Alternatives to Sex

by Stephen McCauley

  “I should warn you,” I said, “that Marty wants to pitch her company to the newscasters for a profile on their show.”

  She waved off this comment. “Let her. They love being flattered. It’s tough being a celebrity no one’s ever heard of.”

  I watched her punching her keyboard for a few more minutes, buying distance from her perfect husband. “I have a personal question to ask you,” I said. “But I’m afraid you might be insulted by it.”

  Her face lit up at this, as if she was delighted by the assumption that anything in her personal life could be controversial. “Ask away, please.”

  “If Raymond were having an affair, which I know absolutely would never happen, would you want to know about it?”

  “Oh, this is one of those hypothetical personal questions which isn’t a personal question at all. I suppose it’s really about that married couple you’re working with, the ones with the big house. I could tell they were in trouble the minute I saw them way back when in their little raincoats. That’s why I passed them along to you.” She paused for a moment, waiting for me to confirm or deny this, and looking at her wholesome, handsome face, I found I couldn’t do either. She nodded, as if my silence was good enough for her. “In theory, everyone wants to know, William, but in reality, no one does. In reality, we all go through massive, uncomfortable contortions to hang on to the ridiculous belief that we’re the only truly happily married couple in the universe. I hope you realize that’s more of an answer than you were looking for. And don’t worry. I won’t breathe a word of this to Jack. Your secret is safe with me.”

  “What secret is that?”

  “When it comes to other people, William, we all, in theory, want to know nothing. But in reality, everyone wants every gritty detail. But I’m not asking. It’s just nice to know you have more going on than I imagined. I think we’re all relieved.”

  So It Seems

  Deirdre assumes I’m sleeping with Sam? Or Charlt? So it seems. Both? Call Ken O’Leary to set up inspection on apartmnt. Bring board of trustees docs to Samuel. Lunch w/ him? And his mistress? Outdated term, “mistress”? Deirdre: We’re all relieved? What were they assuming? Get list of painters for Charlt. I have more going on than they imagined? What if I have less going on?

  After the Fact

  Later that afternoon, Sylvia Blanchard came to my office to coordinate a time for an inspection of Edward’s apartment. In the past, she’d let these details drift while she wallowed in regret and ambivalence and hunted down excuses to back out of the purchase. I found myself doing with her the exact opposite of what I usually did: I advised her to slow down and not get tangled up in formalities. Naturally, she didn’t take my advice. She crowed about her love of formalities, her fondness for details, and her newfound determination to move forward at full speed.

  “You see,” she said, “I’ve decided to become quite American in my behavior. Give me, give me, give me. I want to buy everything, I want to ingest as much as I can, I want to own and possess and control. I’m dining at the all-you-can-eat luncheon buffet. I want it all and I want it now.” Her long, thin legs were wound around each other, and she was leaning forward in her seat with her elbows digging into her knee. She was all angles, sharp and insistent, vibrating with determination. “Call little Edward and let’s make some plans. At very least I’d love to go over there with a tape measure and a pad of paper so I can figure out the dimensions of all the disposable junk I’m going to load into the place.”

  “He’s out of town,” I told her, “but I’ll leave a message and have him get back to you.”

  “I don’t know whether to believe you or not, but I don’t have time to argue. Purchasing the apartment has given me the focus for my next project—an analysis of the spiritual soul of America in the wake of September eleventh. I’m going to call it After the Fact. I’ve been looking down my very long nose at American consumerism for years, but now that I’ve embraced it, I understand it completely. It’s always been marvelous, but it needed a rationale. Now it has one: shop your way to a feeling of safety and security.” She unwound herself and stood up, her body once again taking a recognizable human shape. “Struck from above by a dastardly enemy and the response is an encouragement to visit Disneyland, buy bigger cars, and then launch an attack on a country unrelated to the problem. It’s all brilliantly Fall of the Roman Empire. I’m so happy to be living here during the final days.”

