Alternatives to Sex (9 page)

I’ve always found my ability to detach from and deny some of my own feelings and fears a useful but creepy part of my personality. It raises the possibility that I might not be a truly good person. I like to think of myself as highly ethical, although what that boils down to isn’t making careful ethical choices but acting on impulse and then advertising my guilt and regret about having done so.

I experienced a moment of intense sadness and even panic upon hearing how far Edward’s plans had advanced, but then I found my attention shifting, as if it had a life of its own, to the “pathetic” phone call I’d received an hour earlier. It seems to me defense mechanisms shouldn’t work if you’re aware that they’re defense mechanisms and you know at least some of what it is you’re defending against, but this one worked perfectly. So well, in fact, that I managed to talk Edward out of dessert (“Someone I know got food poisoning from the mousse here last week”) and, shortly thereafter, found myself on the highway, driving to a faux-castle hotel at seventy miles per hour, not thinking about Edward leaving town and what it would mean for me, not thinking about why I cared so much, not chiding myself for rushing headlong into the kind of behavior I’d sworn off, but running through a mental list of possible bodies and faces I could attach to the name “Dave.” Disappointment in myself flickered across my consciousness a few times, but I blocked it effectively with the familiar rationalizations about time and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

As soon as I pulled up to the hotel, I realized the appeal of the place was its immense, moatlike parking lot, a vast sprawl of macadam that could accommodate any number of cars. I admire the way Ian Schraeger revolutionized hotel decor, but given cable TV and free parking, most people would be happy to pay for overnight accommodations in a storage container.

I shared the elevator with a young man and woman who were holding hands and staring straight ahead. “Nice night,” I said, thinking, Ha ha, you have no idea what I’m about to do.

“I think it’s going to be a beautiful fall,” the woman said, no doubt thinking, Ha ha, you have no idea what we’re about to do.

Looking at them, pressed against the wall opposite me, a happy unit of human intimacy, I thought about Charlotte and Samuel, headed to their romantic hotel room a couple of nights earlier. So much for my fantasies about forming a friendly foursome with them and Edward. Now I’d have to move full speed ahead in pursuing some other role. I took out my cell phone, an act that instantly made me feel important and less alone, and left a message on Samuel’s work phone. “Good evening, Mr. Thompson,” I said, all bluster and good cheer. “Give me a call on this phone or at the office. I’ve got some great properties for you and Charlotte to look at.”

All garish pretense of castlelike decor was abandoned in the ornate lobby; the walls of the fourth-floor hallway were covered in a green material that had the slick feel of vinyl, and the carpeting made squeaking noises, like wet grass, as I walked on it.

I knocked at room 473 and the door opened a crack. A faint whiff of smoke and sweat emerged, but very little light. At least I knew I had the right place.

“Dave?” I said.

“Come in.”

The door swung open and I slipped into the dark room. But not completely dark, for the television set was on, flashing colored lights across a tangle of mostly naked bodies on one of two big beds.

“Ah,” I said, pointing with my chin. “Mosh pit.”

“Make yourself at home,” my host said.

He had the kind of plump, nondescript face, puffy with alcohol, common on sportscasters and former athletes past their brief prime. I had a vague memory of having met him, but beyond that, I was blank. His features registered no particular recognition of me. A married businessman from somewhere west of Pennsylvania, I guessed. He’d probably called everyone he’d ever talked to within the Boston area code and taken his chances; the tangle on the bed was the result.

He lumbered back into the bedroom, naked. Nudity comes in several varieties: the wholesome, the artistic, the erotic, and, case in point, the are-you-sure-you-wouldn’t-like-a-towel? There was something stooped and exhausted about his posture and even the way the flesh hung off his body. He stopped in front of the TV—checking out the porn to fire up the furnace, I assumed. But when I moved into the room a few steps, I saw that the on-screen action was one of those pampered, bow-tied, right-wing broadcasters using anger instead of information to promote imminent invasion of Iraq. These red-faced entertainers had been boosting their ratings for months by delivering a blanket kill-everyone-now message. As for the on-bed action, it was a little hard to make out. The exact number of bodies was unclear. And irrelevant. Once you get to three, it doesn’t make all that much difference. There were a few mandatory moans along the lines of “Oh, yeah,” and then someone tried to crank up the excitement by shouting,
“Yeah!”

Dave responded in an angry stage whisper: “I told you guys to keep it down. I don’t feel like getting tossed out of here.”

He picked up the remote control for the TV, switched the channel to an antacid commercial, and turned up the volume: “…that bloated, burning sensation in your stomach. Rumbling gas and…”

Leave now, I told myself. But thinking about the drive home and my ultra-clean house, I stretched out on the empty bed with my hands behind my head. It couldn’t hurt to watch.

