The Wisdom of Perversity (38 page)

“You're not going yet,” Jeff said softly.

Rydel froze. Klein's right hand came up and made a waving motion in front of his right eye as if he were shooing away a fly. Rydel glanced at Klein, then looked back at Jeff, waiting on him.

“Let me try to make your options clear.” Jeff yawned. “Sorry,” he said with another yawn. “I didn't get any sleep. I was up telling my wife all about you and Cousin Richard so she would be prepared for what I'm going to say at the news conference. Such as you watching Klein rape me. And making me put your little blond cock in my mouth.”

Brian and Julie both looked at Jeff, surprised.

Rydel was not surprised. He was ready to respond immediately. “Nothing I did forty years ago can be prosecuted. And I was child myself.”

“You were fifteen when you—” Jeff started.

“I was a child! Emotionally I was more of a child than you.” He addressed only Jeff, as if they were alone. “Are you going to tell the world what Dick was? You gonna tell the truth about your cousin?”

Jeff nodded. “Everything.”

Rydel snorted. “Yeah? You gonna tell them the deal your mother made to keep quiet?”

“Yes,” Jeff said, lingering on the
s
for emphasis.

Klein's hand came up again to wave at something in front of his right eye. This time he kept it raised, staring intently at nothing, then reached with his fingers, trying to catch an object that wasn't there.

“Stop that. Put your hand down. There's nothing there,” Rydel told him impatiently. Klein kept it up, as if waiting to catch whatever it was the next time. Rydel refocused on Jeff. “Really? You're going to tell about all the money he gave your mother? To keep quiet about the others. How you kept quiet?” He looked pointedly at Brian.

Since Jeff had admitted his mother's involvement, Brian's thoughts had returned again and again to this point, but he didn't want to investigate it. That Rydel was trying to drive a wedge between them, and he had found an effective way to do it, infuriated Brian all the more.

“I don't have to say I kept quiet about what I knew,” Jeff said, coolly. “Obviously I did. I was a victim, that's why.”

Rydel wasn't through being skeptical. “You're really going to tell the world everything he did for you?” he asked Jeff. “How he paid for your education? How he made you a star?”

“That's bullshit,” Brian answered for Jeff. “Complete bullshit. So Klein paid for film school, made a few introductions. So what? Klein was a middle-management nobody in marketing. He didn't have some magical access in Hollywood. Jeff is one of a handful of the world's greatest directors. He would have made it without anybody's help and he probably would have made it sooner if Klein hadn't ruined his childhood.”

Hearing this, Jeff turned from Rydel to gawk at Brian with delight and surprise.

Brian bore down on Sam. “You were the one Klein had to pay off handsomely because you were his main victim. That's mostly what I'm going to talk about, how Klein corrupted the young, stole their childhoods, turned them into his creatures. How he tried to convince his victims that they liked what he did to them, how he tried to get me to spank you, how he humiliated and used you—”

“Then why are you doing this to me?” Rydel said. “If you understand how horrible Dick was, how he destroyed my . . .” His mouth trembled. He mastered himself and said coolly, “I'm a victim. That's what you should be telling the world. That
I'm
a victim, not those boys. I was good to those boys. I loved them. I wasn't cruel like Dick.” He slammed both hands on the wheelchair's handles, shaking its occupant.

Klein startled in the chair and cried out fearfully.

Rydel was still ranting. “I didn't humiliate them the way Dick—” He stopped.

Julie could see it occur to Rydel that it might not be safe to talk. He looked around as if expecting the police to show up. “I don't want to hear your litany of excuses,” she said, following Brian's advice to keep him talking by pretending not to care. “We told you what we're going to do. Nothing you've said has changed my mind.”

Brian turned to her. “Can you believe the self-delusion of this guy?” he said mockingly. “ ‘I was good to them.' I'm sure that's what he said to you.” He bent over to direct this at Klein, one last try at getting him to react. “Isn't that what you said to young Sam here? How you rescued and loved Sam, the poor little orphan boy.”

Klein looked at Brian, but he was too interested in the invisible thing flying near his right eye to give him more than a glance. He returned to it, right hand grabbing at air.

“I'm not like him,” Rydel said to Brian, then shouted, “Dick was cruel! I'm not cruel. You don't know what it was like with him . . . You think you do, but it was worse, much worse. I'm the victim.”

