Alternatives to Sex

by Stephen McCauley

  “Past the age of twelve,” Edward had proclaimed, “you can get away with braids only if you’re Willie Nelson or insane. I think we know which category she falls into.”

  An Alternative to Kumiko

  After taking a few deep breaths to calm myself down and hopefully give Kumiko time to get past the threatened tears, I said, “If you were making even partial payments, I would feel better about the situation. I’d feel marginally more hopeful. But even those have dried up.”

  “You told me you found the partial payments too confusing, that’s why I stopped. I thought that was what you wanted. I was trying to be a good tenant. You have to be more clear, William.”

  “I didn’t know that Plan B was no payments at all.”

  I wandered downstairs to the living room, carrying the phone, sprawled in a chair, took off my shoes, and stared at my feet. A week earlier, I’d connected with a handsome young man whose sexual turn-on was bathing and massaging my feet and then trimming and filing my toenails. After getting past the initial ticklishness I’d found it relaxing and, despite a lack of genital contact, incredibly titillating. On top of that, he—apparently a grad student in economics with a fellowship—lived in a suite of Moorish rooms in a Harvard residence, and the architectural splendor alone was worth the trip. He’d done a fantastic job, and my feet still looked clean and well tended. Somewhere on my computer upstairs, I had his number. Surely it wouldn’t count as sex if I got together with him again. It was basically a free pedicure with a little toe sucking tossed in, a happy experience for both of us. On the whole, I’m much less judgmental about a person’s sexual interests than I am about his window treatments.

  As I was mulling over the possibility of calling “Tad” and listening to Kumiko discuss problems she was having with air circulation in the garage studio, I heard a horn blaring on the street below. I went to the window and saw a taxi in front of the house.

  “Could we wrap this up, William?” she asked. “My cab is here. I’m late for a yoga class. Why don’t we try to work on being more clear with each other?”

  “How long have you been taking yoga classes?” I asked.

  “Years. It forms the core of my spiritual life.”

  “Spiritual life,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about getting one of those.”

  After we’d hung up, I watched her load a string bag filled with water and towels and then herself into the back of the taxi. My relationship with her was deeply humiliating, there was no question of that. Worse still was the fact that allowing myself to be exploited by her made me feel morally righteous.

  In fact, the whole absurd conversation made me feel so simultaneously abused and morally superior, I decided to sign on to the Internet and drop my membership for the “dating” site that had been my home away from home for so many months. That would settle it once and for all and make sure that there were no further temptations to resist.

  As soon as the familiar graphics popped up on-screen, loud and lurid, I felt a surge of contentment and the evaporation of the anxieties of my day—my job performance, the Kumiko debacle, curiosity about Edward’s plans for big changes. Oddly enough, I even felt a lessening in my worries about the amount of time I’d been wasting in this very pursuit and the gnawing concern that I wasn’t going to stick to my resolve. Home again, home again.

  But I’d entered so I could leave, and I started that process. Whoever had designed the site had made buying a membership easier than waking up, and closing it out the logistic equivalent of filing taxes. Retraction requests had to be made to several billing services; my “stats”—a compilation of elaborately exaggerated numbers—had to be wiped off the screen; and my pictures had to be deleted. I had posted two pictures, neither one of my face, since that craggy monument to lost youth wasn’t my main selling point.

  By the time I’d dragged my good intentions through half the process, my mailbox was blinking. I can’t stand when people address themselves using their name, but a fake name seemed less cloying. “Everett,” I said aloud, “don’t open that mailbox.”

  When I clicked on it, I saw that six people had written to me. Two were men I’d already met at some point in the last few months, although judging from what they’d written, neither remembered the meetings. Two more qualified as the lunatic fringe (“Im tied up, blindfolded, naked, partying—complete PIG—do it all—no condoms—TOTALLY disease free—”) with proctology-exam photos attached. All displayed the usual contempt for grammar: “Thats nice!!!!” and “Your hot!!!!!” (If you’re going to use an apostrophe in this corner of the virtual world, you’d better use it incorrectly lest someone assume you care about such things or are, God forbid, a homosexual.)

