Vintage Baker

by Nicholson Baker

  “Ah, now you’re admitting it,” she said. “The male models are quite good-looking, too.”

  “Well, but still for me it wasn’t the lace hemi-demicamisoles or any of that. I’ll tell you what it was, in fact. It was this one picture of a woman wearing a loose green shirt, lying on her back, with her legs in the air, crossed at the ankles, wearing a pair of tights. Not black tights. I was, I was absolutely entranced by this picture. I remember coming home from work and sitting at the kitchen table, studying this picture for about … ten minutes, reading the little description of the tights, looking at the picture again, reading, looking. She had very long legs. Now, did I have anybody I could buy these tights for? No, not really. Not at that moment. They were made of a certain kind of stitch, not chenille, not chenille. Pointelle! She was wearing these beigey-green pointelle tights. See, to me the word ‘tights’ is much more exciting than just ‘stockings.’ Anyway I went into the living room and put the phone on the floor, and then I lay down on the floor next to the phone and I just studied this shot, went through the rest of the catalog, but back to this one picture again, until my arms started to get tired from holding the pages in the air, and I put the catalog facedown on my chest, and I went into a state of pure bliss, rolling my head back and forth on the rug. If you roll your head back and forth on the floor it usually increases any feeling of awe or wonder that you’ve got going. But no tingling of the extremities, unfortunately.”

  “No.”

  “And I don’t eat lots of meatball subs. I mean I do enjoy a meatball sub occasionally, with mushrooms—I just want to differentiate myself from, you know …”

  “Oh don’t worry about that,” she said. “Your accent is very different from his, your voice is quite … compelling.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. I was nervous when I called. My temperature dropped about fifteen degrees as I was deciding to dial the number.”

  “Really. Where did you see the ad?”

  “Ah, a men’s magazine.”

  “Which one?” she asked.

  “This is oddly embarrassing. Juggs. Juggs magazine. Where did you see the ad?”

  There was a pause. “Forum.”

  “What does your ad say?” he asked.

  “Let me see,” she said. “There’s a line drawing of a man and a woman, each holding a telephone, and the headline is ANYTIME AT ALL. I liked the drawing.”

  “I’ve seen that one,” he said. “That’s very different from my ad. My ad has a color shot of a woman with a phone cord wrapped around her leg and one arm kind of covering her breasts, and the headline over the phone number is, MAKE IT HAPPEN. But there is something intangibly classier about this ad than the other ads, something about the layout and the type that the phone number is in, despite the usual woman-plus-phone image, and I thought that maybe it might attract a different sort of caller. Although, boy, that flurry of assholic horniness from the men on the line when you first spoke was not exactly cucumber sandwich conversation. That one guy that kept interrupting—‘You like to sock on a big caulk?’ ‘How big and brown are your nips?’ But then, I suppose we aren’t calling for cucumber sandwich conversation.”

  “I wouldn’t object—cucumber away. But I guess not. Anyhow, here we are, ‘one on one,’ as they say, in the famous fiber-optical ‘back room.’ ”

  “True enough.”

  “So go on,” she said. “You were telling me how you were on the floor rolling your head back and forth?”

  “Oh, right. Well, I was on the floor with the catalog facedown on my chest, entranced by those tights, and a conception, this conception of thrilling wrongness, took shape in my brain stem. I had a vision of myself jerking off while I ordered that pair of tights, specifically the vision was of, of, of …”

  “Of?”

  “Of being in the bathtub, but on the phone with the order-taker from Deliques, who’s got, you know, this nice innocent voice, a mistaken but lovable overfrizzed perm, a hint of twang, bland face, freshly laundered jeans, cute socks, but probably wearing a pair of Deliques finest ‘fusion panties’ with a chevron of lace or something over her mound, which she’s bought at the employee discount, while I’m in my bathtub, which is ridiculous since I never take baths, but I’m in my bathtub moving so carefully so she won’t hear any aquatic splips or splaps and know that I’ve taken the portable phone into the bathroom and that I’m semi-submerged, and she says, ‘Let me check to be sure we have that in stock for you, sir,’ and during the pause, I arch myself up out of the water and sort of point the phone at my Werner Heisenberg so she can see it somehow or get its vibes, and at the moment she says, ‘Yes, we do have the pointelle tights in faun,’ I come, in perfect silence, making a Smurf grimace.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “I know, but I don’t know, I was there on the living-room floor. I don’t often lie down there.”

