The Wisdom of Perversity

by Rafael Yglesias

  “You look so different!” Julie exclaimed. “You’re a man.” The latter was said as if that were an unlikely development.

  “I doubt that.” Brian eased himself onto the tippy metal chairs of Not Your Mother’s Kitchen on Hudson, a block from his expensive, very cramped so-called two-bedroom apartment. (He couldn’t fit more than a twin bed in the second room in which he had installed his father this past January, when Danny’s health began a severe decline.) Not Your Mother is where he preferred to meet someone he didn’t know well. The espresso was strong and—an amazing bonus in a hip emporium—they offered a vegan version of Linzer cookies. They were as thoroughly covered in confectionery sugar, and the raspberry jam center was as sweet as his idealized memory of Zolly’s Linzers, but of course spelt, sunflower oil, and agave nectar didn’t reproduce exactly the butter and egg yolk base of the old neighborhood treat. Still, pleasant memories, even imperfectly reproduced, were in short supply. And the virtue of meeting at Not Your Mother was that should the person prove, as people so often did, to be hostile or a bore, the espresso would keep Brian awake while the Linzer cookie salved his wounds.

  “I didn’t mean that the way it came out.” She nervously brushed the short white hairs at her temple as if she too missed her long raven hair. “It’s just that last time I saw you, you were a little boy and now you’re a tall, beautiful man.” She got very flustered. “Handsome. I mean, handsome.”

  “I didn’t know you were in the movie business, Julie. Your flattery is so good you could be a member of the academy,” he said.

  Julie winced. “I’m not flattering you.”

  Brian patted the top of her hand gently. “I’m sorry. I guess I spend so much time listening to insincere people, I can’t hear a true melody anymore.” At his touch, her fingers reacted skittishly, fanning out, on alert. He immediately registered that reaction as further proof she had shut down sexually, confirmed by her mannish do, sparing makeup, and menopausal clothes—jeans a size too large to properly show off her lean body and a shapeless wool sweater.

  A waitress appeared to ask what he wanted. He surveyed her thoroughly: two toned hair, half pale blue, half straw yellow; a line of pimples across the ridge of her forehead; left nostril pierced three times to accommodate the decoration of three thin silver-colored rings, an elaborate floral tattoo that covered her right shoulder like a skin tight epaulette, then flowed down, wallpapering her forearm. He looked away from those desecrations to the purer Julie. She was drinking a cappuccino. “That all you’re having?” Brian asked. She nodded, rested her chin in her hands, and studied his face with disconcerting meticulousness. A taste of his own medicine. He didn’t care for it. He ordered the espresso and Linzer cookie. “My madeleine,” he explained.

  She was following her own train of thought. “Is Jeff good at flattery?” she asked.

  It took Brian a moment to catch up. “I have no idea. Haven’t spoken to Jeff in twenty-five years. At least. And even that was only a two-minute phone call to congratulate him on his first picture. I really haven’t spoken to him in any depth or at any length since we were eleven years old.”

  “So you really don’t talk to him. That’s what he said.”

  “You’ve spoken with Jeff?”

  She nodded guiltily. Guilty about what?

  “So that was a trick question?” Brian asked. “It wasn’t especially tricky. If Jeff and I really were in touch, he could have called me and warned me to pretend we weren’t.”

  Julie laughed, very pleasantly. “That was dumb of me.”

  Brian thought her clumsiness at deception endearing. “Julie, why would we lie about being in touch? Of all the things to lie about, why that?”

  “I just can’t believe it. I know it was forty years ago, but . . .” She paused.

  He was intensely curious about what she might say, but his Linzer cookie arrived. “Your espresso will be right up,” the waitress said.

  “Could I have a glass of water?” he asked, looking up at the waitress’ beringed nostril and wondering how messy it all became when she got a head cold. Once she was gone, he prodded Julie, “Go on. Why can’t you believe we’re no longer friends?”

  “I don’t know, I guess it’s all frozen in time for me. That’s crazy, isn’t it? Also, you two were so close,” Julie added wistfully, as if she missed their friendship.

