Innocents and Others

by Dana Spiotta

  He trusted her and she trusted him, and when she hung up the phone she felt so loved. But then all at once her life—her real life, her harsh, real life—was all around her. She looked down at her hand holding the phone, at her legs in her robe, at her notebook full of notes about her phone conversations. She squinted up at her apartment, and imagined how she looked to anyone else. She tried to tell herself it might be okay, but the gap was so big. It made her gasp.

  JELLY AND OZ

  Sex was the easy part of being with Oz. They decided she would move in right away, just weeks after they started to date each other. The first few months were a daze of body longing and heat. Most afternoons Jelly would have to work her shift at the call center. In between making sales calls, she fell into reveries about sex from that morning or last night. She had never experienced anything like this before, having only one previous lover her last year of college, yet she understood that this intensity was too obsessive and unsustainable. She had some sense that later it would be important to remember feeling this way, so she went over everything they did from the very first night, getting the specifics exactly right and in order. Her reveries were arousing, but they were driven by purpose too. She kept track as if every orgasm were part of a story and she had to follow them in order. But that wasn’t true: it was more like circling in and away, swings, than it was like a story. As time went by she collected favorite moments or sequences (Oz with his mouth by her ear, whispering to her as he came, then a cut to Oz slowly pulling her clothes off, then a moment when Oz reached under her skirt at dinner and put a gentle finger inside her as she spoke). Always Jelly wanted that heat to rise from her body, would rush herself to find the heat. Jelly made another sales call, then gave herself a moment to sit and dream. Daydreams, an indulgent combination of memory and fantasy, dreams that did your bidding. Jelly’s vivid and detailed daydreams were almost as good as real life, like an edited, highlighted version of real life in which she saw herself in a soft, flattering glow. When she finally got home from work in those early months, she would practically run to find Oz and his body. She would put her hands and face against his chest. She would inhale, and the way he smelled made her tremble with want.

  Jelly especially liked when she lay on her stomach and he got on top of her, covering her completely. She could feel the weight of his big body slowly pressing down, and it made her feel contained and safe. It was a lot but it wasn’t too much; Oz was surprisingly graceful in bed. Jelly didn’t like being on top. She had no rhythm, no coordination. She banged her shin on Oz’s platform bed, she tripped against the coffee table. There was a recklessness in her limbs. She always had a bruise on her legs or arms. She could see it, barely, but everything looked bruised to her bad eyes. Oz could not see the bruises, but he could feel her flinch. Her awkwardness hardly mattered after a while. The very first time they slept together (which Jelly would remember over and over for its certain payoff in heat), Oz told her that she needed to settle down. They had already tried a number of positions. She was so aroused she nearly flinched at his touch, but he moved slowly. His patience just made her want him even more. Oz put his big hand over hers and pressed it between her legs. Her head was on his chest; she waited. His hand covered hers but didn’t move. He said, “Show me. Make yourself come.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “I’m too nervous.” Oz kept his hand on top of hers, barely pressing. Jelly was twenty-five, but she felt younger. She reminded herself that Oz couldn’t see her, but he could in his way, he could feel every shudder and shake. Why was showing him so much more personal than when he was inside her?

  “Try, please,” he whispered. She reached her middle finger out to find the little bump under skin. The touch of her finger on it was too much. Sometimes that happened. She found a side spot that allowed for indirect pressure. So difficult—why is it so complicated, so particular from day to day? Not just from day to day, but from orgasm to orgasm. What felt good reconfigured moment to moment. Oz’s hand lifted as she moved her finger, and his large fingers lightly traced her hand. She was moving faster. She knew that it would not take long. The gentle pressure of his hand excited her. Her eyes were closed, but she felt him breathing more quickly as she grew closer. She imagined it was his hand pulling this from her. Her finger thrummed in quick strokes while never losing contact and pushing down steadily. Her body clenched. She crested, Oz put his other hand on her face then, and the crest lasted for some seconds before she fell, relaxed and spent. Particular, yes, because seconds later she knew another one was possible, and she moved her finger until she found a lower, deeper spot. Oz was murmuring, one hand on her cheek and the other on her hand between her legs, when she started to come again. It was quicker this time, but it shook her body from the inside and then out and down her legs.

  Soon Oz could do it to her with his mouth or his hand. She remembered the moment when she realized she no longer had to worry if she would climax—she knew she would always come. Oz liked to make her and he was very good at it. As the nights between them accumulated, she understood that she was particular in her details, yes, but not unreadable, not impossible. She loved Oz, loved fucking him. She had a sex life, right alongside the rest of her life, and it amazed her.

  Eventually trying to remember every sexual act between them became impossible, so then she just thought of what they had done recently and let moments from the past leak in, every act reminding her of previous versions of the act, so nothing they did was distinct anymore. It was all part of their life, private things liked and repeated with tiny variations, the precision of pleasure eventually overcoming the hunger for the novel. She figured that was how it was supposed to go.

