Alternatives to Sex

by Stephen McCauley

  “I’ve done a lot of research and put together an assortment of possibilities in your price range,” I said. “When I see how you respond to these, I’ll have a better idea of what your taste is and exactly what you’re looking for.”

  There was a long pause, and at first I thought he hadn’t heard me. I was trying to follow the general outlines of Charlotte’s advice on how best to manipulate him, without sounding as if I’d scripted the call. His typing stopped abruptly, and he said, “The main thing is, we have to please Charlotte.”

  WE please Charlotte, I wrote. Sam and me.

  “The move is her idea, and she has stronger tastes than I do, so I’m willing to give her a lot of decision-making power. But between you and me, the final decision is mine. Her business instincts could be a lot better. She made a series of horrible investments over the last ten years. I’m not planning to bring that up to her, but just so you know.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  “I need to be convinced it’s a good investment. That’s number one.”

  Money most important, I wrote.

  “Charlotte’s wanted to get a place in town for a long time now. And I’ve resisted, for selfish reasons. The cost, my attachment to Nahant. I’m very happy out there, William, away from everything related to work, the stress. I leave my whole in-town life behind me. I kayak, run on the beach, bicycle, swim.”

  Fitness freak, I jotted down. Shld I be jogging?

  “But something like what happened last year makes you reevaluate your priorities, think about what truly matters in life. For me, it’s my family. That should be obvious, but it’s easy to lose sight of sometimes. Until you get one of those unwelcome reminders.”

  A year ago, everyone had been reminded of something important, but it was my impression that most of us had already forgotten what it was.

  “Daniel’s off at college now,” he went on. “It’s time for Charlotte and me to attend to each other. It’s not as difficult as people think, making someone happy. So as I see, our whole job here, yours and mine, William, is just to make someone happy. Nice work if you can get it, don’t you think?”

  For the moment, I put aside the condescension in his voice—a consultant talking to a lowly real estate agent—and the irritating way he kept saying my name. I liked the plan. True, the speech sounded prepared, as if he’d run through it a few times in his mind, or had expressed the same rationalization while having dinner with a couple of drunken friends, but what was wrong with a little rehearsal? I tried to find an element of irony in his words, but I couldn’t detect any. He believed what he’d just said, and thinking back to the tender way he acted toward Charlotte when they came into the office, I believed him, too.

  “Her liking a place is the starting point. My instincts are the end point.”

  I could tell already that at some point, probably in the not too distant future, I was going to weary of this man with his contradictions and his pride in his business savvy, but at that moment, I was still flushed with admiration and an unthreatening crush on the two of them. We made an appointment to meet again. Wear green C. Lacroix tie, I wrote next to the time.

  Come Again?

  The following week, I was sitting at my desk at Cambridge Properties, nodding at one of my customers, attempting to communicate empathy, while internally retracing the depressing and titillating mistakes I’d made throughout the preceding week, many of which I blamed on Edward and his silly, upsetting plans to relocate. San Diego. It was such an obvious choice—perfect weather and pretty views. Where was the challenge in that? Where was the character-building hardship?

  The customer was Sylvia Blanchard, a woman I’d been working with for more than two years. The depressing and titillating mistakes were, primarily, three attempted phone calls to Didier, my Belgian obsession, and an encounter with a handsome masochist who claimed to be named Sandy and wanted to be treated “as if I were your dog.” Considering the amount of money and affection lavished on domestic pets in this country, “Treat me like your dog” are words no self-respecting masochist should utter.

  As for Sylvia, she had previously put down deposits on three apartments and one two-family house. At the very last minute, she’d backed out of every deal. Her total loss of deposits and fees was approaching $15,000, but it was money she was happy to lose as long as it freed her from making a purchase.

