Alternatives to Sex

by Stephen McCauley

  “You should be dating,” she said.

  I took this advice to mean that she thought I lived an empty and perhaps tragic life. “I’m getting a little long in the tooth for maternal advice,” I said. “I’ve hit a small bump at work, but that’s temporary. I have a lot of close friends, many people who are important to me. For all you know, I could be dating compulsively. And while we’re on the subject, you should be dating.”

  There was a long pause in the conversation, during which the door to the street opened and Charlotte O’Malley came into the office. I stood and motioned for her to take a seat in the reception area out front. She had on the same outfit she’d worn the day before, including the raincoat, even though the sun was out. She sat and began a futile attempt at gathering all the loose strands of her hair into an elastic band. “I should get going,” I told my mother. “A customer just walked in.”

  “What kind of customer?”

  “Half of a nice happily married couple looking to relocate.”

  “Maybe you can learn something from them. Maybe you should try. I don’t see you surrounded by many nice, happy couples of any sort. And for your information, I am dating.”

  “Oh?”

  “I suppose you could call it that.”

  “Well. Good for you.”

  The news came as a pleasant shock. My father had died a decade earlier and in the time after his death, Margaret had flatly refused any suggestions that she might, at some point, long for male companionship. The retirement village was mostly widows, all of whom, according to my mother, had been looking forward to this solo period of their lives since the day they were married, give or take a few hours. Widowhood, she explained, was generally considered the reward for a lifetime of living in the shadow of an overbearing husband and playing the role of dutiful wife. Desert Springs was full of sturdy women in Tshirts and sun visors who, despite their sarcasm and who-gives-a-fuck attitude, seemed fundamentally happy with their lives. They occasionally talked about some man or other who’d outlived his wife, usually in a disparaging tone, as if he’d broken the terms of a contract.

  I’d had a cordial, distant relationship with my father, a dentist, and at his funeral had been stunned to learn that his receptionist had been his mistress for years. Rose herself had told me this. I suppose she thought I would be more understanding and less judgmental than my brother, and this was undoubtedly true. Like most men who adore their wives, worship their children, and are one hundred percent satisfied with their lives, Kevin couldn’t stand to think that anyone was getting away with marital infidelity.

  I’d always found my father a distressingly flat character with no discernible inner life. The mistress news at least provided evidence of outside interests and emotional complexity; it made me happy for him, even if it made me all the more certain that the entire marriage had been a raw deal for my mother.

  “Does this guy live in Desert Springs?” I asked my mother. “Your boyfriend, or whatever he’s called.”

  “He lives in Oregon. We met on the Internet.”

  “How contemporary.”

  “Everyone’s doing it these days.”

  “I’ve heard. I just hadn’t figured you for the type.”

  “I didn’t either. But that computer has been sitting in my kitchen since Kevin gave it to me, and between old age and dirty bombs, I figured I didn’t have all that much to lose. You should try it, William. You can’t believe how easy it is to meet people. Nice people.”

  It was alarming to receive this advice from my mother. I managed to wrangle the phone numbers of my rich cousins out of her, and promised that I’d make my shameful call only once, would leave only one message if they didn’t pick up the phone, and would not mention her name or my brother’s once I’d started my sales pitch. We said our farewells, and as I was about to hang up, she promised she’d send me a photo of Jerry, her romantic interest. “Don’t worry,” she added, “I’ll send one of the G-rated ones.”

  Advice

  “We spent the night at a hotel in Cambridge,” Charlotte O’Malley told me, “in case you were wondering why I’m wearing the same clothes I had on yesterday.”

  To be polite, I said, “I hadn’t noticed.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. I figured you for the observant type.”

  “In general, or particularly regarding women’s clothes?”

  “In general. Then again, you’re wearing the same jacket you were wearing yesterday.”

