Alternatives to Sex

by Stephen McCauley

  It was the late afternoon when I finally did talk to someone at his airline. I explained myself and was put on hold for twenty minutes, which I spent sitting at my kitchen table, ripping newspaper, and weeping in a violent way. I’ve always had a hard time crying, not because I consider it unbecoming behavior in a man, but because I consider it unbecoming behavior in a tall man.

  When the person I’d spoken to came back on and told me that Edward was not listed on any of their manifests and was most likely safely stranded somewhere in the West, I cleaned up the newspaper, had a drink, and tried to drown my sorrows with someone named Huck. There was a message from Edward on my machine when I returned that night. “I’m in Salt Lake City. I’m fine. More or less. I really, really would rather not talk about it ever.” Aside from his recent allusions and expressed fears, we never had talked about it.

  Something the Matter

  Samuel sauntered down a long, narrow hallway, pushed open a glass door, and shook my hand. I was slightly taller than him, but there was something about the way he walked here—his territory—that made me feel he was towering over me. With his dark business suit and his hair slicked back in that neat, rigid way, he looked more dashing than ever, although, in this setting, a little harsh and predatory. Maybe everyone looks predatory in office buildings of this sort. Or maybe it was just that seeing him here in these flashy surroundings touched off more resentment over what he’d told Charlotte about coming upon Edward and me. Why had he felt the need to say anything?

  As he led me out of the waiting room and into the much less impressive hallways of the offices where the work was actually done, he apologized for making me come all the way downtown.

  “It’s not as if it’s far,” I said. “Besides, I’m downtown often.”

  “Right, that friend you brought to the party lives down here, doesn’t he?”

  “For the time being.”

  “Right, right,” he said, feigning interest.

  Samuel’s office gave few clues as to what he actually did in it, but judging from the clutter on the desk and the papers spread out across the bookcase under the window, there was a lot of whatever it was.

  “So,” he said, sitting behind his desk and folding his hands in front of him. “What have you got for me?”

  I took out the papers and spread them across the blotter in front of him. What I had for him was the kind of information most buyers don’t have the patience or interest to study in detail; generally, they leave it up to their lawyers to assure them, in broad blanket terms, that everything is all right. By the time they discover that everything isn’t, they’re ready to sell anyway and pass the problems on to the next person.

  Samuel took out a pair of half eyeglasses and slipped them onto the end of his nose. He went down a column of figures, nodding and occasionally asking a question or two. Despite his thoroughness in looking it over, I had the impression that he was stalling for time.

  “The association is conscientious,” I said. “But the problems with the financing are due mostly to some irresponsible decisions that were made about ten years ago. Everyone who’s looked at these has been impressed with their progress, but you might…” I broke off, too overcome with resentment toward him to continue.

  He took off his glasses and put them on top of the papers. “Something the matter?”

  “I hope you know I’m a very discreet person, Samuel.”

  “Of course I do. I trust you completely.” Undoubtedly, he’d intended his words as complimentary, but here in this office, surrounded by all the trappings of his position, they made me feel like a lesser man, or at least someone who lacked enough ambition to be untrustworthy.

  “Thanks to my job, I’m privy to a surprising amount of personal information, and I never discuss any of it with anyone.”

  “Ah,” he said, as if a light had gone off. He pushed aside the papers I’d handed him, leaned back in his chair, and stared out the window, a showy move that looked staged.

  “I’m devoted to her, William,” he sighed. “Truthfully, I can’t stand the thought of anything bad happening to her. She’s my wife.”

  I was happy for the clarification, because prior to that, it wasn’t clear to me which of the two women he was talking about. He said the word “wife” with the glowing, reverential tone men often use to describe a spouse they’re betraying.

  “We four appeared downstairs more or less at the same time, and then you vanished. Charlotte asked a lot of questions about why you’d left so suddenly. I had to say something.” He spread out his hands, the universal gesture of innocence. “Marriages are complicated. We have a good one. I don’t want to see her hurt in any way.”

