SEX WITH STRANGERS
by Michael Lowenthal
University of Wisconsin Press. 160 pages, $17.95
IN THE EPIGRAPH of Sex with Strangers, Michael Lowenthal quotes Yoko Ono, who wrote that “every meeting is like a miracle,” considering the number of people in this world and the small fraction of them that we will encounter in our lives. These stories look at some such “miracles,” investigating the many ways people face the possibility and potentiality—and reality—of human connection, often, though not exclusively, through sex and intimacy. Lowenthal is a writer, editor, and teacher whose previous novels include Avoidance (2002), Charity Girl (2007), and The Paternity Test (2018). Sex with Strangers is his first collection of short stories, eight in all, some of them previously published in journals or anthologies.
The stories are richly varied in both setting and scope. In “Over Boy,” a gay man on the cusp of thirty feels the pull of youth, which he believes is slipping away. Out clubbing, he sees a crowd of fresh-faced college boys as emblematic of a world to which he no longer has access. It’s the kind of transition that can seem at once tectonic and blink-and-you-miss-it, happening as one ages out of a scene. But through a drugged-out encounter with a man nearly twice his age, he comes to understand that there is value in getting older—that it’s not only the young who hold the keys to beauty and promiscuity. Here as elsewhere in the collection, an unexpected encounter ends up revealing the narrator’s blind spots in how he views his own world and desires.
Lowenthal also skillfully examines what can happen when characters from past entanglements return to one’s life in a new context. In “You Are Here,” a young chaplain on a themed cruise runs into an ex-lover while counseling an older couple whose marriage is straining at the seams. He finds it difficult to explain his turn to religion to his ex, feeling the threat of slipping back into a version of himself that is no longer authentic. He grapples more broadly with the idea of change itself: understanding that inherent in every choice is the acceptance of another door closing, wondering if it isn’t enough simply to entertain the possibility of change without finally choosing to undertake it.
Three shorter pieces evoke snapshots of vivid, colorful characters experiencing the kinds of moments that leave a permanent imprint on one’s psyche. In “Stud,” a teenage busboy at a local music hall is drawn into the transfixing orbit of a famous singer passing through town. By way of a brief but forceful sexual encounter, he sees the window of his life’s possibilities opening as if for the first time. A violent sexual act leads a woman into a vortex of memory, questioning, and estrangement in “Do Us Part,” while the title character in “Marge,” an aging queen who’s been ostracized by her community, provides the narrator with a window into an alternative mode of living that both attracts and frightens him.
Pulsing with an undertone of erotic danger, “Thieves” is a story of attraction, deceit, and blackmail—of an encounter that walks the line between passion and transaction. Through the narrator, a gay American business traveler who meets two young men in a Brazilian town, Lowenthal illustrates Americans’ sinister capacity for exploiting locals and local economies in a variety of ways, including sexual ones. In “The Gift of Travel,” the longest story in the collection, twenty-something Ben cares for an older gay writer dying of AIDS while trying to reassemble the pieces of a crumbling cross-country relationship. Jim, at once patient and mentor—with whom Ben feels a bond that defies categorization—teaches him how to make the kind of mistakes that mean one is living fully and learning deeply.
Throughout Sex with Strangers, Lowenthal brings together characters and plotlines with a particular knack for plumbing the depths of his characters’ memories to paint rich back stories. Taken together, these smartly crafted stories explore the tensions between desire and restraint—the grand, enthralling fearsomeness of deep intimacy, of fully knowing another person. Perhaps what these characters all share is their “seekingness” (to borrow a word from Lowenthal). They, like us, may not always find (or even know) what they are looking for, but what matters is that they are attempting to forge connections that will lead to richer lives.
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Giancarlo Latta is a violinist, writer, and composer based in New York.
