Alternatives to Sex

by Stephen McCauley

  “I wouldn’t object to that,” I said. “But it wouldn’t be the same.”

  “It might be better, for all we know. I’m sorry about little Edward. I don’t suppose it’s serious, do you?”

  “I suppose it is. I just have no idea how to find him. Montreal isn’t exactly a small town.”

  Sylvia brightened at the mention of the city, obviously thinking back to one of the ecstatic, outdated adventures she’d written about. But then she sighed and said, “I could never live anywhere but here now. My contempt is what inspires me. It’s just a matter of getting his address,” she said. “Then you can go and claim your bride.”

  There was always a surprise at a closing, an unexpected problem with the deed, a revelation about a roof leak, or an upcoming assessment that no one had mentioned; but in my experience, the problems never changed the outcome. No one had ever backed out of a deal at that point, no matter what came up. Even when it seemed as if it might be better to stall, the momentum, combined with weariness, its counterpart, always carried the day. I imagined there must be an equivalent in marriage, at least for some people, an eleventh-hour revelation or realization, something that changes everything except the outcome.

  There was a problem with the condominium fees in Edward’s building and a bookkeeping error on the part of Edward’s lawyer’s firm. This resulted in a series of sharp exchanges between attorneys while Sylvia and I discussed the weather and the dire predictions of an early-season snowstorm that night.

  In the end, of course, it was resolved. All of the papers were signed and there was a series of handshakes. “Now what?” Sylvia asked.

  “That’s it,” Edward’s lawyer said. “We’re done.”

  “You just have to move in and live there,” I told her.

  “Oh, dear,” she sighed. “The hard part. I suppose it’s now or never.”

  Outside, the sky had turned steely, and the light was fading quickly. Sylvia wasn’t dressed for the weather, but then, in all the time I’d known her, she’d never dressed for a season or made any concessions to climate. Despite her extreme slenderness, she appeared to be completely inured to temperature. I was wearing my expensive, funereal suit, and a topcoat that was short on me but was made of such high-quality cashmere, I’d taken the consignment owner’s advice to buy it anyway. And still, the cold air had penetrated the layers of expensive wool and entered my bones. Snow was looming, gathering in the flat gray sky. You could feel it pressing down on the low curtain of clouds.

  “I want to take you out to dinner,” Sylvia said. “It’s the least I can do. I’m quite moved by the whole process although I’m so emotionally detached, you’d never guess it. There’s a new Portuguese fish place around the corner that’s notoriously horrible. I’ve been dying to try it.”

  “You’re generous,” I told her, “but I have to drive out to Nahant. I have to return something to a friend.”

  “Oh, William,” she said. She stuck her glasses on her face and gazed at me through the thick lenses. “I’m feeling so alone right now. I bought a small apartment that I’ll live in solo for the rest of my life. I mean, thank God, but even so. Can’t you change your plans for me, carino?”

  “It’s a small window of opportunity. I’m sorry.”

  She thought this over for a minute. “I think I’ll slip back into that office and try to talk your friend’s lawyer into going out with me. He’s very handsome, isn’t he? And I’m sure he’s seducible, don’t you think? A well-preserved seventy, which should make the seduction easier.”

  “I don’t know. I suspect he’s married.”

  “Irrelevant, of course. Either way, he’ll be flattered by the attention.”

  We said our good-byes and I wished her luck with the lawyer.

  “What’s his name again?” she asked.

  “Kurt.”

  “Kurt. I’m sure I must have had one of those but I can’t recall where or when.”

  As I was walking up the street, I heard her call my name and turned to see her dashing toward me. “I almost forgot,” she said. She reached into her overflowing bag and pulled out an envelope bulging with papers related to the signing. From this, she extracted the corner of an envelope with a Montreal address written on it in her handwriting.

  “I assume it’s your friend Edward’s address. The lawyer had it written down on the folder, under Edward’s name, and he stuck the check right next to it. I thought it might be of some use to you.”

