Alternatives to Sex (5 page)

After my usual cheerful inquiries about the apartment, the hot water, and her artwork, I said, “I think we need to have a conversation soon—”

“About money,” she said, cutting me off. “Am I right?”

“Yes, you are.”

“You see, I know you well. I’ve been told I have psychic powers.”

She was leading me down the path of irrelevance, a tactic she often used to derail conversations about the rent. Figuring out that the landlord to whom you owe more than $3,000 is calling about money doesn’t exactly qualify you for the Uri Geller Hall of Fame.

“We need to talk about the rent.”

“You’re angry at me, William. It would probably be best for both of us if you’d just admit that you’re angry.”

“I don’t see how it matters whether I’m angry or not.”

“It matters to
me.
It matters a great deal. You think I’m not trying.”

“Of course I think you’re trying, Kumiko.” I cursed myself for saying her name. Every time I uttered it, I felt I’d handed her a small victory. “I’m not accusing you of not trying.”

“Well then, what
are
you accusing me of? Please. Tell me. Do you think it’s easy selling art since September eleventh?”

It sounded to me as if she was about to get tearful, something I couldn’t abide. I decided, for her sake, to let the attempt at exploiting the terrorist attacks pass. “I’m accusing you…I’m
not
accusing you…Listen, Kumiko”—that name again—“let’s just take a deep breath and calm down, all right?”

“It’s not easy to calm down when you’re about to be evicted and your landlord won’t even tell you why.”

When I’d bought the house three years earlier, the first-floor apartment was inhabited by an elderly couple who’d been living there for twenty years. I was happy to have them in residence, despite a blaring television twenty-four hours a day. They paid the minimal rent exactly on time, and more important, I didn’t have to go through the process of interviewing tenants and making a selection, something I dreaded because I’d been a renter for so long and was infinitely more comfortable in that role.

A year after I bought, the couple announced that they were relocating to a retirement village in Texas. “We hear it’s hot, hot, hot three hundred and sixty-five days a year,” the husband told me. “That’s what we want. Hot, hot, hot.” My widowed mother had moved to an assisted living facility in Arizona a few years earlier, also giving intolerably high temperatures as the central attraction. “Doesn’t the heat bother you?” I’d asked her after listening to her brag about having had a week of 120-degree days. Her indignant answer: “I’ve got the air-conditioning set at sixty-five, twenty-four/seven. I live in sweaters and long pants and sleep under an electric blanket. Why would the heat bother me? I’m freezing.”

Before moving to hell, the elderly couple had told me there was a woman in the neighborhood they’d met a few times who was looking for a place to live; her current landlords, they explained, had raised her rent two hundred percent.

“People have no morals,” I said. “Greed. What does she do?”

“She’s an artist,” they said.

I interpreted this to mean what it usually means: she was living off a trust fund. When I met Kumiko for the first time, everything about her confirmed my suspicion. She was wearing Southwestern turquoise jewelry, was elusive on the subject of income, and had about her an air of education and long-standing unemployability. She had on one of those cheap muslin smocks only a rich person could afford to wear, and she had her long gray hair in braids. An ex-husband was mentioned in passing. Having spent years at the office helping landlords rent out their apartments, I knew that I ought to ask her for references, a security deposit, a month’s rent in advance, and so on, but this all seemed invasive and impolite. I feared doing so would start this promising, amicable relationship off on a sour note. After a fifteen-minute conversation, I invited her to move in.

She had been living in the apartment for eighteen months and thus far had paid the rent on time twice. Most often, it dribbled in unpredictably in cash payments made in small bills that she counted out in front of me, making me feel guilty and avaricious for each and every dollar I was collecting. Half the time, I was so racked with anxiety watching her dole it out that by the time she finished, I had no idea what portion of the rent she was paying or had paid or still owed or if she was paying me this month’s rent or last month’s. I wasn’t entirely sure about the exact figure she owed me, which was probably just as well, as it would only have made the situation seem more hopeless. Thinking it might elicit a little sympathy from her, I had once explained the economics of the arrangement, and had ended up revealing to her the kinds of financial details I’d been embarrassed to ask of her and never discussed with anyone, including my tax accountant.

