The Wisdom of Perversity

by Rafael Yglesias

  She had to admit he sounded convincing. Remarkably so. “Jeffrey,” she said as gently as she could, “Gary says your commencement speech at the American Broadcasting Academy is on their website. It’s on the website that you said your cousin got you your start in the movie business.”

  “He paid my tuition at USC! That’s all.” There was a silence. “He didn’t give me a start in the business,” he added in a disgusted tone. “I was exaggerating. Being kind. Jesus, that was in 1983! I did that stupid speech for my mother. Soon as she died I never saw or spoke to Cousin Richard again. And I stopped having anything to do with that fucking school.”

  “You sound angry, Jeff.” Despite his money and fame she wasn’t intimated by him. That surprised her. “If your cousin never touched you, why are you so angry?”

  “I’m not angry,” Jeff said in a whine.

  “If he paid for you to go college, if he was so nice to you, why did you stop talking to him?” Julie pressed.

  The beautiful young man returned to the window wearing thick, nerdish glasses. She did not want him to see this Julie, a drab middle-aged woman in a robe. She turned her back on him and shut off the desk lamp to further impede him.

  Meanwhile Jeff sighed. There was a long pause, followed by another sigh. Julie waited patiently for his admission. She felt for him. Like her, he must have followed the case with horror and fascination, worrying (with even more reason than she) that Klein’s behavior would come out, that some reporter would make the connection and drag him into it. “Julie,” he said at last, “I’ll be honest. I’ve been expecting you to call for some time. You know. Our parents are dead, we’re all in therapy, and we examine the past. We hope to . . . you know.” He shouted: “FUCKING REDEMPTION!” He went on in a hoarse, exhausted voice, “I was just a kid. I didn’t understand what Cousin Richard was into. I mean, sure I knew he was weirdly interested in kids, but you know what my mother was like. She got Richard to pay for my college education. So she insisted I had to help him when he got canned by NBC, but as soon as she died I had nothing to do with him. And Sam Rydel, I swear, I knew nothing about him. He was there when I gave the speech, but I just said hello to him and that was the last time we talked. Okay?”

  The okay was a mistake. For a cover-up his speech wasn’t bad, but the “okay,” asking for immediate release, gave him away. It was barely possible—she didn’t believe it—but his fans might think it possible that he didn’t fully understand what had happened to her, and that nothing had happened to him, but the plea in that hurried “okay” was desperate and guilty. “Listen, Jeffrey, it’s more complicated than just you and me. My husband is Gary Stein. If you don’t remember who he is or don’t know what’s been going on with him, Google him. He’s a legal columnist for Manhattan Mag. American Justice has him under contract as a TV analyst. He’s going to cover the investigation wherever it leads and he says the DA’s office is about to indict Klein for molesting children at the school and at the camp. He asked me to call you before he goes public with the info about your connection to the school.”

  “Does he know?” Jeff’s voice had changed: panic—accusation too.

  “Know what?”

  “About . . .” Jeff hesitated. “You know. What did you tell him?”

  There it was. An admission he was lying. He had understood what had happened to her. How could he not have understood? “I wanted to talk to you first, Jeff. I told him I had to talk to you first.”

  “Huh,” he said. She heard Jeff open a can. Beer? She didn’t picture him slugging a Bud. He definitely sipped something. After a swallow he asked, “How long have you been married to him?”

  “Twenty-three years.”

  “Don’t trust him, huh?” She could hear the smirk on his face. Why is he making fun of me? That’s not smart.

  “How about you? Does your pretty wife know?” She threw in “pretty” as damning sarcasm, although now that it was out she had no idea how it qualified as a put-down.

  “No!” he almost shouted.

  “How about your first wife?”

  “Jesus Christ, she doesn’t even have my cell number. And I didn’t tell my second wife either.”

  “Tell them what? You just said you didn’t understand what your cousin was into.”

  “I didn’t even tell them what I don’t know.” He grunted at his joke, a feeble grim laugh. “They don’t know the half of how crazy my family was.” Another grunt. “They don’t know ten percent.”

