Alternatives to Sex (6 page)

As I drove to the office the next morning, I decided my tactic of delaying the start of my resolve by twenty-four hours had been brilliant. Now I was truly ready to begin—enthusiastic about the world of real estate, determined to get back in Gina Fulmetti’s good graces, and sexually exhausted.

The office was wedged between a pet-grooming salon and a Mexican takeout joint along a busy and fashionable stretch of Mass Ave in Cambridge. It was walking distance to Harvard Square, but far enough from that circus of chain stores and students to be largely unaffected by it. I’d become friendly with Veronica, the woman who ran the grooming shop. She was an immense, gray-haired woman who tended to have a host of troubled teenagers doing volunteer work for her as they picked up a trade. When she was short on volunteers, she sometimes let me help bathe the dogs. That morning, she was propped up on a chair, drinking soda out of a cup the size of a small wastebasket and overseeing a couple of emaciated girls with pale faces as they hosed down a soapy Irish setter. Just as well I wasn’t needed. I was ready to start my day.

The only person in the office that morning was Mildred Robinson. Mildred was an intensely focused psychologist who worked at the office part-time. She was transitioning—to use her verb—from psychology to real estate because it was more (another quote) fun. Everyone resented her impressive sales figures because we felt she ought to stick to a career she’d trained for for almost a decade. No one begins his adult life as a real estate broker, and certainly no one at Cambridge Properties had started out in this field; but most of us had ended up there as the result of financial or emotional collapse, not because we were seeking something as friable as “fun.”

I sat at my desk and took out a legal pad. I listed the closings I had pending (only two, including one with a compulsive apartment shopper that probably wouldn’t go through) and the follow-up calls I needed to make, putting Samuel and Charlotte at the top of that list. Then I wrote down the names of six people I could contact to remind them that we were in the middle of a real estate boom, and that if they were thinking about taking advantage of it by selling their property, they couldn’t do better than listing it with me. This last chore ranked high on the dreaded death-of-a-salesman scale of business matters. It always made me feel as if I were panhandling or trying to talk someone into a morally questionable act of exploitation. “Sell your house while prices are still unconscionably inflated. Don’t wait for the market to adjust.”

I shouldn’t have dreaded making cold calls as much as I did; I’d learned over the years that most people are flattered by the attention, like talking about their property—especially if they have no interest in selling it—and are always delighted to engage in discussions of the pornographic sum we’d put down as an asking price. Obscene phone calls everyone was happy to receive.

Since the previous September, people were willing to give serious consideration to taking what they could get while they could get it, even if they had no idea what they planned to do with it. Thanks to the wacky color-coded terror alerts, the news reports about anthrax attacks, and the gathering war clouds, the whole country was poised on the brink of smoldering panic. There was an underlying feeling that everyone wanted
out,
although, really, there was nowhere to go. Canada had begun to look like an appealing place to live to a lot of people who previously wouldn’t have considered spending a brief vacation there. Even Edward, who had as much reason as anyone to worry about the future, had made noises about moving to Montreal, a city he’d once derided as being “a strip club with a good subway system.”

The most promising names on my death-of-a-
salesman list were those of a young cousin and his wife who’d made a small fortune in the computer field in the mid-nineties, had cashed out, and now spent their time taking trips to coral reefs, rain forests, and other rapidly disappearing natural wonders. They reportedly owned several condominiums in and around Boston. I’d avoided bothering them for years, but now they looked to me like prime targets. They were connected to the maternal side of my family, and the easiest way to get their number was to call my mother. It was barely dawn in Arizona, but since Margaret claimed not to have slept for at least ten years, I dialed.

I started the conversation with my usual greeting: “I didn’t wake you up, did I?”

“Who is this?” she asked.

“Your firstborn.”

“William?” Perhaps there was another I didn’t know about. “Did they blow up something else?”

“Not that I’ve heard.”

“Ah. Why do you sound so peculiar? Did you just get up?” This was retaliation for my opening question and the ultimate insult. Normal sleep patterns were indicators of luck and a lack of character.

“Hardly,” I said. “I’ve been up for hours, I cleaned my apartment twice, and I’m at my office.”

“At least you went to bed. If I don’t get some sleep soon, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“What’s it been, five, six years now?”

“Twenty, but who’s counting? I see you’ve been getting some rain the past couple of days. It’s going to be lovely today and warm for the rest of the week. In case you haven’t heard.”

She always kept up with the weather in Boston, something I found touching since it meant she was thinking about me. Several years earlier, she’d relocated from Connecticut, where I’d grown up, to stifling Arizona. She’d moved partly for the insufferable heat, partly to be closer to a sister she never spoke to, and partly because my brother and his family lived in California. I’d been relieved that she’d moved out of my sphere of responsibility, but I still hadn’t gotten over feeling abandoned on the East Coast by my family.

