Alternatives to Sex Read online

  “Millions.” Charlotte was scanning the listing sheet with the middle finger of an unmanicured hand. “Only one bathroom?”

  “I’m afraid so. The building’s from the 1920s, when people apparently cared less about having lots of bathrooms.”

  “We don’t care much, do we, Charlotte?” He put his hand on his wife’s thigh, a gesture so spontaneous and tender, I felt intrusive simply for having noticed it. He looked at me. “Our son started college this month, so it’s just the two of us.”

  “We’ll care as soon as we have a guest. Especially if it’s Daniel. Last year at this time, I was convinced I’d risen above caring about two bathrooms. Now, to be honest, I’d love three.”

  She had large dark eyes that had about them a look of exhaustion not uncommon among intelligent people who know themselves too well and are worn down by the acquaintance. Looking at the two of them together, you had to conclude that she was the brighter of the pair—more imaginative, even if less successful. Her light brown hair was gathered into a loose, droopy chignon with a few damp tendrils undone and stuck to her neck. She wasn’t thin—a nice contrast to her husband’s impeccable angularity—and there was something about the easy, sloppy way she was sitting that made me think she didn’t care all that much one way or the other. I guessed her to be at least a few years younger than her husband—mid-forties?—but I was getting increasingly bad at guessing anyone’s age, collateral damage from having lied so often about my own on the computer dating circuit. She appeared to be more tossed together than Samuel, as if she was too busy worrying and fretting to comb her hair in perfect rows.

  They began debating the virtues of having several bathrooms versus having just one in a way that made me think neither really cared about this issue; each just wanted to have the final word.

  Deirdre came back from the alley, trailing in with her a faint smell of cigarette smoke, just in time to hear Charlotte say to her husband, “You make a relevant but facile point.” She sat down at her desk and began banging at her keyboard a little too loudly.

  Deirdre glanced over and rolled her eyes at me, scoffing at the unfairness of being subjected to yet another public display of domestic discord. There was something in the tone of their conversation that suggested they enjoyed having an audience. I didn’t mind. I had been part of a couple and knew how weirdly lonely it can get, and how, from time to time, you need someone to hear the trees falling in the forest.

  “Why don’t we go look at the apartment?” I said. “Just to give you an idea of what’s out there. You have to start the search somewhere.”

  They gazed at each other, silently conversing: Should we? Shouldn’t we?

  “It’s right around the corner,” I said. “We can walk.”

  Passing the Nut House

  It was still pouring when we stepped outside. My umbrella was one of those unreliable folding kind, and I couldn’t get it to open. Within a few seconds, the shoulders of my suit jacket—Prada, inappropriately dressy for that hour of the day, but since it had cost only $90 at the consignment shop, I considered it casual wear—were wet.

  “There’s room for one more,” Samuel said, lifting up his huge umbrella a little higher.

  I’m usually too proud to accept generosity from men, especially if they’re handsome, but in this case, doing battle with a cheap accouterment seemed the more emasculating position, so I tossed my umbrella into a trash barrel, mumbling something about it being a useless piece of garbage, and stepped under theirs.

  It was awkward, walking up the street like that, bumping against one another, each of us getting wet in a different place, but I liked the feeling of being between them, hovering slightly above both, protected by their umbrella and, for the length of time it took to walk four blocks, a part of their lives, even if an insignificant part.

  As we were passing the Nut House, Samuel smiled at Charlotte, more confirmation, I thought, that they’d just spent fifty minutes there. Because Charlotte had already brought up drugs, depression, and suicidal longings, it didn’t seem wildly inappropriate to ask if they had a counselor there, but remembering how offended “Carlo” had been by my vacation question the night before, I attempted a bit of discretion.

  “Nice building, isn’t it?” I said. “I used to go there to see a shrink, not that I needed one.”

  “We went there for the same reason,” Charlotte said. “We fired our counselor this morning. She kept trying to make us change the things that aren’t working in our marriage. I mean, if it was that easy, why would we have been there in the first place?”

