Vox: a novel Part 4

"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 embarra.s.sing 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, was.h.i.+ng their face, brus.h.i.+ng 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 h.e.l.lo 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 very 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 s.e.xual 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 t.i.ts 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 a.s.s, 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 a.s.scheek, 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 c.l.i.t and the rest of it, like some heavy steady piece of road equipment, and then back over my c.l.i.t. 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 pus.h.i.+ng a horizontal stripe over my a.s.s, 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 a.s.s, 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 a.s.s, 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 gla.s.ses between my b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and he touched the roller to one of my nipples, and then rolled up between my b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 c.o.c.k. The hall a.s.s painter took this moment to remove his hands from my back, so that all his weight was directed through his thigh muscles and his c.o.c.k into my a.s.s, 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. .h.i.t 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 c.o.c.k 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 p.u.s.s.y, then finally the one in my a.s.s."

"My gracious," he said. "And that's what you came to in the shower?"

"One of the things. I mean-it takes a while to describe it, but it was just a quick succession of images, among many. It takes me a good long time to come."

"Tell me others."

"Well, hm. The idea I actually finally came to was-it was really two ideas. Excuse me for a second."

There was a pause.

"What did you do?" he asked.

"I just got a towel so that I can have it whenever I need it to mop myself up. I don't want to come yet, and I seem to be getting awfully wet."

"Does that mean you've taken off your black pants and your sneakers?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Underpants?"

"No."

"And what color is the towel?"

"Green," she said.

"Where is it?"

"It's bunched in my hand, held in my unders where I need it. Now I've put it aside."

"Why don't you want to come yet? I won't object, you know."

"Because if I do, I'll crash, I'll want to stop talking to you this way, and I like talking to you this way. My c.l.i.toris is duplicitous: it always tries to trick me when I'm with someone, or when I'm alone, even-it says, *Go on and come, Abby, no problem, you can come a second time in a few minutes, this feels real good, come on, don't be so conservative, I'm good for three or four!' But I know better. I'm not a multiple-o.r.g.a.s.m sort of person. The second after I've come, no matter how foaming and frothing my level of arousal was, that's it, my c.l.i.t is already starting to creep back into its c.l.i.t-cloister and I'm thinking about other things. Two or three hours after that generally I'll top myself off in the shower, but not before."

"I see. Well then by all means keep that towel handy. I'm in for the long pull."

"Good. Where were we?"

"You were just about to tell me the exact thing that was in your mind when you came in the shower yesterday evening."

"Right, but do you mean the image that made me come, or do you mean the image that I had in my head when I came?"

"I-don't know."

"There's a big difference," she said. "I mean, the actual images that I have when I'm coming are things like, I don't know, elephant seals dozing on rocks, a carousel selection of greeting cards, a painting tightly wrapped in canvas, porch furniture-my brain is going so wild that there's no way to predict what sort of oddment will be there when all the flashbulbs go off. They're almost never s.e.xual images. But before that, when I'm getting close, you mean, right?"

"I guess, yes."

"Yesterday I think there were two ideas, combined. I'm embarra.s.sed."

"You're embarra.s.sed, after just telling me about a triple-c.o.c.k blowout?"

"But that's nothing, that's just a picture. The thing that made me come, I've acted on, to a degree, indirectly."

"I told you about buying the romance novel, didn't I?" he said. "I even told you about making obscene fingerings on the roof of my car. I've let my hair down!"

"Tell me what you look like erect."

"You mean from memory?"

"No."

"You mean undo my bathrobe etcetera?"

"Yes."

There was a pause.

"Welp. Um. What can I tell you?"

"Is it hard?"

"Yes."

"Was it already hard, or did you just make it hard?"

"It was somewhat hard, I just made it somewhat harder."

"Talk to me about it. Look at it and talk to me about it."

"Well, it's this thing. I don't know. Gee."

"Are you stroking it?"

"I'm-truthfully?"

"Yes."

"I'm pinching the underpeening skin in the fingers of my right hand, and I'm jostling my b.a.l.l.s nervously with my left hand."

"Stroke it now, slowly," she said.

