Alternatives to Sex

by Stephen McCauley

  Under Samuel and Charlotte’s name, I wrote: Attractive couple, handsome husband, drugged wife, empty nest, both have excellent teeth. Looking for a pied-à-terre with 2 bathrooms. Or nothing? He very touchy. Loves her? I wrote down the address of the place I’d shown them, and then, as an afterthought: Potential friends?

  When Jack’s phone rang, a few minutes later, he pointed at it and nodded. “I’ll bet you anything it’s that couple I just hung up on, crawling back to me. Do me a favor and tell them I’m out showing a house on Walnut to a couple of doctors from Weston.”

  It was Maria, Jack’s current girlfriend, calling from her cell phone while working out at the Harvard gym. Jack had amazing success with women, mostly younger and attractive women who were, I suspected, looking for an aggressive father figure. Aggressive father figures seemed to have a special appeal since the previous September. Most of the interactions I saw between the two involved Jack advising her on how to undercut some classmate or make trouble for a professor, advice she rejected out of hand but clearly loved hearing. The fact that she openly referred to him as “Daddy” answered any questions about what she saw in stocky, gray-haired Jack.

  He used exhaustion and age as an excuse for bragging about his sex life—“At this age, it isn’t easy keeping it up for three hours.” The one time I’d hinted at having a libido, he became distracted, as if we were heading into an uncomfortably dark part of the human experience.

  Where Am I?

  As I was trying to figure out the gist of Jack’s mumbled comments to “Baby,” Gina Fulmetti emerged from the cubbyhole that was her private office, and motioned to me. “I need to talk to you, William,” she said hoarsely.

  I held up a finger, indicating that I was in the middle of something I just had to finish. All of the agents at Cambridge Properties worked on commission, and so, technically speaking, we were paying our own salaries. Although there was no real boss to answer to, Gina owned the business, kept an eye on sales figures, paid the overhead, and was the person we all turned to for assistance. It was she who’d hired me to write ad copy and then encouraged me to get into sales. She was fond of me, I knew, mostly because I wasn’t aggressively ambitious and because I took time to get to know people. But the qualities of mine she liked also meant I wasn’t bringing in as much business as she thought I should.

  There were usually six full-time agents on staff, plus a few part-timers who appeared to be in it for the business cards and the insider information on sales, always good dinner-party conversation. Almost no one, except Jack, kept full-time hours, and it was rare that more than three people were at their desks at any given moment. And yet, given the prices around Boston and the frenzied atmosphere of buying, selling, and speculating, the overall sales figures for the office had been increasing every year I’d been there, and Gina was, according to Jack, “loaded.”

  Her private office was a small windowless box, cluttered with papers and magazines. I felt the usual clutch of claustrophobia as I stooped to enter and shut the door behind me. Gina pointed to a chair, folded her hands on her desk, and stared at me silently for what felt like five minutes. She was usually soft-spoken, but she had a way of looking through me that often made me feel I was melting under her gaze.

  “William,” she finally said.

  “Yes.”

  More silent staring ensued.

  “William.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where are you?”

  She had dazzling eyes, huge for her face and a lurid shade of green that was probably from colored contact lenses, but gave her a hypnotic power and made it almost impossible to turn away from her.

  “I’m sitting in front of your desk.”

  “That’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking you where you are. Where are you?” She ignored her ringing phone and continued to stare at me, waiting for an answer. “I had such high hopes for you. You were doing so well.”

  “Well…”

  “Now I can’t even see you.” She took a folder out of her desk drawer without breaking eye contact. “Your sales figures.”

  “Bad?”

  “Disappointing.”

  “I agree.”

  “Participation at office meetings.”

  “Disappointing?”

  “Erratic.”

  “I was having those problems with my contact lenses.”

  “I’m not scolding you, William.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m worried.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “You’ve gone, William. You’ve disappeared. I can’t find you.”

  I was used to disappointing myself, but I hated to disappoint Gina. She was an unwaveringly positive woman of about sixty-five who’d been through as much trauma and tragedy as anyone I knew. She’d lived through two bouts with cancer, a car accident in which her daughter had nearly died, an explosion of a propane tank that had destroyed two-thirds of her house. Somehow she managed to consider herself the luckiest person alive. The chemotherapy, she’d tell you, had caused her to go bald, but then given her the rich, curly mane she’d longed for her whole life. The car accident had almost killed her daughter, but it had gotten the wayward girl off alcohol and into a nursing career. The propane explosion? “I hated that end of the house, anyway.” It horrified me to think I was disappointing someone who’d managed to find an upside to ovarian cancer.

  “It’s funny you should say that,” I said.

  “Funny. Why is it funny? What’s funny about the disappearance of someone you care for?”

  “I’ve let my attention drift,” I told her. When in doubt, a confession, any confession, usually brings people over to your side. “I realized it this morning. The drifting.”

  “And?”

  “And I’m making some changes, Gina. Good ones, I hope.”

  Her phone started ringing again, but she didn’t avert her mesmerizing eyes for a second. “How?”

  “How?”

  “How are you changing? What are you doing?”