  “They always want you to change,” I said. “It’s depressing.”

  Almost everyone I knew, with the exception of Edward, was in or had been in therapy at some point in his life, ostensibly to solve his problems. But for some, going into therapy was a costly but effective way to settle into a holding pattern until they’d figured out an airtight rationalization for clinging to their neuroses and counterproductive habits. After all, there’s room for only so many geniuses and prodigies in the world. For the rest of us, our best shot at individuality comes in the form of unique character flaws and neurotic patterns.

  “What really happened,” Samuel said, “was that she, the counselor, finally got me, the husband, to see that Charlotte, the wife, had a point about getting an apartment in town. As soon as we settled that, Charlotte decided we didn’t need her anymore.”

  “It was generous of you to go along with the idea,” I said.

  He shrugged. “I was outnumbered. I had no choice.”

  Like most men, it seemed, he took a completely passive attitude toward his marriage and let his wife figure out what was required to keep it together.

  Dishwasher People

  I knew the apartment was wrong for them as soon as we walked in. I’d written the description based on information the owner of Cambridge Properties had given me without ever having visited it, but I saw now that despite its attractive layout, much of the character and style had been sanded, painted, and Home Depot’d into bland facelessness. Everything in the place was depressingly new and functional. It was perfect for the customers I thought of as Dishwasher People.

  There are customers who want a living space that fits in with their lives, their taste, and their aesthetic sense of balance and proportion, and then there are the people who want a dishwasher. In the former category, there are people who walk into an apartment or a house and pay attention to the height of the ceilings, the exposure of the windows, the way the rooms flow one into the other, the width of the floorboards. In the latter category are the people who ask: “Is there a dishwasher?” and then, if the answer is yes, plop down a deposit. The former group looks for a place that will be a good staging ground for the drama of their lives, the latter looks for the location of the cable hookup. Oddly enough, I had the impression that most Dishwasher People didn’t really care all that much about a dishwasher. They just felt obliged to show interest in some concrete detail, so they wouldn’t appear to be an easy target for avaricious sellers or landlords. I doubt many Dishwasher People ever use dishwashers since they tend to be the workaholic sort who rarely spend more than two waking hours at home and subsist on frozen dinners you can eat out of the packaging.

  Technically, I’m a Dishwasher Person manqué. That is, I checked first to see if my house had a dishwasher and cable hookup, and when I saw it didn’t, I bought it anyway.

  Charlotte and Samuel entered the apartment with the tentative silence that often overcomes people when they first start looking at real estate. The couple that owned the apartment had equipped it with the kind of nondescript, supposedly tasteful furniture and artwork (some of which could be found at my house) that constitutes an erasure of all taste. They’d outfitted the living room with a sleek rowing machine and exercise bike, conveniently facing the very big television set.

  “The furniture is all going,” I said, watching Charlotte sink into an immense slipcovered chair that bore no relation to
any of the other furniture in the room.

  “I suppose the walls and ceilings and floors stay,” she said.

  Sam had his hands in the pockets of his raincoat. “Recently painted. And very clean.”

  “He’s the glass-half-full part of the pair,” Charlotte told me. “Also the cook,” she explained as he went looking for the kitchen. She picked up a big, brightly painted balsa wood sculpture of a bird, one of those individual works of art that are imported from Mexico in the tens of thousands. “I hadn’t thought about it before, but in your job, you get to peek into people’s lives directly, more so than a shrink even. They have to wade through annotations and outright lies, while you see the inside of the medicine cabinets.”

  “I never pry,” I said. “I’m scrupulously discreet.”

  “I don’t believe you.” And then, pouting, she said, “I’m dying to open this and see what’s inside.” She touched the handle on a small cabinet beside her chair. “You wouldn’t mind, would you?”

  “Go right ahead.”

  Charlotte was delighted with the contents: a stack of TV Guides, a large box of cheap, chocolate-covered almonds, and two cartons of cigarettes. “All the things about themselves they don’t want us to know,” she said. “Do you think there are pictures of them anywhere?”