  “We were,” he admitted. “I think I saw Jeff every day of my life from when our mothers pushed us in baby carriages in Rego Park until I was almost twelve. A mere eleven years. I mean, I’ve had lots of friendships that lasted longer, but there’s nothing quite like the intensity, the complete trust you feel for that first best friend you make. Think about it. After puberty, you look to one sex for more than friendship and to the other for less-than-complete intimacy.” His espresso appeared. He took a sip, mostly to stop talking. He had said way too much.

  “You’re right. And even for best childhood friends, you two were really close. I remember that so well. You were very important to Jeff. He loved you.”

  Brian’s throat closed. He blinked back tears. How humiliating. Now I’m a sentimental hack. Maybe it’s the new meds. Maybe I’ve let the doc go overboard on de-balling me. Next thing I know I’ll be menstruating. “You really think I was so important to him?” he asked coyly.

  “Oh yeah. Jeff was not a popular little boy. You were. And you were a good athlete. You were smart and handsome and popular. Weren’t you class president?”

  “We didn’t have a class president. It was a public school in a working-class neighborhood. We couldn’t even afford a class clown.”

  “But you were popular. Right? I remember Jeff bragging about how popular you were. Don’t be modest. Tell the truth. Weren’t you a seriously popular kid?”

  The question felt like a trap. He agreed quickly, “Yeah I was popular.” And was quick to retract, “Wasn’t hard, in that group of misfits.”

  “So why did you stop being friends?” She was earnest. She was a very earnest woman. He didn’t really care for earnestness. It wasn’t the same as honesty. In this case, for example, he didn’t think she was being sincere. She knew why. “I’m afraid by eleven, for reasons I’m sure you understand, I decided dealing with Harriet and Richard Klein was not worth the effort of being friends with Jeff.”

  Julie nodded. “But why at age eleven? Did something happen when you were eleven that was different from what happened when you were eight, nine, ten?” She put her chin in her hands and waited with the determination of a child to get an answer.

  She was asking without asking, like a clever interrogator. But this isn’t an interrogation, Brian thought. It’s her mystery too. He focused on the Linzer cookie. They had supplied a knife and fork for its consumption. That was misguided. Cutting it would scatter the confectionery sugar and crack the top layer off the bottom, eventually breaking the whole into pieces. The true pleasure was in biting through the two hardened layers to the sweet layer of jam. He usually acquiesced to decorum and spoiled his own treat by using silverware. Confronted by Julie’s naive gaze he picked up the cookie and chomped. That left a line of white sugar on his mouth. When he spoke, sugar sprayed and flecked Julie’s blue sweater. “Around when I was ten—after almost two years of fending him off—I finally figured out the only way I could handle Richard Klein was not to be in the same room with him. Sorry,” he said, pointing to her sweater and dabbing his lips with a napkin. Julie glanced down at the damage, demurely wetted the tip of her pinky, and lifted off the dots of sugar. Brian drank some of the water, then took a sip of espresso, composed himself, and resumed, “So I told Jeff not to invite me up when Klein was around. In fact, I told him we should always play at my apartment.” Brian sighed. He had no desire to continue. Without regret he could rise from the table and walk away from her forever. What sentimental insanity had made him think any good could come out of talking with someone who had shared his past? She was as ignorant about all this as any civilian.

  “An
d what happened?” she asked.

  “What happened! He kept doing it.” Brian heard his anger, still green. He sighed. He wanted to stop but forced himself to go on. “It would happen every few months, spaced out so I’d sort of forget that it might happen again. I’d speak to Jeff in the morning about what we were gonna do that day, like always, we’d make plans for me to play at his apartment, like always, and then Klein would be there.”

  “And Jeff never warned you he’d be there?”

  “No. He’d let him ambush me. First time it happened I yelled at him. He promised it wouldn’t happen again. Then a few months later it happened again. Again, I yelled at him. Again he promised. Then it happened a third time. That ended our friendship as far as I was concerned. Eventually I went to Horace Mann, a private school—”

  “Sure,” she said. “I know Horace Mann.”

  “Yeah, well, Richard Klein turned out to be a good preparation for that place.”

