Alternatives to Sex (3 page)

“We’re not looking aggressively,” the man said. “I should tell you that right off, just so you’ll know. I don’t want you to end up feeling you wasted your time with us.”

We were standing in front of the empty reception desk near the door, and the man was having a tough time figuring out what to do with his dripping umbrella. Polite to a fault. An attractive fault. I like people who make an effort with the small details of everyday manners, holding open doors, not dripping all over your carpets, saying thank you for insignificant favors.

I was convinced that manners were a dying, possibly dead art, the victim of talk radio and a growing suspicion that anything less than all-out bullying was an admission of weakness, an open invitation to telemarketers and suicide bombers.

“Don’t worry about my time,” I said. “In the end, it’s a lot less work for me if you don’t buy anything. You’ll be doing me a favor.”

He grinned at me. “I feel better already.”

He was a good-looking man with the sculpted face of an aging runner. His graying hair was brushed straight back off his forehead and slicked down close to his scalp, the lines of the comb clearly delineated. He was dressed and groomed—a dark suit under the now-open raincoat and that arranged hair—as if he was about to appear in court or make an important presentation, and so I wasn’t surprised later when I learned that he was that profitable, nebulous thing, a business consultant. There was something in his manner—confidence mixed with empathic generosity—that made me certain he’d grown up with advantages he wasn’t afraid of having taken away from him.

“He’s not looking aggressively,” the woman put in. “He’s looking passive-aggressively.” She pursed her lips, and then smiled, erasing the hostility of the comment.

“Anyplace in particular that caught your eye out there?” I asked.

“The three-bedroom on Avon Hill. The ‘Manhattan-style’ layout?”

She put an ironic spin on this last part, a jab at the silly description of the apartment that, it so happens, I had written.

About ten years earlier, I’d been hired by the owner of Cambridge Properties to write the copy they use in their listings. It was a part-time project I took on to fill a few hours per week after leaving (on the advice of my eight-session therapist) a lucrative but debilitating position at a Boston advertising firm. One thing had led to another, and within a short while, I’d earned my license and was selling. Real estate was, in my case, less lucrative than advertising, but it was also less soul-numbing because you’re at least selling people something they need—shelter—even if at vastly inflated prices.

It didn’t take me long to realize that the key to writing successful listings is to describe everything in relation to something it isn’t: a Manhattan-style layout in a Cambridge apartment; a country kitchen in a downtown condominium; in-town convenience for a suburban ranch. It appeals to the basic human desire to have everything at once and nothing for too long. (“Great resale potential!”) And also, it tricks people into believing that their lives are a little better or more exciting or glamorous than they really are.

As I led them back to my desk, we made our introductions: William Collins, Sam Thompson, Charlotte O’Malley. They told me they had a house in Nahant, a rocky peninsula that sticks out into the ocean north of Boston. It was one of those anomalous scraps of Northeast coastline, a fragment of Maine dragged down on a glacier a few million years ago. Far enough away from urban noise and congestion to be desirable as a summer retreat, but close enough to downtown to be within easy year-round commuting distance and to have views of the city skyline.

Oddly enough, the best way to convince someone to move to a new locale is to praise the place they’re trying to leave. “I’ve heard it’s beautiful out there,” I said.

Samuel lit up at this. “It’s spectacular,” he said. “Views, ocean breezes, incredible sunsets. Really
fabulous.”
He swept a graceful hand—long fingers with a wedding ring floating loosely on one—through the air, setting the scene for me. It was an unnecessarily theatrical gesture that, along with use of the word “fabulous,” made me suspect he knew I was gay. I have a theory that heterosexuals use the word “fabulous” more frequently when in the company of gay men but I had no way of testing out the theory. “It’s another world,” he added.

I nodded enthusiastically, even though “another world” usually turns out to be a euphemism for racially segregated.

