Alternatives to Sex (26 page)

I stayed at the office until Deirdre put in an appearance after showing Marty’s condo. It was nearly five o’clock by the time she arrived. I let her settle in, make an angry phone call to her beloved husband, and check her e-mail. Finally, I sat on the corner of her desk and casually asked about the showing.

She gave me a piercing look, as if she was about to scold me, and then, apparently having changed her mind, relaxed her mouth and said, “I’ll grant you this, the condo looked better. The dog was there as part of the show—more on that later—as well as some little friend who is apparently connected to you as well. He, I might add, did his best to keep things on track and prevented the dog from eating anyone. I brought the husband over first and he liked it. Later in the afternoon, I went back with the wife. I fully expect one or the other, possibly both, will be making an offer.”

The confusing part was that Deirdre’s tone was so sour.

“It all went well,” I said. “There’s going to be an offer. Why do I sense there’s a problem?”

Deirdre lifted an immense padded envelope out of her shoulder bag and tossed it onto her desk. Marty’s promotional material.

“This is the problem. Not once, but twice, I had to sit in the living room and listen to an hour-long pitch your friend gave about herself and her business and the horrible
dog
and how she would be a perfect subject for a profile on one of their broadcasts. They were both fascinated, and I suppose there’ll be an in-court battle over who gets credit for discovering her. One more marvelous contribution to our culture.”

I’d assumed that allowing Marty to discuss her business had been a simple matter of courtesy. It hadn’t occurred to me that someone might go for the idea. “I suppose that’s more good news,” I said. “If they liked her and the condo, there are two feathers in your cap.”

“I feel exploited,” Deirdre said. “And frankly, I’m much more comfortable being the exploiter. Hopefully, we’ll have these two in a bidding war within the next twenty-four hours and some cash will change hands.”

Esther was proving to be a more reliable tenant than Kumiko ever had been. Since my spiritual awakening in the yoga class and her inadvertent revelation of her real name, she’d paid me close to a thousand dollars in cash. It was a small dent in the total amount she owed by now, but it was a dent.

As she was turning over a money envelope to me one morning, she said, “I think it helped that you stopped doing my ironing. It makes you seem more like an authority figure and less like staff.”

“I’m glad you feel that way. I have an old iron I’m not using anymore, and I’d be happy to give it to you, if you’d like. Permanent loan. It’s excellent quality.”

“Thanks, but I’ve hired someone else.”

I opened up the envelope in front of her and counted out five crisp $100 bills. It was a big relief to get these payments, but every time I made a deposit, I was reminded of the fact that she could have been paying me all along and for some reason had chosen not to. “I think I’m going to have to charge you a little extra for the use of the garage,” I said. “What do you think would be a fair price?”

“You’re the one in real estate, William. You tell me.”

“Let me think it over. It won’t be much.”

She sighed and started to head back to her apartment, but then changed her mind. “I’m not a bad person, you know.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“When you let me move in without checking references or asking about finances, I figured you didn’t really need the money. It’s not like my trust fund is all that big, and I resent turning over a chunk of it every month to someone who’s so casual about the whole business.”

“I’ll try to be more stern and professional.”

“Thank you. And just so you know, you really don’t have a clue about how to iron pleated skirts. I can show you, if you like.”

“I appreciate that. But it’s probably a skill I can live without.”

A week later, the male half of the newscaster couple made an offer on Marty’s apartment. It was $25,000 below what she wanted, but she told me she had no intention of turning it down. The newscaster had already made an appointment to spend two days with her the following week to get footage of her for a ten-minute profile to be broadcast on their show,
New England Innovators.
If the offer had been fifty thousand under asking, she still would have taken it, just to stay in his good graces. She mentioned something about Going for the Better Good, another slogan from her seminar, and then explained that she had to get off the phone; she had an appointment for a manicure, a piece of news I found so shocking, I hung up without saying good-bye.

Now I had three closings pending, not spectacular business given the real estate boom, but good enough to satisfy Gina that I was making a serious effort and enough to make me feel the irresistible pull of momentum. It was good news for Edward as well, and since I finally had something positive to tell him, something I thought he’d enjoy hearing, I called his cell phone.

“I’m in Seattle,” he said. “It’s early, William. I had a late night.”

“With your pilot, I assume.”

“Assume Nothing.”

It was the first time I’d heard him use one of Marty’s slogans, and because he’d uttered it in a brittle tone, laced with disapproval eerily similar to Marty’s, I recoiled. I passed along the good news about the condo.

“You shouldn’t have brought newscasters over there,” he said. “You know what a publicity hound she is. I’m glad she accepted the offer, but we’ll see where it goes.”

