The Genius Factory

by David Plotz

  All of us nodded yes, for lack of anything else to say. Jeremy cut slices off an extremely ripe cantaloupe and handed them around. He wolfed his down, spilling juice all over the carpet. I watched as a cockroach strolled brazenly over to the juice spot. Jeremy tossed the rind on the dresser and forgot about it. Tom was sitting dumbstruck, Darian in one hand, melon dripping down the other. He was thinking, This is not real. This is the like the dream I have where I win the lottery and they hand me a tangerine. First there were the drug dealers, now there is the melon, and it’s ninety-five degrees, and I am here, and this is my dad.

  Jeremy stood up again and reached for the baby. “Do you want to give Darian a cold bath?” Lana smiled and said, “No, thank you.” Jeremy asked again, “Don’t you think Darian should have a bath?” Again Lana said no. He asked again. Then again a few minutes later. Darian was squirming and fretful; Tom and Lana looked around dubiously for a place to put him down. Jeremy noticed and said, “I don’t think he should crawl around here because of the cockroach problem, you know?”

  We tried to settle in. Jeremy and Tom checked each other out surreptitiously. They shared a powerful brow, a big chin, and thick hair but little else. Even up close, Jeremy revealed surprisingly little of his age—some gray hairs, a chin that was beginning to wattle. His boyishness was astonishing. Tom was an eighteen-year-old with the air of a forty-eight-year-old. Jeremy was a forty-eight-year-old with the air of an eighteen-year-old. After so many wives and children, Jeremy ought to have looked dragged down by his troubles, but he didn’t. He was careless, in both senses of that word. He was careless in that he didn’t pay attention to the consequences of what he did—hence children and melon rinds strewn hither and yon—and he was careless in that he did not seem troubled by life’s burdens. They didn’t touch him. They were someone else’s problem. He didn’t seem malevolent, only puerile.

  Carelessness made Jeremy a surprisingly gracious host. I would have thought he would be embarrassed by his house or weirded out by meeting an unknown son. But he seemed unperturbed. He joked, he punned, he flitted his attention from Darian to Tom to Lana to me. Tom and Lana seemed too overwhelmed to speak more than monosyllables. So Jeremy carried on a cheery, funny patter. Jeremy said a few words to Lana in Russian, then laughed about how he had once lived in Moscow for a few months and learned only how to curse. He was studying Japanese now, he said, and showed us his language tapes. He offered to buy Tom Russian tapes so he could eavesdrop on Lana’s parents. He questioned Tom about what his mom was like. He said he was part Cherokee. He talked about the weather. Whenever there was a silence, he filled it, giggling his “you know?” at the end of every sentence. He was a natural-born seducer, and he was seducing us.

  Jeremy delighted in Darian, and vice versa. He dandled Darian on his lap. He thrust stuffed animals into his face. He fanned him with a National Geographic. He handed Darian one of his books with an Indian chief on the cover. Darian grabbed the book and tried to eat it. “You wouldn’t be so happy if he tried to scalp you, Darian! But you like to read. That’s a good sign. Will you go to college one day, Darian? What do you want to do with your life, Darian?”

  At the next conversational pause, Jeremy announced to Lana and Tom, “If you want to get married, I’ll pay. We’ll go down to the courthouse right now.”

  Tom broke into a big grin, his first relaxed moment of the visit. At last he had something to say. “We are married. We got married a few weeks ago.” Jeremy grabbed Tom’s hand with a huge pumping shake of congratulation. Jeremy offered to help Lana get her green card. He said he had a lawyer friend, they could fill out the paperwork that afternoon.

  The silence descended once more. Jeremy asked again, “Do you want a cold bath, Darian?” Lana again said no, but this time Jeremy raced over to the bathroom and returned with a cold towel that he wiped all over Darian’s face. The baby cried at the intrusion. “He’s a crybaby,” said Tom.

  “Well,” countered Jeremy, “he’s just very expressive.”

  “I can’t wait for him to talk,” said Tom.

  “That’s the way parents are,” Jeremy answered. “When the kids are young, they want them to walk and talk. Then, when they get older. It’s ‘Sit down and shaddup!’ ” He delivered the punch line as if he were performing in a nightclub.