“One of the reasons we’re thinking about leaving,” Charlotte said, studying the listing sheet for the Manhattan-style apartment, “is that it’s just too spectacular. Too fabulous. It’s
so
incredible, you feel like leaping from the rocks.” She made another little pout and went back to the sheet.

“Some of us,” Samuel said. “Not all of us.” He spoke in a cheerful, reassuring way, issuing his words through a big smile and showing off a set of teeth that had been whitened to the color of fresh snow.

“True. Some of us are happy all the time. Others of us not. Others of us sometimes forget to take our antidepressants and start to think about leaping from the rocks.” She looked at me and gave me an ironic smile that made me feel we were accomplices.

I was tempted to ask her what antidepressants she was taking. I was embarrassed by the fact that I wasn’t taking any mood-altering drugs myself—it seemed so arrogant not to be these days, and obviously I would have benefited—but it made me feel like part of the mainstream to discuss them. Nothing got people into a more open, animated mood than discussing their medication. For many of my friends, their relationship with their antidepressants was the central relationship in their lives. Healthier, probably, than a relationship with your iron, but more expensive. They reveled in describing the distinctive way this or that pill interacted with their unique chemistry, as if they were describing a virtue or a personal accomplishment.
“She
didn’t like Wellbutrin, but
I’ve
never had any problems with it. It’s not for everyone, but for
me,
it’s been wonderful.”

“I hear there are a lot of those in Nahant,” I said. “Rocks.”

“Millions.” Charlotte was scanning the listing sheet with the middle finger of an unmanicured hand. “Only one bathroom?”

“I’m afraid so. The building’s from the 1920s, when people apparently cared less about having lots of bathrooms.”

“We don’t care much, do we, Charlotte?” He put his hand on his wife’s thigh, a gesture so spontaneous and tender, I felt intrusive simply for having noticed it. He looked at me. “Our son started college this month, so it’s just the two of us.”

“We’ll care as soon as we have a guest. Especially if it’s Daniel. Last year at this time, I was convinced I’d risen above caring about two bathrooms. Now, to be honest, I’d love three.”

She had large dark eyes that had about them a look of exhaustion not uncommon among intelligent people who know themselves too well and are worn down by the acquaintance. Looking at the two of them together, you had to conclude that she was the brighter of the pair—more imaginative, even if less successful. Her light brown hair was gathered into a loose, droopy chignon with a few damp tendrils undone and stuck to her neck. She wasn’t thin—a nice contrast to her husband’s impeccable angularity—and there was something about the easy, sloppy way she was sitting that made me think she didn’t care all that much one way or the other. I guessed her to be at least a few years younger than her husband—mid-forties?—but I was getting increasingly bad at guessing anyone’s age, collateral damage from having lied so often about my own on the computer dating circuit. She appeared to be more tossed together than Samuel, as if she was too busy worrying and fretting to comb her hair in perfect rows.

They began debating the virtues of having several bathrooms versus having just one in a way that made me think neither really cared about this issue; each just wanted to have the final word.

Deirdre came back from the alley, trailing in with her a faint smell of cigarette smoke, just in time to hear Charlotte say to her husband, “You make a relevant but facile point.” She sat down at her desk and began banging at her keyboard a little too loudly.

Deirdre glanced over and rolled her eyes at me, scoffing at the unfairness of being subjected to yet another public display of domestic discord. There was something in the tone of their conversation that suggested they enjoyed having an audience. I didn’t mind. I had been part of a couple and knew how weirdly lonely it can get, and how, from time to time, you need someone to hear the trees falling in the forest.

“Why don’t we go look at the apartment?” I said. “Just to give you an idea of what’s out there. You have to start the search somewhere.”

They gazed at each other, silently conversing: Should we? Shouldn’t we?

“It’s right around the corner,” I said. “We can walk.”

It was still pouring when we stepped outside. My umbrella was one of those unreliable folding kind, and I couldn’t get it to open. Within a few seconds, the shoulders of my suit jacket—Prada, inappropriately dressy for that hour of the day, but since it had cost only $90 at the consignment shop, I considered it casual wear—were wet.

