Alternatives to Sex (7 page)

I thought about Charlotte and Sam much later that night, as I was riding the subway home from downtown Boston, where I’d taken a minor detour on the road to celibacy. It was a little after eleven, the hour when the theaters and concerts had just let out, and the subway car was crowded with well-dressed people clutching playbills and each other, scanning programs to review what they’d just seen. I stood holding on to a pole, feeling like the isolated odd man out. I’d taken the subway downtown instead of driving because I was tired of battling Boston’s ridiculous traffic problems, and also because I’d had a loopy, half-baked idea that I might spend the night down there and didn’t want to have to deal with parking. Of course it hadn’t worked out as planned.

A woman in a bright red sweater with one arm around her boyfriend glanced up from her playbill, saw me staring, and gave me a cold glance. Chastened, I turned around.

Earlier in the evening, I’d been sitting in my apartment expending an enormous amount of energy trying to not have sex, which seemed more pointless than actually going out and getting it out of the way. To minimize the amount of time expended, and avoid the black hole of the computer, I called someone I’d known for a couple of years and saw from time to time, usually at his convenience, although a lot less frequently in the past year. His name was Ron. He’d been in Chicago the previous September 11 and got stranded while the planes were grounded. During that period of stunned confusion and vulnerability, he’d met a man in a coffee shop, gone to an art museum with him, and then stayed at his apartment for close to a week. The timing of their meeting gave the relationship an extra layer of significance in Ron’s mind, as if it were compensation of some kind, generously arranged for him by fate.

Since the advent of Marshall, Ron had gotten in touch with me a handful of times, explaining that long-distance relationships were difficult, and that I was the only one of his “buddies” he was comfortable continuing to see, albeit on an infrequent basis. Not only had I chosen to believe this, I’d actually been flattered by it. I assumed he meant I was in some special category of irresistible. (Ron himself was spectacularly irresistible, combining the rugged looks of an Italian soccer player, the submissiveness of overcooked spaghetti, and the mesmerizing self-absorption so common among exceptionally handsome men.)

But that night, as he discussed, in a moment of postcoital expansiveness, the many virtues of beloved Marshall, I began to wonder.

“So, Ron, let me ask you something. You’re in love with Marshall, you’ve just said you have a perfect relationship, there’s nothing you’d change. Why do you call me from time to time? Why did you agree to seeing me tonight?”

He thought this over for a minute and then reached down and squeezed my penis. “This,” he said.

“That, of course.” Partly, it was what I wanted to hear, but having heard it, I was insulted. “Those aren’t that hard to find, and I’m guessing Marshall has one, too.”

“He does, but I especially like yours. And obviously, it isn’t only that. Not by a lot. You’re different from a lot of people I meet.” I was touched by the comment and was about to thank him. Unfortunately, he had more to say. “I’ve told Marshall about you, and it’s all right with him if I see you sometimes. He knows this isn’t any threat to what he and I have. You’re obviously not a relationship kind of person. You’re not a boyfriend kind of guy.” He said it in a cheerful, lascivious way, as if he was paying me a compliment, but I dressed quickly and let myself out.

As I watched the happy couples on the subway car, I mounted a defense of myself. I was not incapable of long-term relationships. Especially short ones. I had had a few. To define my terms, I consider anything that lasts more than a year a long-term relationship. Less than that I think of as dating, even if serious. When people have been together five years or more, I usually file them under “married,” and when a couple has been together for longer than ten years, I assume they’re roommates with occasional sexual benefits.

In my several decades of adulthood, I had had four long-term relationships. The last—a twenty-four-month event—had ended about four years earlier. I considered this a pretty good track record. It showed a certain level of emotional gravitas. A childhood friend had had no LTR—an acronym that makes coupledom sound like an expensive sports car—and secretly, I considered myself four times healthier in the interpersonal relationships department than he was. I had been shocked to learn that he felt that his capacity for long-term relations was enormous but unproven, while mine had four times been tested and four times failed. A friend from college—a liberal arts school of some renown on the outer fringes of New England—had been with the same lover for twenty years. By rights, I should have thought of him as four times healthier than I, but I just thought of him as four times more inert.

