Alternatives to Sex

by Stephen McCauley

  “He’s British.”

  “It is the same thing to the rest of the world, Mr. Collins.”

  In the two years I’d known him, I’d seen him surprisingly few times, probably not more than a couple of dozen meetings, although some of those had lasted as long as three days. Despite that somewhat limited contact, I’d spent so many hours spinning out lurid fantasies of him, I’d wasted so many days waiting pointlessly for him to show up for dates he didn’t have the decency to break, that I’d felt, almost from the start of the relationship, as if we were a real, live, long-term couple, minus the anger, resentment, and gnawing boredom.

  “So how’s the shoe business, Mr. Didier?” I asked.

  “It isn’t good, it isn’t bad. What more do you want to know than that, Mr. Collins? You don’t care about the shoe business anyway.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Of course it’s true. I know you, Mr. Collins. I know you better than you know yourself. I know, for example,” he said, drawing on his cigarette as he eyed me, “that you are now just dying to invite me back to your little house on the hill.”

  “Dying is a bit strong.”

  “I can see it in your eyes, Mr. Collins. Even in the dark and the rain.”

  “Why don’t you invite me to your apartment? You told me you live in this neighborhood, didn’t you?”

  “But I can tell by this question, Mr. Collins, that you don’t believe me. So if I invited you there now, it would be trying to prove something to you. And why do that? Besides, my mother is visiting for two months.”

  The Remote Control

  Sean had filled several small beakers with blends of oils. As he added a drop here or there, he made notes in his meticulous handwriting on an index card. He worked with intensity, but a kind of detached weariness, sighing from time to time. Then, as if he’d suddenly received a jolt of divine inspiration, he poured all the oils together in a deep beaker and swirled it around, with sharp snaps of his wrist, for at least a minute, staring at me with what I took to be disapproval. Without sniffing it himself, he passed the beaker to me. “This is preliminary,” he said. “I have to add some orchestration and a few more colors. But this will tell you the general mood.”

  The fragrance took a while to find me, but when it did, it entered my nose and went to my head exactly like a shot of straight whiskey, and from there, spread down through the rest of my body with a strange warmth. There was an underlying sharpness to it, something bitter and citrusy that wasn’t exactly pleasant, but was addictive. All the dark, musky tones, those animal secretions Sean had mentioned, were there, like faint, seductive music coming from another apartment.

  “How am I doing?” Sean asked.

  I reluctantly passed the beaker to Charlotte. She drew back from it as if she’d been stung. “Not my type at all.”

  “No,” I said. “Not my type either, but that’s how it goes. At the moment, we’re just friends.”

  Sean gave me one of those fond, pitying looks you give a child who needs another twenty years of experience to understand the full import of what he’s just said. “Forgive me if I’m dubious.”

  I was dubious, too, but something had clicked with Didier, in a completely unexpected way. When he proposed that I invite him back to my house, I had, of course, assumed that I’d be unable to resist. But even so, pride and vanity compelled me to make him think I wasn’t going to.

  “I would love to invite you to my house, Mr. Didier,” I’d said, “but I think we both know where that would lead.”

  “No, I don’t know. Maybe you should just tell me.”

  “The fact is, I am not having sex anymore. Not with you, not with anyone. I’ve taken a vow of celibacy.”

  “Celibacy?” he asked, with surprising reverence. He tossed his cigarette down to the wet earth under the tree. And then, without even a trace of accent, he said, “That is so hot, Mr. Collins.”

  “Oh, really? You think so?”

  “Yes, I love that. Please. I want you to fuck me right now.”

  This was all so blunt, so direct, so completely out of character for him, so counter to his usual withholding, I felt, for the first time, power pass into my hands, as if he’d just given me the remote control to a television set with 350 fantastic channels.

  “You’re missing the point, Didier,” I told him. “I can’t fuck you because I can’t fuck anyone. That’s what celibate means.”

  “My priest, when I was sixteen, was celibate, and he fucked me.”

