Authors: Nicholson Baker
“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 clitoris 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-orgasm sort of person. The
second
after I’ve come, no matter how foaming and frothing my level of arousal was, that’s it, my clit is already starting to creep back into its clit-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 sexual 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 embarrassed.”
“You’re
embarrassed
, after just telling me about a triple-cock 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 balls nervously with my left hand.”
“Stroke it now, slowly,” she said.
“All right. God, 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 cock 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 cock? After the thrill and the terror had passed?”
“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 masturbated 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 masturbated 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 passing a huge vulva, so big it had a desk inside, and I decided that what I should do is make an actual photocopy of my dick, 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 cock, 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 dick. 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 cock 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 cock,
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 cock. So I got hard, that was one hurdle. Then I had to place my cock down on the glass, 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 glass 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 cock 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 dick, because the highest reduction setting used the whole area of the glass that my dick 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 dick wouldn’t even begin to reach over the plastic strip between me and where the glass 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 dick 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 dick looked really impressive. It looked like a
big dick
. 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 COCK TRACING
, you know, 11:43
P.M
., S
UNDAY
, N
OVEMBER
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 cock and a cock 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 cock 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 cock 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.”
“That’s right, you told me that. Well?”
“Well, we did spend an evening in my apartment,” he said.
“The usual? You draped your best cummerbund over the lamp shade? She toasted you with the Koromex tube?”
“Something like that. But anyway, that was what I thought of when you asked me to look straight at my cock and talk about it. I have to say, that was one of the more unsettling questions I’ve been asked in my life.”
“Would you like to know whether I would find a tracing of your cock arousing?”
“I would be curious about that, yes.”
“I suppose it would depend on my mood. I might like to perform the tracing. If you traced my whole body, I might in exchange trace your pale Ramone … This mouthpiece I’m talking into? Of the telephone?”