“There’s room for one more,” Samuel said, lifting up his huge umbrella a little higher.

I’m usually too proud to accept generosity from men, especially if they’re handsome, but in this case, doing battle with a cheap accouterment seemed the more emasculating position, so I tossed my umbrella into a trash barrel, mumbling something about it being a useless piece of garbage, and stepped under theirs.

It was awkward, walking up the street like that, bumping against one another, each of us getting wet in a different place, but I liked the feeling of being between them, hovering slightly above both, protected by their umbrella and, for the length of time it took to walk four blocks, a part of their lives, even if an insignificant part.

As we were passing the Nut House, Samuel smiled at Charlotte, more confirmation, I thought, that they’d just spent fifty minutes there. Because Charlotte had already brought up drugs, depression, and suicidal longings, it didn’t seem wildly inappropriate to ask if they had a counselor there, but remembering how offended “Carlo” had been by my vacation question the night before, I attempted a bit of discretion.

“Nice building, isn’t it?” I said. “I used to go there to see a shrink, not that I needed one.”

“We went there for the same reason,” Charlotte said. “We fired our counselor this morning. She kept trying to make us change the things that aren’t working in our marriage. I mean, if it was that easy, why would we have been there in the first place?”

“They always want you to change,” I said. “It’s depressing.”

Almost everyone I knew, with the exception of Edward, was in or had been in therapy at some point in his life, ostensibly to solve his problems. But for some, going into therapy was a costly but effective way to settle into a holding pattern until they’d figured out an airtight rationalization for clinging to their neuroses and counterproductive habits. After all, there’s room for only so many geniuses and prodigies in the world. For the rest of us, our best shot at individuality comes in the form of unique character flaws and neurotic patterns.

“What really happened,” Samuel said, “was that she, the counselor, finally got me, the husband, to see that Charlotte, the wife, had a point about getting an apartment in town. As soon as we settled that, Charlotte decided we didn’t need her anymore.”

“It was generous of you to go along with the idea,” I said.

He shrugged. “I was outnumbered. I had no choice.”

Like most men, it seemed, he took a completely passive attitude toward his marriage and let his wife figure out what was required to keep it together.

I knew the apartment was wrong for them as soon as we walked in. I’d written the description based on information the owner of Cambridge Properties had given me without ever having visited it, but I saw now that despite its attractive layout, much of the character and style had been sanded, painted, and Home Depot’d into bland facelessness. Everything in the place was depressingly new and functional. It was perfect for the customers I thought of as Dishwasher People.

There are customers who want a living space that fits in with their lives, their taste, and their aesthetic sense of balance and proportion, and then there are the people who want a dishwasher. In the former category, there are people who walk into an apartment or a house and pay attention to the height of the ceilings, the exposure of the windows, the way the rooms flow one into the other, the width of the floorboards. In the latter category are the people who ask: “Is there a dishwasher?” and then, if the answer is yes, plop down a deposit. The former group looks for a place that will be a good staging ground for the drama of their lives, the latter looks for the location of the cable hookup. Oddly enough, I had the impression that most Dishwasher People didn’t really care all that much about a dishwasher. They just felt obliged to show interest in some concrete detail, so they wouldn’t appear to be an easy target for avaricious sellers or landlords. I doubt many Dishwasher People ever use dishwashers since they tend to be the workaholic sort who rarely spend more than two waking hours at home and subsist on frozen dinners you can eat out of the packaging.

Technically, I’m a Dishwasher Person manqué. That is, I checked first to see if my house had a dishwasher and cable hookup, and when I saw it didn’t, I bought it anyway.

Charlotte and Samuel entered the apartment with the tentative silence that often overcomes people when they first start looking at real estate. The couple that owned the apartment had equipped it with the kind of nondescript, supposedly tasteful furniture and artwork (some of which could be found at my house) that constitutes an erasure of all taste. They’d outfitted the living room with a sleek rowing machine and exercise bike, conveniently facing the very big television set.

