Alternatives to Sex

by Stephen McCauley

  When Ken had completed his inspection, he came into the living room and presented his case. It was an old house. It had been badly maintained for many decades and then badly broken up into oddly shaped rooms with structural flaws. The electrical systems were insufficient and the windows would soon have to be replaced. There was the water damage and the rot.

  “Would you advise buying it?” I asked him.

  “Frankly,” he said, “I wouldn’t.”

  Usually, he was much more cautious and diplomatic in his pronouncements. I felt obliged to tell Charlotte that she should go over the papers carefully with Samuel and give it a day or two. There was still time to back out without losing too much money. There seemed to be no shortage of reasons for rethinking the purchase.

  “What do I care about the electrical systems?” she asked. “I’m not buying electrical systems. I’m trying to buy a second act here. This will do as well as any other. It’s the perfect place.”

  One Big Sudden Something

  The next day, I was sitting at my desk, answering calls and waiting for word on the reaction of Deirdre’s clients to Marty’s apartment. If one of them actually made an offer, it would be a relief. If Edward’s apartment was going to sell, then it was better for everyone, Edward especially, if Marty’s sold quickly.

  Most of the people who call in on Sundays to make inquiries were easy targets: young two-income couples whose lives and relationships were still upbeat enough to make them completely uninteresting. Generally speaking, they were first-time buyers who had good jobs, no aversion to debt, and undeveloped tastes. They liked gadgetry. They wanted steam showers, Jacuzzis, and any other feature that wasted water. If you caught them at the right moment, you could make a tidy commission with minimal effort. Despite that, I didn’t much care for working with them. They arrived loaded with facts and figures they’d gleaned from Internet searches and took offense at questions about their personal lives.

  But after what had happened with Charlotte the day before, I figured I should do my best to avoid all personal questions for the time being.

  Avoid inquiries, I wrote on a notepad. Young couples with money, no issues, no affairs. Avoid taking notes.

  Shortly after noon, I got a call from my mother. She sounded uncharacteristically glum and opened up the conversation with an accusation. “You’re depressed,” she said.

  “You’re attributing your mood to me. That’s called projection, dear.”

  “And that’s called condescension, dear. I happen to know very well what I’m doing, William. I’m calling you with sad news, and I want to hear you deny you’re depressed before I deliver it. Is that so terrible? Is it going to require years of psychotherapy to expunge?”

  “Funny,” I said, “I don’t remember hearing you use the word ‘expunge’ before. Is it one of Jerry’s?”

  “We do vocabulary together every few days. It’s supposed to prevent Alzheimer’s.”

  “I’ll have to invest in a dictionary. What’s the sad news?”

  “Death, of course.”

  “Could you narrow it down a little?”

  “Please don’t get sarcastic on me. Even when you live in a mortuary like I do, it isn’t pleasant to report on someone’s death. What did you have for supper last night?”

  “I hope that question is an irrelevant non sequitur,” I said. “A friend made me a beef stew with a French name. It took hours. If you like, I can get the recipe from him.”

  “You might as well get me Rollerblades. That whole cooking thing seems so antediluvian to me. I’m surprised anyone bothers with kitchens anymore. But I’m pleased to hear you’ve got someone cooking for you. That’s progress.”

  “You could call it that.” Expunge, antediluvian, I wrote on my notepad. Progress? “Can we get to the obituary now?”

  “If you insist. I had a call this morning at six A.M. that would have woken up any person with normal sleep patterns. It was Rose Forrest’s brother. He’d miscalculated the time change and didn’t seem to understand it once I explained it. Anyway, that’s the news.”

  “Rose?” I said. “But I saw her so recently. What happened?”

  “The brother was vague. She had everything wrong with her, you yourself said she looked bad. In the end, I gather it was something massive. One big sudden something.”

