Alternatives to Sex (25 page)

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 standing 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.”

When Ken had completed his inspection, he came into the living room and presented his case. It was an old house. It had been badly maintained for many decades and then badly broken up into oddly shaped rooms with structural flaws. The electrical systems were insufficient and the windows would soon have to be replaced. There was the water damage and the rot.

“Would you advise buying it?” I asked him.

“Frankly,” he said, “I wouldn’t.”

Usually, he was much more cautious and diplomatic in his pronouncements. I felt obliged to tell Charlotte that she should go over the papers carefully with Samuel and give it a day or two. There was still time to back out without losing too much money. There seemed to be no shortage of reasons for rethinking the purchase.

“What do I care about the electrical systems?” she asked. “I’m not buying electrical systems. I’m trying to buy a second act here. This will do as well as any other. It’s the perfect place.”

The next day, I was sitting at my desk, answering calls and waiting for word on the reaction of Deirdre’s clients to Marty’s apartment. If one of them actually made an offer, it would be a relief. If Edward’s apartment was going to sell, then it was better for everyone, Edward especially, if Marty’s sold quickly.

Most of the people who call in on Sundays to make inquiries were easy targets: young two-income couples whose lives and relationships were still upbeat enough to make them completely uninteresting. Generally speaking, they were first-time buyers who had good jobs, no aversion to debt, and undeveloped tastes. They liked gadgetry. They wanted steam showers, Jacuzzis, and any other feature that wasted water. If you caught them at the right moment, you could make a tidy commission with minimal effort. Despite that, I didn’t much care for working with them. They arrived loaded with facts and figures they’d gleaned from Internet searches and took offense at questions about their personal lives.

But after what had happened with Charlotte the day before, I figured I should do my best to avoid all personal questions for the time being.

Avoid inquiries,
I wrote on a notepad.
Young couples with money, no issues, no affairs. Avoid taking notes.

Shortly after noon, I got a call from my mother. She sounded uncharacteristically glum and opened up the conversation with an accusation. “You’re depressed,” she said.

“You’re attributing your mood to me. That’s called projection, dear.”

“And that’s called condescension,
dear.
I happen to know very well what I’m doing, William. I’m calling you with sad news, and I want to hear you deny you’re depressed before I deliver it. Is that so terrible? Is it going to require years of psychotherapy to expunge?”

“Funny,” I said, “I don’t remember hearing you use the word ‘expunge’ before. Is it one of Jerry’s?”

“We do vocabulary together every few days. It’s supposed to prevent Alzheimer’s.”

“I’ll have to invest in a dictionary. What’s the sad news?”

“Death, of course.”

“Could you narrow it down a little?”

“Please don’t get sarcastic on me. Even when you live in a mortuary like I do, it isn’t pleasant to report on someone’s death. What did you have for supper last night?”

“I hope that question is an irrelevant non sequitur,” I said. “A friend made me a beef stew with a French name. It took hours. If you like, I can get the recipe from him.”

“You might as well get me Rollerblades. That whole cooking thing seems so antediluvian to me. I’m surprised anyone bothers with kitchens anymore. But I’m pleased to hear you’ve got someone cooking for you. That’s progress.”

“You could call it that.”
Expunge, antediluvian,
I wrote on my notepad.
Progress?
“Can we get to the obituary now?”

“If you insist. I had a call this morning at six
A.M.
that would have woken up any person with normal sleep patterns. It was Rose Forrest’s brother. He’d miscalculated the time change and didn’t seem to understand it once I explained it. Anyway, that’s the news.”

“Rose?” I said. “But I saw her so recently. What happened?”

“The brother was vague. She had everything wrong with her, you yourself said she looked bad. In the end, I gather it was something massive. One big sudden something.”

I didn’t know what to say to my mother. In theory, Rose was a relatively minor character in my life whose relevance had ended more than a decade earlier with my father’s death. It occurred to me then that she’d never sent me the boxes of unused gifts she’d given to my father. One more bit of unfinished business in her life. The sad thought of those boxes tossed into a Dumpster somewhere struck me like a blow.

“The brother let slip that she was eighty-five, a big shock. Older than me.” She paused, and as was so often the case these days, I heard the soft typing of a computer keyboard. Even my elderly mother had become a multitasker. When the typing stopped, she said, “I hope you’re not too upset about Rose.”

“It isn’t as if I knew her all that well,” I said.

There was an empty silence on the other end of the line. She seemed to be waiting, with patience, for me to say something else.

“I knew her a little bit,” I said. “Beyond her working for Dad. I had lunch with her a few times after he died. Infrequently but regularly.”

“I know that.”

“Oh?”

“I’m the one who suggested she call you when she was in Boston. Your father’s death was a loss for her, too, and she had no way to mourn it, no way to acknowledge to anyone that it was a loss. I thought you could handle it. After all, I could, so it didn’t seem like such a burden for you. You’re so much less judgmental than your brother.”

Part of the pleasure of my meetings with Rose had been their secrecy, and the way they’d made me feel I had a special relationship with my father, albeit an imaginary one. Perhaps I should have been relieved to learn my mother had been aware of it, but instead it made me feel irrelevant and strangely betrayed by her. “So she knew that you knew…” I couldn’t force myself to make it more specific than that.

“I have no idea. We were all civil, that’s the important part. It helps everyone maintain their dignity. But it’s all in the past. I was never truly miserable, and now I’m happy.”

“With Jerry?”

“With Jerry.”

“I suppose next you’ll be sending him to see me.”

“Hardly. He lives too far away. Anyway, he and I have decided to never meet. It’s much more romantic this way.”

“Never?”

“It’s imperfect, it’s incomplete, but I have the illusion of having a companion, of being in love, and of being loved. And in many ways, it feels more real than the last few decades I was married to your father. Why spoil it by meeting? Your generation wants everything, that’s your problem. It’s all right to want everything and even, for a short while, to look for it. But at a certain point, you have to take stock of what you’ve got. You’re not young, you know. Even if we weren’t all about to be blown up, you still wouldn’t have forever.”