exclusively images, or at least surrounds all images with thoughts, or something, it can be the hottest medium of all. Telepathy on a budget. But still honestly I need the images. For instance of you there
in the shower. I mean, when you come are your legs slightly apart?”

“Yes.”

“And do you have one of those legendary Water Pik shower-massage showerheads?”

“I do, but I don’t use it with any of the special settings. It was installed already when I moved in. It’s useful for cleaning the tub. But when I’m—I don’t hold it or put it between my legs or anything, I just treat it as a regular showerhead. What I do is …”

“Yes?”

“When I start to come?”

“Yes?”

“Yes?”

“I open my mouth and let it fill with water. The feeling of the water overflowing my mouth … You there?”

“
Don’t
stop talking.”

“But that’s all,” she said.

“You were in the shower, yesterday night, and the water was coursing onto your face and falling down from one part of you to another, like balls in a pinball machine, and your eyes were closed. What was in your mind? Oh I’d like to …”

“Excuse me? You’re murmuring.”

“I said I’d like to
clk,
” he said.

“What?”

“Sorry, I occasionally have a problem with involuntary
swallowing. I said I’d like to … put my hands on your thighs, very high up, and hold them apart and cover your whole mound with my mouth and just breathe on you, through the fabric of your underpants.”

“Ooch.”

“Are your legs apart right now?”

“They’re crossed at the ankle on the coffee table.”

“That will have to do,” he said. “Tell me what was in your mind in the shower last night.”

“I honestly don’t think I remember. And anyway the things I think of go by so fast. And it’s not like all I do is come and come. Very often in the shower I remember some embarrassing moment, or some dumb thing I’ve said, and I curse it out, I say, ‘Get away from me, stinker.’ For instance, I might remember this time after I’d come back from a party when I was quite drunk, so drunk that I started to feel that I was going to be sick, but this person was in my bathroom, washing their face, brushing their teeth, humming happily away, and I moaned, I was leaning against the door, I knocked politely, I made these feeble scrabbling sounds, but this person had used the hook and eye on the inside because the latch didn’t work on that door, and he was just too pleased with the world to hear me, or thought I was joking, saying hello by knocking, and so I was sick on my own bathroom door.”

“Oh, terrible.”

“Sorry to be gross. Fortunately it was just the usual fruit punch. He was verv nice, he cleaned me up, he
cleaned my door up, he took off my clothes and put me in a nightgown. Then of course later he drops me abruptly because I tell him to put his pen in his back pocket. But so, in the shower, the memory of that kind of thing will hit me and I swear at it to make it go away.”

“I understand completely. ‘Git out of my shower! Go on!’ ”

“Yeah, yeah. And I wash, too, in the shower. And I think of all the things I have to do. So the coming is just one item on the list. It’s not as if my life is wholly absorbed with it.”

“Oh yeah, oh no, I know that. But—do you wash your hair before or after you come?”

“Usually I get the nuts and bolts out of the way, and then I test the waters to see whether I do want to come.”

“What color is your hair?” he asked.

“It’s a light brown. It’s wavy. But it’s fairly short. What color is yours?”

“It’s black,” he said. “So now tell me the things you have to do that you remembered last night in the shower.”

“Oh, work things. Letters I should write—I should be writing them right now.”

“No you should not.”

“And I need to repaint the hall in my apartment. Ah, now I remember one of my sexual images from yesterday. The people before me put up this dreadful wallpaper, a kind of metallic wallpaper, with a design of a tree
and a split-rail fence with a wagon wheel leaning on it, repeating over and over.
Bad
.”

“Doesn’t sound good.”

