The Wisdom of Perversity (25 page)

This drew Danny's eyes his way. The fear there was not playacting. His mouth opened, presumably to ask a logical question about Brian. Brian had never married or had roommates. There had been putative girlfriends during his tumultuous adolescence and raw youth but only platonic friends since. Brian knew Danny thought he had settled the mystery of Brian's sexuality when the old man had switched from saying “fags” to “gay” fifteen years ago; but this other appalling possibility was brand new.

“No!” Brian fairly shouted. “Not me!” Brian glared, displaying the rage he felt at his father's lack of faith in him. Danny Moran had skipped from what had been done to Brian to worrying over what Brian had become without pausing for even a beat of sympathy. “No, I'm not a child molester,” he said, more calmly. “Very little happened to me, first of all. Second, you may have noticed I've been in therapy for twenty-five years. And I'm on medication that happens to kill my sex drive.” Brian laughed. “Mostly.”

Danny bowed his head and seemed to observe a minute of silence. When he straightened, he had the air of a man who had settled something to his satisfaction.
Has he mourned me so quickly?
“Medi—” The old man choked partway through the word. He cleared his throat and tried again. “What kind of medication? Does it do something . . .” He nodded in the direction of Brian's groin.

“God, no. Jesus. Paxil. It's a widely prescribed antianxiety drug. Usually for extreme phobic behavior, shut-ins who won't leave their apartments, or any other form of social anxiety. But I take it primarily as a sexual suppressor. Because my libido is both the source and the nexus of my anxieties.” Danny sagged in the chair, crushed. Abruptly Brian pitied his father, having to hear his only son's loins were handicapped. Brian had wanted to be cruel to his father; he was sorry to have succeeded so well. He patted Danny's knee. “It works really well for me, Dad. Don't fret about it. Used to bother me that I needed to take a pill. Last Thanksgiving I even tried to stop. For a week, I felt in control, full of energy, myself again. By the second week, I couldn't think about anything else. I can't have my whole life only be about this idiotic incident, this fucking circumstance of my childhood that I can't get out of my head. I'm much better this way. I'm not always seeing things through the . . .” Brian hesitated. He hadn't, as writers often do, mentally written out how to describe the different states. “I don't know. It jumps the tracks for me. I'm lifted out of the groove of unhappy feelings and self-destructive acts of . . . I don't know, rage or punishment or guilt. I don't know. Whatever the hell it is, it stops.” Brian tried a friendly smile. “I'm not a child molester, Dad. Don't worry about that.” It was sad and absurd that he had to make this reassurance; at that moment, it seemed more absurd than sad.

“Of course not,” Danny said, head up, back straight. The curtain was up; he was recast as a defender of his son. “Who would think that? That's preposterous. Utterly preposterous. Lots of people are taking psychiatric medicine. In fact, from what I can tell, practically all truly talented people are on Prozac.”

“Yeah,” Brian said, playing along. “That's why all the books and movies are so fucking bland. Everyone's medicated into reassuring sentimentality.”

Danny grinned. “I should take Prozac. Then maybe
Law & Order
would hire me again.” Over the years, Danny had landed three bit parts on different iterations of the hit show, just enough to allow him to feel he had a career. Those gigs had dried up seven years ago. A lifetime of striving to be a working actor and he had the résumé of a hobbyist. Danny Moran sighed: he had abandoned Brian's troubles and returned to the comforts of his tragedy.

Brian put a reassuring hand on his father's shoulder, a body he could always touch without the fear, to guide him gently to the end of this painful conversation. “I may have to talk about being molested, Dad. There's a chance someone will force things very soon, so that I may have to write something about it, or go into court even, God knows what. That's why I'm telling you. I don't want you to be taken by surprise.”

“Go public?” Danny repeated with a bewildered expression.

“Because Klein and Rydel are going to get away with their latest crimes. The DA's dropping the charges against them, so someone you don't know may put me in a position where I'll have to tell what happened to me.”

“Did this Rydel fellow do anything to you?”

“No. He was the catamite, remember?”

“But you're saying that Klein is still alive?”

“Yes.”

“But what happened to you was a long time ago, wasn't it? Can they still prosecute him for that?”

“No. The idea is to raise hell. Then maybe others will come forward. Or the DA will go ahead with prosecuting.”

