Family Dynamics (Pam of Babylon Book Five) (2 page)

“Can I have the weekend to think about it?” Ted asked.

“Take all the time you want,” Penny Able said. “Call me when you decide, OK? I’ll be monitoring my messages all weekend.” She paused, giving Ted the opportunity to respond. When he didn’t, she continued. “Thank you for calling, Mr. Dale. I hope to talk to you again soon. Goodbye.” After she hung up, Ted sat on a chair placed up against the hallway wall. Natalie Borg. He closed his eyes for a moment, willing a face to come into focus. Who was she? Nothing appeared. He got up and walked into the den. It wasn’t clear by Ashton’s expression if he’d eavesdropped on the conversation.

“I have no idea who the woman is. Natalie Borg. She lives in the city.”

“Are you upset?” Ted asked. The last thing they needed was drama. Everything had been so smooth and trouble-free because Ted didn’t bring much baggage to the table. He’d never had a long relationship, so there were no jilted lovers demanding his time. He was healthy with nothing lurking, unlike Ashton, who had the vestiges of a relationship with Jack Smith, the well-known breaker of hearts, now dead. Until Ashton came along, Ted had led a solitary life. Well, not that solitary.

“No, not upset. Just what you would think. Upset for you. Not at you. What the hell are you going to do?” Ashton asked.

“I want to find out who Natalie Borg is before I agree to see the kid. Deborah Phillips. Her name is Deborah Phillips. It seems pointless to meet her if I didn’t have at least something going with the mother. A friendship maybe I forgot about? Was I that shallow?” They started laughing—gallows humor. “Don’t answer. If we didn’t have at least that, if it was a one-night stand, I might as well have been a sperm donor. The mother a surrogate. Why does the kid want to do this, I wonder?”

“Probably just to know who she came from. Stories like this are in the paper all the time. Don’t get all worked up now, OK? Let’s find the mother’s information if we can. Did you ask the attorney?” Ashton asked.

“No, I didn’t like her and didn’t want to get into a conversation with her,” Ted replied.

“Why didn’t you like her?” Ashton asked, confused.

“She sounded like a mouse over the phone,” Ted replied. “I pictured a mouse with glasses on the tip of its nose on the other end of the line.” Ashton looked over at Ted, who emitted a deep sigh, his rounded shoulders and sprawled-apart legs already showing what he was feeling.

“Stop now. That’s creepy,” Ashton said, getting up from the couch to go to the computer in the corner of the den. He’d Google Natalie Borg and see if he could find out anything about her. “Pull it together before you upset yourself.” He sat at their shared computer and keyed in “Natalie Borg.” Immediately, a URL for Switchboard came up, with N. Borg, Mercer Street, New York, New York. Ashton clicked on the link and like magic, within thirty seconds, he’d found a phone number for the mother of Ted’s child. He got a sticky note and a pen and wrote the number down.

“Do you want to call her, or shall I?” Ashton asked, handing the note to Ted.

“We haven’t been home for two hours, for God’s sake. Can I think about this for a second?” But he knew he needed to make the call to keep the momentum going, so he reached for the note.

“The Village? Hmm.” He closed his eyes again, thinking back to the years when he was in his thirties, when going to a bar in the Village to hear a band would be the normal activity on a weekday night. He tried to place the different bars and any women he had met. Slowly, while Ashton answered the door for the grocery delivery, then began putting the food away, Ted picked through the foggy memories, many of them clouded by the alcohol or drugs he had taken. He saw a few faces that may have been subsequent sexual partners. Why’d he do it? He had known he was gay but was in denial for years and years, bothered by the nervous disapproval of his father whispering in his ear: “Don’t get complacent, Teddy. Don’t give in. We all have those impulses. Trust me, we all have those desires. It’s why they call it sin, young man. It’s why they call it lust.” So he fought it with wanton behavior. “Fast and Furious” had been his nickname in college, drawn from his sexual activity. The women he slept with let it be known around campus that Ted Dale didn’t waste any time. “He gets in and gets out,” one young woman said. “And forget any foreplay. You’d think he was afraid of it.” And he was, sort of. He thought a woman’s naked body beautiful for purely artistic reasons, but forget the beaver shot. It looked like an operation.

“I think I might remember who she is,” Ted said to Ashton. “Natalie Borg lived downtown with her mother and father. She was younger than I was by maybe ten years. She picked me up, or we picked each other up, and went to her parents’ house. They were gone somewhere. I remember the house clearly. Mercer Street. It was a modern three-story place, yellow brick, ugly. I only saw her that one time.”

