“Are your legs apart?”
“My toes are holding on to the edge of the coffee table.”
“Is your right hand touching your clitoris?”
“How impertinent! But yes, the answer is yes. My clitoris is in fact squeezed between my two index fingers, left and right, which are on either side of it.”
“All right. You do whatever you want with those index fingers, and I’ll tell you about a kind of sensing device that I own. What it does, it doesn’t eavesdrop, it doesn’t pick up sounds, it simply senses the presence nearby of any intelligent strumming woman. It looks like an antique pocket watch, it’s gold, with a cover, but when you open it, instead of the dial, there is this mysterious fluid, this very special fluid in there that glows in several colors when the right conditions are met, for reasons that are not clear, except that of course a woman masturbating is so important an event in the physical universe that elemental relations in matter are affected as it occurs, and there are these sort of currents in the fluid that slowly move in a certain direction, like lines of force, which give you some sense of where the masturbation signals are coming from, although it takes years of practice, and of course a great deal of native skill as well, to learn how to read the fluid correctly. It’s called the Bionic Mmmm-Detector, as you might suspect. Well, I’m driving down the expressway of an eastern city one evening around ten o’clock, in town on business, in my rented midsize car, my Ford Topaz, with the radio going, a classics oldie station, playing ‘Ain’t Nobody,’ and I’m just driving along, and as usual I have my Mmmm-Detector open on the seat beside me, but the fluid is dark, and then I start curving through this residential area, very close to the buildings on either side, and I glance down at the seat beside me, and my God, I’m getting a very strong signal, I’m getting wave patterns I’ve never seen before, from very near and to my right, and craning my neck I catch sight of a lighted window, and I know that behind it you are in process, you are beginning. My years of practice in reading the flux patterns in the watch tells me this is something very special, something I cannot pass by, and so I palm the steering wheel around suddenly and veer onto the off ramp and scoot back through the narrow streets, swearing at all the oneway signs, and when I come to the door where the Mmmm-forces are flowing from, I park in a place that is sure to get me a ticket, and I leave my flashers on, and I go into the foyer. There’s a row of buttons with names beside them: I hold the detector to each one until one, the third one down, makes the Mmmm-Detector glow with strange colors, and I hesitate, I know that I am interrupting you, and I don’t want to do that, that’s the last thing I want to do, but it seems so clear to me, reading the force waves, that there is a strong possibility that you would want me to interrupt you, if you knew me, and the conviction that this is true grows in me, and my finger trembles at your button, and there is a huge interior war between reticence and attraction, between the fear that I will inspire fear and the certainty that I should not inspire fear and that we would like each other if I could simply push that button, and I look down at the Mmmm-Detector and I see that you are going to come in less than four minutes if you keep on at that rate, you’re really moving, the colors are increasingly intense, and I’m trembling, I’m shivering, but I’m compelled, and I push the button, bzzzzt. You’re on your bed, and you’re wearing a blue long-sleeved pullover sort of shirt, and black pants and black sneakers, but your black pants are around your ankles, and you’ve got that tattered, disintegrating issue of Forum in your left hand, and you’re reading about a job interview in which the woman interviewer is sucking the interviewee’s cock, and you’re right in the middle of things, when bzzzzt, the doorbell. Who could that be?”
“So I do up my pants and I go to the speaker and I say, ‘Hello?’ ”
“And I say, ‘Hi, this is Jim. I know it’s late, but I wonder if I could use your phone. My car’s engine has seized up, and all the oil lights on the dash are glowing, and I don’t dare drive it any further, and the pay phone down the street isn’t working.’ ”
“I say, ‘Why did you buzz my apartment?’ ”
“And I say, ‘The others don’t answer. You’re right to be hesitant, but this isn’t a normal situation, this is urgent, I’ve got to get back to my hotel, I’ve got a whole day of appointments tomorrow, I just have to get seven and a half hours of sleep or I won’t function, and I need to use your phone, and I assure you that I’m reasonably sane and peaceable, and I would not normally do this, invade your privacy, but I’m telling you nothing could be more important than this. Please.’ And you hear the conviction in my voice, and you buzz me in.”
