Alternatives to Sex

by Stephen McCauley

  “I wouldn’t dream of it. I did want to point out that that condo you mentioned before had two and a half baths. That’s a big selling point.”

  “I don’t care about a half bath, William. I don’t care about a whole bath. You know my terms.”

  Edward sat at the table between us, his face flushed and sweating, and I had to fight off the urge to push his hair off his forehead. Marty told him to take the money for the taxi, and as he thanked her and pocketed it, Marty glared at me angrily.

  “I can’t stay,” Edward said. “The cab’s waiting downstairs. I thought you were coming last night.”

  “William had a last-minute emergency. Or was it a problem?”

  “William has a lot of those. How are the negotiations coming along?”

  I restated some of the facts and figures I’d presented to Marty, trying to impress Edward with my professionalism and how reasonable I was being. I could see Marty getting more restless and impatient. Edward saw it, too, and laid his hand on Marty’s arm until I’d finished making my case. When I’d once asked Edward about the basis of his friendship with Marty, he’d told me, without hesitating, that she made him feel safe. He admired her strength and her determination. I interpreted this to mean she was a mother figure, but I suppose father was closer to the truth. Oddly enough, though, it seemed to be Edward who always took the role of protector and security adviser, telling Marty when to pull back, when to soften her image, when to give in. Poor little Edward, longing for submission, was destined to forever be the person in control, even of a bully like Marty.

  “These numbers are no more convincing than the first time you gave them to me,” Marty said.

  “What you have to remember,” Edward told her, “is that William’s on your side. He wants you to get the most for this apartment you can. It’s in his interest, too. If the place stays on the market too long, it begins to look bad.”

  “He’s right,” I said. “And in a market this hot, two weeks is a long time.”

  “You stay out of this, William. This is between Edward and me. Did you check to make sure the printer spelled Charlaine’s name right this time?”

  “It’s perfect. And I made them double the credit, too.”

  “Good man. You see, William, this is a friend. He’s bringing something to the table.”

  “Hopefully,” I said, “I’m bringing professional expertise to the table, a certain amount of experience.”

  Marty sighed with disgust and Charlaine craned her neck around and gave me a look of contempt. I could tell from the way Edward put his hand against his face my comment had been a blunder.

  “You bring nothing to the table,” Marty said. “It’s my apartment, my improvements, my decision. You’re taking something away from the table, namely seven percent of my money. I’m giving this to you as a favor to Edward. Period. So let’s not talk about what you’re bringing to the damned table. In my seminars, that’s what I call Blowing Smoke.” She unzipped the pack around her waist and tossed another massive treat to Charlaine. “I’ve done a little research myself, and I happen to know that your sales figures for the past six months stink. So don’t try to Blow Smoke up my ass, okay?”

  I assured her that I wouldn’t dream of it and came close to asking her to rethink her offer of tea. It was hard to know what kind of research she was talking about having done, but it seems that even a child can use the Internet to discover the most personal details of your life.

  Edward tactfully changed the subject, mentioned a few million-dollar condos I’d sold without specifying that the sales had been several years earlier, and then stood up. “I should go. The meter’s still running. Walk me out, William. I don’t want Marty to have to go up and down stairs again.”

  “You take care of yourself,” Marty said as Edward hugged her. “I pray for you every day. And don’t worry about the change from that twenty. We can figure it out later.”

  When I was sure we were out of earshot, I said, “She gave you a ten.”

  “You’re so petty, William. How can you think I’d care about something like that? And you have no idea how to handle her. You’re telling her she’s got her numbers wrong instead of assuring her you’re going to work with her. It’s a good thing I showed up.”

  I followed him down the stairs to the street. “How was your date the other night? With the pilot.”

  “It was promising. Now go back upstairs, and please be sensible. I’ll call you next week.”

  “Not sooner?” I asked. But he was stepping into the back of the taxi and didn’t hear me.

