Dead Lovers
a short story
some cw’s for assault, drug use and death.
Every man who could possibly love me is already dead. Take, for instance, the first man I ever kissed. Well, a boy then, and I was just a boy too, on the precipice of calling myself a man while still being a boy in the eyes of all else. His name was Rick and he was a terrible person but we had the sort of homoerotic back-and-forth, will-they-won’t-they love story that took the form of him being rather cruel to me, enacting physical harm on as many parcels of fresh skin as he could find on my body; twisting my flesh into purple mountains, driving fists into my unprotected sides to bring our bones as close together as possible, pushing me into walls with enough force to make blood well inside of my mouth and he liked to hold my jaw open to watch the dark cherry fluid overflow. It was shamefully erotic, intricate rituals and all that.
When he kissed me, it was a boys’ locker room wet dream fantasy, wet in all the worst ways like cold slick tiles under my bare feet, hot and humid air spilling from the boys’ steamy showers making it difficult to breathe, drops of water clinging to my skin so every rush of outside air bristled the skin reminding me of the shape of my inadequate body. He was pushing me against various walls of varying give and texture. The other boys had watched for some time but there was only so much excitement to be aroused in watching the Boy Who Gets Pushed Against Walls All The Time get pushed against walls again. I was dizzy from the thick, hot air, and all the minor concussing of getting pushed against walls so my head was sort of lolling about on my neck like a limp ear of corn. He stepped close and took me by the jaw like he normally did but he held my corn-head up and licked my lips to taste my blood. After getting a taste for my insides, he swooped in again and kissed me hard as though he were trying to widen my mouth to step into my body. I was hardly an active participant but I figured that didn’t matter—my first kiss was with a boy, that was all I’d ever hoped for. I got one last push against the wall and then he left.
The week after that, he was riding an ATV in the woods when the vehicle stalled and he was thrown from his seat into an unforgiving tree trunk which welcomed the implosion of his head. It was a weird funeral because not many people actually liked him and I shook his father’s big, sad hand as though his son’s tongue hadn’t been in my mouth the week before, as though I wasn’t still guiltily getting off on the fever dream taste of his ghost.
My friends laugh at me for getting a newspaper delivered to my door in the modern age but I like scanning the obituaries for missed opportunities. If I’d been born thirty years earlier, maybe I could have been Charlie, 86, survived by his wife and three beautiful children’s gay awakening before that snake, Susan crept in and chained him to the weight of compulsory heterosexuality. Harry, 51, an artist from Queens passed away unexpectedly this Monday from an underlying heart condition, and knowing my keen intuition, I probably could have detected his heart problem if only we’d known each other and he’d let me get close and press my ear against his chest and hear the difficult thumping beneath all his racing love for me.
Most recently, I saw a very tall man on the bus who looked at me over the heads of all the other strangers with such scorn in his eyes that I knew it must be guarded lust. I was wearing a henley tee with the top two buttons undone, offering a tantalizing tuft of chest hair nestled between my very sexy collarbones for anyone who might be interested, as well as some cutoff jorts, which are back in style. I’d become a gym buff in my adulthood so despite still hating my body, I knew my thighs should also be a lure for the eyes of potential suitors. The man’s cruel gaze prodded the contours of my face, slipped past the potential of my chest, and wormed its way between my thighs which I figured he could only just make out over the bobbing heads of other passengers. I had to wonder what he would look like hurting me.
When we unboarded at the same stop and started walking in the same direction, him a few steps ahead of me, I felt in my stomach that it must be love. He turned onto the same street that I live on! His height was god-like. I could already picture him hanging over me and saying something mean so many times that the words would grow warm and comfortable in his mouth and slowly mutate into a gushing red love.
Up ahead, he ducked low under a ladder stretched precariously across the width of the sidewalk and his tall, broad shoulders clipped the ladder’s rear leg and the painter perched on its steps toppled over onto the man, sending him crashing like a felled pine and my lover’s neck pressed perfectly into the right angled corner of the sidewalk and the adjacent building and snapped like a Kit Kat bar. My apartment was just down the street and I watched from the window over a frozen dinner as emergency services arrived with little fanfare and loaded him onto a stretcher. Too long for the skeletal thing, his crisp leather shoes hung off the end and swung rhythmically like a metronome.