  “I’m reading Simone de Beauvoir,” I said.

  “I had high hopes for you, William. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? I’m talking about my son. He’s going to be fine, it’ll straighten him out, and he’ll be a better person, but he isn’t ever going to be a person sitting here at this desk, at my desk. I had high hopes you might. Do you see what I’m saying?”

  A couple of months earlier, her forty-year-old son had confessed to heroin addiction and had entered rehab. From what I could tell, she was saying that she had been thinking of selling me the business at some point. She’d implied as much before, but we’d never discussed it.

  “I’m working on it,” I said.

  “It’s not as if you have distractions, William. No marriage, family, health problems I know of. This should be your focus.”

  “I’m working on it,” I said again.

  “I want results. I need results from you. Come back to me, William, come back.” She picked up the phone and put her hand over the mouthpiece. “Now go.”

  An Alternative to Sex

  My ritual upon entering my apartment at the end of the day was to go from room to room making sure there was nothing out of order. Because I went through the same routine before leaving in the morning, I rarely found anything that needed immediate attention, although sometimes the towels demanded refolding or there were spots on the faucets in the bathroom or a few wrinkles on the pillowcases.

  My cleaning compulsion was the source of endless no-win situations. I hated finding anything disorganized or dirty, but I got so much pleasure out of setting things right, I felt cheated out of a major source of satisfaction when I didn’t. And so, when I walked into the kitchen and saw that I’d left the ironing board in the middle of the floor that morning, I didn’t know whether to be happy to put it away or alarmed at the glaring oversight that was completely out of character. Where was I, indeed, that I hadn’t noticed? Obviously, I was changing my sexual behavior at the r
ight moment.

  Once I’d stowed the ironing board, I heard the computer calling me from the room on the top floor of the house I used as a study. I felt an actual physical craving to sit down at the thing and start typing, similar to the physical craving I felt for coffee the instant I opened my eyes in the morning. At this very moment, upstairs in that study, on that very computer for which I’d paid good money and which therefore was completely within my rights to use, there was a huge party going on, a sweaty orgy of anticipation and flirtation. Within a three-mile radius of my house, thousands of men were logged on to their computers, making connections and offering unlimited opportunities for excitement, distraction, and, yes, disappointment, but even that had its appeal. And I was missing out on all of it.

  I decided to vacuum, always a reliable alternative to sex. I’d bought my vacuum cleaner for $500 several years earlier, and it had quickly become my most cherished possession. I suppose there’s a lot to take issue with in the German character, but one thing you absolutely cannot take away from Germans is their skill at making appliances. Vacuum cleaners are like bread: the less gimmickry, the better the product. This model was a sleek silver canister that was a shining example of simplicity and efficiency, the vacuum equivalent of a simple, crusty baguette. The two floors of my apartment comprise 1,875 square feet, and I went over every bit of it (minus the study, which I didn’t dare enter) in a little under an hour.

  I tried to make dinner, but couldn’t muster up enough enthusiasm for cooking to bother putting together my usual scrambled-eggs-and-potato specialty. Like a lot of lonely people, I tended to eat breakfast food at all meals. I tossed a tray of frozen something into the microwave (no dishes or pans to wash) and brought it into the living room and turned on the TV. I’d stopped watching television with any regularity when I started my sex binge, and judging from what I now saw as I spun through the channels, in the intervening months, the usual programming on every channel had been replaced by shows on which people in bikinis sat around eating insects.

  I checked my watch and saw that I’d been home for a total of two hours. It wasn’t a promising start to the evening. I could feel my frustrated desire to log on morphing into anger and decided to focus some of my rage on the president and his wacko right-wing buddies and their apparent plan to start a preemptive war. But that led to more depression, which led to an intensified desire for carnal distraction.

  Reading, that had been my plan. I went to my bedroom and picked up The Mandarins (wonderful title) and sat down on the chaise longue, exactly as I had pictured myself doing at various points throughout the day. This particular chaise was not quite longue enough for my ridiculous legs, a detail I’d forgotten in my meditative fantasies, and my feet hung off the edge at an uncomfortable angle. I resettled and opened the book. The recent paperback edition I owned had a fifty-two-page introduction by Rosemary Boyle, a contemporary poet and part-time academic who’d become famous for writing a memoir about being a widow. The biographical note on her was twice the length of the one on Beauvoir. She started out praising the novel and quickly lapsed into an explanation of why the intelligent reader should attempt to suffer through its many long, boring sections. “The exasperating tedium of these chapters, the difficulty of forcing oneself to read page after page after page of unnecessary dialogue and descriptive passages will be handsomely rewarded by the satisfaction one feels upon reaching the end.”

  These discouraging words had not been part of my fantasies either. Part II of the introduction opened with Boyle’s description of the ways in which Madame de Beauvoir had inspired her to write her own most recent best seller, an “infinitely more succinct” novel that had won “several major literary prizes.”

  The third section of the introduction began with a beguiling question: “Why dust off this unwieldy antique now, especially in this flawed, barely coherent translation?”

