Alternatives to Sex

by Stephen McCauley

  My Wife

  Edward called the tenant on the first floor of my house my “wife” because he was convinced that my relationship with her had taken on the most destructive qualities of a bad marriage. He wasn’t entirely wrong in this, but I resented the term even so. She—a painter called Kumiko Rothberg, speaking of fake names—was perpetually several months behind on the rent. As of that morning, she owed me $3,000, plus the $500 I’d loaned her to pay off a debt she owed to a previous landlord. A month or so earlier, I’d made the mistake of telling Edward that I’d let her come upstairs to use my ironing board and had ended up doing the ironing myself. I’d resisted the temptation to confess that since then she sometimes left a few rumpled articles of clothing in the front hall with an attached note reading, “If you have time,” and that somehow, I always found the time. I hoped it would encourage her to be more diligent about paying her rent. So far, this hadn’t worked.

  Edward claimed he never would have allowed the situation to get so out of control. This undoubtedly was true; like most people who are one hundred percent submissive in the bedroom, Edward was a tyrant everywhere else in his life.

  Oh, Really?

  “I was going to call you anyway,” Edward said. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to discuss with you for a while. I’m about to make some big changes and I want to talk to you about them.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yes, really. And don’t take that condescending tone. I’m very serious about this.”

  “What are they?”

  “I’m not going to tell you now. It’ll give us something to discuss over dinner. You certainly don’t tell me what’s going on with you.”

  Edward was always contemplating making big changes in his life, but usually they turned out to be something like replacing the bathroom vanity with a pedestal sink or starting a new fitness regimen that required the hands-on assistance of a paid professional who happened to be devastatingly handsome and muscular. I was happy that the planned changes never went deeper than that, since, in my mind, Edward was nearly perfect exactly as he was—due mostly to his many imperfections.

  “I’ll come by your apartment at eight on Thursday,” I told him. “Where are you off to?”

  “Dallas and then some other hell spot, back to Chicago, and then LA, then home.”

  “Have a safe trip.”

  “That’s my hope, but unfortunately, my fate is in the hands of arrogant pilots, hungover mechanics, lunatic baggage handlers, and the minimum-wage kids checking the carry-on luggage for guns. Here’s my gate.”

  The phone went dead.

  When commercial airliners had been used as weapons, Edward had started to talk openly about job-related safety concerns for the first time since I’d known him. He was worried about more terrorist attacks and, equally, about the dismal state of maintenance standards in the face of major financial losses by the airlines. His status in the world had changed radically since the events of the previous September; after years of condescension and derision, being thought of as an unwholesome cross between a cocktail waitress and an airborne geisha, Edward was now treated with the hushed reverence generally reserved for military personnel, Nobel Prize winners, and really good dermatologists.

  I was happy that Edward finally was being given some of the respect he deserved, but all things considered, it seemed like small compensation.

  Previous Addictions

  As I was leaving the house for work, I thought that if I stuck to my celibacy resolution for a couple of months, I might be able to tell a few friends about my recent adventures. All of my previous addictive behavior had been of the most deeply shameful kind: an obsession with vacuum cleaning; a tendency to furtively clean a sink or bathtub when I went to someone’s house for dinner; maintaining a small file of index cards with tips for using hair spray, nail polish remover, lemonade mix, and other household standards as cleaning agents; the ironing thing. During the scattered periods of my life when I’d been in long-term relationships, I’d been ashamed by my adeptness at fidelity, which had made me feel unmanly. I’d used evasive language and innuendo to convey the impression that I was leading a wildly promiscuous life. But once I’d added promiscuity to my repertoire of diversions, I’d done my best to imply that I spent most of my evenings alone at home reading the complete works of Simone de Beauvoir, an intellectual with top-shelf name recognition whose work no one is eager to discuss with anything resembling specificity. If I ever did reorganize my life and take on one of those someday-before-I-die literary projects, I’d feel a lot more comfortable once again assuming the identity of a sexual libertine, using the details I’d accumulated in the past year. Before locking the door of my house behind me, I rushed back upstairs to my bedroom and put a copy of The Mandarins on my bedside table. You never know.

