Alternatives to Sex

by Stephen McCauley

  Charlotte showed up at my office alone the next afternoon. “I didn’t want to get Samuel involved and have to consider his schedule,” she said. “Sometimes it’s better to make your own plans. At some point, I’ll let him know you put in the time showing me the place so he’ll appreciate your diligence.” She picked up a calendar I had on the corner of my desk, arched her eyebrows, and flipped the page to the current month. “Do you really think I’ll like the house?”

  “I’m not sure. But it’s always useful to rule things out absolutely.”

  She waved off the particulars of this place, as if to say that she trusted me and the process. She’d had a manicure since the last time she’d been in, and her nails were smooth and shiny, orange near the tips that appeared to blend subtly into red toward the cuticle, something like autumn leaves. Elaborately painted nails were increasingly common, but I was disconcerted by the sight of them on smart, professional women of my age whom I assumed to be too busy for such glossy vanity. She caught me looking and curled her fingers in a bit. “I have to deliver a manuscript in Boston later this afternoon,” she said. “I was happy to have an excuse to leave the house this much earlier.”

  “Interesting book?”

  “No, of course not. Something called The Confidence Game. A good title for a film noir or a spy thriller, but in this case, it is exactly what it sounds like: instructions on how to be more confident in your business dealings. Ten easy ways to get what you want from the underlings, all infused with a troubling tone of self-righteous American arrogance. At one point, the author even refers to ‘terrorists’ in the employee lounge. I tried to add a note of humility, but I’m sure it won’t be appreciated. Humility is completely out of favor these days.”

  She made her speech with conviction, but also with the inflections of a performance, as if she wasn’t used to delivering this kind of lecture on her work. Maybe she wasn’t used to talking about it at all.

  “If you think of some confidence-building advice for me, let me know.”

  She glanced around the office. By most standards, it was a highly successful business, but Gina, with her devotion to practicality, made very little effort at dressing up the place. The walls were cold white and the furniture was functional pressed wood stuff that she’d leased from a supplier. It probably didn’t look like the kind of office where a truly confident person would work. At first, Gina had hoped I’d spruce up the decor some, but then she’d visited the apartment I was renting at the time and never mentioned the plan again.

  Charlotte fiddled with her unruly hair. “I used to think my greatest maternal accomplishment, maybe my only maternal accomplishment, was instilling confidence in Daniel,” she said. “It was an obsession of mine, practically from the minute he was born, obviously an attempt to undo my own parents’ mistakes, since they were of the break-their-spirits school of child rearing. But lately, I’ve been wondering if I shouldn’t have encouraged specific talents or skills that would give rise to confidence, rather than the abstract thing itself. He’s extremely confident, but has he earned it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Rhetorical question. And please don’t repeat my doubts, especially to Samuel. He and Daniel are basically twin brothers.”

  I was delighted by the double betrayal.

  As I drove her to the house, she became silent, and I could tell she was disappointed in the neighborhood. Vinyl siding was hugely popular in Somerville, and there was something unsettling about the sight of row after row of multifamily houses encased in plastic, as if the whole area were an overgrown Monopoly game.

  “I know it’s not exactly what you were looking for, in terms of location, but there are a lot of advantages.” I left it at that because at that moment I couldn’t think of one. “I don’t live far from here myself.”

  “Oh, it’s fine,” she said. “I was just a little amazed by your car. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a car this clean. Is it brand new?”

  “Nearly.” My Toyota was eight years old, but with its creased upholstery, layers of carpeting, and tiny compartments, it was an endless source of cleaning opportunities. I told her that a friend had taken it to a car wash for me, as a present.

  “Oh,” she said, nodding with the noncommittal distraction that usually indicates disbelief.

  Fortunately, the seller wasn’t home. He’d already begun to pack away books and dishes and posters, and all of the house’s flaws were on display, along with a shocking amount of dust and filth that had been uncovered when the furniture had been moved. Charlotte wandered around the owner’s apartment as if she were in a secondhand shop, occasionally pointing out a bowl or a lamp that she admired, but saying nothing about the place itself. She walked hesitantly, as if she was afraid of stepping on broken glass.

