“Mm-hmm?”
“No, that’s it, I shot my wad getting the two of you face-to-face.”
“No! You’re bailing out right there? Did you really shoot your wad, or you mean figuratively?”
“At the moment, my true wad could not be farther from shooting. It is work getting the two of you together. I feel that any second I’m going to misstep in telling this. It’s very stressful.”
“Now listen,” she said. “Harvey leaves, slamming the door, so the sign says CLOSED, and I, me, I am left, abandoned right in the middle of things by Harvey, and I’m standing there in the shop with the taciturn and very rich guy Forky, Forky Pigtail, who’s holding the necklace that I made in his big knuckly fingers. He sits down on a step stool, he looks down at the necklace, looks up at me. What does he do?”
“He says, ‘I really do have to see what it looks like on someone before I know whether it’s something I want.’ And you look down at your shirt with the green and black stars and you sort of pluck at it and smile and say, ‘I’m sorry, I’m not wearing the clothes for that piece. It’s really an evening piece, for a low-cut dress.’ With your finger you trace the ideal curve of the neckline of the dress. And Fork says, ‘Then unbutton your shirt.’ Well, what can you do? You unbutton the top three buttons of your shirt. With each button, you feel the fabric shift slightly against your collarbone. Fork stands up, letting the necklace dangle from his left hand, and, to your astonishment, he begins unbuttoning the buttons of his fly. Because of course he’s a button-fly kind of guy. He unbuttons three buttons. The two of you are still about ten feet apart. You fold your shirt down, trying to make it follow the line of the dress that you should be wearing to wear the necklace, but looking down at yourself you see that you really need to undo one more button, and you dart a glance at him—has he reached the same conclusion? Oh no, he has! He is shaking his head. He says, ‘I think really you’ll need to go down one more in order to wear your necklace.’ So you unbutton one more button, and he responds by unbuttoning the last button of his fly. He doesn’t do anything, he doesn’t reach in, you almost couldn’t tell that his fly was undone, if it weren’t for the fact that you’ve just seen him undo it. Oh, he is a bold bastard! What is he up to? He takes the necklace in both his hands, by both ends, and he shakes it, indicating for you to walk toward him, which you do. When you are standing close to him, he says, ‘l think it’ll be easier if you turn around. Then I’ll be able to see the clasp.’ So you turn around, and you see this necklace, your own handiwork, descend very slowly in front of your face, and you feel the dangly elements just touch your skin and you try to hold your shirt so it doesn’t get in the way, but instead of doing the clasp, he lowers the necklace further and lets it accommodate itself to your breasts, and you hear him say, thoughtfully, ‘Hmm, no, I really think the shirt has to come olf entirely before I can evaluate this necklace. The green and black stars clash with the stones.’ So you unbutton the shirt completely and let it fall off your arms. You’re wearing a black cotton undershirty thing, with very thin shoulder straps. Very gently he drags your piece of jewelry up again, against you, and then finally he fastens it, holding the ends away from your neck so that his hands hardly touch you. You look down at it. It’s hard to tell, but you think it looks kind of beautiful. Your nipples are visible through the black material. He’s silent behind you. You say, ‘Don’t you want to see it now?’ But he says, ‘Wait, let me just do something.’ And you hear a slight scrape of the step stool against the floor, and you hear his shoes on the steps, and then you hear some rustling, and then a very soft rhythmic sound, the sound of the sleeve of his suit jacket making repeated contact with one side of the jacket itself, and, as the speed of the rhythm increases slightly, you hear every once in a while a little sort of plick or click, a wet little sound, and you know exactly what he’s doing, and you hear his voice, with a bit of strain in it, say, ‘I think I’m ready to see it now.’ And you turn, and there he is, on the top step of this little stool, with his cock and both balls pulled out of his pants, and with each pull he makes on his cock you can see the skin pull up slightly on his balls. I mean is this guy for real? And you touch your shoulders with your hands, and you pull the straps of your black undershirt down, and you pull it down around your waist, so your breasts are right there, out, and now you take hold of your breasts, your frans, and you lift them, so that each of the two side stones of your necklace touches a nipple, and by moving your breasts back and forth, you move your nipples, which are hard, back and forth under the two cool dangly stones, and you see him stroking faster and faster, he’s starting to get the about-to-come expression, and you smile at him and move a step closer, so your breasts and your silver necklace and your collarbone are ready for him, and then you look straight at him and you say, ‘Well, what do you think? Do you like it? As you see, it’s really an evening piece.’ And then, stroking very fast, he bends his legs slightly and then straightens them and he goes ‘Ooh!’ and then he comes in a hot mess all over your art.”
