Alternatives to Sex

My decision to practice celibacy had nothing to do with prudery or penance, morality or manners, dysfunction, or fear of disease. It had very little to do with sex. It was all about real estate.

What had started out, one year earlier, as a bout of benign computer dating—a euphemism for online chatting followed by brief encounters, less impersonal than old-fashioned anonymous sex because you exchanged fake names with the person—had turned into an almost daily ritual that had replaced previous pastimes such as reading, going to the movies, working, exercising, and eating. I’m exaggerating, of course, but by how much, I’d rather not say. For months, I’d known that my habits were slipping out of control, but I figured that as long as I acknowledged my behavior was a problem, it wasn’t one.

And then, one rainy September morning—coincidentally, the same morning Samuel Thompson and Charlotte O’Malley wandered into my life—I woke up and decided that too much really was enough. I could feel trouble pressing down on me like the low dark sky outside my bedroom window. I lived in a house near the top of a steep, San Francisco–like hill, but rather than a view of the Pacific, I saw from my windows the colorful sprawl of Somerville, Massachusetts—jagged rooftops and the tight grid of streets—and in the near distance, the cozy, unimpressive skyline of Boston, minimized this morning by the clouds. The previous owners of my house had installed a picture window in the master bedroom, an architectural feature I frequently deride but secretly love. As I stood looking out through the streaks of rain, a plane dropped from the clouds in its approach to Logan Airport. The sight of it, popping suddenly into view like that, jolted me. For the past year, the sight of airplanes heading toward the buildings of the city had been alarming.

Do
something about your life, I told myself, a directive that’s usually, in my case, translated as:
Stop
doing something.

For some reason, a disproportionate number of the men I met online turned out to live in dank basement apartments with minimal, makeshift furnishings that didn’t acknowledge the existence of aesthetics—sofas made out of rolled-up futons, mattresses on the floor, television sets that took up half a room, collapsible bookshelves lined with DVD boxes. I hate DVDs. I’d switched from vinyl records to tapes, from tapes to CDs, from convection ovens to microwaves, from typewriters to computers, from landlines to cell phones, from revival movie houses to videocassette rentals, and as far as I was concerned, that was the end of it. I’d traveled as far along the technology highway as I could, and the sight of those skinny boxes gobbling up space in the video stores (and on collapsible bookcases) was enough to send me into a spiral of despair and dread.

It’s always good to take a stand in life, even a completely meaningless one.

I don’t mean to be a snob about anyone else’s taste or to suggest that my own is worth bragging about. I don’t really have taste; I have reactions to other people’s. I have opinions. If I walked into my own apartment with anything resembling objectivity (fortunately, an impossibility) my reaction would undoubtedly be disapproval. Too beige. Too many midcentury lines and angles. Too self-consciously symmetrical. Way too clean and tidy. Who lives here? I’d wonder. What’s at the center of this guy’s life, aside from dusting? But imperfect as my own place was, the fact that I so often connected with men who chose to live unfurnished, subterranean lives had started to worry me. Maybe, if I kept to current habits, my future lay in that direction. Downward.

The night before, I’d spent an impersonal, passionate forty minutes with someone who claimed to be called Carlo. Most of the men I met claimed to have names that were either Latin-lover mellifluous or vigorously American West: Carlo, Marco, Hank, Jake. I usually called myself Everett. My name is William Collins. I wasn’t cheating on anyone, wasn’t breaking a vow of fidelity, wasn’t sneaking a wedding ring into my pocket as I knocked on someone’s basement door. But taking on an assumed name seemed to be part of the game, even part of the pleasure, and Everett, being a name that was neither mellifluous nor particularly cow-boyish, struck me as unlikely enough to sound real.

Carlo was not young, not old, not unattractive, not unintelligent, not unclean. Clearly not Latin, but never mind. For the forty-minute encounter, it’s most important to figure out what a person
isn’t
(not a mass murderer, whew); figuring out what he
is
requires more time, not to mention the belief that such information might be useful at a later date. Carlo and Everett barely had a present, never mind the pretense of a future.

It all went predictably enough. He pranced around in a jockstrap, got down on all fours, pleaded, moaned, and complimented my height. If you can’t be classically handsome, you’re no longer young, and your idea of exercise is making plans to go to the gym, it helps to be awkwardly tall. He said “nice” at the appropriate moments and did a little panting thing at the end that turned me on, even if it was clearly one of his rehearsed bits. Afterward, there was that unsettling postcoital silence in which I realized I was with a stranger, noticed the dirty laundry in the corner, and saw that the TV on the bureau was tuned to FOX News. A flushed, scowling commentator was talking ominously about Iraq. I propped myself up on an elbow, ran my finger along Carlo’s tan line, and to fill the conversational void, asked him if he’d been on vacation.

He rolled over onto his back and gave me an indignant look. “I’m not interested in sharing a lot of personal information,” he said.

“Of course not,” I said. “I’m sorry for asking. If it’s any consolation, I’m not interested in hearing any. I was trying to be polite.”

He pulled on a T-shirt and, satisfied by my lack of interest, said, “I was in Maine for two weeks.”

“Ah,” I said, and realized that I truly wasn’t interested and had no follow-up comment or question.

As I was leaving his apartment, I noticed that he had bath towels—light blue with appliqué peonies and bleach stains—tacked over the eye-level basement windows for privacy. At midnight, it had been a detail that had struck me as amusingly tawdry, but now, in the gray light of morning, as I stared out at the rain, it screamed final straw.

