“A sarong. Some places they call it a wrap. Half the men in the tropical Third World wear them every day of life.”
“Not this man. That’s why God made short pants.”
“Think of it as a kilt.”
“A kilt, a sarong, a sixty-three Chevy Impala, it doesn’t matter what you call it, it’s a skirt!”
Toni laughed.
“I won’t wear it.”
“Oh, yes, you will. You volunteered us for this demo, remember? And when we do formal demonstrations of Pukulan Pentjak Silat Serak, we wear formal clothes. You saw that Plinck videotape. You bought it for me.”
“They were wearing sweatpants underneath,” he said.
“Fine, you can wear sweatpants under yours if it makes you happy.”
“It will make me less unhappy.”
“Come on, Alex! You can’t have any doubts about your masculinity. The baby looks just like you.”
“No, he doesn’t. He looks like you.” He tried to keep a straight face, but finally gave it up and laughed.
“That’s what I thought,” she said.
“Admit it, I had you going for a minute there,” he said.
“Did not.”
“Did too.”
He followed her into the bedroom. She opened her closet and came out holding two hangers. “Okay, which do you want, the celestial or the bamboo?” She held up two squares of brightly colored cloth. “Genuine handmade Indonesian batik from Bali, the finest one hundred percent rayon.”
“You don’t think I’m gonna wear a girl’s sarong?”
“Give it up, Alex. They’re unisex and one size fits all.” She pulled the garments off the hangers and unfolded them in a cascade of patterned azure. One, with what looked like stars drawn by somebody tanked up on psychedelic drugs, was dark, mostly indigo; the other was also blue, but lighter, with bamboo plants done in blues and whites.
“Maybe the bamboo. Jeez, it’s as big as a tablecloth!”
“Come here, I’ll show you how to put it on.”
“Hey, I can wrap a towel around my waist, thank you.”
“And it would fall off the first time I threw you.”
“You’d do it on purpose.”
“Damned straight.”
He smiled. She handed him the bamboo-patterned cloth, which was as big as a tablecloth, had to be seven or eight feet long by maybe four feet wide.
“Watch me.”
She demonstrated the way to put it on. “Okay, you wrap it around, like so, then fold it on your left side, and back upon itself, this way. Traditionally, it’ll stay in place with just folding it, but since we are going to be more active, we’ll use a safety pin for the demo, one here, then fold it back to the right, another pin there, then fan-fold it back and forth narrowing it each time, like this, then roll it down in folds to make a waistline, and shorten it at the bottom, see? It should hang to your knees.”
“You wish.”
“Not as much as you do,” she said.
He watched, tried to duplicate her moves. When he was done it looked pretty good — until he let go and it fell down in a pool around his bare ankles.
“Great. Won’t that look good in front of the FBI students. The Hawaiian will laugh himself silly. Two pins, you said?”
“Yes. In your case, I think diaper pins would be best.”
“Ha, ha. You are so funny.”
“Yes, I am, aren’t I? Try again. Keep tension on it with your elbow, here, then here, until you get the waist rolled down to lock it into place.”
He did what she said, and this time when he let go, the sarong stayed in position.
“Well?”
“Have to admit, it’s comfortable.”
“No worse than wearing a towel wrapped around you when you get out of the shower.”
“Except I wouldn’t wear a towel in front of a bunch of people in public.”
“You do it at the gym, don’t you?”
“That’s different. It’s just the guys.”
“Ah, now we get to it. You’re worried that some strange woman might see your wee-wee?”
“No.”
“Well, you should be. I don’t want you showing that to other women. Small as it is.”
He laughed. “I just don’t want to feel like some kind of weird pervert is all. Men don’t wear skirts in this country.”
“As opposed to a nonweird pervert?”
“You know what I mean.”
“So the half-billion men who wear these are perverted?”
“I didn’t say that. Speaking of which.”
“Of which?”
“Perverts. I had an interesting visit with Jay today.”
“Nice segue there. I’m sure Jay will love the transition. What about?”
“You aren’t gonna believe it. But given the direction of the conversational road you’re dragging me down…”
“Me? I’m not the low-self-esteem-I-can’t-wear-a-sarong-because-people-will-think-I’m-funny-looking guy here.”
He shook his head.
“Okay, so what about Jay?”
“You’re kidding,” Toni said.
Alex shook his head. “Not according to Jay.”
“And how would Jay know?”
“That was my first question, too.” He grinned. “He said a good computer op has to do enough research to know the field.”
“And how does his fiancée feel about this research?”
“I didn’t ask.”
They had moved into the kitchen, Alex still in the sarong. It was very thin cloth, and he looked sexy in it. She glanced at the carrot she was about to slice. She held it up, then used the Japanese chef’s knife to lop the ends off.
“Is that an editorial comment?”
“Make of it what you will.”
He laughed.
She went back to dicing the carrot for their salad. With her mother watching the baby at her hotel, they had the place to themselves. Well, for a couple more hours, at least.
Alex said, “It doesn’t really surprise me, when I stop and think about it. There has always been a certain amount of porn on the net, even back in the very early days. Newsgroups dedicated to various perversions, web pages where you could download pictures or movies, even some chat-room interactive stuff. And with scenarios in VR getting better and better, it was only a matter of time.”
“But fully interactive internet sex? That seems so-so—”
“Weird?”
“That’ll do for a start, yeah. You wouldn’t think it would be possible.”
“Well, according to Jay, it’s been possible since before the turn of the century. In the early days, you could buy things like full-sized silicone dolls, with functional, uh, apertures, complete with vibrators. Plug ’er in, and go to town. But that was just high-tech masturbation. Now, you can connect yourself to various, ah, machines, dial up a friend, log into a joint VR sex feelie, and what you see is what you feel. Jay says the machines started out as things like phone pagers, but got a lot more sophisticated pretty quick. Some of them can mimic a penis or a vagina, either with expandable silicone rods, or as many as sixteen sequentially motor-driven, heated silicone undulant pads.”
“Do I want to hear this?”
“I dunno, do you?”
Toni thought about it for a second. “Sure. Never let it be said that after I got married and had a child I automatically turned into an old stick-in-the-mud.”
“The folks who are really into this call the sex devices McCleans.”
Toni finished the carrot, reached for another, and raised one eyebrow.
“It’s from an old limerick, according to Jay.”
“You don’t need to keep saying, ‘according to Jay.’ I’ll take your word for it.”
“Um. According to — I mean, you know about haptic mice and input pens and such. The McCleans came out of research for blind computer users. The top-of-the-line units have oral/genital/anal plugs or cavities, depending on the users’, ah, physical configurations and desires. The headsets come with Aromajet’s DigiScents modules that can mimic certain body smells. They call these ‘reekers.’ There is a tongue wafer from Taste-the-Real-Thing-dot-com that is electronically controlled to offer various tastes, and naturally, they call these ‘droolers.’ ”