Chapter 45: Like Father, Like Son

March 31, 1996, Chicago, Illinois

I was reading the Chicago Tribune on Sunday morning, when I startled Birgit because I burst out laughing. I’d read about a fire at the Pasar Anyar Shopping Centre in Bogor, West Java, and the reports had said as many as 78 people had died. But now, the Trib was correcting that, saying rescuers had eventually noticed that 69 of them were mannequins!

“What’s so funny?” Birgit asked.

I explained what had happened and she laughed as well. I heard the back door open and close, and wondered if Jesse needed something, as it was just about time for him to leave for church. I got up from the chaise, much to Birgit’s consternation, and went to check.

“I figured it was our son,” I said to Jennifer.

“He just left for church with Vasily. I just came to give you your distraction for the day.”

“My what?” I asked.

Jennifer smirked, “You heard me whistle at Kara the other night?”

“Everyone heard that!” I chuckled.

“Imagine if I’d figured out my sexuality sooner...” she said saucily.

I groaned at the mental image she’d just created. Jennifer and Kara? The only words that came to mind were ‘nuclear explosion’ or ‘12.2 on the Richter scale’.

“You’re fighting dirty!” I growled.

“Pleasant dreams!” Jennifer smirked, turning to leave.

She looked back, winked, blew me a kiss, and left the house. I stood there, stunned by the mental images, unable to even move.

“Steve?” Kara asked, coming up behind me. “Is something wrong?”

“My brain short-circuited, and I couldn’t move.”

“A syncopal event?! Let’s get you sitting down and call Doctor Al!”

I laughed, “If I tell him what happened, HE’LL knock me unconscious!”

“What?”

“You remember Jennifer whistling at you when you changed from your sari to your kimono?”

“Yes, of course!” Kara smiled, her eyes twinkling.

“She came over this morning to ask me to think about what might have happened if she’d figured out her sexuality sooner!”

Kara started laughing, “I’m surprised there’s ANY blood left for your brain!”

“And to turn the screw even more, the last thing she said was ‘pleasant dreams!’ before blowing me a kiss and winking.”

Kara took my hand, “Jess hasn’t gone to bed yet. I think she might be able to help us with your condition!”

Kara led me to the ‘Indian’ room, collecting Jessica, who didn’t need convincing, and then the three of us hurried upstairs where the girls spent two hours trying to descramble my brains. They made a valiant effort, but Jennifer knew me well enough to say just the right thing to burn those fantasy images into my brain permanently. We lay cuddled together for a bit before we showered, changed the sheets, and then tucked Jess into bed.

“She’ll sleep like a log after that!” Kara whispered as we left the room.

“Tell me YOU didn’t have thoughts about it!”

“Jennifer and I never developed a relationship that could have led to that because she was gone. I totally understand why it would be such an amazing fantasy for you, but, if you’ll pardon the expression, she’s just another pretty girl. I’m mostly straight, Snuggle Bear. You know that.”

“I do, though it did make me wonder what might have happened.”

“What if?”

“Oh, I know it’s a fool’s errand, but it does pique my imagination! And can you imagine the ‘What if?’ drawing that Jorge would have done if he were here and heard about that?”

“Whoa!” Kara responded, laughing. “What do you plan to do with Maria Cristina today?”

“Talk. And I mean that in the literal sense of the word. The other thing will happen when it happens, if it happens at all.”

“May I make a suggestion?”

“Always.”

“Work up to it, the way you did with Penny. I think with nearly every other girl in your life, you went from ‘hello’ to ‘fucking’ with very little build up. Or if there was a time in between, it was all talking and no action. Anala was probably the main exception besides Penny. Maybe Tanya, but you wrote NO details about what happened with her in your journals, other than she advanced the limits!”

“Of all the girls I’ve been with, she’s the one who would kill me and then destroy all evidence of my journals if she even suspected I wrote about her in that way!”

“But you two seemed to have had an enjoyable, healthy sex life.”