  Snowstorm

  It started to snow while I was stopped in traffic on the Tobin Bridge. It was much too early for winter to begin, but in that moment when I was suspended over the river, high above the green water with a view of the harbor and airport in the distance, the whole dark, raw season blew in off the ocean. My car rocked in the wind. I’d planned my exit from the city poorly; it was the worst hour for traffic, a Friday, and there was now the added complication of the weather. Charlotte’s manuscript sat in a white paper bag on the floor of the passenger side of the car, and I glanced at it occasionally, feeling as if at any moment I was going to be pulled over by a cop and arrested for carrying around something that didn’t belong to me—specifically, Charlotte O’Malley’s yearnings.

  As I looked ahead to the line of stalled traffic, I felt a little catch in my stomach, a flicker of panic and paranoia. What if the bridge collapsed right now? What if the truck ahead was loaded with explosives and the suicidal madman at the wheel, just at that moment, decided to detonate it? But then I remembered that I had no phobias about bridges in general, none about this bridge in particular, and no overwhelming fears of terrorist explosions. I was having sympathetic worries that harmonized with Edward’s. I tried to shrug them off, but in the end, I decided to give in to them. It was soothing to feel my way into Edward’s peculiar and paranoid view of the world, which maybe wasn’t so paranoid at all.

  Montreal. Another half-baked escape idea of Edward’s, this one even more senseless than San Diego. As far as I knew, he had no friends in Montreal and didn’t know anyone in the entire province.

  I’d once dated a man who claimed that Montreal was the height of North American culture, and he and I went there frequently over the course of our ten-month off-and-almost-on relationship. In preparing for each trip, there would be a lot of discussion about superb restaurants, about rushing to buy tickets to some show in preParis tryouts as soon as we hit town, about a great little chocolate shop in a remote neighborhood. As soon as we’d checked into our hotel, he would start to talk about strip clubs and saunas and the number of each in the city and how many new ones had opened up and which we would go to that weekend and in what order. The restaurants? “I’m not hungry.” The plays? “You’d be bored.” The chocolate? “I’m on a diet.” In my mind, the city was a confused blend of sleazy glamour, furtive sexual encounters, and dignified European charm. It made a certain amount of sense for someone like me, but none at all for Edward. The idea of him even considering buying there made me so angry, I was sorry to have his address. Eventually, I was going to have to call him and try to persuade him to leave Canada and face reality either in Boston or San Diego.

  By the time I crossed the causeway onto Nahant, the air was filled with broad, wet feathers of snow, coming down in earnest. It wasn’t sticking to the macadam yet, but it was clinging to the dried grass along the sides of the road like a sticky chemical that had been sprayed on. A spell of false winter with lovely false snow that would hopefully melt away in a day or so.

  There was a cove near Charlotte and Sam’s house, a tiny public beach with a small parking lot. I left my car there for fear of alarming any of the watchful neighbors, and walked up the road in the snow, clutching the bag with Charlotte’s manuscript inside my woolen coat. The pathway that led around the side of the house to the waterfront was lit with low, dim lanterns, but the house itself was reassuringly dark. I stood for a moment on the porch where Edward and I had met Kate and turned to look back at the city across the water. The buildin
gs and the lights were obscured by the storm, and the wind was blowing all that wet fluff back into my eyes. I was struck by the folly of my mission as soon as I turned the knob on the door and pushed it open. I should have just thrown the manuscript away.

  The living room was cool, and smelled of furniture polish and lilies. A spotlight on one of the neighbor’s houses was shining through the bare trees and flooding the floors and walls with a pretty purple glow. From what I could tell, it was as tidy and spotlessly clean as a room in my own compulsively arranged house. I followed the route I’d taken when I’d come for the party, into the kitchen, and up the back staircase. But I had such a strong craving for something alcoholic, I went back into the kitchen and opened up the fridge. I pushed a few things around and saw three bottles of beer in the back. No one would notice if one was missing, and if they did, each could blame the other, another of the many advantages of being part of a couple. I twisted off the cap and downed half the bottle in one gulp as I went up the staircase through the servants’ quarters. “I should drink more often,” I said aloud; I suddenly didn’t care half as much about what I was doing, and any residual sadness about the closing on Edward’s apartment melted. I had his address. The fact that I was here in this house alone while Charlotte and Samuel were off celebrating their anniversary struck me as testament to the fact that somehow or other, my friendship with them and my straddling both sides of their relationship had paid off. I’d done some actual good.