She had an uncanny ability to head off my attempts at pressuring her to pay up. Twice when I’d been on the verge of asking her to leave, she’d asked me for a loan. There was something so bold and outrageous about this, I took it as proof of my initial supposition about her being an eccentric heiress. Vague statements such as “until my check comes in” fed my trust-fund assumptions.

As for her name, this was part of her painterly persona, not something that had been given to her by her parents. She claimed that “Kumiko” is Japanese for “girl with braids,” and she always included “braided imagery” somewhere in each of her paintings. Or so she said; thus far, I’d never seen her work.

“Past the age of twelve,” Edward had proclaimed, “you can get away with braids only if you’re Willie Nelson or insane. I think we know which category she falls into.”

After taking a few deep breaths to calm myself down and hopefully give Kumiko time to get past the threatened tears, I said, “If you were making even partial payments, I would feel better about the situation. I’d feel marginally more hopeful. But even those have dried up.”

“You told me you found the partial payments too confusing, that’s why I stopped. I thought that was what you wanted. I was trying to be a good tenant. You have to be more clear, William.”

“I didn’t know that Plan B was no payments at all.”

I wandered downstairs to the living room, carrying the phone, sprawled in a chair, took off my shoes, and stared at my feet. A week earlier, I’d connected with a handsome young man whose sexual turn-on was bathing and massaging my feet and then trimming and filing my toenails. After getting past the initial ticklishness I’d found it relaxing and, despite a lack of genital contact, incredibly titillating. On top of that, he—apparently a grad student in economics with a fellowship—lived in a suite of Moorish rooms in a Harvard residence, and the architectural splendor alone was worth the trip. He’d done a fantastic job, and my feet still looked clean and well tended. Somewhere on my computer upstairs, I had his number. Surely it wouldn’t count as sex if I got together with him again. It was basically a free pedicure with a little toe sucking tossed in, a happy experience for both of us. On the whole, I’m much less judgmental about a person’s sexual interests than I am about his window treatments.

As I was mulling over the possibility of calling “Tad” and listening to Kumiko discuss problems she was having with air circulation in the garage studio, I heard a horn blaring on the street below. I went to the window and saw a taxi in front of the house.

“Could we wrap this up, William?” she asked. “My cab is here. I’m late for a yoga class. Why don’t we try to work on being more clear with each other?”

“How long have you been taking yoga classes?” I asked.

“Years. It forms the core of my spiritual life.”

“Spiritual life,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about getting one of those.”

After we’d hung up, I watched her load a string bag filled with water and towels and then herself into the back of the taxi. My relationship with her was deeply humiliating, there was no question of that. Worse still was the fact that allowing myself to be exploited by her made me feel morally righteous.

In fact, the whole absurd conversation made me feel so simultaneously abused and morally superior, I decided to sign on to the Internet and drop my membership for the “dating” site that had been my home away from home for so many months. That would settle it once and for all and make sure that there were no further temptations to resist.

As soon as the familiar graphics popped up on-screen, loud and lurid, I felt a surge of contentment and the evaporation of the anxieties of my day—my job performance, the Kumiko debacle, curiosity about Edward’s plans for big changes. Oddly enough, I even felt a lessening in my worries about the amount of time I’d been wasting in this very pursuit and the gnawing concern that I wasn’t going to stick to my resolve. Home again, home again.

But I’d entered so I could leave, and I started that process. Whoever had designed the site had made buying a membership easier than waking up, and closing it out the logistic equivalent of filing taxes. Retraction requests had to be made to several billing services; my “stats”—a compilation of elaborately exaggerated numbers—had to be wiped off the screen; and my pictures had to be deleted. I had posted two pictures, neither one of my face, since that craggy monument to lost youth wasn’t my main selling point.