“Yes, but one which shall remain undocumented, at least in any detail.”

We spent the rest of the morning with the kids, then I made lunch for everyone except myself. Mine was prepared for 1:00pm, when Maria Cristina arrived, and she and I took our food into the ‘Indian’ room. She seemed a bit nervous, which didn’t surprise me, given the circumstances. I had to find a way to put her at ease, but I wasn’t quite sure how to do that without sounding as if I was trying to push her towards a decision.

“How is school going?” I asked.

“Two more months, and honestly, all my classes are pretty easy.”

“Can you skip finals if you have an A in the class as a Senior?”

Maria Cristina laughed softly, “As if the nuns would EVER allow that! They’ll make some girl Pope before that happens!”

“Pope Joan?” I chuckled. “Pure myth and legend. It never happened.”

“Wait! Someone claimed there actually was?”

“Most likely it was a satire against Pope John XI, or a reference to one of the mistresses of John XII, but it’s been effectively demolished by historians. For me, the strongest evidence it’s BS is the fact that Photios, the Patriarch of Constantinople, would certainly have used it as ammunition in his fight with Rome. I suspect you learned about the Photion Schism, though I’d wager you and I have a very different take on who was right!”

“I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention in religion class. Just enough to pass the tests and get B’s. I have A’s in most everything else. I think I told you I go to church with my mom, but I’m not particularly religious. You aren’t either, right?”

“Spiritual, not religious, I think is the saying, but it kind of misses the point. I don’t have much time for organized religion, or rather, religious organizations. That doesn’t mean the theology and world view don’t speak to me. Do you know the word ‘syncretism’?”

“Sure. Like blending things together into something that works for you and which finds some kind of unity in the beliefs.”

“Exactly. So I have mostly what would be called ‘Eastern’ views - Russian Orthodox, Buddhist, and Shinto, with a bit of Hinduism, though I like to toss in the Norse gods for the pure humor they bring, AND their warped views of humanity.”

“I guess that explains the decor of this room and the statues next to the icons. But do you believe in God?”

“I don’t think there’s a simple answer to that question. I believe there is more to being a human being than just the biochemical and electrical processes which we observe, and I believe there is more to the universe than quantum physics allows us to postulate. I don’t know what those things are, so I call myself an agnostic.”

“Greek for ‘no knowledge’.”

“So you DID pay attention, at least somewhat!” I chuckled.

“That was actually from philosophy class, not religion. We had a Jesuit priest who taught our two philosophy classes, and he was really good. We learned about agnosticism and atheism when we were studying epistemology.”

“One of my fundamental principles is based on skepticism, and in the end, that comes down to the essences of epistemology - ‘how can we know that we know?’.”

“Doesn’t that make it hard to decide between right and wrong? I mean if you’re a skeptic and don’t know for sure how you know if something is true or good?”

“That sounds suspiciously like an exam question!” I chuckled.

“It was! I wrote a bunch of stuff that managed to get me an A, but I wouldn’t say it was very convincing now.”

“Why is that?”

“Because later, we talked about the root of true knowledge, you know, «je pense, donc je suis». And all it does is create another problem because it’s kind of circular. You know, saying ‘I think’ to prove ‘I am’ really proves nothing because you have to assume an ‘I’ who is thinking!”

I chuckled, “Welcome to my world!”

“What?”

“Did Kara tell you about the Rap Sessions we used to hold?”

“No.”

“They all got started from those kinds of discussions back when Elyse and I were sharing an apartment when we first came to Chicago to go to school. They grew to a point where a friend of mine and I did a series of seminars at UofC and IIT to attract students to philosophical discussions. They went like gangbusters for years, then kind of died out as the public primary and secondary education system began failing to actually teach kids anything other than rote memorization. That has its place, or course, and I can still recite my ‘times tables’ through 25, and all of the 46 prepositions from ‘about’ to ‘without’.”

“You’re what, 32?”

“Yes. My 33rd birthday is in about three weeks.”