“What about the weekend?” I asked. “Any word on that?”

“Not that I’ve heard. I only watch the three-day forecasts. At my age, there’s no point in listening to the long-range projections.”

She was close to eighty and fiercely healthy. Arizona had cured any minor breathing ailments she’d had, and the activity in the retirement village kept her mind engaged in local gossip and dramas. Still, she’d picked up the sarcastic pessimism that seemed to be the dominant personality trait in widows of her age. Almost every comment or suggestion I made, whether it was about her own life or related to some broader political issue, was greeted with the same dismissive vote of no confidence. Education cuts? “What do I care? I’m on the way out, anyway.” Television? “I’ve got ten minutes to live and I’m going to waste it watching TV?” Go out to dinner? “I’m sick of food.” Call up her widowed sister, who lived a few doors away, and arrange an outing? “I’ve got better things to do than listen to her. She’s so negative.”

It was all a defense against the dying off of dear friends and the awful toll age was taking on the survivors. She spent a lot of time on the phone, talking to friends back east who were in various stages of mental deterioration, something she referred to often but I was banned from mentioning. I was not allowed to utter the words “senility” or “Alzheimer’s.” “Next thing you know,” she’d say, “you’ll have me in a home.” There was no point in reminding her that she was, essentially, in a home, one she’d put herself into.

Despite our consistently combative tone, I enjoyed talking with her and was proud of her. She didn’t drink much, ate sensibly, rarely expected me to visit, and as far as I could tell, never gave money to the Catholic Church. She and my father had been staunch Democrats when I was growing up, but in the past twenty years, her politics had turned vague. If I mentioned a politician, any politician, she’d say, “Ah, they’re all crooks.” I took this to mean she voted Republican but had the decency to be ashamed of the fact.

Once we’d wandered around our usual conversational land mines, I said, “I’m calling about the rich cousins. I need their phone number.”

“Melinda and Rob? People with that kind of money don’t just give out their phone number. It’s unlisted.”

“That’s why I’m calling you. I thought you could give it to me. I wanted to ask them if they were looking for a real estate agent.”

“Oh God, William, that’s so humiliating. It’s panhandling.”

“It certainly is not. Where do you come up with these ideas? It’s business.” I could hear water running and the sounds of scratching or scrubbing. My brother kept her in cell phones with unlimited calling plans, and she spent most of the day wired to a headset with the phone hooked to a belt loop. “Are you scouring the bathtub? What are you using?”

“Some powder that was on sale last month.”

“I told you to use orange Tang for the bathtub and the sink, didn’t I? You dump it in and sprinkle on some Pepsi. It’s much more effective than scouring powder.”

A loud rush of water was followed by gurgling. “I can’t be bothered shopping for all that. It’s not in the store here. And don’t tell me you’ll send it to me. The whole idea of washing the house with food disgusts me. It worries me. Throwing food around the house and vacuuming six times a day. It isn’t normal. You’re almost fifty.”

I bristled at the accusation. “I most certainly am not almost fifty. If you think about it, I’m closer to being almost forty.”

“A big tall man like you dusting all day. What kind of a hobby is that?”

“Let’s talk about Kevin. How’s he doing?” I often used my brother as a conversational diversion when I was talking with my mother. He was the most normal person I knew, which is to say: overworked, stressed out, financially strapped, and emotionally confused. Today, Margaret wasn’t having any of it.

“You should be dating,” she said.

I took this advice to mean that she thought I lived an empty and perhaps tragic life. “I’m getting a little long in the tooth for maternal advice,” I said. “I’ve hit a small bump at work, but that’s temporary. I have a lot of close friends, many people who are important to me. For all you know, I could be dating compulsively. And while we’re on the subject,
you
should be dating.”

There was a long pause in the conversation, during which the door to the street opened and Charlotte O’Malley came into the office. I stood and motioned for her to take a seat in the reception area out front. She had on the same outfit she’d worn the day before, including the raincoat, even though the sun was out. She sat and began a futile attempt at gathering all the loose strands of her hair into an elastic band. “I should get going,” I told my mother. “A customer just walked in.”

“What kind of customer?”

“Half of a nice happily married couple looking to relocate.”

“Maybe you can learn something from them. Maybe you should try. I don’t see you surrounded by many nice, happy couples of any sort. And for your information, I
am
dating.”

“Oh?”

“I suppose you could call it that.”

“Well. Good for you.”