  Occasionally suspicion crept into Jeremy’s conversation. He admired Darian’s cuteness, then muttered, “The cuter they are, the more likely someone is to want to steal them.” There was also an undertone of sleaziness. He advised Tom not to have two girlfriends at the same time, peculiar counsel to someone who was (a) your new son and (b) just married: “You get confused and call one of them the wrong name, and they both kick you out.” He sounded as if he were speaking from experience.

  After half an hour in the hot house, we were all sweating through our clothes, except Jeremy, who still looked crisp. Tom, Lana, and I were dreading the prospect of spending the rest of the day there. We had to escape. I suggested we get some lunch.

  Over Cuban fast food and in the air-conditioning, everyone relaxed. Tom asked Jeremy if he had ever expected to meet his sperm bank kids. In a loud voice, Jeremy started to answer, “I never knew there were any sperm bank kids.” Midway through the sentence, he remembered he was in a public place, looked around campily, and dropped his voice to a whisper. Tom and Lana laughed. Jeremy buzzed Tom with questions, sometimes interrupting answers to make a joke or do an impersonation. What’s your favorite video game, Tom? Why do you like it? Do you play chess? Checkers? What’s your favorite drink? Jack and Coke? Really? What happened when you found out you were a Nobel sperm bank kid? Did you ever break any bones? Which ones?

  Tom enjoyed the attention, but I was uncomfortable. Jeremy seemed superficial. Not fake, exactly, but theatrical. He listened to Tom’s answers, only enough to ask the next question. He didn’t seem to care what Tom was saying. It felt like a show of affection for Tom’s benefit. But if it was, so what? Was faked affection worse than none?

  Jeremy picked up Darian and stared at his chunky cheeks. “Look, he’s Marlon Brando!” Tom loosened up, too. He called Jeremy “Grandpa.” Jeremy smiled at this in a peevish way. Jeremy scooped up Darian and paraded him around the restaurant. The cashiers cooed over the baby, as Jeremy beamed. Tom whispered to me, “It’s what I was hoping for. It’s good. I feel comfortable.”

  It was obvious that Jeremy was no genius. But it was also obvious how he had persuaded Julianna McKillop and Robert Graham that he deserved to be a donor to the Repository: he had a gift for making people feel at ease, and he had a quick tongue. He could charm the pants off anyone (and often had). Twenty years ago, when he was a medical student with a pretty wife, before his life got so messy, he must have shone with all the promise in the world.

  I announced that I was staying in a hotel and offered to get a room for Tom and Lana, too. Jeremy looked relieved. We found a Marriott with a pool. As we checked in, Jeremy pulled out his wallet and tried to hand me a hundred-dollar bill to cover Tom and Lana’s room. I refused it, so he thrust it at Tom. “C’mon, Tom. You had to pay for the airline ticket, right? David won’t take it, so I have to give it to someone, you know.” Tom reluctantly accepted the C-note. As he took it, Jeremy said softly to him, “Remember this when I am old and broke and retired.” In case Tom hadn’t heard, Jeremy immediately said it again, as a question: “You’ll remember this when I am old and broke and retired, right?” Later, when he knew Tom was watching, Jeremy picked up Darian and said, “At least you’ll take care of me when I’m old, right, Darian?” It didn’t sound as if he was joking. Tom was embarrassed. There was something sad about a man with so many children hoping a $100 gift would persuade his sperm bank son to cover his nursing home bills.

  At 4 P.M. we had to pick up Jeremy’s two kids—or rather, the only two of Jeremy’s many kids who lived with him. I drove Jeremy to the babysitter’s. He thanked me for suggesting the hotel room. “You don’t want to sleep on that floor, not with our c
ockroach problem.” I asked him about the scary guys next door. They were his landlords, he said. “The guys, they don’t really seem to do anything.” He said this in a way that made it clear that they did something but he was afraid to say what. In front of Tom, Jeremy hadn’t wanted to talk about why he was living in such squalor, but he opened up a little bit when we were alone. His job paid okay, he said, but he was a civil servant, not a rich doctor in private practice. He had to give half his modest income in child support—half was the maximum allowed by law—for his various kids. “Yeah, it’s not really the best living situation, you know. I don’t have much left over after all the child support. That’s what you get for having X kids, I guess.” But he didn’t sound too regretful when he said this—that carelessness again.