  “So why are you surprised I haven’t told Gary?”

  “’Cause I assume you have a real marriage.”

  “You don’t?” This was interesting.

  “Come on, you must have talked to somebody about this,” Jeff said, evading again.

  No point in tugging at the will of this man. She laughed scornfully, then admitted, “One girlfriend, one boyfriend. Both were a big mistake.” It was during her third year at the University of Pennsylvania, after taking a course in psychology. He was a lean dark-eyed boy, the kind she liked, or thought she did until she decided the lumbering puppy of Gary’s broad body was cozier. The rising senior at UPenn listened solemnly, wasn’t satisfied by her general description, wanted graphic details, seemed (maybe she was paranoid) disappointed that they weren’t worse, brutal. She had hoped telling him would bring them closer, relax her when they made love. Instead she lost all interest in sex. Distressed by his reaction, she told her roommate, a sweet, ditzy blonde from Minnesota who listened and nodded solemnly, said she was sorry and that she had an organic chemistry test she had to cram for. In a month, she caught boyfriend and roommate screwing. He didn’t apologize. He labeled her frigid. The roommate asked to be moved. Soon after, all the women she had been friends with became creepy, some with oily sympathy, the rest shunning her. One of the touch-your-arm-with-a-sad-face girls said, “I heard about your trauma. Have you experimented with women?” Julie never decided if that was a come-on or a veiled insult.

  “You never told your parents?” Jeff sounded anxious. Did he think that’s why their fathers had quarreled?

  “No, of course not.” Her father would have . . . she couldn’t decide how he would have reacted. Beaten the shit out of Klein? Pretended it never happened? She didn’t know, but certainly she would no longer have been an object of pride for him—the only paternal emotion she had ever received from him. Anything she failed at, or didn’t succeed at brilliantly, her father never mentioned again. As for her mother? She had planned to tell Ma, when it was far enough away from the event that she wouldn’t feel she had to tell Dad, but then Ma dropped dead during Julie’s freshman year. She wished she had told her. If anyone could have wiped the slate clean, it was Ma. “How about you? You ever tell your mother?”

  “My mother! Jesus. I didn’t talk to my mother about anything. Didn’t have much to do with her or Cousin Richard or any of my family as soon as I was out of film school. Once I got my first job, I sent the monster a check once a month and stopped answering her calls. Dad I’d see on the side, like we were having an affair.”

  “Did you tell your dad?” She thought: Gary would be proud; I’m coaxing him into tacitly admitting he was molested.

  “No,” Jeff said. “No,” he repeated in a regretful tone.

  “I told a shrink,” Julie offered. “Someone I saw after mom died.”

  “Yeah, I told my shrink. That’s all he wanted to talk about for a good ten years. Then he became a Buddhist. He still brings it up but only to say it’s archival trauma.”

  “Archival?” Julie laughed, thinking of white gloves and dehumidified rooms.

  “Yeah, you know, it’s no longer relevant except as a point of origin. Anyway, he’s an idiot. I’ll give him another twenty years and then I’ll see someone else. What did your shrink say?”

  “Mine thought it was a distraction from my deeper father issues.” Julie laughed scornfully again. That fat, old, droopy-eyed Freudian. He had been useless. She was better off with Zoloft. Maybe that’s what s
he needed. Double to a hundred milligrams of Zoloft. Maybe a thousand. That would dry her up. “So you only told your shrink, Jeff? No girlfriends?”

  “No! Never. All my girlfriends were actresses. Tell an actress something about your sex life and you might as well print it on the front page of the New York Post. Only my shrink and”—he hesitated—“another therapist. So listen, for both our sakes, tell Gary to back off. I resigned from that school in 1988, and if someone asks why I was on it in first place I’ll tell them the absolute truth: it was all a favor to Cousin Richard.”

  “You mean a favor to your mother.”

  “What? Oh yeah, right.”

  He couldn’t keep his own lies straight. He hadn’t helped Klein solely for Harriet’s sake. He had felt obliged too.

  “And what will you say about Sam Rydel? He’s the one who is actually indicted.”