  I somehow managed to avoid shoving Didier into the backseat of my car, driving him to my house, and locking him in the attic for a few days. It was the first time I’d ever felt that I was irresistible to him, and I knew I could only sustain his interest by resisting him. But beyond that, I felt a surge of control over my own impulses that was even more intoxicating than Didier’s nicotine-stained charms. So, I thought, this feeling is what I was after when, all those weeks earlier, I’d unsuccessfully sworn off sex.

  Happy

  I could feel myself growing calm as I watched Sean work, the drops falling into the beaker, the quick flick of his wrist as he swirled the oils, his look of dreamy concentration. “Watching him,” I said to Charlotte, “you’d have to assume Sean is happy in his work.”

  “I agree. It’s one of the pleasures of coming in here. It’s wonderful watching someone do something they love, no matter what it is.”

  Without looking up from his science project, Sean said, “What you’re telling me, William, is that you’re not happy. I’m trying to change that, but there’s only so much you can do with oil and imagination.”

  Of all the many things you’re not supposed to accuse people of, being unhappy is certainly the main one. Crazy, stupid, lazy, cowardly, these are all acceptable accusations among friends in polite society, but unhappy wounds on a deeper level.

  “You’re not going to get happy because of Didier,” Sean said. “And not because of perfume. You need spiritual fulfillment. And that wouldn’t really hurt you, either, Charlotte.”

  “I have marriage,” Charlotte said. “Not the same thing?”

  “No. Not even a good one.”

  Alcohol Instead

  “That wasn’t an insult,” I assured Charlotte as we walked up Newbury Street, the wind blowing in our faces. “He was saying that even though you do have a good marriage, it isn’t enough. You need—we both need—spiritual fulfillment. Whatever that is.”

  “Maybe instead I should have said I have alcohol. And you, apparently, have sex.”

  “I’m guessing the response would have been the same. I’m making great progress with abstinence, by the way.”

  “How virtuous. Maybe we should get competitive about our self-control. I haven’t had a drink since the party. I haven’t really wanted one.” She stopped and adjusted her sweater; it was colder than it was when we went into Sean’s store, possibly a harbinger of an early winter. I don’t mind cold weather, but winter always makes me long for a settled life, at least for a few months. So far, this winter didn’t look any more promising than any other in that respect.

  “I’m a little confused on one point,” she said. “Your friendship with Edward. Not that it’s my business, but of course Samuel told me he and Kate stumbled upon you, and…” She shrugged. “It’s just not the way you presented the relationship. And then you left so quickly. And now Didier. It’s not that I really need to understand.”

  “Stumbled upon us, eh?”

  “I’m sure it was more embarrassing for them than for you. Although as I recall, you hadn’t even been at the party all that long at that point.”

  My responsibility seemed clear to me, and it wasn’t to either Edward or to myself. “It sounds as if Samuel was exaggerating,” I said. “Maybe we should just leave it at that, get some lunch, and discuss our spiritual quests.”

  The Missing Piece

  For the most part, I’m baffled by spirituality. When people talk about their spiritual quests and the com
fort they take in spiritual pursuits, I usually have no idea what they’re talking about. Or to be honest, I often have the impression that they don’t know what they’re talking about.

  Religion, spirituality’s sturdier cousin, has its drawbacks, like, for example, being the cause of eighty-five percent of the violent conflict in the world. But at least religions have specificity, systems of punishments and rewards that are spelled out in detail. Religions have a narrative driving them, and they have, in some form or other, God, that main character to end all main characters. Omniscient and opinionated, good but demanding, just, even if, occasionally, prone to capricious behavior; the elusive, ever-unobtainable father love object benefactor all rolled into one tidy package of omnipotence.

  Spirituality, in contrast, has eye pillows and green tea. It has unmelodic music. People often cite their spiritual quest as a desire to connect with something larger than themselves, but frequently, the journey crosses paths with Oprah Winfrey or someone selling a video on late night TV.