My existence is the product of a one-night stand, a successful insemination that my mother never told my father about. He was on a business trip or traveling for a wedding or had perhaps just come to her city looking for sex; my mother had never been one to care for narrative and she simply didn’t want to bother him with the weird thing amassing cells in her stomach and filling her with cravings for 25 cent gumballs. It had never quite bothered me being raised by a single mother–she dated on occasion but never married, very scandalous until the turn of the century when it suddenly became a brave and strong thing to do as a woman.
She worked quite a bit; mouths to feed, property taxes to pay, that sort of thing. Each day was the most pressing thing until the next day came and pressed even harder. It had little to do with living in the moment and more so having to imagine each day as the only thing that mattered, otherwise she might think about the next day, get overwhelmed by the prospect and collapse into a puddle at the possibility of the rest of her life looking the same as it will always look. The future exists in money to be earned, not in lives to be lived, and so my mother exists as a collapsed narrative that I had little interest in following.
Well, I guess in opposition to her, I’m deeply concerned with my own narrative, though I can never seem to string it together.
When I was twenty-five (twenty-four? It was the winter that I started my first post-grad job but the year’s number value eludes me. No–I’d already been at that job for a year! I got takeout the night before from the Chinese place downtown that I only began to frequent after starting that job when takeout became a guilty luxury that I could mostly afford. So, yeah, twenty-five) I was a frequent flyer on the dating apps. I would go out with basically anyone who bothered to say ‘hey’ and even with some men who only responded after multiple messages over the course of three weeks. The pursuit was romantic.
I went on a date with this banker guy, we got dinner downtown–Oh, wait, it was at that Chinese place! That was my first time going there, so I was twenty-four, which means I was pretty ugly then so it was weird that he’d agreed to a date with me because he was sharp and handsome with a full, well-sculpted beard and a high, European brow that I was supposed to find attractive for the way that it perfectly proportioned his face. I figured because he was going on a date with ugly me that he planned to wreck my body with erotic violence and hurt me so that my ugliness would be unrecognizable, which was just as well. He was a terrible conversationalist which was alright by me because I could go on and on if need be and he seemed at least half interested in my rambling.
I got him drunk on cherry wine so he would take me home with him—and he did—and when he kissed me, I could tell he really hated me which was hot, I think. With a little time, I could convince him to love me, if the time were granted. Hate is a mutable thing, see. It can feel very permanent in the way that it burns up the chest, melting the lungs into vicious scar tissue but scars still need tending and I was hopelessly devoted to the tending of men’s wounds. It gave me something to do with my hands and with my own inability to stoke hate in my heart. Loving was easier and so it was what I did.
Anyway, I wasn’t given the time to shape his heart like clay. He fucked me for a week in which I shared every bit of my purpled body with him and parts of my past he never asked for and then sometime in the chill of our fifth night together he fell out of his window while smoking a blunt by my sleeping body. I stirred in the cold that had stolen through the open window but when I peered out onto the snow laden sidewalk, his body had already been picked up, a smattering of dark blood left behind in the pristine white like garbage sluice.
One of my oldest loves is Kenny, 33, a poet from Brooklyn, survived by his mother and father. The obit was thoughtful and well-written and I imagined his father penned it. It went on to explain that his parents hadn’t known their son very well and when cleaning out his place, they discovered the heaps and heaps of homosexual poetry he’d written and they mourned for all that they hadn’t known about their son and so they’d had a book of his poetry posthumously published which I owned three copies of (one on the coffee table, one by my bed, one in the bathroom.) I’d first clipped the obit from the newspaper when I was twenty-seven and used it as a bookmark while turning the pages of his hidden life. It was full of romance and shameful trysts and so much longing for the skin of other men. I felt very close to Kenny when I read his poetry and knew more than any of the others that he would have loved me if he’d had the chance. In my wildest fantasies, he even found his way near to my heart without having to hate me first.