  Likes and Dislikes

  “I don’t like you,” Marty said. “I never have. The way I see it, you’re just dancing around Edward, fucking with his head, and ruining his life. You have been for three years now.” She reached into her fanny pack and pulled out a box of cigarettes. She lit one and tossed the box onto the table.

  “You smoke,” I said.

  “How’d you guess?”

  “I thought, being a fitness instructor and all that…”

  “Rule number one in my seminars is Assume Nothing. Does nobody any good at all. You could learn a lot from me, William. Rule number two, by the way, is Keep It Between Us. Where was I?”

  “Something about not liking me.”

  “Exactly. I don’t. But the funny thing is, I’ve got people tearing at me day and night, people who want something from me, people I feel obliged to help because I like them. Edward, for example. So when I come across somebody like you, somebody I don’t give a shit about, somebody I actively dislike, the weird thing is, I start to like them. Why? Because I don’t owe them anything, because I don’t have to bullshit with them. That’s my Achilles’ heel. If I dislike you enough, I start to like you.”

  The whole nonsensical rant left me feeling flattered and defenseless. On top of that, I wanted the apartment listing. “I’ll tell you what,” I said. “I’ll agree to list it at five eighty-five. If we don’t get any serious offers in three weeks, we’ll renegotiate.”

  Marty leaned forward in her chair and stubbed out the cigarette in the bottom of a coffee cup. “Nah, I’ll tell you what, William, when I like someone, I like them. List it at five twenty-five.”

  “Five sixty-five,” I said. I could tell from her look this was going nowhere. “All right. Five twenty-five.”

  We shook on it, and she led me to the door with Charlaine trailing behind.

  “Another thing,” I said. “From now on, you should go outside to smoke. People smell smoke in a place these days and they act like it’s cat urine or some other odor they’ll never get out.”

  “Good tip. See, you’re earning your keep already.”

  I handed her a card for a house cleaner I’d met years earlier in a discussion group for people with obsessive cleaning behavioral problems, problems this guy had conquered by indulging in them professionally. “Call him. He’ll come and spend a whole day scrubbing the place. You won’t believe what a difference it will make. I’d volunteer to do it myself, but I don’t have the time.”

  “Is he white?”

  “He appears to be.”

  “All right. I only hire white people to do shit work for me. How much?”

  “Don’t worry about it. He’ll bill me. He’s got a diagnosed problem with obsessive compulsion, so he’ll do a thorough job.”

  “Good man.” She reached up and grabbed my biceps and squeezed. “Not bad. You been working out?”

  “A few push-ups, a couple of times a month.”

  “You have to start somewhere.”

  She was closing the door when something else occurred to me, something I’d managed to skip over earlier. I reached up to prevent her from shutting the door. “How do you figure I’m ruining Edward’s life?”

  Charlaine was apparently put off by my gesture and made a lunge for me. Marty grabbed her collar, pulled her back into the apartment, and slammed the door. “He’s in love with you,” she called through the door. “He has been for yea
rs.”

  “Oh.” I was about to defend myself—against what, I wasn’t sure—but Charlaine was scratching at the door and growling, and I could hear a struggle going on. “He’s dating a pilot now. It’s promising.”

  “Yeah? Well don’t get in the way of it. Keep out of it.”

  There was a loud boom, as if the dog had flung itself against the door. “Don’t leave the dog here when people come to see the place,” I said. “Take him out for a walk or something.”

  “Don’t worry. And she’s a girl, William. Get it right.”

  Feelings

  I’d met Edward more than three years earlier when I was dating a flight attendant named Trent. Like nuns, airline personnel seem to live, shop, and travel in small communities, and at the time, Edward and Trent were sharing the rent on a two-bedroom apartment on the wrong side of Beacon Hill.