The news came as a pleasant shock. My father had died a decade earlier and in the time after his death, Margaret had flatly refused any suggestions that she might, at some point, long for male companionship. The retirement village was mostly widows, all of whom, according to my mother, had been looking forward to this solo period of their lives since the day they were married, give or take a few hours. Widowhood, she explained, was generally considered the reward for a lifetime of living in the shadow of an overbearing husband and playing the role of dutiful wife. Desert Springs was full of sturdy women in T-shirts and sun visors who, despite their sarcasm and who-gives-a-fuck attitude, seemed fundamentally happy with their lives. They occasionally talked about some man or other who’d outlived his wife, usually in a disparaging tone, as if he’d broken the terms of a contract.

I’d had a cordial, distant relationship with my father, a dentist, and at his funeral had been stunned to learn that his receptionist had been his mistress for years. Rose herself had told me this. I suppose she thought I would be more understanding and less judgmental than my brother, and this was undoubtedly true. Like most men who adore their wives, worship their children, and are one hundred percent satisfied with their lives, Kevin couldn’t stand to think that anyone was getting away with marital infidelity.

I’d always found my father a distressingly flat character with no discernible inner life. The mistress news at least provided evidence of outside interests and emotional complexity; it made me happy for him, even if it made me all the more certain that the entire marriage had been a raw deal for my mother.

“Does this guy live in Desert Springs?” I asked my mother. “Your boyfriend, or whatever he’s called.”

“He lives in Oregon. We met on the Internet.”

“How contemporary.”

“Everyone’s doing it these days.”

“I’ve heard. I just hadn’t figured you for the type.”

“I didn’t either. But that computer has been sitting in my kitchen since Kevin gave it to me, and between old age and dirty bombs, I figured I didn’t have all that much to lose. You should try it, William. You can’t believe how easy it is to meet people. Nice people.”

It was alarming to receive this advice from my mother. I managed to wrangle the phone numbers of my rich cousins out of her, and promised that I’d make my shameful call only once, would leave only one message if they didn’t pick up the phone, and would not mention her name or my brother’s once I’d started my sales pitch. We said our farewells, and as I was about to hang up, she promised she’d send me a photo of Jerry, her romantic interest. “Don’t worry,” she added, “I’ll send one of the G-rated ones.”

“We spent the night at a hotel in Cambridge,” Charlotte O’Malley told me, “in case you were wondering why I’m wearing the same clothes I had on yesterday.”

To be polite, I said, “I hadn’t noticed.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I figured you for the observant type.”

“In general, or particularly regarding women’s clothes?”

“In general. Then again, you’re wearing the same jacket you were wearing yesterday.”

I checked. One of the drawbacks of neatly putting away all of your clothes at the end of the day, instead of heaping them on the floor, is that it’s hard to keep track of what you’ve worn and when. “So you spent the night here in town,” I said. “It sounds as if you can’t wait to move. We’re going to have to work on that.”

“Sam had an early meeting and we thought it might be a good idea. To signal the start of this new venture. After all these years, it’s odd to not have to get back home for Daniel’s sake.” She slipped off her raincoat and draped it over the back of her chair. She sighed as she turned around, as if she had a kink in her back. “I’ve struggled with feeling irrelevant since he turned twelve. Now I suppose I really am.”

“It must be a relief.”

“I’m trying to decide whether it is or not. I’m guessing you don’t have children.”

“That’s true.”

She smiled with a hint of sadness in her eye, and I could sense she was writing me off, as people with children often did, as having an impairment that I had to live with, a handicap, something like a missing limb. I never minded the pitying looks parents give the childless, largely because I pity people who were saddled with the grueling task of child rearing. The whole expensive, messy world of parenthood was lost to me, a mysterious and unappealing universe that I felt lucky to have avoided. I don’t mind children, and I’ve met a few I even liked. But the plastic toys and the juice in boxes were another story. Probably I wouldn’t be so dismissive at age eighty, assuming I made it that far.

She named the hotel they’d stayed at. “It’s expensive, but it’s lovely. Very romantic.”

I nodded at this and looked away. By romantic, I assumed she meant that they’d had sex. I’ll listen to the most graphic details of someone’s anonymous sex encounter, but any reference, no matter how oblique, to the intimate life of a long-term couple is deeply embarrassing to me. Especially when the word “romantic,” which I associate with toss pillows and floral bedspreads, finds its unwelcome way into the conversation. “That’s…nice,” I said.

She frowned, disappointed at my reaction, I suppose, and said: “I wanted to point something out about yesterday.”

“Please.”

“You didn’t ask me what I do for work.”

“I didn’t, that’s true.”

“I think you were afraid I don’t do anything and you didn’t want to be rude by asking. You figured you’d just leave the ball in my court.”

I started to protest, reassuring her that it had been a mere oversight.

“You asked Samuel,” she said.

“And he answered, but I’m not sure I truly understand what it is he does. On a day-to-day basis.”