  “No! I keep telling you. I didn’t know about him, I knew back in 1983 that he was around, but I didn’t know what he was doing. I still don’t. Listen to me, Julie, as soon as I got my first TV movie to direct, I stayed as far away as I could from Cousin Richard. I don’t know anything about what happened to Sam or what sick shit he’s into. I saw him at one black-tie dinner for Huck Finn over twenty years ago. I didn’t even know what Cousin Richard was up to. I didn’t even fucking think about what he was up to.”

  He never, ever thought about Klein?

  “Jules?” Jeff prompted. “You there?”

  “What about Brian?” she asked.

  “Brian?” Jeff sounded thrown by this. “Brian Moran? What about him?”

  “You must’ve talked to him about all this.”

  “I haven’t seen him since I was eleven.” Julie was profoundly surprised. It seemed incredible. But why would he lie about it? Into her silence, Jeff amended, “Actually I met him for coffee, once, when I got my first job, but that was a mistake.”

  “You’re really . . . not friends at all?”

  “You mean cause he’s in the business? No. I don’t know him at all.”

  “But . . . how could . . . ? You were in love with him.”

  “What!” The way he said the word it almost a squeal of pain. “What the fuck does that mean?”

  “You two were like glued together.”

  “Yeah, we were best friends as kids. So what? Jesus, that kind of friendship never survives. Do you know anybody who’s still really close to their childhood friend? Isn’t that why BFF is always said ironically? Are you still friends with your girlhood BFF?”

  “I probably would be if I were on Facebook.” Julie chuckled. “I hear she loves Facebook and can’t believe I’m not on it. But I haven’t seen her more than a couple times since her family moved to Texas when I started middle school. We wrote some letters for a while but then lost touch and, well”—she laughed again—“I’m not on Facebook.”

  “That’s more or less what happened with me and Brian. His parents split up and a year later his mom moved him away and we lost touch. Listen, Jules, you gotta keep Gary away from this story. You haven’t told him, so it’s obvious you don’t want him and three hundred million of his closest friends to know what happened to us. And why should you? Won’t do any good. What Cousin Richard did in Queens forty years ago has nothing to do with whatever Sam Rydel did today. So Jules—let’s talk about how I can help your family, which is also my family. What does Gary want? He’s on TV. You said he’s on American Justice. What network is that?”

  “MSNBC.” Julie grunted at the irony.

  Jeff didn’t. “I know just who to talk to over there. And I can do it casually so it won’t be suspicious. I’ve got a TV production company, maybe we can create a show around Gary about the law. Maybe a reality show. I mean, Jesus, we’re the most litigious country on earth, there’s gotta be a TV show in it.”

  “You mean like making him Judge Judy?” Julie pictured Gary in black robes scolding people.

  “He should be so lucky. Judge Judy makes twenty-five mil a year. But no, not Judge Judy. Something classier. Interview show, maybe. We’ll figure it out, Jules.”

  “You know what?” she said, having thought it over many times during the six-hour wait for his callback. “That’s not necessary. All I have to tell Gary is that if he lays off, you’ll owe us. You know what I was thinking you might help with in a couple years? Maybe you can help get Zack into a college, maybe a drama school if he—”

  “I can get him a job on a movie!” Jeff was excited. “I can definitely give him a small role. He’ll get a SAG card and an agent. I’ll find him a good Young Turk at CAA to rep him, get him started. I can’t make him a star, nobody can do that—just ask my three wives—but I can give him a real shot at it.”

  “I know,” she said with a sigh. Zack was corrupted anyway. Why not make him a permanent resident of Sodom and Gomorrah? “I’ll call off Gary. But I should tell you he says it’s just a matter of time.”

  “What’s a matter of time?”

  “Someone in the press seeing you were on the board.”

  “So I was on the board twenty years ago. Look, honey, what’s the story with you? Half the time you get the joke, half the time you’re a straight line. I’m not worried about what Gary can tell the world. I’m worried about what you can tell Gary to tell the world.”

  Across the way, the light went out. She checked: the tall drink of water was gone. “What about Brian?”

  “What . . . ?” Once again Jeff was startled by her mentioning him. Why?

