The Wisdom of Perversity (19 page)

At last she took the risk, her great leap of faith. “In the past forty-eight hours I've lied to both Gary and Jeff. I haven't lied to you so far, and I don't want to, but you shouldn't trust me.”

Brian broke into a grin. “Julie . . .” He tried not to, but then he laughed hard enough for tears to well. When he composed himself, he said amiably, “I don't trust anyone, and by the way, you shouldn't trust me. But I hope that doesn't stop you. I'm dying to know what you've been lying to Jeff about.”

“I told Jeff I would stop Gary from covering the case and I haven't. I told Gary that Jeff didn't care whether he covered the case and he should stay on it.”

“Wow. Good for you. Jeff won't see that coming. I'm sure he thinks offering your boy a career is too good for you to pass up.”

“Zack would probably kill me if he knew. So Gary stayed on the case all day yesterday. And he called last night with really bad, really upsetting news.” Before she continued, she wanted to impress Brian with how much trust she was placing in him. “I'm not supposed to tell anybody on pain of death, so you can really mess me up if you tell Gary's rivals. Right now he has this exclusively.” She waited.

“Okay. I can really mess you up. Do you want me to swear I won't?”

“No. I wouldn't believe you anyway. Here's the scoop: Gary's source in the DA's office says they may not be able to make the rape and sexual molestation charges stick. Only the most recent cases . . . You know about the sta . . .
statute
of limitations on child sexual abuse?”

Brian nodded wearily. He said in a disgusted tone, “Five years after the child victim turns eighteen. If the victim doesn't come forward by age twenty-three, it's history.”

“Amazing,” Julie said. That legal nicety, which apparently was old news to Brian, was shockingly new to her. “Anyway, yeah, so there are only four witnesses under twenty-three. Two of the four are . . . what's the word? Impeached. One has a long criminal record, the other is a meth addict. And yesterday, the two who were considered good witnesses suddenly changed their story, made it sound like it was just consensual sex games going on between the boys that Sam Rydel covered up, or something like that. It's pretty lame but good enough to create reasonable doubt, Gary says. Rydel's lawyer is offering that he'll plead to contributing to the delinquency of a minor, that he's willing to go into rehab for his Percocet habit—”

“Percocet? Seriously?” Brian laughed bitterly. “That's so nineties. He should at least update his addictions.”

Julie didn't care for cynicism and now she tried to discourage it with stern urgency. “Listen. They're negotiating with Rydel's lawyer now. If he can keep his broadcasting school, Rydel's willing to check himself into some kind of psychiatric program for six months. The deal hasn't been made because the DA also wants him to agree to take a drug that some sex offenders are put on. I can't remember what Gary said it was . . .”

“Cyproterone?” Brian offered.

She shook her head. “No, that's not it.

“Depo-Provera?”

“That's it. Depo- . . .” She hesitated.

“Provera. That makes sense for a DA to demand in lieu of jail time because it's verifiable. Depo-Provera has to be given by injection and it stays in your system for ninety days. So once every three months you have to come in for an injection. That way they can be sure a sex offender is on the drug and presumably harmless.”

“I see.” Then a terrible suspicion arrived and she couldn't keep it to herself: “How do you know about these drugs?”

Brian spread his arms to encompass the universe. “Wikipedia!” He made a Bronx cheer. “Also, serial killers, child killers, they're hot, they're the new cool kids, the new vampires, the new zombies, everybody's favorite spook monster. In just the past year, the studios must have sent me two dozen books to adapt about the fascinating subject of child sexual murderers.”

“Is that really why you know so much about them?” She didn't let his eyes go. She was naive enough to believe that if he lied to her about this, she would see it in his eyes.

He frowned with disgust. “I'm not on Depo-Provera or cyproterone, Julie.” She didn't release him. He met her stare and testified solemnly: “I'm not a child molester.”

So, as it turned out, even more than she had assumed, she was still walking on the thin ice of trust. She had gone too far out to worry about falling through now. “Brian, the point I'm trying to make is that one way or the other Rydel's going to get away with it.”

“I agree. I expected him to get off even if they charged him. He can afford great lawyers.”

