“Interesting!” I said, enjoying Arlette’s filth. “Couldn’t you spread those thighmasters for me? Show me that big fat Georgia O’Keeffe?”
“Never,” said Arlette. We laughed because it was so obvious an impossibility. Neither of us wanted the other, but we did want to get close to what we really wanted by talking about it. I pushed my glasses up on my nose Clark Kentishly, forgetting that I was in a period where pushing my glasses up actually did trigger a time-stopping Drop. Out of curiosity, realizing I’d triggered a Drop, I slipped my hands under immobile Arlette’s skirt to see if talking about Kari Thalmeiser had made her detectably wet. It had not. Her idea was to her at that moment no more than a verbal flourish, a rhetorical bit of self-display — her exuberant pleasure was in being cheerfully shocking as much as it was in really feeling the sexual charge of her flowershop-idyll. But I had the strong suspicion that there would be a residual effect — that when she got home from work she would think again about Kari and the flower-cooler and, without the distraction of my being there as an audience, would allow herself to become worked up by it, and I found that I wanted very much to see that happen.
So I followed her home, pushing up on my glasses when it was necessary, as when I slipped past her as she was frozen in the act of opening her door. Standing silently in out-of-sight corners and closets, I watched her take off her work clothes and sit at her kitchen table in her sweats eating a bowl of rice with soy sauce while she watched the news. When she had finished her rice, she began tugging and twirling her pubic hair. She tapped her middle finger to her opening and smelled it. And then she went to the bedroom. It was almost dark by then. She had a solidly sexy field-hockey-playing sort of body. No snake tattoos anywhere; no pierced body-parts. She made herself come twice, first with her fingers, wrongways around in the bed with her feet on the wall, one fingernail tickling the frustum of her ass, and the second time with her Hitachi vibrator — and the second time her eyes were closed in bliss and her left arm was thrown sideways on the bed, so that her hand, palm up, was out in midair, looking as if it wanted something to hold. I pushed up my glasses, stopping events in progress, and emerged from the shadows of the open closet and knelt so that my big silent dim-witted dick hung near this upturned palm. I wanted to close my hands around her hand, around my dick. It was as if her description of what she would impermissibly do with Kari Thalmeiser made it okay for me to give her a handful of myself unasked, though of course I knew that it really didn’t. There is nothing so sexy as seeing a solid young dyke coming with her legs bent in a diamond shape, feet together, and one of those Hitachi camping flashlights, those Hitachi huge-eyed deep-sea exotic fishes, doing its blunt tireless thing in her Marianas Trench. I risked being seen, emboldened by how loud the vibrator was, timing my mastur-strokes to the shaking of her knees and the somewhat Zen-like whooshing of her breathing, and when she began to come for the second time I did in fact stop time for an instant and laid my dick in her palm and closed my fist around her fist, and squeezed on it so tightly my knuckles turned yellow, sliding within my skin in and out of her grip. As the inexorability of my clasm began I pulled down on my glasses so that she and I were living coterminously, and as she came I released one-liners of sperm up her forearm and then squeezed the last semi-painful droplets of my orgasm out on her curled fingers. I let her just begin to register the fact of my cooling slime on her arm after she finished coming herself before I stopped time and toweled her off and left. The next day she looked at me oddly — she said, “Were you …?” and “Did you …?” and then stopped. I said, “Was I what?” smiling innocently. She didn’t pursue it.
Now that I have recorded it here, it seems to me that Arlette’s flowershop story and my behavior in her apartment afterward may mark the end of one phase of my Fold-life and the beginning of another. I was always, or almost always, quite careful, even painstaking, in my sexual adventures in the Fold up until then, but Arlette’s recklessness liberated me, at least to a degree. I still revere the word “painstaking,” as I always have — I pronounce it and think of it as if it were divisible into “pain” and “staking,” because the “staking” contributes a tweezery sort of push-pinned delicacy to the connotation and is in its pointedness the secret reason for the word’s success, even though technically it merely means taking pains, or exerting oneself. But sometimes when I’m recording detailed notes as I remove a woman’s clothes (“left bra strap fallen” or “panties inside out and worked partway into asscrack”) so that I will be sure to replace everything perfectly, just as it was, I feel a gurgle of Arlette’s joyful who-gives-a-fuckness working in me, and I want to strip the entire city of Boston and mound all the clothes together in the middle of Washington Street and dance on top of them screaming, “We’re totally fucking naked, we’re totally fucking naked!”—or failing that (since sudden widespread big-city nudity could lead to rapes and other unforeseen turbulence), I might want to strip everyone in an idyllic small town like Northampton and see how they would adjust to it. That actor on Unsolved Mysteries could do a nice twenty-minute segment about the event — the Quiet Little College Town That Stripped. Nobody would connect it to me and my Solonoid. Since Arlette, I have taken many more risks; I have increasingly wanted to give the world something to digest — something big and anarchic and sloppy but not (I hope) harmful or even particularly embarrassing in any permanent way to the individuals concerned. Probably my decision to assemble something on paper about my life flows in part from this urge.
But I do have limits and hesitations. Only a few days after my evening chat with Arlette, I was waiting in the lobby of the same building for a cab to show up. It was about eleven at night. A Hammermill box full of backup documents was to be put in a cab to go out to a partner’s house. (The partner was sick but, good man, planning to work all night.) The cab was delayed. Every so often I spotted a rat moving fast across the plaza in the dark. The security guard was in a chatty mood. I knew him slightly. He was in his forties, with some serious dental problems. Once, when I had stopped to say hello for a second, he had raved about a piece of music on his radio—“Listen to this, I just love it! I wish I knew what it was. It’s mint!”—proud of himself for his sudden affinity for what he took to be Rachmaninoff or Bruckner or somebody. I listened for a phrase or two and inquired whether it wasn’t the theme from Love Boat. His face went through a male menopause as he realized that I was right and that his attempt to demonstrate his culture had betrayed him into humming enthusiastically along with a tired old TV show. So in a general way I thought I liked him. While I was waiting for the cab, I decided to ask him what he would do if he had a remote-control device that, instead of pausing a video, froze the entire universe. He understood the sexual implications of what I was asking immediately.
“What would I do?” he said. “I’d find the nicest, best-looking chick I could find and rip her clothes off and plank her right there.”
I was a little taken aback. “But she wouldn’t be moving. You would really fuck her?”
He said absolutely he would. “I’d find the nicest, mintest chick I could find and carry her off to an alley and rip her clothes off and start hammering the shit out of her.”
“But she wouldn’t be responding!” I again protested.
“So what? I’m talking about a mint chick now, a really mint chick. If she was mint I wouldn’t care if she was moving. Or, okay, if she wasn’t moving, I’d just click the remote on for a second, and she’d start fighting a little, and then she’d be moving, and then I’d turn her off and I’d hammer on her some more.”