  Despite the snow and the late hour, Charlotte’s top-floor study was blue, with light coming in the skylights, and there were shadows from the branches of the naked trees flickering across the walls. I set down the beer and took the manuscript out of the bag, opened the desk drawer, moved aside some papers, laid it inside neatly, and quietly slid the drawer shut. That mission accomplished, I sat on the corner of the desk and finished off the beer, feeling foolishly virtuous.

  I was casually looking through Charlotte’s desk calendar, trying to see if there was anything about me written on it, when the phone rang. More startling still, the door to the roof deck opened, and Charlotte came in.

  Her hair was covered in snow, and she was holding a glass that was empty except for a few ice cubes. She looked at me, slightly indignant, but not especially surprised.

  “I like your coat,” she said and shut the door behind her. “I wish I’d had it outside there. It’s freezing.” She set down her glass, leaned over, and brushed the snow off her hair. When she straightened up again, she was a little unsteady on her feet, and it was obvious she was drunk. The phone stopped ringing, leaving in its wake a big silence that had to be filled. “Are you going to tell me,” she said, “or do I have to ask you?”

  “I thought you and Samuel were going away,” I said. It was a lame response, but the fact that she’d been drinking made everything seem easier.

  She considered this comment and took a seat on the sofa. “I don’t know what question that’s an answer to, but I don’t think it’s the one I was going to ask.”

  “Ah. And I suppose that question, the one you were going to ask, would be: What the fuck are you doing here, William?”

  “I don’t use the word ‘fuck’ in that way very often. It’s easier for men to pull it off somehow. But that’s the gist of it, yes.”

  The nice thing about being discovered breaking into her house was that it made taking the manuscript seem like an insignificant offense. I explained it to her, stressing my interest in reading her work as a way to get to know her better. She listened, pouting, and tugging on her lips, and I couldn’t help but think she was taking pleasure in my discomfort. When I got around to telling her how much I’d enjoyed reading the stories, she held up her hand and flapped her fingers at me.

  “Uh, uh, uh. Please. If you read them, fine, you read them. But praising me is beyond the call of duty. You could have thrown the manuscript out. I probably wouldn’t have noticed.” She stroked her neck and closed her eyes, and for a minute, I thought she was going to fall asleep. “Tell me,” she said, keeping her eyes shut, “what you liked least about the stories.”

  I stalled for a minute, and then I said, “The endings, I suppose. They’re all too happy.”

  “Oh, that. Well, that’s your problem, not mine.” She said it with a surprising amount of vehemence. “What else?”

  “Truthfully, nothing else. I enjoyed them, even if I felt bad about the way I came by them.”

  “That sounds like appropriately lukewarm praise.” She finally opened her eyes and looked around the little study as if she was expecting to see it changed in some way. She appeared slightly more sober, almost as if she’d taken a brief nap. “Do you think I’m talented?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

  “I always wanted to think I was talented, but I’m not convinced. So I settled for being loved, which has many of the same advantages. Except you’re dependent upon someone else, aren’t you? I know I’m not a very appealing drunk, William. It’s one of the reasons I stopped drinking. But you can guess why I might fall off the wagon tonight.” She held her hand out to me. “Help me up, please. We’ll go downstairs. I’d love a sandwich.”

  The Center of My Life

  She sat at one of the counter stools in the kitchen and directed me toward the necessary ingredients and utensils: a roasted chicken and mustard in the refrigerator, bread in a box on the counter, knives in the appropriate drawers. The house was chilly, but she was wrapped in a big sweater and either because of that or because of what she’d been drinking, she didn’t seem to notice. There was something so peculiarly intimate about standing at her kitchen counter, using her knives to cut up the chicken she’d roasted, that I felt at last I could ask her what had happened to her weekend anniversary plans.

