Alternatives to Sex (4 page)

Charlotte and I were back in the living room when Samuel finished his phone call and emerged through the pantry door. He sat on the arm of the big, soft chair and leaned against his wife. It was unusual to see a long-married couple touch each other in public; most display a faint trace of revulsion at the idea. Samuel’s face, I saw, had a shiny cleanliness that made me think he probably got facials. I’d heard that a lot of heterosexual men of a certain age got facials, reportedly for reasons of professional advancement, the only acceptable reason for men to engage in any activity that might be considered vain. The trend of shaving one’s scrotum had also supposedly spread to heterosexual men. I’d been assured of this fact by a number of friends whose incontrovertible proof was always the same: “I’ve had sex with lots of straight guys who shave their balls.” From this I inferred that the trend had spread primarily to the kind of straight men who routinely have gay sex. It crossed my mind to wonder about Samuel in this regard, too, but only briefly.

I was just about to suggest we all go out for lunch somewhere, so I could get a better chance to find out what they were looking for, when Samuel announced that he had to head back to his office.

“I don’t think this is the place for us,” Charlotte said.

“I don’t think so either,” I said. “But call me in a few days and I’ll have lots of other places you can look at.”

“Good man,” Samuel said. He kissed the top of Charlotte’s head. We buttoned up our coats and jackets and walked out together.

As I parted company with them in front of the office, rain pouring off the rim of their umbrella, I began thinking about how soon I reasonably could get in touch with them with the excuse of new properties to show.

Jack Nelson, one of my officemates, was on the phone, berating a client. Jack had a loud, deep voice and a sales technique that revolved mostly around intimidation and veiled threats.

“Hey listen,” he brayed, “if you don’t want to buy it, that’s your business. But I’ll tell you one thing right now: you’d be a fool not to. Well, then don’t. But don’t complain to me when the place goes up forty percent in value by Christmas.”

With that, he hung up the phone and began erasing names from his appointment book. “They’ll buy it,” he said to me. “They’ll call back in half an hour and make an offer. If not, it’s their loss.”

I took off my sports jacket and shook it once. Instantly, it was as dry as it had been, hanging in my closet that morning. It was made out of an elaborate blend of synthetic materials that repelled water, stains, wrinkles, and all odors. Somehow or other, I’d missed the moment, like so many other moments, when expensive designers had started to use plastic and rubber to make their clothes. “Why are they hesitating?” I asked Jack.

“Some horseshit about it being the wrong layout and the wrong neighborhood and the wrong size.” He crumpled up a piece of paper and tossed it into the trash. All of his gestures were like this—firm and decisive. “‘We want an eat-in kitchen,’” he mocked.

“Maybe it’s not right for them.”

“Hey, it’s in their price range, it’s got a roof and a toilet. You can’t have everything in life. Am I right?”

“Jack, you are so right.” I fished through my pockets for the keys to the apartment I’d just shown Charlotte and Samuel.

Jack was in his late fifties, a retired gym teacher who’d entered real estate a decade or so earlier, after his wife had walked out on him. He was a stocky, gray-haired man, handsome in a pugnacious, barrel-chested sort of way, but with the dark, scowling demeanor of a man who was convinced life had dealt him an unfair hand. Maybe it had to do with his height.

He lived in a state of slowly simmering misery at the thought that anyone else in the world was earning more than he was or working less or getting even a fraction more pleasure out of life. My brother in California was another of this sort; he was always talking about the income and job promotions of relatives and childhood friends as if he were accusing them of criminal activity. Jack worked hard, put in long hours, and much to my astonishment, his bitter, aggressive style paid off. He wasn’t afflicted, as I was, with the desire to make people’s lives better through their real estate purchases; he just wanted to close the deal.

“What were you showing?” he asked me as I put the keys back in the cabinet. I sat at my desk and started a file on Samuel and Charlotte. I always write up a little psychiatric intake sheet on clients when I first meet them, even if I think it’s unlikely I’ll see them again. You never know which connections might come in handy. “I was showing them the Avon Hill Manhattan-style layout,” I told Jack.

“Overpriced,” he scowled. “Lousy management company, the maintenance fees are ridiculous, and the building’s in horrible shape. They going to take it?”

“Not their style,” I said.

He scoffed at this. “Whatever that means. Style. ‘It’s not my style.’ Since when does a condo have to have a ‘style’? It’s got three bedrooms, doesn’t it? They want ‘style’ on top of that?”

“You have a point, Jack. Have you shown the place to many people?”

“A few times. No takers. At the moment, I’m working with a bunch of whiners.”

Jack had absolutely no interest in the aesthetics of a house or apartment and was genuinely baffled by objections to crude renovations, the destruction of architectural integrity, or other such considerations. He was all about practicality and function, the original Dishwasher Person. Jack considered me a fool for paying so much attention to the demands and requests of my clients, for trying to get to know them and find out about their tastes and their fantasies of an ideal life. But he suffered fools gladly because we made him feel better about himself, and so he and I got along well. Like most people who appear to be opposites, we were undoubtedly more similar than either of us realized.