“You sure remember a lotta detail for not remembering anything,” Ashton said. “So are you going to call her?”

“I guess I better get it over with. We aren’t even sure this is her number.” He walked out of the den, staring at the little piece of paper. Sitting back on the chair next to the phone, he dialed the number and waited as the ringing began. Finally, the answering machine picked up.

“Hi, this is Natalie. I can’t come to the phone, but if you’ll leave a number and brief message, I’ll call you back. If you want to get in touch pronto, call my cell: 515-314-0425. Ciao.” It was a nice voice, a middle-aged woman’s voice.

“Hi, Natalie, this is Ted Dale calling. Could you give me a call back?” He gave her his cell phone number and hung up. If she had caller ID, she’d see their land-line number. He was purposely cagey in case she had a husband. If this was the right woman, and the paternity test came back positive, he’d had a child with her. They were almost related because of it. He found that he was mildly excited about it. His temperament was to look at the bright side of things, the exact opposite of Ashton’s most of the time. He had some damage control to do.

“OK, call’s made, message left on her machine,” he said, walking into the den. Ashton was going through a pile of paper, filling a recycling basket with printed recipes and junk-mail catalogs he no longer wanted. Ted went up to his lover and put his arms around his waist, hugging his chest to Ashton’s back. “I love you, Ash. Sorry this spoiled our homecoming.”

“It didn’t spoil anything,” Ashton said. “It’s just life that we have to deal with something we don’t want to deal with.”

Ted made the decision that he was going to be honest about his feelings, no matter what the response might be. “I think I might be kind of excited about it,” he admitted. Ashton turned around in Ted’s arms and looked at his face, into his eyes.

“Really?” he asked.

“I think so. If it’s true, we have a kid,” Ted replied. “Someone else to love, to share our life with.” Ashton stifled his laughter.
Could my husband be that stupid?

“You might be naïve, my friend. What if she’s a homophobe who just wants money?” Ashton asked.

“Oh stop,” Ted said, laughing “If that’s the case, we’ll deal with it. I’m starving. What’s for lunch?” Ashton couldn’t believe his ears.

“You can think about food at a time like this? I’ll make you a sandwich,” he said.
That man can only think about his stomach
. The kitchen was a light-filled space in spite of being in the middle of the apartment with no windows, a trick of good lighting and light-reflecting colors. Ashton liked working in it, and as he prepared some lunch for Ted, he was reminded what a great life they had together. They had jobs they liked, enough money to travel whenever they could, a great apartment in the best city in the world.
Why do I feel threatened?
He poured glasses of iced tea and took them to the dining area of the living room. The sun was out, and he could see a lot of activity on the river as he viewed it through the buildings on First Avenue. As he was walking back to the kitchen to get the plates of food, the first wave of fear washed over him. The feeling slowed him down, and he moved over to a bar stool to sit and catch his breath.
What the hell was that?
Without looking for it, or even thinking of him, Jack’s voice echoed in his brain: “You won’t want to live without me.” It was a lie of the devil.
Get behind me, Satan
, he thought.
You have no power over me. Jack, you ass
. He wasn’t going to allow his dead, former lover to have any control.
It isn’t that uncommon for people to have children appear out of nowhere, is it? You read about it in the paper all the time
.

“Come eat!” he said. Ted walked out of the den, his eyes glazed over. Ashton, in a sudden rush of compassion, went to him and hugged him. “We’ll be OK. I’m sorry I was sharp.”

“No one would ever accuse you of being sharp,” Ted replied with a hint of sarcasm. He leaned in and kissed Ashton on the mouth.

Chapter 2

T
he Department of Public Works began tearing up Mercer Street after Memorial Day to repair an underground problem. Natalie Borg left her apartment early in the morning to drop grades off at school and pick up a few things she didn’t want to leave in her office over the summer. She was gone only four hours, but by the time she got back to Mercer, the jack-hammers were already at work, filling the air with a tooth-jarring din and sending up clouds of concrete dust. It was going to be a long summer.

