The Wisdom of Perversity (32 page)

Jeff's gaze wandered back into self-reflecting glass. “Really,” he said.

“Yeah,” Brian said. “Really.”

Mother's Helper II

November 2008

JULIE TOLD HER
whole story to Amelia and succeeded in unspooling her friend's cool, sophisticated manner, the last thing she ever imagined she might accomplish. She had warned Amelia that she had something unpleasant to tell her and then began the account of her molestation and that she intended to tell the world the truth about Richard Klein and Sam Rydel. While she spoke, Amelia evolved backward from eye-lifted, capped-teeth aplomb, to gossip-hungry New Yorker, to cruise-control sympathy, to the pure shock of bewilderment, and then her earliest self, a sweet child-Amelia appeared. Face shattered, she hugged Julie too hard, squeezing her like a pain-saturated sponge she could wring dry.

Julie was amused by Amelia's ferocious empathy. She patted her soothingly, hoping that might ease her steel embrace. She tried making conversation practical, whispering into Amelia's ear, “Could you tell Suzie and maybe Cindy? They can tell everybody else.” Julie extricated herself from Amelia. “I don't want any of our friends to find out from a news conference,” she explained.

“Honey, we'll be there for you!” Amelia protested as if someone had denied they would. “When is this happening? Suze, Cindy, we'll all go, we'll stand beside you.” Her eyebrows were inverted, beseeching. She was utterly kind, and ridiculous in her kindness.

Julie was deeply touched and had to fight not to laugh. “I don't know when we're talking to the press, Amelia. I don't know even if that's how . . .” She paused, still very uncertain whether she could wrangle two virtual strangers, both odd and difficult men, into this public act of confession. Confession? No. Accusation? Contrition? Humiliation—that's what it will feel like. “I'll let you know. I'm sorry to dump all this on you and run, but I have to go now. I need to meet Zack and tell him all about this. I don't want him learning about it on TV.”

Amelia's covered her mouth. “Oh my God, of course you have to tell him,” she whispered, appalled at the prospect of a mother discussing such a subject with her teenage son. She rallied to be supportive. “Zack'll be great about it. He's such a sweet young man. He'll be proud of you for speaking up.” Her caretaking instinct returned: “Are you sleeping here tonight? Do you want to join Harvey and me for dinner? I'll make chicken soup, I'll make the most comforting of your comfort food, just tell me what that is. Or do you want me to ask Harvey to go out with one of the boys so we can talk?”

“I won't be staying here tonight.”

“You're going home. You've told Gary,” Amelia figured it out. “How was he? Was he a shit about it?”

Amelia's distrust of Gary was undiluted by what Julie had confessed.
Can't she see Gary was unfaithful to me because I couldn't give him real passion, real love?
“Gary's being great about all this.” Julie changed register, to cue her friend that this next question was not as demanding as it sounded: “Is this going to be a problem for you, my working in the archives? I understand if it is . . .”

“Are you insane?” Amelia was restored to her haughtily confident self. “Darling, don't be ridiculous.” She took both of Julie's hands in both of hers and squeezed. “Of course it's not a problem. You were a victim. How does that disqualify you? And you're a meticulous and brilliant archivist. I'm never letting you leave us! You're invaluable.”

“Great. Because I've never really told you how much I love working there. We said it was temporary ten years ago, and I realized when I was walking over that I've never sat down and told you how much pleasure it gives me to be trusted with the sketches and diaries and personal letters. Sometimes”—and of all things, this thought filled Julie's eyes, cracked her voice—“it's like I'm with the artists while they work, that I know what they were feeling”—and now she was blubbering—“that I'm part of making all that beauty.”

Amelia called out, “Oh, honey,” and took her into another crushing embrace. She then proceeded to supervise Julie as if she were her daughter, insisting she fix her face before leaving, digging into her own purse and pressing her to use a mauve lipstick. “It highlights your black eyes and fair skin. I've always wanted you to put on this color, but I felt it was . . . I don't know . . . rude for me to suggest.” She emitted a sigh of relief at having unburdened herself of this suppressed desire—the only kind of secret, Julie believed, that Amelia harbored.

It was not because the lipstick suited her complexion that Zack stopped in his tracks when he came out of Trinity School and saw his mother waiting for him as if he were five.

