It took Richard six weeks to say he didn’t love me. We were spending an afternoon in Central Park, sitting on a sheet I had taken from my apartment and unfolded on the lawn of Sheep Meadow. I was telling Richard how I wanted to see more of him, get to know him better, and that maybe we could do some trips together or take a share in a summer house in the Hamptons or the Pines. Richard answered by saying that things could go no further between us because he was getting back with his ex-lover Donnie. Richard and Donnie had been a couple for three years and ex-lovers three weeks before I met Richard at a bar on the east side of town. “It has nothing to do with you,” Richard said after he told me he was breaking things off between us. Of course it felt like it had everything to do with me. I felt like a failure because I had not convinced Richard that I could be a better lover for him than Donnie was.

It took Richard another three weeks before he broke things off between us. “I don’t know how I can give this up,” he said the afternoon we walked back to my apartment from the park and had discarded our clothes and fallen into bed again. Richard was forty-one years old and going through more crises than just breaking up and getting back with Donnie or me. He had been laid off from his job as a stock analyst for a Wall Street firm and his idleness, or lack of motivation to find a new job, was what had provoked the trouble with Donnie. Richard was not enjoying his forties, a series of root canals had left him cashless and feeling vulnerable, and the night I had met him he had complained of his brown hair graying too quickly, but which I complimented him on as one of his more distinctive and handsome features. I was twenty-seven years old that year and tried to prove that together Richard and I were ageless in bed. Richard was short and thickly built, looking more like a truck driver than a business executive, and he had a cock like a serpent, long and slender with a slightly wider head. I let him stay deep inside my body for what felt like hours; he loved it when I straddled his furry thighs so he could bury his face against my chest, whispering, “Yes, keep me here, right here, don’t let me out.” I was of the age that I believed that if I was passionate and involving in bed with Richard that he would be passionate and involving with me out of bed, a mistake I would make many more times with many other men.

Richard did his best to prove that it was not the quality of sex that provoked our demise. In fact, he said it was the reason why he had such trouble letting go and returning to Donnie. I did my best to show my pride was not wounded or admit that I was again a failure as lover material by recommending Richard to a friend of a friend, a headhunter I had once dated and who specialized in finding displaced executives Wall Street positions.

Richard never thanked me for recommending him to Joel, my headhunter acquaintance, which, in turn, I also got over. Sometime later, maybe about nine or ten months, I ran into Joel in the lobby of an off-Broadway theater with our mutual friend Evan, both of whom knew of my woes with Richard. Joel mentioned that Richard had found a job at one of the city’s larger banking corporations and he had finally broken up with Donnie. Joel even confessed that he and Richard had gone out on a date but that there hadn’t been much chemistry between them. Then Joel told me that Richard had a new boyfriend and that they were part of a house Joel was putting together for the summer in East Hampton.

“I suppose you’re not interested in doing a share?” Joel asked me and explained he was still trying to find someone for the final share.

“I don’t think so,” I answered in my most bitter and campy inflection. In the lobby of the theater, I was left with the hope that perhaps my timing or luck or both had just been out of sync with Richard, and had nothing to do with someone not wanting to know more of me outside the bedroom. Before I left to take my seat inside the theater, I asked Joel if he could recommend me as a boyfriend to any other executives who might pass his way. “Someone like Richard,” I said, “but without the extra baggage.”

It was a few years later when I met Mike on a phone line. Our conversation was brief, revealing our ages, height, weight, genital size, and sexual preferences in bed in the most minimal of ways. Instinct usually rules in these encounters and I had a good feeling that I would not have to be the kind of specific sexual acrobat with Mike that other men on the phone lines so often desired. The only unsettling thing that had transpired before Mike gave me the address to his Chelsea apartment was his asking me, “Are you cute?”

I think I’m cute and I also think I’m cuter than some of the trolls that I’ve met online who call themselves “hot,” “handsome,” or “sexy,” so I answered Mike’s question with my too slick, too practiced response, “You won’t be disappointed,” which I always hated having to use. Mike took my response in stride—we were, after all, hooking up to have sex, not make a porno flick, and it was a rainy, chilly Tuesday night, a time when even the hottest, most handsome, and desperately horny men seldom set out to travel, preferring instead, that their tricks come to them.