  He was telling me that it was incumbent upon him, and now on me, to keep all information about whatever was going on between him and Kate from Charlotte. Letting her know would be cruel, possibly harmful. Secrecy had become the moral imperative; the affair with Kate itself was beside the point.

  There was a picture of their family on a corner of his desk, taken on the beach, of course, since most people associate beaches with cameras as much as with swimming. Charlotte appeared slimmer, tidier, more youthful in a variety of small ways that meant nothing individually, but added up to quite a lot. Samuel looked exactly as he did today, give or take a few gray hairs. I felt a shudder of revulsion toward him.

  Back Rubs

  I’ve always believed that part of being a truly good person is the loud and mournful acknowledgment of your moral failings. For just as it’s supposedly true that you can’t be completely insane if you know you’re crazy, then it stands to reason that you can’t be one hundred percent bad if you acknowledge that you’re a total shit. A couple of years earlier, I’d come across a battered copy of the original paperback of The Godfather. It had been decades since I’d read it, and I had started rereading thinking I’d kill half an hour before tossing it out. Like most things in life, it was both better and worse than I remembered. It falls into a surprisingly large subgenre of fiction in which burly men get back rubs and talk about “snatch.” The novel is spectacularly crass, but so compelling I’d had to put my life on hold until I’d read every page. Ultimately, I found it deeply depressing. It wasn’t that the characters kill one another off with impunity, destroy businesses and families the way most people do laundry, and lop the heads off innocent animals without a second thought. What depressed me so profoundly was that they’d constructed a twisted moral code that allowed them to behave horrendously while still believing they were doing good.

  Samuel appeared sincere enough about protecting his wife, but he didn’t seem to be taking into consideration the fact that he was protecting her against his own behavior. And wasn’t the point, really, that he was trying to protect his affair with Kate?

  “Kate,” I said, feeling the least I could do to make a stand for myself was to drag her name into the conversation, “seems like a nice woman. We talked with her on the porch as we were coming in.”

  “I suppose she was outside smoking,” he said, a frown of disapproval creasing his face. He swung his little glasses around in his hand. “Well, what can you do? We all have our vices. I got her the name of a Russian hypnotist who’s helped a lot of people I know.” He shrugged. “Of course, I can’t force her to go. You can’t force anyone to do anything.”

  “She’s a grown-up,” I said, trying to emphasize her youth.

  “As a matter of fact, she’s remarkably grown-up. She’s taking care of her mother and a divorced sister. She bought a big house up in Ipswich, and the three of them live in it, don’t ask me how. She has a little pied-à-terre in the city she sometimes uses when she gets stuck at work late.”

  That answered a lot of questions and killed the idea of earning some money off the affair. In the end, everything gets back to real estate.

  “She has a couple of horses and they seem to be the center of her life. It’s a whole world I know nothing about.”

  “Do you ride with her?”
r />   He laughed at the idea. “It isn’t like that. If it’s all right with you, I’ll have some copies made of these documents and go over them more closely later.” He glanced at his watch, and taking the cue, I began to gather up my own things. “I broke it off,” he said. He stood and stretched. “More than once. Then, last fall, after…everything…I just realized how short life is and how important it is to enjoy it. You never know, do you?”

  Endearing New Traits

  Something I’d recently learned about Didier that surprised me was that he cooked. Actually, I was also surprised to learn that he ate. I’d assumed he picked at the occasional meal under duress, but mostly lived on Export A’s and moderately priced red wine. He had the piercing, distracted eyes of a man who is always thinking about sex and cigarettes, and I had a hard time imagining him sitting through the smoke-free, asexual tedium of an appetizer–main course–dessert ritual. But since our encounter on the street outside of Edward’s apartment, he had been using food as a pretext for getting together on a nearly nightly basis. Sometimes he took me out to dinner, charging it to the expense account of his mysterious company, and sometimes he showed up at my house with a bag of groceries and cooked simple, delicious meals I could picture a French (or Belgian) housewife serving to her hungry family. Although the only spices he used were the ones I had on hand in the cabinets, nothing he cooked ever tasted even remotely like the dishes I made using the same herbs.