  I didn’t know what to say to my mother. In theory, Rose was a relatively minor character in my life whose relevance had ended more than a decade earlier with my father’s death. It occurred to me then that she’d never sent me the boxes of unused gifts she’d given to my father. One more bit of unfinished business in her life. The sad thought of those boxes tossed into a Dumpster somewhere struck me like a blow.

  “The brother let slip that she was eighty-five, a big shock. Older than me.” She paused, and as was so often the case these days, I heard the soft typing of a computer keyboard. Even my elderly mother had become a multitasker. When the typing stopped, she said, “I hope you’re not too upset about Rose.”

  “It isn’t as if I knew her all that well,” I said.

  There was an empty silence on the other end of the line. She seemed to be waiting, with patience, for me to say something else.

  “I knew her a little bit,” I said. “Beyond her working for Dad. I had lunch with her a few times after he died. Infrequently but regularly.”

  “I know that.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m the one who suggested she call you when she was in Boston. Your father’s death was a loss for her, too, and she had no way to mourn it, no way to acknowledge to anyone that it was a loss. I thought you could handle it. After all, I could, so it didn’t seem like such a burden for you. You’re so much less judgmental than your brother.”

  Part of the pleasure of my meetings with Rose had been their secrecy, and the way they’d made me feel I had a special relationship with my father, albeit an imaginary one. Perhaps I should have been relieved to learn my mother had been aware of it, but instead it made me feel irrelevant and strangely betrayed by her. “So she knew that you knew…” I couldn’t force myself to make it more specific than that.

  “I have no idea. We were all civil, that’s the important part. It helps everyone maintain their dignity. But it’s all in the past. I was never truly miserable, and now I’m happy.”

  “With Jerry?”

  “With Jerry.”

  “I suppose next you’ll be sending him to see me.”

  “Hardly. He lives too far away. Anyway, he and I have decided to never meet. It’s much more romantic this way.”

  “Never?”

  “It’s imperfect, it’s incomplete, but I have the illusion of having a companion, of being in love, and of being loved. And in many ways, it feels more real than the last few decades I was married to your father. Why spoil it by meeting? Your generation wants everything, that’s your problem. It’s all right to want everything and even, for a short while, to look for it. But at a certain point, you have to take stock of what you’ve got. You’re not young, you know. Even if we weren’t all about to be blown up, you still wouldn’t have forever.”

  Mutual Interest

  I stayed at the office until Deirdre put in an appearance after showing Marty’s condo. It was nearly five o’clock by the time she arrived. I let her settle in, make an angry phone call to her beloved husband, and check her e-mail. Finally, I sat on the corner of her desk and casually asked about the showing.

  She gave me a piercing look, as if she was about to scold me, and then, apparently having changed her mind, relaxed her mouth and said, “I’ll grant you this, the condo looked better. The dog was there as part of the show—more on that later—as well as some little friend who is apparently connected to you as well. He, I might add, did his best to keep things on track and prevented the dog from eating anyone. I brought the husband over first and he liked it. Later in the afternoon, I went back with the wife. I fully expect one or the other, possibly both, will be making an offer.”


  The confusing part was that Deirdre’s tone was so sour.

  “It all went well,” I said. “There’s going to be an offer. Why do I sense there’s a problem?”

  Deirdre lifted an immense padded envelope out of her shoulder bag and tossed it onto her desk. Marty’s promotional material.

  “This is the problem. Not once, but twice, I had to sit in the living room and listen to an hour-long pitch your friend gave about herself and her business and the horrible dog and how she would be a perfect subject for a profile on one of their broadcasts. They were both fascinated, and I suppose there’ll be an in-court battle over who gets credit for discovering her. One more marvelous contribution to our culture.”

  I’d assumed that allowing Marty to discuss her business had been a simple matter of courtesy. It hadn’t occurred to me that someone might go for the idea. “I suppose that’s more good news,” I said. “If they liked her and the condo, there are two feathers in your cap.”

  “I feel exploited,” Deirdre said. “And frankly, I’m much more comfortable being the exploiter. Hopefully, we’ll have these two in a bidding war within the next twenty-four hours and some cash will change hands.”