  But other things between them were more difficult. Money was difficult. Oz lived off disability, which was a basic, rent-covering amount. Shortly after she moved in, he began to work part-time for an olfactory research project at the university that was trying to develop a truly neutral scent, the equivalent of white light for the nose. Oz’s sensitivity enabled him to distinguish subtle variations between scents. He also didn’t get olfactory fatigue, in which the perception of smell loses intensity with repetition. Which is why people can’t smell themselves or the stink of their own house after constant exposure. Oz did not get desensitized to smell. They used Oz for only a couple of hours a week, which was okay because he often had a headache for hours afterward. It frustrated Jelly that Oz, who was clearly so exceptional in so many ways, couldn’t find a real occupation. He had a college degree. He understood mechanical things very well. For instance, he fixed the washing machine in the basement. He listened to it run and located what was not working by ear. She imagined that he could listen to cars run and see where problems were. He couldn’t do everything—he was blind, after all—but what he could do, he did exceptionally well. The trouble was the world wasn’t willing—so far—to accommodate his limits to get to his skills. The world had no real use for this large blind man and treated him more like a freak: freakish high IQ, freakish flawless pitch, freakish ability to smell, freakish connection to machines. But the difficult thing was that Oz felt his own acute unusualness too. It had little to do with his blindness. Other blind people—even the congenital hard-core blind—found him unnervingly singular. He had a deep crust of self that was hard to penetrate. Even living with him, Jelly felt he operated in counterorbit from her and her life. The hardest part was that he just didn’t seem to want to share much beyond her body. As close as they felt physically, most nights they would eat without talking, or at least without Oz talking. When Jelly spoke or told a story, Oz would listen and nod. But she could tell he just heard the surface of her voice. The auditory version of when a man didn’t listen because he was looking at your face. Oz smiled and nodded when she spoke. Or he said, “Yeah,” but it was as though he were listening to music he liked. He didn’t seem to hear her. This made her talk more, but at a certain point she realized he couldn’t or wouldn’t respond. The early days when
they had real conversations were gone. She wanted that feeling back—those moments when both of them were trying to reach each other. When stories were told, revelations made. It was like a window that was only open for a short time, but then slowly slid shut once they were truly together. If she only knew that back then, she would have asked more questions, gathered more of this person inside her. Why didn’t anyone warn her that as you get comfortable with a lover, you can’t hear or talk anymore? She tried not to worry about it. It wasn’t just her—Oz didn’t talk to anyone, as far as she knew. Maybe this was just what happened over time when you lived together. You didn’t need to talk. But then why did she feel so lonely?

  All of Oz’s peculiar reticence about people didn’t mean he had lost enthusiasm for his phones. Most afternoons she discovered him ­holding the phone, whistling tones and then listening with a ­compulsive intensity. Oz loved communicating with the phone ­machinery—he felt the pulses and clicks soothed his brain. “The dial tone is my lullaby,” he said. Oz wanted to have two lines, and a big chunk of their paltry monthly income was spent paying for their lines. Even though they never paid for calls, the lines themselves were expensive. It wasn’t sustainable, and Jelly didn’t see why he couldn’t do with just one. Oz was trying to figure out a way around this, a way to cancel one of the lines and then figure out how to reconnect it, to tap into an extra line without paying for it. He wasn’t sure how far he could go in tampering with the phone company before they would figure it out. Jelly and Oz didn’t discuss it, but the prospect of always just barely getting by weighed on them. As the high of their new relationship wore off, they were left with a meagerness that started with their lack of money and then seemed to seep in everywhere.

  Oz applied for jobs in electronics when they came up, but he didn’t get them. Once he came close—he got an interview for a job at the huge Carrier factory that designed and manufactured air conditioners. After the interview, they didn’t call him. He presented too much difference and difficulty. She knew he was frustrated, but not because he talked about it. She knew because that night and the next few nights, Oz tirelessly chirped pulses on the phone so he could listen to prerecorded messages from faraway places. Oz let the recording of a woman’s voice—it was always women—efficiently but politely say something in a foreign language. Then a beep to signal an error and the voice started over again, saying exactly the same thing in exactly the same way. He listened to the repetition for a while and then he connected to another defunct line in another country. Again he listened as a prerecorded female voice repeated its polite lines over and over.

  Jelly’s main interest in phone phreaking was to talk to people far away. Not recordings or pulses. Other people out there. It was a modern mystery: the connection with strangers on the phone. Not crank calls, but reaching into a network of other people and finding the ones you liked. Like writing a message in a bottle, a faith that even if no one wants to connect with you here in your immediate life, out there—the big Out There—someone is just waiting to hear from you.

  For a time, Jelly had attended graduate school in communications with a concentration in film. But after she became partially blind, she had to drop out. Jelly got only a small monthly disability payment from the state, and as her sight improved, she looked for a job. Since she was good at talking, she had easily found work at a call center, first doing customer service and then moving into sales, which made more money. Everyone there hated making calls, hated the customers. Jelly hated it too, but she was excellent at it. Every day she got a stack of cards with her “turf”: names and contact history. Each time she had to force herself to hold up her magnifier, take one of the cards, and begin. Usually she sold vacation time-shares for a place in North Carolina.

  David Johnson. (973) 623-1816.

