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pedestrian. I think I have tp stay with the truth.”
    “All right, tell me what the most recent thing or event was that aroused you.”
    “The idea of making this call,” he said.
    “Before that.”
    “Let me think back,” he said. “The Walt Disney character of Tinker Bell. I was just leaving the video store, and I came to this big cardboard display of
Peter Pan
, the Walt Disney cartoon
Peter Pan
, which has just been rereleased, with a TV beside it playing the movie.”
    “When was this?”
    “This was today, about an hour and a half ago, I guess. I rented three X-rated tapes.”
    “And you’re going to play them later this evening?”
    “Maybe. Maybe not, I don’t know. I was going to play them when I got home.”
    “The second you got home.”
    “That’s right.”
    “What about dinner?”
    “I ate at a pizza place.”
    “What kind?”
    “Small mushroom anchovy.”
    “All right. So you got home with the tapes …”
    “Yeah, and I put them on top of the TV and got out of my work clothes and put on a bathrobe …”
    “Just a bathrobe?”
    “Well, I have my T-shirt and underwear on underneath, of course.”
    “White underwear?”
    “Gray, white, somewhere in that range. Anyway, I came out and saw the pile of X-rated tapes on top of my TV, and they’re in these orange boxes. The store uses brown boxes for their normal tapes, like adventure, comedy, slasher, etcetera, and then they use a whole different color, an orange box, for the adult tapes. It’s to avoid confusion, because now there are so many X-rated Christmas tapes and X-rated versions of
Cinderella
and all that. And I’d never seen two of these particular tapes before, but of course I knew what was in them anyway, and I heartily approved of it, I’m enthusiastically pro-pornography, obviously, but suddenly I foresaw my own crude arousal—I saw myself fast-forwarding through the numbing parts, trying to find some image that was good, or at least good enough to come to, and the sound of the VCR as it fast-forwards, that industrial robot sound, and I suddenly thought no, no, even though one of the tapes has got Lisa Melendez in it, who I think is just …delightful, I thought no, I don’t want to see these right now. Fortunately, I’d also bought a
Juggs
magazine, because this anti-orange-tape reaction has hit me before. There are just times when you want a fixed image.”
    “There’s always the pause button,” she suggested.
    “Well, but then you get those white sawtooth lines across the screen.”
    “Four heads are better than two, as they say. Of course, the resolution is better on the magazine page, I imagine.”
    “It certainly is,” he said. “But it’s much more than that! Don’t laugh, really. No movie still is ever as good as a photograph. A photograph catches a woman at a point where her frans are at their perfect point of expressiveness—the soul of her frans is revealed, or rather the souls
are
revealed, because each has a separate personality. Nipples in still pictures are as varied and as communicative as women’s eyes, or almost.”
    “Frans?”
    “Yeah, sometimes I don’t like the word ‘breasts’ and all those slangish synonyms. I mean, just look at the drop in arousingness between
Playboy
magazine and the exact same women when they’re
moving
from pose to pose on the
Playboy
channel. It’s true that I don’t actually get the
Playboy
channel, so I see everything on it through those houndstooth and herringbone cycles of the scrambling circuit, and I keep flipping back and forth between it and the two channels on either side of it because sometimesfor an instant the picture is startled into visibility just after you switch the channel, and you’ll catch this bright yellow torso and one full fran with a fire-engine-red nipple, and then it teeters, it falters, and collapses—and I’ve noticed that the scrambling works least well and you can see things best when nothing is moving in the TV image,