The Wisdom of Perversity

by Rafael Yglesias

  Gary thumped the table. “No! That is, we don’t know. Thanks to the tabloids and the web, this case has been hopelessly distorted. It’s gone viral that two of the boys were sodomized. But in fact we don’t know what the accusers said beyond the umbrella term ‘molested.’ And since it all happened more than ten years ago, there’s no forensics.” Gary chewed thoughtfully before elaborating. “According to my source in the DA’s office, these are pretty questionable witnesses. Two are addicts; the other has been hospitalized for depression. You know with these cases there’s always the danger of a Children’s Hour scenario, a possible witch hunt.”

  “So the issue isn’t little boys getting screwed, it’s overzealous prosecution?” Zack made a contemptuous buzz with his lips. “That’s a little boring. Isn’t sodomy hotter than perjury?”

  “Zack, please,” Julie said.

  “What?” Zack pretended not to know why she had complained.

  “Exactly, sodomy is hotter,” his father said, pleased Zack was taking him on—much better than indifference. “But the luridness is what makes these accusations so dangerous. Huck Finn was a terrific charity for underprivileged kids, everybody agrees it’s great, and it’s about to be shut down because of Internet chatter. It’s trial by blog.” Gary clapped. “That’s it! That’s my lead.”

  “Oh no,” Zack bowed his head, clutched and tugged hard at the drapery of his locks. “Don’t fall for that bullshit,” he moaned.

  “What bullshit?”

  “That the Internet has changed everything,” Zack said, sneered.

  “Honey, stop pulling on your hair.” Julie reached to stop him. Zack ducked away but at least sat up straight and stopped tearing at his hair.

  “Of course it’s changed things.” Gary goggled at his son. “Don’t you, of all people, think that blogs, Facebook, YouTube, this new thing Twitter, has transformed how we get information?”

  “It’s changed how we get information,” said the teenager. “It hasn’t transformed anything.”

  “You’re wrong,” his father declared. “One way it’s transformed legal cases is that the alleged molester, Sam Rydel, and his defense team are too focused on PR. They keep trying to debunk these bloggers, which makes their accusations go viral, when they should just shut up. Force the prosecution to prove its case.”

  “But doesn’t this Rydel guy have a big reputation to defend? He’s a big honcho at Huck Finn and he owns some kind of university . . .”

  “Not a real university.” Gary’s voice was steeped in the contempt he felt whenever anyone got a fact wrong, his dismissive tone implying they would never recover their credibility with him. “It’s a so-called broadcasting academy, claiming to teach technical jobs in TV and radio. Their students are poor, mostly minorities, who are set up with federal school loans to pay for these basically worthless degrees.”

  “How do you know they’re worthless?” Zack said. “’Cause it isn’t Harvard?”

  “No. I know because I check my facts before I make an assertion. Less than ten percent of the academy’s graduates get jobs in radio or TV, and they’re saddled with loans that either they or we—the taxpayers—end up paying. This semi-scam has made Sam Rydel a fortune. He’s worth something like thirty million. That’s the real scandal. But nobody’s covering that. Instead the media is obsessed with whether or not Rydel had sex with boys. Anyway, my point is that although Rydel has a perfect right to answer the bloggers, don’t misunderstand me on that score—”

  “Score?” Zack interrupted. He winked at his mother. “Who’s keeping score? Oh, it’s you, right, Dad? You’re the scorekeeper in chief.”

  Zack was pressing his luck, Julie thought, though she was sympathetic to his plight. Something ought to be done to silence Gary’s nagging of Zack because the son didn’t share his father’s strengths (or his weaknesses, she might one day be forced to point out) and wasn’t interested in winning the same battles (or suffering the same defeats, she might one day need to remind her husband). Still, she felt he was pressing his luck. To pacify Zack, she patted his forearm.

  “Okay, smart-ass.” Gary tilted back in his chair, chewing double-time. “You asked about my next column. Why ask if you don’t give a fuck about the answer?”