  The big questions that seem to nag at so many people—What’s it all about? Why are we here? What is the meaning of Life?—have never nagged me. When you operate on a premise of muted pessimism and don’t expect great things of yourself, it doesn’t come as a major shock or disappointment to discover that human life in general is lacking in purpose and that your life, in particular, is insignificant.

  But after Sean told me that I was lacking a spiritual connection, I began to think that he might have a valid point. For a long time, I’d been aware that something was missing from my life, although I’d never paid too much attention to the feeling because the entire economy is based on making people believe something is missing from their lives—a new car, softer towels, God.

  I was sitting in my living room, opening and closing the bottle of scent Sean had made for me and trying to decipher its spiritual meaning when I heard the door slam on the first floor. I went to the window and peered down at Kumiko Rothberg, standing on the sidewalk clutching a string bag filled with mats and straps and plastic bricks and a puffy round pillow. She’d told me once that practicing yoga had changed her life. When I asked her how, she’d given me her look of melancholy condescension and had said that it had helped her “understand.” I’d dismissed her evasive language, although she certainly understood how to live a rent-free life. I chided myself for being so dismissive of her and put on a sweater. You can learn from anyone.

  As soon as Kumiko saw me emerge from the house, she said, “I’m late.” This was an obvious attempt to head off a rent discussion. In the past month, she’d tossed a few dollar bills in my direction and had asked, three days earlier, that I recalibrate my elaborate payment schedule to clarify what she now owed. I’d responded to her request with a lot of useless sarcasm that had dissolved into a little badminton game of traded, insincere compliments. Then, feeling guilty for having been too harsh and probably for charging her rent in the first place, I’d spent an hour on the computer at the office recalibrating as requested.

  “I won’t keep you,” I said. “I just wanted to ask your advice about something.” This unexpected comment caught her off guard, and she looked at me as if I were about to grab her bag of goodies and run off with it. “I’ve been thinking about taking a yoga class, and I hoped you might have some advice about a teacher or school or however it works.”

  She flipped one of her braids behind her shoulder. “You don’t strike me as the yoga type, William.”

  Judging from the yoga types I routinely encountered on the streets bullying their way to classes, all posture and passive aggression, I was tempted to thank her for the compliment. But a part of me was wounded. “That hasn’t been determined yet,” I said.

  “In other words, you haven’t practiced before.” She said the word “practiced” with a studied reverence that made it sound like a challenge.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “I gather that means no.”

  “I’ve done a lot of stretching.”

  She sighed and shifted her weight from one leg to the other. She had on a pair of turquoise stretch pants and a big T-shirt artfully spattered with paint and tied jauntily into a knot at her waist. She was, I noticed for the first time, in very good shape—lean and strong. For some reason, this made me more upset about the rent. Fitness, for the most part, is an expensive luxury. “Tell me what you hope to get out of it, William.”

  “The usual, I guess. Flexibility, strength, a little fun. I was hoping it would improve my posture.”

  She checked her watch. “You could join a gym for that. What else are you looking for?”

  It was a simple, fair question, but I felt myself blushing furiously, as if she had made a pointed inquiry into my sex life or my bathroom habits. “Clarity?” I asked. When she responded to this by looking down the street and raising her eyebrows slightly, as if announcing to the neighborhood that I was a sad case, I added, “I’m searching for some…spiritual connections in my life.”

  A cab rounded the corner and pulled up to the curb. “Call me later tonight,” she said. “I’m not saying I can help you, but I’m willing to try.”

  “That’s kind of you.”

  “You’ve been kind to me,” she said. “It’s only right that I return some of your kindness.”

  I stood in silence, cowed by her implicit admission of avoiding the rent, and watched the driver load her bag into the trunk. She got into the backseat with the easy comfort of someone who’s used to being whisked off by paid drivers. “I’ll treat you to a class. I might miss that day’s payment, if you don’t mind.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  At that, the taxi drove off. I watched it disappear down the hill, feeling as if I had a plan.

