Vox (11 page)

“Was it a good movie?” she asked. “Were there any statues?”

“Statues? Ah, you mean
statues
! I don’t know if it was set in Rome or not. It was about this woman who seemed to be managing some kind of counterfeiting operation that stored the fake money in caskets. In one scene she has sex with this guy who has a huge clownish yellow tie on with a U.S. dollar sign on it. Pointless, silly—but never mind, Emily was right, the fact that it was dubbed was outstandingly erotic. And the breasts really looked European somehow: not quite so corn-fed and symmetrical, but again maybe that was an illusion of the sound track.”

“So you watched the movie, or you watched Emily? What was Emily wearing, by the way?”

“She was wearing a skirt, and a short-sleeved sweatery thing, I think it was dark red, some kind of dark red with thin vertical gold stripes. Lovely small, proud, elegant breasts—I mean in the sweater.”

“And you were in a jacket and tie?”

“Yes. I let her into the apartment, and the way my apartment is laid out, there is a very short entryway with a kitchen that opens on the left, and then you’re immediately in the living room—so she walked ahead of me into the living room, and even though I was careful not to turn on any lights in there, still,
there
was the couch against one wall and
there
was the VCR on a table against another wall, and it was as if there was this phosphorescent dotted line connecting the two things, they were linked, nothing else in the room counted, and I saw her turn quickly toward me so as not to face the living room quite yet, and she put down the bag with the blanket—oh, I forgot one other important thing that happened in the car. I parked the car in back of my apartment building, and I went around and opened the door for her, and she handed me the bag with the blanket and
People
magazine in it, and then she got out, and then—and for some reason this seemed exactly right—she held her arms out for me to hand her the blanket bag again. It had become somehow hers to carry. I held the tape, she held the blanket. Anyway, she put the bag down in the middle of the living room, and she said, ‘So, will you give me the
grand tour
?’ And the conventionality of ‘grand tour’
showed how nervous she was, but she was one of those people who are improved by being nervous, you know?—who are nervous in a way that makes your detection of their nervousness seem like a privilege. So I showed her the kitchen, the bedroom, the bathroom—she nodded knowingly at the magnets on my refrigerator—beautifully nervous. I listed off what I could offer her to drink, and she said she wanted orange herb tea and she went in the bathroom. So I put two cups of orange herb tea in the microwave. Normally I make only one cup, of course, and I put it on two minutes, but I figured four minutes
to
handle the extra volume of water, but it was a bit too long, and the water was very hot. I walked out with the two teas and saw her again in the living room, with her back to me: she had been linking at the TV—it’s just a dinky Malaysian TV, somehow everybody still thinks that if you have a VCR, that means you’ve got to have a TV worthy of it—but I don’t know, I think maybe even the smallness was right for that evening. But anyway she slid her purse off her arm and put it on the rug next to an armchair on the wall farthest away from the couch, and took off her shoes and put them next to her purse—establishing a little separate non-couch locus for herself. I went into the bathroom for a second, and when I came out, she was sitting on the couch leafing through
People
in the dim light coming from the kitchen. I still hadn’t turned on any of the lights in the living room, because it would have been so uncomfortable to have to turn them
off later. She half pretended to be startled out of reading an article when I clicked the TV on, with no volume, and she said something about Arsenio Hall. But the irrelevance of what she said made her smile, because she was sitting on the couch, and now the TV was on, and that tiny super high-pitched sound of electrically charged picture-tube glass, that sound that you can sometimes hear even if you’re walking along the street, if windows are open, that is the TV giving itself away, declaring itself, even with the volume off, that sound that your ear seems to be able to hear better and better in the evening, or appreciate better, that means privacy and at-homeness and closed curtains and secrecy too, because it’s like when you snuck downstairs at six in the morning to watch
The Three Stooges
and kept the sound extremely low so your parents wouldn’t detect it, but you always worried that even though super high-pitched sounds don’t carry well at all, you thought it might travel upstairs and the knowledge that you were up and watching