“And that's not the worst part,” Julie said. At last she had arrived at her real point: “Klein's going to get away with it.”

“Klein? Of course. He's eighty-four.”

“No, it's not that he's too old. This is something only Gary knows from his source in the DA's office. So again, I have to trust you.” Brian nodded. “More than a dozen witnesses, boys and girls, have come forward that Klein molested them at the academy, and at the camp too, but mostly at the academy in the past twenty years. All but two are too old, but using the two who still are younger than twenty-three, the DA was going to nail him too, Brian. They were going to get Klein. But the witnesses against Klein have the same kind of credibility problems, so they're going to let Klein go too. And even if the witnesses who aren't too old decide to sue, Gary says both Rydel and Klein will settle out of court with them in exchange for not admitting any guilt.”

“Sure.” Brian rubbed his temples as if he had a headache. “The
Times
piece said that even with the academy's stock dropping like a rock, Klein's still worth a fortune.”

“They're going to get away with it, Brian,” Julie insisted. Her black eyes gleamed. “And I've decided that's not acceptable.”

Brian stopped rubbing. He squinted at her. “Not acceptable? What does that mean?”

“We have to do something.”

“No, we don't,” he said, his answer like that of a schoolteacher: a mild, amused correction. “In fact, ‘something' is exactly what we can't do. There's no ‘something' available to us.”

Julie lowered her voice to a whisper, to make absolutely sure the waitress couldn't hear. “If I'd blown the whistle on Richard Klein years ago, God knows how many kids he molested would have been spared.”

Brian interrupted. “Give me a break, Julie. Give yourself a break. By the time you were twenty-three, it was already too late.”

“Doesn't matter!” Julie caught herself shouting. She lowered her voice, again to an intense whisper. “It would have put the spotlight on them. And maybe whatever sickness he did with Sam would have come out. Maybe our talking then could have helped Sam . . .”

“And that could have stopped him? Saved those poor black and Hispanic kids?” Brian's Linzer cookie was gone. He wetted his fingertip and picked up the few remaining crumbs from his plate, licking them.
How could he eat?
Julie wondered. She felt sick to her stomach. Since she had heard from Gary the full, detailed accounts of what Klein and Rydel did to those poor orphaned boys, the disgusting way they were seduced and bullied and perverted . . . sickening. For years, she had been haunted by the responsibility of not telling on Klein—Rydel was proof her fears had been justified. Saying it aloud made her feel even worse. As an unspoken guilt, in the company of all her other shameful secrets, its ugliness had remained in shadow. Now she couldn't look away from the revealing spotlight: she bore a portion of the blame for all those ruined lives.

“So we're murderers.” Brian sucked the last dot of sugar from his thumb. He didn't have old man lips, thinned and downturned. He looked his age, but there was something preserved about him, an old child. That was how she had remembered him and chose to recall him when she was in heat, sometimes imagining him as an adult in a suit, sometimes insisting on his thin boy's face: but always his eyes understood her, feeling what she was feeling, seeing what she could not.

“What?” She hadn't really taken in what he said.

Brian casually repeated, “So we're murderers. Aren't we—if what you say is correct—responsible for everything Klein and Sam Rydel have done? I don't know if Gary has different info, but I heard on TV one of the Huck Finn boys hanged himself in a cabin on the camp grounds. Before that, another OD'd on glue or some household product or other, right? I mean I did my best not to listen, but I did hear something like that. So if we're responsible for Rydel raping those boys, then we're responsible for their deaths.”

He might as well have punched her. She bent over until her head nearly touched the organic honey dispenser. Brian's judgment hadn't occurred to her, not consciously.
He's right. We're responsible for those deaths.
For decades, they had done nothing about Klein and Rydel, so now they were a party to every crime they had committed, to every boy and girl who had been broken.

Brian touched her forearm briefly. She sat up. He looked stricken. “I'm sorry. I'm being a drama queen,” Brian said. He tried to retract his awful indictment. “That's what the studios pay me to do: raise the stakes; increase jeopardy, heighten conflict. All that bullshit. Don't pay attention to me. It's just storytelling. In the real world, only lunatics believe in that melodramatic crap.”

