The Men I Told

photo by Bommeh

After I told the first one, my mouth filled up with salt. The tears stinging my lips and tongue. 

Then falling. Blurring my phone, where I had typed the word.

Herpes.  

 “Thank you for telling me,” he typed in reply, his nondescript screenname of Scott or Steve or Sam swallowed by the humid heaviness of my apartment, the blackness of my bed. “I’m kind of a germophobe, though, so I don’t think we should meet for a date after all.” 

The letters wavered and smeared. The words melted. 

“Send nudes though?”

The salt stripped all the way down my throat. 

*

Pat forced dinner in the dim of his favorite Mediterranean restaurant before I told him, though I had only agreed to first-date cocktails. To rum and lime sweetened by simple syrup. But he insisted on some sort of autumnal feast, a garlicky spread with flat seeded crackers that stuck wadded with saliva to the top of my mouth. 

His lips hummed his instant approval, pressed flat to hold in his first forkful of the falafel, the cauliflower, the salmon, the whole indiscriminate spread. 

“So good,” he said of his lager, his pie, his friends, his career, his neighborhood. 

“All good. That won’t be a problem at all,” he wrote back to my disclosure afterward. My disclaimer before his suggested second dinner and drinks. 

Then, like a glass of flat tap water, his silence stagnated, stilled.

*

When I whispered the word, Richard winced. Coughed. Gulped his goblet of sparkling water. Then his tea. The thin porcelain rattling above the string quartet’s holiday melodies as he returned the cup to the saucer. Raised it again. Stabbed his fingers at the spongey bread of a finger-sandwich at the top of the three-tiered silver tray. Bit. Chewed. Swallowed. Adjusted his glasses. Flared his nostrils. Nodded his forehead to the erect, bow-tied server for the leather envelope of the check. Pushed his chair back. And gestured me to proceed ahead. 

A direct line to the elevator, without any of the detours he usually proposed when he came to town, when he would press my breasts hot against his body in some secret corner of this downtown hotel after a multiple course meal, after a meandering conversation about his latest investment deal, or a six-hour play he bought box seats to see, or a buzzy art opening in a crowded gallery, and then his breath would heat my lips with his pleas to come up to his room. 

But as the elevator slid down soundless tonight, he pressed his back into the opposite gold-plated wall. “I don’t think we should kiss this time.” 

*

I tell my brother Jake later how I stumbled back to my apartment in my heels in the early winter rain. Wet feet. Wet eyes. Wet open, sobbing mouth. “I should just give up,” I say. “Stop trying to find someone who will want me now. Let myself go.” 

But he knows how I used to play with little plastic figurines in our playroom on Saturday mornings before our parents awoke, when I would always arrange love matches, wedding feasts for my characters, and force his little toy people to attend. 

“No, now you need to look even hotter,” he recommends. Regular bleach appointments at the salon. More fillers in the cheeks and lips. Fewer and fewer calories. Supermodel thin.

Because last week an up-and-coming model was fucking his friend Tyler, he tells me, and Tyler banished even her from his bed when she told him, underneath him, that she had this disease. And then he scrubbed his shaft for hours in the shower afterward.  

*

Giuseppe told me that he used to model. Italian suits tailored to his broad pecs and biceps and traps, spanning catalogs and advertisements, coasts and continents. International flights back to Europe for a photoshoot, or for his mother’s spaghetti. But never for a girl, he said, tilting up his chin, as sharp as the rim of his square scotch glass, the ice block tipping back against his lips. 

“I wouldn’t get near Eastern European girls,” he said, not knowing of my great-grandmother’s girlhood there. “Those girls all have STDs.”  

The bottom of my glass clinked down on the wooden bench. 

“I have an STD,” I said.

And his wrists fluttering and flying and his apologies sputtering behind me were swallowed up by the dark, and by the shouts of men crowding the TV over beers and burgers at the bar, just before the burning red exit sign. 

*

When Jake asks about my date tonight, I tell him I would rather not discuss. Because my fingers are too slippery with potato chips for the keyboard on my screen, and my tongue is too swollen with salt.