“Yeah, yeah, you had your reasons for what you did,” Jeff said, sneering. “Well, as Renoir said, ‘The real hell of life is that everyone has their reasons.' ”

“You didn't have to become who you are,” Julie said, fighting off an emerging feeling of pity for this man. This prince who had become a toad wasn't a cold monster; he was an angry, bitter, and pathetic man. Sympathy for this devil vibrated inside her, along with the relief of having released her rage at Klein and seeing for herself that he no longer knew his victims. The true villain was forever beyond her reach. Disappointment, relief, and pity mixed into a strange combustion. With its ignition, her legs trembled, chest quaking, erupting into a fireball of sympathy for Rydel, for herself, for all the ruined children of the world. “I know Klein was horrible to you. I'm sorry for that boy you were, the boy he used. But what you became, that's you. You didn't have to become him. You weren't strong enough to fight for yourself, your real self. I know. I wasn't strong enough . . .” She was shaking too much to go on and Brian took her in his arms. Her mouth was pressed against his chest, silencing her with affection.

Sam Rydel's gray eyes faded into a colorless fury. He glared at her while working his jaw. “I was strong,” he said. His mouth looked like it was chewing on something hard and bitter. “You don't know how strong.” He was breathing hard through his nose. “I was strong,” he insisted.

“Then stop covering up for him!” Jeff shouted, pointing at Klein who was the calmest of the four, slowly waving a hand in the air as if he were a politician in a parade greeting his supporters. “Confess and tell the world about Dick,” Jeff said. “You probably won't go to real prison—they'll put you in a psychiatric hospital. Give the millions you squeezed out of the school to the boys you raped—”

“I didn't rape them. I loved them. I took care of them. Everything I did was out of love. I understand my boys better than anyone because I was one of them.”

“Okay,” Jeff said. “You love them. So give them your money. Do that and we'll shut up about what you did to me and to Julie. You can frame your life story so it sounds like you were just a victim of Cousin Richard, that he made you sick. But stop the bullshit that you're innocent and your accusers are liars.”

“You self-righteous creep,” Rydel said, self-pity boiling into rage. He abandoned the wheelchair and moved threateningly at Jeff. Brian eased out of Julie's arms and got between Jeff and Rydel. Julie flashed back to them as boys, remembering that the polite Brian was always ready to back up loud-mouth Jeff.

Brian said softly, “Our press conference is scheduled for five. If we don't hear you've made a deal by then, we'll go public.”

Rydel looked deliberately at each of them, an enraged inventory. Then, without a word, he returned to the wheelchair. He slapped Klein's raised right hand, hard. “It's a floater! It's
in
your eye!” he yelled, slapping the hand again, although Klein was lowering it. Klein whimpered and cowered, hands shielding his face. Rydel jerked the handicapped chair up, spun it on the rear wheels to do a one eighty so they were facing the hallway. He dropped the front wheels down hard, again shaking Klein violently, then rapidly rolled Klein, wheelchair and himself into the hallway, disappearing.

“Did they really go?” Jeff asked after several seconds of not hearing the door shut.

Brian went to investigate. Julie felt woozy. She fell into a deep leather club chair, shut her eyes, and wished she could go to sleep on the spot. Brian reappeared, confirmed Rydel and Klein were gone.

Jeff was unscrewing the bottom of a Maltese Falcon prototype. “We didn't get anything, did we?”

“No,” Brian said. Julie thought,
Good. Now Jeff can't back out.

Jeff was still squirming for an exit. “What about when he talked about how what Klein did to him was worse than what he did?”

Brian shook his head. “Implication is not confession.” He sighed. “There's no way out, Jeff. We don't have a lot of time to arrange the press conference. Who are you going to use to manage it?”

Jeff removed a small black piece of plastic—Brian later explained to Julie it was a flash drive—from the Falcon statue. “I'll talk to Sugarman first. He'll get us a crisis manager.”

“Right. Everything starts and finishes with a lawyer. Can we piggyback on your legal and PR?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Jeff tossed the flash drive across the room. It landed noiselessly on the thick carpet. “My people will arrange everything. Take care of you,” he mumbled.

“You'd better call. It's eleven thirty already.”

“I'll call,” Jeff said. He took out his iPhone. He paused. “The old fuck really is senile,” he announced. “Right?” he checked with Brian.

Brian nodded. “You should have stuck by your fake medical report.”

