“I sent somebody out to pick up a copy, but the Times is asking for a comment on a report that you have an illegitimate child,” he responded.
“So? We’ve had these kooks and cranks for years. What’s new about that?” It was true, too. All public figures attract this sort of thing, and it always fell apart in the details.
“This is different, sir. They have a birth certificate and a diary of the mother from 1974.”
“1974! I was a teenager then! What are you talking about, Ari?”
“Have you ever heard of a Michael Petrelli?”
“No.”
“What about a Jeana Colosimo?”
Chapter 157: Fatherhood
Tuesday, September 14, 2004
I stared at Ari Fleischer, slack jawed and disbelieving. Suddenly he had a nervous look on his face. “Mister President?”
I took a deep breath and said, “You want to repeat that, Ari?”
“According to the story, Michael Petrelli is the son of Jeana Colosimo and you. There is reportedly a birth certificate, issued at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, New York, on March 29, 1974. Did you know this Jeana Colosimo?” He was reading from a notepad in his hands.
I smiled to myself and shook my head. “Good Lord! Jeana Colosimo? I haven’t heard that name in thirty years.”
“Mister President? Did you know this woman?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Maybe, Ari. I knew a Jeana Colosimo back in high school, in fact she was my girlfriend for a couple of years. That was in Towson, Maryland, though, not Queens. Is there any proof on this? Where’d this Petrelli name come from?”
“No idea, Mister President. Could it be another scam?” We had been hit by a hoax about a year ago, also, when some dim bulb claimed I was the father of her love child. It took about ten minutes to determine that she was a hooker in San Francisco, and got knocked up when I was at the G-8 Summit in France.
I shrugged. “No idea. Probably. It’s obviously happened before. What do you think we should do about it?”
“First, tell me about the girl you dated. Were you serious about each other?” he asked.
I nodded. “This was all before I met Marilyn, of course. We met in college. This was high school. Anyway, yes, we were pretty serious. Let me think, we met near the start of my junior year, so I was…” I had to do the math in my head. “I probably had just turned 16. We dated until the summer after I graduated, not quite two years.”
“And you were sexually active?”
I smiled again. “Very!”
“How come she has never come up before?” he asked.
“Good question.” I thought for a second, and then snapped my fingers. “Of course! Jeana was a year behind me! When I was a junior she was a sophomore, and when I was a senior she was a junior! More than that, though, they built a new high school. Towson High was way overcrowded, so they built Loch Raven. At the start of my senior year, they split the school boundaries. Anybody who was a sophomore or junior in the new boundary went to Loch Raven. All the seniors stayed at Towson. She would have been a graduate of Loch Raven! That’s why none of the reporters who ever investigated me ever found her! She wasn’t a student at Towson High! They tracked down all my classmates, but she was a year behind me at another school. No wonder nobody ever stuck a microphone in her face!”
“I have somebody running out to get a copy of the Enquirer. Maybe they have a picture you can look at, see if it’s her. Why’d you break up?”
“Well, like I said, I was a year ahead of her. I was heading off to college, and she still had her senior year to finish. Besides, remember when you asked me once about how I busted my nose?”
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.”