  Julie frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Oh there were a couple of Kleins there, but I could spot them immediately.” Brian chuckled. “That was the only favor Klein did for me—he prepared me to deal with our world of predators. I can’t tell you what a dimwitted boy I was. It took me way too long to realize that Richard Klein wasn’t all that unusual.”

  “What!” Julie sat up straight. For a moment, in that pose, he saw the proud, striking girl who wanted to be a ballet dancer. She’s really a handsome woman, he decided, high brow, black eyes and pale skin suggesting an old-world grace that evoked not the Jews of Riverdale but the doomed artists of Prague. “Klein was a monster,” she declared.

  “Exactly. The world is chock-full of monsters. Anyway, with me at Horace Mann and Jeff going to the public junior high we were no longer in the same school, and that, as far as everyone else was concerned, ended our friendship. When I was eleven, my parents, after two trial separations, finally legally divorced, and just before my twelfth birthday Mom moved us out of Rego Park.” Brian paused. He realized that this collection of facts about his life, told in this way, had never been discussed outside of the soft couches of therapy. There they had become commonplace, the chitchat of trauma: easily said, easily understood, easily accepted. Not here. Telling Julie, the words scalded his throat and left a foul taste. He felt as if he’d vomited. “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?” She frowned. Crow’s-feet appeared. He liked those lines. They lent her earnest face a needed dose of skepticism.

  “Being flip. I don’t mean to be flip.”

  “I don’t mind. But I’m confused. I thought you said you saw Jeff once when you were both grown-up. In your twenties, maybe?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Really? I thought you did.” Once again, she didn’t do a good job of lying.

  “I’m sure I said nothing of the kind. Where did you get that tidbit? From Jeff?”

  Julie confessed, “Yeah, he said he saw you after he graduated from film school.”

  “I bet the fucker didn’t tell you what happened,” he said, the ancient anger new again. He wanted to apologize, then balked. Apologize for facts? “Jeff came to see me when he got his first job directing a TV movie. Wanted to know if I’d do a polish on the script—I had already had two plays on at Playwrights Horizons and I was making a living writing for As the World Turns—so he wasn’t doing me any favors. On the contrary. But I was pleased. I admit it, I was a fool, my heart skipping with delight to have my old buddy back. So we met at my apartment. It was just like the old days for about half an hour. Then Jeff, remembering I was a Knicks fan, asked me if I still liked them. Those were days when nobody had cable and you could only get the Knicks on cable. I said I was obsessed with them. So Jeff offered to take me to a Knicks game. He said we could use Klein’s seats, that he had great seats. Said that Cousin Richard would be happy to give them to us whenever we wanted.”

  Julie blanched. “You’re kidding,” she mumbled.

  “I was so shocked I couldn’t answer him.” He laughed grimly. “I stared my shock, my slow horror, my idiotically naive outrage.” Brian leaned back and mused, having thought about this moment a thousand times, “It would take a great actor, a total genius like Brando, to reproduce the complexity of what went on in my eyes in just a few seconds, the seamless shift from shock to understanding to disgust. No,” he amended. “That’s wrong. Betrayed. I was betrayed all over again, as if no time had passed, as if I were still a dumb, trusting child. Anyway,” Brian snorted with disgust at that former self, “Jeff’s face suddenly changed, looked like he understood. He got it, I was convinced. Like when we were boys, he got what I was feeling just from my look. But I was desperately wrong. You know what he said? It speaks volumes. Jeff said, ‘Oh! No, no. You don’t understand. Don’t worry. Cousin Richard’s not interested in us anymore. We’re too old.’ ”

  “Oh my God.” Julie covered her mouth with both hands.

  “I think until that moment I had forgiven Jeff,” Brian said. “Actually, until that moment, I don’t think I was wise enough to know there was anything to forgive.” Julie lowered her hands to ask exactly what he had forgiven Jeff for, but Brian interrupted with his own question: “So you haven’t been in regular touch with him? Just as cousins, family stuff?”

  “What?” she said, momentarily stalled, accustomed to not telling the whole truth. “No. But everyone thinks that’s because of Dad’s fight with Uncle Saul after he finally figured out Harriet couldn’t possibly be dying of breast cancer.”

  “So you never told your parents she was lying about that?”

