Alternatives to Sex

by Stephen McCauley

  A threat was buried in the comment. Perhaps she was organizing the neighbors to throw up a picket line around the house if I tried to evict her.

  I had the schedule neatly folded into an envelope, all very professional. I handed it to her.

  “I took a long time drawing that up and I’d appreciate it if you’d read it carefully. There are about two dozen dates with exact figures next to each. If you follow it to the letter, you’ll be entirely caught up on what you owe me within eight months. I’d like you to take a look and make sure it’s clear.” And then, because I was desperate to change the subject, I said: “How’s the yoga going?”

  “It’s the center of my spiritual life. Forgive me if I’m not comfortable discussing my spirituality with my landlord.”

  She took the schedule out of the envelope and unfolded it, put on a pair of tiny black reading glasses, and peering over the tops of them, said to me, in a tone of reconciliation, “I hope you know how much I appreciate this.”

  The paper she was holding was covered with a list of dates and amounts and times of the day. Seeing it in her hands, I realized I should have used a much larger font. It was the kind of overly detailed timetable, tiny print and all, that could be used as Exhibit A to prove an unstable state of mind.

  She devoted ten seconds to the schedule. “I have to go to a wedding on November twenty-sixth,” she said. “Can we change that date to the twenty-ninth?”

  The specificity of this one objection cheered me up. “Certainly,” I said. “That shouldn’t be a problem. I’ll tell you what, you can skip that payment altogether so it doesn’t throw everything else off. The rest looks fine?”

  “I appreciate this, William. More than you’ll ever know. Kindness is an undervalued quality in our age.”

  “I agree.”

  “I don’t think that friend of yours, the woman you’re trying to rent my apartment to, understands kindness in the same way you do.”

  Despite my better instincts, I was pleased by the flattering comparison. “I’m not trying to rent your apartment to her. I thought I’d made that clear.”

  “I felt as if she was looking right through me.”

  As I was stepping back into the house, feeling as if, all things considered, the conversation had gone reasonably well, she said, “I have a show lined up at an important gallery in December.”

  “That’s wonderful. Congratulations.”

  “It’s a breakthrough for my career. At the end, I should have enough for a down payment on a house, and I’m hoping you’ll agree to work with me, despite your feelings about me.”

  “I’d be happy to help out.”

  “Good. And I’d be honored if you came to the opening. It would mean a great, great deal to me.”

  “I’d love to.”

  “It’s in New Mexico.”

  “Ah. Well.”

  “I’m meeting the gallery owner in Boston tomorrow afternoon. Could we change tomorrow’s payment, too? Or maybe I’ll just skip that one instead of the one at the end of November, and then toss in something else in December.”

  Trapped

  “And I suppose you agreed?” Edward asked me.

  “It’s only for a day or two. I have a good feeling about this plan working. Charlotte, the woman I was telling you about, was very clear.”

  “You take her advice, some alcoholic stranger, but you won’t take mine. You just invited me over to exploit me. Hand me the bucket.”

  I’d invited Edward to my apartment to tell him about Sylvia and to try and settle on an asking price for his apartment. But before we got to that, I asked him to help me with the kitchen sink, which had been draining slowly for a couple of months. He’d asked for towels, wrenches, a metal bucket I used to mop the floors, and a few household items, and had climbed into the cabinet under the sink with simian agility. I was sitting on the floor looking in, marveling at the flexibility of his compact body and the efficient way he worked.

  “You should take Marty’s seminar,” he said. “She’d tell you what to do, and it wouldn’t be to spend hours drawing up some hopeless schedule. You might as well watch what I’m doing down here so you can do it yourself next time. I’m not flying three thousand miles to fix your sink, and a plumber would take you for a couple of hundred bucks. Get your head under here.”

  I lay down on the floor and slid my head and shoulders under the sink, so that they were practically resting on his thighs. After years of wearing a military haircut in a failed attempt to appear more “masculine,” he was letting his hair get longer. His hair was a pretty dirty blond and was growing in in ringlets. I grinned at him and watched as he explained about the trap and grease in his hoarse, cranky voice. He had a way of dressing up all of his instructions with a reprimand. He’d tell me how to do it, but I should have known how all along.

  “You don’t have to pretend to be annoyed all the time,” I said. “It wouldn’t make you too vulnerable to drop your guard every once in a while. Especially with me.”

  “I’m doing the lecturing, William.” He unbolted the trap on the sink, and filthy water poured into the pail. “You should be using a drain opener more often. Don’t let this build up again. Is that clear?”

  “It is,” I said. I loved his firm, impotent commands that seemed to be directly and mysteriously connected to his need to be dominated. There was something about the proximity of his curled up little body that I found unexpectedly arousing, and I shifted my legs and cast a lascivious glance in his direction. “I have some news for you,” I said. “I think it’s going to make you happy.”

  “Absence of news is generally what makes me happy these days.”

  “I have a buyer for your apartment.”

  He continued working on the sink, cleaning out the pipe and applying a sealant to the joint. When he was satisfied that everything was secure, he tossed all of the tools into the canvas bag I kept them in, mostly unused until he visited and repaired something. Without saying a word, he crawled out over me and turned on the faucet.