  Jeremy’s two girls were playing in the yard when we arrived. Mimi was nine; Stacy was eight. They were beautiful and brown-skinned—their mom was Haitian—with their dad’s thick hair and bright eyes. They were darlings: Stacy was powerfully built and full of energy. Her older sister was lither and a little calmer. They bounced all over the car, played with Jeremy’s hair, teased each other and their dad.

  When we arrived back at the hotel, the girls were excited to meet Tom, Lana, and Darian but more excited to swim in the pool. They had only the fuzziest idea of who Tom was and why he was there. At first they thought Tom was their uncle. Jeremy finally managed to explain that Tom was their brother, which did not surprise them; they had so many brothers already.

  We spread out around the small hotel pool. Lana lounged in a beach chair with Darian. The girls took a shine to Tom, though I suspected they would take a shine to anyone who paid attention to them. Tom loves kids, and he found it easier to talk to them than to Jeremy. He raced them across the pool and played Marco Polo. Jeremy joined them for a game of keep-away. When everyone was exhausted, we sat around the table and Tom gave the girls arithmetic problems while they played peekaboo with Darian. “Can the baby stay with us?” Stacy asked. Everyone was laughing and goofing. It was early evening by now; the sky was pink and hazy and soft. The vicious heat had dissipated into an easy warmth. Tom was calmer than I had ever seen him.

  Jeremy, wearing a straw hat and an unbuttoned white cotton shirt, bounced Darian on his knee and gazed at his kids—Tom and the girls—with a bemused smile.

  Tom said he was interested in being a writer, too. He asked Jeremy about the book he had written. Jeremy looked embarrassed. “It was self-published,” he said. “It was about a dream I had.” He didn’t elaborate. Then he said, “I was thinking of being a writer, but it’s really hard to get published, really hard to break in. So I gave up on that.” I asked him about his current job. He said he liked it because it was easy working for the state: “When I graduated medical school, I worked for a private practice, and I was going to set up my own practice. But I looked into it, and it was just so complicated. You had to handle billing and a secretary, and you had to find patients and advertise. It just seemed like it was going to be too much.”

  He knew my magazine Slate was owned by Microsoft, and he wondered if I had any Microsoft stock options. “I don’t own any stocks,” Jeremy said. “I think I could be a really good investor, but I don’t know enough to do it right. What I have always planned to do is make a practice portfolio and then try it for a while and see how I do, and then when I learned how to do it right, I would invest real money. But I haven’t done that yet.” My God, I thought, he sounded exactly like Tom did in the morning, when he was considering and rejecting possible careers. Was this Jeremy’s genetic gift to Tom—this indecisiveness, this giving-up-before-you-startness?

  It was time for dinner. We couldn’t all fit into my rental car. Tom volunteered to ride with Jeremy. (Jeremy’s car looked like his house: trash festooned the floor, books about American Indians were piled on the seats.) We stopped to collect Jeremy’s purse-lipped old lady (though wouldn’t you be purse-lipped if you lived as she had to?).

  We ate at a small Thai restaurant. Tom and Jeremy were next to each other, and I sat across from them. Their gestures were eerily similar. Each leaned slightly back in his chair, right elbow on the table, left hand crossed and resting in the right elbow’s crook. When they talked, they tilted their heads a few degrees to the right.

  “Are you happy?” Tom asked his dad.

  “Yeah, I guess. I am too busy not to be happy,” Jeremy answered. Then he turned the question back at Tom. “You look happy, Tom. You have a beautiful kid, a good job, a pretty wife. You should be happy!”

  Tom smiled. Jeremy described a few of his other kids, particularly a son who had gotten straight As and gone to math camp.

  “I did real bad in high school,” said Tom. “All Bs. I didn’t study. I was really lazy.”

  “You sound like me,” said Jeremy.

  “I really don’t know how to work hard yet. I thought I would learn how to work hard in college, but I haven’t really,” said Tom.

  “Well, there are worse things than being lazy,” Jeremy said.

  Jeremy suggested we get doughnuts for dessert, so we convoyed to a nearby Krispy Kreme. Tom and the girls were mesmerized by the doughnut machine and hyper at the prospect of eating all that sugar. Tom was in an expansive, generous, gleeful mood. He insisted on buying everyone doughnuts, dozens of them, all kinds of them, far more than we could eat in days. We crammed into a couple of small tables, cutely pressed up against one another. Tom fed doughnuts to the girls. Jeremy nibbled slowly on a small glazed; the girls leapt up and down in a sugar mania.