  “Were you actually … playing with yourself as you envisioned this?”

  “Certainly not! I had one hand on the telephone, just toying with the number keys, teasing them, and the other hand was lying on the facedown catalog on my chest. Anyway, then I thought I would be embarrassed to order a pair of tights for myself—maybe the order-taker would assume that I was a transsexual, when in fact I am not a transsexual at all, I’m a telephone clitician.”

  “An obscene phone caller.”

  “Exactly. And I started to think of who I could order them for, and I thought of this woman at work, a very nice woman, some might say plain, but very nice, who once startled me and this other guy by telling a story out of the blue about some friends of hers who’d just had a large wedding at a museum during which some thieves backed a van up and loaded all the wedding gifts in and drove away.”

  “The wedding gifts were on display?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Ah, well, that was their mistake.”

  “Well, they were punished for it. Anyway, one of the gifts, this woman from work told us, was one of those sex slings that I guess you bolt to a stud in the ceiling, so that the woman is …”

  “Yeah, I know,” she said.

  “And this woman from work had joked about the difficulty of trying to fence the stolen sex sling, and the memory of her talking about this oddball device came back to me and I wanted to order the tights for her, so she’d come home from work one day, and she’d go, ‘Hey, what’s this, a slim little package for me from Deliques?’ She’d open it up and slip out this plastic packet with tights in it, and there’s the order slip in her hand, and somehow I’ve convinced the order-taker that I don’t want my name on the slip.”

  “Sure, sure.”

  “So she knows she’s got a secret admirer. And there on the packing slip is the line of printout that says, all in abbreviations, I PR PTL TIGHTS, FN, SM, $12.95, and I just thought of her looking at the packing slip and thinking, Well, gee, I suppose I should at least see if they fit”

  “Ah, but wait,” she said. “No, what catches her eye, what catches her eye is …”

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “Is that on the packing slip, over the numeral one, for one pair of tights, is this check mark, in blunt pencil.”

  “That’s right, there is.”

  “And she looks closely at that check mark, and she imagines a male hand making it, a surprisingly refined hand, because there has been a strike at the Deliques warehouse, and what’s happened is that Deliques management has had to hire the male models from the catalog on an emergency basis to fill in for the normal pickers and packers, who are of course mostly middle-aged Laotian women. And they were right in the middle of a catalog shoot, all these male models, when the walkout took place, so they’re wearing exactly what they were wearing on the shoot, which are the usual aubergine paisley boxer shorts, and Henri Rousseau bathrobes, and Erté pajamas, and that sort of thing, but there was no time for them to change, they had to be herded barefoot into this giant warehouse because the company was bombed with orders. April was their bigges
t month. So—one male model takes this woman’s order slip, and studies it, looks at her name on it—what’s her name?”

  “Jill.”

  “Looks at her name, Jill Smith, and then takes the order slip and crumples it against the piece of horseradish in his foulard silk boxer shorts, and he hands it to the next male model, a gorgeous peasant with strange slitty nipples, who smoothes it out, studies it, duh, Jill Smith, squeezes his ass-cheeks together, and passes it to the next guy, who smooths it out, studies it, bites one corner, and hands it to the next guy, and so on down this row of male models, each one broader-shouldered and sinewier-stomached than the last, until finally the order slip gets to the last guy, who’s fallen asleep sitting on one tang of the forklift, a much slighter gentleman, with a beautiful throat with a softly pulsing jugular you just wanted to eat it looked so good, and of course wearing a green moiré silk codpiece, pushed forward and upward by the one tang of the forklift. This male model rouses himself, smacks his lips sleepily, studies the slip of paper, gets in the forklift, and drives off, weaves off, toward the distant vault where they keep the pointelle tights.”