  Esther

  Esther was proving to be a more reliable tenant than Kumiko ever had been. Since my spiritual awakening in the yoga class and her inadvertent revelation of her real name, she’d paid me close to a thousand dollars in cash. It was a small dent in the total amount she owed by now, but it was a dent.

  As she was turning over a money envelope to me one morning, she said, “I think it helped that you stopped doing my ironing. It makes you seem more like an authority figure and less like staff.”

  “I’m glad you feel that way. I have an old iron I’m not using anymore, and I’d be happy to give it to you, if you’d like. Permanent loan. It’s excellent quality.”

  “Thanks, but I’ve hired someone else.”

  I opened up the envelope in front of her and counted out five crisp $100 bills. It was a big relief to get these payments, but every time I made a deposit, I was reminded of the fact that she could have been paying me all along and for some reason had chosen not to. “I think I’m going to have to charge you a little extra for the use of the garage,” I said. “What do you think would be a fair price?”

  “You’re the one in real estate, William. You tell me.”

  “Let me think it over. It won’t be much.”

  She sighed and started to head back to her apartment, but then changed her mind. “I’m not a bad person, you know.”

  “I didn’t say you were.”

  “When you let me move in without checking references or asking about finances, I figured you didn’t really need the money. It’s not like my trust fund is all that big, and I resent turning over a chunk of it every month to someone who’s so casual about the whole business.”

  “I’ll try to be more stern and professional.”

  “Thank you. And just so you know, you really don’t have a clue about how to iron pleated skirts. I can show you, if you like.”

  “I appreciate that. But it’s probably a skill I can live without.”

  An Offer

  A week later, the male half of the newscaster couple made an offer on Marty’s apartment. It was $25,000 below what she wanted, but she told me she had no intention of turning it down. The newscaster had already made an appointment to spend two days with her the following week to get footage of her for a ten-minute profile to be broadcast on their show, New England Innovators. If the offer had been fifty thousand under asking, she still would have taken it, just to stay in his good graces. She mentioned something about Going for the Better Good, another slogan from her seminar, and then explained that she had to get off the phone; she had an appointment for a manicure, a piece of news I found so shocking, I hung up without saying good-bye.

  Now I had three closings pending, not spectacular business given the real estate boom, but good enough to satisfy Gina that I was making a serious effort and enough to make me feel the irresistible pull of momentum. It was good news for Edward as well, and since I finally had something positive to tell him, something I thought he’d enjoy hearing, I called his cell phone.

  “I’m in Seattle,” he said. “It’s early, William. I had a late night.”

  “With your pilot, I assume.”

  “Assume Nothing.”

  It was the first time I’d heard him use one of Marty’s slogans, and because he’d uttered it in a brittle tone, laced with disapproval eerily similar to Marty’s, I recoiled. I passed along the good news about the condo.

  “You shouldn’t have brought newscasters over there,” he said. “You know what a publicity hound she is. I’m glad she accepted the offer, but we’ll see where it goes.”

  His voice was more groggy and raspier than usual. I shouldn’t have made any assumptions about the pilot; he could have been up pacing the floor of his hotel room in a sweaty panic attack. “When I was over at Marty’s the other day, she told me you’ve been having some problems.”

  “Oh really? If I wanted to discuss them with you, William, I would have told you myself.”

  “Now that I know, let’s talk about it.”

  “It doesn’t help me to talk about it. I’m taking some medication, but I hate the way it makes me feel. My schedule for the next few weeks is horrible. The weather across the country is horrible. The airline is letting people go and the rest of us have to take up the slack and the workload is horrible. I have a horrible head cold. I’m going to hang up now. I’ll call you when I get back to town, all right?”

  He didn’t wait for me to answer.

