Free Vox by Nicholson Baker Page B

coming I only go back a paragraph, but if it looks like it’ll be a while I may even read the whole scene or the whole letter that’s
before
the letter I’m interested in and then go on and read the letter I’m interested in. And sometimes I misjudge, and I start to get close to coming when the big moment of the story is still on the next page, and I have to race ahead lopking for the words I need, or sometimes the opposite happens and I’m crowding up to the big moment of the story and my orgasm is dawdling, not all the precincts are reporting yet, and so I have to read the chosen come-sentence very slowly, syllable by syllable, ‘up … and … down … on … his … fuck … pole …’ ”
    “So if you walked into a room,” he said, “and there was an armchair, and a table, and on one end of the table was a TV and a VCR and an X-rated tape, and at the other end of the table was some book of Victorian pornography, what would you choose?”
    “The Victorian pornography, no question.”
    “That’s incredible to me.”
    “You’d choose the tape, right?” she asked.
    “That or possibly the armchair itself. Not the book.”
    “The classic opposition,” she said.
    “True, but no—actually, it’s interesting. Because I’ve heard for so long about those studies that say that women like stories and men like pictures I’ve started to feel latelythat stories
represent
women and are therefore sexually charged for me, and in fact that’s what got me so hot at Bonnie’s Books that time, the idea that I was peeping in on a women’s preserve. I think I
am
slowly starting to understand why in general people would prefer written porn. It gives your brain a vaginal orgasm rather than a clitoral orgasm, so to speak, whatever that means. I read one story in some men’s magazine once, years ago, in the first person, written by a woman, or probably not, but written at least with the pretense that a woman was telling the story, about a sixteen-year-old girl who goes swimming in a neighbor’s pool and of course her frans are still somewhat new and unfamiliar to her, and she’d forgotten that her top from last year was flimsy and inadequate to the demands that were made on it, and presto it comes off after she’s swum a lap, and she’s
so
embarrassed and apologetic, but Mr. Grunthole reassures her that she needn’t be ashamed, he doesn’t mind if she swims without her top, and so on and so on, and even though it was a totally conventional and undistinguished story, the fact that it was written in the voice of this girl, so I could peep in on her mixed feelings when her top came off, did give me a huge … an unexpectedly large return on my investment. I guess insofar as verbal pornography records thoughts rather than exclusively images, or at least surrounds all images with thoughts, or something, it can be the hottest medium of all. Telepathy on a budget. But still honestly I need the images. For instance of you therein the shower. I mean, when you come are your legs slightly apart?”
    “Yes.”
    “And do you have one of those legendary Water Pik shower-massage showerheads?”
    “I do, but I don’t use it with any of the special settings. It was installed already when I moved in. It’s useful for cleaning the tub. But when I’m—I don’t hold it or put it between my legs or anything, I just treat it as a regular showerhead. What I do is …”
    “Yes?”
    “When I start to come?”
    “Yes?”
    “Yes?”
    “I open my mouth and let it fill with water. The feeling of the water overflowing my mouth … You there?”
    “
Don’t
stop talking.”
    “But that’s all,” she said.
    “You were in the shower, yesterday night, and the water was coursing onto your face and falling down from one part of you to another, like balls in a pinball machine, and your eyes were closed. What was in your mind? Oh I’d like to …”
    “Excuse me? You’re murmuring.”
    “I said I’d like