*

With a sludge of sugared coffee the next morning, I text Jake that maybe I should tell them only via text. So they can save face. No need to rearrange their foreheads and eyebrows into smooth nonchalance while my lip is quivering. But maybe even separated by a screen, they lie to me, to themselves, about their discomfort, their intolerance, not wanting to face their true reflection in the smooth glass of their phones. Maybe my method makes no difference.  

*

I told Andrew in the middle of the first date in the middle of the pub in the middle of the sofa. His thigh spaced an arm’s length away from mine. And he wiped his palms, his jeans darkening with the condensation from his cocktail, and he raised his eyes, his lenses separating us by at least a quarter inch of impenetrable glass, and he said, “OK. No issue here.” 

And then he continued the conversation about his dog, never permitted to snuggle on the bed, never allowed to lick anyone’s face, never embraced with more than a pat.

*

Matthew’s arm squashed hot and heavy on my back before I could say anything. He took both our coats and piled them together behind him out of reach. Reached for his water and guzzled. Started a recitation of first-date trivialities: the places he had worked (a middle manager now), the cities he had called home (Las Vegas last, on the lost, desert outskirts), the women he had loved (his ex, who had moved in with him a week after they met). The words rushed out like a faucet, filling a thirsty man’s glass. 

Until I interrupted with my warning. 

“I don’t care I don’t care,” he said, spit showering and flashing into the light pool from the lamp hanging on the lounge wall. He hung his arm over my shoulder, crushed my other toward his moistened lips, straining sideways to my face. 

I floundered for my jacket, tried to unwind his limbs from mine. 

*

“How desperate can you be?” I ask Jake after I extricate myself, at home afterward while I wait for the macaroni and cheese in the microwave. 

He disagrees. “Maybe you should be more openminded to the men who are okay when you tell them,” he texts. 

And I understand I am the starving, thirsty one.

*

I wanted Rod when he walked in, his body blocking the bar’s doorway before his mouth opened in an unexpected gentle tenor, in a warm, aromatic kiss, faint citrus from the orange garnish in his old fashioned, and I told my secret then against his lips. 

“Okay,” he said. “We can just go slow.” Shoving his knee between my legs on his couch. Pushing my head back over the sofa arm. Thrusting his nose into my breasts. Squeezing my nipple with his teeth. Plunging his hands under my shoulders, my knees, and tossing my body onto his bed. 

Where we slowed. Thumbs fumbling at a zipper half-tugged, jeans half-lowered, dangling, hesitating. Outside, the blow of a train’s whistle in the night, then stillness again. “Just, I guess, just come on my tits,” I told him, and after a while, warm liquid dribbled down. 

I tried rubbing oil first between my palms, then over the huge mounds of muscle rising on his back. But when he would turn over, the front of his shorts remained flat. His body flat on his sofa every Friday night beneath the blue static shaft of the TV screen, and though I would writhe my bare legs against his thighs, flash lacy lingerie, his fingers only ever wrestled with the remote. Or with the phone, ordering boxes of greasy sausage deep dish that we stuffed into our mouths before we stumbled to his bed, where his fingers flopped at the top of my head to direct it down, though in my mouth he flopped like a rubbery, boneless thumb against my tongue. 

“I think I just have low testosterone,” he said the morning after I had awoken at 1:00 a.m. to the rotten odor of the stove burner he had twisted only halfway closed after our supper, and I had cranked all his windows open, and I had known then that he would soon give up, would soon send his inevitable text: “I can’t give you what you want.” Could only fill my mouth. 

He tried a pill, chemicals the only remedy to trick his mind and muscles toward the risk of my infected skin. But when he at last ran his hands up under my skirt, my jaw slacked. “But I don’t have any condoms,” I said. “I stopped bringing them long ago.”  

*

“There’s protection and medication,” Daniel said, nodding measuredly, the wrinkles on his brow contracting when I disclosed. “You just have to be careful,” he said. He gathered the last leaves of lettuce meticulously on his plate, then he offered his umbrella to walk me home. 

But when he returned from my bathroom, he padded gingerly down the hall toward me, my raincoat still wrapped around my body as a barrier, and he folded his fingers quietly in front of his fly, and he tilted his head tentatively, carefully for a kiss, and I touched my palm to his cheek and turned his charity away. 