The Three Stooges
would trouble their dreams—
that
sound was in the room with me and Emily, and even though it was just faces at a press conference on C-SPAN, we knew what it really meant. She pointed at her tea and she said, ‘On second thought, could you maybe plop a little bourbon or something in this?’ So I did. I put the tape in, and the VCR made its little swallowing sound, and I turned the sound up, and then there was, without even an FBI warning or anything, there was the logo, this blue word
ATOM
, with this wow-wow-wow-wow sine-wave kind of music that focused in on a note while the word
ATOM
focused too. There was a little stylized spirograph atom even—it was kind of moving to see this symbol which once meant progress and science fiction and chemistry and then the evils of radiation, and now it just means ‘Hey, you’re going to have to take this sex film very seriously, as seriously as anything that requires a linear accelerator to discover, I mean you can pretend to laugh, and think how funny and ridiculous, but you aren’t really going to laugh, because no matter how many times you see X-rated filmed sex in your apartment, just by renting a tape, it still will have the power to shock you a little bit, it’s still always miraculous, always a blessing.’ And then there was a preview. I handed her the controller and I said, ‘Fast-forward anytime something bores you.’ I’d forgotten about previews—all that fast editing, without any progression, and the sudden jolt of bouncing frans, then a sudden come-shot. I remember once going to an arty movie with Richard Dreyfuss in it, I think, a long time ago, called
Inserts
, that had an X rating, and wasn’t very good, by the way, full of the grimness that films get into when they try to make art out of porn, so uncheerful, but the thing about the experience was that it was a legitimate movie, but because of the X rating, it was playing in a porn theater, this was sometime in the seventies, and I remember seeing a man and a woman walking up the slight slope from the ticket booth ahead of me, holding
containers of popcorn, because the popcorn stand, which normally was completely shut down, had been reopened in honor of this legit, name-star film, and the couple went through the opening so they could hear the bad electronic music, and they turned the corner, and then bang, they were in the darkness of the theater looking out over all those seats during the previews, which were of course previews of standard porn films, five or six of them, so on the screen there was this gigantic shot of somebody like Brigitte Monet sucking a huge horizontal cock, with loud squelching noises, and electronic octaves thumping away, and I saw the woman stop and flinch and grab her date’s arm and look at him pleadingly—‘You told me it wasn’t going to
be
this kind of thing!’—and her date made this awful horrified ‘I’m sorry’ face, and behind them I went ‘Tut tut tut’ in refined disapproval at what was on the screen, because I wanted both of them not to think they’d made a terrible mistake, I wanted her to still like him, I wanted women then, this was when I was maybe eighteen, to see why X-rated films were so wonderful, I still do in some ways, and it has happened, over the last fifteen years, with video, to a limited extent, though as you say you would still reach for the Victorian paperback if given the choice, and probably you are right—but I wanted to reassure this woman that it was okay, people like me were showing up at this theater, nonviolent normal intelligent men, it wasn’t the end of civilization—I made the disapproving
sound even though the sight of the cocksucking wouldn’t have bothered
me
in the slightest if it were just me seeing it: I felt her tentativeness, and I wanted, sort of like a real estate agent who takes a special route to the house he’s showing that goes through the nicer, fancier streets, I wanted her to be squired gently toward the graphic image of a come-shot, and to have a good experience here, not to leave disturbed by male tastes, the same feeling I have sometimes when I see foreign tourists in some city I know walking around bewildered in some downtown area, and I can tell that they’re disappointed, and I want to go up to them and say, ‘I know this is the standard guidebook thing you are doing, but forget it, this isn’t our city really, go see this neighborhood and that neighborhood’—I wanted chivalrously to save that woman from the giant crude cock of the coming attraction, just the same way I used to think when I was little of swimming up toward the surface holding a woman in trouble and letting her use my scuba mouthpiece, and carrying her up on the boat and taking off her wet cold wetsuit and toweling her off as she got her breath and shook her head at her close call.”