  Solutions

  Beacon Hill Solutions, Samuel’s consulting firm, had its offices on the thirty-ninth floor of a mirrored glass building in the antique financial district of downtown Boston. The building took up the bulk of an entire block and had several addresses, depending upon which entrance you used. Buildings like this, all dizzying height, glass skin, inlaid wood, and marble, were far less impressive than they’d been not long ago. All the expensive luxury built into the design didn’t seem as reassuring and immutable as it once had. I suppose all the expensive luxuries of the entire country didn’t seem as immutable and reassuring as they once had. As a hedge against disaster, they’d proven inadequate.

  On the thirty-ninth floor, the elevator door opened into a reception area that looked like a men’s club—gleaming dark wood on the walls, heavy furniture, and big abstract paintings that could call to mind either a splendid autumn afternoon or Armageddon, depending upon your mood. The receptionist assured me that Samuel would be with me soon and then, tossing out mixed signals, offered me coffee, espresso, several types of breakfast pastries, and three different newspapers.

  I took out my Thompson-O’Malley folder to make sure I had all the papers in order. This serious office made me want to make a professional presentation of the information Samuel was looking for. But after waiting fifteen minutes, my professionalism melted into annoyance. Keep me waiting, I wrote in my notes. Open hostility. Sacrifice me/Edwrd to hide affair with Kate. Where do they fuck? Need stdio apt / love nest? Ck listings in ovrprced waterfront building on Lewis Wharf?

  The windows went from the floor to the ceiling, and sitting in a leather armchair clutching a newspaper as if it were a life preserver, I could see the sparkle of Boston Harbor dizzyingly far below, and across the water, the runways at Logan Airport. From this angle, the planes seemed to be taking off in slow motion, with a definite lack of enthusiasm. They stayed patiently lined up on the tarmac in the bright morning sun, and then, one by one, lumbered down the runway and departed heavily.

  The sight of two planes belonging to the airline Edward worked for made me realize I had no idea where he was or what his schedule was that week. For all I knew, he might be sitting in the back of one of those planes, poring over an instruc
tional guide to mutual funds. As I was watching one of the planes lift its nose and rise into the air, I saw out of the corner of my eyes, a billow of black smoke and then a burst of bright orange flames. A plane on the side of the runway was on fire. A squadron of fire trucks and emergency vehicles appeared from behind a terminal and raced toward the blaze, all, from my vantage point, in calm silence. I let my papers fall to the floor as I stood and turned to the receptionist.

  She covered the mouthpiece of her headset and said, “It’s a training drill. It happens twice a month at exactly this time. Don’t worry, everyone freaks out when they first see it. They should do it somewhere else.”

  I settled back into the soft luxury of the leather chair and picked up a phone on the table near me. Edward’s voice mail clicked on immediately. “Where are you?” I asked no one. “I’ve been thinking about you, and wanted to make sure everything’s OK. We have to talk. I don’t want you to sell your apartment. I’m serious, Edward. I don’t want you to move. Call me.”

  I’d been at home that morning, a little over a year earlier, vacuuming, of course, when my phone rang and my mother squawked at me to turn on my television and then hung up. I have a phobia about daytime television and turning on the set before sundown instantly fills me with despair. I assumed she was calling about another celebrity murder or sex scandal. When I got a second call from Deirdre giving me the same advice in the same tone of excited misery, I carefully put away the vacuum cleaner, got dressed, straightened out the towels in the bathroom, and dug out the remote control.

  I called Edward immediately. I left a message. I called two of his airline buddies. The first knew nothing of his schedule, the second made a vague, ominous reference to an early morning transcontinental flight. I spent the next five hours of that day with its insipidly beautiful weather unsuccessfully trying to locate my friend. The phone lines were frequently dead, and even when I could get a dial tone, the airlines were impossible to get through to. Every minute I didn’t hear from Edward seemed more proof of the fact that he’d vanished.