[FICTION]

[02/20/26]

Vulnerability

by Rob Sperry-Fromm

The onyx statue jutted up like a phallus towards the grey sky, a monument to a dead daughter. It marked the center of a circle of green grass which marked the center of a circle of grey pavement, a little roundabout that appeared for no other reason than landscape architecture towards the end of the winding drive through the grounds of the estate. As Richard half-circled it in the backseat of the hired Suburban which had picked him up from PDX, the pit in his stomach grew and congealed. He thought it looked really fucking ominous. 

When he arrived at the main house, Richard hopped out of the car with a spryness that belied his nausea, fatigue, fear, and loneliness. He presented well, despite everything. He kept his body tight, his style more or less The Latest, his hair still On Point despite the longish flight. In his mind’s ear his therapist scolded him for his obsession with Keeping It Together. You can’t do this forever. You can’t just push everything down. You will have to account for your emotions and your behavior. He trusted the message, if not the messenger, understanding at some biomechanical level that he basically had no choice but to reckon with All That Had Gone Wrong. But, being the self-made man that he was, this reckoning would have to take place on his own terms. 

His buddy Elbow, a fellow regular at the sake bar, was the one who told him about MGV. Men Giving Vulnerability. An offshoot of MTAF—Men’s Trauma Awareness Foundation—which was funded by a female billionaire-slash-philanthropist. The retreat was a five-day intensive, all expenses paid by the Foundation, and promised to help men get in touch with their feelings in an environment that was safely masculine. It took the stigma out of it, Elbow had assured him, mustache drooping over the rim of his Junmai Daiginjo. Elbow—nicknamed after the point at which his arm was amputated during his tour in Afghanistan—spoke in a throaty alto which made him sound perpetually on the verge of tears. “We’ve all got problems,” he said. “Every fucking guy I know has problems. Problems with women and problems with money and problems with ourselves. It’s all interconnected. And what do we do about it? We fight and we fuck and we play basketball and we play videogames and we build empires and we destroy empires. But we don’t fucking talk about it. And I’m not talking about talking with some twinky little therapist. I mean with each other. It’s simply not done. But there are places. More and more places, opening up in different parts of the country. More and more men are becoming aware of this problem.”

“I just don’t see what this has to do with feelings,” lied Richard, as much to himself as to his friend. “I have really fond feelings towards Jessica. She’s a great wife. I just wanted to get laid. You stay with someone too long, it gets stale. Sometimes it’s simple.”

“Well, that might explain one or two transgressions,” Elbow said, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a silk shirt open at the collar to highlight his dangling jewelry, “but it doesn’t explain your more… systematic approach.”

So Richard caved and Elbow called someone he knew at the foundation, and then Richard was on a plane. It felt good to turn off his phone and exhale and taste the stale air of the cabin. No one could get to him up there. But the dread began to mount as he stepped out of the airport and into the wet spring air of the real world. What was he getting himself into? What good would it do to immerse himself in the venial sins of a handful of male strangers? Why shouldn’t he just make himself available to his wife, whose only crimes were loving him and wanting to see all of him? And putting a golf club through the windshield of his Rivian, though he had long since forgiven her for this. Why was he running away? By the time he arrived at the Estate's main house, he had compiled a mental inventory of all the different birds and all their different colors along the route. The Universe was presenting him with omens and he needed to balance the scales. 

“You’re not running from, you’re running toward,” he muttered to himself as he approached the house. 

The house looked big—wood and slate and glass and steel in broad swaths and looming chunks. This first impression only deepened when he entered and found himself in a front room that stretched out as far as his eye could travel, a room so large and empty that it complicated the very concept of rooms. Alone among all those expensive building materials and all that space, Richard suddenly felt his own physical smallness like a curse. He felt that all the fucking and sucking he had done over the past eleven years of marriage was an attempt to reconcile this smallness, to spread himself as far as possible, as though all the seed spilled might migrate and diffuse and eventually coat an area large enough that his eyes could not apprehend it. And only then might he transcend his circumstances. 

He swallowed and thought he could hear the vibrations in his throat echoing throughout the room. 

The rhythmic click of heels sounded towards him. Richard looked around for the source, but he couldn’t see the woman until she was about thirty feet away from him, by which point he could already smell her perfume. It was a warm, musky lavender which felt at odds with the cold surroundings. She wore a tan crepe pantsuit which matched her hair and skin tone exactly, blending perfectly into the spatially indeterminate backdrop, draped elegantly enough that she didn’t seem to move at all as she approached. All he could see were her dark, painted eyes, and her red-lipped mouth, growing ever closer, smiling wide.