  “That attitude wounds me to the core of my patriotism and cultural identity.”

  “Yes,” she said. “And how else can a dull academic get a little attention?”

  I was happy to have an excuse to call Edward. It had been close to a week since the party, and because I hadn’t done as I’d intended and knocked on his door in the rain, I’d hesitated about getting in touch. When he answered, I felt an uncharacteristic and immediate urge to confess.

  “I almost came up to your apartment after I dropped you off,” I said.

  “You almost do a lot of things, William. I’m not sure why you’re telling me about what you almost did but then, ultimately, did not do. Am I supposed to applaud your good intentions? Why not tell me why you didn’t come in instead of how you almost did.”

  “It was the parking situation, as always.”

  He offered no response to this.

  “And as I was heading to your door, I bumped into Didier. He’s back in town.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “How do you know?”

  “That’s an irrelevant question. I suppose that means your pointless little obsession is back in full flower.”

  “No, not exactly. Not at all, in fact. He’s helping me with something.” Against the odds, this seemed to be true. I had seen him three times since meeting him on the street, and for the first time since making my resolution about celibacy, I was sticking to it.

  “Helping you? Good for him. Is that what you called to tell me?”

  “Edward,” I said. “I had a few thoughts about your apartment. Sylvia wants to move on it quickly, but I wonder if it wouldn’t make more sense for you to rent it out for a while, see how you like San Diego, if the business with Marty works out. Why not leave yourself the option of coming back? If you keep it furnished, I could find a businessman who’d pay a fortune every month. You’d be making a huge profit, and you could do the whole move west with a few suitcases instead of dismantling your entire life. Just get on the plane and go.”

  “I get on the plane and go three times a day. I’m looking forward to dismantling my life and reassembling it somewhere else. I’ve committed to a plan and I’m following through on it. I have no intention of renting.”

  I hung up the phone, realizing that my plans for the sale of this condo were not going as I’d envisioned; it was going to happen.

  Scents

  Charlotte had called me a few days after the party to complain that I’d left the house abruptly—as I saw it, the only sensible thing to do under the circumstances—and insisted that I meet her at an address she gave me on Newbury Street in downtown Boston. It was the first truly cold day of the fall, and she was dressed in a big gray sweater and a pair of sunglasses. Despite her claims of being fat, she looked fit, even wrapped in layers of heavy wool. I smiled at her as I approached, but it was the first time I’d seen her alone since stumbling over Samuel and Kate, and I couldn’t look at her without factoring in the sad, guilty fact that I knew more about her life than she knew. Even if, as Deirdre had said, it was information she wouldn’t want to know. I kissed her on both cheeks, in a showy, friendly way, hoping to wipe out the embarrassment of the kiss in her kitchen.

  “I didn’t know if you were planning on lunch,” I said, “so I brought my appetite just in case.”

  “We might get to that,” she told me. “But first I want to take you over there.”

  She pointed across the street to a storefront that turned out to be Sean’s perfume boutique. “I’ve never been in,” I told her.

  �
��I know. He mentioned that when I called to place an order. I made an appointment for us. He’s going to compose something for you.”

  “Compose? Really? That’s thoughtful, but I don’t wear cologne.”

  “On principle?”

  “No, no. I don’t have principles.”

  “You can give it to someone else,” she said. “One of the people you’re not being celibate with. Just tell Sean exactly who you’re giving it to and he’ll know what to do. I think you’ll find the whole experience helpful.”

  You had to make an appointment with Sean, she explained, so that he could devote a full hour to mixing oils and balancing base and heart and top notes, giving you exactly the right blend for your personality, the occasion, or the psychology of the person you were giving it to. The creation of his perfumes was all very scientific yet, at the same time, born of mysterious ancient arts.

  “I didn’t imagine you’d be the type to get caught up in alchemy,” I said.

  “I let my cynicism drop once or twice a year,” she said. “It’s nice to believe in something, especially if it’s harmless and non-habit-forming.”