Jeff grunted. “And you said it was bad storytelling.”

“God's a hack,” Brian said. “Only thing I wondered about . . .” He let that hang.

Julie and Jeff looked at him. “What?” Julie said.

“I think Rydel's abusing him. I don't mean sexually. I mean I think he's hitting him.”

There was a silence. Julie sighed.

“I hope so.” Jeff set his iPhone down on the couch, shut his eyes, and put his retro Converse sneakers up on the coffee table. He didn't starting dialing until Brian walked over and kicked their soles.

The Truth

February 2008

BRIAN ORDERED TEA,
coffee, bagels, and two vegan banana muffins while Jeff made a series of calls. He was famished. He ate both muffins in minutes. After a few sips of Earl Grey, Julie recovered from the fatigue and nausea she'd felt in the aftermath of being in Klein's and Rydel's presence.

When Jeff reported that Grace and a “handler” were coming over to brief them on the press conference, Julie said she'd better go home and change. “How do you dress,” she asked Brian, her black eyes glistening, “for a sex abuse confession?”

“You're not confessing,” he reminded her. “You weren't the abuser.”

“Good point. But I'm serious. What should I wear? Not jeans. Not an evening gown. Slacks and a demure blouse?”

“Do you have a simple black dress?” he asked.

“Two.” She smiled. “I live in Manhattan.” By the time she left for home, he felt sure the shock was past, that she wouldn't require his company. He wanted to stay with Jeff, make sure of his resolve.

After Julie's departure, the suite filled up with Jeff's people. Grace appeared first. Then two assistants: one from the production of the film, the other his year round personal assistant. They were followed by two young lawyers from Sugarman's New York office, male and female, oddly resembling each other in their matching pin-striped suits, short haircuts, and solemn, subdued voices. They asked to hear in detail what Jeff and Brian intended to say.

Brian reached underneath his black cashmere sweater and produced two sheets of paper from his shirt pocket. “Here's my statement.”

“You wrote it down!?” Jeff asked, startled.

“I'm a writer,” Brian said.

The lawyers looked pleased. The male removed a device as wide as a sheet of paper, but only an inch long, and asked if he could scan and e-mail Brian's statement to Sugarman in LA. “Sure,” Brian said. “But tell him not to give me notes.”

“Excuse me?” the female lawyer said.

Jeff explained in a grumble, “He means he's saying what's in the statement no matter what.”

“You don't want legal advice?” the male asked. “We understood that the firm is representing you.”

“I'm sure Mr. Sugarman will have something useful to say,” said his twin.

“I hate advice,” Brian said. “Especially when it's useful.”

Jeff extended a hand. “May I read it first?” Brian handed his pages over to the director, a letting-go he had never enjoyed.

Only Jeff's eyes moved while he read. “I didn't know that,” he said when he was done. “Believe me, I didn't know about the Horror's calling your mom to have you come up while I was at Hebrew school.” He gave the pages to the scanner bearer. He glanced shyly at Brian. “I'm sorry.”

This was the grievance Brian had been fretting about since Jeff admitted his mother had known about Klein, that Jeff had conspired with Harriet to use him as a shield. He had told himself to let it go, but he hadn't. His heart zoomed from calm to rage. “You had me over two more times—”

“I know!” Jeff said. “But I was there those times and figured I could stop him from doing the really bad stuff.”

“What the fuck is the really bad stuff? It was all really bad.”

“Let's stay calm,” the preternaturally calm woman lawyer said.

“Why don't you stay calm by keeping your fucking mouth shut!” Brian yelled, instantly regretting it. He rolled his lips inward, folded his hands in his lap.

“You're right,” Jeff said. “I'm glad you fought him off.” He sighed. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I should've known.”

“You were nine, for chrissakes,” Brian said. “It wasn't your responsibility.”

Jeff looked right at him and demanded, “But you thought it was my fault.”

“Yeah,” Brian admitted to Jeff. But that had to be wrong. “It wasn't,” he told his old friend and, as he did, at last truly forgave him. “You were a child. Just a child. What happened to me wasn't your fault.”

A bald man with severe black glasses, introduced by Grace as “a genius crisis manager,” and two young women who worked for him at his PR company appeared with a video team, a camera operator, a lighting supervisor, and their gofer. The crisis manager put his glasses atop his hairless skull, explained they should make their own record of the conference in case the press did a poor job but, more important, to provide their own cut to local television stations around the country to “control the story.” Grace then suggested they rehearse Brian's statement first and that's when he got to his feet, walked to the second bedroom in the vast suite, and locked the door.

