Alternatives to Sex: A Novel

by Stephen McCauley

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780743288965
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	04/05/2006
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	428 KB

About the Author

Stephen McCauley is the author of Alternatives to Sex, True Enough, The Man of the House, The Easy Way Out, My Ex-Life, and The Object of My Affection, which was adapted into a film starring Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Visit his website at StephenMcCauley.com.

Read an Excerpt

Alternatives to Sex

A Novel

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By Stephen McCauley

Simon & Schuster

Copyright © 2006 Stephen McCauley
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0743224736

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a start

My decision to practice celibacy had nothing to do with prudery or penance, morality or manners, dysfunction, or fear of disease. It had very little to do with sex. It was all about real estate.

What had started out, one year earlier, as a bout of benign computer dating -- a euphemism for online chatting followed by brief encounters, less impersonal than old-fashioned anonymous sex because you exchanged fake names with the person -- had turned into an almost daily ritual that had replaced previous pastimes such as reading, going to the movies, working, exercising, and eating. I'm exaggerating, of course, but by how much, I'd rather not say. For months, I'd known that my habits were slipping out of control, but I figured that as long as I acknowledged my behavior was a problem, it wasn't one.

And then, one rainy September morning -- coincidentally, the same morning Samuel Thompson and Charlotte O'Malley wandered into my life -- I woke up and decided that too much really was enough. I could feel trouble pressing down on me like the low dark sky outside my bedroom window. I lived in a house near the top of a steep, San Francisco-like hill, but rather than a view of the Pacific, I saw from my windowsthe colorful sprawl of Somerville, Massachusetts -- jagged rooftops and the tight grid of streets -- and in the near distance, the cozy, unimpressive skyline of Boston, minimized this morning by the clouds. The previous owners of my house had installed a picture window in the master bedroom, an architectural feature I frequently deride but secretly love. As I stood looking out through the streaks of rain, a plane dropped from the clouds in its approach to Logan Airport. The sight of it, popping suddenly into view like that, jolted me. For the past year, the sight of airplanes heading toward the buildings of the city had been alarming.

Do something about your life, I told myself, a directive that's usually, in my case, translated as: Stop doing something.

For some reason, a disproportionate number of the men I met online turned out to live in dank basement apartments with minimal, makeshift furnishings that didn't acknowledge the existence of aesthetics -- sofas made out of rolled-up futons, mattresses on the floor, television sets that took up half a room, collapsible bookshelves lined with DVD boxes. I hate DVDs. I'd switched from vinyl records to tapes, from tapes to CDs, from convection ovens to microwaves, from typewriters to computers, from landlines to cell phones, from revival movie houses to videocassette rentals, and as far as I was concerned, that was the end of it. I'd traveled as far along the technology highway as I could, and the sight of those skinny boxes gobbling up space in the video stores (and on collapsible bookcases) was enough to send me into a spiral of despair and dread.

It's always good to take a stand in life, even a completely meaningless one.

I don't mean to be a snob about anyone else's taste or to suggest that my own is worth bragging about. I don't really have taste; I have reactions to other people's. I have opinions. If I walked into my own apartment with anything resembling objectivity (fortunately, an impossibility) my reaction would undoubtedly be disapproval. Too beige. Too many midcentury lines and angles. Too self-consciously symmetrical. Way too clean and tidy. Who lives here? I'd wonder. What's at the center of this guy's life, aside from dusting? But imperfect as my own place was, the fact that I so often connected with men who chose to live unfurnished, subterranean lives had started to worry me. Maybe, if I kept to current habits, my future lay in that direction. Downward.

The night before, I'd spent an impersonal, passionate forty minutes with someone who claimed to be called Carlo. Most of the men I met claimed to have names that were either Latin-lover mellifluous or vigorously American West: Carlo, Marco, Hank, Jake. I usually called myself Everett. My name is William Collins. I wasn't cheating on anyone, wasn't breaking a vow of fidelity, wasn't sneaking a wedding ring into my pocket as I knocked on someone's basement door. But taking on an assumed name seemed to be part of the game, even part of the pleasure, and Everett, being a name that was neither mellifluous nor particularly cowboyish, struck me as unlikely enough to sound real.

Carlo was not young, not old, not unattractive, not unintelligent, not unclean. Clearly not Latin, but never mind. For the forty-minute encounter, it's most important to figure out what a person isn't (not a mass murderer, whew); figuring out what he is requires more time, not to mention the belief that such information might be useful at a later date. Carlo and Everett barely had a present, never mind the pretense of a future.