She trudged up the stairs of her building after navigating the mess out in the street, her socks in Birkenstock sandals filthy. The mail had arrived, and although she didn’t feel like dealing with it, she stopped at her box and pulled a bigger-than-normal pile out. She was covered in sweat when she reached her floor, weeks of overeating having finally taken its toll. The key turned easily, and she pushed the door open to her safe haven. Glad for the necessity to leave for work every day, she knew she was a potential hermit if she ever lost her teaching job. It was cool inside. She threw her purse and briefcase down on a chair by the door, taking the mail into the kitchen. It was the apartment where she grew up. Her parents had taught at NYU until their retirement. She’d made the tough decision two years earlier that they needed to go to some type of assisted-living situation. They’d tried having someone come in, but it didn’t work out; either the worker wouldn’t show up or would come under the influence, and finally the worst—her parents grew to love the caretaker, and she’d had a heart attack while in their apartment.

Natalie visited several places and decided Manor House in Queens was the best. It had friendly staff, was clean and modern, and would be an easy commute to visit once a week or more if she could manage it. She was guilt-free because she knew it was for the best. Not normally melancholy, she made decisions based on facts and then rarely looked back. Lately, however, depression had set in. She wondered about the usefulness of her life and thought of the simplest way to kill herself. Natalie Borg was in this frame of mind when the letter from Penny Able arrived.

She didn’t recognize the address or the name but figured nothing from an attorney could be good news. Outside of her parents’ wills and other trust-related issues, the only thing she could think of was maybe her building was going co-op, which would force her to get the hell out of Greenwich Village finally. She turned the burner under the teakettle on and went into her bedroom to take off her dirty socks. She had the legal-sized envelope with her. She put it on the desk in her bedroom and went into the bathroom, stripping her socks off. The cold bathroom tile felt good on the soles of her feet. She went to the sink to wash her hands, taking an unwelcome glimpse into the mirror above. Awful. She was getting so fat and hairy. It was almost out of her control. All the walking she did and she was still as fat as a pig. She grabbed a ponytail holder and pulled her curly salt and pepper hair back into it.

The teakettle hissed when she got back to the kitchen. She’d picked up a letter opener off her desk, and after she poured the water over her tea bag, slit the envelope open. It was similar to the one Ted Dale received that day, but this one was scary, blasting away at a stonewall she’d erected eighteen and a half years ago. The child she’d given up for adoption, the same one she named Ted Dale as the father of, wanted to meet her. She was an honor student at Rutgers, it went on to say, a lovely, mature young woman who had the blessings of her adoptive parents to seek out Natalie and Ted. A rush of heat came at her, adding to the fear. Peggy Able had also contacted Ted Dale. Did he even know who she was? They’d had a one-night stand. Natalie had tried contacting Ted several times after they’d spent the night together, and when she discovered she was pregnant, tried again. But he never answered her calls. It was the most humiliating, heartbreaking experience she’d ever had. Everything they said about sleeping with someone you don’t know came true. And because she didn’t date much, she’d built a sort of fairy tale about Ted Dale and began writing him long love letters in her journal, pretending they had a love affair and the feeling was mutual. Now in her mid-forties, she shed a few tears for that awkward young woman, so lonely and without self-respect that she would pick up a guy in a bar, bring him back to her family home, lose her virginity to him on her schoolgirl bed, and then concoct a fantasy about their love affair. She remembered even telling a workplace acquaintance about her new boyfriend, Ted. Long ago, she’d destroyed the journals written full of her make-believe scenarios. The horror of it, of being pregnant with a phantom boyfriend’s baby, was realized when her mother found and read the journal. The shame of it, and then the embarrassment of not just getting caught, but having to admit that it was a one-night stand and not the product of a long, loving romance would long be remembered. Before her parents demanded that she give the baby up for adoption, she had already decided to. It was too late for an abortion, but she wouldn’t have been able to do it anyway. She cupped her hands over spiders and mosquitoes she’d caught, taking them to the window of her bedroom and letting them out on the ledge rather than smashing them with a paper towel like her mother did. Getting rid of the baby wasn’t an option. And now here in black and white was proof of it. Deborah Phillips. Honor student at Rutgers. She drank down her tea, which had grown cold. It was Friday. She’d call the lawyer, Penny Able, and tell her she’d see Deborah. Walking into the living room to get the phone, she saw a blinking light on the answering machine. She picked up the receiver, pressed all the buttons, and then heard the voice. It was obvious that Ted didn’t remember her or that she’d tried to reach him all those times. He left his number, and she listened to the message twice to get it written down correctly. Hearing Ted’s voice again, the reality of him, made her physically ill. She tried to remember each detail, his looks, what his body felt like, every sound he made when they had sex. Later, she would stalk his aunt, also a teacher at NYU, becoming friends with her, fishing for invitations to her apartment. It would all fail miserably, never yielding a glimpse of Ted.