“Exactly, as if it’s a stylized cartoon bubble with a curved window drawn on it, and you’re naked in there, strumming like there’s no tomorrow. But no, actually it isn’t like simple voyeurism, I don’t think — it’s holier or more reverent than that, because when I’m in that mood I don’t want to exist. I don’t mean I want to kill myself, I mean that I’m a man and a man is a watcher and a watcher disturbs the purity of the event, so I don’t want to exist, I want to be faded away to almost nothing. And of course all other men are completely foreign, they aren’t allowed in this at all. When I’m very aroused I almost hate all other men. Sometimes when there’s a kissing scene in a movie, and the camera shows the actor and actress chomping away on each other’s gums, moyong, moyong, and then there’s this sudden folded-up piece of shaven male jaw skin, I feel a wave of disgust — what the fuck is he doing there, get him off the set! That’s not even to mention the bestial idiots in porn movies: this nice woman donating her perfect self to these horrible lascivious dumb fucks, with their suggestive evil laughs, and their intent lustful expressions, and their single-mindedness, and their constant diverting of the conversation around to sex. Get rid of them. One time I was in a store at the dirty-magazine rack and it was a little congested there and I reached sort of over this guy’s shoulder to get a copy of the magazine I wanted to look at—E-Cup or something — didn’t touch him, just reached over him, and the guy half turned his head and said in this psychopathic voice, but very soft, he said, ‘Stay away from me or I’ll cut you up.’ I said, ‘Sorry, sorry, I was just trying to get the magazine!’ And he said, ‘Well just stay the fuck away from me, okay?’ Now I’d never say that or threaten that but that guy’s reaction, when you’re at the magazine rack and you want to be the only one there, among all these lovely kindly wonderful naked women, is a reaction I can at least understand. These groups of buddies who go out and drink beer together at strip clubs — it’s totally mystifying to me that they would want to do that, have male company.”
“But women like men from time to time.”
“I know that, I realize that, and that’s how I trick myself into accepting men’s existence: women often imagine men when they come, so men have a reason to exist. In fact, this secondary deductive twist allows me to get aroused by stuff that doesn’t really arouse me, like for instance when you went into that catalog thing earlier about the row of male models in the warehouse with their cream horns popping out of their shorts, I could think to myself, okay, her arousal is supremely arousing to me, and this image she’s describing is the source or current expression of her arousal, and I could imagine your face thinking of those images, and therefore I was able to make them somewhat arousing to me. Like the religious nut who embraces the devil because it shows his utter humility before God — except I don’t go that far. Oh! I know what I meant to tell you.”
“What?”
“You know you mentioned that friend of yours reading you a romance novel all night? Okay, this is a good example of what I’m talking about. I went into this used bookstore one time, just to browse around, called Bonnie’s Books. But it wasn’t really the kind of place I thought it was going to be, it had hardly any old books, what it had was recently published pre-enjoyed books. A de-facto library. Shelf after shelf of these things, big thick historical romances, super neatly shelved, sometimes five or six copies of the same book side by side, Love’s Hurry, Love’s Eager Trial, Love’s Tender Fender Bender, all that kind of material, but even though there were multiple copies of these books, they weren’t identical, because every one of them had been read. They looked handled. All of their pages were turned. And turned by whom? Turned by women. My heart started going. I had entered this enchanted glade. I took a historical romance off the shelf, and I felt as if I were lifting a towel that was still damp from a woman’s shower. The intimacy of it! But it was long — no way I could ever read a book that long. So I put it back. There was a woman at the counter, maybe thirty-eight or forty, perhaps Bonnie herself. She’d read some of these books! I think I was the only one in the store — I knew she was aware of me — I’d smiled at her when I went in. I wanted her to see me looking at the historical romances. And then I went a little further up this one aisle, and I came to a huge trove of romance novels — hundreds and hundreds of them — all organized by the specific subseries, some of which are slightly softer core or harder core, you know, in some they’re allowed to say ‘he frisked his tongue over her navel’ and some they can’t. And I got to this set of red books, only about maybe fifty of them, called the Silhouette Desire series, and ‘desire’ is written in this luscious sloppy longhand, in a diagonal — Desire. Alarm bells started going off in my head, and I thought of going over to Bonnie and saying, ‘Um, do you know those Silhouette Desire books? Can you tell me which title in that series is the most arousing of all of them, in your judgment?’ But I could never have done that. And it didn’t matter anyway, because hundreds of female orgasms could be inferred from the books themselves — you didn’t need to harass any particular woman, you didn’t need to invade anybody’s privacy, you could just hold any copy and think of a woman holding it open with one hand, with her thumb and little finger. It was all there in the pliability and the thumbedness of the book itself — it practically shouted at you, ‘I have been near a clit as it underwent two orgasms.’ ”
“So did you buy one of these Silhouette Desire books?” she asked. “Love’s Tender Gender Bender?”
