Alternatives to Sex

by Stephen McCauley

  Barry appeared in the bedroom with his hands jammed tightly into the pockets of his shorts, and offered to show Samuel his study. As often happened in these real estate transactions, the couples were forming alliances along gender lines, leaving me stranded gawkily in the middle.

  I followed the guys. Barry’s study was a tiny room off the hallway, a closet that had been expanded and brightened by way of a dinner-plate-sized window. It was tightly packed with computer equipment and bookshelves holding the usual assortment of discs, DVDs, and similar computer-related accouterments that had risen to importance since books had become irrelevant cultural artifacts. This room existed in nearly every living space occupied by a heterosexual couple, and it was always the exclusive domain of the man. At some point, the husband had retreated to a remote corner of the house and claimed it as his own. A basement, a workshop in a garage, a study behind the kitchen, a converted closet under the stairs. Inevitably, it was the location of the computer, and given my own computer habits, I couldn’t help believing that not all of these men were spending all of their time comparing prices on automotive supplies and looking for the cheapest airfare to St. Louis.

  Crammed into the little room, my head nearly brushing the ceiling, I felt a wave of sympathy for Charlotte and a sudden closeness to Sam. Barry left us alone in the study, and Sam took a seat at the narrow, built-in desk.

  “What’s your reaction so far?” I asked.

  He shrugged and looked around the room. “Not very impressed. I was hoping for something more open, more space.”

  “Charlotte’s quite taken with it.”

  “Oh? How do you know that? I suppose she told you. Well, wouldn’t it be nice if she’d thought to tell me? It might be the more sensible way to go about it.”

  “I wasn’t going to mention this because I don’t want to put any pressure on you, but I just checked with the listing broker, and there’s some very serious interest in the place. She’s expecting an offer later this weekend.” It was the kind of lie Jack was always telling his clients. I’d sit at my desk, listening to him spin out these imaginary scenarios, hoping the client would hang up on him. They seemed like such obvious fabrications, but they almost always worked.

  “Is that so?” He sounded skeptical.

  “A Harvard Business School professor and his wife. She didn’t give me the name, of course, or too many details. It might be wise to make an offer this afternoon. I think it would please Charlotte a great deal.”

  “I’ll take that into consideration,” he said, and pushed himself up from the chair.

  I Doubt That’s True

  I took Samuel and Charlotte out for lunch. I chose a restaurant not far from my office where all natural light, and most artificial, was carefully blocked at all hours of the day. It seemed marginally less humiliating to give a heavy sales pitch, full of exaggerations and outright lies, in a place where I was only partly visible. The deep shadows appealed to my vanity as well. I’d tried to talk myself into believing the creasing and collapsing of my face came off as virile cragginess and was, thus, an asset, but then a mirror would suddenly pop up between me and my delusions of Paul Newman.

  We were shown to the darkest corner of the restaurant, and I sat opposite them, pulling out listing sheets and sales figures for the Cambridge market over the past several months, all in an attempt to convince Samuel that buying the condo was the best possible investment he could make. We worked our way through a stack of documents, passing around a little votive candle and holding it up to the pages. Charlotte was strangely quiet, as if she didn’t want to spoil my work by appearing too eager. I could sense Samuel was still unconvinced, unless he was simply trying to annoy his wife by holding out.

  “I’m not going to leap into anything,” Samuel said in a flat, final tone. “It’s a nice place, not great, but nice. I’m not saying no, but I’m not jumping.” He turned around. “The service isn’t very good here, is it?”

  Later, when we’d nearly finished our meal and had sunk to the level of discussing the merits of a couple of new restaurants none of us had been to, Andrew Scali swam into my peripheral vision. I could see his bald pate and his wide, healthy grin approaching, even in the dim light of the restaurant.

  “Well, well, well,” he said, in his hearty, jocular way. “Look at this. Three of my favorite people in the world, together at one table. Don’t get up. Who’s doing what to whom?”

  He pulled up a chair and straddled it with the back facing the table, grinning and assuming dominance over the party, as if he were responsible for bringing us all together.

  “You know Andrew?” Charlotte asked me.

  “Everyone does,” I said, and then, trying to be provocative, I added, “But few know him as well as I do.”

  Andy chuckled at this comment. He liked to categorize people, probably as a way of keeping his thousands of acquaintances clear in his mind. He seemed, in recent years, to have moved me in his mental filing cabinet from “Helpful Friend” to “Amusing Acquaintance” and had the annoying habit of acting as if most of what I said was a joke. He was an accountant, but that was merely the title on his door. Most of his time and energy went into a stunning variety of real estate investments and creative entrepreneurial endeavors that had earned him, judging from the way he lived, vast sums of money.

  He was fifty-three years old and up until twelve years ago had been a happily married husband and father living in a leafy suburb outside of Boston. Now he lived in a spectacular four-story town house on Beacon Hill with Sean, a vain (justifiably, considering his looks) perfumer.