Under Samuel and Charlotte’s name, I wrote:
Attractive couple, handsome husband, drugged wife, empty nest, both have excellent teeth. Looking for a pied-à-terre with 2 bathrooms. Or nothing? He very touchy. Loves her?
I wrote down the address of the place I’d shown them, and then, as an afterthought:
Potential friends?

When Jack’s phone rang, a few minutes later, he pointed at it and nodded. “I’ll bet you anything it’s that couple I just hung up on, crawling back to me. Do me a favor and tell them I’m out showing a house on Walnut to a couple of doctors from Weston.”

It was Maria, Jack’s current girlfriend, calling from her cell phone while working out at the Harvard gym. Jack had amazing success with women, mostly younger and attractive women who were, I suspected, looking for an aggressive father figure. Aggressive father figures seemed to have a special appeal since the previous September. Most of the interactions I saw between the two involved Jack advising her on how to undercut some classmate or make trouble for a professor, advice she rejected out of hand but clearly loved hearing. The fact that she openly referred to him as “Daddy” answered any questions about what she saw in stocky, gray-haired Jack.

He used exhaustion and age as an excuse for bragging about his sex life—“At this age, it isn’t easy keeping it up for three hours.” The one time I’d hinted at having a libido, he became distracted, as if we were heading into an uncomfortably dark part of the human experience.

As I was trying to figure out the gist of Jack’s mumbled comments to “Baby,” Gina Fulmetti emerged from the cubbyhole that was her private office, and motioned to me. “I need to talk to you, William,” she said hoarsely.

I held up a finger, indicating that I was in the middle of something I just had to finish. All of the agents at Cambridge Properties worked on commission, and so, technically speaking, we were paying our own salaries. Although there was no real boss to answer to, Gina owned the business, kept an eye on sales figures, paid the overhead, and was the person we all turned to for assistance. It was she who’d hired me to write ad copy and then encouraged me to get into sales. She was fond of me, I knew, mostly because I wasn’t aggressively ambitious and because I took time to get to know people. But the qualities of mine she liked also meant I wasn’t bringing in as much business as she thought I should.

There were usually six full-time agents on staff, plus a few part-timers who appeared to be in it for the business cards and the insider information on sales, always good dinner-party conversation. Almost no one, except Jack, kept full-time hours, and it was rare that more than three people were at their desks at any given moment. And yet, given the prices around Boston and the frenzied atmosphere of buying, selling, and speculating, the overall sales figures for the office had been increasing every year I’d been there, and Gina was, according to Jack, “loaded.”

Her private office was a small windowless box, cluttered with papers and magazines. I felt the usual clutch of claustrophobia as I stooped to enter and shut the door behind me. Gina pointed to a chair, folded her hands on her desk, and stared at me silently for what felt like five minutes. She was usually soft-spoken, but she had a way of looking through me that often made me feel I was melting under her gaze.

“William,” she finally said.

“Yes.”

More silent staring ensued.

“William.”

“Yes.”

“Where are you?”

She had dazzling eyes, huge for her face and a lurid shade of green that was probably from colored contact lenses, but gave her a hypnotic power and made it almost impossible to turn away from her.

“I’m sitting in front of your desk.”

“That’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking you where you are. Where
are
you?” She ignored her ringing phone and continued to stare at me, waiting for an answer. “I had such high hopes for you. You were doing so well.”

“Well…”

“Now I can’t even see you.” She took a folder out of her desk drawer without breaking eye contact. “Your sales figures.”

“Bad?”

“Disappointing.”

“I agree.”

“Participation at office meetings.”

“Disappointing?”

“Erratic.”

“I was having those problems with my contact lenses.”

“I’m not scolding you, William.”

“I know.”

“I’m worried.”

“Don’t be.”

“You’ve gone, William. You’ve disappeared. I can’t find you.”

I was used to disappointing myself, but I hated to disappoint Gina. She was an unwaveringly positive woman of about sixty-five who’d been through as much trauma and tragedy as anyone I knew. She’d lived through two bouts with cancer, a car accident in which her daughter had nearly died, an explosion of a propane tank that had destroyed two-thirds of her house. Somehow she managed to consider herself the luckiest person alive. The chemotherapy, she’d tell you, had caused her to go bald, but then given her the rich, curly mane she’d longed for her whole life. The car accident had almost killed her daughter, but it had gotten the wayward girl off alcohol and into a nursing career. The propane explosion? “I hated that end of the house, anyway.” It horrified me to think I was disappointing someone who’d managed to find an upside to ovarian cancer.

“It’s funny you should say that,” I said.

“Funny. Why is it funny? What’s funny about the disappearance of someone you care for?”

“I’ve let my attention drift,” I told her. When in doubt, a confession, any confession, usually brings people over to your side. “I realized it this morning. The drifting.”

“And?”

“And I’m making some changes, Gina. Good ones, I hope.”

Her phone started ringing again, but she didn’t avert her mesmerizing eyes for a second. “How?”

“How?”

“How are you changing? What are you doing?”

“I’m reading Simone de Beauvoir,” I said.

“I had high hopes for you, William. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? I’m talking about my son. He’s going to be fine, it’ll straighten him out, and he’ll be a better person, but he isn’t ever going to be a person sitting here at this desk, at my desk. I had high hopes you might. Do you see what I’m saying?”

