Alternatives to Sex

by Stephen McCauley

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. “And very nice sweater, by the way.”

  “I’m helping,” he said. He snapped his fingers, and Charlaine sat at his feet. “Marty needed some prompting. Who are these?”

  The brothers looked at each other, baffled by something as complicated as a request for an introduction.

  “Danny and Jimmy. Or the other way around.”

  Edward looked at the sleepy brothers, assessed the situation, and calculated what needed to be done. “Which one of you is the brains of this outfit?” he croaked.

  They shrugged in unison, but then the taller of the two pointed to his brother and said, “He is, I guess.”

  “In that case, he’s in charge of everything. Danny? You give the orders about how to move stuff out of here. You figure out angles and doorways, all that.”

  Marty was observing in the background, suited up in her biking shorts and clutching one of her canes. “Any scratches, gouges, or chipped paint and you deal with me,” she said. “If you do it right, William will give you a bonus.”

  The brothers woke up immediately and seemed, at the same time, to relax. They’d been handed a job, they knew the system, their limits, and exactly what their roles were. Now they could get to work.

  “We’re a good team,” Marty said. “You see how we handled that, William? We took charge and laid out the rules. Now everyone’s happy. Don’t Dither.”

  Deirdre had been right about clearing out the condo; the more the brothers carried down to the street, the better it looked, larger and, oddly enough, more inhabited. As I watched them work with Edward overseeing, I tried to figure out a way to apologize to him for the phone call and for lying about Didier and dinner. But every time I began, I realized there was more background information I’d have to give, more rationale for my behavior, more confessing about what I’d been doing for the past year. And Edward’s hostile stares in my direction weren’t inspiring me to open up.

  While the brothers were lugging a red love seat down the stairs, I went into Marty’s study to see how much was left to be hauled out. There were several boxes stacked in a corner, and I opened the top one. The carton was filled with parking tickets, some of them, based on a quick scan, recent. The second box contained a stack of papers from collection agencies, and the third was full of late payment notices and what appeared to be threatening letters from the IRS. I’ve always suspected that everyone has a drawer somewhere in his house filled with unpaid parking tickets, but three boxes? It was completely out of character for Marty, or Marty as she and Edward portrayed her. At least her financial ruin was neatly organized.

  I was closing up the boxes when Marty came into the room, and we exchanged a glance. “Those stay,” she said, in a firm voice.

  “Right. I wasn’t sure.”

  “Assume Nothing, William. It’s one of my rules.”

  “I know that.”

  “I’m dealing with my finances the way I deal with my finances.”

  “Absolutely. You don’t need to explain to me.”

  “Of course I don’t need to, but I did. And remember, I explained it to you. No one else.” She put down her cane and walked across the small room with no sign of pain or discomfort. “What time are the newscasters coming to look at the place tomorrow?”

  “Early afternoon. I won’t be here, but someone from the office who’s been dealing with them will be. She’s very professional. I think you’ll hit it off.”

  That struck me as highly unlikely, but there was no harm in pretending. Marty nodded and held up a thick manila envelope. “Make sure they get this before we meet. It’s my promotional material.”

  When Marty was at her most audacious and demanding, her eyes looked especially pleading, a complete contradiction. And now, as she was ordering me around, she looked almost as if she was about to weep. “I’m planning to do a hard sell of my company the minute they walk in the door. It’ll help if they have this information.”

  “One piece of advice,” I said.

  She held up her hand. “No thanks. You don’t think I got this far by listening to anyone else’s advice, do you? I offer advice, that’s what my career is all about.”

  I could hear Edward’s hoarse voice coming from the next room, alternating between giving the brothers orders on what to move and how to move it and asking them questions about their school and their parents. I’d always found Edward’s interest in other people one of his most endearing traits, even if he tried to mask it with constant disapproval.

  “You do know,” I said, “how much Edward is counting on this move?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s a question. I just want to make sure you and he aren’t operating on completely different assumptions.”

  “Assume Nothing, remember? You’re not Assuming Nothing, William, I can tell.”

  “He’s already started looking at real estate in San Diego. For all I know, he might have made an offer on something. I would hate to see him disappointed.”

  “Really? Then look at your own behavior. You think I’m out to hurt him? He’s doing combat duty every day. It’s something I know about, OK?” She nodded toward a bulletin board where she’d tacked up photos of her deceased fiancé. “What you don’t know is that he’s been having panic attacks on the damn planes. He’s on pills for it, but they’re not helping much.”

  “Pills? What kind of pills?”

  She shook her head in disappointment at being asked such an obvious question.

  I couldn’t stand the thought of Edward, rigid with panic, speeding through the subzero ether at thirty thousand feet. Despite the crowding on planes, air travel has always struck me as peculiarly lonely.

  “He hasn’t mentioned any of this to me,” I said.

  “Maybe that’s because he figures he won’t get any satisfaction from you. Maybe he doesn’t feel safe being vulnerable in front of you. Call me as soon as you have the exact time of the showing tomorrow.”

  When the truck was loaded, one of the brothers stood patiently on the sidewalk waiting for me while the other listened to Edward, the nondriver, explaining the virtues of a standard transmission.

