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GEEK part 2
by Ted Pelton

Two months later, they suddenly got married. I pretended not to know why. I thought Ken would ask me to be best man, but he chose his older brother Bob instead, who flew in from California for the ceremony. They'd never been close, but now there was a big reconciliation. Bob had gotten married the year before and had a newborn, so now they suddenly had a lot in common and the family was happy to see them getting along so well.

I didn't say a thing.

Maybe I never would have, but one day Karen called me up. This was just after the wedding, about three months after we'd had our little adventure. "I have something to tell you," she said.

"What's up?"

"I don't want you to get the wrong idea."

I knew what she was going to say.

"Ken and I are pregnant."

"That's great."

I tried to sound upbeat, but something in my voice triggered her attention. She was listening closely to my voice. "Yeah," she said. "We decided it was time. I don't want you to think . . . ."

"Oh, no. I wouldn't think . . . ."

"Yeah, because I had my period. After --." She cut off, then found the right expression. "The Eddie Money night. I got my period after that." She was talking fast. "And then Ken and I decided, he's always wanted a son to play catch with, so we should. And it just happened, right away, as soon as we started trying."

"Great!" I felt as if I'd been holding my breath. "Wonderful!" I knew she was lying, but I had to fill the silence. "I know Ken must be very proud," I said, as straight as possible. The words started to come easier--after all, I had to keep my end of the bargain. I told her I thought of them as really good friends, and that I was very happy for them. By the time we got off the phone, she was crying. "You're such a good friend, Geek. I think Bob's going to be the godfather, but if we could have a second godfather, I'd want it to be you."

I didn't see much of them after that, and even less of Karen than of Ken. I'd play golf on public courses with Ken every so often in the summer, and once in a while we'd go in my car, so I was able to say hello to Karen when I dropped Ken off. When the baby came, they had a big party for the Christening. It looked exactly like me. When I say that it means something. My father was from Haiti. I'm light-skinned, but you can tell I'm not pure Anglo. And this kid certainly did not belong to white people like Ken and Karen. He was dark, like my father. You wouldn't say he couldn't pass for white, but he had a thin down of curly reddish brown hair, like mine. Both Karen and Ken's hair was straight. The relatives were all talking about how he looked like Uncle Claude, Ken's father's brother who died in Vietnam, and passing around this picture of a young man in uniform who had red hair, but who looked nothing like this kid at all. Still, that's what they named the kid, Claude, and all of the relatives, Karen included, kept gawking over this picture, talking about the shape of his face and his eyes and chin. She was purposely not looking me straight in the face. Claude! My child, called Claude! All of this, and me, the real father, standing there, the living picture of this kid, and no one aware of it at all.

Karen then started passing around pictures they'd taken of the baby. She handed me two, barely glancing at me: a wallet-sized and a 5x7 I left her money for.

I bought a frame for it and put it on my dresser.

Whenever I went over to their house from then on, I always made sure I had my camera. I'd have two sets of pictures made, one for them and one for me. I bought an album to start keeping the pictures in. I was clinging, true. But he was my kid. I'd like to see how anyone else would have acted in my place. You can be sure, though, that I never said a word about it to Ken. He'd kick the living crap out of me for starters, but that's not why I did it. It was the bargain. Karen had given me her body that night. I had given my word. That's how I looked at it. The rest of my life might be empty, but at least my word was gold.

Ken was pretty good with the kid, I'll give him that, despite what anyone would have thought beforehand. Except for the occasional game of golf or trip to see a game, he was with the kid all the time he wasn't at work. He'd calmed down, too--no more nights out to all hours or disappearing without notice. I'd kind of entertained the idea that if Ken ever started disappearing again, if it got worse and he left for a couple of days at a time, I could return to Karen, that it would be my role to come to her when she was lonely. That was what I took second godfather, when she said that, to mean. But Claude kind of snapped Ken out of it, and now he always let Karen know where he was when he wasn't at home. Uncle Claude had always been a family legend with Ken, so little Claude was like a little returning ghost, his spirit reincarnated. Anyway, that's how they treated him, as if he not only belonged to Ken, but was the heroic warrior himself in smaller form, come back to life after a period in limbo. It just shows you what people can convince themselves of in their minds.

I had to be satisfied with pictures. But I found I just couldn't be around the three of them anymore. I stopped calling up Ken for golf and such, and made excuses if he called me.

