Alternatives to Sex

A Novel

Stephen McCauley

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9780743288965
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Pleasure and guilt make mischievous bedfellows in Stephen McCauley's witty send-up of modern love, sex, and real estate. Boston real estate agent William Collins knows that his habits are slipping out of control. Due to obsessive-compulsive daily cleaning binges and a penchant for nightly online cruising for hookups, he finds his sales figures slipping despite a booming market. There's also his ongoing struggle to collect the rent from his passive-aggressive tenant and his worries about his best friend, Edward, whom he's certainly not in love with. Just as he decides to do something about his life, he meets Charlotte and Samuel, wealthy suburbanites looking for the perfect city apartment. "Happy couple, " he writes in his notes. "Maybe I can learn something from them." What he ultimately discovers challenges his own assumptions about real estate, love, and desire—and what they learn from him might unravel a budding friendship, not to mention a very promising sale. Full of crackling dialogue delivered by a stellar ensemble of players, Alternatives to Sex is a smart, hilarious chronicle of life in post-traumatic, morally ambiguous America—where the desire to do good is constantly being tripped up by the need to feel good. Right now.

Mrs. Didier

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.

Midnight Call

My phone rang at midnight. I was sitting on the chaise longue in my bedroom, reading the final pages of The Mandarins with regret. Since I’d turned forty, no one ever ca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• By the Same Author
• Copyright
• Dedication
• A Start
• Dinner Plans
• The Seven Stages
• My Wife
• Oh, Really?
• Previous Addictions
• Too Damned Happy
• Rocks and Pills
• Meaningful Relationships
• Should We? Shouldn’t We?
• Passing the Nut House
• Dishwasher People
• Touch
• “Style”
• Where Am I?
• An Alternative to Sex
• An Alternative to Vacuuming
• Landlord 101
• An Alternative to Kumiko
• A Fresh Start
• Sleep Deprivation
• Advice
• LTR
• Exactly on Time
• Edward’s Story
• Contemptuous Compassion
• Dave?
• The Beast
• Fasten Your Seat Belts
• Room 473
• Please Charlotte
• Come Again?
• A Bright Idea
• Confidence
• Just in Time
• Something
• Drying Out
• Real Estate
• Song to a Seagull
• Trapped
• Rose
• Getting My Story Straight
• Atmospheric
• Crutches
• Blowing Smoke
• Likes and Dislikes
• Feelings
• Money
• The Cousins
• Focusing on the Future
• Like Marriage
• The One
• I Doubt That’s True
• Done
• Getting Around
• Simply Buy It
• Sold
• Accepted
• Monogamy
• U.D.
• Thinking About It
• Breathing Exercises
• Thomas Merton on his Best Day
• In Theory, Yes
• Nahant
• Pampered and Expensive
• The Major Leagues
• How Embarrassing
• All her Shameful Secrets
• Mr. Collins?
• Hypotheticals
• So It Seems
• After the Fact
• Scents
• Mr. Didier
• The Remote Control
• Happy
• Alcohol Instead
• The Missing Piece
• Solutions
• Something the Matter
• Back Rubs
• Endearing New Traits
• Ulterior Motives
• Intentions
• So So
• Uncluttering
• Inspection
• One Big Sudden Something
• Mutual Interest
• Esther
• An Offer
• The Neighbors
• Mrs. Didier
• Midnight Call
• Closing
• Snowstorm
• The Center of My Life
• Anyone
• An Empty Bench
• Acknowledgments