“Thank you for coming,” Pam said. “Do you want to go to the house? Or do you want to talk in the car?”
“I’d like to see the house. I feel like I know it in my head. I want to see the ocean.” Melissa replied. Waiting for the pain, for the flush of heat, Pam realized she was over it, that she couldn’t be hurt by Jack anymore. Somehow, in a few short months she had come to this place of peace, or was it emotional death? They pulled up in front of the house and Melissa had the same reaction everyone does; she loved the beauty of the house and its setting. She was thinking I can’t picture Jack here. It’s too removed from the action.
“I can’t picture Jack here.” Melissa stated, repeating her thoughts. “I can’t believe he was ever comfortable here.” Pam thought to herself, nix not being hurt by Jack anymore. Melissa looked at Pam, challenging her to argue. But Pam was intrigued and said as much. This young woman may be the counter-irritant that would make all the positive ass-kissers she had encountered since Jack’s death ring false. All she had heard from others was how much Jack had loved her and how he couldn’t wait to get to the beach. Now maybe she would hear the truth and it would do so much toward her understanding of what her life had evolved to be with him. If he wanted to be at the beach he would have been at the beach. Not in the city, not with other women. Other men in their community commuted into Manhattan every day and came home at night to be with their families. Jack didn’t want to be there. Melissa was right.
“Come sit on the veranda. I’ll get us something to drink. I am anxious to hear why you think he wouldn’t be comfortable here.” Pam showed Melissa the way to the veranda and then went back into the house to get refreshments. While she was preparing their drinks, Pam decided that her approach regarding the AIDS matter would be to blame everything on the health department. She arranged a tray of ice filled glasses, a pitcher of lemonade and a plate of cookies. A civilized snack for an odd couple.
“You don’t have to tell me anything about you and Jack. I am just making an assumption because I remember you being at different functions. I don’t know if Jack always included his girlfriends in our family functions, but I remember you. I remember you at the funeral. Something told me I needed to contact you.
“Yesterday I was visited by interviewers from the Department of Health and they informed me that when Jack died, blood was drawn and they tested him for HIV and he tested positive.” Pam was watching Melissa. Melissa was sitting up very straight, looking at Pam. Pam wasn’t going to reveal anything about her own health. She assumed Jack told his girlfriends that he didn’t sleep with Pam anymore, so she would hold on to that little bit of dignity if she was able.
“That is all I want to say to you. If you did sleep with him, get tested for HIV.” Melissa thought of her fear of being ill lately, her concern that she needed to see a doctor. But HIV?
“I stopped sleeping with him two years ago. And we stopped having any kind of sex when he started to see Sandra.” She knew about Sandra? Once again Pam asked herself, Where the hell was I? Pam felt her heart continue to beat in spite of the pain. Glad that the young woman could tell her the truth; it was satisfying some of her curiosity. She didn’t want to say or do anything negative, because she didn’t want Melissa to stop that train of thought. She wanted her to keep being honest with her.
“It looks like he might have been infected a long time. You should get yourself tested.” Pam repeated, reaching over and patting her hand. Melissa couldn’t believe it, and she finally said so.
“I can’t believe Jack had AIDS and he slept with me without warning me. I can’t believe it.” Pam was looking out at the ocean.
“I feel the same way. I don’t expect you to say anything to me. I just wanted you to know. I have that responsibility because I remembered you and that you came to Jack’s funeral. I wasn’t aware of his affairs then, but recently when I found out about his HIV status, I became suspicious that he’d had an affair with you. Knowing that, I had the responsibility to tell you. I didn’t want you to get that kind of news cold turkey from the health department. It’s evident that you meant something to him. Because of that, because he cared about you, I have that responsibility to you. I don’t even know what that means yet, but I feel something toward you.” Melissa looked away from Pam and looked out at the water.
“You don’t owe me anything. You don’t have any responsibility at all. I’m going to leave now. Will you take me back to the train?” They got up and Pam got her purse. On the way out to the car she decided to expose a little more.