  When I’d hauled my own body out from the cabinet, I said, “You don’t look very pleased, Edward.”

  “There, you see, the drain is fine.” He shut off the water and turned to face me with a look of disbelief. “How can you have a buyer when we haven’t discussed price?”

  “That’s what you’re here to do tonight. I’ve been working with this customer for a while, and as long as we come up with something fair, she’ll go for it.”

  “In that case, I suppose I’d better start packing.”

  “Come on,” I said. I went to him, turned him around, and brushed off the seat of his pants with my hand. “Just pretend you’re happy and grateful.”

  “Don’t touch me like that. Of course I’m happy you’re helping me leave town. Finally there’s a project involving me you can find time for. I’m sure the commission has nothing to do with it.”

  “I agreed to a one percent commission, remember? The rest will go straight into your pocket.”

  “You’ll get credit for the sale and the office will make a few grand.”

  “True.”

  “On top of that, I’ve talked Marty into letting you list her condo. She’s been trying to sell it on her Web site for two months now, but she hasn’t had a single offer. I told her you’d save her time and ultimately make her more money. So please deliver on both counts. Now it’s your turn to be happy and grateful.”

  I assured him that I was both, although really, it was a mixed blessing. True, I needed to bring new listings into the office, but without question, Marty would want a few hundred grand more than the place was worth. Everyone who tries to sell a piece of real estate himself asks for much more than it’s worth. Even the ones who don’t boast about their beastly natures.

  “Let me take you out to dinner,” I said. “We’ll celebrate.” Although judging from the sour look on his face, he was not in the mood for celebration.

  “I can’t. You have to drive me home in a few minute
s. I have a date with a pilot, and he’s landing in half an hour. I have to go clean up.”

  “A pilot?” He hadn’t mentioned a word of this before, and the alleged date had about it the faint smell of fantasy. Typically, Edward was nervous about dates and took hours to get ready. He often canceled at the last minute. “Married, I suppose.”

  “Of course. All pilots are married, and they’re all bisexual. Everyone knows that.”

  “I must have forgotten,” I said. “You realize you’re the one who told me you wanted to sell your apartment. It’s you who decided to move.”

  “I do realize that, William. I’m not completely insane. I guess I just hadn’t realized it would happen so quickly. Not that I’m not grateful.”

  As I was driving him home, more slowly than I ordinarily drive, I struggled to try and find something to talk about but couldn’t come up with anything. It wouldn’t do to assure him that the person interested in his condo had a solid track record of backing out of deals at the last minute and that it was nearly inconceivable she’d go through with the purchase. Finally, I told him that Charlotte had invited me to a cocktail party at their house next month. “If you’re in town,” I said, “I’d love to have you join me.”

  “I’m p-paralyzed with pleasure.” Edward had recently read The Great Gatsby, and this line of Daisy Buchanan’s, affected stutter and all, had become one of his new catchphrases. “You’ve wasted no time replacing me, have you?”

  “It’s hardly that. Anyway, it’s mostly business. They’re clients.”

  “It’s such an obvious attempt to bond with Mommy and Daddy all over again.”

  We were stopped at a traffic light, and without saying anything, he undid his seat belt and opened the door. “I’ll walk from here,” he said. “I need the exercise.”

  “Let me know how the date goes,” I said.

  He dodged the traffic and disappeared down the sidewalk.

  Well, I thought as I was driving home, two could play that game. I dialed the pedicurist grad student and set up an appointment for later that night. It certainly wasn’t the way I’d been planning to spend my evening, but it was more appealing than the chaise longue.

  Rose

  A few days later, I had a lunch date with Rose Forrest, the eighty-year-old woman who’d been my father’s receptionist and mistress. She still lived in the Connecticut town where I’d grown up, but she took the train to Boston a few times a year to visit her brother, a decrepit bachelor who lived in a studio apartment in Back Bay. She usually called me when she came to town, and usually I took her out to lunch at an overpriced restaurant, where she drank a lot, ate very little, and reminisced in a careful, evasive way about my father and their working relationship.

  I’d made arrangements to meet her that day in the lobby of the Ritz. I didn’t like the Ritz, with its ossified Boston ambiance and unimaginative food, but it was close to Rose’s brother’s apartment and was, I imagined, the kind of place my father would have approved of. Earlier in the week, I’d had a big score at the consignment shop—a pair of gray Helmut Lang pants that weren’t exactly flattering but needed no alterations and a cashmere Yves Saint Laurent jacket—and I wore both, even though the jacket was probably out of season. In her younger days, Rose had made her own clothes, knock-offs of designer dresses and suits, and her brother, undoubtedly gay, had been a salesman in the men’s department at Filene’s.

  Rose was folded into an armchair in the lobby of the hotel looking shockingly older than the last time I’d seen her, a little more than a year earlier. She’d always been a tall, slim woman with a delicate body that belied her strong will and commanding—though possibly wasted—intelligence. (Making appointments for my father’s dental practice couldn’t have been an intellectual challenge.) Today, she looked, for the first time in my experience, frail.

