The Voice, Talking Dirty

Having moved from Los Angeles up to Sonoma County with First Wife and our infant daughter, I did the responsible thing, and got a wage-slave job processing words at a big horrible law firm in San Francisco. I’d been heartened to discover they had what they called the Environmental Group, only to learn it was in the business of defending Chevron Oil against the Sierra Club and similar plaintiffs. I was surrounded by gay male fellow “support staff” who disliked me for not being gay, and by overweight female support staff who disliked me for wondering why they bothered drinking Diet Coke, rather than the ordinary sort, when they went through whole boxes of chocolates over the course of an afternoon. The attorneys hated me for hating them — for being, in most cases, arrogant little twerps who couldn’t write grammatical English and who adored the Grateful Dead. 

I’d gotten the job by guile, passing the test on the IBM Stylewriter by finding on the floppy disk they gave me the test of someone who’d actually known something about the IBM Stylewriter, and copying it. I seemed not to be the first who’d had that idea. Reviewing what I pretended to have done, the examiner scratched his head and marvelled at how many people had been unable to complete one particular task. I bit my lip to keep from laughing. Or, for that matter, crying.

The firm had offices in three buildings in a miserable, windy, gloomy corner of the Financial District. Many afternoons on the 21st floor I would think that either I or one of my little twerp attorney tormentors would go out the window by afternoon's end.

I found solace where I could. One source of delight was the voice of one of the telephone operators who would page people over the firm intercom broadcast in all three buidlngs. |Her voice was pure carnality, a Lili St. Cyr advertisement in the back of a second-tier men’s magazine made sound — a contralto purr that combined what sounded to me like disdain with…well, lust.  ”Will Mr. Carmichael please phone his secretary?” she would purr, and what I would hear was “Do you honestly imagine you’re man enough for me, darling?” She made Kathleen Turner, in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, sound like Lisa Simpson. I’ve always found haughty women sexy. 

My marriage collapsed. I moved to The City. 

I learned The Voice’s owner was named N—. I contrived to meet her, and I did. I phoned the operators’ room and asked if she might be kind enough to record an answering machine message for me. She sounded flattered. 

There wasn’t a woman on earth who could have lived up to her voice, and N— didn’t. And she was ancient — in her mid-40s, probably, and I not yet out of my thirties, and still getting stopped in airports and asked for autographs by people certain I must be a rock star they couldn’t quite place. But that voice! I imagined us…getting intimate (have you ever noticed there’s no really good middle ground between “fucking” and “making love”?), and her purring into my ear, “Oh, God, darling! Fill me!” I ascertained she lived in Sonoma County too, and told her that on Sunday evenings I customarily drove past her neighborhood after driving my little girl back to her mother’s home. I hoped she’d invite me over. 

She invited me over.

I’d been without a woman for a couple of months, and N—‘s was the sexiest voice in the history of speech. Entering her apartment, though, I realised that some of the irresistible huskiness of The Voice was a result of N—’s chainsmoking. Her place reeked of cigarettes, but not as badly as it reeked of cats. Every surface was half an inch thick in cat hair.  I was nonetheless able to make out that she had perfectly dreadful taste. Not even the promise of The Voice talking dirty into my ear was enough to keep me there.