  I’d known exactly what to expect when Sylvia walked into the office that Saturday morning. I’d been waiting for a phone call or a visit for days. Her current deposit was on a triple-decker house she’d fallen in love with in a working-class neighborhood close to the one where I lived, and the closing was two weeks away. Now was the time for her to back out of the deal. When she opened the proceedings that morning with, “You’re going to kill me, William,” I checked out of listening mode and escaped into my own thoughts.

  “That makes sense,” I said, every time her mouth stopped moving. “You’re right.”

  Sylvia was an excessively thin woman whose mod wardrobe consisted mostly of bell-bottom slacks and fuzzy mohair jackets, as if her fashion influences began and ended with Twiggy, circa 1968. She wore thick-rimmed eyeglasses in a garish shade of turquoise, the kind of I’m-having-fun accessory a person wears when trying to make herself into a recognizable public personage. She had a charming habit of scattering her conversation with non sequiturs that bubbled up from her subconscious and let you know in which direction her thinking was drifting while her conversation was otherwise engaged. We were very close in height, a fact that probably accounted for a lot of our attraction to each other.

  She was now in the Deep Regret stage of her monologue, pulling glasses off and on. Her thin and very red lips were moving quickly, spitting out apologies and self-recrimination.

  “That makes sense,” I said again. “You’re right.”

  Sylvia was a professor in the Women’s Studies Department at Deerforth College, a school about fifteen miles into the suburbs of Boston. She was the author of three books, each more successful than the last. The first was a study of some justifiably obscure Australian poet, the second a meditation on American women and food—Sylvia herself was British and clearly had a complicated relationship to nourishment. The most recent was an analysis of female sexuality called Come Again. The title of the third, the subject matter, and probably the eyeglasses had given Sylvia entrée to some of the more intellectual cable talk shows and even a brief turn on a couple of the morning network news programs. She’d become a celebrity of sorts in academic circles, applauded and despised for her sudden visibility. She frequently went on long tirades against Camille Paglia, obviously her role model.

  “Of course you’re right,” I said. “And I do understand. That makes sense.”

  Back when I was still reading books—not merely their scathing introductions—I had plowed through Sylvia’s first two tomes, avoiding the extensive footnotes and vast appendices. I’d had a lot more luck with Come Again. True, it was written in that bizarrely dense academic prose that’s the literary equivalent of mud, but with chapter titles such as “Cunt” and “Fucked,” it made for provocative skimming. The book had a shrewdly calculated concept; a bunch of incomprehensible intellectual palaver on sexuality, gender, Foucault, and Georgia O’Keeffe wrapped around—in alternating chapters—a graphic memoir of Sylvia’s own profligate sexual history, one that made my recent adventures look tame enough for an after-school television special.

  I was convinced that Sylvia would never buy an apartment, never budge from the overstuffed rented studio where she’d been living for the past dozen years, but I was always pleased to have her visit me, tell me her woes, and write deposit checks.

  She was an extreme version of a type familiar to real estate agents: a real estate junkie, drawn to almost every house or apartment she was shown, certain it would give her a new and improved life. Most of these people bought and sold properties the way the rest of the population buys groceries, but Sylvia would neve
r sacrifice the hopefulness of the search for the harsh reality of a done deal. What if she found, purchased, and moved into the perfect place and then discovered that her life was still a bog of lonely disappointment?

  Despite all the irritations of dealing with Sylvia, I found her manic, unrealistic brand of optimism inspiring. She was neurotic, restless, confused, and conflicted, but there was an aura of happiness that surrounded all of these emotions. She wasn’t exactly happy, but she believed absolutely that one day she would be. It was a quality I lacked and was trying to nurture.

  “You’re right, Sylvia. Of course. I understand completely. That makes sense.”

  These real estate deals resembled love affairs. She adored everything about a place at the start, every flaw and eccentricity, every potential hazard and drawback, the sloping floors, the tiny closets, the badly renovated bathrooms. These were all charming and endearing. Once the candlelight and violins faded, they became the intolerable features that made it imperative she cancel her plans.