  “William’s helping us find an apartment,” Samuel said. He had, I noticed, sat up straighter in his chair as soon as Andy approached. Andy, who tended to convey an air of passionate organization and competence, sometimes had this effect on people, men especially. You saw him and you wanted to be, or at least appear to be, more capable and efficient than you ordinarily were. If you didn’t, Andy would lay his strong, stubby fingers on you and start offering help. Let me put you in touch with so and so, all right? Would you let me make some inquiries on your behalf regarding that matter?

  I’d met Andrew when he was in the very earliest stages of his sexual awakening, when he knew he was interested in men but hadn’t yet figured out what he wanted to do with them. For the sake of convenience and conviviality, we pretended we’d had a brief relationship, but that was recklessly overstating a single, unenthusiastic mutual masturbation episode followed by months of me coaching him on how he could negotiate a more open and honest life. I was genuinely pleased that he’d worked out an agreeable arrangement for himself, but I occasionally resented that he’d blossomed so strongly so quickly and was now in a position to give me advice about my addled existence.

  “Samuel and I have worked on a couple of projects together,” Andy said to me. “We might even be working on a couple of projects now.” He nodded toward Samuel and winked, bonding the two of them in a manly conspiracy overlaid with flirtation.

  Not that there was a question of anything going on between the two of them. It was doubtful Samuel was bisexual, and more important, Andrew had started to go out with much younger men about six years earlier; once you cross that bridge, there’s no turning back.

  Going out with significantly younger lovers does wonders for a man’s confidence, physique, and complexion, but it’s always a disaster for his wardrobe. Andy was decked out in a powder blue T-shirt and navy sports jacket and a pair of blue jeans that had been washed in a trendy combination of sand and acid. The shaved head was a fairly recent Sean-inspired attempt at masking the fact that he was going bald.

  I showed him the papers on the condo, and made a number of exaggerated claims about its beauty and value. Andrew tried his best to appear impressed. Any real estate deal under a few million dollars was hardly worth his time.

  “What are you doing on this side of the river?” I asked.

  His hand descended to my shoulder. “Secret high-level luncheon me
eting.” He delivered this comment in a tone of self-effacing mockery, mostly, I suspected, to hide the fact that it was true.

  He described a candy factory and low-income housing and the skeleton of a deal he was putting together with investors. Samuel listened with a faint smile that looked to me like jealousy disguised as bemusement. Andrew worked hard on all of his many deals, but they paid off so spectacularly, a lot of men resented his financial success the way I sometimes resented his personal triumphs. Charlotte’s attempt at appearing interested in what he was saying was much less convincing than her husband’s. After swirling her spoon around her coffee cup a few dozen times, she cut him off.

  “How’s Sean?” she asked. There was challenge in her tone; like most beautiful things, Sean required an exhausting amount of maintenance.

  “He’s great, and the store’s really taking off. He appreciates your business. Charlotte’s one of his regular customers. More than we can say for you, William.”

  “I’m not the perfume type,” I said.

  “I doubt that’s true,” Andy said, clapping me on the back.

  Andrew checked his watch, rose from the table, and began adjusting his sports jacket and straightening out his T-shirt. “Take care of these folks, William. They’re good people. And William won’t steer you wrong. He’s honest. You can take his advice.” Having bestowed his blessings, he left.

  They could take my advice, but so far, Samuel didn’t seem to be interested in doing so, and I had a slightly panicked feeling that if I didn’t convince him to make an offer on the apartment, I would have failed Charlotte and missed my goal of sending them off to Nahant happily reunited. It seemed entirely possible that if they passed up this place, I might never see them again. I excused myself and cornered Andrew near the entrance where he was waiting for his clients.

  “You’re a cozy little trio,” he said. “You aren’t fucking Samuel, are you?”

  “Certainly not.” I paused and looked back at our table. They still weren’t talking to each other. “I didn’t know it was an option.”

  “I’m sure it isn’t, but you know me, I suspect everyone. Frankly, I’d rather fuck her, anyway. She’s the brains of the outfit. What’s with you, Collins? You’re all agitated and sweaty. Everything okay?”

  “I need you to do me a favor,” I said.

  “How much?”

  “Nothing like that. Just come back to the table. Say you’ve been thinking about their condo and that it seems like a great investment. Say you’re interested in taking a look at it, if they don’t make an offer. I’m trying to get Samuel to move on it today. This afternoon if possible. I can tell he’s a little bit in awe of you.”

  He laughed. “In awe. Come on.”

  Prompted to deliver another compliment, I did: “Absolutely. Your success, on all fronts.”

  He ran his hand back across his bald head and checked his watch again. “You desperate for the sale? Bills to pay?”

  “Big bills,” I said. “Like you wouldn’t believe.”

  It was a lot less humiliating than confessing my real motives.

  Done

  Mission accomplished, I wrote in my notes for the Thompson-O’Malley file later that afternoon. Solid offer on condo. Thnks to manipulation and lies. Charlotte happy. About apt or just because victory over Samuel? Does it matter? Call Andrew to thank for playing alng. C & S turned down my offer of dinner. Boo hoo.

  Getting Around

  A few days after I put in the offer on the apartment for Charlotte and Sam, I stopped by Veronica’s pet grooming shop on my way to work.