To his “What's up?” she asked where they could go for a quiet talk. He seemed agitated by that and irritably didn't make a suggestion, especially after she said she wanted to avoid any place where his friends might appear. They ended up six blocks away, in the back booth of a coffee shop new to both of them.

He fussed and tugged his locks nervously while she waited for the waitress to bring coffees and a slice of apple pie she didn't want but felt obliged to order. “This isn't about you and Dad?” he blurted before she could say a word.

“It affects us, but no,” she said. Of course Zack worried they might divorce. Had any parent ever succeeded in hiding marital unhappiness from their child? Would it really be so much worse for Zack if she had kept her nerve and they were splitting up? Eventually, at least Gary would be happier with someone else. And that would be better for Zack.

“What happened? Where did you go? Dad refused to say anything. He just kept cursing and looking at his messed-up eye in the mirror and then he left.” Zack scrunched up his face like a little boy trying not to cry. “I was really worried about you, Mom.” He put his hand out, not on hers, but in the general direction so she would be encouraged to take it, as she did.
He is my angel, he will always be my angel,
she vowed while pressing his flesh as hard as Amelia had pressed hers.

Then let she let go and began her story. It took a while to get to the hard part. Zack knew nothing of Klein and Brian and practically nothing, other than their names, of his great-aunt Harriet and great-uncle Saul. He knew about Jeff, but the Jeffrey Mark he knew of was famous, a glittering star of today. The goofy, whiny boy with a crazy mother and dolorous father, in a dingy apartment in a working-class neighborhood was a different creature entirely. His listened distractedly, nervously sipping coffee, staring out the window, until she said Sam Rydel's name. After that he stayed on her.

It was her turn to have trouble meeting his eyes while she explained about Klein's groping her at Aunt Harriet's and, later, with Sam watching, forcing her to . . . she chickened out and let the unfinished phrase hang. Zack got very still, eyes flashing, mouth set. She decided not to tell him any more—she couldn't protect him from lurid details that might appear in the press someday, but with any luck, since she had told him this much herself, he would be merciful to himself and ignore the coverage. And she did not, as she hadn't with Brian or Gary or a shrink, not even the motherly Amelia, breathed a hint about her own odd tastes. All this honesty, after all, wasn't entirely honest. But she gave herself credit for informing Zack of the most important effect on her of the sexual abuse by concluding, “What happened has always made it difficult for me to enjoy myself as I should, as everyone should, when they make love.” She wanted to look at Broadway, at the laminated menu, at her spoon, anywhere but Zack. She forced herself to. He hadn't listened so raptly to her since he was a toddler, when he would sit like a miniature king on the throne of his Maclaren stroller, demanding to know what or why or when, confident his mother had the answer.

Men are different from women. He didn't react with feeling. Like Gary, he wanted more facts. “So this happened at your parents' house? More than once?” he asked with an astonishment that to her ears was a rebuke.

She pleaded, “I was confused, I didn't know what it really—”

“No, no, I didn't mean you could have done anything.” He reached for her but gave up halfway and picked up his coffee instead. Was he scared to touch her now? Was she damaged goods? He said, “I just don't understand what your parents were so busy doing. And Jeff! Jesus, I mean, he did it again in front of Jeff?”

“No, not Jeff, who was a little boy, remember. You can't expect him to have done anything about it. After the first time, only with Sam Rydel. Anyway, your grandmother and grandfather had a house full of people. He came Memorial Day, July 4, then Thanksgiving—”

Zack interrupted. “So he turned Sam Rydel into a pervert,” he said with a kind of excitement at this discovery. “That's why Rydel did the same thing to the Huck Finn kids.”

She winced at his labeling, the pleasure he seemed to be taking in identifying a weak and damaged person. But was Rydel weak? Maybe becoming a monster is a sign of strength.

“And why didn't your mother and father suspect anything about this weird guy showing up?”

“He wasn't weird to them. He was a success.” She sighed. “People in those days didn't think it was possible that an adult would do such things—”

“
WHY
!” Zack half-shouted, incredulous. “After the Nazis? They didn't think ordinary people could do horrible things? Why the fuck not!” He covered his mouth. “Sorry.”

