The Wisdom of Perversity (33 page)

She had expected this would astound Zack, and it did. He absorbed it, then nodded with satisfaction. “Wow” is all he said, his face clouding. He shifted, looked grave. “You don't have to go public about all this, Mom, if you don't want to. Let me take care of him,” Zack said, his jaw set grimly.

She chuckled at his joke.

Zack's hands clenched. “I'm serious. First I'll deal with Klein. Where is he? Where does he live? Is he in New York? Don't worry, I won't hurt him, not really, but I'll scare the shit out of him.” Zack tapped his fists, looking as ferocious as possible for a beardless, wide-eyed boy with tumbling locks of chestnut hair and cherry red lips.

How silly. And how wonderful. A lightness buoyed her above every sad thing. Her bones were glad. Her soul was singing. She smiled her delight.

Zack was insulted. “I'm really serious!” He shook his fists, becoming the fighter he never was in the sandboxes of Riverside Park.

She tried to suppress this ridiculous happiness. She covered her angel's hand, saying as solemnly as she could, although a little laugh of delight escaped anyway, “I know you are, honey. And I'm”—she thought this a peculiar feeling, but admitted it—“flattered. You honor me. But Klein is eighty-four, probably very frail. Anyway, the law can deal with him and Rydel much more harshly than you can.” She stood up, towing her son by the hand to his feet, as if they were going to dance, and she did take him into her arms, or rather at his greater height he took her into his, and she pulled his head and its thick hair down, to whisper into his perfect ear, “Thank you. You don't have to rescue me, Zack. You already have.”

The Artist's Muse

February 2008

BRIAN WATCHED THE
audience enter. Nearly every man, woman, and teenager cradled an enormous bucket of artificially buttered popcorn next to their heart, to leave their hands free for a complimentary container of soda the size of a small dug well. They were dressed in hideous casual clothes: sneakers puffed up with extra layers of rubber as if their owners were racing cars; T-shirts and sweatshirts emblazoned with ads for their manufacturers; pants with pockets big enough to swallow Job. And their various manifestations of hair, including its shaved absence on young men who would have full heads, were grotesque. Locks were purple, orange, fluorescent red, white blond, and opaque black, then sprayed to skyscraper heights, or swirled and teased to cover baldness. No one looked the way nature had made them.
Thank God for that anyway,
Brian thought.
Without their tasteless fashions, they would have been merely ugly.

Was it his work in the film business, surrounded by exceptionally beautiful men and women who labored day and night to sustain and improve their lovely outsides, that made the civilians seem so revolting? Had he lost the capacity to gauge normal?

He decided yes, felt cheered by this exposure to the average. After decades of spending time with dazzling movie stars and surgery-enhanced executives, Brian had been beaten down into thinking of himself as very plain. In fact, the overwhelming majority were like him: so generously endowed with ungainly features that the odd good one seemed to be a flaw. Like him, everyone was all only a few weeks of gluttony away from sickly puffiness, only months of snacking from becoming a swollen bag of mottled flesh.

“Scary, huh?” Jeff's voice cooed in his ear without preamble, startling him. “Can you believe we work our asses off for these bozos?”

Brian turned away from the mob to study his old friend. He noted that if Jeff didn't have a slight tan, if he weren't draped in cashmere, if his glasses (and why was he suddenly wearing glasses?) weren't so nerdishly hip, Jeff would look as ordinary as his fans. “But, Jeff,” he said, “I read in your
New Yorker
profile that you're just one of them, that your movies are so popular because really you're the same person today as that little boy who went to Saturday matinees and couldn't figure out how Buck Rogers was going to escape next week.”

Instead of Jeff's objecting that he would be a fool, worse a criminally negligent member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, if he told the truth about how he felt toward his audience in an interview, he nodded at a particularly imbecilic couple. The man was in his thirties, receding hair slicked up, as if he were an Apache warrior who had suffered a bad scare, black leather motorcycle jacket over a white T-shirt with an arrow, labeled
THE MAN
, pointing up to his face and an arrow pointing the opposite direction below labeled
THE LEGEND
, presumably intending to indicate the crotch of his jeans, only the arrow was intercepted by his inflated belly so the myth seemed to refer to his eating prowess. His companion for the evening was a bloated woman with blotchy, freckled skin. Her huge braless breasts were prevented from reaching her waist by a tube top whose orange color could not be found in nature. The rest of her quivered like Jell-O inside skin tight stretch pants.

“Check out that pair,” Jeff said. “If I hadn't made it in the biz, I'd look like him and I'd definitely be married to her. And you know what's worse? As him, I'd have more to say about what's in today's movies than as a director.”

