Alternatives to Sex by Stephen McCauley

Author:Stephen McCauley [McCauley, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-03-09T21:46:42.357000+00:00

I Doubt That’s True

I took Samuel and Charlotte out for lunch. I chose a restaurant not far from my office where all natural light, and most artificial, was carefully blocked at all hours of the day. It seemed marginally less humiliating to give a heavy sales pitch, full of exaggerations and outright lies, in a place where I was only partly visible. The deep shadows appealed to my vanity as well. I’d tried to talk myself into believing the creasing and collapsing of my face came off as virile cragginess and was, thus, an asset, but then a mirror would suddenly pop up between me and my delusions of Paul Newman.

We were shown to the darkest corner of the restaurant, and I sat opposite them, pulling out listing sheets and sales figures for the Cambridge market over the past several months, all in an attempt to convince Samuel that buying the condo was the best possible investment he could make. We worked our way through a stack of documents, passing around a little votive candle and holding it up to the pages. Charlotte was strangely quiet, as if she didn’t want to spoil my work by appearing too eager. I could sense Samuel was still unconvinced, unless he was simply trying to annoy his wife by holding out.

“I’m not going to leap into anything,” Samuel said in a flat, final tone. “It’s a nice place, not great, but nice. I’m not saying no, but I’m not jumping.” He turned around. “The service isn’t very good here, is it?”

Later, when we’d nearly finished our meal and had sunk to the level of discussing the merits of a couple of new restaurants none of us had been to, Andrew Scali swam into my peripheral vision. I could see his bald pate and his wide, healthy grin approaching, even in the dim light of the restaurant.

“Well, well, well,” he said, in his hearty, jocular way. “Look at this. Three of my favorite people in the world, together at one table. Don’t get up. Who’s doing what to whom?”

He pulled up a chair and straddled it with the back facing the table, grinning and assuming dominance over the party, as if he were responsible for bringing us all together.

“You know Andrew?” Charlotte asked me.

“Everyone does,” I said, and then, trying to be provocative, I added, “But few know him as well as I do.”

Andy chuckled at this comment. He liked to categorize people, probably as a way of keeping his thousands of acquaintances clear in his mind. He seemed, in recent years, to have moved me in his mental filing cabinet from “Helpful Friend” to “Amusing Acquaintance” and had the annoying habit of acting as if most of what I said was a joke. He was an accountant, but that was merely the title on his door. Most of his time and energy went into a stunning variety of real estate investments and creative entrepreneurial endeavors that had earned him, judging from the way he lived, vast sums of money.

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