The Genius Factory (26 page)

Tom again asked for Jeremy. Finally one of them said, “Jeremy. You mean Jeremy Sampson?” Tom nodded, looking relieved. The guys relaxed a little, too. “He’s around the other side of the house.” The house looked too small to have an “other” side, but indeed it did. When we walked around to the left-hand side, past a broken umbrella and various crippled toys, we saw there was indeed a side entrance.

Tom knocked on the side door. It opened, and Jeremy stepped out to greet us. He said, “You must be Tom.” Jeremy reached out, and the father and son embraced awkwardly, all shoulders and arms. So this was what happened when father and son met: nothing much.

Jeremy was in his late forties, but he looked fifteen years younger. He was wearing dress pants, dress shoes, and a garish blue Hawaiian shirt, untucked and open almost to the navel. Tom and Lana had the same first impression: he was a dead ringer for the “hero” in
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City,
one of Tom’s favorite video games. (The aim of
Vice City
was to do anything to anyone for the hell of it—kill strippers, run over old ladies with your car, whatever got you off. Tom tried to block this image from of his mind: it was too alarming, maybe because it was too apt. What had Jeremy done with his life, if not whatever the hell he wanted?)

When I saw Jeremy, I finally understood why he had persuaded so many women to have his children. He had a shambling, raffish Dennis Quaid thing going. His hair was thick and dark, lustrous with some kind of product; he was always running his fingers through it, calling attention to its beauty. He had boyish, laughing features. His eyes were particularly striking: they were slit-narrow, but deep blue and twinkly.

Jeremy hugged Lana after he released Tom. Then he wiggled his fingers in front of Darian, who was delighted. He shook my hand and thanked me for coming. His voice was muddy like Tom’s, but it also had an almost foreign lilt to it. He ended most sentences with a singsong “you know?” It made him sound a bit like a Mexican gangster.

He ushered us into the house and said, “Please, make yourself at home.”

I didn’t see how this was possible. For starters, the house was a sweatbox: it was ninety-five degrees outside and at least ten degrees hotter inside. There was no air-conditioning. A ceiling fan wheezed slowly, stirring the air hardly at all. We entered into what seemed at first glance to be a living room but was actually a bedroom, living room, dining room, and study all rolled into one. It took a while to figure this out, because the room was so gloomy: all the bulbs in all the lights were out, save a single, naked sixty-watt bulb on the ceiling fan. A blue carpet covered the floor. The shag was matted and covered with crumbs. Crushed Pokémon boxes, crumpled family photographs, dirty clothes, old copies of
National Geographic,
and books about American Indians littered the room. Crayon was scrawled on the walls. A boom box in the corner blasted Cambodian pop music.

Jeremy gestured for all of us to sit down. Lana perched precariously on a canvas director’s chair that was missing an arm. I took a wobbly wood chair. Tom sat down gingerly on the trundle bed, which was covered in stained
Star Wars
sheets. Lana and Tom looked stunned. Lana was confused: she had always thought that doctors were rich. Tom was thinking,
This is my supersperm donor dad? I live ten times better than this.
I wondered how Jeremy expected us to spend the night here. The apartment already slept Jeremy, his old lady, and their two girls. Where would we fit?

As soon as we all sat, Jeremy popped out of his chair and stepped into the kitchen: “Would you like some melon?” he asked.

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 cockroach 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.