  I checked. One of the drawbacks of neatly putting away all of your clothes at the end of the day, instead of heaping them on the floor, is that it’s hard to keep track of what you’ve worn and when. “So you spent the night here in town,” I said. “It sounds as if you can’t wait to move. We’re going to have to work on that.”

  “Sam had an early meeting and we thought it might be a good idea. To signal the start of this new venture. After all these years, it’s odd to not have to get back home for Daniel’s sake.” She slipped off her raincoat and draped it over the back of her chair. She sighed as she turned around, as if she had a kink in her back. “I’ve struggled with feeling irrelevant since he turned twelve. Now I suppose I really am.”

  “It must be a relief.”

  “I’m trying to decide whether it is or not. I’m guessing you don’t have children.”

  “That’s true.”

  She smiled with a hint of sadness in her eye, and I could sense she was writing me off, as people with children often did, as having an impairment that I had to live with, a handicap, something like a missing limb. I never minded the pitying looks parents give the childless, largely because I pity people who were saddled with the grueling task of child rearing. The whole expensive, messy world of parenthood was lost to me, a mysterious and unappealing universe that I felt lucky to have avoided. I don’t mind children, and I’ve met a few I even liked. But the plastic toys and the juice in boxes were another story. Probably I wouldn’t be so dismissive at age eighty, assuming I made it that far.

  She named the hotel they’d stayed at. “It’s expensive, but it’s lovely. Very romantic.”

  I nodded at this and looked away. By romantic, I assumed she meant that they’d had sex. I’ll listen to the most graphic details of someone’s anonymous sex encounter, but any reference, no matter how oblique, to the intimate life of a long-term couple is deeply embarrassing to me. Especially when the word “romantic,” which I associate with toss pillows and floral bedspreads, finds its unwelcome way into the conversation. “That’s…nice,” I said.

  She frowned, disappointed at my reaction, I suppose, and said: “I wanted to point something out about yesterday.”

  “Please.”

  “You didn’t ask me what I do for work.”

  “I didn’t, that’s true.”

  “I think you were afraid I don’t do anything and you didn’t want to be rude by asking. You figured you’d just leave the ball in my court.”

  I started to protest, reassuring her that it had been a mere oversight.

  “You asked Samuel,” she said.

  “And he answered, but I’m not sure I truly understand what it is he does. On a day-to-day basis.”

  “He consults. If you ask for more details, he’ll happily provide them, but between you and me, I don’t think you’d find them all that interesting. I know I don’t.” She shrugged and looked around the office. By now, Jack had come in and was turned away from us, muttering advice to his girlfriend into the phone. Mildred, the in-transition psychologist, was eating a candy bar and gazing into space. Aside from the three of us, the office was empty. “Is it always so uncrowded in here?” she asked.

  “A lot of the job involves driving around town and checking out property. If you spend too much time at your desk, it doesn’t look good.”

  “I don’t spend enough time at my desk and it still doesn’t look good. Fortunately, I work at home, so only I notice.”

  “That’s my cue to finally ask you what you do.”


  “Nothing. Well, nothing I’m especially proud of. I’m a ghostwriter for a company that packages business books. Big, dreary tomes about management style and corporate culture. The books come to me late in the process, after the putative authors have finished, and I make them marginally more readable. The secret is knowing and caring nothing about the business world. Obviously, I got into it through Samuel’s connections. Believe it or not, I was a nurse a million years ago.”

  “Pre-Daniel?”

  “Yes, exactly. At one point, I thought I’d go back to it, but I’m not very good at sympathy.”

  I opened my filing cabinet and took out the folder I’d started on them. “You work at home?” I asked. “In that case, we should look at places with at least one study.”

  “Is that about us?” she said. She leaned toward me, trying to see what I’d written down.

  “It’s just the basic boring facts,” I said.

  She probly working-class Irish. Catholic, I wrote. Former nurse who married well. Nice couple? I can learn something frm them?? She needs study. I shld close mine off. Always leads to trble.

