Fenn Does it
3
“So I’m temping now.”
“It’s better than pimping.”
Kenneth looked at Dylan.
“Cause it rhymes with temping.” Dylan shrugged. “It sort of just came to mind.”
“You made him like this,” Kenny told Fenn, who was smoking a cigarette at the open window and replied, “I’d like to think so.”
“Part of me wants the job to become permanent, and it’s not because it pays the bills, cause it really doesn’t. I’ve never felt so fucking useless in my life. But it’s something to do, you know? And I like seeing the folks at work. And then, you know, the other part of me does not want it to last because then I’d have to keep living here.”
“I thought you loved it here,” Dylan said. “This is a kick ass city.”
Dylan put a hand over his mouth and looked at Fenn.
“Well, it’s too late to clean your mouth out with soap,” his father said. “Kenneth, where’s coffee? No, I’ll make it.”
“And it’s kicking my ass.”
“Is it kicking Brendan’s?” Fenn asked.
“How would I know? I never see him. He was so excited about this case. He said it was a sexy case and I hope it is, because we’re not. We are the blandest… most….” he looked at Dylan and then said, “unintimate couple in the world.”
Fenn yawned and only half covered his mouth.
“This coffee is just the beginning of a losing battle,” he said, after reaching behind the sugar and pulling it down. “Why the hell even make it?”
“You can go to sleep in the spare room or on my bed,” Kenny offered. Fenn’s shoes had already been kicked off on the floor.
“How long are you guys staying?”
“As long as it takes,” Fenn said, heading to his room. “As long as it takes.”
“I don’t even know what that means,” Kenny murmured to Dylan as, down the hall, Fenn fell on his face in the spare bedroom.
Dylan told him: “I’ve given up trying to figure out what it all means. At least when it comes to Dad.”
“Okay,” Dylan told Kenny while they sat in the window seat in the kitchen, “I had to get all of this out.”
“Okay?” Kenny nodded, cautiously.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Shoot.”
“How old were you and Brendan when you guys started having sex?”
“Seventeen. Why?”
Then Kenny blinked. “Dylan, are you? Seriously? I mean…”
Dylan waved it away. “Yes.”
“How long!”
“It really doesn’t matter, Kenny,” Dylan said. “The point is that Dad walked in on it last night.”
“Fenn Dad or Tom Dad?”
“Fenn.”
“Oh, God! He must be….crushed.”
“Thanks, Kenny.”
“I mean…” Kenny tried to salvage it. “God, Dill, you’re fifteen years old.”
“Fifteen year olds have sex.”
“Like who?” Kenny waved it off. “That’s not the point. The point is… God, are you alright?”
“I didn’t get shot in the chest. I just… started having sex.”
Dylan decided it was best to act like this was the first time.
Kenny didn’t mean to do it, but he was starting to make Dylan feel ashamed. Suddenly Dylan understood why Fenn, who did nothing on impulse, even when it seemed like it, had said so little to him.
He doesn’t want to embarrass me.
“I… He found out. I was so terrified. and so mortified. I mean I was just crying so hard, and he came in and he just told me to go to bed and not to cry and… I was afraid he would look at me different or… not love me or something. And he just told me to get up, get dressed and brought me here. It’s not like a reward, but… I don’t know why he did it.”
“Have you all talked about it?”
“Yes. On the train. I told him as much as I was comfortable with.” Then Dylan added, “As I thought he could take.”
“Is it Lance Bishop?”
“Yes.”
“Thank God,” Kenny said. “I was afraid it would be that tool, Ruthven.”
Dylan just grinned politely, and wanted to be with his father.
“You’re lucky, Dylan.”
“Dad said that we were sort of a mess right now, and the best way to get better was by going to visit out friends who were also…” well that didn’t sound right.
“As much of a mess,” Kenny finished. He picked up his mug of coffee.
“We really are a mess,” Kenny said.
Dylan looked back into the bedroom. “Why don’t you go see your dad?”
Dylan nodded, climbed off of the window seat and went back to the spare room.
“I’m not asleep,” Fenn said from the semi darkness of the bedroom.
Dylan climbed up onto the bed and lay beside him.
“A penny for your thoughts?” his father said.
“Just…”
His father chuckled in the dark. “You have got to do better than that.”
“Aren’t you mad at me?”
“I’m scared for you. But I’m not mad at you.”
“Disappointed?”
“Dylan, don’t do this.”