Numbers probably don’t tell much, although as I got older, they seemed to play an increasingly important role in my life. There was age itself, and then weight and height. There were numbers related to IRAs and CDs and mutual funds, things that had never interested me in the past. There were numbers I suddenly felt compelled to pay attention to: blood pressure, cholesterol, PSA scores, and levels of red and white blood cells. Then there was the roster of inches, pounds, and years that comprised the fantasy portrait of my online self. It would be a relief to forget those, once I finally started paying attention to my no-sex self.

An older couple gathered their belongings as the train approached Harvard Square. Charlotte and Sam very likely imagined they’d spend their evenings doing this sort of thing once they moved to town, attending lectures and concerts. Probably they would, too.

I suddenly wished I were returning from a long concert or one of those intellectually challenging cultural events that are equivalent to reading Simone de Beauvoir. I indulged in a fantasy of going to Symphony Hall with Charlotte and Sam, all of us returning together on the subway, they making my evening a little less lonely, I making theirs more interesting, just because a third person (any third person) often does.

I liked being caught up in Charlotte’s little plot against her husband. It showed how well she knew him, how much respect she had for him—no matter what Jack had said—and how much she trusted me. For a fleeting moment, thinking about the two of them, I felt myself flush with the warmth of infatuation I often experience for inappropriate people. The warmth made the world, even the subway car, brighter, more hopeful. No doubt Ron had felt this warmth last September when he met Marshall, and had thought it would last forever.

Edward undoubtedly would find something dismissive to say about Sam and Charlotte, but he would like them, and I had a strong suspicion they would both be charmed by him. Once they moved to town, we could go out as a foursome. Edward had, in the past, made a number of suggestions that he and I go on vacation together, but the idea struck me as dangerously intimate, the two of us wandering around a hotel room draped in towels. With another couple along, it would be a more jovial group. Unless, of course, it turned out that they were fundamentalist Christians, or Sam was a closet case, or, as is so often true, both things.

The fantasy dimmed when I got off at my stop, climbed the stairs to the balmy street, and started the long walk home through the crowded neighborhoods of Somerville. Halfway up the steep hill I live on, I saw the looming silhouette of my house. The lights were off on both floors, and if I hadn’t known the house was there, it might have looked like one of the only empty lots on the street.

Edward lived in a bright studio apartment on the fringes of the South End of Boston. With characteristic prescience, he’d bought his place at the last moment that one could get the legendary good deal, and since he’d owned it, its value had quadrupled. I sometimes brought Edward listings of apartment sales in his neighborhood and watched with pleasure as he studied the numbers with the excitement of a recovered drunk mixing a cocktail for someone else.

I rang his buzzer, as arranged, at eight o’clock. He let me in with a look of irritation and immediately went into the bathroom and shut the door behind him. “You’re early,” he shouted.

I dropped onto his sofa and picked up a magazine. “I’m exactly on time, young man.”

“Same thing.”

Through the door, I could hear the usual cacophony of aerosol cans and rushing water. I’d never once visited Edward when I wasn’t forced to wait while he went through an elaborate cleaning, shaving, and moisturizing ritual. In every other respect, Edward was compulsively prompt and precise about time, so I knew his behavior with regard to me was a deliberate ploy. It made me feel like a high school boy being forced to wait while his prom date put the final touches on her makeup. I liked complaining to Edward about this annoying ceremony, but I was flattered that he cared enough about what I thought of his appearance to bother.

Although small, Edward’s apartment was furnished and outfitted in ingenious ways that gave the illusion of space. Edward had made all of the built-in shelves, bookcases, and cabinets himself, along with doing most of the electrical work and a good deal of the plumbing. His skill at complicated home repairs was only one of his surprising traits. He could also sew, play a tidy repertoire of sing-along standards on the piano, and—despite never having driven a car—accurately diagnose automotive problems and then go a long way toward fixing them. I’d always been amused and charmed by watching Edward, not the most stereotypically masculine man on the planet, installing dishwashers and confidently building closets. This tidal wave of eclectic abilities should have induced in me massive feelings of inadequacy, but it was impossible to begrudge him his accomplishments.

