by Warren Adler
On Sunday, he went jogging again and made a beeline to the playground. There she was, sitting on the bench watching the little boy. But this time he studied the boy. The child was tall, dark haired, freckled. Ben was tall, dark haired, and as a child had been freckled. He studied the boy’s movements, the way he moved his hands on the monkey bars. Once the child looked up, and even at that distance he imagined he and the boy exchanged glances. Had they communicated some mysterious genetic attachment?
He had calculated that the boy was about five or close to it. If so, the math worked. Could it be? He hung around the playground, hidden behind the tree, watching, waiting, intuitively investigating the possibility. At about noon, Susan stirred, folded the paper, summoned the boy, took his hand, and proceeded to walk along the path toward Fifth Avenue. He followed her at a distance. Luckily, he could fade into the crowds who filled the streets, taking in the beautiful spring day.
Holding the little boy’s hand, she walked for a couple of blocks and then entered a high-rise apartment building on 71st Street. She had moved up in the world. After she had disappeared into the building, he reentered the park and jogged his way to the West Side.
With effort, he tried to maintain some semblance of normality. Under the circumstances, it was extremely difficult since he was growing angrier by the minute. How dare she? In his mind, he could not mistake the coincidence of the time frame and the appearance of the child.
“Is something wrong, Ben?”
“Why?”
He supposed he was not good at hiding things, especially something as searing as this. If that little boy was his child, she had literally stolen it away from him. Clearly, it was a betrayal. If she truly wanted it, he would have honored his commitment. Despite the awkward timing, he would have found the courage to step up to the plate, to do the right thing.
All sorts of scenarios came to mind. What had she told people about the child? Was there an adoptive father? If she had married, how did she portray the child’s history to his new daddy? What had she written on the boy’s birth certificate? Father unknown? How could she?
He grew increasingly agitated. A few days went by. He grew listless. His mind wandered and his work suffered. Thoughts of how he had been betrayed crowded into his mind. He spent long hours in silent contemplation going over numerous possibilities about how he might react when the true situation was revealed. He had no intention of remaining silent.
Everyone around him during the next week looked at him askance, asking him what was wrong.
“Not a damned thing,” he would shoot back to their queries. He wanted to say it was none of their friggin’ business, but, above all, he was a practical man when it came to taking risks. In the firm, he could not look as if he were involved in anything that was not relevant to the activity of the firm. People did understand real problems like sickness or death in the family, but a person who exhibited perpetual anger and depression was not long for upward mobility.
With Barbara, he did not need to be as careful with his demeanor. She was quick to assess his moods, and when they were prolonged she reacted with concern.
“Why are you so angry?” she would rebuke.
“You’re imaging things.”
“I know you, Ben. What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
Of course, it wasn’t “nothing.” Anger was becoming rage. Susan had inveigled him, forced him into conceiving a child for her own selfish purposes. He was merely a means to an end, a way for her to realize her secret dream of motherhood without having to take him along as excess baggage. He had been taken, abused, his good nature manipulated for her own evil ends. She had stolen his seed.
Thinking back, he tried to re-imagine how he could have been so naïve. She had assured him that she was on the Pill, that she loved him. Now he was certain she had faked her pleasure in their couplings, egged him on, taken advantage of his sexual nature. He cursed his naiveté.
Three times in the week after he had first seen her with the boy, he had stolen away from the office, canceled meetings, and rushed off to the children’s playground in Central Park to observe them. She was so calm, so self-assured, so certain that she had gotten away with her subterfuge.
Watching the boy, he fantasized about him. His son. Child of his loins. His conception. He viewed Susan Charrap with growing hatred, but still he did not reveal himself to her.
One thing was certain: His entire life had been turned upside down. Remembering how he had agonized over his fate, cursed his cowardice in those days after the break-up. Worse, his entire sense of self had undergone profound changes on account of what she had done. Even today, he was becoming convinced it affected him so profoundly that it had inhibited his progress at the firm. In truth, he had expected to go further. Not that he had done badly, but he could have done a lot better if the incident hadn’t happened.
In fact, he looked at Barbara now in a new light. Can any woman be trusted? He was having second thoughts about the future of their relationship. After a week of this new agony, he suggested that maybe they should give themselves pause, reconsider their long-term plans.
“I don’t understand any of this, Ben.”
“It’s my fault,” he told her.
“What changed?”
“That line of questioning will get you nowhere,” he told her, reducing her to tears, which, surprisingly did not move him. He remembered when Susan Charrap had been reduced to tears. Only now he knew they were crocodile tears.
It rained the following weekend, and he did not go out jogging. It was unlikely that Susan would take her son, their son, to the playground. Instead, he stayed in his apartment and stewed. It was becoming impossible to live with his rage. He decided he would have to confront her.
