Authors: Nicholson Baker
“There’s always the pause button,” she suggested.
“Well, but then you get those white sawtooth lines across the screen.”
“Four heads are better than two, as they say. Of course, the resolution is better on the magazine page, I imagine.”
“It certainly is,” he said. “But it’s much more than that! Don’t laugh, really. No movie still is ever as good as a photograph. A photograph catches a woman at a point where her frans are at their perfect point of expressiveness—the soul of her frans is revealed, or rather the souls
are
revealed, because each has a separate personality. Nipples in still pictures are as varied and as communicative as women’s eyes, or almost.”
“Frans?”
“Yeah, sometimes I don’t like the word ‘breasts’ and all those slangish synonyms. I mean, just look at the drop in arousingness between
Playboy
magazine and the exact same women when they’re
moving
from pose to pose on the
Playboy
channel. It’s true that I don’t actually get the
Playboy
channel, so I see everything on it through those houndstooth and herringbone cycles of the scrambling circuit, and I keep flipping back and forth between it and the two channels on either side of it because sometimes
for an instant the picture is startled into visibility just after you switch the channel, and you’ll catch this bright yellow torso and one full fran with a fire-engine-red nipple, and then it teeters, it falters, and collapses—and I’ve noticed that the scrambling works least well and you can see things best when nothing is moving in the TV image, i.e., when it’s a TV image
of a
magazine image, sort of as if the scrambling circuitry is overcome in the same way I am sometimes overcome by the power of fixed pictures. I once stayed up until two-thirty in the morning doing this, flipping.”
“Anyway.”
“Right. Anyway, I looked through my brand-new
Juggs
magazine with high hopes, but I don’t know—again, the sexiest woman was in a poolside setting, and I find poolside settings unerotic—that is to say, in general I find them unerotic, since God knows I’ve certainly come to an enormous number of poolside layouts in magazines, but there’s something about the publicness of its being outside, in the sun—it’s not as bad as a beach setting, which is a complete turnoff—I mean, again, if I were exiled to a desert island with nothing but some pages of a men’s magazine showing a nude woman on a desert island, with the arty kidney shapes of sand on the asscheeks and all that, I would probably break down and masturbate to it … what do you think of that word?”
“ ‘Masturbate’? I don’t hate it. I don’t love it.”
“Let’s get a new word for it,” he said.
“To myself, I sometimes call it ‘dithering myself off.’ ”
“Okay, a possibility. What about just ‘fiddle? Fiddlin’ yourself off? The dropped
g
is kind of racy. No, no.
Strum
.”
“Strum.”
“That’s it. I looked through the
Juggs
, and even though it was a poolside scene, I tried to
strum
, and there
was
one shot where the woman was looking straight at me, on her elbows on a yellow pool raft, and her frans were at their point of perfect beauty, not erect nipples but soft rounded tolerant nipples, which you have to have in a poolside photo set because as soon as you see those erect nipples in a poolside layout you think
cold water
, you don’t think arousal. I want you to know, by the way, that I am not one of these sad individuals who hang out at the frozen fried-chicken section of the supermarket where it’s extra cold just to see women’s nipples get hard. I don’t get the least thrill from wet T-shirt contests either, because I have to have an answering arousal there in the woman, and cold water is anti-sexual, except if in the case of the wet T-shirt contest I can convince myself that this woman is using the shock of the cold water, the giggliness and the splutteriness of it, to make something possible that otherwise wouldn’t be possible and yet is arousing to her: I mean if she
wants
to show off her breasts, if she’s proud of them and yet knows she’s not the kind of person who’s going to go off and become a stripper or whatever, and the douse of cold water is distracting enough to keep her
sense of its all being in innocent fun in the end,
then
I can get turned on by shots of a wet T-shirt contest. You know?”
“I can see how that works. So you’re looking at the woman in
Juggs
.”