The descending airplane disappeared from view behind the skyline of the city; when there was no ensuing rumble or billow of smoke, I got dressed and set up the ironing board in my kitchen. I’d bought a $125 iron from a catalogue that specialized in expensive laundry-related products for obsessive-compulsives. It had arrived in the mail the day before, and I was excited about using it for the very first time. I was pouring verbena-scented water into the thing when it hit me that I should give my sex life a rest for a while. I couldn’t take any more dank basements and grim window treatments. You can choose who you go to bed with, but you can’t choose his decor.

Besides, I had a lot of
New Yorker
s to catch up on. My kitchen shelves needed to be rearranged. I had to start paying much closer attention to my job. I’d been meaning to sign up for a class in tap dancing. It was now or never on the question of spirituality and me. And so on, in that irrelevant vein.

Vanity compels me to say that I knew my resolution was about a lot more than the towels, but pinning it on those allowed me to try and change my behavior without diving into the mucky swamp of my psychology. Enough self-deception, in other words, to make it an unthreatening place to begin.

The iron surpassed my expectations. It glided over the shirt with a life of its own, and when I hit the appropriate button, steam came out with such power, it nearly levitated. I could go on about why I love to iron—a nice straight crease in the pants, wrinkles smoothed—but it’s all pretty obvious stuff.

As I was going over my shirt for the second time, I figured it would be easier to stick to my sex resolution and break a bad habit if I kept myself busy. I’d recently turned forty—and more recently than that had turned forty-four. I’d noticed that for most of my peers, the first half of life is about acquiring bad habits and the second half is about replacing them with something else—usually, these days, some “healing” ritual that invariably turns out to be a variation on massage or a 12-step program.

The past year had been a posttraumatic time of uncertainty and anxiety for the whole country. Since the tragedy of the preceding September, everyone I knew was trying to choose between combating the collective evil of mankind by putting selfishness aside and doing good, and abandoning altruism altogether and doing whatever it took to feel good.
Right now.
The result seemed to be a lot of infidelity and binge eating, followed by resolutions to curtail same, followed by trips to overheated yoga studios where ninety minutes of narcissistic posing and fat-reducing exercises were said to contribute to global harmony because you collectively hummed “Om” at the end. Everyone I knew felt they had, for the first time in their pampered lives, a mission, but no one knew what it was. The pundits, the politicians, and Julia Roberts said that everything had changed, and on some level, it was true. And yet the only change everyone could name was that you were no longer supposed to pack toenail scissors in your carry-on luggage, and almost no one I knew owned a pair of those anyway.

Everyone I knew had felt a sudden need for reassuring moral absolutes, for patriotism, for righteousness. Everyone wanted to feel strong again. Then the hostile bumper stickers started appearing on the gas-guzzling cars with the flags sticking out of the windows, the political convictions grew blurry, and it was back to the massage table.

Given the timing, I had to conclude that my sexual habits of the past year were a combination of makeshift anxiety management and fatalism of the better-get-it-while-you-can variety. Or perhaps I was just trying to shift blame and ascribe global significance to my predictable midlife malaise.

I wasn’t sure, but it was a little too early in the day to define my mission in life or suddenly come up with moral absolutes. It was easier to make distracting dinner plans. I dialed my friend Edward’s cell phone to see if he was going to be in Boston that night.

“Dinner plans?” Edward said. “You haven’t wanted to make plans with me for ages. You’ve been vague and elusive for months now. I can’t pin you down on anything. You must be in despair. What is it?”

Edward and I had been friends for over three years, but because he was a flight attendant with an erratic schedule, it was hard to make dates with him. It was also true that since I’d started my sex bender, I’d avoided tying myself down with social engagements. By eight o’clock on most nights, I grew restless to get on the computer and line up the next disappointment.

I wouldn’t have minded telling Edward I was giving up sex for a while, but telling him what I planned not to do would have meant revealing to him what I had been doing, and because I was a few years older than he and better educated (although unquestionably less intelligent), I always tried to give him the impression that I was above superficial concerns about age, weight, sex, laundry, and most of the other things I was obsessed with.

“You’re being melodramatic,” I said. “I haven’t seen you in a while, and I miss you. I’m getting ready for work, and I thought of you, and here we are.”

“For the record,” he said, “I don’t believe that. But we’ll let it pass.” Edward had a croaky voice, and especially on cell phones, he sounded like someone getting over a mild case of laryngitis. Maybe it was the dry, recycled air he breathed on planes day after day. Whatever the cause, it made him sound adolescent, as if he hadn’t entirely settled into his voice. “Where would we have dinner?”

“Your choice.”

As he thought this over, I heard a lot of commotion in the background, the low hum of voices and the squawk of PA announcements. On principle, I felt compelled to object to invasive, obnoxious cell phones, but really, I loved the way they gave a you-are-there documentary quality to even the most dull conversations. Even conversations with my elderly mother—usually so hypnotically mundane they passed into profundity—had taken on a degree of drama as she chatted with me on her mobile and simultaneously interacted with a large cast of characters she met as she strolled around the grounds of her assisted living facility in Arizona. (“Oh, Christ, here comes that old lush I was telling you about last time. Hi, Carrie. You’re dressed for the heat all right!”)

“That’s a lot of noise for eight in the morning,” I said. “Where are you?”

“I’m walking through O’Hare, and it’s seven in the morning here. I’ve walked past three thousand people, and not one of them has cast even a casual glance in my direction. I went through the security gate, had my luggage searched, and officially entered the invisible stage of life.”