  I myself was on the wrong side of a failed LTR—not to mention the wrong side of forty—and I was using the excuse of having been dumped by my boyfriend of seventeen months to go out with elaborately inappropriate people. Trent fit neatly into that category, one of those bored, pretty narcissists who appear to live entirely for sex and, at the same time, consider themselves above all the sweat and messiness. As if he were dying to be ravaged by a Latin American soccer team, assuming they didn’t muss up his hair. No matter what time we agreed to meet, he’d always arrive thirty minutes late. I’d show up half an hour late myself, and he’d still keep me waiting thirty minutes. Edward was often in the apartment while I waited, usually building a closet or putting up drywall, and I frequently ended up pressed against him, listening to the finer points of joint compound and proper sanding techniques. It did cross my mind that it would be a lot more fun having dinner with him than with coy, tardy Trent, but there was something about the shared, brotherly apartment and the homey renovation projects that made me resist the urge to invite him out. Perhaps I felt an element of shame connected to going out with Trent in the first place that made me consider myself unworthy of Edward.

  By the time Edward had moved into his own condo, he and I had established a friendship, albeit one coated with a heavy layer of flirtation and push-pull tension. But love, as Marty had shouted through her door? Marty was often right about people, as if, with her bullying manner and incongruously large and soft eyes, she could push aside your defenses and look right into your heart. Or maybe, in the end, none of us is as hard to understand as we’d like to assume. In the end, most people just want to be left in peace to fuck, overeat, doze off watching the evening news, and sleep through the night without having to get up too often to piss.

  Of course, Edward and I harbored “feelings” for each other. I was protective of my relationship with him, and it seemed to me that the best way to preserve it was to keep it at the level of complicated friendship. Friendships have a way of enduring while romantic relationships go quickly from a dreamy “I can’t live without you” to a hopeful “Maybe he died in his sleep.”

  Money

  Gina was impressed that since she’d talked to me about my job performance, I’d brought in two new listings. Her only hesitation was in the asking price of Marty’s condo. “I think you’ve under overpriced it,” she said.

  “Under overpriced it.” I rattled the words around in my mouth for a minute while she watched me attentively from behind her desk. “Doesn’t that mean I priced it just right?”

  “There’s no such thing as ‘just right’ in this game. That’s how it is. You should be asking at least a hundred grand more.”

  “I wasn’t going to tell you this,” I said, “but this place was originally an FSBO.”

  “Oh? I didn’t know that.” She put the listing sheets I’d written up on the far corner of her desk, as if they were giving off an unpleasant odor, and picked up a different folder. “I suppose she was asking something ridiculous and no one looked at it.”

  Nothing raised more scorn and irritation than the mention of a property with a For Sale By Owner history. Conventional wisdom had it that the people who try selling their own houses and apartments are the same people who home-school their children, vacation in gigantic recreational vehicles, and do morris dancing.

  “It was priced at about a hundred thousand more.”

  “In that case, I leave it up to you. I’m happy to see some motivation here, William. We’re making progress. Next, I want to see some money.”

  I promised her she’d be seeing some very soon.

  For most of my career in selling, I had been an effective real estate agent, and much to my surprise, I enjoyed the work. It wasn’t the dollars-and-cents business end of things that appealed to me. It was the illusion, and perhaps even the reality, that I was helping people. Bricks and mortar, floors and ceilings and walls. A roof, a bathroom, and sometimes a basement. People open up and pour out their life stories with little more prompting than a question about whether they prefer gas or electric stoves. (For the record, everyone says gas, but hardly anyone really cares.) They begin by telling you how many bedrooms they need, and within a few sentences, they’re revealing their childhood stories and regaling you with tales of failed relationships and hopes for the future. They claim they’re looking for the perfect place to live, but really, they’re shopping for the perfect life. And sometimes, I had the pleasant illusion of having delivered exactly that to my clients.

