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no magazine pictures. And there was the ad.”
    “But you’ve called these numbers before, haven’t you?” she asked.
    “A few times, but with no real success. And I don’tthink I’ve ever called this very number before—2VOX.”
    “What do you mean by ‘success’?”
    “No women with any kind of spark. Or, actually, honestly, few women at all, period, except the ones who are paid by the phone service to make mechanical sexual small talk and moan occasionally. It’s mostly just men saying ‘Hey, any ladies out there?’ But then once in a while a real woman will call. And at least with this, as opposed to pictures, at least there’s the remote possibility of something clicking. Perhaps it’s presumptuous of me to say that we, you and I, click, but there is that possibility.”
    “Yes.”
    “In a way it’s like the radio. Do you know that I’ve never actually gone to a store and bought a record? That’s probably why I never learned to appreciate the fade-out, as you describe it, since on the radio, one song melts into the next. But it seems to me that you really need the feeling of radio luck in listening to pop music, since after all it’s about somebody meeting, out of all the zillions of people in the world, this one other nice person, or at least several adequate people. And so, if you buy the record, or the tape, then you
control
when you can hear it, when what you want is for it to be like luck, and like fate, and to zoom up and down the dial, looking for the song you want, hoping some station will play it—and the joy when it finally rotates around is so intense. You’re not hearing it, you’re overhearing it.”
    “On the other hand,” she said, “if you own the tape, you show you’ve got some self-knowledge: you know what you like, you know how to make yourself happy, you’re not just wandering in this welter of chance occurrences, passively hoping the disk jockey will come through. Maybe when you’re a little kid you find yourself out on a balcony in the sun and you think, My oh my, this feels unexpectedly nice. But later on you think, I know that I will feel a particular kind of pleasure if I walk out onto this balcony and sit in that chair, and I wish to experience that pleasure now.”
    “Well, right, and so the reason I called this line was that the pleasures I’d sought out weren’t doing it for me and there was this hope of luck, that I, that there would be a conversation …”
    “You never said what it was about the Disney Tinker Bell exactly, at the video store.”
    “Well, in the scene I saw, and this is the first time I’ve seen any of this particular Disney by the way, and you have to remember that I’m in an altered state there in the movie store, with my three orange movies and my men’s magazine in my briefcase, but in the scene, Tinker Bell zips around in a sprightly way, with lots of zings of the xylophone and little sparkly stars trailing her flight, and you think, right, typical fairy image, ho hum. And she’s
tiny
, she’s a tiny suburbanite, she’s about five inches tall. This insubstantial, magical, cutely Walt Disneyish woman. But then this thing happens. She pauses in mid-air,and she looks down at herself, and she’s got quite small breasts—”
    “I thought you didn’t like that word.”
    “You’re right, but sometimes it seems right. Actually most of the time it’s the right word. Anyway, she’s got quite small breasts but quite
large
little hips, and
large
little thighs, and she’s wearing this tiny little outfit that’s torn or jaggedly cut and barely covers her, and she looks down at herself, a lovely little pouty face, and she puts her hands on her hips as if to measure them, and she shakes her head sadly—too wide, too wide.
Oh
that got me hot! This tiny sprite with
big hips
. And then a second later she gets caught in a dresser drawer among a lot of sewing things and she tries to fly out the keyhole but—nope, her hips are too wide,