  “You’d have to ask Samuel that question, and he’s not here at the moment. As you clearly noticed. The official word is a business crisis of some kind. What was I supposed to do when he called, challenge him on it? ‘Is that really why you’re canceling our anniversary trip?’ If you don’t want an answer, you don’t ask the question. Maybe a thin spread of mayonnaise before you close up the bread.”

  “Have you ever thought about leaving?” I said, as I sliced the sandwiches in halves and put them on plates. “I often wondered if you were buying the apartment for yourself.”

  She laughed at this suggestion, not drunkenly, but with genuine amusement.

  “A minute ago you were criticizing me for imagining inappropriately happy endings for my poor, mixed-up characters. Now you’re doing the same thing with me; imagining me moving into my large lovely apartment on a pretty street and happily starting all over again. No, that’s not where I’m headed. I don’t believe in that kind of ending for my life.”

  We took our sandwiches into the living room, and she turned on a single light in a far corner of the room. We ate side by side on the sofa, watching the snow pile up on the balustrade around the porch.

  “I hope you don’t regret buying the apartment,” I said. “I feel responsible, at least partly. I can guarantee you it’s a good investment, if nothing else.”

  “Responsible? Don’t be ridiculous. Besides, it’s perfect. Or nearly. It won’t solve all our problems, but it will make some things better. It wouldn’t have happened without you. I made a few attempts with other real estate agents over the past year, but we never quite clicked. You, on the other hand, were the ideal medium. We’re going to have to sell this monstrosity soon, to pay the bills, among other things, and when we do, I’ll make sure Samuel gives the listing to you. I can’t imagine it selling for less than a million.”

  “You easily can double that figure,” I said, thinking about my rich cousins.

  A medium. Of course. I bit into my sandwich. How stupid of me to have thought I was a friend—a different category altogether.

  “What about you?” she asked.

  “Me? What about me?”

  “What are your plans? You need plans. I don’t think you can
just go on like this forever. There’s as much about you in those notes you took on us as there is about our marriage. Even if the bulk of it is wedged unconsciously between the lines.”

  “I’m the medium. Do mediums need plans?”

  She sighed and put down her plate. “Well, I’m sorry, William. I know it wasn’t a very nice thing to say, but after all, it’s not my fault if you choose to be on the outside of your life. You probably disapprove of me for choosing to stay.” She touched my face tenderly, but the look in her eyes wasn’t especially sympathetic. “At least I’m at the center of my life, no matter how complicated it is or even how second rate it is.”

  I stayed for another half hour, and as I watched the snow swirling in off the ocean, I mulled over her words, trying to think about the center of my life, and how I could formulate plans around it. I brought the plates into the kitchen and left them in the sink, then went back to the living room, put on my coat, and wound my scarf around my neck. Charlotte had her feet tucked under her on the sofa, and looked once again as if she was about to doze off.

  “William,” she said, sleepily. “I have a strange request. I’d like you to leave that scarf here.”

  “My scarf? Whatever for?”

  “Leave it draped over the back of a chair somewhere in the house. Samuel will see it, and wonder whose it is. He won’t ask me, of course, but it will bother him. It will equalize things in a tiny way that will matter only to me. I’ll get it back to you, of course.”

  I liked the idea, but not nearly as much as I would have liked it a few hours earlier.

  “I’m afraid I can’t leave it,” I said. “I’m driving up to Montreal tonight, and it’s bound to be even colder up there.”

  “Montreal? But our closing’s on Monday. You’ll be back for it, won’t you?”

  “I don’t know. Someone will cover for me if I’m not.”

  I slid down the slick hill to my car. The whole neighborhood seemed deserted, as if everyone were hunkered down for the storm. My car swerved as I backed out of the little lot, and I nearly went off the road. Someone slowed down in passing, and then, as if changing his mind, continued on. I was fairly certain it was Samuel, but I don’t think he recognized me.