The Wisdom of Perversity

by Rafael Yglesias

  “Tell me,” she began leaning forward, displaying her broad shoulders, bared but for the thin straps of her slinky blouse. She managed to make her question confidential without lowering her voice: “Why do you think Aries Wallinski of all people wants to direct a movie about rape?”

  “Excuse me,” Brian said, pointing to his mouth, pretending to be chewing on a sourdough roll.

  Veronica guillotined another asparagus tip. “I’ve been trying to get Aries to talk to me about the real reason he wants to direct this movie, but Aries is very sly.” Her lips expressed amusement, compassion, and irritation all at once, accomplished with a slight curling that managed to speak volumes on camera, and Brian was as close as a Panaflex to those lips.

  “Sly?” Brian was skeptical.

  “Don’t you think so?” Veronica’s mouth closed over a delicate ruffled tip, sliver tines gleaming against her blood red lipstick.

  Brian began to daydream about his latest indulgence, the Red Head, wondering if she was available for training this afternoon. “I think of him as mischievous,” he said.

  Veronica repeated the word as if it were brand new to her: “Mischievous . . .”

  “A mischievous five-year-old.”

  “Really?” She leaned back, eyes wandering away. “I don’t think of him as childlike. He doesn’t seem anything like a child to me. Not any child I know.” She smirked. “Of course, I know he likes children. Especially female children.”

  Brian was profoundly worried by this unexpected mention of Aries’s sexual proclivities. For two months, producer Gregory Lamont had been negotiating Veronica’s fee, schedule, script and casting approval, airline tickets for family to visit her while shooting in Paris. Three days ago, Veronica had agreed to sign a contract to start filming in six weeks, pending her approval of a discussion with Aries and the screenwriter, Brian Moran, of a revision of the script. Thus Brian had taken it for granted she had long ago made peace with Aries’s past. Her comment mugged that assumption.

  She couldn’t have only recently learned the facts—they were thirty-one years old: in 1977, Aries had been arrested on a charge of raping a thirteen-year-old fashion model during a photo shoot. He didn’t deny having sex with her, taking the indefensible position that it was consensual. Within twenty-four hours of Aries’s arrest, the victim and her mother withdrew the accusation that the acts of sodomy and vaginal penetration involved force, but of course the DA pursued the incontestable charge of statutory rape against the then forty-two-year-old Aries, eventually arriving at a plea agreement: Aries admitted guilt to unlawful sex with a minor, was sent to a psychiatric facility for six weeks, receiving treatment for his “sexually aberrant behavior” prior to a sentence the DA and Judge Kaufman promised would not include jail time.

  During the legal maneuvering and psychiatric treatment, Aries had become a notorious symbol to right-wingers of all that was ill with America. They didn’t view him as a man to be pitied for the multiple misfortunes of his aborted childhood in Nazi-occupied Kraków, or his oppressed youth in Soviet-controlled Poland, or that his pregnant wife and unborn child had been murdered by members of an LA cult; they saw Aries as an unrepentant and enthusiastic member of drug-soaked, sexually indiscriminate, left-wing Hollywood, a depraved man who deserved merciless punishment. After Aries was released from the psychiatric facility, Judge Kaufman soon became irritated that the director’s career was not being adversely affected by his crime and was finally incensed by a photo he was shown of Aries apparently partying hard at a nightclub. He abrogated the plea agreement, announcing that he planned to sentence Aries to hard time. Aries fled the United States for Paris, where he had been born and lived until he was five years old. His father had—in one of history’s worst family decisions—moved the Wallinskis back to his native Poland mere months before the Nazi invasion. As a French citizen, Aries found permanent sanctuary in France, which bars the extradition of its own no matter the crime. Ever since, Aries had had to live and—more painfully—work in exile from the States, England, and any other nation with an extradition treaty with France.

  By 2008, America had grown even less forgiving of Aries’s crime. There were plenty of movie people, in particular actresses, who would not countenance working with him. Maybe, during these months of negotiation, Veronica’s friends or her agents had been critical of her decision to work with Aries and she was now hesitant to appear in a movie that told the story of a traumatized rape victim’s search for justice—no matter how thoroughly on the side of the angels—if it was going to be directed by a convicted rapist.

  Brian understood. It was reasonable for Veronica to worry that she could be viewed as not merely politically incorrect (a survivable fault) but politically depraved. Fans would forgive collaborating with a sexual criminal as a likely by-product of working in the movie business, but to help Aries redeem his crime might make his enemies hers. Movie stars fear losing the audience’s love above all; to be threatened with even the remote possibility of their hatred was terrifying.