  “Here’s another boring fact for you,” she said. “I’m hoping to rent a small office when we move to town. Working at home has been part of the problem.” She looked down at herself and then back at me with a frown. “The kitchen, the pantry. The cocktail hour.”

  Jack had finished talking with his girlfriend and was going through the real estate listings that had come in that morning. He gazed over at Charlotte a few times, checking out her legs and listening in on our conversation. I had the feeling he didn’t care much for women in a general sense, especially if they took the upper hand in real estate transactions.

  “Were you interested in looking at more properties today?” I asked. “I haven’t set up anything, but I could easily make some calls.”

  “No, I have to get home so I can procrastinate in a controlled environment. I was driving by on my way out of town, and there was a parking space, and I couldn’t resist. I thought it might help if I gave you some advice about the best way to deal with my husband.”

  “To be honest,” I said, “I didn’t think you were that serious about buying.”

  “I’m completely serious. He’s ambivalent. We have to work around his ambivalence.”

  “We’re ganging up on him, in other words.”

  “Oh, absolutely. It’s the only way to get anything done. I hope you weren’t planning on being impartial. Even the counselor gave up on that charade.”

  Charades, I wrote on their sheet. Drinker?

  “Let’s face it,” I said. “I’m a salesman. My main objective is to make a sale.”

  “Good. I wanted to get to you before Sam did. The key is this: he responds well to a hard sales pitch. Be aggressive with him. If he thinks you’ve put a lot of work into finding us a place, he’ll be more likely to buy.”

  I nodded, as if this were the kind of information one spouse usually revealed about the other.

  “Don’t hesitate to try guilt. Mention the hours you’ve put in, the weekends you’ve spent sorting through listings for us. If you want to leave a message for him right now, call his cell phone. I’m sure he has it off while he’s at his meeting.”

  “I might feel a little self-conscious with you listening in, knowing it was a charade, of sorts.”

  “But I could coach you.”

  “I’ll call him,” I said, “but not right now.” It seemed important to stand up for myself, even if we both knew she was in control of the situation.

  She thrust out her chest as she slipped on her raincoat, whether for my benefit or Jack’s, I couldn’t tell. “I think this is going to work out well for all of us. Call him soon so we can build up some momentum.”

  I saw her to the door and watched as she walked up the sidewalk to her car, a silver Volvo that appeared relatively new but had a significant dent in the trunk. When I got back to my desk, Jack moved to the chair Charlotte had been in, shook his head with disgust, and scowled. “That’s why I’ll never marry again, William. Manipulative bitch. Stabbing her husband in the back, no loyalty, no shame.”

  “Funny,” I said. “I thought from the way you were looking at her you liked her.”

  “I love her. She proves everything I’ve always thought about women of that generation. If I were you, I wouldn’t get involved with them. You might make a decent sale, but you get too caught up in people’s lives, and the lives of that pair are messy, I can promise you that. They’re going to walk all over you.”

  I should have taken his advice to heart, but it was the most personal comment he’d ever made to me, one that showed he at least had thought about me, and I was genuinely touched. “If you see me going off the rails completely, let me know.”

  “You’re off already,” he said.

  I closed my eyes for a minute, visualized the calm reading corner of my bedroom, the chaise longue, the light shining on the page of my book. It was going to be a very good day.

  LTR

  I thought about Charlotte and Sam much later that night, as I was riding the subway home from downtown Boston, where I’d taken a minor detour on the road to celibacy. It was a little after eleven, the hour when the theaters and concerts had just let out, and the subway car was crowded with well-dressed people clutching playbills and each other, scanning programs to review what they’d just seen. I stood holding on to a pole, feeling like the isolated odd man out. I’d taken the subway downtown instead of driving because I was tired of battling Boston’s ridiculous traffic problems, and also because I’d had a loopy, half-baked idea that I might spend the night down there and didn’t want to have to deal with parking. Of course it hadn’t worked out as planned.

  A woman in a bright red sweater with one arm around her boyfriend glanced up from her playbill, saw me staring, and gave me a cold glance. Chastened, I turned around.