  At first it was disconcerting to have him pursue me so diligently; part of his louche appeal had always been his elusiveness, and in the past, I’d had to leave several phone messages over the course of a few days before I’d even hear from him. It’s hard to know how to deal with people who suddenly change their behavior in a radical way, especially if the change is positive. But I’d begun to find his eagerness to get together flattering and satisfying; so completely satisfying that I’d spent weeks blissfully free of the gnawing urge to retreat to my computer and line up an evening of lubricious disenchantment.

  It was a perfectly balanced situation, but the tension had to be maintained. If I did what both of us wanted and had sex with him, I knew he’d immediately lose interest in me, and I would once again become the beggar pounding at the gates.

  A few days after my meeting with Samuel, he showed up at my door at seven o’clock, exactly as he’d indicated he would in a message. Promptness was one of his endearing new traits. He had a white plastic bag of groceries in each hand and a freshly lit cigarette dangling from his mouth. I hated the smell of smoke in the house, but I couldn’t bear to listen to his rants about the hypocrisy of American attitudes toward tobacco, so I put up with it and opened all the windows for hours after he left, despite the increasingly chilly nights.

  “Right on time,” I said and followed him in to the kitchen.

  “Don’t act so surprised, Mr. Collins. I’ve been showing up on time for many days now. Plus I’m hungry and exhausted. I’ve had a very busy day.”

  “I won’t ask for specifics, Mr. Didier.”

  “No, you won’t. But I would supply them if you did even though you would not believe what I told you. You like to think I do nothing all day except fuck.”

  “Not all day, no.” Although it did please me to imagine that he had an inexhaustible libido.

  He began to unload the contents of his bags on my kitchen counter—a collection of root vegetables, large leafy things that looked ancient and overgrown, and a package of heartbreakingly small hens. I rarely had the patience for cooking, and I’d often felt a twinge of regret when I entered my underused, aggressively clean kitchen. I sat at the table across from him, pleased to watch him, in his slim sharkskin pants and his turtleneck, tossing food around, chopping and sautéing, and ripping open cabinet doors. I’d initially been upset at the splattered grease and the food that ended up on the floor or between cracks in the counter, but that had worn off almost as soon as I tasted the first meal he’d prepared. I suppose some things—the warm comfort of a home-cooked meal?—are worth a little mess, loss of control, and lowering of standards.

  “You see, Mr. Collins, Americans do not know how to eat. They only think about quantity.”

  “Please,” I said, “I’m not in the mood for one of your anti-American lectures. I’m going through a deeply patriotic phase.”

  “Ah, I have to listen to anti-Europe from the minute I wake up until I get into bed and pull my blankets to my chin, but you cannot stand a little criticism.”

  “Surely you don’t expect me to believe you go to bed and sleep, like boring, average people do, Mr. Didier? And watch the ash on that cigarette; some just dropped into the frying pan.”

  “Oh yes, isn’t this exactly what I’m talking about? Americans can fill their food with chemicals and radiation and antibiotics and genetic craziness, but a flake of cigarette ash and the world is coming to an end. And yes, I sleep several hours a night, like a real human being.”

  “Several? I’m shocked.”

  “Several. And please stop looking at my ass. It’s not polite to stare unless you intend to grope. I can feel your eyes on me, even with my back turned. You’re just teasing me and playing with my head, now that you’ve become the pope.”

  “I suppose that’s why you keep coming around.”

  “It must be, right?”

  I had intended to sit there and watch him prepare the entire feast, lewdly appreciating his skills and sleazy charm, but when he began trussing up the little birds with string, I decided to retreat to the living room to read. I’m one of those cowardly carnivores who prefers to stay as far as possible from the mayhem of stockyards, henhouses, and the poignancy of anything resembling a body or a face.