  What amused me most about Veronica, the owner, was the disjunction between the care she brought to styling her canine customers and the haphazard way she approached her own appearance. Although it was easy to spot the raw beauty in her face, she rarely brushed her gray hair, and usually draped her large body in bulky sweaters covered with animal fur. She’d grown up in a wealthy New England family and had rebelled at a young age by taking drugs, becoming obese, and volunteering for a radical animal rights organization. Now in her late fifties, she had the casual sloppiness of the aging hippie, and the gentle, disorganized demeanor and conversational style of a lifelong pothead.

  I had convinced myself that I liked helping her out because doing so involved cleaning, and cleaning a living thing was at least as satisfying as cleaning the floor under a bed. I don’t go for the gooey sentimentality that people use to mask the pleasure of owning a living creature over which you have complete control. But being around Veronica’s animals, forgiving, kind, and nonjudgmental, provided me with a form of attention that I crave and hadn’t yet found in the basement apartments where I’d been spending my time.

  I was helping bathe a wiry, hyperactive Jack Russell terrier when she told me she’d been giving serious consideration to buying an apartment.

  “I figure I should own something before they start that war in Iraq,” she said.

  The dog was nervously looking from me to Veronica and back again, and I bent down and kissed its nose.

  “Okay,” I said. “A very good idea.” I didn’t see the connection between the two things, but there were a lot of missing pieces in Veronica’s conversations, and I’d learned not to question anyone’s motives for buying or selling.

  “That’s what they’re cooking up, you know. Justification for finishing off the last unfinished mess. It’s all over the news now. They can get away with it because everyone’s so confused. No one knows what the hell is going on and everyone feels obliged to go along with anything the little leader proposes. How’d I get onto that?”

  “Something about a condominium.”

  “I figure I’ll care a little less somehow. Shut the door, pay the mortgage, and be another selfish home owner. You think you can help me?”

  “I’d love to,” I said. “We can go next door and look at a couple of listings if you want.”

  “Let’s finish up with this guy first.”

  The dog, whose name was Spirou, was trembling even though we’d bathed him in warm water. I wrapped him in a towel and picked him up.

  “Careful,” Veronica said. “The owner claims he bites.”

  The dog began chewing on my earlobe in an affectionate way. Despite my activities of the night before with a longhaired man who claimed to be called Julian, it felt like the most intimate thing that had been done to me in a very long time.

  “I don’t think he bites,” I said. “I think he’s a little pushover.”

  Veronica observed our make-out session and shrugged. “You’re probably right. The owner’s a beautiful, talkative lawyer. Maybe she was trying to warn me that she bites. Although I doubt that, too. Most people take on their dog’s personality.”

  “I thought it was the other way around.”

  “No. Dogs begin to look like their owners, but the owners act like their dogs. Which is a good thing since dogs have better personalities than people.”

  “Can we take him back to the office with us? Give him a walk?”

  “I don’t see why not. Let’s loop around the block a couple times so I can smoke a joint.”

  We walked back to my office with the dog pulling frantically on the leash and leaping into the air as if his legs were spring-loaded. Since buying my house, I’d considered getting a dog a number of times, but I alternated between fearing slobbering dependence upon me and the possibility that the dog might not like me. “Don’t let him get the best of you,” Veronica rasped, holding in a lungful of smoke. “Take control. Here.” She yanked on the leash and Spirou coughed.

  “Careful,” I said. “You’ll choke him.”

  “They like to be controlled,” she bellowed. “You don’t get it. They love it.”

  The more pot she smoked, the louder her voice got, so that by the time we entered the office, she was practically shouting. Spirou ran over to Jack’s desk and started chewing on his shoelaces. “Nice manners,” he said.

  “So what’s your price range?” I asked V
eronica. “We should start there.” I retrieved the dog and put him on my lap, and he sat there, nervously staring into my eyes.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she brayed. “I inherited money from a crazy aunt who didn’t have any children. I always thought she considered me evil incarnate, but apparently not. She lived in Minneapolis, that area, somewhere out there. I think I met her a couple of times, but I can’t remember her name, not that I can remember anything. What was I saying?”

  “Your price range.”

  “Right. Nice but not too nice. I don’t care about the neighborhood or public schools or any of that. Someplace where you can imagine human beings living, not little robots with perfect bodies and big jobs. You know what I want. I hate shopping. You think I should look before I buy?”

  “I would say yes. Absolutely.”

  “Shit, that’s what I was afraid of.” She watched me squirm as Spirou chewed on my ear again. “You need a dog,” she shouted. “That’d straighten you out in short order.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked. “Straighten me out?”

  “I’ve got a lot of friends. Word gets around. So do you, apparently.”

  “I guess you have to get back to work,” I said. “I’ll call.”

  “A friend of mine who knows I know you said he saw you in a hotel room thing a few weeks ago. He was impressed with your energy.” She roared at this. I didn’t have a clue about her sexuality, but she was completely nonjudgmental about everyone else’s. “I didn’t press him for details, although you best believe I was tempted.”

  I put Spirou down on the floor again, hoping he’d run back to Jack and put Veronica’s rant to an end. Instead, he leapt back onto my lap. “If this dog were available,” I told her, “I’d take him home in a minute.”