“Hello,” she said, finally having reached him. “You must be Richard.” She leaned her cheek into his. “My name is Bethany. I’m the Director of the Foundation. We’re so glad to have you at our retreat this weekend.”

Richard’s voice was caught somewhere in the back of his throat. “Hi.” 

“I didn’t mean to surprise you like this. Don’t worry—I’ll be nowhere in sight for the actual sessions. You will, of course, be surrounded only by other men, as advertised. But I just like to say hello to the new arrivals, if I can get away for long enough. It’s important to remember that we women are rooting for you, too.”

“Of course. Thank you for having me.” Richard smiled in her general direction. A moment passed, and he looked away, feeling the strain of his attempt to see her properly. 

She put a hand on his forearm. “These are your walls,” she said quietly. 

Richard hesitated. He looked back at her; she was pointing off to somewhere in the distance. 

“What?”

“Your room is over there. Here, let me show you.”

She pulled him in what was apparently the right direction. He surrendered himself entirely to her grasp, feeling light-headed and bodied, gliding towards some inevitable horizon.

***

Three hours later, Richard sat in a circle with eight other men. They were in a smaller room with a fireplace, though the ceiling was still disconcertingly high.

A wood fire burned behind the group’s leader, a fireplug of a man named Grant with no observable body fat and who was roughly as wide as he was tall. His eyes were full of kindness, and he wore a t-shirt stretched tight over his chest which read STRONG MEN ALSO CRY. It was raining outside.

Richard looked around, nervously, hoping not to be perceived. His first thought was, I do not like these other men. They looked like jacked-up bros. They had bad facial hair and high-and-tight haircuts. They wore sneakers with neon accenting and had dimples on their chins. They wore clothing that looked both too tight and too comfortable. Richard was not like them. 

“MAN UP,” shouted the leader, without warning, in a powerful baritone. Richard looked around. Everyone’s eyes were wide. “PUT ON YOUR BIG BOY PANTS. TOUGHEN UP. GRIN AND BEAR IT. BITE THE BULLET. SUCK IT UP. TAKE IT LIKE A MAN. GROW A PAIR. COWBOY UP. TAKE ONE FOR THE TEAM.” The man deployed this barrage of phrases with such consistent force, tempo, and volume that for a moment Richard questioned if he was human. Then he paused and smiled, and all that could be heard was the crackling of the fire, the dripping of the rain, and the breathing, discernably heavier, of the rest of the men. 

“Sound familiar?” 

The men nodded. Some of them already had red eyes. Grant continued: “We have heard these phrases, over and over again, since we were children. Hell, we may have even heard them in the womb, when our parents were speaking to each other in anger. These may seem like harmless little bromides, but when I look around this room I see that some of you already understand just how brutal they can be. Because, on their own, these phrases might not mean a whole lot. But, in totality, what you’re looking at is nothing less than the reinforcement of a climate of negative self-expression. What do I mean by this?”

The leader continued on like this for a while, the men gazing at him, rapt—nodding, smiling, wiping sweat and tears from their faces. Richard tried to follow, but he was zoning in and out. Why had he let Elbow talk him into this? He was from Los Angeles. He had heard all this before. There was no way for this kind of talk to cure what ailed him. These men were idiots. These men could not understand the truth of him. They’d be lucky even to understand the truth of themselves.

The other men began to share. Cade spoke up eagerly: “For a long time I wanted to find myself in a woman. But I didn’t know what I needed. I didn’t know how to find that soul partner that appreciated my masculinity and my feelings in the right way. Because the feelings themselves were not where I wanted it to be. I woke up every morning feeling rushed and anxious. I allowed my energy to be bad and the thoughts on myself came from that energy. And I kept trying to find a woman, going out on dates and things like that nature, but I couldn’t find a woman who felt good because I wasn’t feeling good on myself. And what I found was that, when I was able to give the energy I wanted, when I was starting from a place of feeling good, then I could start having those good thoughts that would lead to good energies and connections. So that has been a win for me. But there’s still so much battle remaining. And I succumb to the darkness all the time. All the time.” And then he cried.