*

Jeff said he did not care. Knew someone whose wife had it and they were fine. Switched the topic to his motorcycles. Rode his one-wheel hoverboard through city traffic the next week to my door. Unloaded grocery bags he had balanced on his erect sweat-slicked frame. Popped the cork on the champagne. Cork-screwed the bottle of red wine. Chopped fiery peppers that sizzled in the pan, then on his tongue winding with mine. Tore all his clothes off in a pile. Handed his hard cock to my grip. Sprang his knees up off the bed. Yanked his T-shirt and pants back on. Waved his arm, dashing off to catch the night’s last train. Left me leaning on the doorframe. My hand still sticky. My body still fully clothed.  

*

I edit the evening into a comedic episode when I tell Jake later that night, while I ladle leftovers from the pans into my mouth with the serving spoon. But though my mouth is full, I am empty. My stomach puffed like a hot souffle; the void between my legs deflated, the way the confection collapses, afterward, when it cools.

*

Richard offered breakfast on a summer Saturday, as if he had just now recovered from the nausea, the disgust that had infected him from my exposure last winter at our holiday tea. 

But he gulped his coffee and pushed his plate of eggs away. Backed his chair up and mumbled a reference to some imminent family commitment. Flailed an elbow in an approximation of an embrace, one arm circling the air about my shoulders. And then he left me at the table to finish his fruit bowl if I chose. 

*

Tom’s last name sounded like a fruit, his screenname Mango on my phone, so how could I tell him and sour our make-believe? “I need a taste of Mango,” I would text across the miles between his faraway city and mine, and he would respond with a request to see my strawberry lips, my honeydew breasts. His wish to lick, eat all my skin. 

And half-covered with the underwear untouched by other men, I would send him images, the screen like latex protecting his fingers sliding against my thong. “I’m sliding it down. Filling you up,” he texted, first as a hypothesis, then as a proposition for a trip to visit. Until I told him. 

“Well, you’re still sexy,” he said, soliciting continued photos, continued fantasies. But even his imaginings limited themselves from then on to my mouth. 

*

I start to sip laxatives, but I tell no one, not even Jake, as I pour the crystals sinking into chocolate milk, soaking the French fries and cheesecake heavy in my stomach. That I should flatten now for the flat screen of my phone, for the photos. 

Because maybe they are the most of my body that any man will want.  

*

Liam lifted up my chin and pulled back my hair and stroked between my thighs and sent me spinning like the wheels of our taxicab whirling through the lights of the city streets, all tipping off-kilter, as a cocktail and hope buzzed in my brain, too woozy—too soon—to tell him. 

His smile rose lopsided when he said goodnight at the taxi door, when he said hello again at the bar. His Australian accent always stressing the unexpected syllable, his fingers operating the fork and knife on the uncommon side, his nose inhaling the perfume on the right side of my neck until I teetered on my barstool and leaned my lips into his left ear. And under the music’s syncopated beats, I told him. 

He reeled back, thrown off. “Well, that’s not the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me,” he replied. 

But before his one-sided decision a few nights later to say goodbye, he entered behind me into the taxicab and gave directions to his bed, where he fastened the soles of both feet to the firm mattress where I sat, and he presented his penis straight to my mouth.  

*

I close my lips. “No more. No more telling,” I tell Jake, who agrees, understands, apologizes on behalf of all the men. Because their responses are never right. Will never be right. 

But, of course, the revelation itself is wrong. 

Like a faulty sourdough recipe: mistaken calculations, inaccurate measurements of the flour and yeast. Moldy starter. 

*

I understand then that I have technically miscounted all the men. Because Adam was actually the first one I had to tell. 

The last one I thought I would ever have to tell. 

But “No,” he said. “What the fuck,” he said. “That can’t be. It’s not from me. I’m clean,” he said. That redness just a temporary irritation on his tip. Like a bit of mud on a potato skin that a scouring pad could rub away. Not like an apple, bruised permanently from a fall, rotten to the core. My center raw as I lay in the center of my bed, where no other man but him had lain for so long. Where he stretched now fully clothed, his jacket sleeves protecting against the coming cold, protesting against the altered reality. His elbows up against his ears. 

“Listen,” he said, “just in case it’s not from me,” he said, “so I don’t get it, let’s not anymore,” he said. 

“But this?” he continued, grinning, unzipping. 

And then the salt filled my empty mouth all the way up.