Connie and Paul

As is usual for me, the places named and described are real, but the people are fictional. Milano is how the city of Milan is pronounced in Italy, and the Borsa Italiana is the only stock market in Italy.

*****

One of the great things about morning is seeing my girlfriend, Katla Gunnarsdóttir, walking around our apartment naked. Katla was an aspiring model, having emigrated from her native Iceland to Milano, hoping to catch on.

But Milano is one of the fashion capitals of Europe, second only to Paris, and this beautiful city is full of beautiful girls. Katla did well enough in getting runway jobs, and had landed a couple of print advertisements, but she never really caught on, never became famous or a 'supermodel,' and now 45, though still beautiful, was in the fashion industry only as an assistant editor for Italian Vogue. She had the same ice-blue eyes as always, but her naturally blonde hair was streaked with grey. She still wore it long, longer than most women her age, and was still stunning, but even though she maintained a portfolio, she wasn't landing modeling jobs for mature women.

Still, even barefoot, even nude, she maintained the model strut instinctively, placing one foot directly in front of the other, in a way normal people just don't walk.

Even with the mirror a bit steamy from my shower, I could see her entering the bathroom, carrying my phone.

"Paolo, hai una telefonata dagli Stati Uniti."

At this hour? I thought. It's only 7:10 in the morning, which would make it 1:10 in the US. "Hello," I answered, reverting to English.

"Hello, Paul? Paul Gianelli?"

This was unusual. Even my business contacts in the US called me Paolo. Really, I hadn't been commonly known as Paul since my days in high school.

"Yes, this is he. Who's calling?"

"This is Connie, Connie Guggenheim. Janice Greyson said that you were coming to our thirtieth-year reunion. Please, you can't come!"

"Wait a second, I don't know who you are, and why can't I come to the reunion?"

"OK, it's Connie Schadler, and if you show your face at the reunion, my marriage is over!"

Saturday, May 13, 1989

Prom was going really well at tony Sayre School. Sayre was the most expensive private school in Lexington, and my dad was wealthy, owning a small but still moderately successful horse farm out Versailles Road, near Keeneland. I really didn't understand quite how he was making money, since expenses always seemed high, but he was, or at least he seemed to be, and all of the horsey set kids went to Sayre.

Thing is, I was kind of between girlfriends: Cindy had dumped me a month ago, because I was getting too aggressive trying to get into her pants. We'd fooled around some, and I'd even gotten a blow job from her twice, but I was like any 18-year-old boy: I wanted to fuck!

I hadn't really paid much attention to Connie Schadler. She wasn't horsey people, her father worked at some bank in downtown Lexington, and I didn't know what her mother did. But she caught my attention at prom, because for some reason, she had a fight, a noisy fight, with her boyfriend, some guy who was a football player at one of the public high schools, Tates Creek I thought. I saw the back of him as he stormed out of the hall, and that was the end of him.

Well, I was stag, and it looked like Schadler was by herself now. None of the other guys made a move on her, so two dances - and another cup of the spiked punch - later, I figured what the fuck, why not. Maybe if she'd been a bit buzzed, she'd be down to fuck. I know that I was ready and willing to lose my virginity, and she was certainly fuckable-looking enough.

Buzzed? Yeah, she was buzzed. She'd been into the spiked punch as well, and like most Sayre kids, had probably burned one as well. She was happy to accept a dance request from me, and that was it, she stayed my prom partner for the rest of the evening.

And into the night as well. I didn't have a limo arranged, like some of the kids, but I did have my own car, a 1978 red MGB. It wasn't really expensive, but it looked like it was, and around midnight Connie and I were tooling down Versailles Road to my parents' home. I probably shouldn't have been driving at all, but Sayre kids had a way of avoiding the cops. My parents were kind of permissive, and probably expected their only son to get laid after prom, but we were still quiet sneaking into the house. The look in Connie's eyes told me that she was very impressed, even though I knew that the place was definitely not top-tier among Bluegrass horse farms.