He toyed with the idea of calling her on the phone, but decided that such a move was cowardly. No, he decided, he would meet her face-to-face, and the most logical method would be to do this in the playground with their child just a few feet away. When he came up with that course of action, he felt slightly unburdened. As for the practical implications, the legal aspects, he would consult a lawyer. With DNA testing, he felt certain that paternity could be established without a shadow of a doubt, but he considered that a mere formality.
He wasn’t certain exactly what he would ask for. Probably some form of visitation rights or, at the very least, the revelation that he was the boy’s father and that such knowledge should be imparted to the boy when he was old enough to understand its implications. If there were monetary considerations, he would consider them, especially as concerned the child’s education.
If she refused, he would fight her in court. In his mind, he became militant and aggressive and nothing could assuage his anger. In fact, this cause had established itself as his number-one priority. All else, his career at the firm, his relationship with Barbara, retreated against the onslaught of this personal crusade. The fact that it had happened so fast was not an issue. He was ready to cast everything else aside.
One day he did not go to the office. Instead, he waited on a park bench for any sign of Susan and the little boy. The day was bright; the trees had sprouted to full bloom prompted by the rain and the warmth that had bathed the park in cheerful sunlight.
He saw her approach from a distance, her and the little boy, his son. As before, she sat on the bench and began to read the New York Times while the little boy played on the monkey bars. By then, Ben’s rage had solidified his resolve. He rose from the bench and moved toward the playground, his legs slightly wobbly, his breath short.
As he approached, another woman sat down beside Susan, someone obviously known to her. It put somewhat of a crimp in his strategy but he did not falter. She looked up as he approached the bench and lifted her sunglasses as if to make certain her eyes were not deceiving her. She folded the paper on her lap.
“Is that you, Ben?”
He nodded, but did not smile.
“I can’t believe it.”
She turned to the woman next to her on the bench. She was about the same age as Susan.
“This is Cynthia Raymond,” Susan said, turning to the woman, introducing him. “Ben Grant.”
He was about to ask whether he could speak to her alone. It was an awkward moment, since he did not expect to find another person beside her.
“Cynthia is one of my clients. I’ve been taking care of little Fred while she was out of town.”
“I took the red-eye from California, but I couldn’t wait to see Fred again.”
At that moment, the little boy spied his mother and came running to her outstretched arms.
“He was wonderful,” Susan said. “Not a bit of trouble, really.”
She looked up at Ben and smiled.
“So how are things, Ben?” she asked pleasantly.
He cleared is throat and tried to speak, but found it difficult. They exchanged glances and he saw no fire in her eyes, no real recognition. It was as if nothing had ever occurred between them.
“Very well, Susan. I thought it was you.”
He nodded repeatedly, but could not find anything else to say. The woman brought her son back to the park bench and continued to embrace him.
“Do you live on the East Side now?” Susan asked.
“Still on the West Side,” Ben said, haltingly.
“Good seeing you, Ben,” Susan said, turning to talk to her friend.
Ben hurried away.
Birthday Celebration
by Warren Adler
Al sat on a bench in Washington Square and watched the crazy lady with the pigeons. She had long made it known that this flock was hers and hers alone, and pity anyone who would interfere with her feeding ritual. Al was amused by her possessive tenacity and was particularly attentive when an errant tourist attempted to photograph the ritual and became the butt of her fury.
Al understood ritual. He had his own, although he assured himself that he had drawn the line on obsession. The feeding of the flock was, more or less, the woman’s entire life, her reason for being. His own ritual was more like habit and depended on the weather.
At nine every morning, barring rain, snow, and intense heat, he would walk the five blocks from his rent-controlled apartment in the Village, New York Times in hand, occupy the same bench, and proceed to read every word of interest, including the stock market results, although he no longer had stocks in play. By eleven he was finished, dropping the paper in the trash bin and sitting awhile, observing the scene until noon, the time he chose to move to the Olympia coffee shop on 12th Street for the gustatory phase of his ritual, usually to eat an egg-salad sandwich on rye toast with lettuce and tomato, hold the mayo.
With Milly gone three years now and Jack in California raising his own family, he was alone, hanging on in the Big Apple, the only place he knew well enough to survive comfortably, filling up time, determined to keep his mind churning with interests and trying not to think about waiting for the other shoe to drop.
He had been a high school teacher of history at Jefferson High, where he had spent his entire thirty-year career, through all the turbulence and changes, retiring with relief. Milly had retired from her accounting job a couple of years later and they had their joint pensions, Social Security, and rent-controlled apartment to see them through. With their one child gone off to work in California, they had tolerated their retirement quite well. Milly had done all the spadework for their social life, arranging tickets to shows, lectures, and concerts and the occasional dinner with friends. He went along happily.
With her gone, that part of his life had wound down. So-called friends had either died or drifted down to Florida, living in senior communities, which Al dubbed a fate worse than death, if that was possible. He hated the designation senior citizen, although he took full advantage of all the discounts. He was a frequent user of the New York Public Library and had continued his subscription to the 92nd Street Y lectures and often picked up discount theater tickets at the Times Square discount box office.
