Free Vox by Nicholson Baker Page 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 the 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 ofmen 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.”
    “God, car washes must have driven you wild.”
    “Car washes. I did like that one part at the end, where the felt flappers drag over you, but no, not really—it was! very rare that my family took the car to the car wash. Almost never. Oh, but I do remember one thing I used to imagine—I imagined that I shared a ride back home from college with someone I didn’t know, and we get caught in a terrible tropical monsoon of some kind, and his windshield wipers don’t work, and so I have to go out on the hood of the car and take off my top and kneel there and hold on to the antenna and kind of sop my breasts over the windshield just so he can drive. Actually, that wasn’t something I thought of very much, that was just a one-shot deal.”
    “There are strong evolutionary pressures on fantasies, aren’t there?” he said. “If it doesn’t work, and if it doesn’t metamorphose itself into something that does work, it doesn’t survive.”
    “Yeah, even in the buildup to one orgasm, it’s a kind of bake-off. You think: two cocks, each one poking from under one of my armpits, sperm squirting from them? Yes or no. No. I’m a geometry teacher measuring boys’ penis length? Yes or no. No. Am I a nurse at a fertility clinic and my job is to strip for clients who have difficultycoming and then suck their cocks and let their sperm drip from my tongue into a test tube? No. I’m in a dressing room and some native-Hawaiian security guard is watching me try on blue jeans over the video monitor? Ooh, maybe yes. In fact it’s kind of like getting dressed for a party, and being unsure of what to wear right up to the last minute, and frantically trying on one image after another like clothes, not knowing which combination looks really
good
, and it’s getting later and later, ancj then finally you pull out this wonderful dress, with some rich pattern, and you slip it on, and ah, you can come.”
    “Jesus. But what about if you’re reading and the images are not under your control? Say maybe with a Book Mate thing holding the book open?”
    “Hah hah! You mean with my hands free to
do other things
?”
    “For instance, yes.”
    “Well, I have a whole system if I’m reading.”
    “Say you’re reading your copy of
Forum,
” he said.
    “Right, what I do is I read a little of it, whatever it is, the story or the letter or the novel, to see whether it’s something I do want to masturbate to or not. If it’s something that looks promising, I read it all through very fast, to find out exactly what happens and locate the spot in it where I’m going to want to be coming, and what spots I’ll want to skip because they’re whatever—violent or boring or somehow irrelevant. Then I go back, not always to the beginning, but I backtrack, and the distance I backtrackfrom the point where I’ve scheduled my orgasm I have to gauge exactly, depending on how close to coming I think I am—so if I’m very close to