Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 131

Baker’s Vox and The Fermata

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II.
Vox is about giving “voice” to sex and sexual play and the inherent freedom found
in doing so; it is about speaking the language of sex and giving utterance to the
desires and fantasies of a healthy sex life. In this way Vox is very much about
choice. The choice of two people to indulge in their sexual desires and to indulge
their sexual needs through self-pleasure. The human element in their love making
is not the physical contact shared between a man and a woman. Instead it is audi
tory. They are joined through voice: the human voice connects each with the
absent other. Together, their voices transmit the erotic narratives and fantasies
they speak; their voices, too, serve as a conduit to bring about the physical plea
sure they each seek.
It begins innocently enough: “‘What are you wearing?’” “‘What are you
doing?’” Simple questions. Questions asked to begin a conversation. Questions
asked to get a sense of each other. But once answered, “‘a white shirt,’” and
“‘lying on my,’” respectively, the questions and answers they evoke are raised to a
different level. And the talk circulates freely through the landscape of sexual need
and desire. What follows is talk, lots of talk, an eruption of talk, an eruption of
utterance and of voice. And we? Well, we are eavesdroppers, perhaps “audio
philes” of a type who listen in on their private conversations now made public. Or,
at least, that’s the illusion. But we are aware of this; we enter gamely into the
illusion. As we read, they speak; and as they speak, we “listen.” As they fantasize,
we fantasize. And as they make more and more of their imagined world known—
a world of real sex and fantasy sex, sex in showers and sex at work, sex with one or
two or three or a number of different people, or, even, sex alone—^we are tanta
lized and we are hooked. And perhaps like Rousseau’s belle dame, we find our
selves “reading with one hand,” too.
Vox weaves its narrative frame around the story of Jim and Abby, two
people who spend most of one late evening engaged in a long, continuous tele
phone conversation—a conversation interrupted only when one or the other pauses
to adjust or to take off clothing or to get something cool to drink. Theirs is an
intimate conversation, though they are not intimate friends. In fact, they are strangers
who have met on this phone line by accident; and yet, they discover in each other
a person with whom they can share their most secret and intimate fantasies and
pleasures and with whom there is no fear or embarrassment. Each alone in his or
her respective home, it is their own private sexual need that has prompted their
calls. And though sexual desire and gratification is not the whole of their conver
sation, it is, however, the certain theme.
We take stock of their imaginations. Because they are separated by a
continent it is incumbent on each of them to rely on the imagination—that combi
nation of the prior experienced matched up with the excitedly new—to translate