I was looking to lose my virginity, but I didn't expect Schadler to be a virgin, too. Her sharp cry of pain, and the blood on the sheets - and I thought that somehow there'd be more blood, but what the fuck did I know? - told me a different story. Fortunately, in anticipation, or maybe desperate hope, that I'd score, I had jacked my dick just before leaving for prom, so I wasn't as desperate as I'd normally have been, and I lasted long enough that the pain of losing her virginity had vanished and Schadler seemed to be enjoying herself as well.

It was only a couple of weeks until graduation, and I hoped to get into Schadler's pants again, but that didn't work out. When I tried, she told me that she'd made up with her boyfriend, and so she and I were done. Being the crude and clueless kid I was, I was proud to have taken some other guy's girlfriend's virginity, and was dumb enough to ask her about that. She got a kind of deadpan look on her face and pointed out that she was a cheerleader, and doing the splits all the time, which I realized was her way of telling me that she had an easy excuse for not having a hymen.

Well, fuck it, I was a kid from money, and my grades and father's money meant I'd been accepted to Columbia, an Ivy League school.

Sunday, May 19, 2019

It had been a long time since high school in the US, and I'd made my mark in international finance. My parents, my whole family really, were from Italy, and Italian was my first language, not my second. I worked at Borsa Italiana, on the Piazza degli Affari, with that unfortunate statue of the middle finger by Maurizio Cattelan facing us. I was never sure if that was the 99% giving we 1%ers the finger, or was meant to say that the 1% was flipping off the poorer people.

But, whatever it meant, I was pulling down over €600,000 a year in salary, seven-figure bonuses, and had a fabulous flat not far from the Chiesa di San Maurizio, a magnificent 16th century church, in a building which had escaped the World War II bombing. Add to that the €29,000,000 I'd received when my parents, then in failing health, sold the horse farm in Kentucky, and the ski chalet I'd bought from the Countess Lisl von Schlaf outside of Cortina, and yeah, I was happily one of the 1%, even if I wasn't a billionaire.

Well, when I received the email from Janice Greyson, our high school class secretary, informing me of the planned thirty-year reunion, I figured that maybe I wasn't the wealthiest of the Class of 1989, but I had to be up there. Living and working in Italy, and with six-foot-tall Katla on my arm, yeah, I'd be impressive at the fête, and I always wanted to impress! The reunion was planned for early August, so I had plenty of time to plan, and I emailed Janice back that yes, I'd attend. I wondered if I was the most far-flung of our classmates.

And now Connie had called, begging me not to attend. Her marriage would be over, she said, if her husband saw me. She didn't explain further, but I had to know why.

Facebook made that easy. She'd given me her new last name and I thought, how many Connie Guggenheims can there be?

Turns out that there are more than one, but her age and location - she now lived in Georgetown, Kentucky, which is only one county away from Lexington - homed me in on her. She worked at PNC Bank in Lexington, while her husband, a guy named Carl Guggenheim, was employed at the Toyota plant in Georgetown. The photos showed a solidly middle-class family, not a rich one.

And there it was, the evidence I needed. The Guggenheims had four children, a son and three daughters. Looking at the photo of their son, Carl Jr, was like looking at me, thirty years ago.

What the fuck, I had a son!

A little more digging, and I saw that Carl and Connie had married on July 1st, 1989, and everything added up. It had been a shotgun wedding, because Connie was pregnant, and I guess that her husband thought that the boy was his.

Yeah, it all came together. His Facebook page said that he'd been graduated from Tates Creek, and it showed a senior photo of him in his football uniform. He must've been the prom date with whom she'd had the argument. She must have gotten back together with him almost immediately, and let him fuck her, and that covered the pregnancy date. He had dark hair and eyes, like I do, so Carl Jr was at least plausibly his kid; not being a Sayre student, if he hadn't noticed me at the prom, he'd never had the clues to put two and two together. Their other three kids being girls, there was no other son to whom to compare Junior.

But one look at me, at the reunion, and he'd know! No wonder Connie couldn't afford for me to attend.

Thing is, this was a huge problem for me! I had never married, finding girls way too easy to bed without a ring. I was good looking enough, and wealthy enough, that there was never a serious deficit of women to be had, and Katla wasn't the first model I had dated. After one pregnancy scare back at Columbia - it was a false alarm - and another, real one when I was thirty, in which the young lady chose abortion, I decided: I was not going to have my fruitful bachelor days fucked up by getting some chick pregnant, and I got myself fixed. Four days of aching balls later, along with six months of condom usage, I felt swimmer-free, and was no longer worried.