  Entering the store was like entering an igloo, not that I’d know. Everything was white, glass, or shining metal, and the temperature was surprisingly low. I’d expected to be bombarded with the smell of flowers and musk, but there wasn’t a hint of fragrance, almost as if the air had been scrubbed clean. The decor, Charlotte whispered, had something to do with clearing your palate and your olfactory expectations. Andy must have spent a fortune having the place decorated for his young lover; nothing costs more than making an interior look empty.

  Sean was seated on a tall stool behind the counter, an elegantly transparent piece of Lucite lit from within. He was dressed in white pants and a white cotton turtleneck. He wasn’t thin, and given his perpetual state of exhaustion, it was impossible to imagine him working out or exercising. He had a lazy, sensual fleshiness that was ridiculously attractive. He might only have been thirty-two as he claimed, but he had the appealing world-weariness that a lot of beautiful Brazilian men have, and it made him seem wise.

  “So it took Charlotte to get you to come visit me,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t trust myself to be alone with you,” I said.

  “Oh, I won’t be bought off that easily, William.”

  He slithered off his stool and came around the counter clutching a small blue bottle. He handed Charlotte the bottle and gave her a lascivious embrace that she returned, while rolling her eyes at me.

  “Is that the perfume you sometimes wear?” I asked.

  “We made it for Samuel,” Sean explained. “But Charlotte wears it so she can always have him with her. Smart, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, very.” Although it might have been smarter to have Samuel wearing her perfume as a reminder. “I don’t wear perfume, so mine will be for someone else, too.”

  Sean went back behind the counter, pulled out a pad of unlined white paper and a slim silver pen that looked like a small icicle, and we got down to business.

  “It helps to know something about the person you’re giving it to. We’ll start with the easy things. Man or woman? Age. Name. Eye color.”

  Sean wrote down my answers in small, careful handwriting.

  “Didier,” Charlotte said. “French, in other words.”

  “Belgian. Assuming he’s telling me the truth about where he’s from.”

  “If you were going to lie, you wouldn’t claim Belgium,” Sean said. “Switzerland, maybe. What you’re saying is, you’re giving an expensive bottle of scent to someone you don’t trust.” He tapped his silver pen against his lips. He had beautiful lips, plump and red, and he was always, understandably, drawing attention to them in subtle ways. “Do you think this is wise, William?”

  “It’s a complicated situation.”

  “This is what everyone tells me who has a stupid situation. ‘It’s complicated.’ You can’t believe how much people tell me about themselves when they come in to buy some perfume. I should hang out a shingle.”

  “You have a shingle,” Charlotte reminded him. “A sign, in fact.”

  The whole country had become accustomed to watching television shows in which people reveal their darkest secrets to millions of strangers, open up all their closets, and display filthy laundry for the sake of entertainment. As a result, people had begun to haul out their hidden selves to anyone who’d listen, from their real estate agent to their shoe salesman. The only time people didn’t reveal their darkest secrets was in psychotherapy. There, they just asked for pills to blunt the symptoms so they could go on with their unbalanced but familiar behavior.

  “What does this Belgian Didier do for work? What kind of music does he like to listen to? What color scarves does he wear on winter afternoons? Is he a good dancer? How long is his hair? What are his hobbies?”

  “He likes to smoke,” I said, offering the one thing I knew about him for certain. “I’ve only known him for a couple of years. Off and on.”

  He sighed and put down his pen. “Give me an image. The first thing that comes to mind when you think of him. And please, nothing pornographic because I’m basically a shy person.”

  “A smoky apartment with heavy curtains in a damp European city. Does that help?”

  Sean began selecting flasks of oil from the lighted shelves behind him. He slid open several drawers and pulled out beakers, pipettes, and other chemistry lab accouterments. His movements were smooth and graceful, almost as if he’d choreographed the whole performance. He swirled the oil in the flasks before setting them down on the counter. There, under carefully positioned lights from above, they shimmered as if they were emitting rays of energy. “I’ll start out with a dark foundation,” he said. “Civet, an animal secretion, but dirtier than musk. Do you think I’m on the right track?”