Rico followed: “I was raised in a household that was like: feelings is a luxury. You know what I’m sayin? But I was bullied in school for being a good singer. And I had all these feelings because of that, and I just pushed that shit down and expressed myself with my music. And now that I am that, like, songbird you might say, for the ladies in my life, they don’t always understand that I don’t need to be intimate. Like, my girl says everyone needs human intimacy, but I literally do not. And it’s so hard because, like, I love her, you know? But I can’t give her the love that she needs in the words she needs. So it’s hard.” And then he cried. 

Lachlan was up next: “I broke down the other day. I was having sex with my girl, and I just started crying all over her while my dick was like, seriously rock hard inside her, and then all of a sudden it’s just tears. I felt terrible. Like, to be in such a vulnerable position, I didn’t mean to do that to her. And she was so confused, and I wanted to tell her that the problem was not with her, it was with me. But just to have the humility in that moment to be like, I’m just fucking up by besmearing this beautiful soul of this woman that I love. Like who even am I? I was like, dude, you cannot be crying like this all over women that you are having sexual intercourse with. Like, I really do think that men have a problem in this society because we do not have an outlet. And because of that the women have a problem too, you know? Because we take this all out on them because we don’t know how to love ourselves. And I just don’t want to be that guy anymore.” Lachlan was crying pretty much the whole time. 

It continued like this. Richard shrank further into himself, his judgment building. Problems? These were not real problems. These men did not have the intelligence to create real problems for themselves, let alone to solve them. These were just overgrown children whose mothers had not loved them or had loved them too much and who, thus, did not have the ability to create meaningful connections with women. Richard did not have that problem. He had far bigger problems. Problems that they were not good enough to have. These men were idiots. Morons. What the fuck was he doing here? What the fuck was wrong with him?

Eventually the room fell silent, the hugging and the blubbering and the chest smacking died down, and Richard looked around. He realized that everyone was looking at him. Grant said, “Richard, it’s your turn to share.”

Richard blanched, then tried to play it cool. “I, uh— I don’t know. I don’t really have anything to share. I just want to listen.”

“Sure you do, Richard,” Grant said. “We all do. There’s no wrong answers in here. Just tell us what’s on your mind.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Richard, it’s okay.”

“Okay, I’m sorry, but I just don’t… I don’t have anything in common with you guys. I think it was a mistake for me to come here.” He stood up from his chair. The man sitting next to him, whose name he had not caught, stood up with him and put a firm hand on his chest. The man looked into Richard’s eyes, and for a moment Richard looked into his. The man had a beard and dark shoulder-length hair adorned with a backwards baseball cap. His eyes were bright-blue, like twin lights amidst a forest of darkness. He held his hand directly on Richard’s heart, which briefly reminded Richard that he did, indeed, have one. That he was, indeed, alive. 

Richard collapsed back into his chair. His body felt limp and relaxed. He looked around the room and he no longer saw emptiness in the eyes of these other men. Instead, he saw something else, something that he had never really seen in the eyes of another man, something like hope. 

“Okay, I, uh—” he stopped. There was a catch in his throat. 

“Just let it out, brother,” someone said.

“Okay. Okay.” Richard exhaled deeply. “So I’m in a little bit of a problem. In a bad situation. I mean, it’s not even a situation. It’s just my life. I work in real estate, mostly commercial developments, and the long and the short of it is… I’m over-leveraged. It’s hard to build in California right now because of all these regulations. And there’s fires and stuff, so it’s hard to get insurance. And everything is really expensive and there’s a lot of red tape. And I’ve been able to get around it all for years, and build a really great business, and a lot of connections, and a lot of relationships, and really entrench myself in the community there. But now I’m having a hard time. So, yeah.”

Richard paused here, looking around. No one said anything. After a minute, Grant said. “Okay, is there anything else you’d like to share about those relationships?”

Richard exhaled and continued, “I got married pretty young. Jessica—that’s her name. And there were things about her that maybe I wasn’t so excited about, but we were ready for a family, a house, the life. And we had, you know, a shared vision for the future. I maybe had some misgivings about monogamy being the right thing for any human being, but I went with it because she wanted to get married and I cared about her and I felt like I was ready. And she’s great. And she was so much— Such a support to me, early on, when we were struggling, and I was trying to make it happen for myself, and it was all about where we were going. It was, like, this exciting time, and everything was in front of us. And then over time I was able to have some success, get in on some good deals at the ground floor, build some equity. And we bought a beautiful house in the Valley and we had a kid. A little boy named Curtis, after my grandfather.”

Richard looked around. He had already spoken far more than he intended. The room was full of expectant faces. Open faces. When he looked at the other men, he wondered why he had ridiculed them just moments before. The truth was he felt afraid of them. Or afraid of being like them. Or something like that. He was shaking. 