I only ever had one boyfriend and he hated me the most so I loved him the best. I was nineteen and he was twenty-three and my friends all hated him but he was an older man which was undeniably hot and he bought us alcohol on the weekends so they tolerated him and his casual cruelty and more than casual racism. The first time he funneled enough alcohol into my feeble body to make me blackout, I guess I asked him to be my boyfriend which I never would have done sober. He told me this the morning after while I was draped naked over the dirty toilet in his studio apartment where he made noise music and threw lit cigarettes out his window.
“You were like, ‘Drew, pleeeeeaaaaseee be my boyfriend,’ ” he recounted with his arms locked behind his head, delivering a light kick to my ribs, maybe to help me get the bile up and out. “It was kind of pathetic but you asked so many times, so I was like, ‘sure.’ ”
Having a boyfriend was exciting, a possible world I hadn’t known existed. I’d say, loudly, ‘my boyfriend,’ to anyone who would listen and then follow it with anything I could think of whether it was true or not. ‘My boyfriend has a trust fund.’ ‘My boyfriend is 6”7’.’ “My boyfriend is not racist, he only says that word if it’s a part of the song he’s singing.’ ‘My boyfriend loves me.’
But he never did say that he loved me no matter how I submitted myself to him. The more pleasing and pathetic I made myself for Drew’s benefit, the more he seemed to get off on hating my perfect reflection of his desires. When we had sex, which usually started while I was asleep, I’d make all the right noises and hover in all the right corners of the room but the moment any of my own pleasure crept in, he’d go soft and lock himself in the bathroom so he could do lines of coke off the marble sink and I’d jerk off to the sound of his sniffing and the sighing as the high hit him and pretend it was me bringing him numbing pleasure rather than the drug.
My pleasure must have been too good because Drew overdosed at a party after three months of dating, most of which I don’t really remember for some reason. I wasn’t at the party because he hadn’t invited me and no one told me he’d died until multiple days and several lengthy texts later and I cried when I heard because I’d felt that he’d been so close to loving me.
My mother had always told me that she still had my father’s name and number scribbled out in a journal somewhere and she’d give it to me whenever I asked, she just didn’t want to be involved in whatever came of it. I’d been curious before but never enough to care. After Drew died from wanting too much, I decided I wanted to know my father though I couldn’t be sure why. I called my mother for the first time in several months and told her all was well, my classes were great and I loved my friends and I felt connected to her going to school in the same city she’d spent her twenties in. I said all the right things and she was glad for it and I asked for dad’s name, wrote it down in a blank notebook for a class I’d been skipping all semester, then hung up without asking how she was.
It took me a few weeks to gather up the courage to call my father. I tried my hand at some internet sleuthing to uncover anything about him prior to the call but his name was fairly common and my mother knew very little about who he was before or after their meeting so I had to go in blind. On the first try, it went to voicemail and he didn’t have a personalized message, just an electronic lady so I couldn’t even get a tiny window into him. The second, third and fourth calls went unanswered as well. I wondered if he somehow divined that it was me trying to call, if he’d known that his son existed the whole time and he’d learned to hate me from afar and had no interest in knowing me or even speaking to me.
I gave it a week, to let his hate morph and fester and cool, and on the fifth try, a woman answered and demanded to know who I was. A lie rose from my throat for some reason and I told her I was an old friend from college, though I was sure my youngish voice betrayed me. I asked about herself before she could intercept the lie.
“I’m his wife,” she explained with an extended sigh. “Was his wife. Bill died last week.”
“Oh,” I’d said, small like a rodent. “I’m sorry for your loss. Forgive me.” And I hung up.
So I read the obits like Craigslist missed connection ads. It’s the easiest place to find men capable of loving me. I clip the best ones, leave them all over so everywhere I turn I might find someone to comfort me.
My father’s obit was short and uninspired, left me nothing of him to cling onto so I folded it up, put it in an envelope and sent it to my mother and she stopped calling me after that.
I’m 33 now, the age Kenny was when he died. I think of him as my boyfriend sometimes because he’s stayed with me for so long but I don’t tell anyone he loves me or that he’s tall and handsome and not racist because I know that he’s dead. Still, the love is as real as the life Kenny lived without me. It has to be.
I think—it must be my love that kills all men past-future-present. I wonder—if I never try to find love for myself, might I find it in me to live forever?
jw