It took him a second to remember that conversation, and then his eyes popped open. "NO! Don't tell me!"
"Bingo! Her old man was running an armed guard around her the rest of the summer. I never heard from her again."
"I don't think I want to tell anybody that particular story!", he replied. "All right, let's surprise them with the truth. If anybody asks about the story, I'll simply say that we don't know anything about this Michael Petrelli. If there is anything to it, they are going to figure it out for us soon enough. If it's a scam, it's better if the press figures it out, and not us."
"Okay."
"What if it's not a scam?", he asked.
"What do you mean?"
Ari looked at me and said, "What if it's true? What if this is the Jeana Colosimo you used to date, and this guy really is your son? What do we do then?"
It was my turn to shrug. "No idea, Ari. It sounds pretty far-fetched to me. A thirty year old guy pops up in the middle of a Presidential campaign claiming to be my love child? He's probably just looking for a payoff."
He nodded. "Probably. I'll let you know."
Ari left and I sat there a few minutes more, reminiscing about my misspent youth. Jeana Colosimo! I hadn't thought about her in years! She had been the love of my life at one point, but even then I always knew she was just a placeholder until I got to RPI and was able to maneuver my way to meet Marilyn. I couldn't imagine Jeana getting knocked up, though. She had been on the Pill. I had never been that stupid!
Ari brought by a copy of the Enquirer after lunch. There I was on the cover, along with a picture of a very nondescript man in his late twenties or early thirties, and a picture of the mother. She looked vaguely familiar, but if it was Jeana, she had not aged well. The Jeana I had known was a centerfold knockout. The picture showed a middle aged woman who had put on a lot of weight. I just shrugged at Ari and told him I couldn't tell.
I told Marilyn about it that evening, over dinner. ("How was work, dear?" "Fine, honey. I was hit with another paternity suit!") The last time this happened, Marilyn was royally pissed and wanted the hooker put in jail. She wasn't happy, but she understood.
"This might be real?", she asked.
"I have no idea. I dated a girl named Jeana Colosimo, that is a fact. Is this woman that person? Is this man her son? I have no idea. This was all thirty years ago. I have no idea what happened to Jeana after I went to college."
"She's the girl you told me about, the one you dated the longest in high school, wasn't she?"
"Yeah, I suppose. You never met her because she was a year behind me, and ended up over at Loch Raven."
She thought for a second, and then quietly asked. "Did you love her?"
I stood up from the table and came around to her side. I picked her up and gave her a big hug. "That was long before I met you. Okay, yes, I loved her. I also told you once, that you weren't the first woman I loved, but you were the last. Nothing has changed since then, nothing."
Marilyn hugged me back fiercely at that. I let her sit down again, and went back to my plate. She giggled for a moment and then asked, "Did this Jeana get the Carl Buckman Experience?"
I snorted my wine out through my nose, which caused a burning sensation. Marilyn was laughing at my discomfort, and I just pointed at her. "You are pushing your luck!" That just made her laugh even harder.
Unsurprisingly, Ari was asked the next morning at the press briefing about the story in the Enquirer. I was watching it on the closed circuit television.
Q: "What about the story in The National Enquirer about President Buckman having an illegitimate son?"
A: "Well, I can tell you that when I mentioned the words National and Enquirer, the first thing the President said to me was that Elvis was still dead and that there were no aliens in Roswell. I think that pretty much sums up the President's thoughts on the subject."
Q: "So the President is stating that Michael Petrelli is not his son?"
A: "The President is stating he has never met or heard of Michael Petrelli. I think it is pretty suspicious, though, that this Petrelli character pops up in the middle of a hotly contested and close election campaign."
Q: "What if he is related to President Buckman?"
A: "I am not going to play the what-if game. What if aliens land on the South Lawn? Ask me when the aliens land."
I smiled to myself. I liked the line about the aliens. That made it to the evening news. Meanwhile I had much more important things to worry about, like debating John Kerry, and, oh yeah, running the country.
The story didn't go away, however. By the end of the week it was being reported in both the New York Times and the New York Post that the Jeana Colosimo in Queens really was the same Jeana Colosimo I had known at Towson High. The Colosimos had moved from New York City to Baltimore in 1971, which was when I met her, and they still had family in Queens. (Mr. and Mrs. Colosimo had died several years ago.) Then, in 1973, the Colosimo family sent Jeana back to New York City to live with several very strict aunts and attend a parochial girl's school in Queens. That didn't work out so well, since by the middle of the fall semester she was very obviously 'in the family way'. The nuns kicked her out as a bad influence and Jeana ended up getting a GED right around the time she gave birth to a son. She named him Michael after her father, to try and get back into his good graces but that failed, and she ended up living with her aunts for a few months. Desperate to get away from them (they were from the old country and barely spoke English, and spent most of the time lecturing her in Italian) she hooked up with the first guy she met, Mario Petrelli. The marriage didn't last even a full year, but by then she had been able to get out of the house and start getting a few college credits at the nearby community college. By that time she was calling the baby Michael Petrelli, but it wasn't clear if Mario had adopted the child. Jeana had spent the next thirty years in Queens, working as a secretary in various office jobs, and had died in a car accident in June.
Meanwhile, Michael Petrelli was being investigated as well. Michael had grown up in Queens, and his most noticeable accomplishment was a total lack of accomplishment. He had graduated from high school with middling grades at best, and never gone to college. He had gotten some training in being an auto mechanic over the years, and had spent the last ten years working as a mechanic, occasionally employed, and occasionally under the table. He had alternated between having his own apartment and living with Jeana in her apartment. He had first learned about me when he was going through his mother's things after her funeral, and discovered her diaries. His birth certificate didn't have his father's name on it.
The New York papers were able to track down a few cousins of Jeana, who reported that Jeana had been 'knocked up by some guy down in Baltimore' but they never knew the name. They also reported that Jeana had always had a diary and wrote everything in it. I began to get a sinking feeling in my stomach about all of this. One of the cousins reported that she herself had gotten pregnant as a teenager, and that Jeana knew it, and thought it was romantic, at least until she had to start taking care of a baby on her own. Is that what made Jeana go off birth control, a desire to emulate her cousin?
Mario Petrelli was tracked down. He turned out to be an insurance salesman in Hempstead. He had married Jeana, but it hadn't worked out and ended almost as soon as it began. No, he had never adopted Michael, and no, he had no idea he was using his name. He hadn't talked to Jeana in well over twenty years and didn't even know she had died.