His voice was more groggy and raspier than usual. I shouldn’t have made any assumptions about the pilot; he could have been up pacing the floor of his hotel room in a sweaty panic attack. “When I was over at Marty’s the other day, she told me you’ve been having some problems.”

“Oh really? If I wanted to discuss them with you, William, I would have told you myself.”

“Now that I know, let’s talk about it.”

“It doesn’t help me to talk about it. I’m taking some medication, but I hate the way it makes me feel. My schedule for the next few weeks is horrible. The weather across the country is horrible. The airline is letting people go and the rest of us have to take up the slack and the workload is horrible. I have a horrible head cold. I’m going to hang up now. I’ll call you when I get back to town, all right?”

He didn’t wait for me to answer.

What I was enjoying most about
The Mandarins
was everything that the author of the introduction had derided. The hypnotically leisurely pace, the extravagant set pieces, the abundance. Reading it felt like a luxurious reminder of all the free time I had, now that I’d given up the computer. Even on nights when I didn’t see Didier, I’d come home and prepare a meal for myself, forgo the lure of the vacuum cleaner and the ironing board, and sink into the rich, chatty world of the book, a world where DVDs and laptop computers and cellular telephones did not exist. The sprawling, untidy nature of the novel seemed to be connected directly to its extraordinary intelligence. You couldn’t imagine any of these characters scouring their sinks with carbonated beverages or caring too much about folding their towels.

I was stretched out on my chaise longue one night, reading more and more slowly, when Charlotte called to talk about the closing for their condo.

“What are you doing this evening?” she asked.

“Reading,” I said. “Something I’ve been trying to get to for years.”

“No doubt it’s about management style for the new millennium. Don’t answer that. I’m just calling to see if we can postpone the date of the closing. Not for any of the reasons you might guess. It’s for a reason you probably wouldn’t guess.” She paused, as if waiting for me to suggest something. After a moment she said, “You’re no fun, William. It’s our anniversary. Samuel suggested we go away for a few days.”

“Very nice,” I said. “A surprising development. A positive development.”

“I thought so, too.
He
wants to go to Bermuda, but I suggested something a little closer to home. I think it will be a happy anniversary.”

It was clear she wanted me to believe this, even if she didn’t herself. After assuring her that the date could be changed without much trouble, I began to think about her manuscript. I still hadn’t decided the best way to get it back to her. Simply giving it to her and explaining myself would have been the most honest way to handle it, but I couldn’t imagine the mechanics and discussion involved. I wasn’t a good liar, and I knew I’d feel compelled to qualify my response to the stories, and after all the other trouble I’d caused her, that plan of action struck me as heartless.

“What do you do with a big rambling house like that when you go away?” I asked. “I suppose you have to get a house-sitter.”

“You’re forgetting,” she said. “There’s no crime out here, discounting domestic violence and the occasional murder in a family of good standing. It’s one of the reasons the real estate prices are so high. No one locks their doors. I mean, thank God, because there are about eight doors on this house, and I couldn’t stand having to wander around making sure each one was closed, never mind locked. When the neighbors go away, we look in on their houses. What terrifies me is that I’m going to walk in on neighbors A and B doing something inappropriate in the house of neighbor C, or worse still, in my own house.”

Unlocked doors and people wandering in and out at all hours. It seemed like a solution to the manuscript problem, and although it wasn’t beach weather, it might be nice to drive to Nahant one more time.

Marty had sent out several bulk e-mails announcing the date and time the profile of her would be broadcast on
New England Innovators.
Her e-mails were half self-promotion and half unconvincing hype about the show itself. The latter reached a potential audience of two million people, she claimed, which I took to mean that if everyone in the Greater Boston area with a television set tuned in to watch her, the audience would be in the neighborhood of two million.

I was excited about seeing Marty on TV. There’s something inexplicably thrilling about the sight of someone you know on a television screen, even if you don’t have much respect for the program, even if you barely know the person in question. I invited Didier to watch it with me, but he complained about the quality of my set and suggested that I come to his apartment instead. “I have a big flat screen with stereo speakers I bought to keep my mother amused. She hates American TV, but she finds it easier to take than America itself.”

“She’s still here?” I asked skeptically.

“She is here, Mr. Collins. I told you she was here but you never believe anything I say. You two can have a big conversation in French.”

