Stephen McCauley - Alternatives to Sex

Vanity compels me to say that I knew my resolution was about a lot more than the towels, but pinning it on those allowed me to try and change my behavior without diving into the mucky swamp of my psychology. Enough self-deception, in other words, to make it an unthreatening place to begin.

The iron surpassed my expectations. It glided over the shirt with a life of its own, and when I hit the appropriate button, steam came out with such power, it nearly levitated. I could go on about why I love to iron—a nice straight crease in the pants, wrinkles smoothed—but it’s all pretty obvious stuff.

As I was going over my shirt for the second time, I figured it would be easier to stick to my sex resolution and break a bad habit if I kept myself busy. I’d recently turned forty—and more recently than that had turned forty-four. I’d noticed that for most of my peers, the first half of life is about acquiring bad habits and the second half is about replacing them with something else—usually, these days, some “healing” ritual that invariably turns out to be a variation on massage or a 12-step program.

The past year had been a posttraumatic time of uncertainty and anxiety for the whole country. Since the tragedy of the preceding September, everyone I knew was trying to choose between combating the collective evil of mankind by putting selfishness aside and doing good, and abandoning altruism altogether and doing whatever it took to feel good. Right now. The result seemed to be a lot of infidelity and binge eating, followed by resolutions to curtail same, followed by trips to overheated yoga studios where ninety minutes of narcissistic posing and fat-reducing exercises were said to contribute to global harmony because you collectively hummed “Om” at the end. Everyone I knew felt they had, for the first time in their pampered lives, a mission, but no one knew what it was. The pundits, the politicians, and Julia Roberts said that everything had changed, and on some level, it was true. And yet the only change everyone could name was that you were no longer supposed to pack toenail scissors in your carry-on luggage, and almost no one I knew owned a pair of those anyway.

Everyone I knew had felt a sudden need for reassuring moral absolutes, for patriotism, for righteousness. Everyone wanted to feel strong again. Then the hostile bumper stickers started appearing on the gas-guzzling cars with the flags sticking out of the windows, the political convictions grew blurry, and it was back to the massage table.

Given the timing, I had to conclude that my sexual habits of the past year were a combination of makeshift anxiety management and fatalism of the better-get-it-while-you-can variety. Or perhaps I was just trying to shift blame and ascribe global significance to my predictable midlife malaise.

I wasn’t sure, but it was a little too early in the day to define my mission in life or suddenly come up with moral absolutes. It was easier to make distracting dinner plans. I dialed my friend Edward’s cell phone to see if he was going to be in Boston that night.

“Dinner plans?” Edward said. “You haven’t wanted to make plans with me for ages. You’ve been vague and elusive for months now. I can’t pin you down on anything. You must be in despair. What is it?”

Edward and I had been friends for over three years, but because he was a flight attendant with an erratic schedule, it was hard to make dates with him. It was also true that since I’d started my sex bender, I’d avoided tying myself down with social engagements. By eight o’clock on most nights, I grew restless to get on the computer and line up the next disappointment.

I wouldn’t have minded telling Edward I was giving up sex for a while, but telling him what I planned not to do would have meant revealing to him what I had been doing, and because I was a few years older than he and better educated (although unquestionably less intelligent), I always tried to give him the impression that I was above superficial concerns about age, weight, sex, laundry, and most of the other things I was obsessed with.

“You’re being melodramatic,” I said. “I haven’t seen you in a while, and I miss you. I’m getting ready for work, and I thought of you, and here we are.”

“For the record,” he said, “I don’t believe that. But we’ll let it pass.” Edward had a croaky voice, and especially on cell phones, he sounded like someone getting over a mild case of laryngitis. Maybe it was the dry, recycled air he breathed on planes day after day. Whatever the cause, it made him sound adolescent, as if he hadn’t entirely settled into his voice. “Where would we have dinner?”

“Your choice.”

As he thought this over, I heard a lot of commotion in the background, the low hum of voices and the squawk of PA announcements. On principle, I felt compelled to object to invasive, obnoxious cell phones, but really, I loved the way they gave a you-are-there documentary quality to even the most dull conversations. Even conversations with my elderly mother—usually so hypnotically mundane they passed into profundity—had taken on a degree of drama as she chatted with me on her mobile and simultaneously interacted with a large cast of characters she met as she strolled around the grounds of her assisted living facility in Arizona. (“Oh, Christ, here comes that old lush I was telling you about last time. Hi, Carrie. You’re dressed for the heat all right!”)

“That’s a lot of noise for eight in the morning,” I said. “Where are you?”

“I’m walking through O’Hare, and it’s seven in the morning here. I’ve walked past three thousand people, and not one of them has cast even a casual glance in my direction. I went through the security gate, had my luggage searched, and officially entered the invisible stage of life.”

Edward’s version of the Seven Stages of Man was this: Jail Bait, Barely Legal, Fuckable, Barely Fuckable, Irrelevant, Invisible, and Dead. If I had to choose a category in which to put him, I’d say he was still very much Fuckable, but I would never have said this to his face because I didn’t want to give him any wrong ideas.

His sex life consisted mainly of intense attractions to men with some tenuous claim to heterosexuality—a girlfriend who lived in another city, an ex-wife, a child or two they were helping to support. Straight men, Edward claimed, were just different, by which he meant, in a self-hating way, better. He met most of these better men while serving them drinks on airplanes. They’d show up at Edward’s hotel room draped in their superior heterosexuality, drop to their knees, and beg to be controlled, feminized, and fucked, things Edward was definitely not interested in doing.

As for his claims that straight men are different from gay men, I suppose there’s truth in it, although the only consistent difference I’ve noticed is that straight men rarely buy their own clothes.

I was touched by the thought of Edward, a short man with light hair and boyishly thin arms, alone, wheeling his little black suitcase through the bustling, nervous crowds of such a large and chaotic airport.

“If you turn around right now,” I said, “you’ll probably see that at least half a dozen people have stopped to give you a long, lascivious second glance.”

“Oh, you think so? Let me check. Well, there’s one. Five thousand years old and drooling, but never mind. I feel much better. Pathetic for being so shallow, but better. I hate to mess up your dinner plans, but I won’t be back in town for a few more days.”

“A few more days,” I said. “Not till then?”

“Oh, William, you are in despair. Why? Tell me. No, don’t tell me. I don’t have time to listen. I hope it’s interesting, that’s all. Will you be treating me to dinner?”