Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2023 07:18:25 -0700 From: Juxepe Albi Subject: An Affair to Remember - Chapter 1 - Lest Auld Acquaintance... tb/F tb/tg M/M An Affair to Remember Chapter 1 - Lest Auld Acquaince.... It was more than strange. Last night I received a telephone call from an old female acquaintance. Marlene was the daughter of a man that had worked one of my grandfather's farms; and I had known her family my entire life. When I was sixteen, we had met secretly four or five times for intimate relations; I was a teen---- she was twenty-six. I was big for my age----six-six, 210 lbs, with hazel eyes and white blond hair. As luck would have it, she became pregnant. I was a junior in high school; but she had a boyfriend who was really serious about her, and she saw an answer to the problem. I knew that she didn't really sleep around; but she was seeing him when she went to bed with me. It was an easy matter to make him think the baby was his. I hadn't heard from Marlene for ten or eleven years; and I had moved from New Orleans, where I had received my MD at Tulane, to Baltimore, to complete my PhD in stem-cell biology at Johns Hopkins, and was now living in New York. Marlene, by that time, had three boys----one by me and two by her husband. She heard that I was back in town, and called me at my parents' house. My grandfather, Dr. Jean Falkessen, Grandpa John, to me, had passed on; and I was in New Orleans for the funeral. "Lex, I'm calling to tell you how sorry I was to hear about your Grandpa John's passing. It's been a long time; and I'd like to see you while you are in New Orleans. I will be at the funeral, maybe we can get together for dinner, too." "That would be nice, Marlene," I replied. "I was surprised to learn that practically everyone I had known in New Orleans has flown the coop, and moved away. I couldn't remember your married name, and neither could Mom." "Great! Then I'll see you in a couple of days. I look forward to seeing you again." "Me, too, thanks for calling." Prior to her unexpected call, I had no idea of contacting her when I came to town. We had lost track of each other when she married. I had gone through a short-lived marriage, myself; and there was a boy living in California with his mother that I had sired. My ex-wife, Lily, had been two-timing me with a sailor named Rod; and he was living under the delusion that Little Rodney was his child; so I had no connection with them. I had taken our breakup badly and had to be asked not to call her again. New hubby was insanely jealous of me; and my occasional inebriated call to her had been causing problems. I was pleased to find out that Grandpa John's car, a new BMW, as it turned out, was in running order; I drove it to the funeral home. Marlene, as she had said she would be, was at the funeral. She had brought her three boys with her. Etienne, the eldest at twelve, mine, had my hair and eyes, in contrast to his brothers', Beaufort's, ten, and Corbin's, eight, brown hair and eyes. I took them to T. Pittari for dinner, where the boys had elephant, tiger and wildebeest steaks. Marlene took my advice and had a beef rib-eye steak, as did I. We could smell the tiger cooking all the way from the kitchen----it reeked of TCP. The boys wanted to go to the movies, so we accommodated them, while Marlene and I had coffee in the French Market. She explained that her husband was an alcoholic and abusive. Presently, he was in a rehab center in Slidell, a suburb of the city. I was staying in my grandfather's three-story home on St. Charles; and I took them there after the movie. The house had an olympic-size pool; and the boys wanted to swim. When I couldn't produce any swimsuits, they shucked off their clothes and jumped in the pool au naturel. Marlene had to visit her husband the next day, and prevailed upon me to entertain the boys, so that they wouldn't have to deal with seeing their father in the institution. The next day went smoothly; the boys spent most of the day in and out of the pool, totally unconcerned with their nudity. Etienne spent half the day questioning me about my friendship with his mother; and, as we passed by a full-length mirror in the Grande Salle, he remarked on the similarity of our hair and eyes. He was a big boy for his age, about five ten, and remarkably well-developed physically. He was quick to inform me that he had also inherited my rather oversized privates. I hadn't realized he knew about me at all. He remarked that his "father" also was quite well-endowed, although he confessed not having seen it on more than one or two occasions. He also was very critical of his father's drunkenness and abusiveness. It seems that the boys frequently had been farmed out to Marlene's sisters for sometimes as long as six months at a time because of trouble at home. We parted on very good terms and the boys all thanked me for a wonderful day.