“Sandra got to the hospital before I did, when Jack died. She was called first. I met her in the hospital. Because of that, she and I have ties. Because of Jack, we are almost related. We can talk about Jack together, things no one else would know. We can talk about the way he made us feel, like there was no one else in the world as important. If you ever feel like you need to connect in that way, you can call anytime.” Melissa couldn’t believe Pam was saying this because she knew she would never need to talk to her again.
“Don’t you realize your husband couldn’t have loved you? Loved you yet treated you like that? Fucking other women? Not just me. Not just Sandra. I don’t want to go into what I know about Jack. I feel no responsibility to those other women. They brought it on themselves. You and Sandra getting together to talk about how special Jack made you feel is a laugh! Oh, Jesus Christ! Are you kidding me?” Pam started laughing along with Melissa. Melissa was shocked. She expected the woman to haul off and smack her silly. Instead, she was agreeing with her.
“It does seem that way, doesn’t it? But I know that he loved me. As much as he was capable of loving, he loved me. He might have loved Sandra, and he might have loved you and how many other women, maybe he just had a huge capacity for love. Until he loved Sandra, and I never told her this, I never felt a lack in our relationship. I knew he wasn’t giving me everything that he could. My sister says that my head is in the clouds. ‘Get your head out of the clouds.’ And you know what? She was right. I had my head in the clouds.” She pulled up to the train and was happy the conversation had come to an end. She had revealed too much.
“Do you have it?” Melissa asked.
“I thought your impression was that Jack didn’t have sex with me?” Pam said. Had Melissa even said anything? “That we didn’t sleep together anymore. Anyway, I just found out he had it yesterday, remember?”
“I guess that answers my question.” Melissa got out of the car without saying good bye to Pam. But Pam wanted to say one more thing to her. She rolled down her window and called after Melissa. The young woman walked back to the car. She was on the verge of tears.
“Will you let me know what happens?” Pam asked.
“Why? What’s the point?” Melissa was suspicious of Jack’s wife, but more fearful of slipping into her realm of needing her. She didn’t want to need her.
“Why?” Pam repeated. “Because I care about you. Tell me I’m an ass, that you understand why a man like Jack would be unfaithful to someone like me. I am an ass! But I’m a caring one.” Melissa tried to squelch laughter, but it was too strong. She laughed out loud.
“Well then, I am an ass, too. Jack made asses of all of us.” She leaned in on the car door, sticking her arm through the window opening to shake Pam’s hand. “Actually, the truth is that he was an ass, and we were just normal women, wanting love.” She laughed again. “I read that in a book by Doctor Phil.” Pam smiled at her. They said good bye and Pam pulled out of the driveway of the train station drop off entrance. She was sorry Melissa hadn’t said more about her relationship with Jack. Pam figured out that Jack had many women, and Melissa confirmed it. She didn’t want or need the details. More details than she really wanted to know would come later, much later.
Chapter 9
Betty James and Maggie Daniels parted ways when they returned to the office from their interview with Pam Smith in Babylon. Dee gave Betty Cindy Thomasini’s phone number and Maggie left to meet with Ma
rie Fabian, Pam Smith’s sister, at her apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. Maggie would then take the ferry home to New Jersey. It would be a perfect way to end the day.
Marie left work early to get home and straighten her apartment up. She was a wreck. It was okay meeting with the health department, but now she was faced with the possibility that she would get into trouble if she divulged the name of the man she had been sleeping with. She wanted to tell him first, let him hear it from her. They had unprotected sex a few times. Did that guarantee that he would get it? Why did she screw him when she knew she was sick? She really liked the man and he was bound to be pissed off at her. Oh Lord, why’d she do it? She wanted to go on like nothing was wrong, like she didn’t do anything bad. She decided to lie then. She would tell whoever this was coming to invade her privacy that she hadn’t slept with anyone, that she didn’t know anyone who had slept with Jack, and she would exercise her rights to privacy. They couldn’t do anything to her, could they?
When Maggie got there, Marie didn’t offer her a seat. She stood with her in the area by the door that opened out into her living room with the view of the Hudson River and the city of Weehawken beyond. Maggie gasped when she saw the view. What did this woman, who was nearly her age, do for a living to afford a place with a view like this?