It also meant that I had ended my family line, because I was an only child.

When I was thirty, that didn't seem to matter to me. I was in New York then, filled with beautiful women who were down to fuck, but also the most aggressive social climbers around. I had caught on with Lehman Brothers and was just about to reach the annual bonus level, figuring my low six-figure salary would start to see six-figure, and maybe even better, bonuses the following year. That was when the opportunity to move to the London market arose, and I took it.

New York, then London, and finally Milano: high pressure places, with high-pressure rewards, all with a strong anti-family career path. It wasn't as bad for men as for women - women who got pregnant in the financial industry were denigrated as having gone on the "mommy track," and their careers stagnated - but men simply were not given the time to be fathers to their children. In Manhattan, having kids meant that the only green space they saw was some weekend days in Central Park, and London was, if anything, even worse. Milano is smaller, and the 'renovation' by bombing meant some more careful urban planning, but still, no place I'd want to bring up a kid. I didn't have a wife, and didn't really want one: the models I dated, and tried to date - I'd struck out on more than one occasion - had tried to fuck their way to the top, and even Katla, though she would never admit it, had bedded a few guys she thought would help her modeling career, and it still didn't work. I liked Katla, sometimes I even thought I loved her, but in some ways, I still thought I was using her as well.

And now I was 48 years old, never married, never had any children, and realized that the Gianelli line was ending with me. When you're 18, the last thing you are worried about is your own mortality. When you are 30, there's still so much more to do with your life, and who needs a wife and kids to tie you down. I didn't want to live in some Connecticut suburb, doing yardwork on the weekends; I wanted a townhouse in Grammercy Park or Central Park West, or maybe a fabulous loft in Soho.

But now, at 48, I realized: I had a son, a son I had never seen, a son who didn't know that Carl Guggenheim Sr wasn't his real father. And that son had a mother who really, really, really didn't want my son to find out any differently.

Saturday, July 13, 2019

My flight touched down at Bluegrass Field in Lexington. The flight from Milano to JFK had been a miserable 9½ hours long, even though I had been in first class, and even though there was a women's college basketball player from Wake Forest to ogle on the flight; Katla was not with me. I hadn't told Connie that I was coming, but I had to meet her, had to confront her. Had I let her know in advance, she would have told me never to come, but I didn't want to give her an opportunity to try to veto my trip. I had a whole day to kill, because there was no way I could try to meet her on Sunday, not with her husband almost surely at home. No, I knew that she worked at the PNC Bank on Main Street in Lexington, so I'd just show up there and ask her to take lunch with me.

I guess that really wasn't much of a plan. Connie was working as a loan officer, with her own glass-walled office, but one which was very, very public; I recognized her as soon as I saw her, but, of course, I was looking specifically for her. I simply got sat down in the waiting area until her current client left, and then walked in.

Connie knew who I was immediately. "Oh my God," she gasped as I entered her office.

"Hello, Connie, how are you?"

She was flustered, flabbergasted, you name it, but managed to get a grip on herself after a few seconds. "Paul, you can't be here."

I sat down in the chair across from her desk. "Connie, we need to talk. I know the truth about our son." I made certain to say "our son" rather than "your son."

"Paul, you can't just waltz in here and ruin my life. You have to leave. I have appointments all day."

"Then when, and where, can we meet. This is something we have to discuss."

I could see the wheels turning as she looked at me, in silence. Finally, she picked up the phone and called someone who was, apparently, her boss, and asked for tomorrow afternoon off, due to a family problem which had just arisen.

"Woodland Park, tomorrow, about 12:30. Meet me by the bandstand, and bring something to eat. We'll be able to find a park bench where we can talk without eavesdroppers. Now, please leave."

That didn't sound particularly good, but I realized that it was smart on her part. Woodland Park was public enough that I couldn't force her into anything, way too many people, especially with the big, public pool there, but there were places where people could talk privately.

