Adventures of the Artificial Woman by Thomas Berger Page B

out. The husband’s position regarding the kids had always been hands off. “Sports,” she added cryptically, and then explained: “All he does when he’s home is watch sports.”
    When Phyllis entered the washroom for the first time she saw what May meant about its lack of cleanliness, and having a few minutes of privacy owing to Larry’s rule that only one woman at a time could be away from the phones, she found a mop, a bucket, and other cleaning materials in a closet and quickly washed the floor, Ajaxed the washbasin and faucets, and swabbed out the toilet.
    Phyllis would have had no idea of what to say to a caller, but Larry had given her sufficient guidelines to get started, and she learned from every call she took.
    â€œI’m Phyllis. Tell me what I can do for you.” She could have used a pseudonym like the others—May’s was Felicity—but she had no personal identity to conceal.
    â€œI’ve been a bad boy, Phyllis,” was the way many callers began. “I must be punished. My name is, uh, Paul.”
    It was not her business to ask what kind of crime could properly be punished by what a stranger said on the telephone. “You deserve no mercy, Paul,” she said sternly. “Get your clothes off, you worm.”
    â€œI’m naked, Mistress.”
    â€œMy rawhide whip has been soaking in vinegar. Every time it hits your naked ass, it’ll open up a deep cut, and when the vinegar meets a bleeding wound, the pain will be agonizing.”
    â€œOhhhh, do it, Mistress…. What about my balls?”
    â€œI’m going to rip them off.”
    â€œMy God, I’m ready to come right now.”
    Phyllis was supposed to delay this outcome until the customer had been on the line for at least five minutes, arousing him but then periodically curbing the arousal, but she was by nature, which is to say by design, inclined to a mode of operation unsympathetic to delay. She also found it hard to understand why a man would find so desirable a postponement of his satisfaction that he would pay extra for it.
    But customers often wanted her to go into painstaking detail about what she would do with their sexual organs, rectum, mouth, even ears and nostrils. Some might by contrast provide a lengthy account of what they would do with hers. They could not of course be criticized for an ignorance of her material composition. Those who wanted to chew the crotch of her dirty underwear were not aware that it would smell exactly as it had when she put it on.
    Now and again someone called who wanted her to play the bad child, to speak in a high-pitched voice and in fantasy lie across his naked lap while he lowered her little white cotton panties and spanked her tiny pink butt until she was so sexually excited that she would rape him by one means or another, which seemed to Phyllis impractical if she were as small as she was supposed to be.
    Occasionally she could not forbear from pointing out absurdities in what a customer would say or ask, even though Larry had warned her against negative expression that did not enhance the pleasure of the caller.
    For example, you could threaten to do physical harm, castration and other mutilations, flogging, choking, et cetera, but not reflect on the man’s taste, judgment, or morality. “Remember, this is all just talk, Phyl. The customer’s always right if he keeps paying.” Yet when a man told her that what he wanted to hear was the sounds she would make if after buggering her with a Coke bottle he snuffed her with a razor blade across the throat, Phyllis believed she should point out that while such fantasies were not illegal, any attempt to realize them would be against the law.
    Comparing notes with May during the periods when neither was on the phone, Phyllis observed that no callers yet had asked to speak about the straightforward sort of intercourse in which the penis is inserted into the vagina and