  I was always flattered by the attention (“Thank’s!!!!!!!”), even when it came from people I wasn’t interested in. I reserved special contempt and derision for anyone who was tacky and desperate enough to spend as much time combing through this flesh pile as I did. (“Hmm. Him again. Obviously has no life whatsoever.”)

  By the time I’d deleted those messages, several more had arrived in my mailbox. I could feel myself being sucked into a familiar cycle and could tell already that I was going to have trouble pulling out. What if one of these messages was from someone who might be the person who…But I couldn’t finish the thought because I didn’t know what the best-case scenario was in this case. What was I looking for?

  Read them, I told myself, but don’t respond to them. And then I qualified the rules so that I could respond only if the messages contained full sentences. Or if not full sentences, at least no spelling errors. Oh, all right, not too many spelling errors. And if the person clearly wasn’t a native English speaker—Carlo, Marco, Sergio, David—the rule about spelling errors didn’t apply.

  I gave myself ten minutes to finish up; then I’d start making business calls. An hour and a half later, I got a message from someone who made the requisite anatomical compliments and wrote in complete sentences that he’d just moved into a new apartment and was looking for someone to come over and help him christen it. Real estate. Practically business-related. I could ask a few questions about his broker. Even my boss, Gina, would approve of that. I practically owed it to her to see him. Maybe he hadn’t sold his old place yet and was looking for someone to put it on the market.

  Half an hour later, as I was driving into Boston in the rain, I reasoned that I wasn’t really breaking my celibacy resolution, I was simply delaying it. One day was as good as the next to make a start.

  Besides, I had the option of turning around at any moment and heading back home. At nearly every intersection, I assured myself that if I turned around now, I wouldn’t even have delayed my vow.

  As I was parking the car, I told myself that I could just go for a walk and didn’t have to bother ringing “Buck’s” bell, and as I was ringing the bell to what turned out to be a third-floor apartment, I assured myself I didn’t have to wait around to go in.

  When “Buck” turned out to look absolutely nothing like the pictures he’d sent, I told myself I wasn’t obliged to go inside, and when I entered, I told myself I didn’t have to have sex with him just because it was a beautiful apartment.

  “You’re tall,” he said, a statement of fact I chose to interpret as a compliment.

  As we were fucking, I told myself it was for the best that I was getting the whole thing out of the way here and now and could start fresh in the morning.

  There was a window beside the bed, and through it I could see the lights of cars speeding along Memorial Drive, on the opposite side of the river. There were still a lot of unpacked boxes from the recent move, but they were stacked in neat piles.

  “Who’s your real estate broker?” I asked as I was getting dressed.

  “That’s kind of a personal question,” Buck said.

  As I was driving home, I told myself I now had new confirmation that the celibacy resolution was a good idea. And since I was starting that tomorrow, and tomorrow was another day, I might
as well make use of the remaining hour of this last day of my sexual profligacy. I thought about Didier again, as I often did at the tail end of these disappointments, but of course I was much too sensible to venture there.

  I decided instead to call Christopher, a right-wing nut whose politics were in such conflict with his erotic appetites, it felt almost like my moral duty to have sex with him from time to time to point out to him what a hypocrite he was.

  A Fresh Start

  As I drove to the office the next morning, I decided my tactic of delaying the start of my resolve by twenty-four hours had been brilliant. Now I was truly ready to begin—enthusiastic about the world of real estate, determined to get back in Gina Fulmetti’s good graces, and sexually exhausted.