A couple of months earlier, her forty-year-old son had confessed to heroin addiction and had entered rehab. From what I could tell, she was saying that she had been thinking of selling me the business at some point. She’d implied as much before, but we’d never discussed it.

“I’m working on it,” I said.

“It’s not as if you have distractions, William. No marriage, family, health problems I know of. This should be your focus.”

“I’m working on it,” I said again.

“I want results. I need results from you. Come back to me, William, come back.” She picked up the phone and put her hand over the mouthpiece. “Now go.”

My ritual upon entering my apartment at the end of the day was to go from room to room making sure there was nothing out of order. Because I went through the same routine before leaving in the morning, I rarely found anything that needed immediate attention, although sometimes the towels demanded refolding or there were spots on the faucets in the bathroom or a few wrinkles on the pillowcases.

My cleaning compulsion was the source of endless no-win situations. I hated finding anything disorganized or dirty, but I got so much pleasure out of setting things right, I felt cheated out of a major source of satisfaction when I didn’t. And so, when I walked into the kitchen and saw that I’d left the ironing board in the middle of the floor that morning, I didn’t know whether to be happy to put it away or alarmed at the glaring oversight that was completely out of character. Where
was
I, indeed, that I hadn’t noticed? Obviously, I was changing my sexual behavior at the right moment.

Once I’d stowed the ironing board, I heard the computer calling me from the room on the top floor of the house I used as a study. I felt an actual physical craving to sit down at the thing and start typing, similar to the physical craving I felt for coffee the instant I opened my eyes in the morning. At this very moment, upstairs in that study, on that very computer for which I’d paid good money and which therefore was completely within my rights to use, there was a huge party going on, a sweaty orgy of anticipation and flirtation. Within a three-mile radius of my house, thousands of men were logged on to their computers, making connections and offering unlimited opportunities for excitement, distraction, and, yes, disappointment, but even that had its appeal. And I was missing out on all of it.

I decided to vacuum, always a reliable alternative to sex. I’d bought my vacuum cleaner for $500 several years earlier, and it had quickly become my most cherished possession. I suppose there’s a lot to take issue with in the German character, but one thing you absolutely cannot take away from Germans is their skill at making appliances. Vacuum cleaners are like bread: the less gimmickry, the better the product. This model was a sleek silver canister that was a shining example of simplicity and efficiency, the vacuum equivalent of a simple, crusty baguette. The two floors of my apartment comprise 1,875 square feet, and I went over every bit of it (minus the study, which I didn’t dare enter) in a little under an hour.

I tried to make dinner, but couldn’t muster up enough enthusiasm for cooking to bother putting together my usual scrambled-eggs-and-potato specialty. Like a lot of lonely people, I tended to eat breakfast food at all meals. I tossed a tray of frozen something into the microwave (no dishes or pans to wash) and brought it into the living room and turned on the TV. I’d stopped watching television with any regularity when I started my sex binge, and judging from what I now saw as I spun through the channels, in the intervening months, the usual programming on every channel had been replaced by shows on which people in bikinis sat around eating insects.

I checked my watch and saw that I’d been home for a total of two hours. It wasn’t a promising start to the evening. I could feel my frustrated desire to log on morphing into anger and decided to focus some of my rage on the president and his wacko right-wing buddies and their apparent plan to start a preemptive war. But that led to more depression, which led to an intensified desire for carnal distraction.

Reading, that had been my plan. I went to my bedroom and picked up
The Mandarins
(wonderful title) and sat down on the chaise longue, exactly as I had pictured myself doing at various points throughout the day. This particular chaise was not quite longue enough for my ridiculous legs, a detail I’d forgotten in my meditative fantasies, and my feet hung off the edge at an uncomfortable angle. I resettled and opened the book. The recent paperback edition I owned had a fifty-two-page introduction by Rosemary Boyle, a contemporary poet and part-time academic who’d become famous for writing a memoir about being a widow. The biographical note on her was twice the length of the one on Beauvoir. She started out praising the novel and quickly lapsed into an explanation of why the intelligent reader should attempt to suffer through its many long, boring sections. “The exasperating tedium of these chapters, the difficulty of forcing oneself to read page after page after page of unnecessary dialogue and descriptive passages will be handsomely rewarded by the satisfaction one feels upon reaching the end.”

These discouraging words had not been part of my fantasies either. Part II of the introduction opened with Boyle’s description of the ways in which Madame de Beauvoir had inspired her to write her own most recent best seller, an “infinitely more succinct” novel that had won “several major literary prizes.”

The third section of the introduction began with a beguiling question: “Why dust off this unwieldy antique now, especially in this flawed, barely coherent translation?”

My back was aching from the way I’d had to contort my body and I could hear the whirr of the computer from my study. As an indication of the dangerous water I was headed toward, I began to think about Didier, a scrawny troublemaker who’d been dropping in and out of my life in assorted unwholesome ways for a couple of years. Don’t, don’t, don’t, I reminded myself and then, in a moment of inspiration, picked up the phone and dialed my tenant, Kumiko.