“Your last name isn’t Klein?”
“No,” she said. “But I will tell you something.”
“What? What? What?”
“Occasionally when I’m just about to reach an orgasm I … I think of it as a ‘Delgado.’ ”
“Think of what as a Delgado?” he asked.
“The erect male cock.”
“Oh, oh. Sorry.”
“It’s because I was infatuated with a boy named Delgado in high school. So when you said something about, something about your ‘sperm-dowel’ earlier, I misheard for a second, and I felt this rush of blood—I thought you were using my secret word.”
“Now see that is what I live for, for someone to tell me something like that. I need that to happen to me every minute, every second.”
“That’s an impossibility.”
“I will feast on that revelation for weeks to come.”
“It’s a secret, though, so …”
“Up, it doesn’t go beyond this conversation. Out here we say everything, but in our lives, nothing. Out here you can tell me, just request me, to pull on the knot of my bathrobe until it falls open.”
“What kind of bathrobe is it?”
“White terry cloth. And you can just tell me, you can just say, ‘Jim, please lift the waistband of your gray underpants up to its extreme limit of stretch so that it clears your erection and then bring it around and hook it under your balls, and then take that Juggs magazine and use it to fan your overheated pop stand.’ And you know what? I would do it.”
“Well, yes, I could tell you to do all that, but I don’t know, those are important decisions you maybe ought to make for yourself.”
“And I could probably ask you to tell me anything about yourself and you will tell me.”
“Maybe,” she said.
“You told me the secret word you have for the adult male cock, anyway. Not for my cock, leave me out of it. For the one you think about on your own. See, see, this is what I need. I need to know secrets and have secrets and keep secrets. I need to be confided in. Each time you come alone and you don’t tell anybody, that’s a sexual secret. The event has taken place and only you know about it and you have ministered to yourself in exactly the way you wanted to and thought of exactly what you wanted to think about. And each of these thousands of times you have come alone constitutes a perfectly unique moment, with precisely this order of images and that fold of yourself being moved by your middle finger in just that way and that biting of lower lip with exactly that degree of force, all entirely private. I almost think that each one of the times a woman comes in private in her life has to continue to exist as a kind of sphere, a foot-and-a-E-cuhalf-wide sphere, in some ideal dimension, sort of like all the ovums you’ve got queued up in you, except these are … ovums of past orgasms, weird as that sounds, and I am this one viable spermazoid lurking around among them, and I would happily spend my life floating up to one after another of these unique orgasm spheres and looking inside and I’d be able to watch you make yourself come that one time.”
“I bet each one of these mystical spheres has a little window in it with a little Levelor blind that’s down almost but not quite all the way, right, that you creep up to and peer into, am I right?”
“Exactly, as if it’s a stylized cartoon bubble with a curved window drawn on it, and you’re naked in there, strumming like there’s no tomorrow. But no, actually it isn’t like simple voyeurism, I don’t think—it’s holier or more reverent than that, because when I’m in that mood I don’t want to exist. I don’t mean I want to kill myself, I mean that I’m a man and a man is a watcher and a watcher disturbs the purity of the event, so I don’t want to exist, I want to be faded away to almost nothing. And of course all other men are completely foreign, they aren’t allowed in this at all. When I’m very aroused I almost hate all other men. Sometimes when there’s a kissing scene in a movie, and the camera shows the actor and actress chomping away on each other’s gums, moyong, moyong, and then there’s this sudden folded-up piece of shaven male jaw skin, I feel a wave of disgust—what the fuck is he doing there, get him off the set! That’s not even to mention the bestial idiots in porn movies: this nice woman donating her perfect self to these horrible lascivious dumb fucks, with their suggestive evil laughs, and their intent lustful expressions, and their single-mindedness, and their constant diverting of the conversation around to sex. Get rid of them. One time I was in a store at the dirty-magazine rack and it was a little congested there and I reached sort of over this guy’s shoulder to get a copy of the magazine I wanted to look at—E-Cup or something—didn’t touch him, just reached over him, and the guy half turned his head and said in this psychopathic voice, but very soft, he said, ‘Stay away from me or I’ll cut you up.’ I said, ‘Sorry, sorry, I was just trying to get the magazine!’ And he said, ‘Well just stay the fuck away from me, okay?’ Now I’d never say that or threaten that but that guy’s reaction, when you’re at the magazine rack and you want to be the only one there, among all these lovely kindly wonderful naked women, is a reaction I can at least understand. These groups of buddies who go out and drink beer together at strip clubs—it’s totally mystifying to me that they would want to do that, have male company.”