Samuel Thompson worked for a company called Beacon Hill Solutions. I loved the open-ended mystery of the name. Solutions to what? I suppose the idea was to make you think that whatever problem you had, this group of consultants could help you solve it. Since the company was located on an upper floor of an office tower in the flat heart of the city’s financial district, “Beacon Hill” seemed to have been slapped on to give an aura of Brahmin respectability. I went to the BHS Web site to try and find some information that might help me deal with Samuel, or at least give me something to talk about with him. There were ten consultants affiliated with the company, although what any of them actually did remained unclear.
“Your business is our business,”
I copied down onto my notes for Sam and Charlotte.
“Making it work for you is what makes it work for us.” What’s that mean? More charades.
A short biography of Samuel reassuringly mentioned that he had an MBA and previously had worked for Merrill Lynch for “more than a decade.”
Mde a killing in mutual funds? Problm solver? Maybe he cn “make it work” for me? What’s “it”?

There was a standard studio photo of Beacon Hill Solutions’ six senior partners: Samuel surrounded by three overfed men in dark suits, a plump, platinum blond woman, and a pale beauty with her hair pulled back so tightly, she appeared bald at first glance.

Salesman,
I jotted down.
Partners resent his gd looks.

When he finally returned my message a few days later, he sounded genuinely sorry that it had taken him so long to get back to me. “It’s been a little hellish here,” he said. “Our busiest season. Everyone wants to end the year with his problems solved. Come to think of it, that’s why Charlotte and I came to you—solve our real estate problems before Christmas. Along with everything else. You up for the job?”

“It sounds a little daunting, but I’m willing to take a stab at it.”

“Good man. I’m sorry that place we looked at wasn’t right for us.”

“The first place is never right,” I said. This wasn’t true. The first place people look at is often perfect, but they almost never buy it for fear of finding something better as soon as they’ve put down the deposit. In most cases, closing the deal, like securing a marriage proposal, is a matter of chipping away at expectations. “Usually the first half dozen places aren’t right. I suggest we get those out of the way, too, so we can move on to something probable.”

“Absolutely,” he said. He spoke with enthusiasm and vigor—abso
lute
ly—but there was an edge of distraction in his voice, and I could hear typing in the background, as if he were answering e-mails.

“I’ve done a lot of research and put together an assortment of possibilities in your price range,” I said. “When I see how you respond to these, I’ll have a better idea of what your taste is and exactly what you’re looking for.”

There was a long pause, and at first I thought he hadn’t heard me. I was trying to follow the general outlines of Charlotte’s advice on how best to manipulate him, without sounding as if I’d scripted the call. His typing stopped abruptly, and he said, “The main thing is, we have to please Charlotte.”

WE please Charlotte,
I wrote.
Sam and me.

“The move is her idea, and she has stronger tastes than I do, so I’m willing to give her a lot of decision-making power. But between you and me, the final decision is mine. Her business instincts could be a lot better. She made a series of horrible investments over the last ten years. I’m not planning to bring that up to her, but just so you know.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

“I need to be convinced it’s a good investment. That’s number one.”

Money most important,
I wrote.

“Charlotte’s wanted to get a place in town for a long time now. And I’ve resisted, for selfish reasons. The cost, my attachment to Nahant. I’m very happy out there, William, away from everything related to work, the stress. I leave my whole in-town life behind me. I kayak, run on the beach, bicycle, swim.”

Fitness freak,
I jotted down.
Shld I be jogging?

“But something like what happened last year makes you reevaluate your priorities, think about what truly matters in life. For me, it’s my family. That should be obvious, but it’s easy to lose sight of sometimes. Until you get one of those unwelcome reminders.”

A year ago, everyone had been reminded of something important, but it was my impression that most of us had already forgotten what it was.

“Daniel’s off at college now,” he went on. “It’s time for Charlotte and me to attend to each other. It’s not as difficult as people think, making someone happy. So as I see, our whole job here, yours and mine, William, is just to make someone happy. Nice work if you can get it, don’t you think?”

For the moment, I put aside the condescension in his voice—a consultant talking to a lowly real estate agent—and the irritating way he kept saying my name. I liked the plan. True, the speech sounded prepared, as if he’d run through it a few times in his mind, or had expressed the same rationalization while having dinner with a couple of drunken friends, but what was wrong with a little rehearsal? I tried to find an element of irony in his words, but I couldn’t detect any. He believed what he’d just said, and thinking back to the tender way he acted toward Charlotte when they came into the office, I believed him, too.

“Her liking a place is the starting point. My instincts are the end point.”

I could tell already that at some point, probably in the not too distant future, I was going to weary of this man with his contradictions and his pride in his business savvy, but at that moment, I was still flushed with admiration and an unthreatening crush on the two of them. We made an appointment to meet again.
Wear green C. Lacroix tie,
I wrote next to the time.

