The Wisdom of Perversity (3 page)

She stepped into his lair. Gary was in an unusual pose, perched on the windowsill, staring out at the restless Hudson River. No cigarette smell, but he had the window open as far as it could go. The February air was raw; goose bumps tickled her bare arms. She longed to return to the kitchen, to the satisfaction of cleaning.

“What?” Gary demanded, still facing away. Julie shut the door behind her to be certain Zack wouldn't overhear. “What. Is. It.” Gary telegraphed irritation, continuing to give her his back.

Her throat constricted. She was frightened to ask her husband to show their child love. “I'm scared.” It was the whole truth.

Gary immediately shut the window. He hurried over to her, wearing a worried frown and a searching gaze. “What is it, sweetie?” Abruptly he was a loving puppy, placing both paws on her shoulders, facing her nose to nose with affectionate curiosity. He had been patient and sweet like that when her mother died soon after they had begun dating, holding her week after week while she cried and moped and never really explained her grief, never confessed to Gary that losing her mother felt as if all hope of improving herself was also gone.

“I'm . . . I'm worried . . .” she stammered her way into what she wanted to say, “about Zack.”

“So am I.” Gary puffed up, ready to speechify.

She raised a hand to stop him. “I mean: I'm worried about
you
and Zack.”

“Oh.” He rolled his eyes. “You're worried about
me
and Zack.” He turned away to fetch a stick of Trident from a towering stack on his desk. That reawakened her suspicion he had been cheating. Why else would he be sitting at an open window in winter, contemplating a view he'd seen daily for nineteen years? It wasn't plausible that the anxious, efficient Gary would be meditative. As if to prove that point, he restlessly pulled a wrapper off the gum, fed a stick to his maw, and chewed, glaring at her defiantly.

“Honey,” she said, anxious to calm him, “I'm not criticizing you. I don't think you realize how much you mean to Zack. He worships you.” The instant she spoke that overwrought sentence she regretted it. The hyperbole was obvious and would offend.

“Really?” Gary's jaw ceased working angrily, his face relaxing into delight.

Forward, then, into shameless flattery: “Of course. You're brilliant and so successful. Think how hard it must be to have a father like you. How can he ever hope to be your equal?”

Gary was mesmerized by her bait—for a split second. Then he frowned. “No. He's like every teenage son in the history of the world. He thinks his father is an asshole. And you know what? He's right. For wasting my time trying to get him to like me, I'm a gigantic asshole.”

“He doesn't think you're an asshole. He's intimidated by you,” Julie argued, although she was relieved Gary hadn't been fooled. “You're perfect and he's not—”

“I'm not perfect,” Gary snapped, and winced at having to make this concession.

“To him you're perfect. Everything he has trouble with, you do perfectly.” She meant that. Gary's facility with language, formidable debating skills, and the blunt confident way he presented himself to the world must loom as unassailable mountains to Zack.

Gary's mouth twisted skeptically, but he nodded.

She pressed her advantage. “And every time you criticize him it makes Zack feel he'll never measure up.”

“What are you talking about? I have to criticize him.”

“Why?” Julie shot back.

He goggled at her. “Why!”

“Why?” she insisted.

Gary sneered. “Because you won't.”

She decided to ignore that provocation. In his work it was routine for Gary to react to any dispute with attack. “His teachers criticize him. His friends criticize him. The world is ready to find fault night and day. He doesn't need more of it from us.”

“What do you want from me?” Gary's angry front abruptly collapsed. His nose and mouth scrunched together and he moaned piteously, “What do you want from me? I can't watch every fucking word I say! This is my home.” Tears welled. Tears! When had she last seen tears in her husband's eyes? “This is my family. Can't I relax with my own family?” He turned away to lean on his desk, a hand inadvertently toppling the stack of gum. “I can't take this,” he whispered. “I'm falling apart.”

Moved by his confession of turmoil, she put a hand on his bowed back. This part of him rippled with muscles. They were formed in his youth, lugging a backpack laden with thick, sharp-edged tomes up and down Cathedral Parkway to Columbia Law School. She pitied him and whispered, “Of course you can be yourself with Zack.”