  “Yes?”

  “And he reaches the mountain of crates marked FAUN, and he slides the forklift into the highest pallet and lifts it off and, vvvvvvvv, brings it down, and he pries it open …”

  “Probably with his dick.”

  “No, no, with his powerful refined hands,” she said. “The packing tape goes pap! pap! pap! as he tears the mighty box asunder. But now that you mention it, as he’s reaching in, deep into the box filled with … with one metric ton of cotton pointelle, his cock is pressing against the cardboard, pressing, pressing, and it starts to fight against the tethers of that codpiece. So he climbs back in the forklift, puts the pair of tights in his lap, and drives back. Well, while he was gone, Todd, Rod, Sod, and Wadd, the other male models, all heterosexual, of course, who’ve been standing in a row waiting for him, have been thinking about Jill Smith wearing those tights and by now their bobolinks have all gotten thoroughly hard, and even the sleepy forklift driver, perhaps because of the faun tights in his lap, is embarrassed to get out because there’s this frank erection that has now gotten so big and bone-hard that it’s angling right out of his codpiece. He takes his place in the row of male models, his cock swaying slightly, and he holds the tights to his face and exhales through them, then nods, takes a pencil with a surprisingly sharp point, and makes a check mark over the numeral one on the packing slip. He hands it to the next guy—by this time all the male models have abandoned their shame in each other’s presence and they are all standing there in a row with their various organs pronging at various angles out of their various robes and boxers and sex-briefs. So the forklift guy hands it to the next guy, who almost ritualistically takes the tights and winds them around and around his cock, pulls once hard, and then unwinds them and makes a check mark exactly superimposed over the first check mark on the numeral one on the packing slip. And he hands the tights to the next guy, who also winds the tights around his cock, many winds, it’s very long, and he pulls, and he makes a superimposing check mark, too, and so on down the row, wind unwind check, wind unwind check, and the final guy folds the tights up with neat agile movements that belie his enormous forearms and slides them into the sheer plastic envelope and puts the last check mark over the numeral one, so that it now looks as if only one blunt pencil checkmarked over it, when really there were nine check marks. And so together, humming ‘The Volga Boatman’ in unison, they seal the package up with Jill Smith’s address on it and send it off to her.”

  “Well, maybe that is what happened,” he said. “No, in reality, there wasn’t any strike at Deliques when I called. Their computer was down, though.

  “Oh, so you really did call?” she said. “That’s very wicked of you. In the bath?”

  “No, in the end that seemed like too much trouble. I called from the living-room floor. First I worked myself up to a creditable state of engorgement, then I dialed the 800 number.”

  “All right …”

  “A woman answered and said something like ‘Hello and welcome to Deliques Intimates, this is Clititia speaking, how may we help you today?’ She had a young high voice, exactly the sort of voice I’d imagined. Well, my fourteen-and-a-half-inch sperm-dowel instantly shrank to less than three inches. Which is the opposite of what was supposed to happen. I told her what I wanted to order, and she said the computer was down, but she would take the order ‘by hand,’ right? Why wasn’t I enough of a leerer to come back with something insinuating? Just something basic, like ‘Heh heh, honey, I hope you do take it all by hand.’ But instead I just said, ‘Boy oh boy, that must be a lot of trouble for you.’ I gave her my address, my card number, and she said, ‘I’ve got that, sir, now, is there anything else you would like to order this evening?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m torn, there is one other thing I’d like to get this person, just a pair of very simple panties, but I’m torn.’ I said, ‘Now you see the so-called Deliques minimes on page thirty-eight? You see those? Do you have the catalog there right in front of you?’ She said she did. I said, ‘Okay. I’m not sure I can tell the difference between these minimes and the so-called nadja pants on page, ah, forty-six. To the naked eye they seem identical.’ She said, ‘Just one moment,’ and I heard her flipping through the catalog, and I made a last valiant attempt to stroke myself off, because the idea of her looking carefully at those pictures of women in those tiny weightless panties, with the darkness of pubic hair visible right there through the material, at the very same time I was looking at those same cuppable curves of pubic hair on my end, should have been enough to make me shoot instantly, but I don’t know, she sounded so well-meaning, and I knew that there was a very good chance that she would not like to know that I was there trying to … I mean, she didn’t want to work at a job where men called her and ordered a few items of merchandise just so they could … right? That wasn’t what she’d had in mind at all in taking the job, or possibly wasn’t, at least, so even when she said, finally, ‘Well, the nadja pants ride a little lower on the hip,’ which is a statement that any normal jacker-offer should be able to come to easily, because what does it imply? It implies her own hip, it implies that the nadja panties have ridden her own hip. But even then I could not achieve and maintain. So I said, ‘Oh well, no, thanks, I’ll see how the tights go over and then order the minimes later.’ And a week afterward, I was the owner of a pair of tights. I still have them, unopened. Give me your address and I’ll be glad to forward them to you.”