The following week, I was sitting at my desk at Cambridge Properties, nodding at one of my customers, attempting to communicate empathy, while internally retracing the depressing and titillating mistakes I’d made throughout the preceding week, many of which I blamed on Edward and his silly, upsetting plans to relocate. San Diego. It was such an obvious choice—perfect weather and pretty views. Where was the challenge in that? Where was the character-building hardship?

The customer was Sylvia Blanchard, a woman I’d been working with for more than two years. The depressing and titillating mistakes were, primarily, three attempted phone calls to Didier, my Belgian obsession, and an encounter with a handsome masochist who claimed to be named Sandy and wanted to be treated “as if I were your dog.” Considering the amount of money and affection lavished on domestic pets in this country, “Treat me like your dog” are words no self-respecting masochist should utter.

As for Sylvia, she had previously put down deposits on three apartments and one two-family house. At the very last minute, she’d backed out of every deal. Her total loss of deposits and fees was approaching $15,000, but it was money she was happy to lose as long as it freed her from making a purchase.

I’d known exactly what to expect when Sylvia walked into the office that Saturday morning. I’d been waiting for a phone call or a visit for days. Her current deposit was on a triple-decker house she’d fallen in love with in a working-class neighborhood close to the one where I lived, and the closing was two weeks away. Now was the time for her to back out of the deal. When she opened the proceedings that morning with, “You’re going to kill me, William,” I checked out of listening mode and escaped into my own thoughts.

“That makes sense,” I said, every time her mouth stopped moving. “You’re right.”

Sylvia was an excessively thin woman whose mod wardrobe consisted mostly of bell-bottom slacks and fuzzy mohair jackets, as if her fashion influences began and ended with Twiggy, circa 1968. She wore thick-rimmed eyeglasses in a garish shade of turquoise, the kind of I’m-having-fun accessory a person wears when trying to make herself into a recognizable public personage. She had a charming habit of scattering her conversation with non sequiturs that bubbled up from her subconscious and let you know in which direction her thinking was drifting while her conversation was otherwise engaged. We were very close in height, a fact that probably accounted for a lot of our attraction to each other.

She was now in the Deep Regret stage of her monologue, pulling glasses off and on. Her thin and very red lips were moving quickly, spitting out apologies and self-recrimination.

“That makes sense,” I said again. “You’re right.”

Sylvia was a professor in the Women’s Studies Department at Deerforth College, a school about fifteen miles into the suburbs of Boston. She was the author of three books, each more successful than the last. The first was a study of some justifiably obscure Australian poet, the second a meditation on American women and food—Sylvia herself was British and clearly had a complicated relationship to nourishment. The most recent was an analysis of female sexuality called
Come Again.
The title of the third, the subject matter, and probably the eyeglasses had given Sylvia entrée to some of the more intellectual cable talk shows and even a brief turn on a couple of the morning network news programs. She’d become a celebrity of sorts in academic circles, applauded and despised for her sudden visibility. She frequently went on long tirades against Camille Paglia, obviously her role model.

“Of course you’re right,” I said. “And I
do
understand. That makes sense.”

Back when I was still reading books—not merely their scathing introductions—I had plowed through Sylvia’s first two tomes, avoiding the extensive footnotes and vast appendices. I’d had a lot more luck with
Come Again.
True, it was written in that bizarrely dense academic prose that’s the literary equivalent of mud, but with chapter titles such as “Cunt” and “Fucked,” it made for provocative skimming. The book had a shrewdly calculated concept; a bunch of incomprehensible intellectual palaver on sexuality, gender, Foucault, and Georgia O’Keeffe wrapped around—in alternating chapters—a graphic memoir of Sylvia’s own profligate sexual history, one that made my recent adventures look tame enough for an after-school television special.

I was convinced that Sylvia would never buy an apartment, never budge from the overstuffed rented studio where she’d been living for the past dozen years, but I was always pleased to have her visit me, tell me her woes, and write deposit checks.

She was an extreme version of a type familiar to real estate agents: a real estate junkie, drawn to almost every house or apartment she was shown, certain it would give her a new and improved life. Most of these people bought and sold properties the way the rest of the population buys groceries, but Sylvia would never sacrifice the hopefulness of the search for the harsh reality of a done deal. What if she found, purchased, and moved into the perfect place and then discovered that her life was still a bog of lonely disappointment?

Despite all the irritations of dealing with Sylvia, I found her manic, unrealistic brand of optimism inspiring. She was neurotic, restless, confused, and conflicted, but there was an aura of happiness that surrounded all of these emotions. She wasn’t exactly happy, but she believed absolutely that one day she would be. It was a quality I lacked and was trying to nurture.

“You’re right, Sylvia. Of course. I understand completely. That makes sense.”

These real estate deals resembled love affairs. She adored everything about a place at the start, every flaw and eccentricity, every potential hazard and drawback, the sloping floors, the tiny closets, the badly renovated bathrooms. These were all charming and endearing. Once the candlelight and violins faded, they became the intolerable features that made it imperative she cancel her plans.