  “It sounds about right. I think he once told me he plays chess,” I said. “If that’s any use.”

  “I’ll try to work with it. But ultimately, I’m just going to go with my own instincts.”

  “That’s what he did with Samuel, and he got him exactly right,” Charlotte said.

  Mr. Didier

  Didier’s appearance on the street outside of Edward’s apartment had been unexpected, but not entirely. He was a stray, and like all strays, he had a way of turning up and disappearing at unpredictable times. Originally, I’d thought he was just irresponsible, but after a while, I began to think that he understood the limits of his charms and didn’t want to wear out his welcome.

  For the sake of my own dignity, I wish I could say that I had developed a full-scale erotic obsession with Didier because he was intelligent and kind. Sweet. Needy. I wish I could say I was drawn to his manners and sophisticated wit. I wish I could say he had an endearing lost-soul or bedraggled-puppy-dog quality that made me want to take care of him. Barring all of that—and all of that had to be barred because none of it was true—I wish I could say I was attracted to his beauty, in a Platonic-ideal sort of way. But Didier was not a beauty by even the most lenient standards. He barely came up to my shoulder and was skinnier than I was; he had a dark, pointy, I-am-insane face that he further disfigured with a little patch of fuzzy hair under his thin lower lip. He was the incomprehensibly proud owner of a frail, hyperactive penis I found annoying, and his head was covered in a mop of tight curls that he sometimes had highlighted with orange. His body smelled faintly but distinctly of cigarettes at all hours of the day and night. I didn’t have more than a clue about his age; in the time I’d known him, it had bounced back and forth between an impossible twenty-four and an improbable thirty-two. My guess was forty, but what difference did it really make?

  He had, at some point in his jumbled history, discovered the only infallible method of making himself erotically irresistible and indispensable: he figured out, with his tiny, piercing eyes and his eerily sensitive body, exactly what you most wanted—and then he withheld it. As a tool of seduction, you can’t do better.
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  I had sworn off Didier and banned him from getting in touch with me, because I had grown tired of his evasions and deceptions, the way he made plans and then broke them at the last minute or simply didn’t show up, the humiliating way he tossed off lies without even trying to make them plausible. But seeing him on the street outside of Edward’s building, I’d felt the same irresistible urge a drunk feels for a drink he knows will lead to ruin. If, a minute earlier, I’d felt that walking into Edward’s apartment would save me from a lifetime of Didiers, I’d suddenly felt as if Didier would save me from caring so much about Edward.

  I walked down the steps in the soft rain and joined him under the protection of the trees. “It’s been too long,” I told him.

  “You said not to talk to you anymore, Mr. Collins, and so I stop talking to you. I do always what you tell me to do.” Didier, of course, never did what you told him to do, one of the secrets of his success. “I was out of the country for a while, and now I am back.”

  “I see.” He took out a fresh cigarette, and I lit it for him. “And where were you?”

  “I went back to Brussels on business. From there, I was everywhere.”

  “Brussels is lovely in the winter.”

  “You’re teasing me, Mr. Collins. Brussels is awful in the winter. Summer, too. Everywhere else was better.”

  “I love everywhere else,” I said. “So much character.”

  “You are teasing me again, Mr. Collins.”

  He supposedly worked for a shoe manufacturing company, but sometimes he referred to it as a leather company and sometimes as a vaguely defined import/export business. In one of my bleaker moments, I’d gone online to search the name of the company he had given me and had come up with a Web site written in a language I’d never seen before. When I made the mistake of mentioning this fact to him, he turned it around and said, “You don’t trust me. You hurt my feelings. Nothing I can say can convince you, so why would I try? Americans love to be spies, like James Bond.”