  I settled onto the sofa in the living room with the bag of business books Charlotte had ghostwritten. The subject matter of these volumes was of so little interest to me, I could barely force myself to read the titles, and was unable to make it all the way through a single subtitle: How to Wow Now: A Punchy New Management Approach to the; Who Poached My Salmon? A Radical New Style of Management; Miss Management: A Fresh Feminist Look at Corporate.

  Most of the books were designed with elaborate graphics—huge bold-faced headlines, aggressive bullet points, amusing illustrations—that seemed intended to assure the reader he didn’t have to bother slogging through the actual text. Charlotte’s name appeared nowhere on the title or copyright pages, but all of the putative authors thanked her profusely for her assistance in the copious acknowledgments.

  I took out the manuscript I’d lifted from Charlotte’s desk drawer. I’d been meaning to read it since I’d more or less stolen it, but I’d felt too guilty about having done so and too disillusioned about their marriage. But with time, the guilt had worn off, as guilt tends to do, and with Didier in the kitchen, slamming things around and filling the apartment with the smells of garlic and cigarettes, I began reading So You Said.

  The book was a collection of stories, each in the form of a monologue delivered to a psychotherapist who never actually appears, but is occasionally complimented (“Nice bookshelves, doc”) or insulted (“You don’t really do anything, do you, doctor? Your job is just sitting there”) by the speaker. The patients were all women, and they all had the same problem: being in love with a man who was genuinely (and thus blamelessly, if I was reading correctly) incapable of loving them back. It was written with brio and wit, and what the stories lacked in variety of theme, they made up for with a diversity of voices. As I sat reading them, I had the same pleasant shock I’d experienced when I heard a friend I didn’t know to be a musician play a series of beautiful Chopin etudes. If the stories had one single, persistent flaw, it was that they all had happy, unearned endings.

  But as I read on, I became more and more uncomfortable. I began to feel as if I was reading Charlotte’s journal, and despite my voyeuristic tendencies, I had to stop. I’d suddenly peered a little too deeply into some hidden part of Charlotte’s psyche, the part in which she longed for things she wo
uld never have. It wasn’t only the content of the stories—the impossible longing for love, the patient mercy toward the men—but also the writing itself; it was good, but probably not quite good enough. Judging from the gratitude of the alleged authors of the business books, Charlotte’s greatest talent might well have been doing a kind of writing she didn’t enjoy, wasn’t interested in, and had very little respect for.

  As I put the manuscript away, I realized that I had a problem on my hands: how was I going to return it without revealing to Charlotte that I’d taken it?

  Didier appeared in the doorway from the kitchen, cigarette in mouth, pointing at the ringing telephone on the coffee table. “I’m expecting a call,” he said. “I gave them your number. So, if this is for me, tell them I’m not here.”

  It was Edward, finally returning the message I’d left from Samuel’s office.

  “Where are you?” I asked. “I’ve been worried about you.”

  “I’m in San Diego, looking at real estate.”

  “Alone?”

  “At the moment, yes. I can get a lot more for my money out here, I’ll tell you that. Possibly even a tiny house in an undesirable neighborhood. You and Didier can come visit me.”

  “I’m not making any travel plans, alone or with anyone else, certainly not Didier. There’s some interest in Marty’s apartment, by the way. It hasn’t been the easiest sell in the world. We have one good prospect, assuming Marty doesn’t squelch the deal by trying to exploit the buyers for publicity.”

  “Well, whatever you do, don’t try to convince her to do anything. It’s always a bad approach with Marty. You always have to make her think it’s her idea.”

  “Can we make a plan to get together? We need to have a serious discussion.”

  “Serious? How serious? And what’s that noise in the background? You’re not cooking, are you?”

  There was a door between Didier and me, and even though the door was open, I was amazed that Edward was able to hear the sounds of his cooking. Perhaps he responded to some internal vibrations that the rest of the world couldn’t detect.