Despairing, Julie stared into the middle distance: rows of pastries blurring, an espresso machine catching light, blinding her for a moment. Brian tapped her arm again, lightly, voice urgent: “Listen, I was exaggerating. Okay? I like to play around with this shit in my head, that's all. Any first-year psychology major will tell you we were kids, just kids—none of it is our responsibility. And any first-year law student will tell you there was nothing we could have said, even if we were miraculous human specimens who could get it together to make our accusations before we turned twenty-three, in the 1970s the chances our testimony alone would have prevailed is really really questionable. In fact, we could have been sued for slander, and with a guy like Klein, I bet he would have sued. And as for today? These new charges? We have no evidence, none at all, against Klein or Rydel about what they did. What I said makes a good dramatic speech, but in the real world it's just bullshit. Nobody, nobody in the history of the world, would have done anything differently than what you and I did. Nobody. What I just said is sentimental melodrama. Don't give it a second thought.”

Julie was grateful he wanted to relieve her of guilt. But he was wrong. She did not judge him harshly for his longing to remain passive, the cynical bystander. He was willing to accept her without judgment and deserved the same from her. For better or for worse, she felt sure there was no one else on earth who could do for her what Brian could. Others could offer sympathy, empathy, soothing explanations. But only he knew or could know the truth of her experience. She could trust him. She was convinced she had found a reliable ally. That was what today's meeting had to settle for her.

Julie sat up, head straight above her spine, chin forward, neck long, shoulders relaxed. “An exclamation point, that's what you are,” her ballet teacher used to say. Julie summoned her from long ago, that good girl who knew right from wrong, to tell the solemn boy of yesterday, “I'm not a child anymore. That excuse doesn't work. And I don't care if what I have to say is of any use in court. I won't let Klein die unpunished. I won't let Rydel bury what they are. I'm going to the press. I'll tell Gary about it, about all of what happened to me, or as much of it as he needs to know, and he'll figure out the best way to go public. And I'm not going to warn Jeff because I think he's helping Klein and Rydel cover up—”

“Of course he is,” Brian said, interrupting. “He tried to buy you off and now the victims are being bought off. It's got to be Jeff who's behind that strategy.”

“I know!” Julie nodded, pleased they had figured that out. “But why? Why is he protecting them? He's not . . .” She couldn't say it. “You don't think he's also . . . ?”

“Jeff? No! It's his reputation. He's the most beloved director in America. Or the most successful, anyway. If all this comes out, that he got his start thanks to a child molester, you know what they'll do to him. Nothing on earth is more vicious than a disappointed American public.”

Julie nodded.
Yes, that would be unfair to Jeff,
she thought,
very unfair, but shielding Jeff isn't worth ruining a single child's life.
She took her final, her greatest, leap of faith with Brian: “I'm going to tell what I know about Klein and Rydel, although it's not evidence, although probably no one will care or do anything about it. I'm going to tell what happened so they can't hide anymore.” Julie panted. She felt as if she had been running as fast as she could for as long as she could. “I'll also be exposing you. So I came here today to figure out if you deserved a warning. If I'm wrong to trust you, and you go to Jeff, maybe you can mess me up, concoct some story about how I'm unstable, discredit me or whatever, but . . . well, I trust you. I didn't think there was anyone I could trust. But I can. And it's you.”

Original Sin

April 1966

RICHARD KLEIN SHUT
the door. He lifted the hook off Jeff's lock, aiming it at the eye without letting go, as if figuring out how they worked together.

“Don't do that,” Brian said.

With a mischievous smile, Klein let the hook dangle freely. He turned to give the boy his full attention. “Why not?”

“You're not supposed to lock Jeff's door unless he's here.”

Klein pointed at his chest with a smirk. “
I'm
not?”

“Nobody is. Jeff isn't supposed to lock it without permission from his mom.”

“Then what's the point?” Klein laughed. He took a step toward Brian, who took a step back. Klein took three more steps forward and Brian retreated three. Klein noticed. Brian saw he noticed. “Why have a lock if you can't use it to keep your mother out?” Klein chuckled.

Brian shrugged. “She has to knock.”

