Alternatives to Sex

by Stephen McCauley

  Anyone

  Because I’d had no intention of driving to Canada when I’d left my house earlier that day, I had no maps with me, and no change of clothes or shaving kit or shampoo. But it was a direct drive from Boston to Montreal, and even I would have had a hard time getting lost.

  Somewhere in Vermont, the weak signals of classical music stations failed, and I was reduced to shifting back and forth between a variety of loud talk shows that bore stunning similarity to one another. The hosts railed angrily against the world and the callers called in drunkenly to support their rants, and everyone tossed around a lot of unsubstantiated suppositions and thinly veiled racism as excuses for blowing things up—people, buildings, whole countries. The confusion and fear of the past year had hardened into a thirst for explosive revenge, if not against the perpetrators of disaster, then—please—against someone. Anyone.

  An Empty Bench

  I crossed the Champlain Bridge over the St. Lawrence River as the sun was coming up. The buildings of the cold, foreign city were steaming in the frail morning light, and the mountain rising up behind the glass skyscrapers was a black shadow. It was too early to head to Edward’s address, so I went first for breakfast. In the restaurant bathroom, I made a feeble attempt at cleaning up and washing away the telltale signs of my all-night drive. Sleeplessness is never an attractive ornament, but I hadn’t realized quite how damaging it was at my age until I looked in the bathroom mirror. Maybe, to be optimistic, my appearance lent gravity and urgency to my face, to my reasons for being there. Edward couldn’t doubt my sincerity, looking the way I did.

  The address Sylvia had written down was on a north-south street in the Plateau, a working-class French neighborhood that, like most working-class neighborhoods these days, had been taken over by the upwardly mobile. But not entirely. Decay and disrepair stood side by side with polished renovation, giving the whole neighborhood the schizophrenic feel that’s so prized by investors. It was bitterly cold, but there was no snow on the ground here; the storm I’d driven through hadn’t come this far north.

  Edward’s building was leaning more toward the decay and disrepair side of the gentrification equation. The sign outside indicated that it was a house of temporary rentals “for students and others.” I waited on the sidewalk until the front door opened. A man wearing two coats, clearly an “other,” came out.

  If the outside had a certain amount of antique charm, to use the most relevant real estate euphemism, the inside combined the less appealing features of a dormitory and a boardinghouse, all overlaid with the faint smell of cigarettes and age. How had my meticulous friend ended up here? I wondered.

  I cruised up and down the hallways until, on the third floor, I came across one door that was partly open, with a thin cloud of marijuana smoke drifting out. I knocked, the door swung open, and I saw two young people of indeterminate gender sitting on the bed, passing a joint back and forth, intently studying a fashion magazine. They looked up at me with the silly, easily pleased look of the stoned.

  “I’m looking for a friend,” I said. “He’s in this building, but I’m not sure which apartment he’s in.”

  “Sorry, but I don’t know a lot of people here,” one said, clearly a boy, possibly Dutch, judging from the accent.

  I described Edward, and he said, “Oh, older guy? Long hair?”

  Older? “That could be him,” I said.

  The second person spoke up, twin to the first but a girl this time. “He’s the one who fixed the toilet down the hall?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m sure that’s him. Do you know which room he’s in?”

  “It’s number twenty-two,” the boy said.

  “Twenty-four,” the other corrected. “He’s bad with numbers,” she explained.

  The boy held the joint up and smiled, offering it to me. “It’s a little early,” I said, but of course, what I really meant was, it was much too late, unfortunately, for me to sit around a dorm room at nine in the morning, smoking pot.

  There was no answer when I knocked at number twenty-four. I tried the knob, but it was locked. I pressed my ear to the door, but the room was silent.

  “If you see him,” I said to the stoned couple, “can you tell him William is looking for him? You’ll remember the name, won’t you? Or at least what I look like?”

  They gave me confused glances, and I realized of course that I’d long ago passed into the Invisible stage of life; my appearance hadn’t registered on either of them and they wouldn’t have been able to describe me, even if staring at me directly.

