Stephen McCauley - Alternatives to Sex

“I’d love to. Then I’ll feel more in control of the situation.” I vacillate between pointless generosity (keeping a tenant in my first-floor apartment who rarely pays her rent, for example) and bouts of pennywise parsimoniousness that last a few hours at most. Maybe celibacy would lead to a spell of frugality and wise investment. My sales figures at the real estate office where I worked were not what they should have been.

I sprinkled more scented linen water on my shirt, hit the steam jet on the iron, and was engulfed in a fragrant fog.

“If you’re paying, I accept the invitation. We’ll go someplace that’s overpriced and where no one’s likely to be holding hands. You’re not ironing, are you?”

Edward had an uncanny ability to read my mind and guess at my activities. (He’d probably guessed at my sex spree, for example.) He was unusually sensitive to the smallest gestures and shifts in vocal inflection, but this seemed unnervingly on-target, even for him. Not wanting to give him the satisfaction of being one hundred percent correct, I clicked off the iron and unplugged it. “I was,” I said. “How did you know?”

“I could hear you banging it against the board. Plus there was that weird distracted tone you get when you’re doing housework. Are you using that hundred-and-twenty-five-dollar thing you told me about? You could have given that money to a worthy, hopeless cause. Me, for example. You should be ashamed of yourself for buying a thing like that.”

“I am ashamed,” I said. “I’m deeply ashamed.” I find even the most egregious self-indulgence forgivable if it’s accompanied by massive helpings of shame, regret, or self-hatred. Even murderers are shown a degree of leniency if they can cough up a bit of remorse.

“I hope it’s not a pillowcase or a dish towel you’re ironing, something truly demented.”

I assured him that it was a cotton shirt, one that was genuinely in need of ironing.

“And it’s yours, isn’t it? Not your wife’s.”

“It’s mine,” I told him. “And it’s a very nice one. White with an invisible white pattern that only registers subliminally. A Dutch designer with an unpronounceable name. My wife prefers peasant costumes.”

Edward called the tenant on the first floor of my house my “wife” because he was convinced that my relationship with her had taken on the most destructive qualities of a bad marriage. He wasn’t entirely wrong in this, but I resented the term even so. She—a painter called Kumiko Rothberg, speaking of fake names—was perpetually several months behind on the rent. As of that morning, she owed me $3,000, plus the $500 I’d loaned her to pay off a debt she owed to a previous landlord. A month or so earlier, I’d made the mistake of telling Edward that I’d let her come upstairs to use my ironing board and had ended up doing the ironing myself. I’d resisted the temptation to confess that since then she sometimes left a few rumpled articles of clothing in the front hall with an attached note reading, “If you have time,” and that somehow, I always found the time. I hoped it would encourage her to be more diligent about paying her rent. So far, this hadn’t worked.

Edward claimed he never would have allowed the situation to get so out of control. This undoubtedly was true; like most people who are one hundred percent submissive in the bedroom, Edward was a tyrant everywhere else in his life.

“I was going to call you anyway,” Edward said. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to discuss with you for a while. I’m about to make some big changes and I want to talk to you about them.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes, really. And don’t take that condescending tone. I’m very serious about this.”

“What are they?”

“I’m not going to tell you now. It’ll give us something to discuss over dinner. You certainly don’t tell me what’s going on with you.”

Edward was always contemplating making big changes in his life, but usually they turned out to be something like replacing the bathroom vanity with a pedestal sink or starting a new fitness regimen that required the hands-on assistance of a paid professional who happened to be devastatingly handsome and muscular. I was happy that the planned changes never went deeper than that, since, in my mind, Edward was nearly perfect exactly as he was—due mostly to his many imperfections.

“I’ll come by your apartment at eight on Thursday,” I told him. “Where are you off to?”

“Dallas and then some other hell spot, back to Chicago, and then LA, then home.”

“Have a safe trip.”

“That’s my hope, but unfortunately, my fate is in the hands of arrogant pilots, hungover mechanics, lunatic baggage handlers, and the minimum-wage kids checking the carry-on luggage for guns. Here’s my gate.”

The phone went dead.

When commercial airliners had been used as weapons, Edward had started to talk openly about job-related safety concerns for the first time since I’d known him. He was worried about more terrorist attacks and, equally, about the dismal state of maintenance standards in the face of major financial losses by the airlines. His status in the world had changed radically since the events of the previous September; after years of condescension and derision, being thought of as an unwholesome cross between a cocktail waitress and an airborne geisha, Edward was now treated with the hushed reverence generally reserved for military personnel, Nobel Prize winners, and really good dermatologists.

I was happy that Edward finally was being given some of the respect he deserved, but all things considered, it seemed like small compensation.

As I was leaving the house for work, I thought that if I stuck to my celibacy resolution for a couple of months, I might be able to tell a few friends about my recent adventures. All of my previous addictive behavior had been of the most deeply shameful kind: an obsession with vacuum cleaning; a tendency to furtively clean a sink or bathtub when I went to someone’s house for dinner; maintaining a small file of index cards with tips for using hair spray, nail polish remover, lemonade mix, and other household standards as cleaning agents; the ironing thing. During the scattered periods of my life when I’d been in long-term relationships, I’d been ashamed by my adeptness at fidelity, which had made me feel unmanly. I’d used evasive language and innuendo to convey the impression that I was leading a wildly promiscuous life. But once I’d added promiscuity to my repertoire of diversions, I’d done my best to imply that I spent most of my evenings alone at home reading the complete works of Simone de Beauvoir, an intellectual with top-shelf name recognition whose work no one is eager to discuss with anything resembling specificity. If I ever did reorganize my life and take on one of those someday-before-I-die literary projects, I’d feel a lot more comfortable once again assuming the identity of a sexual libertine, using the details I’d accumulated in the past year. Before locking the door of my house behind me, I rushed back upstairs to my bedroom and put a copy of The Mandarins on my bedside table. You never know.

This morning, there was no basket of laundry from Kumiko waiting for me in the entryway, a huge relief for about one second, before I began to worry that she hadn’t liked the way I’d done her ironing last week. I was tempted to knock on her door and assure her that with my new iron, I’d do a better job next time, but that was a bit much, even for me.

I opened up my umbrella and made a dash for my car, glistening with rain in the driveway. My house had a garage, a small bunker of concrete blocks with two windows, covered in vines, but I’d never used it once since purchasing the place. About six months earlier, I’d let Kumiko move her painting supplies into the building and set up a studio. Maybe, I’d reasoned, if she felt she was getting more for her low rent she’d be more likely to pay it. So far, I’d seen no signs that she’d used it for anything but storage.