“You're so full of shit,” Brian said amiably. “You don't need them. They need you. You're the highlight of their year.”

“I'm their slave, Bri. My last two movies have flopped. I'm one bomb away from becoming the studio's bitch.”

Brian made a sour face to discourage his friend from continuing this nonsense. Was this why Jeff had insisted Brian come? To feel sorry for the poor A-list director forced to pander? “Come on. You've made billions for the studios. They'll let you flop at least five more times.”

“No more. Industry's being squeezed by piracy, by streaming, most of all by video games. These days three strikes and you're out. This picture tanks, they'll take away my Get Out of Studio Notes Free card. You watch. If this mob tonight doesn't like my ending, I'll have to change it.”

“Bullshit,” Brian said with a smile.

“It's not bullshit. Sure, I could insist on the integrity of my ending, but I'd have to put everything on the line. Threaten to go public. To preserve a farcical ending in a broad comedy I'd have to risk a lifetime's worth of capital.” Jeff snorted. “Integrity. What a fucking joke. Who am I kidding? I'm popcorn.”

“Even popcorn,” Brian said, “can have integrity.”

“How can popcorn have integrity?”

“It can have the integrity of being good popcorn.”

Jeff grunted. He nudged Brian with his shoulder. “Before they give me the Cards find me.” “The Cards” referred to the most unsettling aspect of the test preview. After the movie ended, the audience would be handed index cards, sometimes a sheet of paper, with multiple-choice questions. Did they think the movie was Excellent, Very Good, Good, Fair, or Poor? Would they Definitely Recommend, Recommend, or Not Recommend to friends? And at bottom, most perilous of all for the director, were a few blank lines for them to scrawl what they wished could be changed about the picture. “You find me,” Jeff said, “and tell me the fucking truth before the hyenas hit me with the numbers. So I got something to hang on to while they flay me alive. Okay, buddy? Promise? If my ending sucks, tell me. I don't want to defend the Alamo over nothing.”

Tell me the fucking truth,
Brian repeated to himself while he was ushered to a seat by an assistant Jeff signaled.
Tell me the fucking truth,
Jeff had begged, and as the lights came down he wondered whether he should. What if Brian thought Jeff's movie to be ghastly and told him so? How would that affect Jeff's weighing whether or not to reveal to the world that a man who had paid for Jeff's film schooling, perhaps gave him a leg up in the business, had also molested him as a child? Or that Jeff had been on the board of a company that had enriched two men accused of multiple sex crimes? And was that the worst of what would come out? Maybe Jeff had conspired with Sam Rydel to suppress the testimony of his victims. Gary said that fake medical report mirrored what Rydel was claiming to the DA about Klein's condition. Had it originated with Jeff? It was put together awfully fast. Maybe Rydel had given it to him. The reality is that he couldn't trust Jeff, so should Brian be ruthlessly honest when he needed Jeff to cooperate with finally striking a real blow in the real world for real truth, real justice, and the actual American way?

No. Brian decided no matter how awful the picture, he would tell his friend, as he was sure all of Jeff's associates did, that the movie was brilliant, the ending perfection.

Good thing Brian had decided to lie before the movie started. During the first hour, he distracted himself from its awfulness by preparing phrases of false praise. He hated the first hour so intensely that at one point he thought the swelling of loathing in his chest cavity might stop his heart. He had to restlessly shift in his chair in a vain attempt to avert his face from the blaring chaos, presented in a slow-paced, flat tone with great self-confidence as if the filmmaker were convinced that what is grotesque is funny if you also make it very dull. His head began to throb from the cranked-up sound track that pushed each overacted, slapstick calamity to be as loud as the bombing of Dresden. He winced at the parade of beautiful actors squeezed into grotesque costumes and made up like clowns—again as if exaggeration and comedy were synonyms.

Then, abruptly, in the second hour Jeff calmed his film down. He elaborated a thin and rather strange love story that had seemed a throwaway in the first half. In keeping with the picture's overall style, the lovers were a grotesque physical contrast. The boy was played by the once adorable child actor Billy Frederick, who had evolved into a thin and, in other films, appealing adolescent. In Jeff's hands, he became concentration-camp skinny, outfitted with contacts to simulate walleyes, wearing a prosthesis to sport a pair of chipmunk buck teeth. The look was reminiscent of an old Jerry Lewis character, a boyhood favorite of Jeff's. During the bombardment of the first hour, Brian had assumed it was intended as a wry homage to Lewis, but then an offbeat love story developed between the buck-toothed, walleyed skin-and-bones teenager and a very WASPy, innocent, and clumsy Veronica Stillman, cast as a nerdy scientist. Jeff's personal inspiration for this plot became clear to Brian when the mother of the buck-toothed boy, played by the comic actress Charlene Boxer in an immobilizing fat suit and makeup that simulated four double chins, learns of her son's crush on Veronica. Enraged, Boxer proceeds to whack him repeatedly on his ass with a hot waffle iron kept beside her chaise longue, from which she never rose during the course of the film. After she spanked her son, Brian realized the preposterous mother was a portrait of Harriet, and the hideously unappealing young man was disguised autobiography.