  “I don’t suppose you want to see the other apartments in the house,” I said.

  “No, I don’t think so. I mean, there’s no point, is there?”

  “Probably not.”

  “A more interesting idea would be to look at your house. To give me a different view of the neighborhood.”

  I sensed that this was a bad idea. I was letting her get the upper hand in the relationship, never sensible, professionally or personally.

  “All right,” I said. “It’s only a couple of minutes from here.”

  Just in Time

  It was a bright day, warm for fall and disorienting to me because of the way the temperature scrambled my expectations of the season. Both Charlotte and I were overdressed for the weather, and standing in the cramped entryway of my house, fumbling with the keys, I could smell perfume rising off her with the heat of her body. It smelled of cinnamon and patchouli, a distinctive and seductive scent that I hadn’t noticed before, even as we were driving.

  I was about to comment on it when the door to Kumiko’s apartment swung open. She stood there clutching a wicker basket filled with laundry wearing a look of exaggerated concern, as if she’d caught me in the middle of criminal activity. I had a moment of uncertainty about how to introduce her; “friend” was completely inaccurate, and “my tenant” sounded insulting. I settled on “my neighbor,” which was truthful but vague.

  “Charlotte and her husband are clients of mine,” I said. “They’re apartment hunting.”

  “William is my landlord,” she corrected in a soft tone, as if she were my indentured servant and the laundry in the basket was mine. “I’m afraid I’ve fallen a little behind on the rent. Is that why you’re showing the apartment, William?”

  “Let’s not get into it right now,” I said. There was no way this discussion would make me look anything but ridiculous. In addition to that, I was desperate to get Charlotte upstairs before Kumiko handed me her laundry with a request to go lightly on the starch. I looked down at the wicker basket and then glared at Kumiko—significantly, I hoped. “Kumiko’s a painter,” I said. “She uses the garage as a studio.”

  “And I appreciate it, too. Despite the mildew situation. I hope I don’t develop an allergy to mold.” She hesitated for a moment, and then reading my look perfectly and confirming the close, unhealthy nature of our relationship, tossed aside the laundry and withdrew.

  As soon as I opened the door upstairs, I was overwhelmed by the stench of bleach, floor wax, and vinegar from an early morning cleaning binge. Usually, these smells made me feel happily in control of my life, but standing there with Charlotte, I felt ashamed of myself. “The cleaners were here this morning,” I said.

  It was early afternoon, and the bright sunshine pouring in all the windows was bouncing off every polished floor and piece of furniture, creating an almost blinding dazzle of light. “I hope you pay them well,” Charlotte said.

  “Who’s that?”

  “The cleaners.”

  “Right.”

  “You must live alone. To keep everything so tidy. I told Samuel you had the look of a solitary man. There’s a monklike air about you.”

  By this, I assumed she meant I appeare
d to have no social or sex life. Why was I giving this impression to so many people?

  “I hope you realize,” she went on, “that your tenant is clinically passive-aggressive. I worked on a book about passive aggression in the workplace. I know quite a bit about it.” I took her into the kitchen and pointed out the view and the skyline of Boston, glinting in the haze of the afternoon light. She nodded at it and shrugged, eager to get back to the subject of Kumiko, mostly, I suspected, because it made her feel more insightful than me. “Someone that manipulative and sick can string you on for years.”

  “I prefer to think of her along the lines of eccentric.”

  “No, no. She crossed that line long ago.” She took a seat at the kitchen table and I quickly removed a neat stack of papers on which I’d tried to make a record of exactly what Kumiko owed me. I was unnerved that Charlotte was settling in, but there was nothing I could do except offer her a drink.

  “Soda water, please.”

  “I have something stronger, if you’re in the mood. Wine?”