By the time I’d dragged my good intentions through half the process, my mailbox was blinking. I can’t stand when people address themselves using their name, but a fake name seemed less cloying. “Everett,” I said aloud, “don’t open that mailbox.”

When I clicked on it, I saw that six people had written to me. Two were men I’d already met at some point in the last few months, although judging from what they’d written, neither remembered the meetings. Two more qualified as the lunatic fringe (“Im tied up, blindfolded, naked, partying—complete PIG—do it all—no condoms—TOTALLY disease free—”) with proctology-exam photos attached. All displayed the usual contempt for grammar: “Thats nice!!!!” and “Your hot!!!!!” (If you’re going to use an apostrophe in this corner of the virtual world, you’d better use it incorrectly lest someone assume you care about such things or are, God forbid, a homosexual.)

I was always flattered by the attention (“Thank’s!!!!!!!”), even when it came from people I wasn’t interested in. I reserved special contempt and derision for anyone who was tacky and desperate enough to spend as much time combing through this flesh pile as I did. (“Hmm. Him again. Obviously has no life whatsoever.”)

By the time I’d deleted those messages, several more had arrived in my mailbox. I could feel myself being sucked into a familiar cycle and could tell already that I was going to have trouble pulling out. What if one of these messages was from someone who might be the person who…But I couldn’t finish the thought because I didn’t know what the best-case scenario was in this case. What was I looking for?

Read them, I told myself, but don’t respond to them. And then I qualified the rules so that I could respond only if the messages contained full sentences. Or if not full sentences, at least no spelling errors. Oh, all right, not
too many
spelling errors. And if the person clearly wasn’t a native English speaker—Carlo, Marco, Sergio, David—the rule about spelling errors didn’t apply.

I gave myself ten minutes to finish up; then I’d start making business calls. An hour and a half later, I got a message from someone who made the requisite anatomical compliments and wrote in complete sentences that he’d just moved into a new apartment and was looking for someone to come over and help him christen it. Real estate. Practically business-related. I could ask a few questions about his broker. Even my boss, Gina, would approve of that. I practically owed it to her to see him. Maybe he hadn’t sold his old place yet and was looking for someone to put it on the market.

Half an hour later, as I was driving into Boston in the rain, I reasoned that I wasn’t really breaking my celibacy resolution, I was simply delaying it. One day was as good as the next to make a start.

Besides, I had the option of turning around at any moment and heading back home. At nearly every intersection, I assured myself that if I turned around now, I wouldn’t even have delayed my vow.

As I was parking the car, I told myself that I could just go for a walk and didn’t have to bother ringing “Buck’s” bell, and as I was ringing the bell to what turned out to be a third-floor apartment, I assured myself I didn’t have to wait around to go in.

When “Buck” turned out to look absolutely nothing like the pictures he’d sent, I told myself I wasn’t obliged to go inside, and when I entered, I told myself I didn’t have to have sex with him just because it was a beautiful apartment.

“You’re tall,” he said, a statement of fact I chose to interpret as a compliment.

As we were fucking, I told myself it was for the best that I was getting the whole thing out of the way here and now and could start fresh in the morning.

There was a window beside the bed, and through it I could see the lights of cars speeding along Memorial Drive, on the opposite side of the river. There were still a lot of unpacked boxes from the recent move, but they were stacked in neat piles.

“Who’s your real estate broker?” I asked as I was getting dressed.

“That’s kind of a personal question,” Buck said.

As I was driving home, I told myself I now had new confirmation that the celibacy resolution was a good idea. And since I was starting that tomorrow, and tomorrow was another day, I might as well make use of the remaining hour of this last day of my sexual profligacy. I thought about Didier again, as I often did at the tail end of these disappointments, but of course I was much too sensible to venture there.

I decided instead to call Christopher, a right-wing nut whose politics were in such conflict with his erotic appetites, it felt almost like my moral duty to have sex with him from time to time to point out to him what a hypocrite he was.