  This morning, there was no basket of laundry from Kumiko waiting for me in the entryway, a huge relief for about one second, before I began to worry that she hadn’t liked the way I’d done her ironing last week. I was tempted to knock on her door and assure her that with my new iron, I’d do a better job next time, but that was a bit much, even for me.

  I opened up my umbrella and made a dash for my car, glistening with rain in the driveway. My house had a garage, a small bunker of concrete blocks with two windows, covered in vines, but I’d never used it once since purchasing the place. About six months earlier, I’d let Kumiko move her painting supplies into the building and set up a studio. Maybe, I’d reasoned, if she felt she was getting more for her low rent she’d be more likely to pay it. So far, I’d seen no signs that she’d used it for anything but storage.

  The car windows fogged up as soon as I closed the door behind me. On the passenger seat, there was a paper with my handwritten directions to Carlo’s apartment. A reminder of past mistakes. I ripped it in half and put it in the trash container I had Velcroed to the dashboard. I felt lighter and calmer already. Breathe in, breathe out. I couldn’t imagine why I hadn’t thought of abstinence sooner. I sat for a moment folded up in the driver’s seat with the engine idling and my eyes closed. I pictured returning to the driveway after work, walking into the house, and picking the book off my night table. The Mandarins. Excellent title. I had a clear image of it in my mind. I felt relaxed and in control of my life as I walked to the chaise longue in the corner of my bedroom, turned on the light, and began to read. These were pleasures I’d enjoyed in the recent past, and with a little discipline, they would be mine again. I’d had a year of posttraumatic self-indulgence, and now it was time to move on. I opened the glove compartment, stuffed my mobile supply of condoms into the trash container, and backed out of the driveway. It was going to be a very good day.

  Too Damned Happy

  It had been a dry summer, and that morning’s rain, far from being an annoyance, was a welcome novelty, a suggestion that nature was, perhaps, getting back on a path of normalcy. And maybe, therefore, life in general would resume a normal rhythm at some point.

  I’d been at my desk for about an hour when I looked up to enjoy the sight of Massachusetts Avenue being washed by a suddenly fierce downpour and saw two people huddled under a large black umbrella gazing at the real estate listings posted in the window of the office. Given the position of the umbrella, I couldn’t see their faces, but there was something about the way they were leaning in toward each other and wearing twin raincoats that made me think they were either headed for or had just come from next door, a brick building affectionately referred to as the Nut House because so many shrinks had offices there. I was familiar with the place, having spent a few afternoons in it myself a number of years ago. Fortunately, I was declared cured after a mere eight sessions, on the very day that my insurance coverage ran out.

  The Nut House was a boost to businesses in the neighborhood. People were always rushing from their shrink appointments and heading to a bakery around the corner or the restaurant across the street to binge on instant gratification. Or coming into Cambridge Pr
operties to signal a change in their lives by buying a new place to install their familiar miseries.

  “What do you think?” I said aloud. “Headed to see their couples counselor, or just on their way out?”

  Deirdre Fisk, occupant of the desk next to mine, leaned away from her computer and peered out the window. I glanced at her screen and saw that she was shopping online for ceiling fans. Deirdre, an extremely successful saleswoman, spent a lot of her time in the office shopping for overpriced appliances, face creams made by eastern European countesses, handcrafted furniture, and antique wallpaper. She was disappointed in nearly every item she bought via the computer (I could relate to this) and always ended up sending it back.

  “I couldn’t tell you,” Deirdre said. “I can’t get past the outfits. I hate couples who dress alike. And raincoats with belts? Horrible. They’re probably one of those smug, self-satisfied couples who go around advertising how unhappy and discontented they are to any sap who’ll listen. ‘We’re about to get a divorce.’ ‘He’s an abusive drunk.’ They’re always so proud of themselves. You have no idea how hurtful it is.”

