“I’m familiar with the general concept.”
“All right, well this kid apparently spontaneously human combusted, but the combustion was confined to his genitals. Boom! He was very uncomfortable. But see, I understand perfectly how that could happen. I fear for my own genitals sometimes. I get so fricking horny … now there’s another inadequate word … so porny, so gorny, so yorny … I get so yorny that I look down at my cock-and-balls unit, and it’s like I could take the whole rigid assembly and start unscrewing it, around and around, and it would come off as one solid thing, like a cotterless crank on a bicycle, and I would hand it over to you to use as a dildo.”
“Okay then, hand it over. Although I’ve never cottoned to dildos particularly. I used one once, to oblige someone, and I got a yeast infection. I think it was called a ‘Mighty Mini Brute.’ ”
“That’s a fair description of my … crank.”
“I know what you mean, though. Sometimes I get the same way, so worked up. My clit gets hard and it feels like this discrete wedge item, like a piece of candy corn, and I feel as if I should put it in a little wooden box for safekeeping. I usually like to come in the shower.”
“Mm! Shouldn’t that bra come off, really?”
“No it really should not, and I’ll tell you why. When I dither myself off … no, I don’t want to tell you.”
“Please, yes you do, please tell me, yes you do, please, right now.”
“When I masturbate and I’m not in the shower, I need my breasts to be tended to, but, boo-hoo, there’s nobody to tend to them, so what I do is I pull my bra down so that the edge of it catches under my nipples, and then they’re all taken care of, and I can use both hands to tend to matters below.”
“This is a miracle,” he said.
“It’s just a telephone conversation.”
“It’s a telephone conversation I want to have. I love the telephone.”
“Well, I like it too,” she said. “There’s a power it has. My sister’s little babe has a toy phone, which is white, with horses and pigs and ducks on the dial, and a blue receiver that has no weight to it at all, and I find there is an astonishing feeling of power when you pretend to be talking to someone on it. You cover the mouthpiece with your hand and you say in this dramatic whisper, ‘Stevie, it’s Horton the Elephant on the phone. He wants to speak to you!’ and you hand it over to Stevie and his eyes get big and you and he both for that second believe that Horton the Elephant really is on the phone. And then you get two phones going. Stevie’s on the white phone with the ducks and pigs, and I’m on the yellow phone with the wheels and the eyes that move when you pull it along the Floor, and I ask how Stevie’s doing and have a little conversation with him and then I say, ‘Stevie, would you like to speak to Paul?’ And Stevie says yes. Paul is a relative — this happened last time I was back home — and Paul, who’s sitting right there, gets this startled look, his hand automatically flies up to take the tiny plastic phone that I’m handing to him, he interrupts whatever real conversation he’s been having and he says, ‘Hello?’ and his smile is very complicated — he almost believes.”
“That’s right!” he said. “And here I am talking to you, and you truly are somewhere on the East Coast, and you’re wearing a bra!”
“Amazing as it may seem. What other words do you have for the things I’m looking down at right now and admiring?”
“Other words for breasts? Frans is the main one. Sometimes … frannies. Frans, nans, and Kleins. And I never thought ‘ass’ fit. Sometimes I think of a woman’s ass as a ‘tock.’ ”
“So then it follows that she has a ‘tockhole’ as well?”
“I never pushed it that far.”
“Kleins is strange. ‘I’m squeezing my big fleshy Kleins’? You sure?”
“I don’t know, I think Patsy Cline is a sexy name. I don’t even know who she is.”
“She’s a singer.”
“I know that much. Once I looked down the list of Kleins in the phone book and found one with a woman’s name spelled out, and God, it was everything I could not to call that number. In fact, I did call the number, and she answered, and I said, ‘Oh gosh, I must have the wrong number.’ And yet the Kleins I’ve known in real life haven’t been surrounded by a mysterious sexual power.”
“It’s that telephone.”
“Your last name isn’t Klein?”
“No,” she said. “But I will tell you something.”
“What? What? What?”
“Occasionally when I’m just about to reach an orgasm I … I think of it as a ‘Delgado.’ ”
“Think of what as a Delgado?” he asked.
“The erect male cock.”
“Oh, oh. Sorry.”
“It’s because I was infatuated with a boy named Delgado in high school. So when you said something about, something about your ‘sperm-dowel’ earlier, I misheard for a second, and I felt this rush of blood — I thought you were using my secret word.”
“Now see that is what I live for, for someone to tell me something like that. I need that to happen to me every minute, every second.”
“That’s an impossibility.”
“I will feast on that revelation for weeks to come.”
“It’s a secret, though, so …”
“Up, it doesn’t go beyond this conversation. Out here we say everything, but in our lives, nothing. Out here you can tell me, just request me, to pull on the knot of my bathrobe until it falls open.”
“What kind of bathrobe is it?”
“White terry cloth. And you can just tell me, you can just say, ‘Jim, please lift the waistband of your gray underpants up to its extreme limit of stretch so that it clears your erection and then bring it around and hook it under your balls, and then take that Juggs magazine and use it to fan your overheated pop stand.’ And you know what? I would do it.”
“Well, yes, I could tell you to do all that, but I don’t know, those are important decisions you maybe ought to make for yourself.”
“And I could probably ask you to tell me anything about yourself and you will tell me.”
“Maybe,” she said.
“You told me the secret word you have for the adult male cock, anyway. Not for my cock, leave me out of it. For the one you think about on your own. See, see, this is what I need. I need to know secrets and have secrets and keep secrets. I need to be confided in. Each time you come alone and you don’t tell anybody, that’s a sexual secret. The event has taken place and only you know about it and you have ministered to yourself in exactly the way you wanted to and thought of exactly what you wanted to think about. And each of these thousands of times you have come alone constitutes a perfectly unique moment, with precisely this order of images and that fold of yourself being moved by your middle finger in just that way and that biting of lower lip with exactly that degree of force, all entirely private. I almost think that each one of the times a woman comes in private in her life has to continue to exist as a kind of sphere, a foot-and-a-E-cuhalf-wide sphere, in some ideal dimension, sort of like all the ovums you’ve got queued up in you, except these are … ovums of past orgasms, weird as that sounds, and I am this one viable spermazoid lurking around among them, and I would happily spend my life floating up to one after another of these unique orgasm spheres and looking inside and I’d be able to watch you make yourself come that one time.”
“I bet each one of these mystical spheres has a little window in it with a little Levelor blind that’s down almost but not quite all the way, right, that you creep up to and peer into, am I right?”