  “Gary, please . . .” Julie said.

  “What? He can make fun of me and my work and I’ve got to fucking like it?”

  “Your language. We shouldn’t be cursing each other over breakfast.”

  Gary stood up. His shirt was a size too small. His breasts appeared to be almost as large as hers, at least a B cup. She looked away. “He’s fifteen! You think he doesn’t know them?” Gary spat them at Zack: “Shit. Fuck. Cock. Cunt. Asshole. Motherfucker. Anything you haven’t heard before?”

  Zack’s grin became a wince. “No.”

  “Then we’re clear on that score! Thanks for breakfast,” he tossed at Julie, storming off in the direction of his study.

  Her son lowered his head, hair shading pain. “Zack,” she called into the cave of his unhappiness. Her boy meant well. Sure, he had provoked Gary, but look at him blinking back humiliation, full of regret. “Zack, you know what? You know what the problem is?”

  “What?” he mumbled.

  “Your father is very proud of you. That’s the problem.”

  Zack straightened, pushing back his hair, exposing a high brow as impressive as his father’s. Big Brain, she had nicknamed the skinny twenty-four-year-old Gary when they first met, for his shining forehead and the intensity of his debating skills. Zack didn’t have his father’s energy. He was dreamy and contemplative. Like me. “What are you talking about, Mom?”

  “That’s why he’s so hard on you. He’s as proud of you as he is of himself so he isn’t careful about your feelings—because he thinks they’re his feelings.” She wasn’t sure she had made sense. “Do you know what I mean?”

  “Yeah, you mean he doesn’t have any idea who I am.” Zack noisily shoved his chair away from the table, the legs gouging her sanded, stained oak floorboards. She didn’t waste a complaint; the battle to maintain her floor’s purity had been lost a decade ago. When declaiming to dinner guests Gary liked to tip back in his chair, each oration leaving its scar in wood. Julie had tried to protect it by putting a rug under the table, but after a week she had to remove it. During a dinner party to impress new contacts in the world of talk television, Gary had leaned back to make a point in grand style about the three knocks Kato Kaelin heard on his air-conditioner; his chair legs slid on the rug and Gary toppled backward onto his ass. Luckily, although his head whacked hard on the floor, he came away with no worse than a small lump. The amazing part was that Gary resumed his oration case while being helped off the floor, passively lifted like a statue in the fallen chair, all the while not missing a beat. “Your husband has amazing concentration,” the CNN legal reporter commented to Julie. Julie was thinking, He’s become a monster.

  “Zack—” she tried to delay her son.

  “I’ve got rehearsal,” he said, meaning Trinity High School’s production of Romeo and Juliet; much to her delight he had landed the part of Romeo, a compliment to him, since he wasn’t a senior and leads were supposed to be reserved for them. (Gary hadn’t approved. “With your grades? Taking all that time away from studying? That smart? I mean, you’re not going to be the next George Clooney.”) Zack left for his bedroom, presumably to fetch his school backpack. She was alone with the breakfast plates. She had cooked and now before going to her job she was supposed to clean up. Yeah, she sure was living in a feminist paradise.

  She gathered silverware and plates, put them in the sink, returning to fetch coffee mugs, butter dish, maple syrup jar. It was an effort to leave the kitchen a mess even briefly, but doing nothing to clean up the quarrel between father and son was even more unbearable. Teeth clenched, she forced herself to not immediately load the dishwasher. She couldn’t allow yet another ugly outburst to pass without comment.

  Julie’s determination hiccupped
as she reached the shut door to Gary’s study. Here her prized floorboards were striped with white gouges from Zack’s preteen love affair with roller blades. Gary had managed to belittle that interest and eventually discourage it through shaming and indifference, rarely indulging Zack with excursions to Riverside Park and only then with sufficient grumpiness and belittling observations to forestall new requests. I love my family, Julie chanted silently for courage. I love my men and I want them to love each other.

  She knocked.

  “What!” Gary barked.

  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 shimmere
d 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.