Klein nodded. “You're very smart, aren't you?” He veered away from Brian, seeming to be abruptly fascinated by Jeff's bracketed system of shelves. He ran his fingers across the colorful spines of Landmark in History books. “Harriet was just telling me you're very very smart. Actually she said you're smarter than Jeff.” Klein smirked, as if they were sharing a joke. “I didn't know Harriet thought it was possible for anyone to be smarter than her precious Jeff.”

Brian shrugged. That he was smarter than his best friend was hardly news. He ought to go find Jeff, presumably in Harriet's bedroom with all the others, but he didn't. He wasn't in danger. Everyone was just a few feet away. The door was unlocked. Still, he wished Jeff would return.

Klein turned, facing the shelves, his wandering eyes dropping down a level to a deeper shelf where Jeff had stowed the portable tape recorder. Klein's hand hovered above the machine for a moment before he depressed the Play button. The large plastic reels jerked to life, the lax tape tightening to begin their journey through the heads.

“Don't!” Brian raced over to shut off the recorder before Klein could hear a syllable of the secret recording.

Klein's hand closed around the back of Brian's neck. He twisted Brian's head up, bringing the boy's abashed face close to his delighted one. “What a reaction!” He put his index finger on the bridge of Brian's nose. With insinuating gentleness, he trailed slowly down to the tip while he said in a teasing lilt, “Have you boys been doing something naughty with my present?”

Klein's Old Spice aftershave enveloped Brian. Brian squirmed against the hand on his neck. Klein held on by slightly emphasizing his grip, as if it were a leash. He reached across Brian's body with his free hand, threatening to press the Play button. While doing that he locked his forearm around Brian's chest and shifted his feet to stand directly behind him, pressing tight against Brian.

Brian's body wanted to free itself. It could have. Klein's grip on his neck felt firm, not imprisoning, but Brian was preoccupied by the urgent need to stop Klein's other hand from turning on the tape. He grabbed at the adult's chubby fingers with his skinny, smaller ones, tugging on the knuckles, trying to lift them clear of the Play button.

Klein could easily have won the struggle and turned on the machine. Instead, he splayed his fingers and captured Brian's. Brian brought his other hand over as reinforcements. Klein matched the maneuver, letting go of Brian's neck. He captured this new contestant by the wrist and pushed up tight against Brian's back.

Brian froze. He felt Klein's Thing, stone hard and impossibly long, nestling into the groove of his spine. Klein leaned his chin on Brian's head. His aftershave fell over Brian like a caul. Brian didn't move. He could break free only by abandoning the recorder, but that wasn't what held him there. He was unable to think. There was this amazing and appalling object that made nonsense out of everything. Klein's voice whispered, suffused with pleasure, “What have you bad boys been up to?”

“Nothing,” Brian mumbled.

Klein covered the back of Brian's hands with his own and moved them away from the tape recorder to Brian's Levi's. He was a skinny eight-year-old. The gap between skin and waist easily accommodated the double thickness of the quartet of hands that Klein forced, his fingers wiggling, digging below for It.

For the second time in his life, Brian's body reacted in an astonishing way to being touched. On this occasion, there was confusion in the overwhelming sensation, confusion about whose fingers were teasing It. He was touched and touching. Richard Klein no longer existed and Richard Klein was all that existed. There was tremendous heat pulsing in his chest, his belly, throughout his groin. His mind shut off. The world was his body's remarkable reaction to those twenty fingers, irrevocably altering his understanding of what the universe could offer.

He felt a whoosh of air from the direction of the door as it opened. Klein's head twisted to look. Brian jerked to get away. In that moment, he learned two lessons. First, his body, although hesitant to fight to free itself, was instantly willing to fight not to be discovered. Second, Klein easily held him in place, destroying the illusion that he could always escape. Klein spoke in the direction of the door, voice husky: “Hi, Jeff.”

Brian opened his eyes. He hadn't realized until then he had shut them. He violently tried to pull his hands out of his Jockey shorts and Levi's, but they were stopped by the obstruction of Klein's forearms at his waist. Klein's fingers remained. He continued to stroke Brian's Thing, which felt so hard and jumpy he worried it would break off.