  The Neighbors

  What I was enjoying most about The Mandarins was everything that the author of the introduction had derided. The hypnotically leisurely pace, the extravagant set pieces, the abundance. Reading it felt like a luxurious reminder of all the free time I had, now that I’d given up the computer. Even on nights when I didn’t see Didier, I’d come home and prepare a meal for myself, forgo the lure of the vacuum cleaner and the ironing board, and sink into the rich, chatty world of the book, a world where DVDs and laptop computers and cellular telephones did not exist. The sprawling, untidy nature of the novel seemed to be connected directly to its extraordinary intelligence. You couldn’t imagine any of these characters scouring their sinks with carbonated beverages or caring too much about folding their towels.

  I was stretched out on my chaise longue one night, reading more and more slowly, when Charlotte called to talk about the closing for their condo.

  “What are you doing this evening?” she asked.

  “Reading,” I said. “Something I’ve been trying to get to for years.”

  “No doubt it’s about management style for the new millennium. Don’t answer that. I’m just calling to see if we can postpone the date of the closing. Not for any of the reasons you might guess. It’s for a reason you probably wouldn’t guess.” She paused, as if waiting for me to suggest something. After a moment she said, “You’re no fun, William. It’s our anniversary. Samuel suggested we go away for a few days.”

  “Very nice,” I said. “A surprising development. A positive development.”

  “I thought so, too. He wants to go to Bermuda, but I suggested something a little closer to home. I think it will be a happy anniversary.”

  It was clear she wanted me to believe this, even if she didn’t herself. After assuring her that the date could be changed without much trouble, I began to think about her manuscript. I still hadn’t decided the best way to get it back to her. Simply giving it to her and explaining myself would have been the most honest way to handle it, but I couldn’t imagine the mechanics and discussion involved. I wasn’t a good liar, and I knew I’d feel compelled to qualify my response to the stories, and after all the other trouble I’d caused her, that plan of action struck me as heartless.

  “What do you do with a big rambling house like that when you go away?” I asked. “I sup
pose you have to get a house-sitter.”

  “You’re forgetting,” she said. “There’s no crime out here, discounting domestic violence and the occasional murder in a family of good standing. It’s one of the reasons the real estate prices are so high. No one locks their doors. I mean, thank God, because there are about eight doors on this house, and I couldn’t stand having to wander around making sure each one was closed, never mind locked. When the neighbors go away, we look in on their houses. What terrifies me is that I’m going to walk in on neighbors A and B doing something inappropriate in the house of neighbor C, or worse still, in my own house.”

  Unlocked doors and people wandering in and out at all hours. It seemed like a solution to the manuscript problem, and although it wasn’t beach weather, it might be nice to drive to Nahant one more time.

  Mrs. Didier

  Marty had sent out several bulk e-mails announcing the date and time the profile of her would be broadcast on New England Innovators. Her e-mails were half self-promotion and half unconvincing hype about the show itself. The latter reached a potential audience of two million people, she claimed, which I took to mean that if everyone in the Greater Boston area with a television set tuned in to watch her, the audience would be in the neighborhood of two million.

  I was excited about seeing Marty on TV. There’s something inexplicably thrilling about the sight of someone you know on a television screen, even if you don’t have much respect for the program, even if you barely know the person in question. I invited Didier to watch it with me, but he complained about the quality of my set and suggested that I come to his apartment instead. “I have a big flat screen with stereo speakers I bought to keep my mother amused. She hates American TV, but she finds it easier to take than America itself.”

  “She’s still here?” I asked skeptically.

  “She is here, Mr. Collins. I told you she was here but you never believe anything I say. You two can have a big conversation in French.”

  I was amazed by the invitation to Didier’s apartment. In all the time I’d known him, he’d come up with a series of increasingly elaborate excuses to avoid inviting me over, or even to giving me his address. Now he was simply asking me to visit because he had a better television set, as if this were the kind of thing he did all the time. There was something so radical about the invitation and about the casual way he’d made it, that I sensed it didn’t signal a new beginning to our relationship, but was more likely an ending of some kind. I dressed for the occasion in an Italian suit that had cost me close to a thousand dollars, even at the consignment shop.