The first one was a Swiss tourist in the back of a nightclub. I am sure I knew his name at one point but I certainly don’t know it now. I had been talking to Italian men all night, warily, because I am frightened of Italian men. The Swiss man, in fact, had taken my arm and gently pulled me away from the eager grasp of one such Antonio from Rome and offered to translate the man’s loose Italian. I am sure I shook my head in evasion of this offer, but he did it anyway: “He said you shouldn’t be talking to him. You should be dancing with me.” I’ll admit it; I was charmed. Mostly I just wanted to feel like someone’s for the night, so I chose to feel like his. Later in the night, after things which occurred in the back of the nightclub were over, he asked me where I was sleeping. I felt alarmed by the bizarre question, which was really just a function of the language barrier between us. I told him I didn’t know. It wasn’t so far from the truth, anyway.

The second one was a Parisian on the left bank of the Seine. It was my twenty-first birthday and I was alone in the massive, lonely city, walking the docks when he approached me and offered to give me directions. I told him I did not need directions because I was twenty-one that day and purposefully directionless, wandering. He said in that case he’d like to walk awhile with me, if that was okay. I said it was, because I was not immune to the certain charms of flirting with a Parisian man as I walked the left bank of the Seine on my twenty-first birthday. As we walked he talked a lot about himself, and after I had said a few words in agreement or acknowledgement, he asked if he could take me out. He said I had the body of a dancer and that he wanted to take me dancing. I was unsure to which kind of dancer he was referring, but I told him that I’d planned to go to a jazz club that night. He asked me for my number, so that we might organize this dancing expedition for later in the weekend, and I consented, at this point because we were alone on the left bank of the Seine and the man was awfully persistent. Over the next few days, I incurred relentless text messages in broken English which sounded all the more ominous for its brokenness. These text messages contained many invitations to join the Parisian man at his house for a coffee. “You’ll like that,” the texts insisted. I wasn’t so sure. I didn’t respond. The last text I got said, “Fucking American bitch. Go away. Lol.” Go away? I thought. From where? Paris? I’m already gone. As to the “lol,” I was at a loss.

The third one was a bar man at a jazz club in London. I was standing at the bar between combinations, ordering a beer for the friend I’d come with. I said the long, complicated, adjective-heavy name of the beer to the man, who had a round face and a pierced ear, and he grinned. “A good beer,” he said. “Is it for you or someone else?” Someone else, I told him. “That’s a shame. Well, tell him he has good taste in beer. And in women.” Never mind that the person for whom I was ordering a beer was a woman, and that our relationship was platonic, and that I didn’t care to think about her “taste” in female friends longer than I ought to. Never mind that I’d decided not to drink that night, because I felt I’d overspent and overindulged at dinner. “And…a glass of red wine,” I said, as he passed me the beer and the expensive, tasteful liquid spilled amber over my shaking hand. “Cheapest you can pour me.” “Of course, darling,” he said, in his toothless accent from his toothless mouth. I’d smiled when I asked for the wine, happy that I had the ability to watch him pour it for me, but he still charged me ten, and asked me for my name. I gave him my sister’s and sat down with the wine, sipping it slowly and letting it move around my mouth. It tasted like what I’d expected to pay for it. It didn’t taste ten dollars. It tasted antiseptic. Still, I kept sipping, feeling that roundheaded Limey bar man’s eyes on me. Something about taking what you could get felt proper in this situation.

The fourth one had red hair and long arms and a Catholic name; the ideal Irishman. Like every other man I’ve met he loved to interrupt and told me I took myself too seriously when I told him I would never eat meat again. He told me he was sure I would. He told me I hadn’t had enough experiences to say for sure what I liked and didn’t like. Being told this was almost unspeakably arousing. He was seven years older than me, a fact of which he reminded me later, when we were in bed together and he asked me what year I was born in and then laughed and said I was a little girl when I told him. He had been cerebral, almost awkward, at the bar where we met and the bar I followed him to afterward, but in his room on a quiet street six blocks north of the Liffey he was strangely brutal. I made him call me a cab at five AM, when it was over, when I told him I wouldn’t sleep in a stranger’s bed. Even now, I am cautious not to look too deeply into the eyes of any man I pass when I am walking north on a city street.

– Charlotte Freccia