“I think it sounds hot,” I said. “However, I should warn you that I carry a gun in the left inside pocket of my leather jacket, so you’ll want to make sure to pinion my hands and disarm me first. I suggest some kind of restraining device.”

There was a long silence.

“What kind of gun?”

“A Ruger compact semiautomatic seven-shot .45 with a three-and-three-quarter-inch barrel,” I replied.

There was another long silence.

“You’re not going to get much range with a gun like that,” he said finally.

“How much range do I need? If you’re close enough to grab me, I’ll be close enough to hit you. Anyway, what do you care? You’re going to pin me and take it away before I get a chance to shoot, aren’t you?”

Silence again.

He started to laugh.

Click.

MARIAN PHILLIPS

on “Three Obscene Telephone Calls,” first published in Best American Erotica in 1999

My sister Meg was the original inspiration for “Three Obscene Telephone Calls.” I was visiting her in Florida—had just flown across the country and was fighting jet lag, trying to sleep on one side of her queen-size bed (she didn’t have a spare bed).

Meanwhile, Meg, who worked graveyard shift as a nurse, was smoking, drinking, and reading on the other side of the mattress. The phone rang; Meg picked it up and proceeded to have a low-voiced conversation until suddenly she laughed, said, “Good luck, buddy,” and hung up.

“Who was that?” I said.

“Well, I thought it was my boyfriend,” Meg said with a chuckle. “It turned out to be an obscene phone caller.”

“What did he do when you played along?”

“Oh, he was kind of sheepish,” Meg said. “I think he didn’t quite know how to handle it.”

Some time later, in San Francisco, my friend Megan Costello called me up and without preamble cooed, “Hi, what are you wearing?”

The first part of “Three Obscene Telephone Calls” is pretty much a verbatim report of our conversation.

It wasn’t until a couple of years after it was published that I realized that the story was my reaction to Saki’s “The Open Window.” I had adored Saki’s short stories when I was younger, in part because he wrote a number of stories about self-possessed female storytellers. It isn’t a common portrayal, and it definitely doesn’t fit in with the way women are “supposed” to react to obscene phone calls; we’re supposed to be angry or scared. And yet, there was my sister, acting like someone out of a Saki story, chuckling along and probably—knowing Meg—outdoing anything her hapless caller came up with.

Tennessee

Patrice Suncircle

I loved Rohn because she was neither a woman nor a man.