“Come in, Jeffrey,” Klein whispered. “Shut the door.”

Brian expected horror and disgust from Jeff. The only secret he had ever kept from his best friend was exploded.

Jeff, head down, solemnly shut the door.

Klein took a firm hold on Brian's Thing, fat hands enveloping It, as if he were taking ownership. He whispered to Jeff, “Lock the door.”

Jeff put the hook in the eye. He spoke to the floorboards. “Mom wants us to be with everybody.”

“Come here.” Klein's breathy voice was hardly audible, but it was infused with command. Eyes averted, Jeff obediently moved toward the awkward embrace of adult and child. Klein roughly removed his right hand from Brian's jeans; the left remained anchored there. With Klein's withdrawal, Brian's hands exited gladly, but then they did nothing with their freedom, hanging limply. He watched as Klein took possession of Jeff's elbow, dumbfounded that his friend did not protest. Klein stepped sideways, one hand in Brian's pants, the other towing Jeff, forcing them into a clumsy group walk to the twin bed against the wall, a maneuver as silly as anything out of
The Three Stooges,
only it wasn't funny.

Brian tried to meet Jeff's eyes. They remained downcast. He's not happy about this either, Brian realized, and couldn't understand why he obeyed. This wasn't the whiny, argumentative Jeff he knew. Brian counted on Jeff to resist grown-up craziness on his behalf, especially from members of Jeff's family.

Klein sat on the bed, pulling Brian down beside him on his left, tugging Jeff down with his other hand to lie on his right side. Out of the corner of his eye, Brian saw Klein reach into Jeff's Levi's. Brian looked away, to the windows. Framed by the city's sky he saw the top floors of their public school. They were double height to accommodate the gym and its glistening wood floor. He thought:
I'm not going to think.

“I know you boys play with each other,” Klein informed them. “You like doing this,” he said, accompanied by the clink of Jeff's belt buckle being released.

“Don't take them off,” Jeff pleaded.

“The door's locked,” Klein answered in a soothing tone. “You boys like doing this. All boys like playing with themselves. When you have sleepovers, you like playing with each other, don't you?” Klein stopped stroking Brian. He pulled his hand out of Brian's jeans. The relief—and the confusion that this relief was accompanied by a loss of pleasure—was short-lived. Klein flicked opened Brian's waist button, pulling one side down, unzipping him. His white Jockeys and the lump of It were exposed. He looked away to the school's roof.

Klein gripped Brian's right wrist, pulling it toward Jeff.

This time Brian resisted. He jerked violently, sure his hand would come free. But Klein didn't give an inch. He tugged harder, painfully forcing Brian's fingers at Jeff's opened pants. Brian's eyes went to the struggle. His friend's white Jockeys were pulled halfway down. The head of his Thing was sticking halfway out, smooth and very swollen, looking too large for its own good. Above his captured hand, Brian saw Klein's other hand towing Jeff's fingers toward the lump in Brian's underpants. Lying between them, Klein's ridiculously big Thing was making a tent of his gray slacks.

If Brian had known the word
grotesque,
that's how he would have thought of the scene, everything distorted like a comic book's drawings. For the first time since Jeff came in, their eyes met. Jeff's eyes looked as if they were covered by cellophane: dimmed and sad.

Brian stopped resisting. Klein placed the palm of Brian's hand onto Jeff's Thing, half on cotton, half swollen flesh. He was surprised that It felt like regular skin. Klein pushed Jeff's fingers under the elastic to touch Brian's. The boys didn't move their hands.

“Rub like this.” Klein put his one hand on top of each of theirs, forcing their hands to rub each other's Things back and forth a few times. Then he released them, Klein's hands burrowing underneath his own belt, inside his tent, frantically jerking the pole up into the fabric in a way that looked like it must hurt.

Again Brian's eyes met Jeff's cellophane-covered eyes, a stranger he didn't want to know. He removed his hand from Jeff's Thing, not caring what Klein would do.