He was a self-made Renaissance man who spent a lot of his downtime on airplanes studying history books, manuals of do-it-yourself home repair, magazines analyzing the performance of assorted mutual funds, and reading a number of Great Books, invariably identifying heavily with the oppressed and self-destructive heroines.

Edward had grown up in Cincinnati, the only child of a pair of religious fanatics (a phrase that was becoming, in the newly terrified and confused America, more and more of a redundancy) who belonged to a cult version of Christianity. If you could believe Edward—and most of the time, I did—his parents talked endlessly about their love of Jesus, as if they were close personal friends. (“As I was saying to Jesus this morning…” “Jesus has such a cute smile.”) And yet, their Jesus was also a petty, vengeful snoop with the worst traits of a nosy neighbor and a grotesquely malevolent baby-sitter, constantly wagging a finger of reproach, and whispering suggestions in your ear that you blow up a Planned Parenthood office.

Listening to Edward talk about his upbringing made me feel lucky to have had parents who paid lip service to piety but drove my brother and me thirty miles each Sunday to a little Catholic chapel that specialized in fifteen-minute masses. I’m sure there’s a place for religious conviction, but on the whole, freedom of religion pales in importance next to freedom from it.

Edward’s parents claimed to have known that their only child was gay from the moment of his birth, but upon being presented with the evidence when Edward was sixteen—in the form of an incident involving a basement recreation room and a cousin in the National Guard—they acted as if Edward had chosen his sexual preference as a way of getting them in trouble with their unforgiving, heavenly best friend. (“Jesus is going to think it’s our fault,” they’d reportedly said. “It’s not that we don’t love you, Edward, but we have to show Jesus we don’t approve.”)

Becoming a flight attendant got him out of town and kept him on the move, the homosexual equivalent of joining the military. I couldn’t decide whether Edward’s choice of career was perfect or complete lunacy. He loved being at home, and was consumed by his many home improvement projects, and hated almost all forms of travel, from flying to taking the subway across town. But in other ways, it was a perfect job for him since it allowed him to indulge in his basic love of taking care of people without letting down the impervious stance that was the heart of his defense against the world.

I checked my watch after a few more minutes of rushing water. “I hope you aren’t drawing a bath in there,” I said. “And what’s the big news you have for me? What stunning changes are you about to make?”

“Relax. I’ll tell you in the restaurant. You’re not reading one of those shelter magazines, are you? There’s no point in that, William, since you couldn’t stand the dust involved in the home improvements you need.”

Of course, he was right; I’d picked up a copy of
Metropolitan Home
and was deep into the story of the amazing things Harry and Charles, a jovial, meticulous pair, had done to their Detroit loft. I believed these shelter magazines with their blasé acceptance of the Harry-and-Charles partnership were among the most subversive publications in the country. Harry and Charles and countless others like them talked for pages about choosing wallpaper and fabrics and designing their bathroom, and then, in the most casual and unflustered way, the author would mention that “the couple likes to give impromptu dinners for their friends” or that “the pair shares their bedroom with their three-year-old golden retriever.” I approved of the politics of these articles, although the focus on partnered domesticity sometimes made me feel like half a person. It might be nice to see a story in which one of my lonely, aesthetically challenged basement dwellers was profiled. Or maybe a story in which an obsessive-compulsive cleaner rambles on for pages about his new iron or his German vacuum cleaner. “What William Collins lacks in taste and anything resembling a domestic life,” the article might read, “he makes up for in cleanliness.”

I threw the magazine down so Edward wouldn’t be so eerily right about what I was reading. “I’m not reading anything,” I said. “And please hurry, I’m starving.”

“I wish I’d known,” he said. “I’d have made reservations at one of those big restaurants where they expect you to eat.”