“Go ahead,” Grant said. “We can handle it.” 

Richard exhaled wetly, then continued. “There was something about the security. Once I climbed the mountain, I had everything. Then it was almost like I wanted to destroy it. Even though I loved it, and it was my whole identity. I started to have this feeling that I couldn’t be who I actually was. Like I wasn’t allowed to be myself in my marriage, or in my work. When I say that it sounds cliché, but I was losing myself. Actually, that’s not it. It’s more like I hadn’t found myself yet, at any point. That my true self was still out there, waiting to be discovered. All of the things I thought I wanted—the money, the companionship—they were just there to distract me from finding him. And I started to feel resentful. Trapped. And so… I tried to find it. My true self. It just started in little drips. I would stay out later than I said and not apologize. Or I would photoshop my neighbor Annie onto some pornographic photos. Gradually I started to find myself and I realized that it was— He was… He was bad. My self. I knew that if I let him have free reign then he would destroy everything. And then it was like I had two selves, and I didn’t know which was which, and the self that I thought was good was like, my primary self, and this other self was always calling out, Do it! Do the bad thing! Do the thing that will make you who you are! And the primary self knew that I shouldn’t listen. But it was more complicated than that, because the bad self was also me, so I couldn’t just tune it out. And even if I was able to, it would just be temporary, because not listening to the bad self wasn’t going to make it go away.

“So, one day, when Jessica was out of town and I was home alone with our son, I got a babysitter and I went to this— Well, it was basically a brothel. A very high-end one. Very exclusive. And the women were beautiful. And I chose this one woman who was particularly hot. I mean, she was absolutely gorgeous. Like, my fantasy woman. You guys know what I’m talking about. But I was so nervous, and I couldn’t do it. I had never cheated on anyone. I was sitting there, just clutching my soft dick like I was back in grade school. I was so embarrassed and sad and I wanted her to be nice to me and soothe me but she didn’t seem to care. It was almost like she thought it was funny. I just wanted to see her and fuck her and have her see me, the bad version of me, but I couldn’t. She couldn’t, and it just made me feel worse.

“And then I went home and I fucked the babysitter. I fucked her on the couch while my kid was asleep upstairs. And it was so easy. She was, like, just ready for it, and I could tell. Her name was Inga. She was a Swedish Au Pair, which— That’s the kind you want. The woman in the brothel was hard and the babysitter was easy. I wasn’t sure why that was. Why was it easier to fuck someone I knew, in my own home? Was it because the person within me that I was honoring, this person I was seeking, was evil? Was he satisfied only by committing the most destructive act possible?

“But I didn’t have much time to think about it, because the dam broke that night. It was over for the good self. I started fucking the babysitter regularly. Then my wife fired her and I started fucking the next babysitter. For awhile it was just babysitters. Mine and my friends’. There was something about them that got me going, something about the way they cared for children but also were not my wife. But that’s neither here nor there. Anyway. Before long I moved on to other kinds of women. All kinds of women, actually. I got on all the apps: Plenty of Fish, Feeld, Adult Friend Finder, whatever. I was on it. I was keeping track of so many different lies. I started keeping spreadsheets of all the women I was fucking, calendars, timetables. I had an assistant and I had him managing some of the workload—sending gifts, apologetic text messages, STD test results, that sort of thing. I had different places around town I would go, standing arrangements at different hotels, bars where I knew I wouldn’t be clocked. I wore disguises. It was like a full-time job. And I told my wife that work was really busy, and that we were thriving. And to keep up that illusion, and probably to deal with my guilty conscience, and to have a place to stash either my family or whoever I happened to be fucking at any given time, I bought a second home in Palm Springs. Which was a bad idea because business was actually not going well. I wasn’t focusing on it, and it had suffered. I basically stopped going to work because I wasn’t interested anymore. I mean, this quest became all-consuming. I needed to have every single consensual, heterosexual experience known to man. Every specific combination of sexual act and physical characteristic. That was where the spreadsheets came in handy. I had to complete the grid. I was literally like, Anal sex with a Puerto Rican woman: check. Sixty-nine with a short brunette with breast implants: check. Threesome with an affluent blonde and a working-class redhead. You know, on and on and on.”

