Alternatives to Sex

by Stephen McCauley

  “I enjoyed giving him things—very nice things—but we agreed it wouldn’t look right for him to bring them home. So I kept them for him. I probably should have thrown them out years ago, but I haven’t been able to. Some things might fit you. He never had an opportunity to wear a lot of them. There’s not more than a couple of boxes. I can have them shipped to you, if that’s all right.”

  “Please do,” I said. “I’d be honored.” I was trying not to picture her shopping trips, buying clothes she knew would never be worn, or to think about where she’d kept everything, year after year, in her small apartment. I offered to walk her back to her brother’s place, but she said she had an appointment with a hairdresser later that afternoon and would just wait in the lobby. It was fun to see people coming and going, she said, trying to guess where they were from and what they were doing there. I led her back to the chair she’d been sitting in earlier, and kissed her good-bye, saddened and unexpectedly relieved by the thought that this might be the last time I saw her.

  Getting My Story Straight

  There was one thing about the forgettable, impersonal, and ultimately depressing forty-minute sexual encounter that I loved: I got to meet a lot of people I otherwise would never have met. The fact that it turned out, in many cases, I wouldn’t otherwise want to meet them was irrelevant.

  Despite a pretty steep level of disillusionment with the whole process, I loved knowing that all over the city, at every hour of the day and night, there were people—men and women of all ages and preferences and physical proportions—opening their doors to strangers and getting right down to carnal business. You could easily think of this as total depravity, as end-of-civilization decadence. Given the assorted risks involved, you could think of it as stupid or suicidal. On the other hand, if everyone were having as much sexual activity as he’d like, adhering to the rules of protection, and avoiding guilt and self-hatred, there’d be no such thing as road rage, and no one would ever have voted for George W. Bush. Life, on the whole, would be better.

  My problem was that I’d let an activity become a habit, a habit become a distraction, and a distraction become an obsession. After a while, it had become like eating vast portions of flavorless food at every meal, simply because it’s on the plate or because there’s nothing good on television. Oh, one more bite, you think. Why not?

  Thus, with an abundance of rationalizations and an absence of hunger, I went to meet Francis at yet another suburban hotel. It was a Monday night, I was exhausted, I was supposed to be going to Marty Gordon’s apartment to give her an opinion of value and negotiate listing prices. But a message had appeared in my e-mailbox, I wasn’t dying to wrangle with Marty about money, and I do enjoy visiting hotels.

  I called Marty from my cell phone as I drove on the Mass Pike. “We’ll have to do it another time,” I said. “I have an emergency I have to attend to.”

  “What is this?” she asked. “You’re testing my limits, seeing how much crap I’ll let you get away with before we’ve even established a professional relationship?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “A problem I didn’t foresee, that’s all.”

  “Thirty seconds ago, it was an emergency. Now it’s been downgraded to a problem. If we’re on for another two minutes it’ll be an ‘issue.’ Get your story straight, William. It’s one of the rules I give in my first seminar. Get Your Story Straight.”

  “What about tomorrow night?” I asked.

  “Okay, so now we’re changing the subject. Hey, whatever. I can rearrange my schedule and my career around your emergency issues. I have no life, William. Be here at eight o’clock. One more ‘problem’ and I’m calling Century 21.”

  Atmospheric

  Francis had described himself as thirty-two and blond. His age was hard to judge in the dim light of the hotel room. He’d personalized the place with votive candles burning in small blue globes on the desk across from the bed.

  “Atmospheric,” I said.

  “Vanilla. Aromatherapy. It’s clarifying.”

  “Ah.”

  He was dressed for the occasion—naked, in other words—and on the whole, looked thoroughly done in, as if he’d be happy to crawl under the covers on the king-sized bed and go to sleep. He had thin, reddish blond hair, light eyebrows, and the kind of pale features that seem to disappear the longer you look at them. He sat at the desk chair and gazed at me with weary intensity.

  “You’re hot,” he drawled, unconvincingly.

