This Is Your Fantasy Phone Call
He wanted a dalliance. I wanted a magazine story. It was my wit against his libido.
The call found me on a weekday afternoon when I still had the house to myself. It pierced the silence of carpeted rooms where nothing moved but cat paws and the pen in my hand, making notes for a magazine story. I reached for my red Princess phone: “Rona Maynard.”
Who would it be this time? Cancer researcher, maybe. Dean of the country’s top MBA program. VP of human resources at a bank. As a magazine writer with a full dance card, I put out calls daily to people of position. Let them picture me in a suit fresh from the cleaner’s, not sweats with permanent olive oil stains. Some freelance writers, it was said, got a subversive charge from interviewing honchos while wearing nothing but a bath towel. I had a sense of decorum.
“Well, hell-oo there!” A honeyed barstool voice, all tease and promise. Could he hear me thinking he had the wrong number? He moseyed up to the point: “This is your fantasy phone call. Are you alone?”
My son would not be home for hours. My Princess phone could morph into a seraglio, and no one but the caller would hear my sighs and moans. None would be on offer, but the velvet-voiced stranger intrigued me. Who was he? What led him to me?
Random-dialing, he said. He flicked the buttons till they took him to a female voice with spark and no kids yelling in the background. A voice like mine. He had a feeling about me, a sweet one. Typical barstool guy, laying on the flattery. I had never hung out out in bars but figured I knew what went on there. Mr. Velvet little dreamed he was dealing with an ace interviewer. He had a story under lock and key. I intended to jimmy the safe.
People share the most intimate things with a stranger they cannot see. I made my reputation interviewing unknown women about their private sorrows—the toddler taken by social services; the husband who up and left, just like that; the lonely struggle with postpartum depression. They never thought their experience mattered until I assured them that it did. I let them ramble, circling around the heart of the story, while they gathered courage to step into its darkest corners. Although they didn’t know it, they’d been waiting for a witness who would listen with her full attention and ask, “How did that feel?”
I asked, as if he headed up research for the Kinsey Institute, “What are women’s most common sexual fantasies?”
Their real names would remain a secret between me and the magazine’s fact-checker, whose job it was to verify that I didn’t invent the whole story. They would be hidden while they shared that story with hundreds of thousands of readers. And they would never speak to me again, much less run into me at parent/teacher night. As a woman’s tea cooled on a kitchen table in Halifax or Vancouver, she’d say to me at my desk in Toronto, “You’re the first person I’ve told about this.”
It crossed my mind that Mr. Velvet might be a story. I asked, as if he headed up research for the Kinsey Institute, “What are women’s most common sexual fantasies?”
“Oh, getting it on with a neighbor. Or Bruce Springsteen in a balloon.” I probed, he parried. What was so hot about neighbors? (I didn’t fancy any of mine.) We were all mad for Springsteen in 1980-something, but why a balloon? The story might still come into focus if I kept Mr. Velvet talking. He talked, alright. About what he sensed in me. The fun we might have if I let myself go. I had mentioned that I was a writer, the kind who talked to invisible strangers for days at a stretch. My earnestness appeared to turn him on.
If I had a calling in the Land of Kink, it was Grammar Dominatrix. Dangle a modifier, naughty boy, and I’ll put you over my knee. Can’t suppress the urge to say “I” instead of “me?” Twenty whacks with a ruler on your pink and tender tush. I was not about to release Grammar Dom, but maybe he could hear her in my voice. Maybe he’d already unzipped his jeans.
“There must be a reason why he has to get his jollies phoning strangers,” I mused to my husband.
The most revealing things people told me often didn’t make the editor’s cut. I saved both the spiral notebooks and my transcripts. They held fragments of human souls, and a soul should not be trashed. If you are a writer, it might be of use one day. Joan Didion nailed it in Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “Writers are always selling somebody out.”
Mr. Velvet hadn’t given me anything worth saving. I looked at my watch. “It’s time to start dinner.”
He let out a sigh. “Oooh, what are you cooking?”
“Stuffed Cornish hens.”
True, and he wanted the whole truth, the wild rice, tarragon and dried cranberries. His voice in my ear was a caress. “I must admit I’m disappointed. With you it would have been special.”
“There must be a reason why he has to get his jollies phoning strangers,” I mused to my husband. Over Cornish hen and a suitable wine, we ran through some possibilities: quadriplegic, 300 pounds, disfigured in a fire. Neither of us questioned the operative word, “strangers.”
Nearly 40 years after my encounter with Mr. Velvet, I have a strong hunch that he knew me and knew he would find me home alone. Maybe he lived on my block (that neighbor fixation). He might have worked with my husband, serviced our drains or traded quips with me at some long-forgotten party. He was no random dialer, I am all but certain. Bruce Springsteen in a balloon? Journalism 101: People make shit up.
Anne Sexton once said of a friend’s poem that it grew like a bone inside of her heart. Stories told by invisible stories had a similar effect on me. They poked my tender places, both alien and familiar. Every story worth telling is birthed by a feeling, and collecting those stories expanded my capacity to feel without asking me to reveal anything of myself. My cache of interview notes did not survive our move to a condo, but I thought I’d remember the souls within. They’re gone forever now, like most of the magazines that once employed me. The skeleton of a vanished life.
Mr. Velvet, though, might as well have called yesterday. I wonder now what he felt, besides a tickle in the loins. How it was to be him. If I’d asked, he might have told me. What I might have answered, I have no idea.
Thank you, friends new and old, for joining me here on my virtual front porch. Amazement Seeker turns one year old today, and I’m delighted to have you with me. You’re the reason I keep writing. And as I hit “publish,” I always wonder what you’ll have to say.
Dive in, people. Who do you think was calling? (I’m betting on a neighbor. He had the best voice on the block.) Could this story happen today, when we answer our phones in checkout lines and on buses? Have you ever revealed a secret to a stranger, perhaps one you couldn’t see? P.S. to Anne Sexton fans: that lovely quote about the bone in the heart is from page 66 of Anne Sexton: a Self-Portrait in Letters, edited by Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames.
Now’s the perfect time to share my first post, in which my seatmate on a plane tells a story I’ll never forget. And in one of my most popular posts, I discover the tender side of someone I’d taken always disliked.
Everything I post here is free to read and will remain so. If you have the means and the inclination to pay for a subscription, I’d be thrilled. If not, there are other ways to speed this project on. Click the heart, share a post, share your thoughts. Or just read quietly and come back soon. I know you’re out there. Your presence guides me.
I love your comment that your interviewees were "circling around the heart of the story, while they gathered courage to step into its darkest corners". You come from the world of magazines, I come from the world of social research - both use interviews to get their material. I spent most of my life working with interview (and sometimes focus group) material and absolutely loved it, because you got so close to understanding a lot about the human heart – in my case, people dying from AIDS, working in hospice care, parenting a child with disabilities, living with cancer and more and more and more.
I realised early on that I was a lousy interviewer (for complex reasons) but worked with two of the best qualitative interviewers in the UK (they were the leading interviewers of what was probably the best social research agency). I asked one how she did it and she talked about how she "tucked away" an early response that was a hint of something deeper until it was the right moment to "go for the kill". Sounds like your quote from the other side. The funny thing was that neither woman had any interest in writing up the interviews and I was known as having the knack of taking their material and using it sensitively. Worked wonderfully until they got too old to carry on (both well into their 70s). Thanks for taking me down memory lane.
You have lived a most interesting life, but that is just the start: You write of it all with power.