Danny took his time responding. Brian's thoughts drifted. He wondered if Julie would be inspired by learning that he had finally told his father. Or would she take it as a rebuke? Danny cleared his throat to make sure he had Brian's full attention. “In fact, what you can testify to, what happened to you, doesn't have anything to do with this Rydel chap, correct? And they can't prosecute Klein for what he did to you?”

Brian groaned. “Yes,” he said angrily.

“So what's the point?”

Brian's irritation that his father had still offered no sympathy or apology, for the circumstance if nothing else, erupted: “I don't know what the point is, Dad! But I may have to go public anyway.”

“I don't see the necessity of . . .” Danny began.

“For my sake!” Brian interrupted angrily. “Okay? For the sake of my immortal soul.”

Danny fixed him with the kind of penetrating look actors are regularly asked to produce: announcing the wisdom of the third act, providing a truth that will send the audience home sadder but wiser. “Brian, if you tell, that's all they'll ever think of you. You realize that, don't you? Your lovely plays, your brilliant movies—that won't be what they'll think of when they hear your name. They'll think of some man diddling you. A lot of them will get confused and think you did the diddling. But what's worse . . .” Danny lowered his register a scale, to punch the payoff: “What's worse about all the ugly attention you'll have to endure for merely telling the truth, is that everyone will think the only reason you talked about it at all is to help sell your scripts.”

Confession

February 2008

THEY'RE GOING TO
get away with it,
she thought, fighting the urge to flee, as if Klein and Rydel were coming to kill her.

“Mom! Are you here?” Zack appeared from his room. His door had been shut for an hour after he came home with a whore named Gabby. Julie couldn't remember if she was mentioned in his loathsome diary as the one who gave him a blow job. He walked right up to his mother, stopping too close, as if he were suddenly severely nearsighted. “We want to make cookies.” His eyes were bloodshot and unfocused. He hadn't bothered to disguise either the sour stink of weed or the dank odor of cigarettes. “Chocolate chip cookies,” he said, hair falling softly over his high brow. “She likes, you know, chocolate chip cookies to be hot.” He blinked rapidly as if trying to clear the fog from his drug-addled, sex-soaked brain. “You know, I mean . . . fresh-baked.”

She nearly asked, “Isn't it dinnertime?” as if they were children spoiling their appetite. Instead she answered in their vernacular: “Whatever.”

“Great. It's okay to use the baking stuff and chocolate chips?”

She nodded and walked away. She couldn't bear the sight of his sloth, his depravity, his impurity. She shut the bedroom door behind her and paced restlessly. She felt trapped although for the first time since she recognized Rydel she wasn't cornered. With the charges dropped, Jeff would never find out that she hadn't told Gary to give up his intention to write about Rydel. She could pretend to have done Jeff's bidding and he'd launch Zack's acting career. All else could remain as it is, as it had been for decades: her secret safe but for the boys, now men, who had witnessed her degradation; her marriage a lie she could easily endure. All she needed was to calm her nerves.

Unfortunately her son was occupying the space where she would usually seek refuge and soothe herself with the orderly fragrant and tactile pleasures of cooking. She resorted to her late-night comfort, a hot bath.

She made it so hot her belly reddened, as if she were a boiled lobster. The enveloping heat worked its magic: neck melting, muscles softened. Her mind drifted back to those troubling days and landed somewhere neutral, a vivid memory of her mother's having found out Harriet had lied about dying of cancer. Ma had ranted in front of Julie, exposing her true opinion of Harriet for the first and last time, denouncing her sister-in-law as a destructive, selfish monster who should have her son taken away from her. Hy had remonstrated that she was “going overboard,” that Harriet loved Jeff and took pretty good care of him. At the time, Julie had agreed with her father. Today she marveled at how correct her mother had been without possessing one-tenth of the information that would have proved her right. What a wise and moral woman her mother was, patient to a fault with her self-absorbed husband, maybe, but always sure of her moral compass, always bold in the face of evil. How she missed her! She needed her mother's care more than ever, although she was older now than her mother was when she died.

She cried a little, gently and pleasantly, splashed the tears away, then sank lower in the tub, soaking in a reverie of admiration for her mother until Gary thumped on the bathroom door. She listened to his fist and voice as if she weren't occupying the same dimension of time and space. “Jules! You in there?” Framed between her toes poking out of the bathwater, she saw the glass doorknob turn.

