Sweet Nothings: Vox

My amateur actor friend at work recently had coffee with a fellow actor and they got to talking about novels they could adapt for a local production. The author they were discussing as a possibility was Nicholson Baker, who wrote Checkpoint and Vox. Our library system only stocked the latter, and since it is a short book of a verbatim session of telephone sex, it seemed a good match for the lust list.

Published in 1993, way before instant messaging, skype, and iPhone pictures, two characters, Abby and Jim, use one of those advertised numbers in the back of an X-rated magazine to do what you do for phone sex. (I couldn't help but remember one Slacker's writing class assignment to do an entire short story using only dialogue ... why didn't we think of a vehicle like this?) (At only 165, and readily falling into the construct that the plot's advancement was moving at a $2.95 per minute pace, I read this tiny paperback of a piece last night in a couple of hours.)

Well, I really don't want this to be a sordid repetition of what male and female accomplish. My interest, upon reflection, focuses on how a couple develops erotic images to trigger their sex lives. Like traveling salesmen, just dialing one of these numbers is a "cold call." Unless the woman has a script and stock provocative lines, making a conversation arousing takes some doing. Jim's stories and questions are expert in sounding out what Abby finds exciting. He ends up almost seeming to be the professional testing flatteries, asking about previous real encounters, and making it all seemed anchored to her physical setting. (The first line of the novel, as all the best first lines, is a grabber simply because it is so real, something every reader probably said or heard over the telephone at one time or another -- hopefully often -- "What are you wearing?")

Not to diminish, by any covert intention, the importance of smell, touch and taste, Vox could have easily been called Ears, as it relies almost exclusively on that least defenseless sense of hearing, the door directly into the most erotic organ, the brain. Jim uses his voice, not modulating it in false tones of seduction, but to set the stage to engage memories of other tactile and visual sensations: mercury street lights going through the spectrum as they go on of an evening; feeling a hot outdoor shower on a wet bathing suit; adding some bourbon to cool down too hot orange tea.

One cover short review praised the book for portraying the woman as being as sexually charged as the man. But the book is an exercise in long-distance foreplay as Jim nudges Abby along like a skittish foal and Abby moves from a listener directing him back to story lines and from asking "met you at happy hour" type of questions.

As I usually do, I look into these novels to see where I think the author breaks through into the character or plot, to overlay his focus or to have some fun with the reader. Baker has Jim go into a used bookstore and he buys old, beat up Romance paperbacks because he imagines their condition has to do with what the female readers did, alone with themselves, after a particularly sexy scene. Jim is turned on by thinking of women turning themselves on. A nice contrast to Humbert here where Lolita's satisfaction never enters the story and Humbert is too arrogant to think that mutual sexual fulfillment might be important to lust and passion.

So, no everlasting love (despite exchanging phone numbers) and no personal growth or insight through a red to blue flame of desire, but what do you expect from an investment of 150 minutes ... let's see that would total $442.50! No wonder these sleazy businessmen make money.