  “Please, no. I’ve quit drinking. You know what the worst part of giving up alcohol is? People look at you as if you’re a drunk. You can collapse at any number of dinner parties and no one says a word, but order ginger ale in a restaurant and everyone gives you a sympathetic look, to let you know they understand. I suppose I’ll have to go on a huge bender one of these weekends just to reassure Samuel that I’m not a hopeless alcoholic.”

  She sipped at the water delicately and drummed her pretty nails against the glass. I wondered if she was having as much trouble sticking to her abstinence resolution as I was.

  “When did you stop?”

  “Most recently, this morning. How far behind on the rent is she? Whatever her name is. Eight months, a year?”

  “Oh, no,” I said, reassured by the overstatement. “Only three or four months. Plus a little money I loaned her.”

  “Let’s make a plan of action for you,” she said. “They’re big on making plans in the confidence book. It helps you imagine a positive outcome.”

  As I went into the pantry to get a notepad, she called out, “This is going to work, William. Samuel and I got to you just in time.”

  Something

  I felt virtuous and hopeful for having taken notes on Charlotte’s plan of action. So virtuous, in fact, that I was sure it would be easy to spend the evening propped up on my short chaise longue and finally get past the introduction so I could begin reading The Mandarins itself.

  After dinner that night, in the glare of the reading light, I found where I’d left off a couple weeks earlier and read to the end of Rosemary Boyle’s commentary. She concluded her introductory rant in an expansive mood, congratulating the reader. “Those who bought this book are to be applauded for their good intentions. You’ve undertaken a daunting task. You will not regret beginning this novel even if, like the vast majority of unpaid readers, you don’t make it past the first chapter. Those in search of greener pastures should bear in mind that de Beauvoir was wildly prolific. And that this is her most readable work. Good luck.”

  An hour later, I was driving along a suburban parkway to an arranged meeting with a supposedly married man who was supposedly named Rick. Rick owned a van. Vans—the kind with few windows—are extremely popular, for obvious reasons, with married men who have secret lives. I was quickly coming to the conclusion that everyone had a secret life. After all, if I had a secret life, no one was above suspicion. My own father had had a secret life with his receptionist.

  It would be nice, I thought, scanning the parking area off the side of the road for the green van, if Samuel and Charlotte turned out not to have secret lives, if both of them were content with their marriage and with each other, just as they appeared to be. It would lend balance and a sense of proportion to the confusing world of human relations. Surely one happy, uncomplicated marriage wasn’t too much to hope for. And clearly, there was something to learn from them, even if I wasn’t certain what it was.

  As soon as I spotted the van pulled over in the agreed upon spot, surrounded by low-hanging trees, my mouth went dry with excitement and regret. It was unforgivable that I hadn’t stayed home and read past the introduction to The Mandarins. I should have begun reading the book itself. A couple of chapters. Was that too much to expect of myself? I yanked up the parking brake and got out, hitched up my pants, and headed toward the van. I spotted Rick in the driver’s seat, his window rolled down. Like many people I ran into in these settings, he had a pleasant, ordinary face, with the overfed, pampered look of marriage that’s made up of equal parts contentment and defeat. He was nervous, always a reassuring sign, and one that stifled any mass-murderer concerns.

  I could have read one chapter of de Beauvoir. Two pages. One page. It wouldn’t have been much, but it would at least have been something. I had to promise myself I’d get to it tomorrow. No matter what.

  “Hey,” I said, using the gruff tone that always screams bad acting to me. “You Rick?”

  “Everett? You’re taller than I expected.”

  “Well.” I loved the way people felt you were obliged to meet their private expectations and fantasies. The engine of the van was turned off, but the radio was on, tuned to a talk show where a commentator was rambling ungrammatically about Saddam Hussein’s plot to blow up the U.S. with a “megabomb.”

  Rick looked at me suspiciously. Everyone was suspicious. “You’re not a cop, are you?” he asked.

