Stephen McCauley - Alternatives to Sex

Once I’d stowed the ironing board, I heard the computer calling me from the room on the top floor of the house I used as a study. I felt an actual physical craving to sit down at the thing and start typing, similar to the physical craving I felt for coffee the instant I opened my eyes in the morning. At this very moment, upstairs in that study, on that very computer for which I’d paid good money and which therefore was completely within my rights to use, there was a huge party going on, a sweaty orgy of anticipation and flirtation. Within a three-mile radius of my house, thousands of men were logged on to their computers, making connections and offering unlimited opportunities for excitement, distraction, and, yes, disappointment, but even that had its appeal. And I was missing out on all of it.

I decided to vacuum, always a reliable alternative to sex. I’d bought my vacuum cleaner for $500 several years earlier, and it had quickly become my most cherished possession. I suppose there’s a lot to take issue with in the German character, but one thing you absolutely cannot take away from Germans is their skill at making appliances. Vacuum cleaners are like bread: the less gimmickry, the better the product. This model was a sleek silver canister that was a shining example of simplicity and efficiency, the vacuum equivalent of a simple, crusty baguette. The two floors of my apartment comprise 1,875 square feet, and I went over every bit of it (minus the study, which I didn’t dare enter) in a little under an hour.

I tried to make dinner, but couldn’t muster up enough enthusiasm for cooking to bother putting together my usual scrambled-eggs-and-potato specialty. Like a lot of lonely people, I tended to eat breakfast food at all meals. I tossed a tray of frozen something into the microwave (no dishes or pans to wash) and brought it into the living room and turned on the TV. I’d stopped watching television with any regularity when I started my sex binge, and judging from what I now saw as I spun through the channels, in the intervening months, the usual programming on every channel had been replaced by shows on which people in bikinis sat around eating insects.

I checked my watch and saw that I’d been home for a total of two hours. It wasn’t a promising start to the evening. I could feel my frustrated desire to log on morphing into anger and decided to focus some of my rage on the president and his wacko right-wing buddies and their apparent plan to start a preemptive war. But that led to more depression, which led to an intensified desire for carnal distraction.

Reading, that had been my plan. I went to my bedroom and picked up The Mandarins (wonderful title) and sat down on the chaise longue, exactly as I had pictured myself doing at various points throughout the day. This particular chaise was not quite longue enough for my ridiculous legs, a detail I’d forgotten in my meditative fantasies, and my feet hung off the edge at an uncomfortable angle. I resettled and opened the book. The recent paperback edition I owned had a fifty-two-page introduction by Rosemary Boyle, a contemporary poet and part-time academic who’d become famous for writing a memoir about being a widow. The biographical note on her was twice the length of the one on Beauvoir. She started out praising the novel and quickly lapsed into an explanation of why the intelligent reader should attempt to suffer through its many long, boring sections. “The exasperating tedium of these chapters, the difficulty of forcing oneself to read page after page after page of unnecessary dialogue and descriptive passages will be handsomely rewarded by the satisfaction one feels upon reaching the end.”

These discouraging words had not been part of my fantasies either. Part II of the introduction opened with Boyle’s description of the ways in which Madame de Beauvoir had inspired her to write her own most recent best seller, an “infinitely more succinct” novel that had won “several major literary prizes.”

The third section of the introduction began with a beguiling question: “Why dust off this unwieldy antique now, especially in this flawed, barely coherent translation?”

My back was aching from the way I’d had to contort my body and I could hear the whirr of the computer from my study. As an indication of the dangerous water I was headed toward, I began to think about Didier, a scrawny troublemaker who’d been dropping in and out of my life in assorted unwholesome ways for a couple of years. Don’t, don’t, don’t, I reminded myself and then, in a moment of inspiration, picked up the phone and dialed my tenant, Kumiko.

After my usual cheerful inquiries about the apartment, the hot water, and her artwork, I said, “I think we need to have a conversation soon—”

“About money,” she said, cutting me off. “Am I right?”

“Yes, you are.”

“You see, I know you well. I’ve been told I have psychic powers.”

She was leading me down the path of irrelevance, a tactic she often used to derail conversations about the rent. Figuring out that the landlord to whom you owe more than $3,000 is calling about money doesn’t exactly qualify you for the Uri Geller Hall of Fame.

“We need to talk about the rent.”

“You’re angry at me, William. It would probably be best for both of us if you’d just admit that you’re angry.”

“I don’t see how it matters whether I’m angry or not.”

“It matters to me. It matters a great deal. You think I’m not trying.”

“Of course I think you’re trying, Kumiko.” I cursed myself for saying her name. Every time I uttered it, I felt I’d handed her a small victory. “I’m not accusing you of not trying.”

“Well then, what are you accusing me of? Please. Tell me. Do you think it’s easy selling art since September eleventh?”

It sounded to me as if she was about to get tearful, something I couldn’t abide. I decided, for her sake, to let the attempt at exploiting the terrorist attacks pass. “I’m accusing you…I’m not accusing you…Listen, Kumiko”—that name again—“let’s just take a deep breath and calm down, all right?”

“It’s not easy to calm down when you’re about to be evicted and your landlord won’t even tell you why.”

When I’d bought the house three years earlier, the first-floor apartment was inhabited by an elderly couple who’d been living there for twenty years. I was happy to have them in residence, despite a blaring television twenty-four hours a day. They paid the minimal rent exactly on time, and more important, I didn’t have to go through the process of interviewing tenants and making a selection, something I dreaded because I’d been a renter for so long and was infinitely more comfortable in that role.

A year after I bought, the couple announced that they were relocating to a retirement village in Texas. “We hear it’s hot, hot, hot three hundred and sixty-five days a year,” the husband told me. “That’s what we want. Hot, hot, hot.” My widowed mother had moved to an assisted living facility in Arizona a few years earlier, also giving intolerably high temperatures as the central attraction. “Doesn’t the heat bother you?” I’d asked her after listening to her brag about having had a week of 120-degree days. Her indignant answer: “I’ve got the air-conditioning set at sixty-five, twenty-four/seven. I live in sweaters and long pants and sleep under an electric blanket. Why would the heat bother me? I’m freezing.”

Before moving to hell, the elderly couple had told me there was a woman in the neighborhood they’d met a few times who was looking for a place to live; her current landlords, they explained, had raised her rent two hundred percent.