“Can you hold on for just a second? I have to get it.”
“I guess so, sure.”
There was a pause.
“It’s called Beginner’s Luck,” he said, “by Dixie Browning, and it’s singled out by the publisher as a quote ‘Man of the Month’ volume. Not only is it heavily thumbed, but the woman who owned it before I did spilled water or gin or something on it, so that it’s all wavy. It’s got a permanent wave. You can imagine.”
“Whew.”
“As I was driving home I was so still from owning this pre-enjoyed book that once when I was stopped at a stoplight and I saw a woman in my rearview mirror I made a very small clit-circling motion with my fingers on the roof of my car, despite the bird droppings up there— the idea that she might notice and understand what this motion meant made me feel faint with excitement — but she was expressionless. Anyway, I took the book home and read it, and you know what? It was good! Not only did it give me a partial erection on two occasions, I actually got tears in my eyes toward the end! It’s about a man and a woman in a cabin in the woods. He’s a klutzy scientist, she helps him get less klutzy and finally gets him to shave off his beard and it turns out that when he’s cleaned up he’s irresistible and despite being unschooled in the ways of love he is successful in bringing her to a fever pitch. Good stuff. I mean I probably won’t reread it very soon, but when you think of some of the stuff that passes for highbrow these days, you’ve got to admire it for hanging back so humbly in the genre category. But never mind that. I finished the book, and I pictured the woman who owned the book finishing the book, with her normal flannel nightgown on — she switches out the light, she closes her eyes, she switches on the alarm — and then I turned the last page of the book, and there were more pages, there were four or five pages of promotion, upcoming titles, etcetera, and I turned to this one page. You ready? I’m going to read it to you. It says, ‘You’ll flip … your pages won’t! Read paperbacks hands-free with BOOK MATE I. The perfect “mate” for all your romance paperbacks. Traveling, vacationing, at work, in bed, studying, cooking, eating.’ Did you hear that ‘in bed’ in the middle there? It’s squirreled away in a nonsexual list, legitimized, like those gigantic massager wands that are always accompanied by catalog copy that talks about relieving aching muscles and lower back pain, when what we’re all really talking about is women making themselves come in bed. What this Book Mate is is this rigid-backed thing to which you strap the book using this quote ‘see-through strap.’ There’s nothing the book can do, it’s powerless — it’s strapped wide open — open for all the hungry eyes of the world to admire. The ad says, ‘This wonderful invention makes reading a pure pleasure! Ingenious design holds paperback books OPEN and FLAT so even wind can’t ruffle pages — leaves your hands free to do other things.’ And that’s the page of this book Beginner’s Luck that I finally masturbated to: the thought of a woman reading that this invention will leave her hands free to do other things, and the thought of her ordering it and then maybe holding the strapped-open book between her bent knees so she can read the crucial page of pleasure while she goes to town down there … needing to have both her hands free to do other things … ho God! The problem is, though, that you yourself almost certainly don’t find any of this arousing.”