In a moment, Jeff followed him and knocked. “You don't have to do a run-through, okay? That was a terrible idea. Sorry.”

“I need to take a nap,” Brian said. “I didn't get any sleep either.”

“Okay, I'll come get you in a hour.”

Brian used his cell to call home. The nurse answered, said his father was doing well, and put Danny on. “So?” His father huffed and puffed into the phone as if he had jogged five miles to the receiver. “You're going through with this fiasco?”

Brian explained what would happen, that it might hit the news as early as six, but probably cable first. “Try CNN if you're curious. Don't worry about what they say about me, Dad, if they bother with me at all. Jeff is the real show.”

“They'll talk about everyone and everything. That's what they do. You aren't going to go into all the gory details of what that awful man did to you, I hope?”

“Yes, Dad. The details are important. The details are everything.”

“Oh sweet Jesus. Why didn't you at least time this to the opening of your next play and do it on
Oprah
?”

“Never was good at self-promotion, Dad. Didn't have your genius for it.”

“No need to bite me,” Danny said breathlessly. “I'm not the child molester.”

But you were,
he thought bitterly as he hung up. Lying fully clothed on the made bed with his shoes on, like a corpse awaiting the undertaker, he admitted that he blamed Danny as much as anyone. He listened in a fury to the increasingly loud hubbub coming from the suite's living room. Sounded as if a thousand people were in there. He covered his eyes with the crook of his elbow and in that blindness thought,
I blame Jeff, I blame his mother, I blame his father, I blame my mother, I blame my father, I blame Klein, I blame Rydel, I blame me.

He felt again the shock, the naive and stupid shock, of arriving at Jeff's door, having been ordered by his own red-eyed mother after yet another long phone call with the “dying” Harriet, to go up and play Jeff's brand-new board game, Risk. In fact, Jeff was at Hebrew school. Klein greeted him, pulled him close, putting his lips on Brian's, sticking his tongue between his teeth and down his throat. He had pulled away, revolted, retreated (again, stupidly) into the living room, thinking it too public for Klein to follow him there, as Klein then did, too public for Klein to dare, as Klein then did, to push him down on the sofa. The perfumed man opened his gray slacks—they must have been unbuttoned and unzipped already, his ridiculously big Thing growing out of a slit in his boxers. “It's nice to touch, isn't it? So hard and smooth . . .” His hand encircled Brian's skull and pushed him toward it. “Give it a little kiss . . .”

He had acted, for once, the real Brian at last, punching Klein as hard as he could in his bulbous stomach, and ran, out the door, down the stairs, onto the street, knowing he couldn't go home without explaining . . .

I should have told. Julie's right: I would have saved dozens of others. Jeff, Julie, Sam, the academy kids, the Huck Finn boys, everyone else was ignorant or greedy or scared or confused or overwhelmed by bullies, but I was strong enough—I could've pushed him away. I did push him away. I saved myself and let everyone else suffer. Me and the god of creation—we're the villains of this story.

BRIAN WAS RIGHT,
of course. Simple black. And her mother's pearls to go with its mournful elegance. To have Ma for company, courageous and right-thinking, was a comfort.

“You look beautiful,” Gary said in the unnaturally gentle voice he'd been using since she had told him about her past. She was heading for the front closet. He had been home unexpectedly, had forgone the weekly meeting at
American Justice
over developing stories. His eye had cleared up. There was a dashing bruise underneath, but otherwise eager neediness had returned to his chubby face. “When do we have to be at the news conference?”

She was irritated by his faux-innocent helpfulness. “
I
have to go back to the hotel now,” she said. “I'm not sure if Jeff has scheduled the conference for five or six.”

“I'll go with you,” he said.

She shook her head.

“Honey, I know these people, the legal beat reporters. I can be helpful. Believe me, there are ways I can make sure they're civilized about this.”

“Gary, I appreciate everything you've done, but I have to do this on my own.”

His eager-to-please manner vanished. He breathed hard through his nose. “Are you coming home tonight?”

She shook her head. “I'll stay with Amelia. And I'll ask around, start looking for a place. We'll figure out about what to do about Zack when things calm down.”

“What?” His startled reaction was genuine.