“So I painted it when I moved in,” she said. “I painted it a color called Paper Lantern—and I put on two coats. Someone said, ‘You
know
that you’re painting over metallic wallpaper, that’s going to come through-hoo,’ but I just couldn’t make myself steam off all that old paper—the design would imprint itself in my psyche if I did that, it would rise up when I’m eighty years old, on my death bed. So I just painted it over, with two heavy coats. And the first year it was fine. But then we had that killer summer, and somehow the humidity sweated the metallic pattern back out, so that now you can make out the split-rail fence and the wagon wheel. But it’s very faint. Now in fact I kind of like it. But I really should repaint it. So in the shower I had this image of painting the hall wall with a roller. What a waste of time. And then I thought, wait, I have the money, this time I’ll hire people to paint it for me. And so three painters materialized, and then suddenly there was a large
hole
in the wall, about three feet off the floor, big enough so that I could fit through so that my legs were standing in the front hall and yet my head and upper body were in the living room. The hole was finished off and lined with sheepskin. I had nothing on. My hands were resting on two full paint cans. But the strange thing was the cans of paint were
warm
. There was one painter doing the living room, and
the other two were doing the hall, where my lower body was. The painter I could see didn’t seem to notice me. He was painting a wall with his back to me. The painters in the hall were using rollers, but they were those little detail rollers that you use for trim work, that are about three inches wide, the darlingest little rollers, that can go
everywhere
. Somehow I knew that one of these hall painters was mistakenly using the wrong color, it’s a color I used in the living room, called Opulent Opal—apparently he’d taken the wrong can of paint from his truck.
Very
careless. The other one was more conscientious—he was using the glossy Paper Lantern on the trim. These are Sherwin Williams’s paint names, not mine, by the way. Anyway I called out, ‘Ah, people, sirs? Please be sure to use the right color! There is a potential for confusion!’ But they were talking and they didn’t hear me. I could hear their sticky little rollers moving over that wall,
ssshp, ssshp, ssshp
, and they were having an idle conversation about the chick they saw on the lake that weekend riding in the back of an inboard motorboat in a pair of overalls with no top, so her tits flopped around behind the fasteners on the top flap, and then they made reference to the time on one job when one of them evidently quote ‘ate out’ the woman whose house they were painting and then she jerked him off onto a cracked slate hearthstone because she was paranoid about hurting the finish on the antique pine floors, and again I called out, as nicely as I could, ‘Guys, please, make
sure you’re painting the right colors!’ and this time, instead of answering, one of them simply took his little roller and got it very heavy with the semi-gloss Paper Lantern and touched it to the right side, you know, the … cheek, of my ass, and then I could feel him rolling a stripe of paint right down my leg, over my calf, right down to my Achilles tendon, and then rolling right back up again. Like the seam of a pre-war stocking, except wide. Then he worked the roller a little on the tray, loading it up again, and he started on my other asscheek, and went very deliberately down and up again. At first he pressed quite lightly, so I could just barely feel the sodden fluff touching my skin on my upper thigh, and the roller barely rolled, but then as he traveled down he pressed harder, and some of the paint was squeezed from the roller and dripped down my leg ahead of it. It was
so
surprisingly warm. They’d had the paint cans in the back of their truck, which was parked in the sun. When the roller traveled over the backs of each of my knees it felt very very nice. I felt myself arching myself up slightly, like a cat who’s being stroked. Meanwhile the third painter, who was in the room that my head and my upper self were in, was still blithely painting away, with his back to me, so at least part of the job was moving steadily forward. And I expected that the two of them in the hall would now get back to work. But instead I felt a pair of hands on each leg, and I was lifted for a moment, and a paint can was slid under each of my feet. This was
not a particularly comfortable position. The rims of the paint cans hurt the balls of my feet slightly, and my legs were farther apart than I was used to standing, and the small of my back was pressing against the sheepskin lining of the hole in the wall. Not comfortable, but tolerable. And then I felt knuckles brush against the inside of my thighs—and I knew that the first hall roller was now beginning to paint a stripe of Paper Lantern that started just at the top of my pubic hair and rolled very slowly over my clit and the rest of it, like some heavy steady piece of road equipment, and then back over my clit. And at the same time, the other hall painter had loaded his roller with
the wrong paint
, the Opulent Opal, and he’d turned his roller sideways and he was now pushing a horizontal stripe over my ass, at first a light stripe, and then, on the return, a harder stripe, and then he rolled down in between, and I called out, ‘No no, I’m telling you that’s the wrong paint!’ but he was very deliberately working the roller in the region of my, what shall we call it, my ‘tockhole,’ without seeming to hear me. Nontoxic paint, of course. And then I heard him put down the roller and he planted his hands high on my ass, holding my hips, and then he did an amazing thing. I felt his whole weight go on his hands, and on my back too, and he was apparently supporting himself like a gymnast, entirely on his hands, with his knees bent and his legs apart, and then a second later I felt this burning blunt nub press against my Opulent Opal tockhole, and then
kind of urge itself a little ways in. I went, ‘Yew!’ and the painter in the living room turned in surprise and registered my existence for the first time. My hands were still planted on the cans of paint. And back in the hall, while the one gymnast painter was sinking himself unapologetically deep into my ass, I felt the other, the one who’d responsibly used the right kind of paint all along, now use his thumbs to hold my real … self open, my lips, and then I felt him slide slowly up my real hole. I said, ‘Vvoo!’ The living-room painter’s eyes got big, and he studied my face with this look, like, ‘What exercise tape has
this
lady been using?’ I’m afraid that by now I was curling my upper lip with pleasure. My expression in fact was exactly the one I would have had if I had been biting open a condom packet with my teeth, that gnashy look, but the thing was—
there was no condom packet
. My painter loaded up his roller with wall paint, this was a warm neutral gray, and I mean warm, and he came over and he lay down on the floor underneath me, in the opposite direction, with his head touching the baseboard, so I could see his face and his paint-spattered glasses between my breasts, and he touched the roller to one of my nipples, and then rolled up between my breasts and down and over the other nipple, and as he was doing that he used his foot to pull another paint can into position, and then, still lying on his back, he lifted his hips up in the air with both boots resting on the can of paint sort of like a circus elephant on one of those little stools, you
know? And he brought out his cock. The hall ass painter took this moment to remove his hands from my back, so that all his weight was directed through his thigh muscles and his cock into my ass, while at the same time the leg painter, who was standing, pulled almost all the way out of me and then he slid himself all the way back in so that I could feel the muscles of his legs hit against me, and I opened my mouth to say, ‘Hooh!’ which is I think almost certainly what I would say if all that was going on in my front hall, but of course as soon as I opened my mouth the cock of the man underneath me slid right inside, so all I could do was hum, and then all three of them came in me, one right after another, first the one in my mouth, surprisingly enough, then the one in my pussy, then finally the one in my ass.”