Jeff's hand also departed from Brian's body and he was quickly on his feet, zipping his pants, fastening his belt. “Mom's calling,” he said, a preposterous lie. The only sound was the friction of Klein's hands moving furiously underneath his slacks. Otherwise the silence in the room was profound, the silence of places Brian had not yet been: gazing at the lifeless body of a beloved, the echo of a lost illusion, the tinnitus of betrayal.

Jeff crossed to the door.

“Don't go,” Klein commanded in a low voice.

Jeff halted. He kept his back to them, head bowed, shoulders slumped.

Klein's chubby hands reappeared. He leaned over Brian, tugging at his underpants, his aftershave rolling in like a fog. Brian pressed his ass down on the bed as hard as he could to prevent Klein from lowering his Jockeys. Klein pulled the front elastic band away with his left hand, stretching the material to its limits, while his right showed Brian a part of Brian he no longer recognized: once soft, now swollen; once wrinkled, now smooth; once shriveled, now long. He was mesmerized by the sight of the transformation. He had felt Its stiffness once before in the NBC bathroom but not seen it. That day Brian had kept his eyes up the entire time, looking at his face in the mirror. Now Klein displayed It thoroughly, cradled in the warm hollow of his hand while he whispered compliments, “Yours is very long for a little boy. And your stomach is so flat, so soft. I like how your belly button goes in. And I can see your hip bones!” He touched the peak of one. “And I like that you have no hair,” he said, running the back of his hand lightly over the boy's concave stomach. Klein closed his fingers around Brian's Thing and began to stroke it roughly. That the pumping felt very painful and also very good was stupefying. Brian stared at his body, the features Klein had pointed out, as if he had never seen them before. He hadn't, this way, and forever more he would see himself through his molester's eyes.

“Turn around, Jeff,” Klein said. “Look how excited Brian is.”

“Jeff! Where are you?” Harriet's screech penetrated the door. Klein's hands released him. Jeff pressed against the door as if to barricade it. Brian stopped breathing. “Dick! Are you with the boys? Bring them here!” Brian realized she hadn't moved from her bedroom.

Jeff pleaded in a whisper, “We have to go.” Then he shouted. “
COMING MA
.” He fumbled with the hook and eye to undo it.

Klein released Brian, standing up and moving fast despite the bulge in his slacks. He paused to button his jacket, using the fabric to cover his Thing's shape. He followed Jeff out.

Brian had the most trouble repairing himself. While zipping up he was distressed that this time, unlike in the bathroom, the manifestation of his excitement wasn't subsiding once Klein let go. Was he permanently damaged? Would everyone know just by looking at his Levi's?

He pushed his swollen Thing to the side. He punched It. He tried to walk nonchalantly while looking down to see if It was visible. He tried to convince himself It could look like a Swiss Army knife in his pocket—only he knew the position at his groin was hopelessly wrong. He paused outside Harriet's bedroom door, squeezing the bulge through the denim, hoping to compress It down to unobtrusive utility. As he strained to squash It, he sensed someone coming out of the room and managed to get his hand away only a second before Julie's solemn face appeared.

“Hi, Brian,” she said with a chime of delight, smiling in a wonderfully friendly way. She had a tiny beauty mark below her right eye at the point where her cheekbone appeared. It was interesting. And there was another one directly beneath her left eye. “There you are! Everyone was wondering.” She twisted toward Harriet's door. Brian's eyes roved over her long raven hair, cascading down her red sweater. “He's here!” She turned back. “I'm making tea for Aunt Harriet. Want to help me?”

He nodded. Recent events made him wish to be a mute from now on. He followed her past the open door of Harriet's room, which was experiencing a rush hour of unprecedented proportions. Noah was perched on the bed next to Harriet, his legs crossed while peering intently at a Superboy comic. The Mark brothers, Saul and Hy, were seated in folding chairs arranged beside the invalid, squeezed into the narrow passage between dresser and bed. Richard Klein was occupying the most comfortable seat, the wing chair on the far side of the bed, in the corner, in front of heavily draped windows. He was angled away from a direct view of the invalid, favoring another of Klein's gifts, the RCA television console, its curved glass screen currently a dormant gray. Jeff sat on the floor near his father, back propped against the closet door, as far from Klein as was possible in his mother's cramped bedroom.