  “Is he usually here during the day?”

  “I think he’s taking French classes,” the girl said.

  With that, they both lost interest and began speaking in their own language, pointing things out to each other in the magazine.

  On the street, the cold air had the opposite effect on me from what it usually did, and instead of feeling revived, I felt so suddenly and completely exhausted, I nearly dozed off standing up. I’d left my car on a street beside a park, and when I went back to claim it, it was gone. All the cars that had been there were gone. Towed, a more careful reading of the sign revealed, for reasons related to a road construction project.

  Halfway up the block, I saw a house with the unmistakably overdone paint job and window treatments of a bed-and-breakfast. I’d have preferred an anonymous hotel, and the free parking would have saved me a lot of trouble. But it was preferable to nodding out on a park bench. The owner was an irritable man, portly and gray-haired, and when I tried to explain in French that I wanted a room, he cut me off and said: “I know you want to practice, but I don’t have time. Anyway, I’m American.”

  He handed me a series of forms to fill out, and as I did so, I asked him how long he’d been living in Canada. “A year,” he said. “Almost exactly. It was time to get out. Is that what you’re doing here? Planning an escape?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not.”

  “If you change your mind and decide you’re interested in buying an apartment, which I’d strongly suggest, I can help you. I have my real estate license.”

  He led me up two flights of stairs to a tiny room under the eaves. The ceiling was so low, it was impossible for me to stand straight without brushing my head. “How much is it again?” I asked.

  He repeated the price. “But if you end up buying something through me, I’ll reimburse you fifty percent of the room rate for the first week.”

  I collapsed on the bed, and when I woke up, the room was shadowy and freezing. It was twilight. I reached out and touched a radiator beside the bed, but it was cold, and I couldn’t figure out the complicated system of knobs that turned up the heat. There was one small window across from the bed, and from it, I could see the park with its barren trees and its long, serpentine pond, clogged with leaves and the thin shimmer of an icy crust, just beginning to form. The soft, yellow streetlamps had come on around the pond, and people were out with dogs, bundled up against the cold, hurrying from one part of their lives to the next. Tight jeans and turtlenecks and women in high-heeled boots. A little boy on the sidewalk below was screaming something in French to his young mother. I was about to turn away when I spotted a man, sitting on a bench just across the street, reading a newspaper in the dim yellow light. He had on a leather jacket and a green woolen hat that covered his hair and didn’t suit him at all. But it was unmistakably Edward.

  “I know you’re trying to get away from everything,” I practiced as I splashed water on my face at a little sink wedged into a corner. “I know you’ve been unhappy and everything seems crazy, but we both know this plan isn’t going to work out. Come back with me, and we’ll figure it out together. I have plenty of room in my house. It won’t be perfect, but we’ll be at the center of each other’s life. You’ve been at the center of mine for years now. I’m sorry I didn’t realize it sooner.”

  I ran down the staircase. The cold and the noise of the street hit me with a pleasant shock when I opened the do
or. I walked out into the winter twilight with a mission, but by the time I’d dodged the traffic and crossed into the park, the bench was empty. I buttoned up my coat and wrapped the scarf around my neck more tightly. There weren’t that many places he could go. I wasn’t worried. I knew where to find him.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to The Ragdale Foundation, The Boston Athenaeum, The Newton Free Library, Wellspring House, and La Bibliothèque Nationale du Québec. Also to Chuck Adams, Denise Roy, and Denise Shannon. Also to Cynthia Liebow. Also to Kimberly Diaz, Emily B. Petrou, and Nancy Gorman. Also to Helene Jacob, Philippe Le Sage, Florence Martin, and Antonio Interlandi. Also to John Morley. Also to Sandrine Calabria. Also to Sebastian Stuart. Also to Jonathan Strong, Morgan Mead, Scott Elledge, and Ann Colette. Also to Amy. Also, most especially, to Anita.