That might have ended my generosity for the evening, since the library was closing, but for the fact that as I got in line at the checkout desk, a large tall woman appeared just in front of me. I am always glad to be in line behind a woman, because I can look at her freely without making her uncomfortable. This one had loosely arranged, very thick soft hair that was possibly dyed with henna — anyway, it was a deep red-brown color. She was the sort of plump person who people say carries it well. She looked great. She was wearing an indeterminate number of layers of very loose clothes with huge loose neck-holes that slumped overlappingly over one another like the eccentric orbits of several comets — one neck-hole was almost falling off her shoulder, exposing some sort of blue bodysuit strap that probably represented the deepest layer. It was a way of dressing and looking that I had never until then thought I liked, but on her I felt I could like it very much. The shoulder that was partially exposed had lots of sun freckles on it, which made it seem unusually smooth and touchable, like some sort of river stone.
But it was not until I noticed the book that she was checking out that I was completely captivated: she was on her way home to read something called Naked Beneath My Clothes, a fairly recent book by a woman stand-up comic. I’ve looked at the book since: it is a sometimes funny, okay little book — but the greatness of it for me then was its title. For years and years I had been amazed by just this obvious truth, that we are all naked beneath our clothes; coming across a woman in the library holding a book which announced the fact in its title made me get that so-sexual-that-it’s-not-sexual melting feeling, as if my knees were no longer going to do what they were designed to do and my balls were going to droop past them like toffee and hang to my ankles, softened by the warmth of my longing. I knew that the woman had just wanted to take out this book because she wanted to laugh and she had been told it was funny, but it had this provocative title, and now she was, despite her relaxedness about sex, ever so slightly embarrassed to be checking it out of the library.
Her embarrassment was, it seemed to me, directed forward, at the man working the card machine — a spindly nice-mannered ugly man who shaved too far down on the sides of his beard. But she knew that someone was behind her as well, and she could be considering that my eyes were on the freckles of her shoulder, and she might be able to feel them moving down her arm to read the title of the book again, Naked Beneath My Clothes—a fact that, because she held the book, was being asserted not as a general truth but as a truth specifically about her and her alone, prefixed by an “I am.” I very much wanted to see her naked beneath her clothes. And of course I could have easily enough. Yet I hesitated to drop into the Fold to remove all those layers, since I would have trouble remembering how they hung with such artful sloppiness over one another when it was time to dress her back up. (She wasn’t, thank God, wearing those leggings that terminate in a bit of lace!) Every curve and movement of her body cried out, “I’m extremely single at the moment and I’m available tonight to have a drink or two with a nice man who will listen to me and make me laugh.” I knew that she was feeling that this interval in the checkout line was her last chance to meet someone, and I knew that I was at least a better catch than the library staffer with the unsightly beard.
But though I was, am, extremely single, and though I had suffered a serious attack of loneliness involving a tape gun only hours before, and was probably giving off the same rads of availability and generalized longing as she was, I didn’t strike up a conversation with her, because I was smart enough to know by now to spare a woman like this my tentative but occasionally successful pickup technique, since even if we did go out to dinner a few times and have a few nights in bed, it would all be essentially sad, essentially wrong. I wasn’t the sort of man that she really wanted, and she wasn’t for me, either — there would be a temporary wonder and excitement in those loose neck-holes, and then the differences between us would doom us — and why do any of that, when all I really wanted to know was how, exactly, she was naked beneath her clothes? I could imagine some of the unseen her in advance, having undressed so many women on the sly in my life — I’m aware of certain connoisseurial correlations between the type of face a woman has and the type of back she has: in fact, I felt that I had a fairly well defined sense of how her back would look and feel, how high her hidden waist was. But breasts were always a wild card, and the ass, too (I mean the real-world ass, not the dirty-magazine ass), was a thing of a billion unique variations.
I wanted, failing knowledge of her nakedness, simply to announce to her, in a quiet, serious voice, “I am, too.” And when she turned her face to me in sociable puzzlement, I would gesture at her book and say, clarifyingly, “I mean that I’m naked, too, beneath. Really, I am.” Maybe she would roll with this lameness. One of the very first times I ever made out with a girl was in a park when I was fifteen: we lay on a slight slope, among many short conifer trees. Eventually her hand undid my pants and went into my underpants, and she hoisted my moist troika out into the world and left it there. Neither of us looked down for a long time — I was concentrating on making her come without taking off her jeans, which was not all that easy. Finally we gave up, needing real privacy to make any headway, and then we both looked down, and there was a sight of my naked self that I had never seen, or never paid attention to — an almost shockingly awful sight: the ultra-pale skin of my horizontalized balls was stretched very tight, stretched to a state of egg-glaze glossiness (because the waistband of my too-small underpants was underneath them, pushing my balls up), and it was overwritten with many delicate, infantile blood vessels, as in a Lennart Nilsson photograph of the head of a developing fetus. And — adding considerably to the overall obscene effect — sparse hair follicles made little white bumps in the stretched skin. Though it was highly unpleasant, or at least unromantic, to look at (my girlfriend flinched, I think, seeing more of me than she had been prepared for just then), I couldn’t help noting to myself with some satisfaction how surprisingly spermatious the ball-hairs themselves appeared, with their long wispy tails and their ovoid follicle heads: hair-sperms surrounding the egglike testicles, trying to fertilize them, as if my body were offering to anyone who cared to look its own magnified, three-dimensional representation of the task that my gonads were programming their product to perform.