"All right. G.o.d, each time I pull on it, its muscle clenches. I mean, of course it's always done that, but now, with you telling me to look at it, this seems the most noteworthy feature, this clench."

"Go faster."

"Just for a second, though, right?"

"Right, no spontaneous human combustion yet."

"Right. Eee, that feels pretty good."

"I can hear your strumming in your voice, you nasty boy."

"Nastybation. I don't want to come, though. I'm going to stop."

"Prudent."

"Funny," he said. "When I was going fast, I pictured something that I've pictured for years and yet never noticed. I pictured doing an impossible thing-I thought that if I got too close to coming, I could somehow angle my leg and contort it so that I caught hold of my c.o.c.k in my bent knee and squeezed it like a nut in a nutcracker until it stopped wanting to come."

"You're a strange case," she said. "It was fun getting imperious with you for a moment, though."

"Hah! Frightening, too. There are different rules on the telephone. You want to know what I actually thought of when you asked me to quote *talk' to you about my c.o.c.k? After the thrill and the terror had pa.s.sed?"

"What?"

"This time I had a crush on a woman at work," he said. "She had beautiful long arms, of which she was very proud. I don't think she had a single dress with full sleeves. She had a hopeless thing for a man named Lee, who was a smugly flirtatious married guy, whom I personally disliked intensely. This woman knew I had a crush on her, in fact I used to send her a memo with a single asterisk in the middle of the page on the day after any night I'd m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed thinking mainly about her. I don't know if she thought this was charming or not. On the whole I think it pleased her. I was not completely serious myself anyway. One time she even held her arms out in perplexity and said, *What, no asterisk today?' She knew I loved her arms. I tried to get her to send me a memo with a pound sign on it the day after any night she had m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed thinking about Lee, but she never did. One night I was working late and I started to need to jerk off. The place was absolutely deserted, it was a holiday weekend. I went past this woman's door, her name was Emily, and it was like I was pa.s.sing a huge v.u.l.v.a, so big it had a desk inside, and I decided that what I should do is make an actual photocopy of my d.i.c.k, in fact two copies, one before coming, one after, and leave these, along with an asterisk memo, on her desk."

"What did you hope to accomplish by doing that?"

"Well, I was very interested in having her see my c.o.c.k, but of course I wasn't ever going to just flip it out in front of her, I needed some ... distancing step, so that ho ho ho yes we're civilized adults here, it's all on paper. Well it's harder than you may think to make a copy of your d.i.c.k. I know it's done in offices all the time, but I found it to be quite a project. Maybe if I'd been able to do some kind of planche, like your painter friend did on your ... back, it would have been easy, but what I had to do was first try to get something akin to an erection standing at the copier of a deserted office on a holiday, I had to think of her seeing the copy of my c.o.c.k on Monday, I had to think of her first thinking, Golly, what a nut, and then finding she had to stare uncontrollably at the specific image of my c.o.c.k, boyoing, had to file that image away in a secret file folder where she filed away all my asterisk memos, and that some night, working late, she'd reach her long arms down to that drawer and bring out the asterisk file and go through the pages, asterisk after asterisk, until she found my c.o.c.k. So I got hard, that was one hurdle. Then I had to place my c.o.c.k down on the gla.s.s, but the way this copier is designed-I disliked this copier, by the way, that place is too cheap to lease a decent brand of copier-the way it's designed is that a normal eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper is oriented sideways in the middle of the gla.s.s between two marks, you know how that works, right?"

"Yes."

"So the problem then is that only a little sliver of the tip of my c.o.c.k was going to make it in range of the footprint of a normal eight-and-a-half-by-eleven copy. There were ways I could straddle the machine, but this just seemed ludicrous. Finally I made a seventy-percent reduction copy of my d.i.c.k, because the highest reduction setting used the whole area of the gla.s.s that my d.i.c.k could reach, and so I captured something vaguely obscene-looking, even if the total overall scale was reduced. It looked like a little Quonset hut, halfway up the right side of the page. I wrote 70% REDUCTION on the copy. But obviously my plan to strum off hastily and then make the second copy had to be abandoned, because my d.i.c.k wouldn't even begin to reach over the plastic strip between me and where the gla.s.s started when it was soft. But by now I was crazed with the idea of doing something for this woman that retained some shred of playfulness to it, so she could think to herself, All in fun, all in fun, and yet which conveyed the full force of the idea that I had been alone in that office that weekend with a huge erection, thinking of her. How do I give her that sense? Actually come onto the asterisk memo? That seemed crude. Do you think that would have crossed the line?"