“But women like men from time to time.”
“I know that, I realize that, and that’s how I trick myself into accepting men’s existence: women often imagine men when they come, so men have a reason to exist. In fact, this secondary deductive twist allows me to get aroused by stuff that doesn’t really arouse me, like for instance when you went into that catalog thing earlier about the row of male models in the warehouse with their cream horns popping out of their shorts, I could think to myself, okay, her arousal is supremely arousing to me, and this image she’s describing is the source or current expression of her arousal, and I could imagine your face thinking of those images, and therefore I was able to make them somewhat arousing to me. Like the religious nut who embraces the devil because it shows his utter humility before God—except I don’t go that far. Oh! I know what I meant to tell you.”
“What?”
“You know you mentioned that friend of yours reading you a romance novel all night? Okay, this is a good example of what I’m talking about. I went into this used bookstore one time, just to browse around, called Bonnie’s Books. But it wasn’t really the kind of place I thought it was going to be, it had hardly any old books, what it had was recently published pre-enjoyed books. A de-facto library. Shelf after shelf of these things, big thick historical romances, super neatly shelved, sometimes five or six copies of the same book side by side, Love’s Hurry, Love’s Eager Trial, Love’s Tender Fender Bender, all that kind of material, but even though there were multiple copies of these books, they weren’t identical, because every one of them had been read. They looked handled. All of their pages were turned. And turned by whom? Turned by women. My heart started going. I had entered this enchanted glade. I took a historical romance off the shelf, and I felt as if I were lifting a towel that was still damp from a woman’s shower. The intimacy of it! But it was long—no way I could ever read a book that long. So I put it back. There was a woman at the counter, maybe thirty-eight or forty, perhaps Bonnie herself. She’d read some of these books! I think I was the only one in the store—I knew she was aware of me—I’d smiled at her when I went in. I wanted her to see me looking at the historical romances. And then I went a little further up this one aisle, and I came to a huge trove of romance novels—hundreds and hundreds of them—all organized by the specific subseries, some of which are slightly softer core or harder core, you know, in some they’re allowed to say ‘he frisked his tongue over her navel’ and some they can’t. And I got to this set of red books, only about maybe fifty of them, called the Silhouette Desire series, and ‘desire’ is written in this luscious sloppy longhand, in a diagonal—Desire. Alarm bells started going off in my head, and I thought of going over to Bonnie and saying, ‘Um, do you know those Sil
houette Desire books? Can you tell me which title in that series is the most arousing of all of them, in your judgment?’ But I could never have done that. And it didn’t matter anyway, because hundreds of female orgasms could be inferred from the books themselves—you didn’t need to harass any particular woman, you didn’t need to invade anybody’s privacy, you could just hold any copy and think of a woman holding it open with one hand, with her thumb and little finger. It was all there in the pliability and the thumbedness of the book itself—it practically shouted at you, ‘I have been near a clit as it underwent two orgasms.’ ”
“So did you buy one of these Silhouette Desire books?” she asked. “Love’s Tender Gender Bender?”
“Can you hold on for just a second? I have to get it.”
“I guess so, sure.”
There was a pause.