  “Oh. Thanks.” In a moment of architectural insanity, the hotel had been built directly above the Mass Pike, with traffic whizzing beneath it. Through the translucent curtains, I could see headlights zooming toward the room as if the cars were about to crash through the wall. “You, too,” I said. “Hot.” Having uttered that meaningless word, I needed to reorganize my thoughts about this meeting. “Mind if I use the bathroom?”

  There were more candles burning on the counter around the sink, mixed in with antiseptic cleaners for inside and outside the body. I suppose the attention to cleanliness should have been reassuring, but it all seemed so carefully planned and organized, it struck me as unwholesome, and the antithesis of sexual. I lifted the toilet seat with my foot and took a piss. I had a strong urge to leave, but I’d already canceled my meeting with Marty and I knew I’d end up at home arranging something else similar to this anyway.

  As I took a seat on the edge of the wide bed, my eyes adjusted to the light and I saw, laid out on a low table near the window, a collection of nearly a dozen sex toys. They were lined up in an orderly way, according to size and color. Behind them was an assortment of lubricants in tubes and bottles, arranged by height. The bedside table had a big plastic bowl filled to the top with condoms; there was a stack of neatly folded towels and facecloths at the foot of the bed. Draped over the easy chair were thongs, bikinis, rubber shorts, and what appeared to be a pleated plaid skirt, like Catholic schoolgirls wear.

  The way he’d set out the whole display reminded me of one of those Hong Kong tailors who used to set up shop in hotel rooms for a week, taking orders for custom-made suits. For a moment, I wasn’t sure if I was expected to admire his collection or shop.

  “You travel light,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Not really. I’m leaving tomorrow morning and I’m half packed.”

  “There’s more, in other words?”

  “If you don’t see anything that interests you here, you can look in there.” He pointed to a black duffel bag near my feet. His cock and balls were bunched up on the seat of the chair, like a family of mice huddled together for warmth. Maybe I could say I’d left some of my own accouterments out in the car and make a cowardly, be-right-back exit that way.

  “They must love going through your carry-on at the airport,” I said.

  “They don’t qualify as weapons.”

  A matter of opinion.

  There was something grim about the seriousness of his attitude, as if he was lugging around this boatload of props out of need and didn’t get much pleasure out of it. Taking in the candles, the display, the bowl of condoms, and his state of exhaustion, you’d have to conclude he’d done a couple of shows already that day, possibly that very evening.

  “You look a little wiped out,” I said. “Maybe I shouldn’t stick around.”

  “Hey, come on,” he said. “I’m all worked up.” I looked back at the mice, sleeping soundly, begging not to be disturbed. “You said you would.”

  I sighed and gazed out at the traffic again. “Where are you from, anyway?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “It makes no difference, I’m just interested. An unofficial poll.”

  “Atlanta,” he said.

  “Everyone’s from Atlanta these days. Why is that? Based on my very unscientific study, half the people you run into on any given day are here from Atlanta. At least the naked ones in hotel rooms.”

  I could see that his patience, assuming that’s what it was, was about to harden
into contempt. His pale, nearly invisible eyes blazed for a moment in the unbaked dough of his face. “I turned down a couple of other guys.” And then, sweetly, like a child, “You promised.”

  I was beginning to feel as if I’d seen a car pulled over on the highway, had stopped to help, and was now obliged to change the tire. All against my better judgment and my own desires. The truth was, I hadn’t felt any sexual interest or enthusiasm all night and had arranged this whole meeting out of habit and to avoid dealing with Marty. I was as exhausted as he looked, and it occurred to me that, pleas to stay or not, he probably found my attitude and enervation as depressing as I found his.

  But recognizing that we were in a similar state of restless ennui made me more sympathetic to him, even if no more attracted. I had made an implicit promise, and I felt obliged to deliver in some way.

  “Look, I’ll help you out,” I said. “But I’ll only get off on this if I stay fully dressed the whole time and you understand that I’m not going to get off.”