“ ‘Oh, thank you, Popeye, for saving me from that large low-born cock!’ ”

“Exactly. Anyway—do you still want to hear this?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Anyway, there was the preview, which was for some terrible-looking
post-Caligula post-Devil in Miss
Jones
kind of movie, with lots of gratuitous grotesquerie, stuff I hate, torchlit sets, dwarves, but in the midst of that stuff of course there were, bang, these shocking pure normal sex scenes, whose abruptness I felt through Emily, because Emily was my guest on my couch watching them. Then the preview was over, and the
ATOM
logo came on and focused itself again, and I looked over at her. She was looking straight at the TV—the light from the kitchen was behind her profile—and she had her legs crossed, and one of her forearms was resting on her stomach, and her tea was in her left hand. Her skirt was pleated. She looked so exceedingly
clothed
. She lifted the mug, and I could see her lips meet it—the water was still too hot, so she had to do one of those long inward sips that makes the liquid lift off from the surface into a tea aerosol, and her eyes narrowed when she felt the fine hot spray of it touch the tip of her tongue. And then the movie began—
Pleasure So Deep
. It starts with a maid who hears a tinkling bell and takes something on a tray to a man and they talk for a second and then she walks away.”

“Have you rented this movie since then?” she asked.

“Twice. It’s also one of the three I rented tonight, which I’m probably not going to watch. Much more fun telling it to you. Anyway, the maid walks away, and then this thin Europop electronic sex-music starts going, and then instantly: cut to half-naked woman and man with cock, with dubbed moans. The woman is in her late
thirties maybe, very attractive, with her hair pinned back. Emily watched this for maybe a minute, and then she looked over at the windows and she said, ‘Are you sure people can’t see in?’ I do have curtains, but I honestly wasn’t sure if people could possibly see in or not, and my apartment is on the first floor, on the side of the building, so
it
was a legitimate concern, so I hopped up again and got my keys and said I’d be back in a second, and I went outside and tried to look in my windows, and it was surprisingly secure: not only could you not see Emily or anything in the room, you couldn’t even tell the TV set was on, I guess because it’s a small set. So I went back in and sat down, slightly out of breath, and told her that you couldn’t see a
thing
from outside. She said, ‘Great, thanks.’ I said, ‘What’s happened so far?’ and she said, in a slightly unnatural voice, ‘The woman and her lover have been fucking in various ways.’ It was the same scene, in fact—this Italian guy, whose name turns out to be Mario, has his amazingly long cock between her breasts—I remember seeing that image and immediately turning to Emily and watching her eyes: every time there was a cut, I could see her eyes make a tiny movement to find the center of gravity of the next image. Porn movies are almost always done with very repetitive cuts back and forth between two or three camera positions, so I knew what the images were and yet I could watch Emily’s eyes: say the alternation was between a close-in shot of the woman’s head bobbing as she was sucking the cock, and
then a farther-back shot showing that she was kneeling on the bed holding her hair out of the way of the camera and he was lying on his back, A B A B, and I could
see
the mixture of colors change on Emily’s iris, and I could see it make these exact little adjustments. The miracle of sight. She had an expression of very alert frowning amused distaste. When that scene was over, I said, ‘What do you think so far?’ I just wanted to hear her voice. And she said, ‘As it happens, I’ve seen this movie before, about a year ago.’ Then we watched maybe three sex scenes silently. Maybe more. Once I asked some question like ‘Is that one of the counterfeiters?’ And she said, ‘Yes.’ Otherwise we were totally silent, while these hardworking Europeans struggled and jacked and sucked and moaned and came in English in front of us. The men came, anyway. It’s still a rarity to see a woman really come on a video, as opposed to thrashing around. There was more of the dimensionless electronic Europop music. After one giant come-shot Emily put her tea down and took a deep breath and puffed out her cheeks and smiled. I laughed with relief. I said, ‘Is it as you remembered it?’ And she said, ‘I’m a little chilly.’ So I unsnapped the plastic cover of the blanket and unfolded this big acrylic plaid thing and put it over her, but I did it wrong, evidently, because she said, ‘Could you turn it this way?’ and she showed me how she wanted it. So I tucked her in with the fringe of the blanket running under her neck. Then I sat down again, focused on the
movie, and again there was the jolt—you have a moment of two fully clothed work friends in a living room adjusting a blanket, and I’m stuffing two of its corners behind her shoulders, probably the first time I’d ever touched both of Emily’s shoulders at the same time, absolute coziness, we should have been talking about the very first birthday we could remember or something, and then we turn to the TV and there are tits swinging around and a woman’s hairdo swinging around while she rises up and down on some expressionless Eurodick and we’re hearing ‘Oh Mario Mario!’ After a little while there were some movings around under the blanket, and then it started to shake, sort of. She didn’t say anything, she didn’t even change her breathing, she was keeping it very steady. Her mouth was closed. She said, ‘Could you do me a favor and hold the blanket for a second so it doesn’t slide down?’ So I held it in place while she lifted her hips and moved around some more, frowning. Her face was fairly close to mine but we didn’t have eye contact. Then her panty hose appeared from under the bottom of the blanket, with her underpants still nested in it, and then her feet disappeared again. She said, ‘Thanks,’ and took hold of the top of the blanket. Again the slight fast movement underneath. Her mouth opened slightly, and I could see her tongue pushing against her lower teeth, and she made these very subtle little movements with her lip—not twitches, that sounds too obvious and uncontrolled, just these very controlled barely perceptible sudden movements,
as if several times she were on the verge of saying something that began with the word ‘you.’ On the TV a woman was making her fist go up and down on a cock with her mouth slack. When a sex scene ended, Emily’s blanket would stop. We got to the scene where the guy with the wide yellow tie with a dollar sign on it has sex with the heroine. She says something like, ‘Don’t play around, just fuck me,’ and so he does. This scene really got to Emily, and she took the blanket in her teeth so she could have both hands free and yet have it over her, so now there were these loomings as her left hand moved back and forth between breasts, and the little circling rhythm was slightly less constrained.”