Vox

they met on a crowded 900 line and made a carnal connection

"Tell me the last thing you thought of that made you pay some attention to your clitoris."

"I liked the story you told about the jeweler pretty well."

"No, no, before tonight. Whenever the last time was you made yourself come."

"Last night. I really don't remember. These are fleeting things."

"Oh, you do remember."

"I was in the shower."

"Wait a second. OK. You were in the shower."

"What did you just do?" she asked.

"Nothing. My shorts were starting to bug me. Go on."

"I was in the shower, which is almost always the place I come best. In college, there were very nice marble showers with high shower heads, and the water, the shape of each drop of water, was exactly right--fat, soothing, generous drops, but billions of them. I came many, many times in those showers."

"Public showers, you mean?"

"No, no, private," she said. "This little high marble box with a marble foyer. It was very loud, and sometimes when the water collected and flowed together down my arm and between my legs and then fell from there, it made this almost clacking noise on the tile. The dorms were co-ed, so potentially there was a man from my hall in the next shower over, but that didn't interest me. (continued on page 146) (continued from page 112) I used to take showers at odd times of the day anyway, when the bathrooms were deserted. One-thirty in the afternoon. I'd go to class, and I'd draw a little curve, and I'd think, hmm, a curve, and then I'd turn it into a breast and I'd make it a bit larger, and then I'd make another one, and then I'd draw a pair of hands holding the breasts from behind--that was always an idea that interested me, that I'd be sitting in some class or auditorium, dimly lit, an architectural-history lecture, with slides, and a person sitting behind me would reach his hands forward and take hold of my breasts, pulling me back against the chair. So by the time I'd drawn those hands and those large breasts I really had to come, and I'd walk briskly back to my brown-marble shower. I read something about river gods that excited me, too. Really, back then I'd put out for any body of water at all--a pool or a bath or a pond or an ocean. We rented a house on the Carolina coast for several summers--this was when I was in junior high school--and I'd go swimming in the ocean, and as soon as I was in the water, I'd want to dither. I'd swim far out and I'd think of the tons and tons of water underneath my legs, but of course I couldn't because there were lots of people swimming, so I'd come in the shower--oh, and that was an especially good kind of shower, too, because it was outdoors in this wooden shed, and I had this freezing-cold bathing suit on, which I would take off in the shower, and because the suit was cold my nipples were erect, and I was stripping in the warm shower water. I'd slowly strip off this cold bathing suit, very pleasant to have the warm mingle with the cold so that sometimes I could feel cold rinsing down my legs and sometimes warm, and I could hold the suit open and let the water fill it so that the warm was just pouring out around my legs. That was nice, so my skin was all confused and very aware of itself, with the steam rising--oh, and there was a little metal mirror, I guess it was a shaving mirror, which would get steamed up, even though I was outside. It was on the left wall as you faced the shower head, which in this case was quite low. And after I'd taken off my swimsuit, I'd hang it up on the nail next to the shaving mirror, and the sight of it all crumpled and dangling there was exciting because it implied my complete, full nudity, and when the shaving mirror got steamed up, I used to draw a pair of breasts in the fog with my fingers. The glass was cold. I wanted to press my breasts against the mirror, but it was too high for that, but I imagined myself pressing them against the mirror, first squeezing them together and then pressing them against the mirror, and I'd just seen something on TV about one-way mirrors, so I thought of men in the garden being able to see my breasts stuffed flat against the foggy mirror. Once, I even brought in some lip gloss after my swim and spent a long time putting lip gloss around my nipples and soaping it off."

"God, car washes must have driven you wild."

"Car washes. I did like that one part in the end, where the 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, 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, it 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 build-up 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, and 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 some erotica," 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 looking 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 ... 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 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, without a 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 the used-book store 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?"

"And do you have one of those legendary shower-massage shower heads?"

"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 shower head. What I do is----"

"Yes?"

"When I start to come?"

"Yes?"

"I----"

"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."