  “No. I never told them anything. Not even that.” She sighed. “Mom and Dad figured out Harriet wasn’t dying soon enough. I mean, my God, she didn’t have any surgery, she didn’t lose her hair, there was absolutely no sign of treatment. I guess it took a year, but Dad finally challenged Uncle Saul and he admitted she’d made it up to buy him some time to repay Dad. And he did repay Dad—in fact, he repaid him with interest—but still, you know, my mother and father were easygoing up to a point, but once you lost their goodwill, you kind of lost it forever. So my dad and Saul stopped talking altogether, much to my mom’s relief. And then, when I was in college, my mom died suddenly and Dad really didn’t want to talk to Harriet, the fake-fatal-illness-lady.”

  “Oh, Julie,” Brian said, instantly sympathetic. It seemed obvious that this woman needed her mother to be strong and alive. “I’m sorry about your mom.”

  “It was a long time ago,” Julie said casually. “Even losing Ma was a long time ago.”

  “I’m sorry. I lost my mother five years ago,” Brian said. “It was hard. Very hard. Much harder than I expected. I don’t know why. Yes, I do. Before she died, in some way death simply hadn’t been real.”

  “Did you ever tell your mother about Klein?” Julie asked.

  “No,” Brian said. He reflected on the questions again and repeated, “No.” He thought some more and said, “That would have been cruel.”

  “Cruel?” Julie was puzzled.

  “She was already beating herself up for ruining my life by divorcing her faithless ne’er-do-well husband.” He sighed. “I guess we should straighten this out right away—outside of shrinks, no one knows about me and what happened. And you?”

  “Not really. I told two people in college, but I don’t know them at all now, so no one who is close to me knows about me.” She grunted. “That’s a really sad thing to say, isn’t it?”

  Brian nodded. “I wanted to talk about it at one point. With Jeff of all people. When I got into therapy for the first time, in my midtwenties, I was all hot to talk it out, you know heal myself.” Brian laughed derisively. “I was so desperate for a happy ending, a so-called normal life, I was even prepared to forgive the Knicks ticket business. I called him a few times. He never returned my calls. Of course, by then he was a really hot director so I thought maybe he was just dodging me for career reasons.” Brian took an enormous bite of his Linzer cookie, white dust and crumb
s collecting on his lips.

  Julie offered her napkin as if he were her very own messy boy. She was pleased he took it and cleaned himself up. “It’s funny,” she said. “While waiting for you here I realized I never really knew if Klein . . .” She grimaced rather than say the word.

  “You didn’t know if Klein molested me?” Brian said very loudly.

  Julie ducked as if he’d thrown something at her, and she put a finger to her lips. Brian looked around. At eleven, too late for breakfast, too early for lunch, the place was nearly empty. Only the nose-pierced, blue and yellow hair waitress, standing behind the counter near their table, was near enough to have heard him. Judging from the way she was staring at him Brian decided she had heard, and he understood her surprise. He must look the picture of staid middle-aged respectability in his sensible Ecco walking shoes, his Banana Republic chinos, his Paul Stuart black cashmere crew neck sweater, covering all but the collar of his Armani white shirt, balding hair neatly trimmed, face carefully shaved with the white-tipped beaver brush and cream for sensitive skin from the Art of Shaving. Hearing such an obviously square man declaim “molested me” had jarred the tattooed lady. He met her young eyes with a knowing smile and asked in his head, Want to sit on my lap, little girl? She intuited his look, dropped her eyes, and pretended to fuss with something on the counter.

  “How would I know for sure?” Julie asked Brian. “I didn’t see him do anything to you. I assumed it eventually, much later. I thought about it and figured he must have. That’s why . . .” She didn’t finish.

  Brian completed her logic aloud: “That’s why I didn’t tell on Klein about what I saw.” He winced at this realization. “Jesus, before you figured out I was also a victim, you must have hated me.”

  “Hated you?” Julie looked so surprised he was relieved. “Why?”

  “For not rescuing you.”

  She smiled tolerantly. “Oh no. I didn’t expect you to save me. You were a little boy.”

  “Who then?”

  Her eyes flickered. Was that mischief? Then they dulled into disappointment. “Me, of course.”