  “That’s cool,” he said. He stood up wearily, like someone who’d run a few too many miles that afternoon, and bent over the desk. “Start off with that red one in the middle there.” He looked over his shoulder. “It’s okay about not getting off. I won’t get off either.”

  Crutches

  Like most people who are obsessed with fitness and advertise their superior health and physical condition, Marty Gordon lived in intense, unrelenting pain. It traveled from one region of her body to another and usually required a crutch or an elastic bandage, an elaborate brace, or some combination of the above. She offered the fact that she was able to live and function with this pain as proof of her stamina and courage and the effectiveness of her assertiveness training and exercise routines. The reasons for the pain were never mentioned.

  When I got to her apartment the following night, she was carrying a metal walking stick with a pink rubber tip. She hobbled through the rooms, using the stick to point out to me the improvements she’d made over the years and the ways in which they ought to up the asking price. Her dog, a fat Rottweiler named Charlaine, was trailing behind her, occasionally nudging the fanny pack Marty had strapped around her waist. Charlaine was discussed at length on ReleaseTheBeast.com as the superior creature from whom Marty had learned many of her aggressive techniques. Based on my personal observations, she was a quiet and relatively docile animal who was casually possessive of Marty, mainly because she viewed her owner as a short, muscular can opener.

  Their relationship seemed to follow the basic folie-à-deux pattern of most dog/owner, parent/child, husband/wife arrangements: Charlaine was plagued by many of the same physical ailments as Marty; the two shared a lot of the same steroid-based medications; Marty took Charlaine to her masseur for treatments. The dog looked at me with scornful dismissal that was eerily similar to Marty’s.

  “Walk-in closet,” Marty said, shoving open a door in the hallway with her cane. “I had it built two years ago.”

  I peered in. The shelves and hooks against the walls were all spilling over with straps and crutches and back braces, making it look like a shrine at Lourdes. “If I need medical supplies,” I said, “I know where to come.”

  She slammed the door shut. “It cost me twelve hundred dollars to have that closet built. New shelves, built-in cabinets. How come you’re not writing it down?”

  I flipped a page on the pad I was carrying and scribbled a note. Big closet. Big deal.

  “Edward offered to help build the closet, but I”—full stop, to let the obvious point sink in—“don’t believe in taking advantage of friends.”

  “No.”

  She opened her fanny pack and pulled out what looked like a lamb chop. Charlaine snatched it out of her hand and practically swallowed it whole. “So let’s see, we’re up to about eighty thousand in home improvements I’ve made, right? And I haven’t even shown you the bedroom.”

  Because there was no love lost between Marty and me, we didn’t see each other all that often. When I did see her, I was always struck by how petite she was. Her diminutive height was exacerbated by her stocky, muscular build. No matter what the season, she dressed in black, knee-length bicycle shorts and an assortment of baggy sweatshirts with her Web site and a close-up of Charlaine’s mouth printed on the front and back. For all of her macho posturing, Marty had a surprisingly soft face, made to look more tender by large amber eyes. Even when she was barking orders at you, there was something vulnerable, even pleading, in her eyes, and I sometimes wondered if the underlying goal of all her bravado wasn’t simply to bully you into loving her.

  Most of Marty’s apartment was decorated with exercise equipment, military memorabilia, and big boxes of brochures for her business. There was a frat house atmosphere throughout, as if the place was lived in by an overworked person who spent most of her time elsewhere.

  Marty’s bedroom, however, could easily have belonged to a ten-year-old girl. The walls were painted a flushed, florid shade of pink, there were white frilly curtains over the one window, and the bed—a narrow single with a white headboard—was covered with a flowered spread, a dozen or more toss pillows, and a collection of stuffed animals.

  “This is obviously your private refuge,” I said, trying to contain my surprise. I’d been in the apartment twice before, but had never been given a tour and certainly had never entered the inner sanctum.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It looks as if you come here to…I don’t know, relax and unwind, get away from your obligations and responsibilities.”

