Some of them were acting out something in their own lives that caused them to be casually mean to me. “You should go to the gym more,” one guy said when we were done. “Your hips make you look like a fucking woman.” All of that hate and abuse heaped on young gay boys, where does it go but into the gay boy? Where it stays, and becomes a kind of pattern, like a crystal, causing other psychic material around it to conform to its structure. No one has ever said things as casually cruel to me as gay men, online or in person. That is how I, too, learned to be cruel, and while I try to contain those impulses, to quarantine those patterns, I can feel them growing in there in the dark.

But for the most part my lovers were kind, if somewhat detached. Sometimes they even claimed to love me. When I broke up with dear Ed of the tiny penis, he told me I was breaking his heart, and the idea that his heart had ever been involved struck me as so absurd I accidentally laughed.

But that summer I began to see someone seriously. The relationship was obviously doomed; he was forty-five, I was seventeen. I could not imagine what his life was like or how I fit into it. I suspected he was married because he wore a ring, but whether to a man or a woman I wasn’t sure, and I was hesitant to ask too many questions for fear of puncturing the flimsy skin of whatever dream contained our goings-on.

His name was Anthony, and he was long-limbed with shinbones so bony and unpadded they looked like the bottoms of canoes. His hair was already mostly silver gray and he wore it in a late-Pierce-Brosnan quiff. Honestly, he was a snack in a dad-core way, radiating the confidence of a man who knows how to bandage a skinned knee. He was easy to smile, quick to compliment, as un-coy as it is possible to be.

He said he dreamed about me, that he couldn’t wait to see me again, that I was perfection. He called me Adonis, he called me Butterfly, such ridiculous and extravagant pet names that I blushed. He wore jeans from Costco. He was wild about wiener dogs and would cry out whenever he saw one. He loved sports and was always asking me if I had caught a particular football or basketball game, and when I told him I didn’t like those things, he was never offended, in fact, my lack of interest seemed to delight him, and he would say, “Of course you don’t, of course.” He was a corny, corny man, and he appalled me, and I loved him, the deal clinched in my heart before I could object.

We first met at a park, at night, the big one in the center of town, where the baseball and soccer fields were. Even though it was full dark out, the stadium lights of the fields kept the park weirdly bright, and as I walked to meet him, my shadow followed me in triplicate. I didn’t normally meet dates in North Shore. I liked to meet up in a neighboring town where there was less chance of being seen. But I also liked the safety of a public space and being within walking distance of home, so when he proposed meeting at the park, I said yes. He was already there, sitting on a bench, and I recognized him from the pictures he had sent me.

The first thing he said to me was: “I am so nervous to meet you, I don’t think I’ve been this nervous in years and years.”

“Oh?” I said, sitting down next to him, not too close, but not too far either.

“So I have to thank you for that much already. What an experience. To meet a beautiful young man at night in a park. I mean, wow.”

I laughed. “You not get out much?”

“No,” he said, and smiled at me. “I do not get out much.”

I think that was when I noticed the wedding ring, or maybe I only noticed it later. The memory has become so romanticized and blurred in my mind that I tend to remember him as I knew him later. But at the time, I think I worried he was somehow deranged. He smiled so much. He was wearing a truly ugly sweater, color-blocked cashmere in shades of dog poop and amber.

“Are you nervous to meet me?” he asked. “You probably do this all the time. I don’t mean to say—well, not all the time! But you have done this before, this internet dating.”

“Of course,” I said. I thought of telling him about the time I met up with a date only to realize we had already fucked each other once before and not liked each other much. “Oh, it’s you!” we said. And then we fooled around, even though we didn’t really want to.

“It feels like it’s happening completely outside the bounds of normal life,” he said, excited. “I had no idea they kept the park this bright at night! I think that may be adding to the surreality of this encounter for me, if you will forgive me for going on and on like this. I’m so sorry. How do these things normally go?”

“There’s no script,” I said.

“See? No script!”

“None!” I laughed.

“You could say anything to me. I could say anything to you.”

“You could,” I admitted.

He screwed up his face like he was thinking hard, an eight-year-old in a spelling bee. “Oh, man, I can’t think of anything good,” he said. “Wait, did you know there are different sizes of infinity?”

“Isn’t that impossible?”

“Precisely not. Okay, imagine the first infinity, the regular one, just one, two, three, four, and on and on to infinity.”

“Yeah.”

“Now, in your head, circle all the prime numbers. If your first list goes on infinitely, then your list of primes would also go on infinitely, even though it is a smaller infinity than the infinity of the original set.”

He smelled like clean laundry. “You could make, actually, an infinity of subset infinities,” he said.

I felt then this wild, jerking, insane hope that manifested as an intense desire to get his pants off, to press him into me, to seal the cosmic deal, but really it was some buried healthy part of me that saw that he was kind and good and smart and thought he could save me.

“I like your nose ring,” he said. “Very brutal looking.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Do you want to go to your car?” I asked. A jogger ran past.

“Well, that had been my plan insofar as I had a plan,” he said, “but now that I’ve met you, I think we need a new plan.”

“Oh,” I said, stung. It was a measure of my inexperience that I had never been turned down before, and my first reaction was not sadness but rage that fizzed behind my closed mouth as though I were a shaken soda can.

“You are so young, and I knew that, but I just, you know, twenty looks a lot younger than I remember it being.”

“I’m not some innocent,” I said.

“I realize, I realize,” he said. “I just want to take my time. I want to replace everything I imagine about you with something real that I know about you,” he said. He thought for a moment. “That’s what I want.”