“So that was eighteen years ago you learned them, I mean roughly?”

“Seventh grade with Mrs. Ada Oligee.”

“Prove it!” Maria Cristina smirked.

“About, above, across, after, against, along, among, around, at, before, behind, below, beneath, beside, between, beyond, by, concerning, down, during, for, from, in, into, near, of, off, on, onto, out, over, past, regarding, since, through, throughout, till, to, toward, under, underneath, until, up, with, within, without,” I reeled off, without taking a breath.

“Wow.”

“I bet you memorized prayers that are longer!”

“Yes, but we use those regularly!”

“Psalms then? You had to memorize the 23rd Psalm in first grade, I bet.”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“I was in Parochial school for first, fourth, fifth, and sixth grades. We moved a lot when I was young, and my mom couldn’t always get me into the local Catholic grade school when we moved.”

“What made you stop going?”

“I got myself kicked out by telling a nun to go to hell.”

“That must have gone over well at home!”

“My dad is an atheist, and he decided he’d seen enough of the Roman church by that point that he insisted I go to public schools from that point on, instead of trying to get me back into the Catholic school.”

“How did your dad become an atheist?”

“World War II. He was a sort of typical New England Methodist beforehand, you know, go to church because it’s the thing to do, and once he saw war, that was the end of his belief in God. Any god.”

“That must have made for interesting discussions at home!”

“He pretty much stayed out of it. Mom took us kids to church and he left it at that, at least until I parted ways with the church over a disagreement about sin.”

“May I ask?”

“Sure. I made love with my girlfriend and there was nothing anyone could say to me that would make me think something so beautiful was a sin. She was a Swedish exchange student, and we only were together that way once before she had to go home. And just over a year later, she died in a boating accident, before I could ever see her again.”

“Oh my gosh!”

“The next time I was able to be with her was at her gravesite when I went to Sweden as an exchange student. We’d planned to be together for that year and talked about a future together, but Fate had different plans.”

“You say that word almost as if it’s a person.”

“I treat Fate as the nasty bitch she is, and fight her tooth and nail at every turn. At the moment, I’ve have her pinned to the mat with my knee on her throat and I do not intend to let up!”

“Because of your girlfriend?”

“Not only her. Those pictures on the shelf near the icon - Stephie, a girl I loved dearly who died of ovarian cancer at age 25; Jorge, perhaps my dearest and closest male friend, who was killed just over two years ago at age twenty-seven by a drunk driver; Birgit, the girl I just told you about from Sweden; my patron and first mentor, Don Joseph Grossi; my friend Lieutenant Nick Evans, husband of the girl who was my best friend in High School, who was murdered at age twenty-seven by an enlisted sailor.”

“Wow. I don’t even know what to say about all of that. I’ve only known one person who died - my friend who had leukemia.”

“There were other things Fate threw at me as well - that best friend almost died in a car accident on Christmas Eve, 1984. Jessica’s boss, Doctor Al Barton, saved her life. It was, without question, a miracle she survived, and he was, if you’ll pardon the expression, the ‘Hand of God’. Another friend of mine almost died when she was shot in a random shooting as we drove through the projects heading to IIT.”

“You’re not exactly filling me with confidence!”

“Believe it or not, all of that changed one morning, about eighteen months ago on a rural road in Oguni, which is in Yamagata Prefecture in Japan. Fate confronted me, I kicked the living shit out of her, and sent her running with her tail between her legs. She hasn’t dared come at me since.”

“Lucifer?” she asked.

I shrugged, “Call him or her whatever you like, but the Bible says Lucifer is the prince of this world. Well, then I’m the leader of the rebellion!”

“The Archangel Michael?”

I laughed, “Hardly. I rebel against what they both stand for, at least as that’s usually portrayed by Christians. I object to BOTH establishments. The Scriptures say no man can serve two masters. I agree, and take it one step further - I serve no master.”

“Except a certain nearly eight-year-old daughter, as I hear it told!”