  “Not really. I usually fall asleep out on the sofa in the living room. I paid nine hundred dollars to have the ceiling and the walls plastered. Plus I had the floor sanded and stained. That was another five hundred. Write it down.”

  I picked up a photo of a handsome man in uniform from the top of her bureau. “Is this your brother?” I asked.

  “Why do you think he’s my brother? Because he’s black? Is that it?”

  “Edward told me you have a brother who’s in the military.”

  “True, but I don’t have pictures of that asshole lying around here. That was my fiancé. He was killed in a helicopter accident in Kosovo.”

  “I’m sorry, Marty. I had no idea. Edward told me you’d been engaged, but—”

  “Shit happens, William. When you’re trying to serve your country and make the world a better place, shit happens. Some risks are worth taking. That’s how I see it. I decided I could let his death kill me or make me stronger. Figure out which option I chose. Let’s go into the kitchen.”

  Blowing Smoke

  She pulled a chair out from her kitchen table and said, “Sit.” Charlaine and I both sat at the same time. “I’ll make you some green tea. I’m big on green tea. You should drink at least four cups of green tea a day. Green tea is full of antioxidants. I’ll bet you didn’t know that.”

  “You’re right. I keep hearing about antioxidants, but I have no idea what they’re good for.”

  “Your health, obviously.”

  “I know, but I meant specifically.”

  She turned from her tea preparations at the counter and put her hands on her hips. “In my seminars, I call that Kicking the Gift Horse. I tell you it’s healthy, I offer you a cup of good health, something that might save your life, or at least make your death a little less painful, and you doubt it. You question it. You Kick the Gift Horse.”

  “You have the wrong idea,” I said. “I’m not doubting it, I was wondering what specifically it was good for, what part of the body?”

  “Why? Because if it’s good for your heart you’ll drink it, but if it’s good for your liver you won’t? Because you only want one part of your body to be healthy?”

  “No, I was—”

  “You were Kicking the Gift Horse, William. And you know what? I’m not buying into it.” She clicked off the stove and the gas flame died with a gasp. “Go to Starbucks and pay for poison. I’m doing what I call Kicking
Back.”

  “Tough love.”

  “That’s what I’m paid for, baby.” She tugged a chair out from the table with her good foot and sat down leaning toward me with her elbows on her knees. “I want six hundred grand for this place, and if you can’t get it for me, I’m calling Century 21.”

  I was prepared for this, or something like it, and had done my homework. “The thing is, Marty—”

  “Stop right there. I don’t give a fuck about ‘the thing,’ William. The only ‘thing’ I’m interested in is the bottom line. I paid seventy-five grand for this place and I’ve put over a hundred into it and I want to triple my investment. That’s ‘the thing.’ A crappy place two doors down sold for five fifty. That was two months ago. No reason I shouldn’t get six hundred.”

  I took out a sheet of comparables I’d prepared back at the office. “That place had an additional seven hundred square feet.”

  “Yeah? Well, it had no new kitchen, no refinished floors, and no walk-in closet. Six hundred. Take it or leave it.”

  Her doorbell rang. She gave me a hard, disapproving look, silently demanding I think it over, and then pushed herself up from the table. Charlaine had a moment of confusion, trying to decide between following Marty and guarding me. She growled and trailed after the hand that fed her. I could overhear a muffled exchange at the door, Marty dismissively saying, “Yeah, in the kitchen,” and then she and Charlaine returned with Edward in tow. He was cradling a large carton in his arms, and I leapt up from the table to help him.

  “He made it in here on his own,” Marty said, pulling out her chair. “I don’t think he needs you at this point. Put it down out in the back hallway, Eddie. We’re almost done. He picked up some brochures for me and brought them over. He likes helping out his friends.”

  “He doesn’t drive,” I said. “How did he get that over here?”

  “Ever hear of taxis?” She pulled a ten-dollar bill out of the pack around her waist and slapped it down on the kitchen table. “Satisfied? He won’t take it, but don’t say I didn’t try.”