“No!” she cried out.

“You're not decent, eh?” Gary asked, suggestive, frisky. Since her confession of smoking and her excited response to his lovemaking, he had a new confidence in his seductive skills.

“I'm in the bath,” she called. “I'll be right out.”

The door opened a crack. Gary's voice snaked through. “Now I
really
want to come in.”

Julie slid out of the tub like a bar of soap, flopping on the floor, feet hydroplaning as she reached to push the door shut before Gary could come in.

“Hey, what are you hiding? A lover? Open up, babe. I'll help towel you off . . .” he murmured, through the keyhole it sounded like.

She wanted to shout,
Don't you dare come in,
but she had no right to refuse him.
I am a whore,
she reminded herself.
I was Klein's whore, I was a show whore for Sam and Brian and Jeff.
All these years, disgusted by Gary's appetite for food and for fucking her, she had thought his grossness justified her rejections. Wrong, hopelessly wrong. Gary was a righteous man, frank about his lusts, and they were the lusts of the righteous: for sugar and fat and the succor of a wife.

“Honey?” Gary was abruptly meek. “Is something wrong?”

“I'm toweling off. I'll be right out.” She pulled a towel off the rack. Her right side, where she'd landed on the tiles, was immediately sore. She searched for a bruise. She stretched, twisted, examining breasts, hips, back. No crenulation. No cellulite puckering. Still an ass that could tempt a man's hands. But look at that mournful face and droopy breasts. And worst of all, the loose withered neck . . .
Oh God, I'm old and I've never been young.

“Listen,” Gary called. He hadn't moved from the door. “Frankenthaler thinks I should go ahead with a series of columns about Rydel. You know, a lynching story. And
American Justice
agrees. They'll pit me against Kelly who'll want his balls cut off and we can argue it forever since there's not going to be a trial . . .”

Julie wrapped the towel around her and pulled the door open. “A what story?”

“You know, the public hysteria about all this. Let's face it, Sam Rydel nearly got lynched. And the old guy too, Klein, Jeff's cousin, although nobody knows about him and I can't blow my source. But two unsubstantiated child molestation stories and the cops were all over both of them, assuming they were child rapists. Even I bought into it—a little. It's obvious now that the cops never vetted these witnesses. Turns out both of them had tried to blackmail Rydel and Klein with the threat that if they didn't pay them off they would tell these lurid stories. One of them even accepted a thousand dollars, but he wanted more, fifty thousand to send himself to college, he claimed, though really he's a meth addict. Anyway, the cops were sloppy and the media were all too ready to believe any sexual abuse story. People hear child abuse and they freak out. Scream for blood. Mob vengeance.”

The sharp edges of her short hairdo were glued onto the back of her neck, wet and chilling. She shivered.

“Maybe we should take a bath together.” Gary stepped close, a hand reaching as if to strip away her towel, although thankfully his greedy fingers stalled halfway, flicking at the air. “We won't be interrupted. Zack's got his own girl.” His brows went up and down lasciviously.

“He's a pervert,” she said.

Gary laughed. “He's a teenager. All teenagers are perverts.”

“Rydel is a pervert,” she repeated in a toneless voice, a dull fact. She felt utterly different than how she had imagined she would when she finally told Gary. No shame, only the tedium of explanation: “When I was eleven years old, Sam Rydel watched a grown man play with my genitals. That grown man was Klein. When I was twelve, Rydel watched Klein shove his dick in my mouth. He watched as if it were normal, as if it were something he had seen many times before. And then he . . .” She couldn't finish. “Sam was fifteen and he was already a pervert. What do you think he's become after forty years of indulging himself?” The edge of the towel came loose, falling away. Cool air struck her left breast, the nipple hardening.

Gary's eyes locked onto it, but he obviously wasn't focused there. He frowned, then stammered, “What? Klein . . . ? You were eleven . . . ? You know Klein? Go back. I'm not following . . .”

“Listen to me carefully,” she interrupted. “Don't make me repeat things until you've got every little fact memorized and ready to be checked. I can't stand to say it over and over, so listen.” She suddenly realized that she was yelling, “
SO FOR GOD'S SAKES, LISTEN
!”