  Earlier in the evening, I’d been sitting in my apartment expending an enormous amount of energy trying to not have sex, which seemed more pointless than actually going out and getting it out of the way. To minimize the amount of time expended, and avoid the black hole of the computer, I called someone I’d known for a couple of years and saw from time to time, usually at his convenience, although a lot less frequently in the past year. His name was Ron. He’d been in Chicago the previous September 11 and got stranded while the planes were grounded. During that period of stunned confusion and vulnerability, he’d met a man in a coffee shop, gone to an art museum with him, and then stayed at his apartment for close to a week. The timing of their meeting gave the relationship an extra layer of significance in Ron’s mind, as if it were compensation of some kind, generously arranged for him by fate.

  Since the advent of Marshall, Ron had gotten in touch with me a handful of times, explaining that long-distance relationships were difficult, and that I was the only one of his “buddies” he was comfortable continuing to see, albeit on an infrequent basis. Not only had I chosen to believe this, I’d actually been flattered by it. I assumed he meant I was in some special category of irresistible. (Ron himself was spectacularly irresistible, combining the rugged looks of an Italian soccer player, the submissiveness of overcooked spaghetti, and the mesmerizing self-absorption so common among exceptionally handsome men.)

  But that night, as he discussed, in a moment of postcoital expansiveness, the many virtues of beloved Marshall, I began to wonder.

  “So, Ron, let me ask you something. You’re in love with Marshall, you’ve just said you have a perfect relationship, there’s nothing you’d change. Why do you call me from time to time? Why did you agree to seeing me tonight?”

  He thought this over for a minute and then reached down and squeezed my penis. “This,” he said.

  “That, of course.” Partly, it was what I wanted to hear, but having heard it, I was insulted. “Those aren’t that hard to find, and I’m guessing Marshall has one, too.”

  “He does, but I especially like
yours. And obviously, it isn’t only that. Not by a lot. You’re different from a lot of people I meet.” I was touched by the comment and was about to thank him. Unfortunately, he had more to say. “I’ve told Marshall about you, and it’s all right with him if I see you sometimes. He knows this isn’t any threat to what he and I have. You’re obviously not a relationship kind of person. You’re not a boyfriend kind of guy.” He said it in a cheerful, lascivious way, as if he was paying me a compliment, but I dressed quickly and let myself out.

  As I watched the happy couples on the subway car, I mounted a defense of myself. I was not incapable of long-term relationships. Especially short ones. I had had a few. To define my terms, I consider anything that lasts more than a year a long-term relationship. Less than that I think of as dating, even if serious. When people have been together five years or more, I usually file them under “married,” and when a couple has been together for longer than ten years, I assume they’re roommates with occasional sexual benefits.

  In my several decades of adulthood, I had had four long-term relationships. The last—a twenty-four-month event—had ended about four years earlier. I considered this a pretty good track record. It showed a certain level of emotional gravitas. A childhood friend had had no LTR—an acronym that makes coupledom sound like an expensive sports car—and secretly, I considered myself four times healthier in the interpersonal relationships department than he was. I had been shocked to learn that he felt that his capacity for long-term relations was enormous but unproven, while mine had four times been tested and four times failed. A friend from college—a liberal arts school of some renown on the outer fringes of New England—had been with the same lover for twenty years. By rights, I should have thought of him as four times healthier than I, but I just thought of him as four times more inert.

  Numbers probably don’t tell much, although as I got older, they seemed to play an increasingly important role in my life. There was age itself, and then weight and height. There were numbers related to IRAs and CDs and mutual funds, things that had never interested me in the past. There were numbers I suddenly felt compelled to pay attention to: blood pressure, cholesterol, PSA scores, and levels of red and white blood cells. Then there was the roster of inches, pounds, and years that comprised the fantasy portrait of my online self. It would be a relief to forget those, once I finally started paying attention to my no-sex self.