  I confessed that I hadn’t noticed the belts, but otherwise found the raincoats dashing. It was a mistake to venture into the subject of clothes with Deirdre. She loved talking about clothing and generally had scathing views that she delivered with intimidating authority. Shortly after she came to the office two years earlier, I started paying a lot more attention to my own wardrobe, hoping to avoid her scorn. I’d developed a friendly relationship with the owner of a consignment shop in Boston who called me up whenever he got in anything that might fit my tall, skinny body.

  It was also a mistake to bring up the subject of couples around Deirdre. In terms of age, she lived in my untrendy, forty-something neighborhood and had been married to a homely, arrogant lawyer named Raymond for nearly twenty years. The central problem in her life (her version) was that she and Raymond were, and always had been, too compatible, too much in love, too damned happy. According to Deirdre, people snubbed you socially, condescended to you intellectually, and questioned the depth of your emotions if you were happily married. It didn’t help that she generally worked with divorcing couples funneled to her by Raymond.

  The man shook the rain out of his big black umbrella, held the door open for the woman in a courtly way, and the two entered. It was close to lunchtime and Deirdre and I were the only ones in our small office, one of the few independent real estate offices in town that hadn’t been gobbled up by a conglomerate.

  “Do you want to help them, or should I?” I asked Deirdre.

  “I was just about to go out and buy a soda,” she said, code for huddling in the alley behind the building and smoking. She pushed herself back from her desk. “You take them. I’m not in the mood to listen to them bragging about how close they are to divorce. You can deal with it better than I can, being single and all.”

  When it comes to dealing with gay colleagues, most people follow a Don’t Ask policy, as if posing a question about dating or romantic interests would be unacceptably invasive. In all the years I’d been working at Cambridge Properties, no one had ever questioned me about my social life, and although I was open with everyone in a general way, I’d never shared a detail of same, aside from occasionally dropping the name of a man I might be dating into a conversation, something that had never produced a single follow-up question. This situation made me feel inferior to my coworkers—a bit like a maiden aunt with no prospects—and oddly enough, simultaneously superior, as if I had a wildly sophisticated private life that was above the tedium of marital squabbles and framed photographs of smiling spouses.

  Being single and all, I took on the couple, and Deirdre went out for her Marlboro Ultra Light.

  Rocks and Pills

  “We’re not looking aggressively,” the man said. “I should tell you that right off, just so you’ll know. I don’t want you to end up feeling you wasted your time with us.”

  We were standing in front of the empty reception desk near the door, and the man was having a tough time figuring out what to do with his dripping umbrella. Polite to a fault. An attractive fault. I like people who make an effort with the small details of everyday manners, holding open doors, not dripping all over your carpets, saying thank you for insignificant favors.

  I was convinced that manners were a dying, possibly dead art, the victim of talk radio and a growing suspicion that anything less than all-out bullying was an admission of weakness, an open invitation to telemarketers and suicide bombers.

  “Don’t worry about my time,” I said. “In the end, it’s a lot less work for me if you don’t buy anything. You’ll be doing me a favor.”

  He grinned at me. “I feel better already.”

  He was a good-looking man with the sculpted face of an aging runner. His graying hair was brushed straight back off his forehead and slicked down close to his scalp, the lines of the comb clearly delineated. He was dressed and groomed—a dark suit under the now-open raincoat and that arranged hair—as if he was about to appear in court or make an important presentation, and so I wasn’t surprised later when I learned that he was that profitable, nebulous thing, a business consultant. There was something in his manner—confidence mixed with empathic generosity—that made me certain he’d grown up with advantages he wasn’t afraid of having taken away from him.

  “He’s not looking aggressively,” the woman put in. “He’s looking passive-aggressively.” She pursed her lips, and then smiled, erasing the hostility of the comment.