Voice warbling, he mumbled, “I can't.”

“Sure you can,” she soothed. She felt tenderness for him, reminded that behind the pomp of his debates lurked an easily discouraged boy. Gary's desire to succeed in his dealings with Zack was so profound he dreaded failure as a father with the same intensity he feared losing a case.

“I can't quit smoking like this,” he whined. “I just can't.” He collapsed in his swivel chair. Its cushion gasped. “How can I quit with this Sturm und Drang going on all the time? I've talked about it with my smoking coach. He says until I'm past the first six months I have to reduce stress. So I'm not gonna get involved anymore. I'll just tell Zack everything he does is brilliant. Okay? He won't feel criticized and I won't smoke. That satisfy you?”

Long ago Julie had accepted the truth about her husband's character, that it took a massive effort for Gary to think about anyone but himself; nevertheless she was shocked to rediscover his self-centeredness. It was unforgivable.
This man is too selfish to love.
“Yes.” She hissed the word. “That'll satisfy me.” She slammed the door on her way out.

Back in the kitchen she put on yellow rubber gloves, jerked the dishwasher open, turned the hot water on full blast, rinsing and scrubbing the breakfast residue off the plates before loading them. Gary often mocked her for that meticulousness, saying, “You're washing the dishes twice,” but it really was harder to get off encrusted food after the dishwasher failed to live up to its name. She was attacking the frying pan with Bar Keepers Friend when she heard Zack's heavy tread in his black rubber-soled shoes. “Bye, Mom,” he called from the hall as he tramped out of the apartment.

She wouldn't see him for hours. What was their last exchange? Something angry. Not their true feelings for each other. She pulled off the soapy gloves and dumped them in the sink, then hurried to the foyer, arriving as the front door banged shut. She pursued him into the building's hallway, catching him at the elevator.

Zack was alarmed by her approach. “What is it, Mom?” he asked as she embraced him, her right hand clutching his thick, abundant hair.

“Have a good rehearsal,” she whispered into his ear, then stepped back with a flourishing release of her long arms, an admirable willingness, she felt, to share her treasure with the world.

Zack, flustered, nodded. “Sure, Mom. Thanks.” The elevator arrived. He stepped in gratefully.

“I love you,” she called.

“Love you,” he mumbled, eyes down. “Bye.” He jabbed the Close Door button.

In the kitchen, beyond the range of Gary's arrows, she finished scrubbing the All-Clad, cheered by the task's righteousness. She dried the silver pan to gleaming, returned it to the cabinet, used the dish towel to wipe down the stainless-steel sink, pleased by the way the morning sun shimmered on its surface. She draped the washcloth over the faucet to dry, used a broom to sweep up the five crumbs she spied on the black-and-white tile floor. The kitchen was spotless, the dishwasher purring. She moistened a paper towel and left to wipe the dining room table. It was when she lifted the newspaper that she first saw the photograph of the man accused in the Huck Finn Days sex abuse case.

They still subscribed to the paper version of the
New York Times
although only Julie read it. Gary compulsively checked the news every five minutes on his iPhone or MacBook, had read everything he cared about at least twelve hours before the printed version arrived. Zack never read what Julie thought of as the “real paper” and laughed at her for, as he put it, “always being a day late.” Still, in the vain hope they might someday rejoin her in the pleasures of reading the news over breakfast, she brought in the paper every morning and became accustomed to only her interests being ruffled: the Science, Arts, Style, and Home sections. The untouched A section would survive for an unloved twenty-fours on the coffee table until it met its fate in the recycling bin the next day. As she picked up this morning's
Times
she took a second look at the face on the front page. That was when she recognized him.

The evaluating eyes were unmistakable. Sam the NBC page's tight blond curls were gone, replaced by a bald peak and a closely cut, almost shaved laurel of gray hair but seeing those heartless eyes up-close, the settled middle-aged face began to resemble the teenager's handsome angular features, and finally the name, Sam Rydel, at last resonated. This past week, when Gary talked about the case, she idly thought it reminded her of a character in a novel, not someone from her past. But Sam was definitely his first name, and although she wouldn't have been able to come up with it on her own, now that she saw it in print she remembered that Sam the page's last name was Rydel.
It's him.
Incredible. There he was, all grown up, doing to disadvantaged boys what had been . . .

