The Consequence of Sex
by Richard C. Reinhart
Alyson Books. 242 pages, $14.95 (paper)
FOR MANY of the characters in Richard C. Reinhart’s The Consequence of Sex, sex is an easy but ineffective salve for the twin pains of loneliness and despair. While its author doesn’t tend to moralize, The Consequence of Sex is aptly named. In many of these short stories, Reinhart explores the potentially devastating physical and emotional consequences of sex, or how the importance that’s attached to sex can undermine—or overwhelm—love. The stories are filled with one-night stands, prostitution, alienation, and rape, rendering all the more poignant those few moments that gesture toward real connection or even love.
The collection begins and ends with stories about despondent, aging men. The first, “The Boys of Mérida,” follows the adventures of a pedophile, Mr. Tunsmith, as he returns to his yearly hunting grounds for what will be the last time. Reinhart is excessively fond of using words like “debased” or “degraded” to describe his characters, but only rarely does he use these words more appropriately than in this story. Generations of young boy prostitutes have come to look forward to Mr. Tunsmith’s annual visits and lavish spending from his meager hairdresser’s savings. A subplot about burgeoning love between two of the young prostitutes—and the barriers to admitting it, even when they’re in bed together—is, as they are, underdeveloped. We don’t have to like Mr. Tunsmith or what he does, but he doesn’t offer much more than an object lesson in sad depravity. The unbelievable ending finds an aging prostitute—i.e., he’s of legal age—following Mr. Tunsmith to the U.S.A. to start a life with him. Maybe the point here is to show that even someone as repugnant as Mr. Tunsmith can find love. But what passes for love in this fairy tale is really just another business transaction.
Some of the other stories, though, map out a convincing and compelling range of ways in which people think of themselves as sexual beings. Although the unbelievable corporate caricatures in “Lust’s Labors Lost” and “Magic” undermine the credibility of otherwise entertaining farce and whimsical fantasy, a few of Reinhart’s efforts take a serious look at the role of sex in shaping how we think about ourselves. For those who let their sexuality dominate their identity, like the exceptionally well-endowed protagonist of “Anatomy Lesson,” the tiniest loss of sexual vigor can begin a rapid surrender to time and to the clichés of aging. Writes Reinhart of this poor soul: “He made the emotional leap from forty to sixty in less than a year.”
At the other end of the spectrum of sex’s consequence, in “Murder,” are two former lovers, Dave and Henry, who have found a way to be “deeply loving without the confusion of being lovers.” The ambitious “After Norman: Eulogy, Memory, Legacy” traces the many ramifications for his friends and lovers of the untimely but not unexpected death of a once-promising artist. Each friend’s perspective illuminates a way in which sex has allowed this tragic man to cling to some faded form of life or human connection, just as his outdated portfolio has permitted him to foster his fragile identity as an artist. Here, Reinhart is especially adept at creating characters whose attitudes toward sex are representative of larger patterns in their lives.
The narrator of “Actor” is another of these characters. He tries to assert a chatty and puckish demeanor, but he’s too sad even to conjure the cattiness that usually accompanies the fey and dodgy language of such a man: someone who has been wounded and is always ready to be wounded again. He’s capable of clever self-deprecation, as when he observes of his body, “You need ironing.” But his fear of sex has kept him from developing all but the most ephemeral of relationships. And in the older man’s sexual stage fright, which almost destroys his relationship with a younger actor, Craig, Reinhart makes a powerful statement about the danger of having too much depend upon how we appear in the bedroom, just when we’re at our most vulnerable. By ending the collection with this story, Reinhart leaves us with a portrait of a relationship that puts sex in its place, in a way. The narrator’s eventual illness makes sex a much less important component of this relationship. After so many sexual failures—failures of sex to perform as hoped and failures of men to perform sexually—we finally see that sex is not the only thing that can express or constitute intimacy, even between two lovers.
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Thomas March teaches at the Brearley School in New York.