“They just didn't, honey. Not in the suburbs. There were no Nazis in Riverdale.” She laughed helplessly, then sighed in despair. “Me too. I didn't think it was something that happened to anybody else but me. And I felt it was up to me to deal with, that I had done something wrong, and I had to stop it. I made sure I never went to Aunt Harriet's anymore, and after Thanksgiving I made sure to be at a friend's house for the next holiday weekend barbecue. But then Klein showed up at the house with a fake dental emergency and finally I . . . I don't know why, but finally I had the nerve to risk a scene. I threw a chair at him. A folding chair.” She laughed. It suddenly seemed absurd that having an object to hurl had inspired self-defense. “And I ran to my mother and I stuck myself to her like glue.”

“But you still didn't tell her?”

“I never told her. I never told . . .”

“Did you think she wouldn't have believed you?”

She sighed. “Zack, you have to understand, I thought it was shameful it had happened at all. I thought I had brought it . . .” She stopped, not for discretion. She was flooded by a vivid memory of being ambushed by Klein on Thanksgiving, on her way to obey Ma's request she fetch two more seltzer spritzers from the delivery crate. He grabbed her ponytail in the pantry room off the attached garage, only one window, its shade drawn, the air stifling. He kicked the door shut behind them, turning her against the plaster wall. To this day, she could feel its coolness on the backs of her arms as Klein pressed up against her, a hand reaching down her puffy blouse to her flat eleven-year-old chest. Now in the coffee shop, a middle-aged woman with a grown son, she felt the male's warm thumb and index finger frame her nipple and squeeze, very hard, an angry pinch, a mean, invasive, entirely unpleasant sensation only . . . only it seemed to bring her child's breast to life, the first time she could remember feeling, for lack of a better word, sexy up there. Klein's fingers had mapped how to please herself there and over the years, by extrapolation, all over. In midsentence, while Zack waited patiently for her to continue, this always dimly understood revelation emerged starkly, really an admission to herself: Klein had been her introduction to pleasure; his mean-spirited act of power had been her virginal introduction to lovemaking.

“Mom, you don't have to talk about this anymore, okay? I'm glad you told me, but . . .” He bowed his head penitently. “I'm sorry, I'm really sorry all that happened to you.”

His pity melted her heart. To stop tears, she looked through the dirty window at Broadway in winter, an avenue of solitary pedestrians hunched against the February chill. Her eyes burned. She squeezed them dry. She had to impress him with this next point, dangerous though it was for their relationship. “What I'm trying to tell you . . .” She looked right at him, patted the back of his hand. “What I'm trying to tell you, Zack, is that the things people do when they're young can last much longer and become something they can't get rid of or forget so easily. Of course, you're not a child. I was a child. But some of the girls you know may not be as grown up as you or they think. And what you do with them may last longer, much much longer, than you realize.” This wasn't coming out right. She didn't mean to scold or scare him about sex. That was her problem. She was ashamed and frightened. No one should feel that way.

Zack didn't like her comment either. He pulled his hand free, appalled. “I don't do anything like that! Jesus, Mom, what makes you think I do anything—”

“I'm not talking about child molesting, Zack. I mean there's the body and there's the heart. What the body likes doesn't necessarily have anything to do with what the heart wants. You feel frustrated about your father and school and what you're going to do in life. You're very handsome, Zack. I know you're fifteen and you may feel some pretty odd things about yourself these days, but whatever you feel about yourself inside, on the outside you're a confident, attractive young man and young women are going to want to please you . . .” She stopped. She didn't know what she was saying. Zack's diary entry had seemed to her to be a catalog of acts of rape. In her mind, there was a rough equivalency between Klein and her son's diary, and hearing herself say it aloud she realized that was just plain crazy. He was a teenage boy bragging about getting laid, acting macho about lovemaking at just the age boys were supposed to. She reversed course: “I'm sorry. I'm not being clear. I'm implying things I don't mean at all. I'm just trying to tell you that I was hurt, very deeply hurt, by what a sick man did to me when I was young and now I've got a problem, a big problem that I don't know how I'm going to deal with, but . . .” Again, she took possession of the hand she had created. There was simply no other way she could feel about Zack, although she knew perfectly well that he would be infuriated by the notion that he belonged to her—he was her only decent, lasting achievement and therefore she ought to have control over everything he might become. “But whatever I do about it, I wanted you to know. It's a secret. It's been a secret my whole life. That day when your father fell in the bathroom, that was the very first time I told him.”