“I just have a few questions to ask you. Can we sit down somewhere?” On the other side of where they were standing was a dining area; Maggie could see Marie look over at it, contemplating whether or not she should invite her to sit when she sensed a change in Marie.
“You know, I really don’t have anything to say. If my doctor has notified you that I have HIV, then so be it. I have it. But that is all I want to say. There is nothing else to tell.” Marie walked to the door and removed the chain. “Sorry you came all this way for nothing.” Maggie thanked her and left, not feeling hostile or angry; her ferry was right down the street at the river’s edge and she would be home in less than a half an hour. But she was worried about the woman’s truthfulness. There would be nothing to do or say about it. She started walking down the hill, headed for her ride home.
Marie’s hands were shaking. She couldn’t base a relationship with Steve Marks on lies. Jack had done it, and had been successful at it, but look what happened to him? What was happening to her? She had been on a collision course; having unprotected sex was only one thing. She hadn’t taken her meds, was drinking to excess, and had quit eating. She knew she was going down a steep path of destruction but this time her death wouldn’t be the only outcome; she had Steve Marks mortality to worry about.
Marie was going to lie and tell him that the health department just notified her, but she thought through the scenario and if he called them, he’d find out she had lied. She struggled with this all night. By omitting the truth, by exposing him to HIV, she had done the unforgivable. And the thing that really backfired on her was that she liked him! After he had stalked her and bugged her at work, it turned out there was a ton of chemistry between them.
She called him after work the next evening, after avoiding him all day. She decided not to try to make excuses. She was crazy, he pursued her, and she wasn’t thinking of the consequences. The Department of Health had made a visit to her apartment to question her about her partners and she thought of him, knowing that she owed him the information so he could get tested right away. There was silence. And then the unexpected. He started screaming at her like a crazy man.
“You stupid cunt!” He yelled into the phone. “What the fuck did you do? Did you give me AIDS? You goddamned bitch, I should have known! If I have it, if you gave it to me, you’re dead! You realize that, right? I’ll fucking kill you!” He hung up. She stood in her bedroom with the phone still at her ear for several minutes, waiting to move until her heart rate slowed down enough that she wasn’t in the stroke zone. What was she going to do? She thought she better leave town right then; time to flee to Babylon! She threw some clothes into a bag, grabbed her wallet and keys, and left within five minutes after he hung up. Even if she had called him while he was at the bar up the street, it would take him longer than that to reach her. She drove out of the garage and onto Thirty-Fourth Street like a demon possessed, frightened that Steve would do as he said and kill her. She found herself chanting over and over; don’t let him have HIV, don’t let him have HIV, so that is sounded like ‘doughn lettem av H ivy.’ By the time she got to the bridge, she was laughing!
“Yeah, God, doughn lettem!” She yelled. “Oh fuck!” And then she made the mistake of looking in her rearview mirror and there was Steve Marks, tailgating Marie’s Honda, riding the bumper and going for the kill. She could see his watery blue eyes, bugged out of their sockets, and his purple face. She decided at the last minute that getting on the bridge and being stuck on the expressway with a maniac trying to run her off the road was not smart. She pulled off the ramp, into the coffee shop parking lot. She made sure her doors were locked and then she called 911. When dispatch answered, she just screamed ‘He’s going to kill me! I’m in the parking lot of the coffee shop under the bridge! Help me!!’ Suddenly, Steve was at her window with a rock in his hand, slamming it against the glass, screaming at her to ‘get out of the God-damned car, you’re dead meat!’ He must have said that ten times, jumping up on the hood and flinging himself at her. Finally, strangers from the coffee shop came to her rescue and were pulling him off her car. She looked around at the men struggling with him and said,
“Fuck it, I’m outta here,” and gunned the engine, squealing tires kicking up dust and gravel in the faces of the men, and she got back onto the bridge ramp toward Long Island. She’d make Pam call Andy the cop and see if he could help her in some way. Andy had tried to date Pam but it was too early after Jack died. He still stayed in touch with her. Marie knew that she was not staying in Manhattan for a while, at least until Steve Marks calmed down.