  A Bright Idea

  We’d progressed to the part of her monologue in which she ripped off her turquoise glasses and listed a variety of psychological and chemical problems that made the purchase of this particular house impossible. Hypoglycemia, hypocholesterolemia, posttraumatic something or other.

  She halted her speech to look for a mint in one of the canvas tote bags she always carried with her. She was an ex-smoker who kept replacing that oral fixation with a variety of others: chewing gum, mints, breath sprays, lollipops, and so on. The occasional solid meal might have taken care of the entire problem, but there was about as much likelihood of that as the actual purchase of a piece of property.

  “And why take on the burden of all those tenants?” I prompted. “They would just be more headaches you don’t need.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “Look at your nightmare in that regard.”

  “Exactly.” During our long talks about her housing headaches, I’d revealed to her many of my own, including the Kumiko Rothberg situation.

  “I’d be as inept at collecting rents as you are. I wonder if I should go to a movie tonight? And you know I consider that particular ineptitude a sign of strength of character, in your case.”

  “Yes, I know. I appreciate the vote of confidence.”

  “Thank you for taking it the right way. Not that there’s a single movie I want to see right now. Oh well.”

  Despite having read lurid descriptions of Sylvia’s multiple orgasms and sexual escapades in parks and department stores, I found it hard to imagine her touching another human being, let alone being driven to heights of wild passion in a fitting room at Harrods. She struck me as too anxious and distracted—not to mention absorbed in the minutiae of university politics—to care about such things. I didn’t know her age, but reading between the lines of her book, I’d come to the conclusion that she’d reached a period of blissful sexual dormancy, give or take the occasional grad student.

  “And I wasn’t ever really sure that that neighborhood was right for you,” I said. “It’s fine for me, but it would add another twenty minutes to your Deerforth commute.”

  “I wasn’t sure either. Although I was almost sure. It was that point-two percent uncertainty that unraveled me in the end.” Unable to find what she was looking for in her bag, she gave it a little kick and sat up straight. “I can get more mints when I buy the soap. They’re usually on sale there.”

  I always ignored these oddball interjections and was never entirely certain if she knew she’d said them aloud.

  “You don’t hate me, do you, William? This is the third time I’ve done this.”

  “Fifth. But I’m not counting. When the right thing comes along, we’ll know it,” I assured her. “That fireplace in the second-floor rental unit would have been a constant worry.”

  Reassured that I was going to forgive her and was still on her side, she relaxed back into her chair. “I’ve been thinking of going back to square one. Can you stand to think about square one again? A tidy studio apartment right in the middle of everything. I know that’s what I’ve got now, but I want to own. Downtown Boston somewhere. I’m sick of landlords, no offense.”

  “We’ve discussed how much you’re going to lose on this, haven’t we?”

  “Down to the penny. But it’s worth it and it’s only fair. Those poor people deserve something. You’ll find a buyer for the place, won’t you? It’s not uninhabitable; someone could cope with it. On top of that, I’ll get us tickets for an opera or some expensive ‘event.’ America’s becoming a culture of ‘events.’ I’ll have to make a note on that before I leave. Remind me, will you? No, never mind, it’s an idiotic observation that’s going to go nowhere. I’m desperate for a new topic. I’ve exploited food and fucking already. Unfortunately, I don’t have drugs or murder in the family to yack about. I may have to resort to literature again. How’s your sex life, carino?”

  “Dreary,” I said. “An orgy here, a foot fetishist there, a couple of outdoor encounters along the river, a guy on a leash.” I shrugged.

  “Sounds like my week.” One of her bags had toppled over, and she bent down to gather up the stack of books that had fallen out. “One day, I’m sure you’ll tell me the truth.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” I said.

  With some people, the best place to hide the truth about your life is out in the open. Sylvia often asked me, casually, about my sex life, one of the privileges, I suppose, of a person who’d written graphically about her erotic experiences on a fishing trawler. It was only to her that I’d made a full confession of all my doings, and she, in a gratifying and disappointing way, had consistently acted as if I was serving up lies as homage to her book.