  “I’m sure there are. Everyone has pictures, even though it seems easier to me just to look in a mirror. Should we go explore?”

  “If I can pry myself out of this chair.”

  In the course of our conversation, she’d arranged herself in the big chair in a provocative manner with her coat falling open and her legs crossed at the knee in a way that drew attention to their shapeliness. She was wearing a pair of dark shoes with thin heels that accentuated her calves. I wasn’t at all conflicted about my (homo)sexuality, but I enjoyed looking at women’s bodies, almost as much as I enjoyed looking at men’s. Sometimes more, since there was no envy, angst, or lurid desire to possess or to be the other.

  I was about to compliment her appearance in the fatuous, automatic way I sometimes have when Samuel’s cell phone went off in the other room, and he began a quiet conversation. Charlotte cocked her head and played with the loose strands of her hair while trying to overhear what he was saying without being too obvious about it.

  “A business call?” I asked.

  “It could be. Or it could be his mistress.” She turned to me and opened her dark, tired eyes wide, as if to say: What do you make of that? Am I shocking you?

  “Oh? Does he have one?”

  “You never know. I’ve been encouraging him to get one for some time now.”

  They’re just playing around with me, I thought. Samuel was being honest when he said they’d never buy. They probably have no intention of buying. I knew the type well, the pseudoshoppers who figure it’s cheaper and easier to look at real estate on a week-day morning or a Sunday afternoon than to head to the beach or feign interest in a symphony. I extended my hand and pulled her up out of the chair. “We’ll poke our heads into the other rooms and see if we can find anything of interest.”

  The rest of the apartment was as wrong as the front rooms—dark, despite large windows, and poorly laid out. I made a point of showing her the cramped closets, using them as an excuse to brush up against her a little too closely a couple of times. I wanted her to like me, even though I wasn’t sure how much I liked her.

  “Scented candles,” Charlotte said. “What do you think that’s all about?”

  The air in the master bedroom was heavy with the cloying smell of artificial vanilla.

  “Undoubtedly what everything else is about—self-hatred and insecurity.” That, in abridged form, was my version of the meaning of life.

  The bureau was lined with small, framed photographs, a brief montage of the courtship and marriage of the owners, one of those young professional couples who look as if they spend all their free time alternating between healthy outdoor activities and massive drinking binges.

  “Why are they selling?” Charlotte asked.

  Office rumor had it that the wife was pregnant and that they were looking for a place in the suburbs. But it seemed too tidy a mirror image of Charlotte and Samuel’s move, and I was a little worried that it might sound to her as if the young couple was starting the richest part of their lives while they were sliding into late middle age and empty-nest irrelevance.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “Some people just want to make a change.”

  Touch

  Charlotte and I were back in the living room when Samuel finished his phone call and emerged through the pantry door. He sat on the arm of the big, soft chair and leaned against his wife. It was unusual to see a long-married couple touch each other in public; most display a faint trace of revulsion at the idea. Samuel’s face, I saw, had a shiny cleanliness that made me think he probably got facials. I’d heard that a lot of heterosexual men of a certain age got facials, reportedly for reasons of professional advancement, the only acceptable reason for men to engage in any activity that might be considered vain. The trend of shaving one’s scrotum had also supposedly spread to heterosexual men. I’d been assured of this fact by a number of friends whose incontrovertible proof was always the same: “I’ve had sex with lots of straight guys who shave their balls.” From this I inferred that the trend had spread primarily to the kind of straight men who routinely have gay sex. It crossed my mind to wonder about Samuel in this regard, too, but only briefly.

  I was just about to suggest we all go out for lunch somewhere, so I could get a better chance to find out what they were looking for, when Samuel announced that he had to head back to his office.

  “I don’t think this is the place for us,” Charlotte said.

  “I don’t think so either,” I said. “But call me in a few days and I’ll have lots of other places you can look at.”