“It’s called Beginner’s Luck,” he said, “by Dixie Browning, and it’s singled out by the publisher as a quote ‘Man of the Month’ volume. Not only is it heavily thumbed, but the woman who owned it before I did spilled water or gin or something on it, so that it’s all wavy. It’s got a permanent wave. You can imagine.”
“Whew.”
“As I was driving home I was so still from owning this pre-enjoyed book that once when I was stopped at a stoplight and I saw a woman in my rearview mirror I made a very small clit-circling motion with my fingers on the roof of my car, despite the bird droppings up there— the idea that she might notice and understand what this motion meant made me feel faint with excitement—but she was expressionless. Anyway, I took the book home and read it, and you know what? It was good! Not only did it give me a partial erection on two occasions, I actually got tears in my eyes toward the end! It’s about a man and a woman in a cabin in the woods. He’s a klutzy scientist, she helps him get less klutzy and finally gets him to shave off his beard and it turns out that when he’s cleaned up he’s irresistible and despite being unschooled in the ways of love he is successful in bringing her to a fever pitch. Good stuff. I mean I probably won’t reread it very soon, but when you think of some of the stuff that passes for highbrow these days, you’ve got to admire it for hanging back so humbly in the genre category. But never mind that. I finished the book, and I pictured the woman who owned the book finishing the book, with her normal flannel nightgown on—she switches out the light, she closes her eyes, she switches on the alarm—and then I turned the last page of the book, and there were more pages, there were four or five pages of promotion, upcoming titles, etcetera, and I turned to this one page. You ready? I’m going to read it to you. It says, ‘You’ll flip … your pages won’t! Read paperbacks hands-free with BOOK MATE I. The perfect “mate” for all your romance paperbacks. Traveling, vacationing, at work, in bed, studying, cooking, eating.’ Did you hear that ‘in bed’ in the middle there? It’s squirreled away in a nonsexual list, legitimized, like those gigantic massager wands that are always accompanied by catalog copy that talks about relieving aching muscles and lower back pain, when what we’re all really talking about is women making themselves come in bed. What this Book Mate is is this rigid-backed thing to which you strap the book using this quote ‘see-through strap.’ There’s nothing the book can do, it’s powerless—it’s strapped wide open—open for all the hungry eyes of the world to admire. The ad says, ‘This wonderful invention makes reading a pure pleasure! Ingenious design holds paperback books OPEN and FLAT so even wind can’t ruffle pages—leaves your hands free to do other things.’ And that’s the page of this book Beginner’s Luck that I finally masturbated to: the thought of a woman reading that this invention will leave her hands free to do other things, and the thought of her ordering it and then maybe holding the strapped-open book between her bent knees so she can read the crucial page of pleasure while she goes to town down there … needing to have both her hands free to do other things … ho God! The problem is, though, that you yourself almost certainly don’t find any of this arousing.”
“No, well,” she said, “I find it mildly arousing, for the very reason you already said—it’s something that’s arousing to you.”
“But there’s the thing,” he said. “If you only find it mildly arousing because I found it exceedingly arousing, then I have to cancel my strong arousal and replace it with mild arousal, since the degree of your arousal is the primary source of my arousal. And then, the problem is, you’ll find it only infinitesimally arousing and I’ll then have to discard it as a total turnoff. That’s the problem.”
“We have to find a middle way,” she said.
“The middle way is for you to tell me the last thing you thought of that made you pay some attention to your candy corn.”
“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. Okay. You were in the shower.”
“What did you just do?” she asked.
“Nothing. My underpants 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 showerheads, 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 coed, so potentially there was a man from my hall in the next shower over, but that didn’t interest me. 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 start drawing in the margin of my notebook, and I’d draw a little curve, and I’d think, hm, 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, as in your wet T-shirt contest, 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 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, in this shower enclosure, which would get steamed up, even though I was outside. It was on the left wall as you faced the showerhead, which in this case was quite low. And after I’d taken off my swimsuit I’d hang it up on t
he 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 on it 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 my breasts against this little mirror, so 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.”