I walked through downtown Lexington. The place was alive with construction projects, from a large building to city maintenance work. I passed the old Kentucky Theater, with its marquee noting that they'd be playing Rocky Horror on Friday at midnight.

An old college professor of mine liked to encourage students to get their work done with the bastardized expression tempus is fugiting. Well, in this case, tempus was reptating, just crawling by. I had a nice dinner, I watched movies in my hotel room, and I just stared at the blank ceiling, trying to get some sleep.

It was 11:50 when I parked my rental car on Woodland Avenue, right in front of the tennis courts at the park. The bandstand was on the left-hand side of the park, looking at it from Woodland Avenue, and there were a couple of old park benches nearby. It was a hot, sunny day, and the pool was filled with mothers and their kids, and some coeds between semesters laying out to work on their tans. Some were definitely ogle worthy, but that just made me feel old: Katla was gorgeous, but close to my age, and while the coeds weren't fashion models, they sure weren't going to be interested in a man my age.

Well, maybe if they knew how much money I had!

But my age was definitely in the forefront now, because somewhere out there, I had a son who was older than the coeds, a son who had been brought up not by me, but by another man he thought of as his father. Even if I met him, even if Connie acknowledged me as his real father, my son was twenty-nine years old now, and I was nothing but a stranger.

My phone said that it was 12:28 when I saw Connie walking up. She was wearing some khaki shorts in the hot weather, but they weren't Daisy Dukes or anything like that. She had on a blue UK t-shirt, something that would hardly stand out to anyone else, and a pair of rubber thong sandals.

I had a basket of food for us, some chicken salad sandwiches, chips and bottled water. Rather than the park bench, Connie hopped up on the edge of the bandstand, so we'd have a place to lay out the food.

"OK," she began, "yes, my son Carl is your son. I didn't really know that until he was growing up, and the resemblance to you became obvious. I made up with my boyfriend the day after the prom, and I finally gave him what he wanted, let him screw me.

"Well, once that line had been crossed, we kept right on screwing, and I realized that I was pregnant. Yeah, I counted the days, and figured that there was a chance my baby was yours, but I figured it was a small chance, since we'd only been together one night and Carl and I had been screwing for weeks. Once I told Carl I was preggers, he proposed immediately, and I guess that he'd been thinking along those lines already anyway. Your faces are totally different, but you have the same coloring, so I wasn't too worried, not even after Junior was born."

"You know, you could have told me," I replied.

"Told you what? That I was pregnant with someone who might be your kid? Carl was there, he loved me and wanted to be with me. And I'd heard that you were going off to some Ivy League school. By the time Junior was born, you were off in New England or somewhere."

"OK, but once your realized that he was my son, you could have contacted me. Even if I was away, my parents lived here until 2004, and they could have gotten in touch with me even if you didn't know where I was."

"And say what? Hey, Paul, you've got a kid out there? How was I to know whether you'd be happy or just blow me off? And Carl was really happy with his children. By the time I was pretty sure that Junior was your kid, we already had two of our daughters, and what was I going to do, destroy my marriage and our family by revealing that Junior wasn't really Carl's son?

"Carl was proud, really proud, that he'd taken my virginity, and he never knew that he hadn't. I sure never told him otherwise, and I've been a damned good wife to him. I made a good home for him, I've worked my ass off at the bank, and I never cheated on him. It would devastate him to learn Junior wasn't his, it would destroy our marriage, and who knows what the Hell it would do to the relationship between Junior and his sisters?"

"Connie, I don't know what to tell you, other than I'm very well off, and I have no other children, I have no heirs."

"So, what, you want to wave your money under my nose? What the fuck difference does that make when it's my family you'd destroy?"

"It might make a lot of difference to our son."

"My son is doing just fine. He's an engineer now, married and with children of his own. He's happy and he has a great wife. What would you do, give a few million bucks to my son, and nothing to my daughters, just emphasizing the difference in their parentage? He doesn't need your money."

"Connie, these kind of secrets don't always keep. Who knows, there might be a situation in which someone needs some sort of transplant or genetic testing, and it gets revealed then."

"I guess that I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. You've got big bucks; you should be able to find some sweet young thing to have a son with."