  “Good man,” Samuel said. He kissed the top of Charlotte’s head. We buttoned up our coats and jackets and walked out together.

  As I parted company with them in front of the office, rain pouring off the rim of their umbrella, I began thinking about how soon I reasonably could get in touch with them with the excuse of new properties to show.

  “Style”

  Jack Nelson, one of my officemates, was on the phone, berating a client. Jack had a loud, deep voice and a sales technique that revolved mostly around intimidation and veiled threats.

  “Hey listen,” he brayed, “if you don’t want to buy it, that’s your business. But I’ll tell you one thing right now: you’d be a fool not to. Well, then don’t. But don’t complain to me when the place goes up forty percent in value by Christmas.”

  With that, he hung up the phone and began erasing names from his appointment book. “They’ll buy it,” he said to me. “They’ll call back in half an hour and make an offer. If not, it’s their loss.”

  I took off my sports jacket and shook it once. Instantly, it was as dry as it had been, hanging in my closet that morning. It was made out of an elaborate blend of synthetic materials that repelled water, stains, wrinkles, and all odors. Somehow or other, I’d missed the moment, like so many other moments, when expensive designers had started to use plastic and rubber to make their clothes. “Why are they hesitating?” I asked Jack.

  “Some horseshit about it being the wrong layout and the wrong neighborhood and the wrong size.” He crumpled up a piece of paper and tossed it into the trash. All of his gestures were like this—firm and decisive. “‘We want an eat-in kitchen,’” he mocked.

  “Maybe it’s not right for them.”

  “Hey, it’s in their price range, it’s got a roof and a toilet. You can’t have everything in life. Am I right?”

  “Jack, you are so right.” I fished through my pockets for the keys to the apartment I’d just shown Charlotte and Samuel.

  Jack was in his late fifties, a retired gym teacher who’d entered real estate a decade or so earlier, after his wife had walked out on him. He was a stocky, gray-haired m
an, handsome in a pugnacious, barrel-chested sort of way, but with the dark, scowling demeanor of a man who was convinced life had dealt him an unfair hand. Maybe it had to do with his height.

  He lived in a state of slowly simmering misery at the thought that anyone else in the world was earning more than he was or working less or getting even a fraction more pleasure out of life. My brother in California was another of this sort; he was always talking about the income and job promotions of relatives and childhood friends as if he were accusing them of criminal activity. Jack worked hard, put in long hours, and much to my astonishment, his bitter, aggressive style paid off. He wasn’t afflicted, as I was, with the desire to make people’s lives better through their real estate purchases; he just wanted to close the deal.

  “What were you showing?” he asked me as I put the keys back in the cabinet. I sat at my desk and started a file on Samuel and Charlotte. I always write up a little psychiatric intake sheet on clients when I first meet them, even if I think it’s unlikely I’ll see them again. You never know which connections might come in handy. “I was showing them the Avon Hill Manhattan-style layout,” I told Jack.

  “Overpriced,” he scowled. “Lousy management company, the maintenance fees are ridiculous, and the building’s in horrible shape. They going to take it?”

  “Not their style,” I said.

  He scoffed at this. “Whatever that means. Style. ‘It’s not my style.’ Since when does a condo have to have a ‘style’? It’s got three bedrooms, doesn’t it? They want ‘style’ on top of that?”

  “You have a point, Jack. Have you shown the place to many people?”

  “A few times. No takers. At the moment, I’m working with a bunch of whiners.”

  Jack had absolutely no interest in the aesthetics of a house or apartment and was genuinely baffled by objections to crude renovations, the destruction of architectural integrity, or other such considerations. He was all about practicality and function, the original Dishwasher Person. Jack considered me a fool for paying so much attention to the demands and requests of my clients, for trying to get to know them and find out about their tastes and their fantasies of an ideal life. But he suffered fools gladly because we made him feel better about himself, and so he and I got along well. Like most people who appear to be opposites, we were undoubtedly more similar than either of us realized.