Betty went to her office to call Cindy Thomasini and set up an appointment for her surveillance interview. She saw her home phone number and realized it was a Hudson County, New Jersey exchange. It wasn’t their responsibility to notify partners who weren’t living in New York. She got out the appropriate forms and placed Cindy in the hands of the New Jersey beaurocrats.
Chapter 10
Cindy
I was a good Catholic girl. My parents were strict about the oddest things when we were growing up. I wasn’t even allowed to watch a movie our school sponsored that explained the process of menstruation to the girls in fourth grade.
“Why do you want to fill your head with that garbage?” my mother said. “You have your whole life to suffer with monthlies; they don’t need to spend my tuition money forcing it down your throat. Anything my girls need to know, I will tell them. Anything the boys need, their dad will provide.” When the time finally came, she made a public spectacle of me. I went into the bathroom to pee in the morning; I had just turned thirteen. I pulled down my underpants and there it was; a bright red, bloody crotch. I had a hot flash. Fear spread through my body. Did I have to tell my mother? I shared a room with Gayle and Carrie, but they were already up and gone for the day. They had boxes of pads in the closet. I went back into our room and fished around until I found what I needed. I would tell them later. I managed to get through the day, worried the flow would go through to the back of my ugly navy blue pleated skirt. All day I kept my back to the lockers when I walked the halls to class. When I finally got to the bathroom, there was only a dot of blood. The whole day was spent being a nervous wreck for nothing. I told my sisters that night and it was Gayle that insisted I tell our mother.
“She’ll be dragging you to the doctor’s to find out why you didn’t start. No, we have to tell her. I’ll go with you. Just buck it up. We are all tortured by her when we go through it; you’re not alone.” So Gayle dragged me to confess to my mother, who looked like she performed a miracle having given birth to a female who was growing up.
At dinner time that night, we were almost done with dessert and I
thought to myself, Ah, you escaped exposure. But I couldn’t be that lucky. My mother stood up at her end of the table and produced a big box of Kotex with a ribbon around it.
“Everybody, before you leave the table, listen up! Stand up, Cynthia.” She looked at me with a ‘get up kid, you can’t get out of this humiliation’ look on her face. “Cynthia got her monthly visitor today!” She placed the box in front of me and started clapping like a crazy woman. My sisters covered their faces and my brothers started laughing, almost falling off their chairs. Father sat at his end of the table, a huge smile plastered across his face. “You are lucky to be a girl in this day and age,” my mother continued. “You can be a mother and have a life! You don’t have to be chained to your family like I am!” Later she would whisper to me that I better make sure that period showed up each month, or else!
My mother also wouldn’t buy me a bra so that by the time I was twelve, I was the only girl in gym class who wore an undershirt. Granted my ‘boobs didn’t pop out’ until I was fifteen and then I thought my mother would have a cow when she noticed. I’ll never forget coming downstairs to the breakfast table on a Saturday morning with my flannel nightgown on; my seven brothers and sisters already there before me, my father at the head of the table reading the paper, and my mother standing behind him with a frying pan full of scrambled eggs in her hand.
“Lord forgive us,” she said, looking at me as I came into the room. Everyone looked up from their plates. My brother Jeff was reading the funny pages and he was the only one who ignored me. “Cynthia Margaret Thomasini, what in heaven’s name do you have stuffed in your nightgown?” I could feel my face start to burn, the color had started at my navel and made the trip up my body in seconds, reaching my face in time for my sister Heather to get up from her chair. She took me by the shoulders and gently turned me around, whispering, ‘let’s go up and get dressed.’ She shot the look of death at my mother before we left the room, but it was too late, the rest of the kids were laughing at me. It would be remembered as the day my boobs popped out. My mother would bring that up at every family get together after that until finally two years ago, we all moaned and my brother Fred said, ‘Ma, give it a rest, will ya?’ I told her myself that I would never come for another Sunday dinner if she was going to bring up that story again. Our reward for such disrespectful behavior was a two month reprieve where my mother refused to come out of her room when we came back to visit. My father and Fred would cook the Sunday meal and we had the best time without her.
Dream Lover: Pam of Babylon Book #3 Page 7