He emerged from the bathroom looking slightly damp and shiny. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing’s wrong. Why do you ask?”

“You’re making one of those faces. As if I look weird, but you’re not going to tell me why or how.”

“You’re imagining things.”

Edward almost always looked tidy and nicely arranged, even when he was in the middle of a messy plastering or painting job. He had a narrow, lean body that seemed to shrug off fat and all attempts to develop musculature. Despite the time he spent with his assorted personal trainers, his slight body remained stubbornly true to itself. On the whole, I’m a little troubled by bodies that clearly have been tortured into nonindigenous shapes, even beautiful ones. It’s like looking at someone wearing clothes that don’t fit or an expensive hairpiece improperly attached.

But maybe that’s my rationalization for never using a rowing machine I’d bought ten years earlier.

Edward’s minimal height, sandy hair, and large, puppy-dog forehead made him look deceptively boyish, as if he hadn’t quite grown into his final form. Boyish looks are a great advantage when you’re in your twenties, but as Edward edged past his middle thirties, they were becoming a little less marketable. “Like trying to sell a thirty-seven-year-old bottle of Beaujolais
nouveau,”
he’d once told me.

The top of his blond head came up to my shoulder.

At work, Edward had developed an interpersonal style I thought of as contemptuous compassion. His facial expressions and body language always seemed to be saying, May I help you? and, Don’t invade my space! at the same time. It served him well in the cramped aisles of a jetliner; in the real world, it made him seem aloof and unapproachable. Edward was chagrined and proud of the fact that he intimidated people, as if it were a curse he’d worked hard to acquire.

“You think this shirt is ridiculous,” he croaked in his ruined voice. “You think it’s out of season, and I’m too scrawny, and the color is all wrong for my pallor.”

He was wearing a jersey, a red cotton thing with white stripes, a polo costume filtered through a designer he probably couldn’t afford. Edward had pale blue eyes and uneven ears that were far too big for his head, and the shirt accentuated a slight Howdy Doody aspect of his I found completely lovable. “I didn’t say anything,” I reminded him.

“You didn’t have to. It was all in your mute horror.”

“You look adorable.”

“Adorable? In other words, it’s too young for me.”

“You look perfect.”

He shook his head in disgust. “I count on you to lie to me, but what’s the point if you don’t do it convincingly?”

“Well, what’s the point at all if you know I’m lying?”

He slid open a drawer on one of his built-in cabinets and pulled on a dark, shapeless sweater that covered all of the jersey and half of his gray pants.

“What’s the point in God or Mozart or a seat cushion that doubles as a flotation device?”

“I give up.”

“They give you a little lift, the passing illusion the universe isn’t completely chaotic and that you just might be able to swim to shore. That’s all I’m asking from you, a little uplifting dishonesty.”

The rant was so clearly motivated by circumstances beyond my control, I figured it was best to change the subject. “You’ve made some improvements since I was last here.”

“When was that?”

“I’m not sure. A month ago, maybe?”

“You haven’t been here since May. You insist we meet at movie theaters and restaurants, someplace you can escape from easily, to go do whatever you do.”

“Parking is difficult,” I said.

Edward straightened out my necktie and then, dissatisfied with the results, made a tighter knot. The products he’d been using in the bathroom gave off a woody scent, combined with the faint smell of the sweat he’d worked up applying all of them. I drank in his clean scent while he took care of my tie. “Parking,” he scoffed. “I almost wish I had a license so I could haul out the parking problem every time I’m late.”

“You’re rarely late,” I pointed out.

“Thank you for noticing.”

I wasn’t sure why Edward had never had a driver’s license, but I assumed it must have had to do with an early childhood trauma involving his father, the all-purpose tyrant. He certainly had no fears of being driven around by other people, and I genuinely liked to drive him places, since it gave me immediate control over him.

He patted the tie back into place against my stomach. “You’re too skinny,” he said. “Twenty-year-olds interested in men your age expect beer bellies. It’s part of the appeal.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Well, now that you’re in my apartment for the first time in months, let’s leave.”