  “Anyplace in particular that caught your eye out there?” I asked.

  “The three-bedroom on Avon Hill. The ‘Manhattan-style’ layout?”

  She put an ironic spin on this last part, a jab at the silly description of the apartment that, it so happens, I had written.

  About ten years earlier, I’d been hired by the owner of Cambridge Properties to write the copy they use in their listings. It was a part-time project I took on to fill a few hours per week after leaving (on the advice of my eight-session therapist) a lucrative but debilitating position at a Boston advertising firm. One thing had led to another, and within a short while, I’d earned my license and was selling. Real estate was, in my case, less lucrative than advertising, but it was also less soul-numbing because you’re at least selling people something they need—shelter—even if at vastly inflated prices.

  It didn’t take me long to realize that the key to writing successful listings is to describe everything in relation to something it isn’t: a Manhattan-style layout in a Cambridge apartment; a country kitchen in a downtown condominium; in-town convenience for a suburban ranch. It appeals to the basic human desire to have everything at once and nothing for too long. (“Great resale potential!”) And also, it tricks people into believing that their lives are a little better or more exciting or glamorous than they really are.

  As I led them back to my desk, we made our introductions: William Collins, Sam Thompson, Charlotte O’Malley. They told me they had a house in Nahant, a rocky peninsula that sticks out into the ocean north of Boston. It was one of those anomalous scraps of Northeast coastline, a fragment of Maine dragged down on a glacier a few million years ago. Far enough away from urban noise and congestion to be desirable as a summer retreat, but close enough to downtown to be within easy year-round commuting distance and to have views of the city skyline.

  Oddly enough, the best way to convince someone to move to a new locale is to praise the place they’re trying to leave. “I’ve heard it’s beautiful out there,” I said.

  Samuel lit up at this. “It’s spectacular,” he said. “Views, ocean breezes, incredible sunsets. Really fabulous.” He swept a graceful hand—long fingers with a wedding ring floating loosely on one—through the air, setting the scene for me. It was an unnecessarily theatrical gesture that, along with use of the word “fabulous,” made me suspect he knew I was gay. I have a theory that heterosexuals use the word “fabulous” more frequently when in t
he company of gay men but I had no way of testing out the theory. “It’s another world,” he added.

  I nodded enthusiastically, even though “another world” usually turns out to be a euphemism for racially segregated.

  “One of the reasons we’re thinking about leaving,” Charlotte said, studying the listing sheet for the Manhattan-style apartment, “is that it’s just too spectacular. Too fabulous. It’s so incredible, you feel like leaping from the rocks.” She made another little pout and went back to the sheet.

  “Some of us,” Samuel said. “Not all of us.” He spoke in a cheerful, reassuring way, issuing his words through a big smile and showing off a set of teeth that had been whitened to the color of fresh snow.

  “True. Some of us are happy all the time. Others of us not. Others of us sometimes forget to take our antidepressants and start to think about leaping from the rocks.” She looked at me and gave me an ironic smile that made me feel we were accomplices.

  Meaningful Relationships

  I was tempted to ask her what antidepressants she was taking. I was embarrassed by the fact that I wasn’t taking any mood-altering drugs myself—it seemed so arrogant not to be these days, and obviously I would have benefited—but it made me feel like part of the mainstream to discuss them. Nothing got people into a more open, animated mood than discussing their medication. For many of my friends, their relationship with their antidepressants was the central relationship in their lives. Healthier, probably, than a relationship with your iron, but more expensive. They reveled in describing the distinctive way this or that pill interacted with their unique chemistry, as if they were describing a virtue or a personal accomplishment. “She didn’t like Wellbutrin, but I’ve never had any problems with it. It’s not for everyone, but for me, it’s been wonderful.”

  Should We? Shouldn’t We?

  “I hear there are a lot of those in Nahant,” I said. “Rocks.”