New Yorker Fiction 2015

A WRITER'S WIT
Life would be a lot easier if conversations were rewindable and erasable, like videos. Or if you could instruct people to disregard what you just said, like in a courtroom.
Sophie Kinsella
Born December 12, 1969

Phone Sex for Real

Prager | Blair

December 14, 2015, Dana Spiotta, “Jelly and Jack”: In 1985 Syracuse, forty-one-year-old Jelly calls important, creative men by phone and induces them to fall in love with her. ¶ This narrative takes place in a time when people may have enjoyed speaking on the phone . . . enjoyed rampant paid phone sex, which is where one thinks this story is beginning. Yet it is one of those rare ones that seems to s-t-r-e-t-c-h time, unrolling second by delicious second:

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"And it worked like this: you found the words—out of a million possible words—that truly described the experience. That part, the search for the right language, was fun, almost like solving a puzzle. You thought of the word, and then you felt it in your mouth, pushed breath into it, and said it out loud. The sound of it contained the meaning—she had to hear the words to know if she had it right. Then, as it hung there, she revised it, re-attacked it, applied more words to it" (72).

Jelly takes great pains to make herself sound seductive, younger than her years, and lures men into falling in love with her—in spite of her “jelly doughnut,” stretch-mark laden body, which they never see.

"She would not call anytime. She would call on Sunday, at the same time. Only Sunday, and it would only be her calling him. Parameters. Predictability. That was the way it would work best for both of them, for this thing they were building between them" (72).

Each time the relationship reaches a certain point—a man wishes to see her photograph or meet her in person—Jelly breaks it off. With Jack, a film score composer living in Los Angeles, the situation plays out differently. She seems actually to fall for him. As with previous phone partners, to extend their time a bit, she sends Jack a photograph of a young, lithe friend, a mother of one of her blind clients, whom Jelly works with in real life, having nearly lost her own sight years before.

"It was the first time she’d understood what the phone could be—a weapon of intimacy" ( 76).

Spiotta’s book, Innocents and Others: A Novel, comes out in March 2016.
Photograph, Alex Prager
Design, Kelly Blair

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READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 
Date of Original Post:
11/13/14 — Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
11/20/14 — "My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
11/27/14 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
12/04/14 — "Ghost Riders"
12/11/14 — "The Best Mud"
12/18/14 — "Handy to Some"
12/25/14 — "Blight"
01/01/15 — "A Gambler's Debt"
01/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
01/15/15 — "Men at Sea"
01/22/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
01/29/15 — "Engineer"
02/05/15 — "Snarked"
02/12/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
02/19/15 — "The Age I Am Now"
02/26/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
 
Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
03/12/15 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
03/26/15 — "The Best Mud"
04/02/15 — "Handy to Some"
04/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
04/16/15 — "Men at Sea"
04/23/15 — "My Long-Playing Records"
04/30/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
05/07/15 — "Snarked"
05/21/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
05/28/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
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