  The office was wedged between a pet-grooming salon and a Mexican takeout joint along a busy and fashionable stretch of Mass Ave in Cambridge. It was walking distance to Harvard Square, but far enough from that circus of chain stores and students to be largely unaffected by it. I’d become friendly with Veronica, the woman who ran the grooming shop. She was an immense, gray-haired woman who tended to have a host of troubled teenagers doing volunteer work for her as they picked up a trade. When she was short on volunteers, she sometimes let me help bathe the dogs. That morning, she was propped up on a chair, drinking soda out of a cup the size of a small wastebasket and overseeing a couple of emaciated girls with pale faces as they hosed down a soapy Irish setter. Just as well I wasn’t needed. I was ready to start my day.

  The only person in the office that morning was Mildred Robinson. Mildred was an intensely focused psychologist who worked at the office part-time. She was transitioning—to use her verb—from psychology to real estate because it was more (another quote) fun. Everyone resented her impressive sales figures because we felt she ought to stick to a career she’d trained for for almost a decade. No one begins his adult life as a real estate broker, and certainly no one at Cambridge Properties had started out in this field; but most of us had ended up there as the result of financial or emotional collapse, not because we were seeking something as friable as “fun.”

  I sat at my desk and took out a legal pad. I listed the closings I had pending (only two, including one with a compulsive apartment shopper that probably wouldn’t go through) and the follow-up calls I needed to make, putting Samuel and Charlotte at the top of that list. Then I wrote down the names of six people I could contact to remind them that we were in the middle of a real estate boom, and that if they were thinking about taking advantage of it by selling their property, they couldn’t do better than listing it with me. This last chore ranked high on the dreaded death-of-a-salesman scale of business matters. It always made me feel as if I were panhandling or trying to talk someone into a morally questionable act of exploitation. “Sell your house while prices are still unconscionably inflated. Don’t wait for the market to adjust.”

  I shouldn’t have dreaded making cold calls as much as I did; I’d learned over the years that most people are flattered by the attention, like talking about their property—especially if they have no interest in selling it—and are always delighted to engage in discussions of the pornographic sum we’d put down as an asking price. Obscene phone calls everyone was happy to receive.

  Since the previous September, people were willing to give serious consideration to taking what they could get while they could get it, even if they had no idea what they planned to do with it. Thanks to the wacky color-coded terror alerts, the news reports about anthrax attacks, and the gathering war clouds, the whole country was poised on the brink of smoldering panic. There was an underlying feeling that everyone wanted out, although, really, there was nowhere to go. Canada had begun to look like an appealing place to live to a lot of people who previously wouldn’t have considered spending a brief vacation there. Even Edward, who had as much reason as anyone to worry about the future, had made noises about moving to Montreal, a city he’d once derided as being “a strip club with a good subway system.”

  The most promising names on my death-of-a-salesman list were those of a young cousin and his wife who’d made a small fortune in the computer field in the mid-nineties, had cashed out, and now spent their time taking trips to coral reefs, rain forests, and other rapidly disappearing natural wonders. They reportedly owned several condominiums in and around Boston. I’d avoided bothering them for years, but now they looked to me like prime targets. They were connected to the maternal side of my family, and the easiest way to get their number was to call my mother. It was barely dawn in Arizona, but since Margaret claimed not to have slept for at least ten years, I dialed.

  Sleep Deprivation

  I started the conversation with my usual greeting: “I didn’t wake you up, did I?”

  “Who is this?” she asked.

  “Your firstborn.”

  “William?” Perhaps there was another I didn’t know about. “Did they blow up something else?”

  “Not that I’ve heard.”

  “Ah. Why do you sound so peculiar? Did you just get up?” This was retaliation for my opening question and the ultimate insult. Normal sleep patterns were indicators of luck and a lack of character.

  “Hardly,” I said. “I’ve been up for hours, I cleaned my apartment twice, and I’m at my office.”

  “At least you went to bed. If I don’t get some sleep soon, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  “What’s it been, five, six years now?”

  “Twenty, but who’s counting? I see you’ve been getting some rain the past couple of days. It’s going to be lovely today and warm for the rest of the week. In case you haven’t heard.”