Mike met me at the door of his apartment, having already scrutinized me through his doorman’s video camera. His apartment was tastefully decorated—solid colors, beige furniture, modern art on the walls, and he had lit candles on the coffee table as a centerpiece. He offered me a drink, which I accepted, and we talked while somewhere a hidden stereo system hummed out the notes of a jazz pianist.

Mike was close to as he had described himself, his short, blond hair was thin and balding, but since he was clean shaven and wore wire-rimmed eyeglasses, he looked as academic as his perfect pronunciation had indicated. In fact, in our short conversation, he admitted he taught an Urban Studies class at one of the downtown universities but worked full-time as an architect for a midtown firm.

On the couch, we kissed for a few minutes, and when Mike felt comfortable, he led me into a bedroom where there were more candles lit—on the nightstands, dresser top, and window sill. Rain pelted at the window and the stereo had drifted into a sequence of softer lullabies. The overly romantic scenario and the alcohol had finally made me relaxed—I’m usually very suspicious as these encounters begin—and we lay on the bed continuing our kissing, slowly undressing one another in a randomly aggressive and passionate way.

It was when we were undressed and I was lying on top of Mike that I got an eerie sensation that Mike’s attention had been pulled out of the room. Looking over my shoulder, I saw the shadow of a man standing at the door. My body tensed from fear and I could feel a startled sweat break out at my forehead, armpits, and back. I had not known that there was someone else in the apartment—Mike had not indicated that he shared the apartment and I had not heard anyone come in, and I had not detected Mike speaking to anyone when he had gone out of the living room and gotten us drinks. I rolled off of Mike and swung my feet over the side of the bed and reached for my T-shirt and underwear on the floor, defensive enough to throw a punch if that was what the scenario required. My heart was beating heavily in my ears, but somehow I heard Mike say, “Happy Birthday, Darling.”

The man in the doorway moved further into the room and Mike reached out to me and said, “Don’t go.”

“What’s going on?” I asked. I was worried that the man might be angered—I still had not seen his face and he stood at the doorway with his hands crossed against his chest.

“Looks like my gift is as surprised as I am,” the man said. The tone of his voice, the same calm, practiced sort of speech as Mike’s, was layered with a brilliant glee, and made me stop getting dressed, though my heart continued its crashing inside my chest.

“You don’t think I was going to get you a hustler?” Mike said. “You could have done that on your own.”

“So instead, you’ve hustled our new friend, who seems not to know anything about me.”

The man was now closer in the room and I could see he was startling handsome—dark slick backed hair, dark eyes, with a slender European style to him. I immediately understood why Mike took whatever steps he could to please this sort of man, even to the expense of luring a stranger into bed. The man radiated sex, and it seemed to me that he was the kind of man it was not easy to possess because life could offer him potential distractions it would not necessarily offer others.

Mike introduced me to Tino, his lover for two years. Tino was turning forty the following day, or rather, at the stroke of midnight, only a few minutes away. Tino and Mike settled my nerves and Mike fetched more drinks—a bottle of champagne was opened and poured into long, thin glasses. We talked a bit more in the bedroom — mostly my lobbying questions at Tino to dispel my anxieties, till Mike toasted Tino at midnight. Tino responded with a kiss—first of Mike, and then with me, and he drew us easily into a lovely and unexpected threesome.

That was not my first or last three-way, and I must confess that Mike and Tino paid more attention to me than they did to each other, as if I were the one celebrating a birthday. I’ve not done enough of these threesome encounters, however, to be an expert on their psychological construction, but it was clear to me even on that night that there was an imbalance in their relationship. But it was a few years later when I think I finally understood what Mike had been trying to do that night we hooked up on the phone. By then I was in my forties and in my first relationship with a man to last more than six months and I was looking for ways I could justify keeping our unbalanced relationship going. Keith was also in his early forties, recently divorced from his wife and out on his own for the first time as a newly minted openly gay man. His years as a suburban high school math teacher had given him a conceitful arrogance and he now found everything of gay life as sexually exciting as a teenager just discovering the power of his dick. Among his newly articulated fantasies which he shared with me was his desire for a “hot three-way,” something that though I did not discourage him from finding, I did not want to participate in with him myself. Keith had a stinginess to his personality which I had grown to dislike the more I knew him better—a sort of this-is-what-I-deserve-because-I-have-been-in-the-closet-for-such-a-long-time—that I knew whatever three-way encounter we could have would leave me as the odd partner out. I could clearly imagine him luring another man into bed in the same way Mike had lured me, yet Keith would never have been as accommodating in the way Tino had. Keith, in fact, would have made me watch him make love to someone else, as if it were a way to punish me for the bad behavior of revealing my insecurities over our relationship. I was wildly attracted to Keith, more so than he was to me, which had set up our inequality since our first date. Keith was the sort of man who wanted a boyfriend who wouldn’t mind him having other boyfriends, and though I tried my best to be that sort of man, it just wasn’t where I was headed at that moment.