There was a pause. She said, “Does he buy the necklace or does he just take his fixed fork and go home?”
“I don’t know. I assume he takes the paper towel that he’d wrapped his fork in and uses it to wipe you off and wipe off your necklace and then he buys it and gives it to you.”
“That’s good. He sounds like an honorable sort. A bit precipitate maybe. Um—would you excuse me for a second?”
“Sure.”
“I just—my mouth’s dry—I want to get some more—”
“Sure,” he said.
There was a long pause. She returned.
“It’s funny that you cast me as an arts-and-craftsy type,” she said.
“Not aggressively arts-and-craftsy. Are you?”
“Well, no. I’m really not, I don’t think. Do you have a ponytail?” she asked.
“No.”
“Then do you have an old-world smell?”
“I don’t think that would be the word for it.”
“I wonder what your smell is.”
“I’ve been told I smell like a Conté crayon,” he said.
“Hm.”
“Or I guess it was that I smelled like what a Conté crayon would smell like if it had a smell.”
“Well, that’s good to know,” she said. “Of course I have no idea what you’re talking about. But no, you know what your story reminded me of, when I was in the kitchen just now?”
“What?”
“I was in a museum in Rome with my mother, and we passed a statue that had all these discolorations on it, a nice statue of a woman, and my mother pointed to a sort of mottled area and she shook her head and said, ‘You see? It’s so realistic that men feel they have to …’ She didn’t explain. And I don’t know now if she was serious or not. I was—I guess I was eighteen. I thought, oh, okay, in churches in Italy, people wear down the toes of the statues of popes by touching them so much, and in museums in Italy, men come on the statues of women.”
“Yes,” he said, “I think I do remember coming on that statue. It’s all a blur, though. There were so many statues in those years.”
“Do you, as they say, like to travel?” she asked.
“You mean get in a plane and fly somewhere for recreation? No. I’ve never been to Rome. I spend my vacation money in more important ways.”
“Like this call.”
“That’s right. Now tell me, though, really, when your mother pointed out that statue, was it faintly arousing?”
“I don’t think it really was,” she said. “It was just interesting, an interesting sexual fact, like something in Ripley’s. I’m not, by the way, to get back to your story for a second, I’m not wearing a black undershirt under my shirt.”
“What are you wearing under your shirt?”
“A bra.”
“What kind of bra?”
“A nothing bra. A normal, white bra bra.”
“Oooo!”
“It’s shrunk slightly in t
he wash but it was my last clean one.”
“It’s always impressive to me that bras have to be washed like other clothes. Does it clip on the front or on the back?”
“The back.”
“Shouldn’t it come off?”
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“Oh, I can hear in your voice the sound of you frowning and pulling in your chin to look down at them! Oh boy.”
“Hah hah!”
“The idea of women looking down at their own breasts drives me nutso. They do it while they’re walking. Some walk with their arms sort of hovering in front of their breasts, or awkwardly crossed in front of them, or they pretend to hold the strap of their pocketbook so their hands are bent in front of them, or they pretend to be adjusting their watch, or their bracelets, and the fact that even fully clothed the helpless obviousness of their breasts is embarrassing to them drives me absolutely nutso.”
“They see you staring, with your eyes sproinging out of your skull, of course they’re embarrassed.”
“No, I’m very discreet. And this is only in certain moods, of course. Once I got into a wild state just standing at a bus stop. It was rush hour, and there were all these women driving to work, and they would drive by, and I would get this Hash, this briefest of glimpses, of the wide shoulder strap of their safety belt crossing their breasts. That thick, densely woven material, pulling itself tight right between them. That’s all I could see, hundreds of times, different colors of dresses, shirts, blouses, over and over, every bra size and Lycra-cotton balance imaginable, like frames of a movie. By the time the bus came, I was literally unsteady, I could barely get the fare in the machine. What’s that noise?”