“The furniture is all going,” I said, watching Charlotte sink into an immense slipcovered chair that bore no relation to any of the other furniture in the room.

“I suppose the walls and ceilings and floors stay,” she said.

Sam had his hands in the pockets of his raincoat. “Recently painted. And very clean.”

“He’s the glass-half-full part of the pair,” Charlotte told me. “Also the cook,” she explained as he went looking for the kitchen. She picked up a big, brightly painted balsa wood sculpture of a bird, one of those individual works of art that are imported from Mexico in the tens of thousands. “I hadn’t thought about it before, but in your job, you get to peek into people’s lives directly, more so than a shrink even. They have to wade through annotations and outright lies, while you see the inside of the medicine cabinets.”

“I never pry,” I said. “I’m scrupulously discreet.”

“I don’t believe you.” And then, pouting, she said, “I’m dying to open this and see what’s inside.” She touched the handle on a small cabinet beside her chair. “You wouldn’t mind, would you?”

“Go right ahead.”

Charlotte was delighted with the contents: a stack of
TV Guide
s, a large box of cheap, chocolate-covered almonds, and two cartons of cigarettes. “All the things about themselves they don’t want us to know,” she said. “Do you think there are pictures of them anywhere?”

“I’m sure there are. Everyone has pictures, even though it seems easier to me just to look in a mirror. Should we go explore?”

“If I can pry myself out of this chair.”

In the course of our conversation, she’d arranged herself in the big chair in a provocative manner with her coat falling open and her legs crossed at the knee in a way that drew attention to their shapeliness. She was wearing a pair of dark shoes with thin heels that accentuated her calves. I wasn’t at all conflicted about my (homo)sexuality, but I enjoyed looking at women’s bodies, almost as much as I enjoyed looking at men’s. Sometimes more, since there was no envy, angst, or lurid desire to possess or to be the other.

I was about to compliment her appearance in the fatuous, automatic way I sometimes have when Samuel’s cell phone went off in the other room, and he began a quiet conversation. Charlotte cocked her head and played with the loose strands of her hair while trying to overhear what he was saying without being too obvious about it.

“A business call?” I asked.

“It could be. Or it could be his mistress.” She turned to me and opened her dark, tired eyes wide, as if to say: What do you make of that? Am I shocking you?

“Oh? Does he have one?”

“You never know. I’ve been encouraging him to get one for some time now.”

They’re just playing around with me, I thought. Samuel was being honest when he said they’d never buy. They probably have no intention of buying. I knew the type well, the pseudoshoppers who figure it’s cheaper and easier to look at real estate on a week-day morning or a Sunday afternoon than to head to the beach or feign interest in a symphony. I extended my hand and pulled her up out of the chair. “We’ll poke our heads into the other rooms and see if we can find anything of interest.”

The rest of the apartment was as wrong as the front rooms—dark, despite large windows, and poorly laid out. I made a point of showing her the cramped closets, using them as an excuse to brush up against her a little too closely a couple of times. I wanted her to like me, even though I wasn’t sure how much I liked her.

“Scented candles,” Charlotte said. “What do you think that’s all about?”

The air in the master bedroom was heavy with the cloying smell of artificial vanilla.

“Undoubtedly what everything else is about—self-hatred and insecurity.” That, in abridged form, was my version of the meaning of life.

The bureau was lined with small, framed photographs, a brief montage of the courtship and marriage of the owners, one of those young professional couples who look as if they spend all their free time alternating between healthy outdoor activities and massive drinking binges.

“Why are they selling?” Charlotte asked.

Office rumor had it that the wife was pregnant and that they were looking for a place in the suburbs. But it seemed too tidy a mirror image of Charlotte and Samuel’s move, and I was a little worried that it might sound to her as if the young couple was starting the richest part of their lives while they were sliding into late middle age and empty-nest irrelevance.

“I have no idea,” I said. “Some people just want to make a change.”