“Yeah, well,” I chuckled. “We all have our weak spots.”

“So how do you decide right from wrong?”

“By deducing how to do the least possible harm to anyone. It’s similar to Jesus’ command to ‘do unto others’, though with the caveat that everyone should be left to make their own choices and decisions with as little interference as possible. Just because I think it’s OK to do something doesn’t mean it’s OK for me to insist everyone do it.”

“So where does that leave sin?”

“Where the Orthodox have it, and in some sense, the Buddhists. It’s falling short, missing the mark, if you will. The Greek word is derived from a Hebrew archery term. Think of it as missing the center of the target. It’s not some permanent state which separates us from God unless we make it so. What we do is collect our arrows and try again. The goal is NOT to be perfect; the goal is unity with God. THAT leads to perfection, not the other way around.”

“I’ve never heard it put that way before.”

“Because the Romans, and the Protestants who followed them, moved towards a concept which was more like Roman law than a vision of union with Jesus Christ. It’s a very different take. Buddhism is a slightly different take because it posits that union as the end of the individual, whereas Christianity posits the continuation of the individual. But I’m not sure they’re saying different things. If we are of one mind and one spirit with God, ARE we still individuals?”

“This is NOT what I expected to be talking about!” Maria Cristina said, shaking her head.

“Perhaps, but it is what we need to be talking about. I’m hoping the picture is becoming clearer, now that you’ve had chances to talk with Kara and Jessica, and now with me. I suspect it’s not what you thought it was.”

“No, it’s not. It’s, well, may I be blunt?”

“Absolutely. I want nothing less!”

She smiled, “I thought, obviously, this was just you looking to trade tuition and room and board for sex. But it’s more than that, isn’t it?”

“A lot more.”

“Why?”

“Why is it more? Why is it you?”

“Both, really.”

“From about the time I turned fifteen, there has pretty much always been a trio of girls close to me, in one way or another. Someone who was my ‘main’ girlfriend, if you will, someone who was my closest advisor and confidante, and someone who was an occasional lover. There were stints when I tried to go the route of monogamy, but it almost always came back to two or three, and mostly three, girls. When I married, it was Kara and Jessica, obviously, and Elyse. When Elyse and I ended that part of our relationship, I tried twice to find the right person, but both times we ran into trouble.

“Kara assessed the situation and suggested it might be best if she picked the third, and I agreed, as I’m not really in a position to meet girls in the right age group, if you will. And that age group is kind of necessary because this needs to be long-term. Obviously, I can’t predict the future, but the plan would be for the young woman in question to be around for eight to ten years, depending on her career and family plans.

“So why you? Kara heard about your situation and felt there might be a way to solve the problem, especially when you joked about finding a rich guy to pay for everything. Now, I wouldn’t call myself rich, at least compared to some people I know, but we do have everything we need or want, which is not true for most.

“I also understand the struggle it is to become a doctor from watching Jessica and a couple of my friends go through the hell that is medical training in this country. I also know the system is biased against females, and especially against those who can’t afford to go to a top school for their undergrad degrees. Kara and her friends think you have real promise, and so does Jessica.

“I agree with their assessment, obviously, or you wouldn’t be here. Our conversations in the past, and especially today, tell me you’re mature enough to join our little circus, and there is no doubt in my mind that you are extremely intelligent. And it sure doesn’t hurt your cause that you’re beautiful and fit my vision of sexy.”

“I, uhm, don’t have much experience.”

“How much experience do you have for being a doctor?”

“None, obviously.”

“And how do you propose to get it?”

Maria Cristina laughed, “Education, with lots of studying and homework, then clinical work and lots of practice!”

“There you go!” I chuckled.

“I kind of struggle with the idea that pretty much the only way I can achieve my goal is by having sex with you.”

“That wasn’t the bargain I offered.”

“But...”

“Did Kara talk to you about my views on consent?”

“You mean the bit about not being able to give irrevocable consent?”