  “Why don’t you give them to Jill?” she asked.

  “Oh, a million reasons. But that’s not quite the end. I hung up from making the order and instantly I got hard again, naturally, and I thought for a second, and I hit the redial button, and a different woman answered, with a much lower and smarter voice, with some name like Vulva, and I said, ‘Vulva, I have what may sound like an unorthodox question, and you don’t have to answer it if you don’t want to. But what I’m curious about is, well, of the men who order from your catalog, do you think some of them are in a subtle and maybe not-so-subtle way obscene phone callers?’ She laughed and she said, ‘That’s a good question.’ And then there was a long pause, a very long pause. I said, ‘Hello?’ And right there I knew I’d blown it—I knew the tone of my hello, that slight reediness in my voice that betrayed sexual tension, blew away the potential rapport I might have had with Vulva. See, I’d sounded quite confident when I actually asked her the question.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She just said, in a more official voice, but still a friendly voice, ‘I don’t think I’m going to answer your question.’ And I said, ‘Fine, I understand, okay, sure.’ And she said ‘Bye.’ Not ‘Good-bye,’ you notice—still the slight vestige of amused intimacy there. If she’d said ‘Good-bye’ I would have felt absolutely crushed.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I sat up and ordered a pizza and read the paper. So you see,
I’m not an obscene phone caller, really. I can’t smother an orgasm.”

  “Ho ho. I can,” she said.

  “Can you? Well, I mean I can physically do it.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  There was a pause.

  “I hear ice cubes,” he said.

  “Diet Coke.”

  “Ah. Tell me more things. Tell me about the room you’re in. Tell me the chain of events that led up to your calling this number.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m not in the bedroom anymore. I’m sitting on the couch in my living room slash dining room. My feet are on the coffee table, which would have been impossible yesterday, because the coffee table was piled so high with mail and work stuff, but now it is possible, and the whole room, the whole apartment, is really and truly in order. I took a sick day today, without being sick, which is something I haven’t done up to now at this job. I called the receptionist and told her I had a fever. The moment of lying to her was awful, but gosh what freedom when I hung up the phone! And I didn’t leave the apartment all day. I just organized my immediate surroundings, I picked up things, I vacuumed, and I laid out all the silver that I’ve inherited—three different very incomplete patterns—laid it out on the dining-room table and looked at it and I gave some serious thought to polishing it, but I didn’t go so far as to polish it, but it looked beautiful all laid out, a big arch of forks, a little arch of knives, five big serving spoons, some tiny salt spoons, and a little grouping of novelty items, like oyster forks. No teaspoons at all. One of the dinner forks from my great aunt’s set fell into the dishwasher once when I was visiting her and it got badly notched by that twirly splasher in the bottom, and someone at work was telling me he knew a jeweler who fixed hurt silverware, so I’m planning to have that fixed, it’s all ready to go. And I even got together all my broken sets of beads—I sorted them all out—the sight of all those beads jumbled together on my bedside table was making me unhappy every morning, and now they’re ready to be restrung, the pink ones in one envelope, and the green ones in one envelope, and the parti-colored Venetian ones in one envelope—and I have them on my dining-room table too, ready to go.”