I was amazed by the invitation to Didier’s apartment. In all the time I’d known him, he’d come up with a series of increasingly elaborate excuses to avoid inviting me over, or even to giving me his address. Now he was simply asking me to visit because he had a better television set, as if this were the kind of thing he did all the time. There was something so radical about the invitation and about the casual way he’d made it, that I sensed it didn’t signal a new beginning to our relationship, but was more likely an ending of some kind. I dressed for the occasion in an Italian suit that had cost me close to a thousand dollars, even at the consignment shop.

Didier’s building turned out to be a couple of short blocks from Edward’s. It was an old factory that had been converted into famously expensive apartments. Whenever I’d tried to imagine where Didier lived, I’d pictured a small studio with heavy drapes and dusty antique carpets, ashtrays heaped with cigarette butts, and the smell of sex clinging to the upholstery. I was shocked when Didier opened the door to his apartment and I saw behind him a wall of windows blazing with the lights from nearby buildings and reflected up from the street, five stories below. He gave me a series of right-cheek, left-cheek pecks and welcomed me in. “What is this outfit, Mr. Collins? You’ve come directly from work?”

“A funeral,” I said quickly. “I didn’t have time to change.”

“My mother will be impressed. She loves death.”

Although I generally prefer small, even cramped rooms, I was dazzled by the bright expansiveness of his place, the high ceilings, and polished walnut floor. Far from being cluttered and dusty, it was a masterpiece of midcentury understatement and was so crisp and expensive, I thought I must be imagining the whole scene. I complimented him on his taste and his tidiness, although it seemed highly unlikely he’d done either the decorating or the cleaning.

“Yes, Mr. Collins, I know. You thought I lived in a terrible little hovel with no windows and cigarettes and perfume that smells like animals. You thought I was ashamed of how terrible it was. But instead, I was maybe a little ashamed that it was so nice.”

He led me into the living room, and there, sitting on a classic piece of Le Corbusier leather and metal, was a golden-haired woman he introduced, unapologetically, as “Mrs. Didier.”

“C’est M. Collins,”
he said.
“Le type que je t’ai décrit.”

I understood enough to get that at least I’d been mentioned to the matriarch.

“Enchanté, madame,”
I said and shook her hand. I then added the one sentence in French I can speak with a semblance of fluency:
“Je m’excuse de mon français. C’est très, très limité.”

“Ah, well,” she said, “if your English, Italian, Spanish, German, or Flemish is better, we can try any of those.”

Mrs. Didier was neither thin nor fat, but appeared to have a solid, sensible body, encased tonight in a very smart woolen suit that was probably an ancient, well-preserved Chanel. At least I didn’t feel overdressed. She was smoking a cigarette with elegant nonchalance. Her hands were mottled with age spots, the skin loose and veiny, but her face was a splendid example of careful renovation. Her forehead and eyes were completely unlined, and her neck was taut. All of it was unmistakably artificial, but her appearance didn’t reach the level of horror movie excess that often went with this territory. As one tends to do in these situations, I began admiring, not the bone structure and features of the face itself, but the skill of the surgeon who had reconstructed it, and Mrs. Didier’s wisdom in seeking him out.

“I wasn’t expecting such a beautiful woman,” I said.

This comment inspired her to slowly grind out her cigarette, slip on a pair of black, heavy-framed glasses, and make a more thorough examination of me. Finding me as uninteresting as she’d suspected, she took off the glasses and shrugged. “I like your socks,” she said.

“I’m coming from a funeral.”

“You can’t be all bad then, can you?”

Sitting on a leather sofa and taking in the surprising surroundings, I had to conclude that Didier had been more truthful with me about his work life than I’d assumed, and that the confusing stories about the trips abroad and his employment in the family business had very likely been accurate. He and Mrs. Didier chatted in what sounded to my untrained ears like formal French while I tried to piece together why seeing him like this, as a three-dimensional human being with actual family on the furniture and actual artwork on the walls, made him more interesting but less attractive to me.

At nine o’clock, Didier switched on the television set, and after a series of mishaps with the remote control, the big, impressively flat screen was filled with an image of Deirdre’s divorcing newscasters, joking and smiling at each other as if they were the happiest couple in the world. “These are boring people,” Didier said.

“I suspect you’re right. I think you’ll find Marty more interesting.”

There was a profile of a shopkeeper in Rhode Island who sold nothing but magnets, and then a feature on a swarthy little glass-blower in northern Maine. There was a long, tiresome series of advertisements for local businesses, and finally, the newscaster husband said, “Now let’s meet a New England entrepreneur who’s giving anger and hostility a good name.”

“I didn’t know it had a bad name,” the wife joked. “Around our house anyway.”

Marty appeared on-screen, microphone in hand, pacing back and forth across a stage, shouting at a roomful of people who sat cowering on folding chairs. The camera pulled back to show Charlaine poised at a corner of the stage, baring her teeth at the intimidated audience.