  It was as I was watching her pack up her bags and pat down her short, artificially red hair that I was struck with what seemed like a brilliant idea. I’d solve a couple of problems at one time and make several people happy—boss Gina, Sylvia herself, Edward, even Edward’s beastly friend Marty.

  “You know, Sylvia,” I said, “I’m not sure this is the right moment to bring this up…”

  “In that case, you must.”

  “A friend of mine told me he might be selling his studio in the South End. It’s modest, but tidy, nicely appointed.”

  Her canvas bags slid off her thin arm and dropped to the floor. She sat down again, wound her legs together, and leaned on my desk. “Tell,” she said, her eyes bright behind her big eyeglasses.

  “It’s not officially on the market yet, but we could probably take a look at it. Built-in everything, very modern…”

  “Perfect.”

  “Small.”

  “Perfect. Windows?”

  “Well…”

  “Unimportant. When?”

  “When?”

  “…is he moving out?”

  “Oh, probably before Christmas. There might be some negotiating room.”

  And so we were off on love affair number seven.

  “She’s your classic dead-end street,” Jack said, once she’d left. “Or cul-de-sac. That’s French for sack of shit. I would have fired her years ago.”

  Jack had read through some of the more graphic sections of Come Again and was convinced Sylvia had made half of it up. I suppose his unwillingness to believe the book was motivated by jealousy, although some chapters did include practices that sounded physically impossible.

  “I think this time it’s going to work out,” I said. “I have a completely different feeling about it.”

  “Feelings. There’s a concept I just don’t get. You threaten them, William. You tell them you won’t work with them anymore, they’ll go bankrupt. Give me one week with her and I’ll have her in a crap condo that’ll shut her up once and for all.”

  “I’ll think it over,” I said.

  “It’s about real estate, not people. You forget that.” He shuffled around some papers in a completely unnecessary way, and then, without looking up from his desk, he said, “What’s th
is about a guy on a leash?”

  “Guy on a leash? I have no idea what you’re talking about. You must have misunderstood. Was I talking about a lease at one point?”

  He scowled at me, and I was shocked to realize that it wasn’t with disapproval of what I’d told Sylvia, but disappointment that I wasn’t sharing the information with him.

  Confidence

  The seller took the news about Sylvia badly. He had a life of his own. He was moving to New Mexico. This was going to complicate everything for him. He was a hefty man with such a thick and idiosyncratic Boston accent, it was impossible to imagine him living elsewhere. Last September, he’d decided to move away from the East Coast because he considered it too vulnerable to future attacks. Like many people who had made radical plans for similar reasons, his will seemed to be wavering after a year of quiet on the home front, and I wouldn’t have been stunned to learn that he was secretly relieved the sale had been postponed. Even so, I assured him that I’d start showing the house again the next day, and that if my customers didn’t bite, two other agents in the office were confident they could find a buyer within a week.

  “I know it’s bad for you,” I said, “but don’t forget, she’s not getting off easy, either. She’ll be losing a lot of money.”

  “Good. I hope she loses everything. She’s not one of those nuts who does this six times a year, is she?”

  Six times a year was overstating it, even for Sylvia, so I told him truthfully that she was not one of those nuts. After I’d hung up, I began pondering my motives for interesting Sylvia in Edward’s condo. Inevitably, she would complicate Edward’s relocation idea, just as she’d complicated this guy’s. It would be a roadblock to Edward’s plans, even if not an insurmountable one. Every time I thought about helping my friend pack his belongings into boxes and shipping them to San Diego, I felt queasy.

  The place Sylvia had rejected was wrong for Samuel and Charlotte in all ways, but I decided to show it to them anyway. In most cases, finding the right place to live is like finding a romantic partner through a personal ad. People go in with a list of qualities and physical details they consider essential, but then some chemical attraction to the least likely candidate kicks in and the interest in classical music and fine dining or the must-have walk-in closet is rendered irrelevant.