Occasionally, his ritual was enhanced with conversation, usually with a student from NYU, the buildings of which had completely enveloped Washington Square. Normally he would be ignored by them. He had by then discovered a person of years was often considered irrelevant by the young. He didn’t like the idea, of course, but he accepted the situation in silent protest. He wasn’t exactly decrepit. Long walks had kept him limber and he looked, he believed, younger than his seventy-five years.
Today, June 16, was actually his birthday, not exactly a celebratory experience since it marked one more year on the inevitable march to oblivion. He preferred to consider it a great joke, the very idea of living three quarters of a century. It was a hoot, he told himself, regaling himself often with a laundry list of past friends and acquaintances who had checked out of the world. He was a big fan of the Times obituary columns, checking the ages of the well-known belated who got the big write-ups and the listings of others in the “paid for” column announcing the demise of a loved one.
At times, a student would engage him in conversation, sometimes out of politeness or seeking information or directions to this place or that. Lately he had struck up a conversation with a young student named Marvin. He didn’t know his last name. He was skinny and, it seemed, rarely shaved more than two or three times a week and wore faded jeans, black T-shirts, and scuffed sneakers, which seemed to be the uniform of choice of young people these days. He seemed pleasant enough, intense and intelligent with an open, dimpled smile. He was nineteen, majoring in computer science, and was often absorbed in banging away at his laptop.
Their conversation was sporadic. Mostly, Al asked about Marvin’s brief history, his life in Great Neck, inquiring also about his parents, what they did, and about his hopes and dreams for the future. Marvin was slightly older than his grandchildren, who he saw little of these days. They were busy with their own lives in California and Al hadn’t been to California for two years.
It was a beautiful day, sunny but cool. The leaves of the well-tended trees rustled gently in the breeze and his hearing was still good enough to hear the sounds of birdsongs despite the cacophony of the surrounding traffic. An idea had popped into his head as he shaved that morning.
If Marvin showed up, he had decided to invite him to a nice restaurant a few blocks away for what he dubbed in his mind, a birthday lunch. It would be pricey, but he felt he deserved to celebrate the event. After all, three quarters of a century was no small thing. If Milly were alive they would have had a birthday dinner and she would have ordered a slab of chocolate cake topped with a lighted candle and he would make a wish, always the same wish for good health for Milly and himself and their son and grandchildren. It hadn’t worked in Milly’s case. Wish or not, she fell ill, lingered, and died in pain in six months.
The stories in the morning Times offered their usual gloomy testimony to a world gone mad with perpetual terrorism warnings and the continuing saga of man’s inhumanity to man. He read these stories with increasing disgust although he could not resist a sense that having lived so long, he could look back to having survived the best of times in America. He had been lucky, he decided, coming through without a scratch, a combat veteran of the college of hard knocks.
He perused the movie section, unable to ignore the full-page ads hawking movies that were increasingly irrelevant to him. Kid stuff, he sighed, noting that the new movies were an index of how his age group had been excised from the popular culture.
Television, too, had written off his so-called category. Senior citizen! Demographics! He scoffed at the designations and the way people were put in these silly cubbyholes. Once he had loved the movies. Even now he wallowed in the joy of nostalgia when an old black-and-white movie showed on television, and he prided himself on how many actors in these old movies he could name. That was when movies were movies, not the computer games that passed for stories these days.
Looking up from his paper, he watched the pigeon lady, knee deep in bird
s, sprinkle her feed to her flock of gray-feathered city dwellers. She was a dour, intense woman with a mean look for anyone who passed to observe her, especially those with cameras ready to focus. He kept turning away from these peculiar activities to scan the area for any sign of Marvin.
He was entitled to company on his birthday, he told himself, feeling a sense of accelerating impatience and regret that he had not made a date with Marvin in advance. He was sorry that he had invested so much hope in the idea of the birthday lunch. As he waited, growing more anxious by the minute, he realized that his presumption had only set himself up for disappointment. Then, as if it were an answered prayer, Marvin did show up.
Marvin, oblivious to the private drama that had been played out in Al’s mind, plunked himself down beside him on the bench and began to open his computer.
“How ya doin’, Al?” Marvin asked as he fired up his laptop.
“Fair to middlin’,” Al said, enormously relieved as he watched Marvin begin to tap the keyboard.
This was always the extent of their initial greeting. Normally Al would let Marvin work for a while before extending the conversation. But today was special. He had already gone through one crisis of waiting and had no stomach to go through the process twice.
“Got an idea, Marvin,” Al said, plunging right in. “Today is your lucky day. I’m springing for a fancy lunch at Café Loup. You and me, kiddo.”
Marvin looked up from his screen with a quizzical and somewhat ominous expression. It struck Al that perhaps Marvin was observing him now in a different light, perhaps as a potential sexual predator. He dismissed the idea and pressed on.
“It’s my birthday,” he said in explanation.
“Awesome,” Marvin said. “Happy birthday.”