Dylan felt Fenn’s hand on his head.
“It’s just… you don’t know how bad I felt last night.”
“Probably the opposite of how good you were feeling the moment before I walked into the room.”
“Dad!”
Fenn sat up.
“Do you know for the better part of fifteen years, all I’ve done is think about how to raise you? What I wanted for you? I’ve spent so much time taking breaths so that the breath that came out had the right words for you. Not something stupid, not something that would tear you apart or make you have to sit on someone’s couch.
“I was nearly forty when you came to me. A surprise gift. You’re the only son I have, and the only one I’m ever likely to. And you are so smart, and talented and beautiful. This morning on the train you were asleep beside me, and I looked at you and I thought, he is big as me, perhaps bigger. He is a man. He’s been a man. No wonder….”
“I’m not a man!” Dylan said quickly.
“But you’re not a child,” Fenn told him. “Unless you’re my child, and you will always be that. But I won’t treat you like one, and I can’t make you a virgin again even though I really, really, wish you were.”
“Kenny says I broke your heart.”
Fenn took a deep breath and said, tranquilly: “Kenny should be slapped around a little bit.”
“Did I, though? Cause that’s what I keep thinking. I keep thinking you’re disappointed in me and I hurt you and—”
“The one thing I will not give you,” Fenn said, “is an unobstructed view of my heart. Every child in the world throws his parents a curve. All you need to know is I love you. You are talented and smart and good looking. Beautiful! But more than that, you are good. I saw you give that man on the street your last change. You’re good. You’re so good, and you’re so kind and you’re so sweet, and you are just the son I’d want. There isn’t another son.”
Fenn lay down.
“Dad?”
“Yes?”
“If I’m grown…”
“You’re not totally grown.”
“But just tell me about you and Dad. Tom. Why you aren’t together? Why are you my Dad and not Lee. Please.”
Fenn took a very long breath and then said, “Yes… It’s time.”
“And I don’t want to hear a G rated version or a PG.”
Fenn turned over to look at his son, whose eyes were closed and who was lying on his back like he was waiting for a bedtime story.
“Good,” he said to Dylan, “because there isn’t one.
“Since you’ve aged me by about ten years in the last twenty four hours,” Fenn continued, “it’s only fair that I should return the favor.
“But for the story to make any sense, we have to begin way at the beginning. We have to go back well before you were born. I met your father when I was coming out of college, and he had graduated early and was in graduate school. He is a little younger than me. To make a long story very short, I came, I saw, we ended up together.”
“I still can’t imagine it.”
“Well, it was a long time ago. I was in my twenties then and now I’m in my fifties. But we were together for ten years, or nearly that.”
“And then what happened?” Dylan sat up. “What happened that you never tell me about.”
“Tommy cheated on me. It’s as bald as that. If I soft soap it, you will never understand the rest of the story.”
“Dad cheated on you!”
“Yes,” Fenn said prosaicly. “It’s a well known story, just one that’s been preserved from your ears. But you were bound to find out eventually. It’s one of the reasons that Adele never cared for your father.”
“That’s right,” Dylan realized. “Who was it?”
“Who was what?” Fenn said.
“Who did Dad cheat on you with?”
“It hardly matters.”
“Do I know him?”
Fenn thought on this, and then said, “Yes.”
“Well, then it matters.”
“Dylan—”
“Dad,” Dylan sat up, “if you don’t tell me, I’ll ask Dad myself.”
“Well then it was Bryant Babcock.”
“Uncle Bryant?”
“If you must call him that.”
Dylan thought on this, and said, “It explains so much. Aunt Adele never really liked him either. And I remember when Chad and him split up, how Layla said something about it serving him right.”
“She was wrong for that,” Fenn said.
“But… I knew there was something,” Dylan reflected. “I just… never asked.”
“Childhood instinct,” Fenn shrugged. “Grown ups are like rocks. If you turn us over there are bugs, and you don’t need to see that.”
“But now I’ve got a few bugs too.”
“Yes, and so that’s why now I’m sharing this with you.”
“Didn’t it hurt? I mean it must have hurt.”
“You never thought of going back? Or he never thought of it?”
“Later he thought about it many times, I believe. But I wouldn’t go back. And during the time when the mess happened, I think that Tom wasn’t thinking of very much at all. He was so inexperienced, and so sheltered when I met him. When he found Bryant, he was so caught up in the excitement I think he just told himself that everything would be alright. I wasn’t ever supposed to find out. I walked in on the whole business.”