But she didn't know for certain. And she respected Gary's principle: you must be sure of your facts. A few times, all of them before she started taking Zoloft, she had lived to regret getting herself riled up that a teacher or camp counselor was too fond of her beautiful Zack.

Sam the NBC page might have grown up to become a pedophile, though. Isn't that what happens to some men who were molested as boys? And Klein must have molested Sam. More than molested. He had lived with him, didn't he? Sam was his ward, right? She couldn't remember. She had been a child and, anyway, didn't like to think about it. But Klein had certainly exposed Sam to his molestations of children, and now Sam was doing the same to these poor boys who had no fathers, boys just like him. And what about Cousin Jeff? And his best friend, the dark-haired Brian, who was famous too? And why were they all so goddamn famous? Even this Sam had done well. Worth thirty million, Gary had said. Was everyone who was famous really a creep?

You're being hysterical,
she lectured herself. Damning adults she knew nothing about. Cousin Jeff had been a stranger for over thirty years, since their fathers had quarreled about money. She had wondered about his glamorous life, and Brian's too, when she noticed his name in an ad for a play or a movie. Klein and Sam she had happily heard nothing about since her father mentioned, years and years ago, that Klein had been fired from NBC and had started some kind of business, but she had acted as if that was of no interest to her so she never heard details of what he was going to do. Her father died a few years later and he was the only one who ever mentioned Klein. Klein must be a hundred by now. How old was he back then? Must be dead. While still a teenager, she had often wondered about Sam's fate with Klein. Sam was an orphan, she remembered that, or at least he had no father, at the time a circumstance she had encountered only in books.

She decided her eyesight was too blurry to trust at arm's length. She moved the photograph up to her nose, Rydel filling her vision while he was led away in handcuffs out of his Broadcasting Academy. A scam or a fraud or something, Gary had said about it.

Yes, she knew this Sam Rydel.
This was the unpleasantness she had wanted to forget ever happened, the neighborhood of evil she always detoured, taking the longer duller route. This was the dark alley she had once stumbled into and, in the half consciousness of falling sleep, had mistaken as real.

Okay, it was real.
It had happened. She knew that. Who was she kidding? She had never doubted its reality, not for a single solitary moment.

Yes, she needed to put away things neatly in drawers, the mess out of sight. Okay, she was “obsessive compulsive,” as the pill-pushing psychiatrist had diagnosed her. Still, she didn't understand how it was possible that glimpses of this notorious Sam Rydel on television during the previous week hadn't jogged recognition. Why was it so clear to her all of a sudden that this photograph of a chubby middle-aged man was the lean blond boy in her evil fairy tale, a handsome prince who had turned into a toad?

Nevertheless she
was
sure. Those were the hungry and cold eyes that had watched her timidity and her shame. She squeezed her legs together, clenched her hands into fists, crinkling the
Times
so Sam's face wobbled and creased, but she didn't crush his baleful eyes. They saw her still. “No,” she said aloud. She shook her head and insisted to the newspaper: “No.”

She leapt from the chair as if Klein's greedy fingers were climbing her thigh. She hurried to the kitchen's service door and tossed the evil eyes into the paper-recycling bin. Heart pounding, she returned to her spotless kitchen. “So what?” she said aloud. No answer except the hiss and groan of the radiator and a steady drip of the dish towel drying into the sink. She squeezed it hard, moved the damp cloth into a sunny spot on the counter.
What difference should it make to her that Sam had become a pedophile because of Klein?
Klein was the man who had ruined her and he was dead. And what had been done to her, what did it amount to, after all? Everywhere, all over the world there were millions of kids who had truly suffered: Mengele's experiments on children at Auschwitz; boys and girls used as sex slaves in Thailand; child soldiers forced to kill in Sierra Leone. The list of ghastly crimes was endless, itself too painful to contemplate.
Don't be a baby. What happened to you was almost nothing. It was nothing. It was less than nothing.