  The difficulty for Brian was that Veronica was the sole actress the studio was willing to finance in his arty script—lose her and the movie was dead. Because Aries couldn’t come to the United States to meet with her, and Veronica was unwilling to fly to meet with the director without a signed contract, Brian had been drafted to discuss her script concerns before they had a video conference call with Aries to come to a final resolution about what work Brian would do to satisfy her. But apparently Veronica wasn’t worried solely about the script. Evidently Brian also needed to reassure her about Aries’s sex life.

  Racing through these calculations contorted Brian’s face. Veronica noticed his distress. She looked apologetic for upsetting him. “I mean,” she added gently, “his wife is in her twenties, right?”

  “No,” Brian said pedantically. “She’s thirty-four.”

  “But she was fifteen when they started up, right?”

  “I’m not sure of the dates.” Brian had become a hostile witness.

  “And of course . . .” Veronica trailed off, demurely dropping her amazing green eyes (as one critic had written, they truly were emeralds) to the beheaded asparagus stalks. “There was the girl he raped,” she whispered. She glanced up suddenly as if to catch him off guard. “She was a child.”

  My God, she’s actually testing my moral compass about sex crimes against children. His anxious self, the wary, unhappy boy whom he struggled daily to console, was chased away. Chat was perilous, polite civilities a headache, the brutal diplomacies of the movie business nauseating, but to provide a straightforward statement of his beliefs about this subject into the world of bullshit was a pleasure. “Yes, that’s right. The girl Aries raped was thirteen. She was a month shy of her birthday so Aries likes to say she was fourteen. He doesn’t understand it’s a meaningless distinction. Of course, I’m one of those people who don’t see what he did as rape. I see it as child molestation. A meaningless distinction to—”

  Veronica interrupted sharply, incredulous: “Child molestation!”

  “Yes,” Brian was matter of fact. “I don’t mean to say it’s a lesser crime than rape. But I do think what Aries did was child molestation, not rape. Perhaps to most people that’s a meaningless distinction—”

  Veronica interrupted again. “What is the distinction?”

  “Rape is primarily an act of physical invasion; child molestation is primarily an act of emotional invasion. But I don’t make this distinction to downplay the heinousness of Aries’s crime. On the contrary. In some ways, a thirteen-year-old being drugged and seduced into sex by an adult is worse than being forced. Within limits, of course: severe physical brutality trumps all traumas. I simply mean that if there is something worse than having your will overwhelmed by force, then it would be having your desire to please used against you: perverted to serve the will of your enemy.” Talking freely in this way Brian was finally able to study Veronica without constraint. She really was exquisite. Even more striking
in person, which for a movie star, given the aids of makeup, hair, collagen, costume design, and lighting, was unique in his experience. The deep-set emeralds of her eyes, her long, elegant nose, and those fluted lips and strong chin were more dazzling and original that the generic prettiness of TV stars. Precisely because Veronica had some flaws, her looks were never boring. There was a slight bump in her nose, one eye was minutely lower than the other, which lent intelligence to the otherworldly beauty of her face. And those full lips were always slightly parted, ready to be kissed or amused. Brian’s eyes trailed down the smooth white column of her neck to her broad shoulders, from the intriguing scoop of her collar to the rise of her breasts. Of course she excites me. So the fuck what? Doesn’t change what you are.

  “I’m not sure I get what you’re saying.” Veronica furrowed her brow as if irritated, while her eyes brimmed with compassion. This was a complicated look she relied on at some point in every role. It didn’t play as a mannerism, a star’s lazy signature, but as part of her naturalness, the indelible element of her real self morphing into a new character, flexible enough to convey empathy in her crusading lawyer in Dead River, the anger and heartbreak of her Holocaust survivor in The Grocer’s Daughter, the pragmatic and loving heart of the doomed mother in Time Remaining. Brian was dazzled as she invited him into her heart. No, this was something purer, an invitation into her soul. She allowed him to feel that she cared about him, that she was listening to his deepest feelings with all her attention, and Brian thought: We’re all phonies, aren’t we? So, of course, the pretending is what we trust.

  “I’ll try to explain.” Brian raised a hand to signal he needed a moment to collect his thoughts. Diplomacy wouldn’t get Veronica to sign the contract. She must have already heard all the mealymouthed excuses from Lamont and Aries’s people. But how to tell her Brian’s wisdom? He shut his eyes to relieve himself of Veronica’s mesmerizing beauty. Her challenge, or the adrenaline it provoked, felt good, burning off the foggy calm the latest psychotropic medication had draped over all sensations. He had to try something new after his relapse in December, anything to stop the longing to put his hands on the Red Head or the Lazy Intern or the Little Beast. He hadn’t felt this alert, keenly aware of color and sound, in weeks. His always cramping, gurgling stomach—especially when stressed—was tranquil. His always stiff fifty-year-old back, sometimes pierced by iron spikes, felt loose and gloriously free of pain.