So Jeff saw himself as a vulnerable and awkward teenager, yearning for love and nurture. Since he had grown into a balding, self-satisfied, wealthy, middle-aged man, the connection probably would escape others, but to Brian it wasn't far-fetched. The walleyed, whiny, lonely, skinny boy on that screen was no doubt exactly how Jeff had felt and still felt about himself.

Brian wondered about why Jeff's character loved Veronica the scientist. Did Jeff mean her to represent filmmaking with her technical expertise, her emotional simplicity, her ability to find Alien bones? (The plot—don't ask.) The picture evolved into shameless sentimentality about the geeky teenager's love for Veronica, building to a climax as the mother's opposition becomes murderous. She enters into a conspiracy with an Alien, played by Chris Zaban with his usual frenetic bombast. Zaban's Alien needs to consume young female organs to survive. He has come to earth in disguise as an advertising executive for TV. The evil mother decides to thwart her son's planned union with Veronica by offering his true love to the Alien as a midnight snack.

Just how block-headed am I?
Brian wondered when it took him until ten minutes from the end to realize this was a portrait of Jeff's life with his mother and Cousin Richard. Perhaps it was based on a particular trauma in his teenage years, something that had happened after their friendship ended. Jeff wasn't merely obsessed with entertaining a huge audience. Like Aries Wallinski, like a real artist, he was trying to get at personal truth, to organize and illuminate life as he understood it. Maybe, as Brian leaned forward, thoroughly absorbed by wondering how the story would end, maybe Jeff, like Aries, wanted to heal.

Not surprisingly, the slower, more human storytelling of the second half engaged the audience. No longer stupefied by deafening special effects, they began to laugh, louder and longer, at a few verbal jokes about the evil mother's motivations and the awkward son's wooing. Not Oscar Wilde, to be sure, but they were genuine witticisms about the characters.

At the climax, loud special effects in the style of its unworthy first hour returned, but now Brian was emotionally invested in the action. His chest constricted and sweat broke out on his forehead as the monstrous mother filled the screen. Jeff had him now. He was awed and terrified by the unleashing of his friend's soul. All around him the audience guffawed while the mother was mistakenly consumed by the Alien because her son had miniaturized her and stuffed her into a giant box of human-flavored popcorn. (Again, don't ask about the plot's logic.) And while she was hoisted by her own petard, eaten alive by the same monster whom she had planned to feed her son's lover to, the climactic lines of the picture were shouted by her geeky son in an extreme close-up, provoking hysterical laughter in nearly every seat. “My mother's a monster,” the teenager announced. “She's in the popcorn and you just ate her alive!” The Alien, who can only survive on a young female's reproductive organs, is poisoned by those of a menopausal human female. He dies while mumbling in agony, “I can't believe I ate his whole mother.”

The audience loved this portrait of Jeff's mother, the monster in the popcorn, and they ate her alive with gusto. Brian didn't rise from his seat when the movie ended; around him the audience was harassed by marketing assistants: “Please fill out the cards we gave you when you came in and hand them to one of the people standing by the exits on your way out. Thank you for taking the time to give us your reaction.”

Brian was stunned. No, the picture wasn't great. Probably wasn't good at all. Probably wasn't even first-rate entertainment. But it was art. Jeff had found his way through the gloom of the past—unlike Klein, unlike Sam, unlike, he feared, Julie. Jeff had learned the wisdom of perversity and made his lonely secret into art.

Jeff arrived with a lurch, past hovering studio executives and Grace, to stumble into the seat next to Brian. “I'll be in the lobby in a sec,” he said to a man Brian recognized as the studio president of production. “Just want to get Brian's reaction. Fresh eyes,” he explained. The studio head squinted at Brian, then shrugged and left.

They waited in silence for the audience to exit, the all-important taste makers climbing up the sloping aisle with their postcard verdicts. Several peered at Jeff and Brian, who had made themselves noticeable as the only two who lingered. One woman called to Jeff, “Awesome, Mr. Mark. The movie's awesome!”

“Thank you,” Jeff said, then turned his back to the aisle until they were all gone.

“All clear,” Brian reported.

Jeff still spoke in a whisper: “The truth. Remember? You promised. Is the ending worth fighting for?”