  Jeremy suddenly asked me, “Where would you want to live if you had a hundred million dollars?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “Maybe Los Angeles in winter, Vermont in summer, New York City the rest of the year.”

  “I would live in the Queen Charlotte Islands, way up off the coast of Canada. There’s hardly anyone there, just some Indians.”

  “Why are you so interested in Indians?” I asked.

  “I think it’s the yearning for a simpler life.” He looked at the girls and at Tom. “But that will never happen.”

  We returned to the hotel. Jeremy and his family said good night and left us. Tom changed Darian into his pajamas and reviewed the day—the drug dealers, the melon, the heat, the filth, the pool, the doughnuts. Mostly, Tom said, he was really happy: he felt pretty comfortable with Jeremy. He was glad that Jeremy was curious about him. He didn’t care that his genius sperm bank father wasn’t Jonas Salk.

  Still, something was eating at Tom: Why had Jeremy fathered so many kids, and why had he left them?

  “I can see why he got so many girls to go to bed with him. He has all this charisma. But I was trying to figure out the kids, and it just hurts my head. He really looks like he loves Mimi and Stacy. If he felt that way about the others, I don’t know how he ever left them. Is it that he just has bad taste in women? I can’t believe that. I can’t believe he has X kids and married that many times. The type of person who would do that, it just doesn’t seem like him.”

  “People make mistakes,” Lana offered.

  “Yeah, but not X times,” Tom cracked.

  “Or maybe he just has bad common sense, like you,” Lana said.

  “Yeah, maybe. It’s kind of scary that I am like him, because he has done so much stuff I don’t want to do—the kids, the marriages.”

  Jeremy and his daughters returned to the hotel in the morning. We spent a few more hours poolside. Jeremy was wearing his battered straw hat, a white linen shirt, and a towel wrapped around his waist like a skirt. He looked like a contented old hippie. Jeremy and Stacy chicken-fought in the pool with Tom and Mimi. The girls pushed Darian around in his stroller when he fussed. “You are wonderful aunts,” Tom called to them. When Tom tried to feed Darian a bottle, Stacy grabbed it from Tom and rebuked him: “Don’t play with my baby.” Jeremy danced around the edge of the pool with Darian. He stopped for a moment and asked, “How many kids do you want, Tom?”

  “Two of t
hem is all I want,” said Tom, “and we’re going to wait five years for the next one.”

  “Two or three, that’s a good number,” said Jeremy. “More than that, and the possibility of fighting increases exponentially. There are too many different combinations.”

  “Jeremy, can you write down a list of all my brothers and sisters and their ages for me?” Tom asked.

  “Yeah, I can do that. I used to have a list like that around. But they keep on coming out of the woodwork. There are more every day. You and Alton and—”

  I asked Jeremy the question Tom had asked me the night before: Why had he had so many kids? If he could live his life over, would he have them again? He thought for a moment, then answered, “I don’t know. Stacy and Mimi are number X minus 2 and X minus 1. So imagine, if I had stopped earlier, then I would never have had them.”

  But what about all those other kids, all the ones you don’t see and don’t take care of? What about them? That’s what I wanted to ask, but I didn’t.

  Jeremy proposed we drive to South Beach. It was a beautiful day, Tom and Lana had never seen the ocean, and that way Jeremy could drop us off at the Miami airport late that night. Jeremy and Tom drove together. On the way down, with me out of earshot, Jeremy congratulated Tom on finding a foreign wife. Foreign girls, he said, let you get away with a lot more. You can mess around with other women and then explain to your wife that cheating is the American way. He told Tom that he even had a built-in excuse if he got caught. “You can tell Lana, ‘Oh, it’s normal for me to want two girls. I was raised by my mom and my sister, so I need to have two women in my life.’ ” Tom was revolted. He had been married for two weeks, and his dad was offering him tips on how to cheat. Tom changed the subject.

  Tom and Lana were agog at South Beach—models in bikinis, fortune-tellers, stores selling water pipes and incense, outdoor bars, street musicians. Jeremy found a shady spot on the sand, beneath a lifeguard shack. We laid out towels and settled in for the afternoon. It was mellow and sweet and happy. Stacy fed Darian a bottle. Mimi braided Lana’s hair. Jeremy changed Darian’s diaper. Jeremy and Tom waded in the surf together. Jeremy came back first. We were alone. I asked him what he thought of meeting his Repository son.