“This is your friend?” Mrs. Didier asked.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s definitely Marty.”

“He is brutal.”

“She’s a woman,” I said.

Mrs. Didier laughed at the suggestion and put on her glasses again. “This country,” she said dismissively.
“Je comprends maintenant, chéri, pourquoi tu ne peux pas trouver une femme.”

She understood why her son hadn’t been able to find a woman? Or had she meant a wife? Either translation raised a number of fascinating questions that it was impossible to ask at that moment. I looked over at Didier, but he was engulfed in cigarette smoke, grinning one of his enigmatic grins.

There were shots of Marty stomping and screaming, riling up a group of people by pumping her fists into the air, eliciting bestial cries of outrage and fury. Then, in a stunning slam cut, she was shown curled up on her living room sofa, professionally made up, dressed in a pink sweater, looking soft and stereotypically feminine. “It’s not about being angry,” she said softly. “It’s about being active.”

The next image was of one of Marty’s clients, huddled in a corner of a room weeping into a napkin while Marty screamed at her; and the newscaster (Tom, they were all named Tom) said, in a cheerful voiceover, “But if this isn’t anger and hostility, it sure looks like it. And maybe that’s exactly what everyone wants and needs in this time of terror alerts and posttraumatic stress—a little righteous aggression.”

“It’s not about fear,” Marty said, sitting on her sofa, a few of the stuffed dolls from her bedroom visible on the windowsill behind her. “It’s about faith in yourself.”

The piece rambled on in this incoherent fashion, mixing Marty’s kind, gentle words with contradictory images, and shots of her jogging along leaf-strewn paths with faithful Charlaine at her heels. Next came the testimonials from people who’d been in her training seminars, including one woman who claimed, through a shower of tears, that she’d lived most of her life as a recluse after an unspecified violent attack in her youth, and that upon finishing Marty’s training she’d begun to “live her dream” and had opened up a chain of successful restaurants. There was a lot of sobbing, and many references to September 11 as either the motivating factor in taking the seminar or justification for having done so.

Didier and his mother seemed to find the entire ten minutes hysterically funny, as they commented on the clothes of the people on-screen, the simple-minded attitudes, and mostly, Marty’s stunning audacity. But by the time the profile ended, I think even they were impressed with Marty’s self-confidence. The whole piece finished with a brief shot of one of Marty’s previously traumatized clients walking peacefully through a park, holding the hand of her large husband, as if, in the end, this simple act of intimacy was what required the most courage and determination. As if this ultimately was the goal.

“That is a sweet story,” the newscaster wife said to her husband. “I guess the world needs more rage.”

“Please,” the husband joked. “Just not in the kitchen.”

As soon as Didier clicked off the television, Mrs. Didier pushed herself out of her chair and excused herself.
“Après ça, il faut que je mange.
Interesting to have met you.”

She walked carefully down a long hallway and disappeared around a corner.

“She’s an imposing figure, Mr. Didier. You might say intimidating.”

“You might if you were her son. So, now you know everything about me, Mr. Collins. You can see I’ve had nothing to hide all along.”

“I’m stunned. But even if you had nothing to hide, you hid it well.”

“I do my best. I’m going back to Brussels with her the end of next week, Mr. Collins. I won’t be seeing you for a while. You will have to find someone else to not fuck.”

“I’ll try. It’s not so easy, you know, Mr. Didier. There is one thing I have to ask you about. The wife. I didn’t know you were looking for one.”

“Oh, yes. But not looking very hard. It’s mostly to please my mother.” He settled himself back on the sofa in a brief, naughty sprawl, as if, once again, he were in control of our relationship. “Don’t be so surprised.”

“So she doesn’t know—”

“She knows everything. What do you think? Appearances matter in my family, and it would be nice to produce an heir. I am the only child.”

An heir. I’d never heard anything quite so odd as the prospect of Didier being a father.

He led me to the front door of the apartment. From somewhere down the hallway, I could hear the sound of a garbage disposal, grinding up food in the sink. I loved the idea of Didier’s elegant mother in her Chanel suit stuffing leftovers down the drain.

Before opening the door, Didier reached up and patted my face. “You didn’t tell me who died, Mr. Collins.”

“Ah. No one at all. I had a feeling we might not be seeing each other for a while. I wanted to look nice for you, Mr. Didier, to leave you with a good impression, I suppose.”

“Yes,” he said. “I knew that. I just wanted to make you admit it.” He ushered me out the door, and I heard it lock behind me.