I didn't stop taking pictures, though. I bought a 35 millimeter Minolta which could take a large zoom, like the kind you see them using in the photographers sections at the end of the dugout in a baseball stadium. I got this idea when they started leaving Claude at day care. The day care mother would take him to the park and I'd sit across the street in the back of my car. I'd gotten the windows tinted, so no one could see me. The pictures I got were surprisingly good. My job allowed me time off during the day. It creeped me out a little to see myself doing all this, but I wanted to see my son grow up, and I wasn't left much alternative. It wasn't like I was some kind of pervert or something. I was just a good father, a doting father--or as much as I could be, given the circumstances. I rarely saw Karen and Ken now except when they picked up Claude or Christmases or occasionally at the supermarket or around town.

One day, the girl behind the counter at Modell's said, "You sure take a lot of pictures." This was Sandra, the woman who'd eventually help me turn my life around.

"They're pictures of my son." I took them from the envelope and showed them to her. They weren't your typical snapshots. The zooms in from a distance put their subject in focus and made everything around him a blur. Several of them had been shot through fences and were foregrounded by nets of dark, translucent lines. I worried for a moment about showing them, but parents naturally love to show pictures of their kids. I'd never had the chance to before.

Sandra was oblivious to their dubious photographic qualities. She saw the pictures in the best possible light, and she sympathized. "I have two myself," she said. "I don't think their father ever took a picture of either one of them in his life." I took that to mean their father was no longer around. I talked to her the next couple of times I was in Modell's, and even stopped by for no other reason but to say hello. She was twenty, eight years my junior. She didn't impress me as beautiful at first, but now I started to see that she was pretty in her way, though tired looking from the schedule she had to keep up and from raising two kids without a father. I asked her out, offering to pay for her babysitter as well.

"How can I refuse an offer like that?" she said.

Over dinner, I told Sandra a version of the story, skipping the part about begging Karen. In my retelling, we went out once, got drunk and had sex; Obviously, I left out the part about the rubber. But did that make a difference? What we were talking about was my genetic material helping create another life, a life I was now cut off from. "You should fight it," said Sandra. "You should at least get visiting rights. He's your son." Sandra told me she'd left home at an early age, then gotten pregnant the first time she ever had sex, at sixteen. "I didn't think it could really happen your first time." She had considered an abortion, but instead discussed her predicament with a local minister, who had her bring in the father, a boy two years older than her, so he could counsel them both on the importance of marriage and creating a stable home for the baby they were bringing into the world. But the baby turned out to be twins and Ahmet, the father--it turned out I knew him from playing softball--couldn't handle it. Sandra was left with two little girls, now aged four. She got by on Welfare and Modell's, but she wanted to go back to school now and eventually college. She had in the meantime converted to Islam and didn't drink or engage in sex outside of marriage.

I had never considered the possibility of actually getting rights to Claude. "You think I could do that after all this time?" It had been over five years since the night he was conceived.

"Fathers have rights, too," she said. It was happening all over the place. She told me how she had seen men in my situation on talk shows on TV, and how experts said that the bond of the father was something people had to stop ignoring because it was real, not just something in my imagination. Experts were saying now that men had chemicals in them, she said, and these chemicals made them become more nurturing, more like mothers, once they'd fathered children.

Sandra and I didn't make love, but I began to see her body in ways I never saw a woman before. We'd sit out on the porch of her apartment in the sun, drinking lemonade. On her creamy brown belly was a wide purple scar from her Caesarian. This was a woman's body, a temple to be respected and honored. I told her the story I'd prepared to tell Karen if she'd ever asked, that my condom was old and had broken. Sandra called it fate and said that Allah decreed such things to show us that we couldn't control our own circumstances but should instead bow down and see His power in all things. She showed me her prayer rug and, though it was against Islamic tradition for men and women to pray together, showed me how to offer prayers in Arabic, facing East toward Mecca. One day, she said, she hoped to raise the money to go there with her sons. We spent the whole weekend together, and she made me feel like a real man for the first time. I went to the lumberyard and brought back wood to build her a bookshelf. I had never done anything with my hands before, but Sandra gave me the confidence in my manhood that I'd been so sorely lacking before. She knew me by my given name, Dennis, and I didn't even tell her that I had once been known as Geek.

I decided to do what I had to do. I called in sick to work on Monday night and called Karen. It was just after she'd gotten home from work. Ken wouldn't be home for another hour--his highway jobs could be as far away as the Bronx or Westchester. I wanted to make sure I got her alone, to try to explain my plan. To go through the courts wasn't appealing to me, but if I told Karen that it was possible I could do it, I figured it would be possible for me to arrange to have Claude a day here and there, to go on trips with Sandra and her kids, the five of us like a real family, one of mine and two of hers, our own little brown Brady Bunch.

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