“He consults. If you ask for more details, he’ll happily provide them, but between you and me, I don’t think you’d find them all that interesting. I know I don’t.” She shrugged and looked around the office. By now, Jack had come in and was turned away from us, muttering advice to his girlfriend into the phone. Mildred, the in-transition psychologist, was eating a candy bar and gazing into space. Aside from the three of us, the office was empty. “Is it always so uncrowded in here?” she asked.

“A lot of the job involves driving around town and checking out property. If you spend too much time at your desk, it doesn’t look good.”

“I don’t spend enough time at my desk and it still doesn’t look good. Fortunately, I work at home, so only I notice.”

“That’s my cue to finally ask you what you do.”

“Nothing. Well, nothing I’m especially proud of. I’m a ghostwriter for a company that packages business books. Big, dreary tomes about management style and corporate culture. The books come to me late in the process, after the putative authors have finished, and I make them marginally more readable. The secret is knowing and caring nothing about the business world. Obviously, I got into it through Samuel’s connections. Believe it or not, I was a nurse a million years ago.”

“Pre-Daniel?”

“Yes, exactly. At one point, I thought I’d go back to it, but I’m not very good at sympathy.”

I opened my filing cabinet and took out the folder I’d started on them. “You work at home?” I asked. “In that case, we should look at places with at least one study.”

“Is that about us?” she said. She leaned toward me, trying to see what I’d written down.

“It’s just the basic boring facts,” I said.

She probly working-class Irish. Catholic,
I wrote.
Former nurse who married well. Nice couple? I can learn something frm them?? She needs study. I shld close mine off. Always leads to trble.

“Here’s another boring fact for you,” she said. “I’m hoping to rent a small office when we move to town. Working at home has been part of the problem.” She looked down at herself and then back at me with a frown. “The kitchen, the pantry. The cocktail hour.”

Jack had finished talking with his girlfriend and was going through the real estate listings that had come in that morning. He gazed over at Charlotte a few times, checking out her legs and listening in on our conversation. I had the feeling he didn’t care much for women in a general sense, especially if they took the upper hand in real estate transactions.

“Were you interested in looking at more properties today?” I asked. “I haven’t set up anything, but I could easily make some calls.”

“No, I have to get home so I can procrastinate in a controlled environment. I was driving by on my way out of town, and there was a parking space, and I couldn’t resist. I thought it might help if I gave you some advice about the best way to deal with my husband.”

“To be honest,” I said, “I didn’t think you were that serious about buying.”

“I’m completely serious. He’s ambivalent. We have to work around his ambivalence.”

“We’re ganging up on him, in other words.”

“Oh, absolutely. It’s the only way to get anything done. I hope you weren’t planning on being impartial. Even the counselor gave up on that charade.”

Charades,
I wrote on their sheet.
Drinker?

“Let’s face it,” I said. “I’m a salesman. My main objective is to make a sale.”

“Good. I wanted to get to you before Sam did. The key is this: he responds well to a hard sales pitch. Be aggressive with him. If he thinks you’ve put a lot of work into finding us a place, he’ll be more likely to buy.”

I nodded, as if this were the kind of information one spouse usually revealed about the other.

“Don’t hesitate to try guilt. Mention the hours you’ve put in, the weekends you’ve spent sorting through listings for us. If you want to leave a message for him right now, call his cell phone. I’m sure he has it off while he’s at his meeting.”

“I might feel a little self-conscious with you listening in, knowing it was a charade, of sorts.”

“But I could coach you.”

“I’ll call him,” I said, “but not right now.” It seemed important to stand up for myself, even if we both knew she was in control of the situation.

She thrust out her chest as she slipped on her raincoat, whether for my benefit or Jack’s, I couldn’t tell. “I think this is going to work out well for all of us. Call him soon so we can build up some momentum.”

I saw her to the door and watched as she walked up the sidewalk to her car, a silver Volvo that appeared relatively new but had a significant dent in the trunk. When I got back to my desk, Jack moved to the chair Charlotte had been in, shook his head with disgust, and scowled. “That’s why I’ll never marry again, William. Manipulative bitch. Stabbing her husband in the back, no loyalty, no shame.”

“Funny,” I said. “I thought from the way you were looking at her you liked her.”

“I love her. She proves everything I’ve always thought about women of that generation. If I were you, I wouldn’t get involved with them. You might make a decent sale, but you get too caught up in people’s lives, and the lives of that pair are messy, I can promise you that. They’re going to walk all over you.”

I should have taken his advice to heart, but it was the most personal comment he’d ever made to me, one that showed he at least had thought about me, and I was genuinely touched. “If you see me going off the rails completely, let me know.”

“You’re off already,” he said.

I closed my eyes for a minute, visualized the calm reading corner of my bedroom, the chaise longue, the light shining on the page of my book. It was going to be a very good day.