  Money had never been of any particular interest to me, one of the luxuries of having done fairly well for most of my adult life. I’d gone into advertising because I considered it a creative field, not necessarily a lucrative one. I preferred to think of myself as an imaginative person, despite the fact that I’d never exhibited much artistic ability, aside from taking accordion lessons in high school. But most homosexual men are assumed to have an aura of nebulous creativity around them, and I took it on faith that I had a strand of imagination hardwired into my DNA. I’m sure the nervous collapse (to dramatize what had really been a brief love affair with Vicodin) that led to my career shift was mainly the result of discovering that I was swimming in the deep end of the tank with voracious capitalist sharks, not collaborating with a bunch of artistes.

  In the late nineties, I’d sold a series of over overpriced condominiums, and on Edward’s advice, I’d dumped some of my profits into tech stocks that he’d selected from the financial magazines he read in the back of airplanes. I bought the stocks because I wanted to stop his constant nagging about my refusal to manage my money in a responsible way. Secretly, I was hoping the stocks would collapse, thereby proving that I’d been right all along with my hide-it-in-the-mattress theory of investment. Alas, within months, the money had grown by an obscene percentage. When I realized how much I’d made and how rapidly the lump sum was continuing to grow, I sold all the stock in a fit of guilty panic and stuck my new resources into a savings account that earned almost no interest.

  Six months later, the stock collapsed. If I’d waited to sell, I would have lost everything, a more appealing prospect than having to deal with my moral crisis over having made money simply because I had it to begin with.

  I’d done the usual responsible, penitent things with it—given some to worthy causes, set up a small account for my brother’s children. My brother was infuriated that I’d made a few hundred thousand in the stock market. “For doing nothing,” he kept reminding me, exacerbating my own complicated response to the situation.

  The Cousins

  My mother called me at my office to see if I’d made contact with my rich cousins. I assured her that I had, and that, following her advice, my sales pitch had not been too hard or too humiliating. “I made my case and then asked them about their kids.”

  “They don’t have children, William.”

  “Ah. Well, that explains their vague answer.” I realize that being a parent is no easy task, but trying to keep track of the children of friends and relatives is not a simple matter either. “They’re interested in oceanfront property, which isn’t my specialty. How e
xactly are we related, anyway? It’s never been clear to me.”

  “I’m not sure either. The children of cousins of mine, maybe? That’s a guess.” It pleased me that she wasn’t particularly sentimental about family ties and connections. I’ve always lumped people obsessed with genealogy and family trees with conspiracy theorists and Civil War enthusiasts. “Oh look,” she said, in a louder, lighter tone. “There’s Betty Boop. Hi, Betty, you look adorable today…She’s got about a week to live, if she’s lucky.”

  As she strolled around the retirement village with her cell phone, my mother encountered vast numbers of fellow residents, all of whom referred to one another by cute, randomly chosen nicknames that changed from one sentence to the next. It was an inventive solution to the plague of memory slips that appeared to be affecting everyone, regardless of age. Everyone was so overloaded with news, information, terror alerts, threats of war, and nerve-jangling advertisements, no one could remember anything. All circuits were jammed. People were always accusing one another of forgetfulness the way, once upon a time, they’d accused one another of alcoholism, having an eating disorder, or having been sexually abused as a child. Half the conversation of most couples involved who’d forgotten what and which had the better memory for important information. Fortunately, genuine senility would render all the accusations of senility meaningless.

  “Did they mention me?” my mother asked. “The cousins. Whoever they are.”

  “Your name came up. I told them you were dating.”

  “That’s none of their business, William. I wish you hadn’t done that. I suppose they were interested and wanted to know about him.”

  “I couldn’t tell them much. How is all that going?”

  “Jerry has a thyroid condition, so he has odd eating habits. We have dinner together almost every night. I’m trying to be a good influence.”

  Despite his unusual eyes and weathered face, her beau was handsome, based on the photo of him she’d sent me. As I got older, I was able to see and appreciate the appeal, and even the beauty, of people in their sixties, seventies, and eighties in a way that had previously eluded me, as if an evolutionary coping mechanism associated with age was kicking in. Less productively, I was finding men in their twenties more attractive, too.