“It's not fair for you to have to move.” She looked away from the astonished hurt contorting his features.

“You gotta be kidding. Right? You're kidding.”

“This isn't the time to talk about it. I've already said it and I feel this way more than ever—I can't stay in our marriage. I can't be with you and be an honest person. I've been lying too long about every feeling. It's . . .” She paused, unable to figure out a way to make any kinder what she was doing to poor, needy Gary. “Nothing I do is going to be fair to you, so the sooner I get out of your way, the sooner I let you move on. That's the best I can do.”

His eyes narrowed. His jaw set. He clenched his fists. He glared. He said, “I love you.”

She nodded. “I have to go.” She moved toward the closet.

Gary stepped in her way. He sneered. “You're not even going to have the decency to say a merciful ‘I love you too'?”

“I do love you, Gary. I've lived my life with you. But that's not relevant to whether we can go on living together.”

“Just tell me what you want in bed and I'll do it!” He laughed mordantly. “I might even like it, for chrissakes.”

“Gary, this isn't something you can fix. You haven't done anything wrong. I was wrong. I'll tell Zack it's my fault. You can tell everybody I was very damaged, that I'm having a terrible crisis, a breakdown. All that's true and I won't contradict you. I'm the bad guy, no question about it. I have to go…” She tried to step around him.

He grabbed her arm and squeezed hard. He was flabby everywhere but in his arms; they had always been strong. “Ow,” she complained, trying to tug away, but he clamped down, pulled her flush to him. His eyes were horrible in their honesty: shot through with hurt and fury, pain and loathing so complete she felt justly condemned. She surrendered. “Go ahead,” she said. “Hit me. I deserve it.”

“Is that what you like?” He grimaced saying each word, as if spitting up stones.

“Of course not.” Her arm was going numb.

“I never stopped cheating on you.” He pulled her closer, until their noses touched. “She wasn't the first and she wasn't the last. You wouldn't put out so I got laid whenever I felt like it.” His breath was stale from coffee and, yes, cigarettes. “It was better, a lot better than fucking you.”

“I'm sure,” she said, waiting for him to finish this contest, because that's what he needed—to be the winner. “I'm broken, Gary. I don't work. Of course I can't satisfy you in bed. I can't satisfy you anywhere.”

A dimming overcame his enraged eyes, hatred going out, a waning, like death. “Okay.” He released the compression of her arm, although he held on. He let her move a step away from the stench of his angry fear, the odor of defeat.
Poor man. The lie of our marriage was good enough for him. I've spoiled his victory over love.

“I'm sorry, Gary. I really am.”

“I don't give a fuck you're sorry. If you can't see I'm doing everything for you, I'm bending over backward for you, that I've been patient for twenty-four years and you don't appreciate that I'm willing to be patient for the rest of my life . . .” His voice warbled. He released her with contempt. “Fuck you. Go to hell, you frigid bitch.”

She was angry enough, then, to tell him she believed he was incapable of true sympathy, too selfish to feel as another feels, to defer his desires even for a few seconds. But she said nothing. She left mute and ashamed of her timidity. Any truth, even a mean one, she couldn't speak to the man she had wasted so much of her life on.

JEFF COAXED BRIAN
out of hiding in the bedroom into the center of a three-ring circus, consisting of the PR people, their camera crew, the original two young lawyers, and a pair of dour, middle-aged lawyers who had joined them, Grace, her personal assistant, Jeff's pair of assistants, and several others in casual clothes, new to Brian, whom he couldn't immediately assign a role to. The hubbub of parallel conversations died down when he and Jeff entered, a Broadway audience readying itself for the show. They stared at Brian and Jeff, some with open curiosity, others with rueful looks that Brian supposed were meant to be sympathetic.
It's no big deal,
he wanted to shout.
I'm okay. It didn't do anything to me.

He realized then his shallow, opportunistic, desperate-for-attention father was right—from now on all anyone would see was a little boy who had been diddled. And to make sure that's all they thought, since they'd soon forget his statement, he'd probably have to figure out a graceful way of slipping into every getting-acquainted conversation that he had merely been diddled, no cock shoved down his throat or up his ass, just masturbated, one disgusting kiss, his little penis put in Klein's mouth one time, his hand and lips refusing to touch Klein's one-eyed monster.
He only played with my penis!
Brian wanted to shout. Maybe he should have that printed on his business cards, right above his e-mail address.