Stephen McCauley - Alternatives to Sex

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.”

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.

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 man, 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.