  She held out her cold, bony hands to me, and I pulled her up from her chair and kissed her cheek.

  “You’re late, William,” she said. “I’ve been here nearly half an hour.”

  I checked my watch. “I’m awfully sorry. But we said one. It’s quarter of. Do you think you got here too early?”

  “Oh? That’s a possibility I hadn’t considered. I’m slipping when it comes to dates and times and those sorts of things. Trevor insisted I get here whenever it was I got here. He’s more vague with details than I am.” She and her brother, whom I’d met only twice, both had odd pronunciation, reaching in a sweet, unconvincing way for an upper-class accent. Details. She scrutinized me for a moment, and I grinned, hoping for a compliment on the jacket. “You’re going gray,” she said.

  “Ah.” It was one of the signs of aging that didn’t concern me, at least not yet. “Only a few strands here and there.”

  “Yes, but that’s how it begins. You should start putting something in it now, before it becomes too obvious. Your father dyed his hair, you know.”

  “I didn’t know. I suppose I should have figured it out, now that you mention it.” I wasn’t about to tell her that my image of my father was so ill-defined I couldn’t remember exactly what color his hair or his eyes had been. She took my arm, and I led her into the dining room. Frail as she was, she still had perfect posture and a dignified gait, both of which seemed connected in some way to the affected pronunciation. “How old was he when he died? Seventy-five?”

  “Seventy-three. And no gray. I insisted he have it done right,” she said. “Professionally. Not the ink you get in a drugstore.”

  “I’m sure he appreciated the advice.”

  “I don’t know whether he did or not, but I’m sure someone appreciated the results.”

  I’d noticed over the years that Rose took pride in these small, insignificant ways in which she’d been a good influence in my father’s life. I suppose they were the only things about her relationship with my father she was comfortable discussing with me, and probably they balanced out, in her own mind, her role as other woman. It wasn’t for his sake she’d insisted on the professional dye job, or for her own, but for my mother’s; she was the one who got the benefit of Rose’s grooming tips. Thus, her relationship with my father hadn’t compromised my parents’ marriage but had made it better. For all I knew, it had.

  I pushed in her chair. Her body seemed weightless.

  “Do you want to start off with your usual?” I asked. “We can worry about the food later.”

  “I’ve stopped drinking wine,” she said. “Doctor’s orders, unfortunately.”

  “Nothing serious, I hope.”

  “I’m trying not to focus on it. I had that surgery six months ago, so I’ve had to make some adjustments.”

  I nodded and signaled for the waiter, slightly panicked. I had a vague memory of her telling me, in a phone conversation, about a hospitalization, but I wasn’t sure if she’d told me the exact nature of the illness or any of the details of the treatment. I met with Rose for these lunches and sat through the conversation, at times strained, because doing so made me feel closer to my father than I ever had during his life, as if he and I were in collusion on an important secret, as if he trusted and confided in me in a way he never had. But it occurred to me, as I scanned the menu, that I didn’t know Rose herself very well at all; she was a medium, through whom I was communicating with my father, not a real, three-dimensional person. Undoubtedly, she thought of me in a similar way, no matter how carefully I dressed for her and how diligent I was about pushing in her chair.

  “How’s your business?” she asked me. “Selling a lot, I suppose. I keep hearing about prices in Boston and Cambridge.”

  “Business is all right. I have a few promising things in the works. A friend selling a condo, a professor desperate to buy, a nice married couple moving in from the suburbs.”

  “That’s happening a lot, married couples moving in from the suburbs. It’s important to make changes when you’ve been together a long time.” When you’ve bean together.

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

 
“I hope you’re able to help them out.”

  She often talked about marriage in an authoritative way, as if her role of mistress had given her special insight into the institution. She had her hands folded on top of the menu, not even feigning interest in food, and when the waiter came, she asked him to bring her a small salad, “Something I can push around on the plate.”

  “Do you ever regret not marrying?” I asked her. According to family gossip, she’d been engaged more than once and had backed out at the last minute.

  “Not at all. I wasn’t meant for motherhood and housewife duties. I would have felt boxed in by the whole business.”

  “I see what you mean,” I said. Hearing her put it that way, I couldn’t imagine her, with her affected way of speaking and her brittle posture, dealing with the sloppiness of children and a live-in husband.

  She did as she’d promised and pushed the salad around on her plate without making much effort at eating it, and I began to think she might be a lot sicker than she was letting on. We talked about the weather and a few uncontroversial current events. She was a woman who was used to placating men like my father by rarely expressing an opinion. When the plates had been cleared and I sat nursing a coffee I’d ordered only to prolong the lunch, she told me she had a favor to ask.

  “Please,” I said. “If there’s anything I can help you with.”

  “It’s nothing like that. You see, I have, in my possession, some things that belonged to your father. And I’d like to send them to you.”

  “Of course. What kinds of things?”

  She sighed and smiled in a fond, proud way. “They’re gifts I gave him over the years. Personal things, mostly, but also some books, a few records he especially liked.”

  “Records?” I’d never known my father to listen to music or express any opinions on the subject, and the idea that he might have musical favorites was a shock.