“Well, no, first I hold the talk button in and to my empty apartment I call out, ‘Jeff? Jeff? Enough with the weights! Do you and Mojo Cartilage-Popper mind if someone comes up to use the phone for a second?’ Then I buzz you in downstairs, knowing that I can look at you through the peephole in my door, and call Bobby the super if you look strange.”
“Exactly. I run up to the second floor, and I find your door, and before I stand right in front of it, I check the Mmmm-Sensor and find that your arousal has suffered some decline, you are now ten or more minutes away from an orgasm, though the glow faintly persists. I knock, and I begin pacing back and forth in front of the door, distractedly, like a guy impatient to make a phone call. You look through the peephole and you see this guy, middle height, black hair, not bad-looking, somewhat frazzled, pacing back and forth in front of your door, checking a pocket watch. You let me in. And I introduce myself, I apologize for bothering you, I smile at you, and immediately I can sense the alertness and intelligence in your face, and I see that we understand each other, and I know my Mmmm-Sensor hasn’t misled me. Ah, but I’ve lied my way into your apartment, which is a problem.”
“It is, because if I knew!”
“Curtains. So you bring me the phone, and I sit on the edge of a dining-room chair, and I call my answering machine, and I start telling it about the oil lights on my dashboard, I really have to have someone take care of it, I need the number of a cab company, etcetera, and then all of a sudden I stop, in midsentence, and I click off the phone and I say, ‘Nah, I can’t.’ ”
“ ‘You can’t what?’ ”
“ ‘I can’t do it. I can’t pretend.’ And I confess to you that I’ve lied, that my car is fine, that I was driving on the expressway, and I got this highly unusual, if not unique, reading on my Mmmm-Sensor, or Mmmm-Detector, whatever I’m calling it, and I pull it out of my pocket and open the finely scratched gold top and show it to you, and I explain, hesitantly, that it, um, picks up the flux currents from intelligent, um, masturbating women, and I show you how it glows, and I point out the wavy flow lines as they move in your direction, and I say, ‘They’re somewhat fainter now, but they’re definitely still there, and they really look great. Now, let’s see what happens if I do this.’ And I stand next to you, so you can see the Mmmm-Detector as I hold it a foot or so from your face, and then I lower it and slowly pass it a few inches in front of each breast, and the pattern makes these complicated shifts. And I say, ‘But as you may be able to see, I’m getting other readings, interference fringes,’ and I hold the thing up and I walk slowly to the walls of your hall, where there is a faint rural pattern showing through the paint, and I say, ‘For instance, the walls, very curious,’ and I shake my head in perplexity, and then I follow the flow lines to a drawer in the kitchen, filled with silverware — very odd — and I follow it into the bathroom, and you follow me in, and I lean into the shower and move the Mmmm-Detector past the fixtures, the drain, the shampoo bottles — beautiful color changes and convergences of flow waves — and I shake my head and I say, ‘Gosh, I’ve never seen anything as rich as this,’ and I follow its lead into the bedroom, and you follow me, and I say, ‘Wow, very high flux levels in here,’ and I pass it over your chenille bedspread and I say, ‘Your feet must have been here and here,’ pointing to two places quite far apart on the bed, and I know that everything I’m doing is forward, is really inexcusable, but in a way you’re curious, and I’m just relaying facts, and I sense your willingness to have this happen, and I push the Mmmm-Detector into the pillow and then reach under it and find your disintegrating copy of Forum, and I sit down on the bed and page through it slowly, holding the device to each page, until I reach a certain page, and I peer very closely at the sensor, and then I hold it close to the button on your pants, and I inspect it again, and I look up smiling, and I hold the magazine out to you, pointing at something on the page, and I say, ‘You were reading this sentence, this phrase right here in this sentence, when I buzzed your apartment.’ ”