  My back was aching from the way I’d had to contort my body and I could hear the whirr of the computer from my study. As an indication of the dangerous water I was headed toward, I began to think about Didier, a scrawny troublemaker who’d been dropping in and out of my life in assorted unwholesome ways for a couple of years. Don’t, don’t, don’t, I reminded myself and then, in a moment of inspiration, picked up the phone and dialed my tenant, Kumiko.

  An Alternative to Vacuuming

  After my usual cheerful inquiries about the apartment, the hot water, and her artwork, I said, “I think we need to have a conversation soon—”

  “About money,” she said, cutting me off. “Am I right?”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “You see, I know you well. I’ve been told I have psychic powers.”

  She was leading me down the path of irrelevance, a tactic she often used to derail conversations about the rent. Figuring out that the landlord to whom you owe more than $3,000 is calling about money doesn’t exactly qualify you for the Uri Geller Hall of Fame.

  “We need to talk about the rent.”

  “You’re angry at me, William. It would probably be best for both of us if you’d just admit that you’re angry.”

  “I don’t see how it matters whether I’m angry or not.”

  “It matters to me. It matters a great deal. You think I’m not trying.”

  “Of course I think you’re trying, Kumiko.” I cursed myself for saying her name. Every time I uttered it, I felt I’d handed her a small victory. “I’m not accusing you of not trying.”

  “Well then, what are you accusing me of? Please. Tell me. Do you think it’s easy selling art since September eleventh?”

  It sounded to me as if she was about to get tearful, something I couldn’t abide. I decided, for her sake, to let the attempt at exploiting the terrorist attacks pass. “I’m accusing you…I’m not accusing you…Listen, Kumiko”—that name again—“let’s just take a deep breath and calm down, all right?”

  “It’s not easy to calm down when you’re about to be evicted and your landlord won’t even tell you why.”

  Landlord 101

  When I’d bought the house three years earlier, the first-floor apartment was inhabited by an elderly couple who’d been living there for twenty years. I was happy to have them in residence, despite a blaring television twenty-four hours a day. They paid the minimal rent exactly on time, and more important, I didn’t have to go through the process of interviewing tenants and making a selection, something I dreaded because I’d been a renter for so long and was infinitely more comfortable in that role.

  A year after I bought, the couple announced that they were relocating to a retirement village in Texas. “We hear it’s hot, hot, hot three hundred and sixty-five days a year,” the husband told me. “That’s what we want. Hot, hot, hot.” My widowed mother had moved to an assisted living facility in Arizona a few years earlier, also giving intolerably high temperatures as the central attraction. “Doesn’t the heat bother you?” I’d asked her after listening to her brag about having had a week of 120-degree days. Her indignant answer: “I’ve got the air-conditioning set at sixty-five, twenty-four/seven. I live in sweaters and long pants and sleep under an electric blanket. Why would the heat bother me? I’m freezing.”

  Before moving to hell, the elderly couple had told me there was a woman in the neighborhood they’d met a few times who was looking for a place to live; her current landlords, they explained, had raised her rent two hundred percent.

  “People have no morals,” I said. “Greed. What does she do?”

  “She’s an artist,” they said.

  I interpreted this to mean what it usually means: she was living off a trust fund. When I met Kumiko for the first time, everything about her confirmed my suspicion. She was wearing Southwestern turquoise jewelry, was elusive on the subject of income, and had about her an air of education and long-standing unemployability. She had on one of those cheap muslin smocks only a rich person could afford to wear, and she had her long gray hair in braids. An ex-husband was mentioned in passin
g. Having spent years at the office helping landlords rent out their apartments, I knew that I ought to ask her for references, a security deposit, a month’s rent in advance, and so on, but this all seemed invasive and impolite. I feared doing so would start this promising, amicable relationship off on a sour note. After a fifteen-minute conversation, I invited her to move in.

  She had been living in the apartment for eighteen months and thus far had paid the rent on time twice. Most often, it dribbled in unpredictably in cash payments made in small bills that she counted out in front of me, making me feel guilty and avaricious for each and every dollar I was collecting. Half the time, I was so racked with anxiety watching her dole it out that by the time she finished, I had no idea what portion of the rent she was paying or had paid or still owed or if she was paying me this month’s rent or last month’s. I wasn’t entirely sure about the exact figure she owed me, which was probably just as well, as it would only have made the situation seem more hopeless. Thinking it might elicit a little sympathy from her, I had once explained the economics of the arrangement, and had ended up revealing to her the kinds of financial details I’d been embarrassed to ask of her and never discussed with anyone, including my tax accountant.

  She had an uncanny ability to head off my attempts at pressuring her to pay up. Twice when I’d been on the verge of asking her to leave, she’d asked me for a loan. There was something so bold and outrageous about this, I took it as proof of my initial supposition about her being an eccentric heiress. Vague statements such as “until my check comes in” fed my trust-fund assumptions.

  As for her name, this was part of her painterly persona, not something that had been given to her by her parents. She claimed that “Kumiko” is Japanese for “girl with braids,” and she always included “braided imagery” somewhere in each of her paintings. Or so she said; thus far, I’d never seen her work.