  “Why don’t you come with us?” I said to him, putting my arm around his shoulder. “We’ll unload this stuff, unload Danny and Jimmy. I have to go to an inspection for Charlotte and Samuel, and then we can all go to a movie or take a walk. Something.” Anything was what I meant.

  “Sentimental weakness,” he said. “Besides, I’ve got other plans.”

  Inspection

  On my advice, Charlotte and Sam had hired Ken O’Leary, a burly little man with a bad back, to do the inspection on their apartment. Of the many inspectors I’d worked with over the years, I liked Ken best. He was thorough and efficient and had an amusing way of being exasperated by almost everything he saw in a house or apartment. He would go into a state of despair and disbelief at the condition of the roof, the dampness in a basement, the inadequacy of the smoke detectors, at the sheer stupidity of the owners who had allowed a particular contractor into their house, almost as if every flaw was a personal affront. He’d look at the circuit breakers and sigh and mop at his face with his hand as if he’d just been told discouraging results of a major medical test. It made the potential buyers feel as if they weren’t in this alone, as if someone with professional authority was taking on the burden of their purchase. Best of all, in the end, he’d shrug, ask the buyer if she still liked the place, and then recommend going forward. “I’ve seen a lot worse,” he’d say, a comment that everyone found comforting, no matter how many sheets of paper he’d covered with serious problems that needed immediate attention.

  I was standing outside the building with Ken, waiting for Charlotte and Sam to show up, weary from the move earlier that morning, and frustrated by my own inability to talk to Edward. Even if I didn’t know exactly what it was I wanted to tell him. Temperatures had soared once again to midsummer levels, but the tree we were st
anding under was shedding its leaves in autumn style, a weird juxtaposition of seasonal cues. When I commented on this, he shrugged.

  “End of the fucking world. Serves us right. Greedy bunch of shits we all are.”

  Ken had been living in Boston for forty or more years, but he still had the faint traces of a brogue and a lyrical way of describing assorted structural problems and code violations. He was polite, nearly erudite, when talking to potential house buyers, but with me he tended to use graphic scatological images to describe everything.

  He was wearing a weightlifter’s leather belt around his waist, an item that gave him excellent posture, squeezed his soft body into an hourglass shape, and somehow helped him do his job. His blue eyes lit up his whole face and made me think he’d probably been a successful womanizer at one time.

  “How’s your wife?” I asked.

  “Worse, poor thing. But we’re going forward. It makes you appreciate every moment you’re given.”

  I’d been working with Ken for ten years now, and in that time, his wife, a mysterious woman who never appeared at any of the parties or real estate events Ken went to, had been in a courageous battle with an assortment of indeterminate ailments. Her condition was always described as “worse,” and from what he said, he seemed to think her remaining days could be counted on one hand. Sometimes I wondered if this invalid status wasn’t a family myth invented to add tension to their lives and to force them to wring joy and poignancy out of every minute.

  I opened up my folder on Charlotte and Samuel. Late again, I jotted down. Marital meltdown? S’s affair discovered? Outdated word? Affair? Infidelity. Fcking around. Kate good in bed? Long legs. What to do about Edward. How to help. Looked espec cute and sad with longer hair. Natural blond? Wld like to have kissed him. Sentimental weakness? Is that so bad?

  Charlotte’s silver car pulled up in front of the house, and she climbed out, alone and exasperated. “I’m going to kill him,” she said, hitching her bag up to her shoulder. “I waited and waited for him to show up, and nothing. I hate when he works on Saturdays. I hope this doesn’t throw off your whole day.”

  Ken was particularly smooth in the presence of women. “Not at all,” he said. “I can tell you right now, very nice condo conversion. We don’t know what we’ll find on the inside, but it looks splendid from here.”

  We started in the basement of the house, and Ken was immediately peeved by a lack of proper lighting in the entryway.

  “Code violation number one and we’re not even in the door.”

  He looked crestfallen, as if the managers of the building had let him down personally with this oversight. I often wondered what it would be like to be attuned to every problem festering in the walls and under the counters and floors in a house, and to know, as he seemed to, the significance of every mysterious household odor. Like most people, I preferred to live in a state of hazy half awareness about such things.

  He carried a leather briefcase with him, and from this he extracted vials to take samples of mildew he spotted crawling up a wall. He took out a towel and laid it on the floor so he could reach behind a bank of washing machines without getting his clothes soiled.

  “Oh, oh, oh, I don’t like what I’m feeling back here. Not good, not good at all.”

  I looked at Charlotte and shrugged.

  Ken fearlessly tasted water from a small puddle he found in a corner of the floor to see if there was oil seeping out of the burner. I’d seen him do this before and it never failed to endear him to potential buyers who felt he was putting his own health at risk for the sake of their purchase. “I think we’re safe here,” he said. “But you see over there?” He shook his head and gave a doleful sigh. For a man of sixty, he had boyish hair that was always falling over his forehead. “That beam. Trouble of the very worst variety. Supports sixty percent of the weight of the house and it has about it the look of a weary traveler ready to collapse from exhaustion.”

