Alternatives to Sex Read Online Free PDF

Oddly enough, I had the impression that most Dishwasher People didn’t really care all that much about a dishwasher. They just felt obliged to show interest in some concrete detail, so they wouldn’t appear to be an easy target for avaricious sellers or landlords. I doubt many Dishwasher People ever use dishwashers since they tend to be the workaholic sort who rarely spend more than two waking hours at home and subsist on frozen dinners you can eat out of the packaging.
    Technically, I’m a Dishwasher Person manqué. That is, I checked first to see if my house had a dishwasher and cable hookup, and when I saw it didn’t, I bought it anyway.
    Charlotte and Samuel entered the apartment with the tentative silence that often overcomes people when they first start looking at real estate. The couple that owned the apartment had equipped it with the kind of nondescript, supposedly tasteful furniture and artwork (some of which could be found at my house) that constitutes an erasure of all taste. They’d outfitted the living room with a sleek rowing machine and exercise bike, conveniently facing the very big television set.
    “The furniture is all going,” I said, watching Charlotte sink into an immense slipcovered chair that bore no relation to any of the other furniture in the room.
    “I suppose the walls and ceilings and floors stay,” she said.
    Sam had his hands in the pockets of his raincoat. “Recently painted. And very clean.”
    “He’s the glass-half-full part of the pair,” Charlotte told me. “Also the cook,” she explained as he went looking for the kitchen. She picked up a big, brightly painted balsa wood sculpture of a bird, one of those individual works of art that are imported from Mexico in the tens of thousands. “I hadn’t thought about it before, but in your job, you get to peek into people’s lives directly, more so than a shrink even. They have to wade through annotations and outright lies, while you see the inside of the medicine cabinets.”
    “I never pry,” I said. “I’m scrupulously discreet.”
    “I don’t believe you.” And then, pouting, she said, “I’m dying to open this and see what’s inside.” She touched the handle on a small cabinet beside her chair. “You wouldn’t mind, would you?”
    “Go right ahead.”
    Charlotte was delighted with the contents: a stack of TV Guide s, a large box of cheap, chocolate-covered almonds, and two cartons of cigarettes. “All the things about themselves they don’t want us to know,” she said. “Do you think there are pictures of them anywhere?”
    “I’m sure there are. Everyone has pictures, even though it seems easier to me just to look in a mirror. Should we go explore?”
    “If I can pry myself out of this chair.”
    In the course of our conversation, she’d arranged herself in the big chair in a provocative manner with her coat falling open and her legs crossed at the knee in a way that drew attention to their shapeliness. She was wearing a pair of dark shoes with thin heels that accentuated her calves. I wasn’t at all conflicted about my (homo)sexuality, but I enjoyed looking at women’s bodies, almost as much as I enjoyed looking at men’s. Sometimes more, since there was no envy, angst, or lurid desire to possess or to be the other.
    I was about to compliment her appearance in the fatuous, automatic way I sometimes have when Samuel’s cell phone went off in the other room, and he began a quiet conversation. Charlotte cocked her head and played with the loose strands of her hair while trying to overhear what he was saying without being too obvious about it.
    “A business call?” I asked.
    “It could be. Or it could be his mistress.” She turned to me and opened her dark, tired eyes wide, as if to say: What do you make of that? Am I shocking you?
    “Oh? Does he have one?”
    “You never know. I’ve been encouraging him to get one for some time now.”
    They’re just playing around with me, I thought. Samuel