“Nothing. I was just changing the phone to the othe ear.”
“Oh,” he said. “Did you see that thing about the Chinese kid who suffered an episode of spontaneous human combustion?”
“No.”
“You really missed something. It was originally in one of the tabloids, I think, but I heard about it on the radio. You know about spontaneous human combustion, right?”
“I’m familiar with the general concept.”
“All right, well this kid apparently spontaneously human combusted, but the combustion was confined to his genitals. Boom! He was very uncomfortable. But see, I understand perfectly how that could happen. I fear for my own genitals sometimes. I get so fricking horny … now there’s another inadequate word … so porny, so gorny, so yorny … I get so yorny that I look down at my cock-and-balls unit, and it’s like I could take the whole rigid assembly and start unscrewing it, around and around, and it would come off as one solid thing, like a cotterless crank on a bicycle, and I would hand it over to you to use as a dildo.”
“Okay then, hand it over. Although I’ve never cottoned to dildos particularly. I used one once, to oblige someone, and I got a yeast infection. I think it was called a ‘Mighty Mini Brute.’ ”
“That’s a fair description of my … crank.”
“I know what you mean, though. Sometimes I get the same way, so worked up. My clit gets hard and it feels like this discrete wedge item, like a piece of candy corn, and I feel as if I should put it in a little wooden box for safekeeping. I usually like to come in the shower.”
“Mm! Shouldn’t that bra come off, really?”
“No it really should not, and I’ll tell you why. When I dither myself off … no, I don’t want to tell you.”
“Please, yes you do, please tell me, yes you do, please, right now.”
“When I masturbate and I’m not in the shower, I need my breasts to be tended to, but, boo-hoo, there’s nobody to tend to them, so what I do is I pull my bra down so that the edge of it catches under my nipples, and then they’re all taken care of, and I can use both hands to tend to matters below.”
“This is a miracle,” he said.
“It’s just a telephone conversation.”
“It’s a telephone conversation I want to have. I love the telephone.”
“Well, I like it too,” she said. “There’s a power it has. My sister’s little babe has a toy phone, which is white, with horses and pigs and ducks on the dial, and a blue receiver that has no weight to it at all, and I find there is an astonishing feeling of power when you pretend to be talking to someone on it. You cover the mouthpiece with your hand and you say in this dramatic whisper, ‘Stevie, it’s Horton the Elephant on the phone. He wants to speak to you!’ and you hand it over to Stevie and his eyes get big and you and he both for that second believe that Horton the Elephant really is on the phone. And then you get two phones going. Stevie’s on the white phone with the ducks and pigs, and I’m on the yellow phone with the wheels and the eyes that move when you pull it along the Floor, and I ask how Stevie’s doing and have a little conversation with him and then I say, ‘Stevie, would you like to speak to Paul?’ And Stevie says yes. Paul is a relative—this happened last time I was back home—and Paul, who’s sitting right there, gets this startled look, his hand automatically flies up to take the tiny plastic phone that I’m handing to him, he interrupts whatever real conversation he’s been having and he says, ‘Hello?’ and his smile is very complicated—he almost believes.”
“That’s right!” he said. “And here I am talking to you, and you truly are somewhere on the East Coast, and you’re wearing a bra!”
“Amazing as it may seem. What other words do you have for the things I’m looking down at right now and admiring?”
“Other words for breasts? Frans is the main one. Sometimes … frannies. Frans, nans, and Kleins. And I never thought ‘ass’ fit. Sometimes I think of a woman’s ass as a ‘tock.’ ”
“So then it follows that she has a ‘tockhole’ as well?”
“I never pushed it that far.”
“Kleins is strange. ‘I’m squeezing my big fleshy Kleins’? You sure?”
“I don’t know, I think Patsy Cline is a sexy name. I don’t even know who she is.”
“She’s a singer.”
“I know that much. Once I looked down the list of Kleins in the phone book and found one with a woman’s name spelled out, and God, it was everything I could not to call that number. In fact, I did call the number, and she answered, and I said, ‘Oh gosh, I must have the wrong number.’ And yet the Kleins I’ve known in real life haven’t been surrounded by a mysterious sexual power.”
“It’s that telephone.”