"I think, yeah."

"I thought so. So instead what I did was-you remember making outlines of your hands in kindergarten? You held your hand still on the page and you traced around each finger, and all the little contours of your finger joints were captured, and you would go around a few times, and each time the pencil was at a slightly different angle, so you got this aura of your hand, that was so much more accurate than you could ever draw, and all you had to do was put in the fingernails and the little wrinkles on the backs of your fingers and you really had something? Once this girl traced my hand and I traced hers at the same time-I went very slowly, which triggered her ticklishness, and she laughed hard every time my pencil made it to the place between two of her fingers, but she was brave, she stayed put. Her name was Martha. I'm pleased to have remembered that! A teacher showed us how to make a turkey, using two hands superimposed. But that wasn't interesting, that was just a trick. It's the same with shadows: the beautiful thing isn't the alligators or bats you can make with your hands, the beautiful thing is the way the shadow image allows you to see so precisely what the outer contour of your own hand really looks like, those little bunches of flesh under each bent finger joint. Obviously this was what I had to do. So I closed the top of the copier and I took a blank piece of paper and again I concentrated on the idea of this woman's surprise and then transfixion when she saw my memo until I was hard again. I traced around my d.i.c.k with a pen, holding myself in place with a finger and holding the pen straight up and down, and it was a very interesting sensation, not pleasurable, but very interesting, this cold pen. I went around about five times. And the great thing was, on paper, my d.i.c.k looked really impressive. It looked like a big d.i.c.k. Because of course the image you get is bigger all the way around by what, two pen radii, or one full pen diameter, so a good quarter of an inch. Much better than the copy, which as I said was this miniature sideways thatched farmhouse there in the right margin. So I wrote FULL-SCALE c.o.c.k TRACING, you know, 11:43 P.M., SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 24TH or whatever the date was. And I put the memo and the two pieces of artwork in her in box."

"You're kidding! Did somebody find them?"

"No no. I plucked them back out just before I left."

"Ah, okay."

"And I didn't send her any asterisk memos at all for about a month after that, which was highly unusual. She started giving me quizzical looks. Then one afternoon she came by and she asked me what was up. She said I wasn't my usual buoyant self. And I griped to her about a certain person at work, I lamented the fact that we were a second-rate company when we could be a first-rate company, the usual junk. And then I said, *And there's something else.' She said, *Well, what is it?' She knew it was about her. So, with this weird combination of reluctance and eagerness, I confessed to her that I'd made a copy of my c.o.c.k and a c.o.c.k tracing and that I'd put them in her in box late one night and then thought better of it. She said, *Well, do you still have them?' I said, *Gee, I think I do!' "

"You'd kept them? In a little file of your own?"

"Of course," he said. "After all that trouble? Plus this was in some way part of the whole thing, that I'd blurt out what I'd done and she'd ask to see and I'd have it on hand to show her."

"What did she say?"

"She said that the copied c.o.c.k looked like a sonogram."

"That's it?"

"I'm telling you, she had it very bad for this Lee guy. I suggested that she could take the two pages if she wanted, for her reference. She said no thanks. We had lunch a week or so after that. She moaned about Lee, I listened sympathetically. Then I asked her, I couldn't help it, I asked her, I said, *Never mind the photocopy,' I said, *let me just ask you, was the c.o.c.k tracing I showed you in any slight way arousing? Not right then in my office, to be sure, but later? Did you feel the slightest smidgin of arousal later?' And she gave me an indulgent look and she said, *I'm really sorry, the pictures made me feel tender feelings for you, but they just really did not arouse me.' So that seemed conclusive."

"I would say so," she said.

"Yep. Yep. It wasn't. More happened."

"You mean you and she ended up getting together? What was her name?"

"Emily."