“No, well,” she said, “I find it mildly arousing, for the very reason you already said — it’s something that’s arousing to you.”
“But there’s the thing,” he said. “If you only find it mildly arousing because I found it exceedingly arousing, then I have to cancel my strong arousal and replace it with mild arousal, since the degree of your arousal is the primary source of my arousal. And then, the problem is, you’ll find it only infinitesimally arousing and I’ll then have to discard it as a total turnoff. That’s the problem.”
“We have to find a middle way,” she said.
“The middle way is for you to tell me the last thing you thought of that made you pay some attention to your candy corn.”
“I liked the story you told about the jeweler pretty well.”
“No no, before tonight. Whenever the last time was you made yourself come.”
“Last night. I really don’t remember. These are fleeting things.”
“Oh, you do remember.”
“I was in the shower.”
“Wait a second. Okay. You were in the shower.”
“What did you just do?” she asked.
“Nothing. My underpants were starting to bug me. Go on.”
“I was in the shower, which is almost always the place I come best. In college there were very nice marble showers, with high showerheads, and the water, the shape of each drop of water, was exactly right, fat soothing generous drops, but billions of them. I came many many times in those showers.”
“Public showers, you mean?”
“No no, private,” she said. “This little high marble box, with a marble foyer. It was very loud, and sometimes when the water collected and flowed together down my arm and between my legs and then fell from there it made this almost clacking noise on the tile. The dorms were coed, so potentially there was a man from my hall in the next shower over, but that didn’t interest me. I used to take showers at odd times of the day anyway, when the bathrooms were deserted. One-thirty in the afternoon. I’d go to class, and I’d start drawing in the margin of my notebook, and I’d draw a little curve, and I’d think, hm, a curve, and then I’d turn it into a breast, and I’d make it a bit larger, and then I’d make another one, and then I’d draw a pair of hands holding the breasts from behind — that was always an idea that interested me, that I’d be sitting in some class or auditorium, dimly lit, an architectural history lecture, with slides, and a person sitting behind me would reach his hands forward and take hold of my breasts, pulling me back against the chair. So by the time I’d drawn those hands and those large breasts I really had to come, and I’d walk briskly back to my brown marble shower. I read something about river gods that excited me, too. Really, back then I’d put out for any body of water at all — a pool or a bath or a pond, or an ocean. We rented a house on the Carolina coast for several summers, this was when I was in junior high school, and I’d go swimming in the ocean, and as soon as I was in the water I’d want to dither, I’d swim far out and I’d think of the tons and tons of water underneath my legs, but of course I couldn’t because there were lots of people swimming, so I’d come in the shower — oh, and that was an especially good kind of shower too because it was outdoors, in this wooden shed, and I had this freezing cold bathing suit on, which I would take off in the shower, and because the suit was cold my nipples were erect, as in your wet T-shirt contest, and I was stripping in the warm shower water, I’d slowly strip off this cold bathing suit, very pleasant to have the warm mingle with the cold, so that sometimes I could feel cold rinsing down my legs and sometimes warm, and I could hold the suit open and let the water fill it so that warm was just pouring out around my legs, that was nice, so my skin was all confused and very aware of itself, with the steam rising — oh, and there was a little metal mirror, I guess it was a shaving mirror, in this shower enclosure, which would get steamed up, even though I was outside. It was on the left wall as you faced the showerhead, which in this case was quite low. And after I’d taken off my swimsuit I’d hang it up on the nail next to the shaving mirror, and the sight of it all crumpled and dangling there was exciting, because it implied my complete full nudity, and when the shaving mirror got steamed up, I used to draw a pair of breasts on it in the fog with my fingers. The glass was cold. I wanted to press my breasts against the mirror, but it was too high for that, but I imagined myself pressing my breasts against this little mirror, so first squeezing them together and then pressing them against the mirror, and I’d just seen something on TV about one-way mirrors, so I thought of men in the garden being able to see my breasts stuffed flat against the foggy mirror. Once I even brought in some lip gloss after my swim and spent a long time putting lip gloss around my nipples and soaping it off.”
“God, car washes must have driven you wild.”
“Car washes. I did like that one part at the end, where the felt flappers drag over you, but no, not really — it was very rare that my family took the car to the car wash. Almost never. Oh, but I do remember one thing I used to imagine — I imagined that I shared a ride back home from college with someone I didn’t know, and we get caught in a terrible tropical monsoon of some kind, and his windshield wipers don’t work, and so I have to go out on the hood of the car and take off my top and kneel there and hold on to the antenna and kind of sop my breasts over the windshield just so he can drive. Actually, that wasn’t something I thought of very much, that was just a one-shot deal.”
“There are strong evolutionary pressures on fantasies, aren’t there?” he said. “If it doesn’t work, and if it doesn’t metamorphose itself into something that does work, it doesn’t survive.”
“Yeah, even in the buildup to one orgasm, it’s a kind of bake-off. You think: two cocks, each one poking from under one of my armpits, sperm squirting from them? Yes or no. No. I’m a geometry teacher measuring boys’ penis length? Yes or no. No. Am I a nurse at a fertility clinic and my job is to strip for clients who have difficulty coming and then suck their cocks and let their sperm drip from my tongue into a test tube? No. I’m in a dressing room and some native-Hawaiian security guard is watching me try on blue jeans over the video monitor? Ooh, maybe yes. In fact it’s kind of like getting dressed for a party, and being unsure of what to wear right up to the last minute, and frantically trying on one image after another like clothes, not knowing which combination looks really good, and it’s getting later and later, and then finally you pull out this wonderful dress, with some rich pattern, and you slip it on, and ah, you can come.”