  “Will Brian say something?”

  “He hasn’t said anything for forty years.”

  Again she felt utterly alone, as if she were the hero of one of those movies about the world ending: the sole survivor with nothing to look at but empty rooms.

  “Jules,” Jeff said into her gloomy silence, “Brian didn’t call me, you called me. So don’t worry about Brian. I gotta go. I’m late to the editing room. We okay, Jules?”

  “We’re okay.”

  “Let me know if I should find something for your boy in my next picture. Either way, I’ll call you soon. We should stay in touch. We’re family. Bye.” The phone clattered, then silence.

  In the dark of her loneliness she thought about the arrangement. Convincing Gary wouldn’t be a problem, sadly. So it was all neat and tidy, stowed in the bottom drawer again. Only one messy item left to dispose of, the memo paper in her hand with Brian’s phone number, the dark-haired boy of long ago. He was only a phone call and sixty streets away.

  First Cause

  April 1966

  BRIAN SEARCHED FOR Jeff at Zolly’s Deli. Catching him there, he might be able to wave for his best friend to come out and discreetly make sure Richard Klein wasn’t going to stay all evening. And if Jeff insisted Brian join them, at least he could have a hot dog. Mom’s grilled cheese was great, but a kosher frank with sauerkraut and slathered with spicy deli mustard was a treat beyond equal.

  Brian hurried to Alderton Street, slowing as he approached Zolly’s one window, dominated by a yellow neon HEBREW NATIONAL sign. Between the N and the A, Brian saw Richard Klein on a metal chair that was usually placed at one of two freestanding tables. He had moved it to the open end of a red vinyl booth to serve as a fifth seat. Presumably Sam, Julie, Jeff, and little Noah were inside the high wood walls of the booth; they weren’t visible.

  Brian was grateful to be able to watch Klein from another environment through a pane of glass, a television-like perspective that allowed Brian to satisfy his curiosity from a safe vantage. He scrutinized every detail of this puzzling and disturbing man, settling on Klein’s pudgy hands, ceaselessly punctuating his talk. When Klein paused to listen to the booth of children respond to his animated conversation, it was with an expression of pure delight, at one point throwing his head back to laugh openmouthed at something one of them said. While Brian wondered at how happy Klein seemed to be, the executive turned his head toward the window casually. Then his eyes found Brian.

  Brian ran to the corner, h
eart pounding. A wood-paneled station wagon braked hard a few feet from Brian, car lurching to a stop. The woman driver stared at him angrily, although he was on the sidewalk and in no danger of being under her wheels. Maybe she thought he was about to cross, since Brian kept turning his head to check on whether he was being pursued.

  At that point he did see the deli door being opened from the inside. He bolted again, back to Sixty-third Street. He thought he heard his name called repeatedly, but the wind and traffic made it impossible for him to be sure.

  He decided to head back to Jeff’s while waiting for them to return from Zolly’s. Harriet’s interrogation would be terrible, but that would be better than sitting with Richard without other adults around. He had already been with Klein in a place not drawn on the map of his day-to-day world; he wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  Brian was in no hurry to face Harriet. He stayed on the far side of Sixty-third, went past his building, and decided to climb up the low part of a concrete wall that rose until it joined at a right angle to an overpass above a forbidden place to horse around, the perilous elevated Long Island Railroad tracks. At the wall’s base, Brian placed one Keds’ heel flush to its mate’s toe, imagining that he was walking a tightrope as it gradually rose from two to over six feet off the pavement. Farther along, on the overpass, it would rise even higher and to fall off there meant you would tumble onto the deadly tracks. Some of the older boys made that climb and, in a feat of daring, leapt down immediately after the last car of a train passed, madly climbing back up using struts, garbage, and their strength, racing to see who could be first. Every mother had warned the boys against that stunt and Brian had never attempted it, although tempted. He chose not to again, especially after a chilly gust had him wobbling for a few seconds to maintain balance. He sat down on the wall, putting his legs over the sidewalk side, and was about to slowly slide down when an amused voice asked, “How’s the view?”