  He took a small silver flashlight from his briefcase and crawled behind the hot water heater.

  “I hope you’re not too discouraged about all of this,” I told Charlotte. “He finds every flaw, no matter how small, and then you have to choose which ones matter to you.”

  “Like dealing with a husband.”

  “I imagine so.”

  “How’s your sex life?” she asked.

  “It’s nonexistent.”

  “That’s the goal, apparently. Do you miss it?”

  “No,” I said. “Not at the moment, anyway. Although there’s something about the ritual I miss. I can’t put my finger on what it is. Do you miss drinking?”

  “I feel lonely without it.” We were standing in the dim light of the basement, and her hair was falling around her face in disarray, and it sounded like an especially heartfelt declaration. “Like right now, I am very certain I’d care a lot less about Samuel and where he might or might not be if I knew you and I were going to go out and have a drink after this. But we aren’t, so once we go upstairs, I have to look at this apartment in bright sunlight, and when we’re done, you have to go home and clean.”

  We made our way out of the dark basement and up the staircase into the increasingly warmer air of the floors above. The owners of the apartment had started packing and the odd corners of the rooms and bays of windows, the very things that gave the place so much charm, were exposed now, and it was easy to see how much of the space was decorative and unusable.

  Charlotte wandered from room to room tugging at her lower lip.

  “Buyer’s remorse,” I said. “Not that you’ve actually bought it yet. Everyone goes through it. You probably went through it with the house in Nahant.”

  “We didn’t buy the house in Nahant,” she said. “We inherited it from Samuel’s uncle. My husband’s always been lucky with money and real estate. He gives the illusion of being a successful businessman, but in many ways, he’s just a lucky businessman.”

  She arranged herself on a window seat and looked out at the warm day. I was leaning against the mantelpiece. I opened up the folder and began scribbling again. Lucky businessman. Same thing as successful? Hedges against loneliness: Sex, booze, furniture polish, Mr. Edward. Samuel’s affair with Kate. More good luck?

  “Sometimes I resent him for being so lucky,” Charlotte went on, “even though I benefit. I hope you’re not writing down what I say.”

  “Just scribbling. Details I should bring up with you later.”

  “The counselor was always taking notes. I found it completely unnerving. It made me think my words mattered.”

  I put the papers back in the folder and closed it up. “I have a terrible memory for details.”

  “It’s a plague, the memory problem. Either that or a blessing. And speaking of things I’d rather forget, I don’t suppose you’ve read the books I gave you, cover to cover, word by word.”

  The mention of those books made me think about her manuscript, and I searched her face, trying to see if she was really asking me about that. I told her, truthfully, that I’d looked at them. “There was one that interested me. I think it had the word ‘zowie’ in the title.”

  She dismissed my comment with a wave of her hand. “No one reads them. They sell hundreds of thousands of copies, but no one reads them. Knowing that makes them much easier to write.”

  I heard Ken O’Leary let out a cry of discouragement from somewhere in the back of the apartment, and I excused myself and went into the kitchen. Despite his age and his back problems, he always managed to dismantle a room single-handedly and then put it back together. The stove and the refrigerator were in the middle of the floor, and he was standing against one wall in a puddle of rank black water. The refrigerator, he explained, had been leaking here, onto the hardwood floor, for, he was guessing, nearly ten years. There was serious rot, and probably leakage into the floor below. “And that’s only the beginnings of the problems,” he said. “It’s a major shit storm here.”

  When I went back into the living room,
Charlotte was still sitting on the window seat, gazing at the trees.

  “A few minor glitches,” I said. “Nothing to worry about.”

  She shrugged and turned, and I saw that she was crying. Within seconds, her head was in her hands, and she was sobbing. Although tears are a routine part of nearly every movie I’ve ever seen, they’re a rarity in my everyday life, and I was horrified and probably a little thrilled by the sight of Charlotte bent over with her shoulders heaving. After a moment, the thrilling part wore off, and I stood there, watching her, feeling frozen and completely inept. “Is there something I can do?”

  “No, absolutely not.” She pulled a pack of tissues out of her shoulder bag and cleaned up her eyes and her face. “I used to cry a lot when I was younger, and then I went through a dry period of maybe twenty years when I never shed a tear. Now, everything gets to me. I’m sure it’s hormonal or an indicator of my middle-aged psychological state.” She blew her nose and stuffed the tissues back into her bag.

  It was then that I saw the folder I’d been keeping on them sitting on the cushion beside her. She caught my gaze and laid her hands on it, her pretty fingernails more incongruous and pointless than ever.

  “It’s not news to me,” she said. “It’s really not news. I’d call it terribly harsh confirmation of nagging suspicions. More than suspicions. Let’s face it, it’s easier to pretend something isn’t happening if you assume you’re the only one who knows it is.”

  I moved the folder from the cushion and sat next to her. A few of the crasser phrases I’d jotted down raced through my mind as I took her hand and made an attempt at a mumbled apology.

  “Well, it’s not as if it’s your fault, is it? Don’t worry about that part. In some ways, I’m grateful. The lack of complete sentences and the awful abbreviations made it a little easier to take.”