  Sometimes the cards had financial data and a history of previous sales on them, either with this product or a related one. Rarely was it a totally cold call.

  Jelly had the script and had been trained in the techniques. KISS—keep it short and simple. Use their name. Get them to agree to something small, and then work to a bigger yes. Ask questions—if they answer a question, they are committing to you. But she understood the gist and did her own variation on the techniques. She often went off script and long.

  “David, forget my Outer Banks Escape Offer for a moment. Tell me what would be your ideal vacation if you were entirely free to do what you wanted? Not the kids, not your wife. You,” Jelly said.

  David Johnson—of Maplewood, New Jersey, previous purchaser of a deluxe gym membership that was canceled after six months, thirty-eight years old, fifteen-year member of IBEW, income in the lower-middle bracket—said nothing.

  Jelly waited. She heard David make a wordless humph sound through air hummed out his nose that meant it was too ridiculous to consider such a thing. But then, into the waiting air, he spoke.

  “I would like to fish, somewhere with no phone, no TV, and no family. Just me and the water,” he said. “Somewhere different from here, quiet with no traffic. Maybe a cold beer afterward, and some fried fish, a cabin.”

  Jelly pictured what he said, and imagined David, handsome and tired, with his fishing pole. It helped if she imagined them as handsome. David had black hair and wore a flannel shirt. If you touched his flannel-covered arm, you could feel the hardness of his muscles through the fabric. Soft flannel, hard muscle.

  “No neighbors,” David said. “No work, no talking. None. Not even the radio.”

  “Yes,” she said, in her low, slow voice. She had learned to take a deep breath and relax her throat before a call. This was her phone register, hummed and liquid and soft.

  “No phones!” he said, laughing.

  Jelly returned a bright laugh sound into the phone receiver. “Silence?” she said.

  “Maybe I would play my guitar. I like to sit around and play, but I never have time for it. But somehow I have time to watch two hours of TV after dinner, right? I don’t know why I don’t play more. I am beat after work, and anything but TV feels tiring. I guess that’s it.” Dark-haired David in a sad room lit only by the flickering light of the TV.

  “You want someplace simple and quiet, away from work and obligations. No pressure, no shopping centers or traffic jams. Somewhere you have time to relax, but also do something you love and are good at, like play your guitar and fish,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Sometimes doing something you love is the most restorative thing. TV seems to relax you, but it is the relaxation of being drugged. It deadens you, and you want something deeper and more satisfying.”

  “It hypnotizes you. I don’t even care what I watch. We watch—me and my wife—Johnny Carson and the news and before that whatever nine o’clock drama is on. They are all the same, really. I just hate those comedy shows the kids watch. I can hear the canned laughs in steady bursts, drives me nuts. God, I hate it. Like nothing is worse than hearing laughing when something isn’t funny. And I wonder what it does to them, day after day, watching that garbage. All of us, hypnotized by lousy television. I tell you.” David in the doorway of the sad room. Watching his kids watch TV. Their faces impassive as staccatos of laughter erupt from the TV speaker.

  Something would happen between them, a transaction. It didn’t matter if the time-share was not a cabin by a lake but a condo by the beach. It would suffice with the right emphasis. You don’t need to answer their answers so much as repeat the answers back to them. To be heard is a gift you can give them, and after, they will then do what you suggest. Don’t let them defer to a later time. Use a personal story to humanize yourself and relate to them. (“My own time at Outer Banks Escape is spent walking by the water early in the morning. I hear waves instead of traffic. The rhythm of the waves has been shown to mimic the rhythm of the heart, did you know that?” Jelly said.

  “I do think I heard that somewhere.”

  “Yes. It
soothes us the way we were soothed before we were born. But I also love to walk to the bay side and the docks, where people take out small boats and fish. Or fish from the dock.”)

  Always get the credit card numbers. The advantage was all hers—she did it dozens of times a week, while the people she called were not sales experts at all. They were just predictably human. It made her vaguely sick. What she liked was the connection she felt with them—and that’s what it was, a genuine connection between two strangers when they buy something. They trust you: it moves from transactional to faith. She liked that, and she knew that on the phone she was irresistible. She didn’t even mind making things up (her own experience at Outer Banks Escape, for example, was limited to emotive elaboration of the photos on the brochure). Making things up was okay because it was all about feelings, real feelings and real longing. How they came about, fantasy or not, didn’t matter to her. What she hated was that it was all for money. She hated that it all got reduced to numbers in the end, quantified. She had a quota, and she found this humiliating and stressful. Then one day she began to call strangers for fun, not money, from the call center. It felt a little rebellious, and it also felt good.

  The first time she allowed herself a nonsales call was with Tim Estes. Tim was forty and lived in Mamaroneck, New York. Divorced father of three in the upper middle-income bracket. A handwritten notation on the card indicated that he had a gatekeeper—a housekeeper or girlfriend who kept deflecting calls. This was not promising.

  In any case, she called and to her delight Estes himself answered the phone.

  “Hello,” he said

  “May I speak to Tim Estes?”

  “This is Tim.” There was something sad in the tone of his voice that made Jelly not want to sell him something. But what then was the purpose of her call?