Gary winced, put a finger over his lips, and said through gritted teeth, “Calm down. I am listening.”

She took a deep breath, then returned to a bored recitation. “Of course I knew Klein. I met him at Jeff's apartment. He was a crazed child molester, unbelievably bold. I think that was part of it for him, he enjoyed that he might get caught. I still can't believe he was never caught! Sam Rydel was his . . . I don't know what to call it. He was his main victim, I guess. Klein brought Sam along like they were a tag team. He molested me three times right in front of Sam. Those poor victims of the media you feel sorry for treated me like their plaything. Sam Rydel watched while Klein fingered me. He even smiled. And a month later, because Klein starting seeing my father as a patient, and was sending him celebrities . . .”

“Klein was a patient of your father's?” Gary interrupted. Julie must have glared at him with an intent to kill. Gary raised his hands in surrender. “I'm sorry, but I'm catching up, you didn't tell me any of this . . .”

“Yes, for a couple of years Klein was my father's patient and a family friend, if you can believe that,” she said, cutting off his complaint. “Klein and Sam even came to Thanksgiving one year. Another time he made up some excuse to show up in Riverdale, a fake dental emergency, I'm convinced, and he brought Sam along and . . .” She sighed. “I can't stomach going through the whole story, but he maneuvered things so I was alone with the two of them and Klein took out his penis and he made me . . .” She shook her head, shrugging the memory off. “Sam watched and touched himself and then Klein told him to put his . . .” She didn't finish. She was immediately sorry she had said this to Gary. She hadn't been willing to let go of this detail even to tell someone as sympathetic as Brian, that in addition to not stopping Klein from raping her mouth, she had failed to stop Sam too. “They're perverts . . .” She burst into tears. She hadn't felt the urge to cry. The tears came without warning. She doubled over and covered her face, listening to herself sob, and she kept thinking,
You're a phony. You're not upset about this anymore. You're a big phony.
All the while she blubbered, “I was eleven.” She felt only frustration, but her voice was saturated with anguish. “I know you love being on TV and you can't say it 'cause there's no proof, but these men are monsters.” Her chest was quaking and she keened, forehead touching knees.

Gary's shoes appeared. A hand landed on her neck. “Honey,” he whispered. “It's okay.” He kissed the top of her head, then her cheek. “Shhh,” he said into her ear, hand sliding down to pat her back. She felt like his pet.

“It's not okay.” She straightened, unaware his chin was right above the crown of her skull. She caught him with a devastating uppercut.

Gary staggered, toppling backward. One hand grabbed at a glass shelf and collapsed its brackets. Cosmetic jars smashed on the floor, makeup powder swirling, colored glass flying. His other hand reached for the tub's edge. His palm slid off the slick surface and sent him falling faster that way, left cheek and eye slamming into the black-and-white tile floor. The deafening noise of bottles exploding and Gary smacking hard onto tile was terrifying.

He lay completely still on the floor. “Gary?” she whispered. She wouldn't have been surprised to discover he was dead.

Zack called from just outside the bedroom door. “Mom? Dad? You guys okay?”

She bent over her husband. He was unconscious. Alive—chest rising and falling—but out cold.

She ran out of the bathroom door—passing her son and the slut as they entered the bedroom. She made for her closet, fumbling for clothes.

She heard the girl scream. Zack said, “I'm here, Dad,” so she presumed they were tending to him.
Good,
she thought,
because I'm not.
She dressed in the closet's darkness, then made a run to the hallway.

Glancing back, she saw Gary was awake, propped up in Zack's arms. Gary's swollen left eye was all red. A devil's eye.

“Mom?” Zack called plaintively.

“Honey?” Gary cried, bewildered.

Even the slut looked to her for rescue.

“Put ice on it! There are green peas in the freezer.” Worried Zack might try to catch her while she waited for the elevator, she hustled down nine flights of stairs, arriving breathless on the street, profoundly relieved to be clear of the mess of glass and muck that needed to be swept, scrubbed, bagged, and thrown out.

The air was freezing and the sky heavy with gray and black clouds. They filled in the narrow clearance between the Upper West Side's brick towers, but she was not hemmed in. The first drops of an icy rain tapped on her skull. She lifted her face to the needles of water. She was free. She was free of lies she had told Gary all their married life. She was free and she had nowhere to go.