“Like you walked in on me,” Dylan said, his voice crashing.
“But I wasn’t fifty then, and the way that made me feel is wholly different. I had to put myself back together quickly. My relationship with your father was getting old, and when I found out what Tom did, it burnt the last of my desire to make it work. I had to be alone. And then I met Todd.”
“What was that like?”
“Well, I didn’t really meet Todd, I’d always known Todd, and if you must know it was much like what you have with Lance. I didn’t know if I was deeply in love or not, and really, after Tom I didn’t want to be. And of course I remembered your godfather as a baby. He’d been around my whole life, so I was nervous about starting anything. The truth, because you are at that place where I can only tell you the truth now, is that it began as an intense affair. And then we became serious, and then he went off to Germany as a soldier, and we decided to be free while he was gone and, when he got back, come back together.”
“Really?”
“I didn’t want another Tom. I didn’t want to make someone who was younger than me commit to a life of celibacy where he wouldn’t see me for two years. And I didn’t want that for myself either. So we made the rule to be free while we were apart. Incidentally, that is not something I would allow now.”
Dylan grinned.
“You would shoot Todd first.”
“Yes,” Fenn reflected. “I think I would. Ah, love.
“Todd’s tall, Dad isn’t. But they’re both dark.”
Fenn nodded. “Anyway, Tom and I weren’t finished and we started up again.”
“So you were still in love with him!”
“But cautious. I was determined that we would not be a couple again, that I wouldn’t trust him. And then I did what is the point of this whole story.”
“Alright?”
“One day I met this woman, dark haired, clear skinned, pretty enough, fallen out of a bad relationship. She had miscarried. She said she’d never loved her father—who was involved in risky business near Port Ridge—and wanted a child who loved her. She said sperm banks did not have what she wanted, and she was desperate. And I was desperate for money and I wanted my revenge on Tom.”
Fenn was very silent for a moment. He was thinking, and then he said:
“Alright, I’ll tell it quickly. You don’t need to picture it, but when Tom would finish up, I would take his semen and freeze it. Not in the fridge, but in a real freezer. I sold it to her. I didn’t think it would keep. Eventually she used it, and then one day there was you.”
Dylan said absolutely nothing. Fenn realized it was a lot to process. Well, there, let him process it! Didn’t he and his father give Fenn tons to process?
“How…” Dylan began, “did you…?”
“Dylan, you know how it goes. I know you know how it goes. You can hold a man when he’s coming and take his stuff. He can let go in a condom, or in your hand, or you can guide him into a vial. Or something.”
“That’s… pretty twisted.”
“Yes. Yes, it is.”
“I can’t say I blame you, but… It’s sort of like… a crime of passion. Or at least a misdemeanor.”
Then Dylan said, “I need to think about this.”
At last he said, “So what you’re telling me, is that the only reason I exist at all is because you met my mother and showed her a picture of Dad, and then while the two of you were having sex, you stole his semen and sold it to her?”
“Yes.”
“Shit!” Dylan swore, putting his hand to his chest.
“And then one Christmas Eve she came to the door with you, asking for Tom. And that night Tom and Lee came to the house and Tom was so in love with you. When I put two and two together and realized what you were, who you were, I told Tom.”
“Was he mad?”
“Mad, shocked, relieved, all of it. And then he turned around and asked me to be your father.”
“Well, because you are,” Dylan said.
Awkwardly, Dylan explained: “I mean Lance: the whole reason he exists is because his mom tried to trap his dad into marrying her. And Laurel: she was a complete mistake. I always thought that I was just this sort of pristine, well intentioned thing and that Dad, out of the kindness in his heart, for a reason that really made no sense, asked you to be my father. But…”
Dylan turned around. He seemed to be studying Fenn, “It turns out that I wouldn’t exist at all if you hadn’t done what you did, and if you hadn’t done it out of passion. I mean, if you and Tom weren’t having sex, if he hadn’t been having an orgasm with you, then I wouldn’t be here. If you hadn’t given that semen away I… would not… exist. That means you really are my father, and my mother. You knew about me before Tom did. You really, really, made me.”
“You sound happy about that,” Fenn said, dubious.
“I’m shocked by it,” Dylan admitted. “And a little grossed out. Totally amazed too. I don’t know that happy is the right word, but… it’s the closest I can find.”