  She always kept up with the weather in Boston, something I found touching since it meant she was thinking about me. Several years earlier, she’d relocated from Connecticut, where I’d grown up, to stifling Arizona. She’d moved partly for the insufferable heat, partly to be closer to a sister she never spoke to, and partly because my brother and his family lived in California. I’d been relieved that she’d moved out of my sphere of responsibility, but I still hadn’t gotten over feeling abandoned on the East Coast by my family.

  “What about the weekend?” I asked. “Any word on that?”

  “Not that I’ve heard. I only watch the three-day forecasts. At my age, there’s no point in listening to the long-range projections.”

  She was close to eighty and fiercely healthy. Arizona had cured any minor breathing ailments she’d had, and the activity in the retirement village kept her mind engaged in local gossip and dramas. Still, she’d picked up the sarcastic pessimism that seemed to be the dominant personality trait in widows of her age. Almost every comment or suggestion I made, whether it was about her own life or related to some broader political issue, was greeted with the same dismissive vote of no confidence. Education cuts? “What do I care? I’m on the way out, anyway.” Television? “I’ve got ten minutes to live and I’m going to waste it watching TV?” Go out to dinner? “I’m sick of food.” Call up her widowed sister, who lived a few doors away, and arrange an outing? “I’ve got better things to do than listen to her. She’s so negative.”

  It was all a defense against the dying off of dear friends and the awful toll age was taking on the survivors. She spent a lot of time on the phone, talking to friends back east who were in various stages of mental deterioration, something she referred to often but I was banned from mentioning. I was not allowed to utter the words “senility” or “Alzheimer’s.” “Next thing you know,” she’d say, “you’ll have me in a home.” There was no point in reminding her that she was, essentially, in a home, one she’d put herself into.

  Despite our consistently combative tone, I enjoyed talking with her and was proud of her. She didn’t drink much, ate sensibly, rarely expected me to visit, and as far as I could tell, never gave money to the Catholic Church. She and my father had been staunch Democrats when I was growing up, but in the past twenty years, her politics had turned vague. If I mentioned a
politician, any politician, she’d say, “Ah, they’re all crooks.” I took this to mean she voted Republican but had the decency to be ashamed of the fact.

  Once we’d wandered around our usual conversational land mines, I said, “I’m calling about the rich cousins. I need their phone number.”

  “Melinda and Rob? People with that kind of money don’t just give out their phone number. It’s unlisted.”

  “That’s why I’m calling you. I thought you could give it to me. I wanted to ask them if they were looking for a real estate agent.”

  “Oh God, William, that’s so humiliating. It’s panhandling.”

  “It certainly is not. Where do you come up with these ideas? It’s business.” I could hear water running and the sounds of scratching or scrubbing. My brother kept her in cell phones with unlimited calling plans, and she spent most of the day wired to a headset with the phone hooked to a belt loop. “Are you scouring the bathtub? What are you using?”

  “Some powder that was on sale last month.”

  “I told you to use orange Tang for the bathtub and the sink, didn’t I? You dump it in and sprinkle on some Pepsi. It’s much more effective than scouring powder.”

  A loud rush of water was followed by gurgling. “I can’t be bothered shopping for all that. It’s not in the store here. And don’t tell me you’ll send it to me. The whole idea of washing the house with food disgusts me. It worries me. Throwing food around the house and vacuuming six times a day. It isn’t normal. You’re almost fifty.”

  I bristled at the accusation. “I most certainly am not almost fifty. If you think about it, I’m closer to being almost forty.”

  “A big tall man like you dusting all day. What kind of a hobby is that?”

  “Let’s talk about Kevin. How’s he doing?” I often used my brother as a conversational diversion when I was talking with my mother. He was the most normal person I knew, which is to say: overworked, stressed out, financially strapped, and emotionally confused. Today, Margaret wasn’t having any of it.