Keith had also complicated our relationship with clues of his other sexual involvements—Post-It notes with names and addresses seemed to float out of garbage pails or wave at me from desk drawers to catch my attention; phone messages would begin on his answering machine while we were in bed having sex, “Uh, Keith, this is Joe, we met last week...”

I suppose I should have just abandoned Keith, given him up, but psychologically I couldn’t admit another defeat. I had come this far. I thought if I found a way not to care about Keith’s other activities, I could find a way for our relationship to work out for me—and I pursued several options—meditation and yoga, long hours at the gym, easing my confusion with a series of strong drinks—all of which didn’t work. I also considered ways in which I might be more sex-positive; I thought about suggesting we go to a sex club together or participate in a three-way, though in actuality I could not commit myself to discussing these possibilities with Keith. Which was how I found my way into a bar in the East Village one night and where, slightly inebriated and finally relaxed, I met Jesse.

Jesse was in his late twenties and perhaps the tallest of all my lovers, six-foot four, long-legged, hairless and lean, with the pale, chiseled physique of a swimmer. He was a corporate lawyer who spoke in such a soft, dull monotone that I would have to blink to maintain my attention. Jesse was much more lively in bed, however, and he made me feel like a young man myself with his slender legs propped up against my shoulders and his ass willing to accept my cock. It was the fifth or sixth time with Jesse when things turned sour —impotence struck me for the first time in bed with a man. I knew I should have been moving into a deeper emotional involvement with Jesse but I couldn’t because I still had Keith lodged deeply in my consciousness. I knew I couldn’t go any further with Jesse unless I confessed the truth about myself because I had been dishonest with him from the start—never mentioning that there was another man and who was now causing me anxiety over what I should feel for Jesse. It was as if Keith were already in bed with us, commenting on Jesse’s attributes, ready to take him for himself.

Jesse didn’t seem to mind my inability to perform—he was firmly erect and I could have gone ahead and been the evening’s passive partner. But my frustration was caught in my throat and I began a short crying jag that startled both of us. Jesse held me the way a concerned lover would—exactly the kind of lover I always wanted—and I unraveled the whole misery of my affair with Keith, and for the first time I understood what Richard must have been feeling the afternoon he had told me we could go no further.

When I had finished my tale and restored my emotional stability, Jesse said, “I’ve not been honest myself.” It was now my turn to embrace him and he confessed his ongoing relationship with a guy who lived out of town, his former college boyfriend. Together, Jesse said, they were great in bed, but neither of them would commit to giving up their lives and careers away from each other, so they only saw one another once a month on visits. The moment Jesse began talking about his boyfriend Chip, the better I felt, as if I knew that I no longer had to be a major player for Jesse, or he for me.

Though our sexual chemistry failed to ignite that night after our confessions, it was not my last encounter with Jesse, yet our affair did not continue much longer. I did not give up on Keith right away, either; I found myself in deeper despair before I found my path out. But there was an evening when Keith and I went as boyfriends to a gallery opening in Tribeca and we ran into Jesse, who was friends with one of the artists in the exhibit. As I introduced one lover to the other I sensed Keith’s interest in Jesse as a potential and younger sexual partner and Jesse’s interest in Keith because he had witnessed my tale of woe over this man. I sensed that I could have possibly engineered a three-way that night, but I didn’t attempt it. Instead, I walked away from both of them and their growing conversation, hoping they might hit it off together on their own without me. They didn’t, of course, and I was spared the humiliation of watching one’s lovers walk off into the sunset together, arm in arm. But it was certainly a defining moment. Watching them from the other side of the gallery with a drink in my hand, I finally understood I was on my way to someone else.

© 2005 Jameson Currier - Contributor's Bio