“Yes, and she was looking right at me, so appealingly, with such a lucid joyful amused look and her elbows were really digging into the pillow of the yellow raft, so it looked as if it might burst, and I could almost imagine strumming myself off to this, but then, no, there were too many things wrong—the photographer had put her hair in pigtails, tied with some kind of thick purply pink polyester yarn, and it just seemed so awful somehow, the age-old thing of men wanting to pretend that twenty-eight-year-old women are little girls by forcing this icon of girlishness, pigtails, on them, when really, when was the last time you saw a real little girl wearing pigtails? Not to
mention
the incidental fact that little girls are a turnoff. Here’s this beautiful, alert, lovely woman, of at least twenty-seven, and all I could see was the dickhead photographer handing her some polyester yarn and saying, ‘Uhright, now tie this purple stuff in your hair.’ And I felt at that moment that I wanted to talk to a real woman, no more images of any kind, no fast forward, no pause, no magazine pictures. And there was the ad.”
“But you’ve called these numbers before, haven’t you?” she asked.
“A few times, but with no real success. And I don’t
think I’ve ever called this very number before—2VOX.”
“What do you mean by ‘success’?”
“No women with any kind of spark. Or, actually, honestly, few women at all, period, except the ones who are paid by the phone service to make mechanical sexual small talk and moan occasionally. It’s mostly just men saying ‘Hey, any ladies out there?’ But then once in a while a real woman will call. And at least with this, as opposed to pictures, at least there’s the remote possibility of something clicking. Perhaps it’s presumptuous of me to say that we, you and I, click, but there is that possibility.”
“Yes.”
“In a way it’s like the radio. Do you know that I’ve never actually gone to a store and bought a record? That’s probably why I never learned to appreciate the fade-out, as you describe it, since on the radio, one song melts into the next. But it seems to me that you really need the feeling of radio luck in listening to pop music, since after all it’s about somebody meeting, out of all the zillions of people in the world, this one other nice person, or at least several adequate people. And so, if you buy the record, or the tape, then you
control
when you can hear it, when what you want is for it to be like luck, and like fate, and to zoom up and down the dial, looking for the song you want, hoping some station will play it—and the joy when it finally rotates around is so intense. You’re not hearing it, you’re overhearing it.”
“On the other hand,” she said, “if you own the tape, you show you’ve got some self-knowledge: you know what you like, you know how to make yourself happy, you’re not just wandering in this welter of chance occurrences, passively hoping the disk jockey will come through. Maybe when you’re a little kid you find yourself out on a balcony in the sun and you think, My oh my, this feels unexpectedly nice. But later on you think, I know that I will feel a particular kind of pleasure if I walk out onto this balcony and sit in that chair, and I wish to experience that pleasure now.”
“Well, right, and so the reason I called this line was that the pleasures I’d sought out weren’t doing it for me and there was this hope of luck, that I, that there would be a conversation …”
“You never said what it was about the Disney Tinker Bell exactly, at the video store.”
“Well, in the scene I saw, and this is the first time I’ve seen any of this particular Disney by the way, and you have to remember that I’m in an altered state there in the movie store, with my three orange movies and my men’s magazine in my briefcase, but in the scene, Tinker Bell zips around in a sprightly way, with lots of zings of the xylophone and little sparkly stars trailing her flight, and you think, right, typical fairy image, ho hum. And she’s
tiny
, she’s a tiny suburbanite, she’s about five inches tall. This insubstantial, magical, cutely Walt Disneyish woman. But then this thing happens. She pauses in mid-air,
and she looks down at herself, and she’s got quite small breasts—”
“I thought you didn’t like that word.”
“You’re right, but sometimes it seems right. Actually most of the time it’s the right word. Anyway, she’s got quite small breasts but quite
large
little hips, and
large
little thighs, and she’s wearing this tiny little outfit that’s torn or jaggedly cut and barely covers her, and she looks down at herself, a lovely little pouty face, and she puts her hands on her hips as if to measure them, and she shakes her head sadly—too wide, too wide.
Oh
that got me hot! This tiny sprite with
big hips
. And then a second later she gets caught in a dresser drawer among a lot of sewing things and she tries to fly out the keyhole but—nope, her hips are too wide, she gets stuck!”
“Sounds sizzling hot.”
“It was.”
“You remember
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, when Marilyn Monroe tries to squeeze through a porthole on a ship, but her hips are too wide?”
“I
don’t
remember that. I better rent that.”
“It would be funny if Tinker Bell inspired old Marilyn,” she said. “You know, I found the Disney
Peter Pan
vaguely sexual, too.”
“Well, yeah—J. M. Barrie was a fudgepacker from way back, and clearly some of that forbiddenness sneaks into every version.”