Richard paused for a second, adjusted himself, realizing that he had an erection. But rather than feeling embarrassed, he felt completely clear. He felt powerful and at ease. He felt like he was doing what he was supposed to do. The other men continued to look at him. He thought maybe they were waiting for him to cry. But he felt very far from tears. He felt positively activated. So he continued. 

“There was something about that part of it—the hobby part, the checking of the boxes—that allowed me to justify it. I was a connoisseur. An adventurer. It was really like a job, only it was costing me a huge amount of time and money. I just felt… called to it. And I didn’t feel bad about it. Because I wasn’t hurting anyone.”

“Hang on, hang on,” Cade cut in. “You weren’t hurting anyone?”

“Well, let me finish—”

“No, man, I’m sorry, but this is, like, too much. We’re here to support each other, and I can’t listen to you, like, deny reality like this.”

“Cade, let him finish,” Grant said. “This is a safe space.”

“But he’s talking way longer than any of us did.”

Grant cast him an icy glare and he quieted. 

Cade having been put in his place, Richard was in command. His problems were the best in the room. Maybe there was something to this whole vulnerability thing after all. “So after a while Jessica started to catch on. But I just gaslit her. It was easy because I was gaslighting myself. Telling myself that what I was doing was cool. That it was what I needed. That it was, like… ethical. So I just told her she was crazy. That I was busy with work. That parenting had made her insane and paranoid. And she believed me for a long time. Because it was easier to believe that she was crazy than that her husband was fucking literally everything that moved. And for a long time we were sharing a house and a bed but we were complete strangers to each other. I looked at her and all I saw was an obstacle to overcome. The bad self was totally in control.”

Grant said, “I’m going to stop you there,” his voice rumbling from such a low register that it felt like it was coming up from beneath the ground. As soon as Richard stopped talking, he felt chastened. Why had he said all of this to these people? Why had he thought all of it? Why had he done all of it? 

“This is a safe space to share, and you will be able to continue sharing, and to feel safe making yourself vulnerable. Because we can see you. And I can see you. And what I see is someone who is not yet showing us everything. So let me just say this: There are no two selves. There is one self. You. You—who are in this room with us and who has done things and had things done to him. Your fears and your guilt and your trauma. And saying that there are two selves is a way of keeping us distant from you. So I want you to try your best to get rid of that concept. There’s no other person inside you who did these things. You can’t split yourself like that. Not here. It was you.”

By the end of this brief speech Richard was crying inconsolably. For awhile they just let him weep.

When he was able to compose himself, he said, “I made a mistake. Well, my assistant made a mistake. He double-booked the Palm Springs house. I was there with one of my regulars—her name is Ella—and we had set up the sex swing in the living room. Then my wife and son walk in and they see us, right there, right in the middle of it, hanging in the air. This was not a situation where I could pull up the covers and hide myself. The sight lines were clear. The angles were… They were vivid. My little boy, Curtis, saw his father suspended, midair, with his cock up a strange woman’s ass.” Richard felt the tears once more. “And he’s nine years old. For the rest of his life, he’ll see this image. When he thinks of me, he’ll think of this. He will never see me the same way again. And worse, he will never be normal. He will never have a normal sexual relationship with a woman. He will never know the bliss of an uncomplicated romantic partnership. He’ll be like me. Like us. He’ll find himself sitting in strange rooms with strange people, unburdening himself in some hopeless attempt to become well. But he can’t become well. He can’t become whole. He will always have to contend with the psychic baggage of having a father who is the pervert of all perverts. Who cannot control himself. The father who blew up everything into a million pieces and ruined everyone’s lives with his cock.” Now Richard was screaming, sobbing, as his tale reached its Satanic terminus. “And this is what happens. This is what happens when you become an adult. This is what happens when you live a life. You destroy things. You destroy people. You almost can’t help it. You make mistakes and they mean something. God’s forgiveness can only take you so far. There are real world consequences and there is real hell to pay. I am broke and I am at the bottom of a well and there is nowhere to go but further down. I can scream and cry in here but I still did what I did. I can be honest and vulnerable and bare my soul to all the men in this room and all it gets me is this. And, this is not enough. I am not enough.”

For a long time everything was silence except for Richard’s wailing. The room was spacious, and well-ventilated. It could contain all this sound and fury, and then some. The sound of Richard, a man possessed, giving expression to all his sorrows, still did not reach beyond its walls. 

ROB SPERRY-FROMM is a writer based in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in Brooklyn Vegan and Invisible Oranges. He is the associate producer of premium vertical series content such as "Seduction Cove," "Video Game Romance," and "Gossip Godmother."