It all went predictably enough. He pranced around in a jockstrap, got down on all fours, pleaded, moaned, and complimented my height. If you can't be classically handsome, you're no longer young, and your idea of exercise is making plans to go to the gym, it helps to be awkwardly tall. He said "nice" at the appropriate moments and did a little panting thing at the end that turned me on, even if it was clearly one of his rehearsed bits. Afterward, there was that unsettling postcoital silence in which I realized I was with a stranger, noticed the dirty laundry in the corner, and saw that the TV on the bureau was tuned to FOX News. A flushed, scowling commentator was talking ominously about Iraq. I propped myself up on an elbow, ran my finger along Carlo's tan line, and to fill the conversational void, asked him if he'd been on vacation.

He rolled over onto his back and gave me an indignant look. "I'm not interested in sharing a lot of personal information," he said.

"Of course not," I said. "I'm sorry for asking. If it's any consolation, I'm not interested in hearing any. I was trying to be polite."

He pulled on a T-shirt and, satisfied by my lack of interest, said, "I was in Maine for two weeks."

"Ah," I said, and realized that I truly wasn't interested and had no follow-up comment or question.

As I was leaving his apartment, I noticed that he had bath towels -- light blue with applique peonies and bleach stains -- tacked over the eye-level basement windows for privacy. At midnight, it had been a detail that had struck me as amusingly tawdry, but now, in the gray light of morning, as I stared out at the rain, it screamed final straw.

The descending airplane disappeared from view behind the skyline of the city; when there was no ensuing rumble or billow of smoke, I got dressed and set up the ironing board in my kitchen. I'd bought a $125 iron from a catalogue that specialized in expensive laundry-related products for obsessive-compulsives. It had arrived in the mail the day before, and I was excited about using it for the very first time. I was pouring verbena-scented water into the thing when it hit me that I should give my sex life a rest for a while. I couldn't take any more dank basements and grim window treatments. You can choose who you go to bed with, but you can't choose his decor.

Besides, I had a lot of New Yorkers to catch up on. My kitchen shelves needed to be rearranged. I had to start paying much closer attention to my job. I'd been meaning to sign up for a class in tap dancing. It was now or never on the question of spirituality and me. And so on, in that irrelevant vein.

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.

Copyright 2006 by Stephen McCauley

Continues...

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Excerpted from Alternatives to Sex by Stephen McCauley Copyright © 2006 by Stephen McCauley. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

Alternatives to Sex is a bravura performance, chockablock with well-chosen words, sweeping psychological insights no truer than they should be, and characters who just might fulfill their desires for lodging and love, if only they knew what those were.
— The Washington Post

Dennis Drabelle

McCauley's latest blunt and funny novel lays bare the inner life and obsessive-compulsive behavior of William Collins, a gay 40-something Boston realtor who struggles to give up trolling the Internet for impersonal sexual liaisons. Taking stock of the year following 9/11, William attributes his promiscuity to "posttraumatic self-indulgence" and unsuccessfully attempts to trade one addiction for another: cleaning house (not always his own). When affluent straight couple Charlotte O'Malley and Samuel Thompson arrive at his office, prowling for a new home, William hopes he can close the sale and wonders if he can look to their marriage as inspiration for a long-term relationship. While McCauley entertains with a motley group of supporting characters, the novel pivots on William's close friendship with Edward, a flight attendant. Hoping to preserve their relationship by keeping it romance-free, William tries to deny his feelings for the ever-patient Edward. McCauley (True Enough) delivers the promise of emotional progress for his flawed, charming protagonist in this clever take on the desire for love, sex and real estate. (Apr.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

"McCauley's best . . . With his self-effacing wit and disarming compassion for even the most unlikely characters, McCauley proves once again that he's the master of the modern comedy of manners." — USA Today

"Hilarious, poignant, and true. Wickedly insightful about the millennium's two greatest obsessions: sex and real estate." — Darren Star, creator of Sex and the City

"Stephen McCauley is a social satirist in the tradition of Evelyn Waugh and Oscar Wilde . . . with fierce, occasionally lacerating wit; a gimlet eye for human foibles; and a commendable willingness to dally in ambivalence and moral ambiguity." — Los Angeles Times

"A light, diverting romp through eminently adult concerns: sex, real estate, fidelity and housecleaning. . . . Full of the complications of modern life. . . . Loony and delicious . . . a delightful story." — San Francisco Chronicle

From the Publisher

A light, diverting romp through eminently adult concerns: sex, real estate, fidelity and housecleaning…A delightful story.”

San Francisco Chronicle