“The girl floats around in her nightgown,” she said.
“That interested me quite a bit. And she’s
too old
to live in the room with the littler kids—I remember that. I must have been about twelve. I saw it with my friend Pamela, who I think has turned out to be a lesbian, bless her soul. We used to build tents in her bedroom and eat Saltines and read the medical encyclopedia together. It showed the dotted lines where the surgeon would cut cartilage from the ears if you were having an operation to make your ears flare out less. And at the end of each entry it would say, it was done in a question-and-answer format, it would say, ‘When can marital relations be resumed?’ And the answer always was four to six weeks. No matter where the dotted lines were, it seemed you could always resume marital relations after four to six weeks. I used to read the articles aloud to her. And once she read a whole romance novel aloud to me in one night. I fell asleep somewhere in the middle and woke up again later—Pamela was a little hoarse, but she was still reading. And once, maybe it was that same night, I told her a sexual fantasy I’d had a few times, in which I’m at a place where I’m told I have to take off all my clothes and get into this tube.”
“Sorry, get into what?”
“This tube, a long tube,” she said. “I slide in, feet first, and I begin moving down this very long tube, on some sort of slow current of oil. I’m sure you remember those water slides that you set up on the lawn, that destroyed the grass? This was not as fast-moving as that, much
slower-moving, but no friction, and in a luminous tube. As I went along these pairs of hands would enter the tube a little ahead of me, waving around blindly, looking for something to feel, and then my feet would brush under them, and they would try to grasp my ankles, but their fingers were dripping with oil, and as I moved forward they slid up my legs, holding me quite hard, but without friction because of the oil, and then they pressed down as my stomach went under them, and then they sort of turned to encounter my breasts, the two thumbs were almost touching, and they slid very slowly over my breasts, pushing them up, and believe me, in this fantasy I had very large heavy breasts, it took a long time for the hands to slide over them.”
“Wow! What did old Pamela say when you told her that?”
“I finished describing it, and I asked her if she had thoughts like that and she said ‘No!’ in quite a shocked voice. She said, ‘No! Tell me another.’ You think maybe my tube was what turned her into a lesbian?”
“Well, it certainly would have turned me into a lesbian. But now—can you clarify one thing for me? Do you right now have the light on or off in the room you’re in, the combination living room dining room?”
“I have it on. It’s a table lamp. I could turn it off if you’d like.”
“Perhaps that, perhaps that would …”
“Listen.” There was a click.
“Now your silverware is glinting in the moonlight, right?” he said.
“I can’t see it.”
“Have you noticed that little juncture in movies, or I guess it’s more in TV shows, when somebody has some pensive thought, or peaceful thought, close-up of her face, and then she reaches over and turns out the bedside light, click, but of course this is a movie set, with elaborate lights all over the place, so her turning that little switch has to coincide with the shutting off of major flows of current,
kashoonk
, and the problem then is that movie film doesn’t work in the dark, so there has to be quite a high light level but with the impression of darkness, and so at the same instant the big imitation incandescent lamp lights are turned off, the imitation moonlight or streetlight lights have to come on outside the window, and yet there is often a problem, there is often a tiny millisecond delay while the filaments of the moonlight lights heat up and reach their peak, and so in this changeover you can see the second set of lights that are supposed to mean ‘dark peaceful room’ spread over the bed and the walls? Have you noticed that?”
“No,” she said. “But it sounds very interesting and I promise I will look for it next time I watch TV.”
“Do,” he said. “Meanwhile you’ll be glad to know that the real streetlight outside my window is beginning to come on. It’s the most amazing effect. It doesn’t come on all at once, it’s nothing like what I just described. It
comes on very very gradually, over about twenty minutes. It starts off in a very deep orange phase. I very seldom have
time
to watch it, of course, with my hectic schedule. But when I do, it really is quite beautiful. It’s so gradual that you’re not quite sure whether it’s the light coming on and shining a little more brightly, or if the sky has darkened—of course it’s both, but you can’t tell which is overtaking the other, and then there’s this moment, about five minutes from now, when the streetlight is exactly the same color as the sky, I mean exactly the same green-violet-yellow whatever, so that it seems as if there’s a
hole
in the middle of the tree across the street, in the branches, where the sky, which is really the light on this side of the street, shows through.”