Free Vox by Nicholson Baker

“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 downmy 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 theshower—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