  I assured him I wasn’t, but I couldn’t tell if he was relieved or disappointed.

  Drying Out

  From my bedroom window, I could see Kumiko Rothberg laying out her laundry on the grass in the yard behind the house. It was a hot, bright morning. Too bright. I felt slightly hungover from a lack of sleep and assaulted by all that optimistic sunshine.

  Kumiko’s laundry routine was another of the peasant affectations she’d picked up somewhere in her travels, although not, presumably, in Scarsdale, where she’d grown up. She shook out a white smock and spread it on the grass. There was a dryer in the basement of the house and a laundry line attached to her back porch, but when I’d pointed these out to her, she’d gone into a long story about having learned this superior method of clothes drying decades earlier from her “Guatemalan family,” a mythic group of people she’d exploited for six months while studying Spanish in Central America.

  She straightened out the smock, tossed one of her long gray braids over her shoulder, and looked directly at my window. I withdrew. Oddly enough, the more behind she got in the rent, the more embarrassed and concerned I felt when I spotted her, as if she were the landlord and I the tenant months behind on the rent.

  Real Estate

  Despite having worked in real estate for a decade, I’d resisted buying a piece of property until three years earlier. The ostensible reason for the delay was a vague political objection to ownership of property and government subsidies of same in the form of tax breaks. For years, even before buying my house, I had trouble remembering the specifics, probably because the whole thing was just self-righteous frosting on what was essentially a fear of settling down, not entirely dissimilar to Sylvia’s problems. As a result of my delays, I’d been priced out of the downtown Boston neighborhood, not far from Edward, where I’d been renting for years, and had been priced into Somerville. Despite its density of population and abundance of vinyl siding, Somerville was most notable for its diverse population. The city was crawling with people of all shapes, colors, sexual orientations, and religions, from varied class and ethnic backgrounds, speaking dozens of languages, living more or less harmoniously, all drawn together by the fervent desire to move someplace better.

  The outstanding virtue of my two-family house was its location. The sweeping views created the illusion that I was floating above the crowded streets, about to take off for a journey to a neighborhood where you could find artisan bread. Financially, the outstanding virtue was the commodious rental unit on the first floor of the house.
Or so it had seemed when I bought the place.

  All the rain had freshened the lawn, and the grass was a bright green, nearly artificial looking, making a nice contrast with Kumiko’s bright white smocks. The sky in front of me and the houses down below looked bleached. It was time to deliver the complicated schedule of payments—a spreadsheet, in fact—I’d drawn up for Kumiko, following Charlotte’s advice.

  Song to a Seagull

  I stood on the back porch of the house, where the mournful sounds of a Buffy Sainte-Marie tape were coming through the open window of Kumiko’s apartment. Kumiko had a fondness for mournful sopranos.

  “Morning,” I said, trying to inject as much optimism into the greeting as possible.

  She spun around, alarmed. “You frightened me,” she accused.

  “Lovely day.” I squinted at the blinding sunlight.

  She shook out a pillowcase and laid it on the ground. “I suppose it depends upon your definition of lovely.”

  “The sun is out,” I said. “It must make everything dry more quickly.”

  She had droopy, sorrowful eyes, and when she looked at me, it was often with the pity a believer feels for the unenlightened. “It’s interesting how speed is considered such a virtue in our culture, even for laundry.”

  I stepped down onto the lawn, a little square of grass bordered by lilac bushes and evergreens Edward had helped me plant shortly after I bought the place. “I think I used to own this album,” I said. “I haven’t heard it in years.”

  “If the music is bothering you, William, you just have to tell me. I’ll turn it down.”

  “I didn’t say it was too loud.” Although the truth was, it was a little early in the day for that melancholy tremolo and all that yearning.

  She gave me another of her pitying smiles. “As soon as I’m finished here, I’ll go in and turn it off. I promise I won’t play music unless I know you’re out of the house. Unless the neighbors have been complaining, too. But I suspect they’d take my side. They’re very supportive.”