  When he opened his eyes again to the sun of Veronica’s loveliness, he talked freely. “I’m a coward,” he told her. “I would probably have chosen to collaborate with the Nazis rather than be killed—I’m Jewish on my mother’s side, so they would have killed me no matter how eager I was to sell out—but despite my lack of bravery I still believe in the proverb ‘A coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave man only one.’ People who collaborate to survive are more to be pitied than the dead. To feel you’ve helped your tormentor at your own destruction, what could be worse? In a spiritual sense, deep in her soul, maybe a thirteen-year-old girl who sleeps with a world-famous director to please him was more raped than the heroine of Sleep of the Innocent. Your character was not even given an illusion of choice. She was helpless, strapped to a gurney, then tortured, then raped . . .”

  “Sorry, but I don’t buy that,” Veronica said, confident she had discovered a fatal flaw. “I don’t think being raped by Aries is worse than being tortured with electric shocks to your clitoris.” She smiled. “Or my clitoris.”

  “I agree,” Brian answered, admiring her willingness to be witty about rape. “Not while you’re being tortured. Pain is pain. I don’t mean to overstate my distinction. All I mean to say is that I believe the effects of molestation could be longer lasting. Harder to discover, for one thing. Maybe easier to talk about, in a superficial way. Certainly easier for everyone to hear. And much easier to dismiss as a trauma. But I think, ultimately, it’s harder to resolve.”

  “Then,” Veronica asked him slowly, amazed at what she was discovering Brian to mean, “you really think that what Aries did to that girl was even worse . . .” She dropped the thought.

  Brian picked it up. “It’s a paradox: that thirteen-year-old child may well have suffered a deeper wound than our heroine, and yet I think Aries was less of a rapist than the doctor in our story.”

  Veronica looked up at the double-height ceiling. Her long neck was delicious. Oh, to nuzzle and nip at that tender spot! She stared at a modern wrought-iron chandelier above their table. They would be crushed if it fell. Why would it fall? Brian wondered at his own violent image. He looked away. Behind her, about half of the hotel’s luncheon patrons were gaping at the two-time Academy Award – winning actress. One woman seemed to be debating with her husband whether she dare approach. “So you think . . .” Veronica said struggling to untangle his reasoning, “what Aries did was in some ways worse than out-and-out rape, but he’s less guilty than a rapist?”

  “Exactly. The doctor in Sleep of the Innocent knows he is a monster. Aries thought what he did with that girl was naughty, nothing more. He didn’t believe it was rape. He didn’t know it was rape. How could he? He was seven years old when the Nazis took his mother. He was seven and a half when his father sent him off alone to the countryside to escape the death camps. He managed on his own until the war ended and was finally reunited with his father at age eleven. His father had survived Auschwitz. While being repatriated, he had married another woman. This stepmother, a noble Jewish survivor of Buchenwald, by the way, took one look at eleven-year-old Aries, a child who had survived the war all by his lonesome, and decided she didn’t like him, didn’t want to live with him. So Aries’s father left motherless eleven-year-old Aries in an abandoned apartment building in postwar Poland to fend for himself. ”

  Veronica gasped. Brian was relieved, felt lucky that she didn’t already know the full details of Aries’s youth. Most people didn’t; the rape charge overwhelmed the rest of his horrific past. “She . . . she actually refused to let Aries live with his father?”

  “Said she couldn’t stand the brat.”

  “And I thought my three stepmothers were bad . . .” Veronica mumbled.

  Brian laughed. “Good line. Anyway, that’s why Aries didn’t think a nearly fourteen-year-old girl is a child. He hasn’t been a child since he was seven, since the Nazis took everything from him: mother, father, friends—all of Kraków, for that matter. The idea to Aries that a thirteen-year-old is being coerced who takes a quaalude, doesn’t gag while giving you a blow job, and doesn’t scratch your eyes out when you fuck her is nonsense. I know it isn’t nonsense, you know it isn’t nonsense, the editorial page of the New York Times knows it isn’t nonsense, but Aries didn’t, and he still doesn’t know. What he did to her was appalling and disgusting and it was rape, an insidious and despicable rape, the overwhelming of a child’s will, but Aries is not, in his heart, a rapist.”

  “Okay,” Veronica conceded. “I don’t agree with you. But I see your point.” A waiter hovered at her elbow while another removed Brian’s salad. Veronica put her knife and fork on the plate over the uneaten asparagus stalks. The waiter reached for her plate.

  Brian warned him off. “She’s not done,” he said.

  “I’m finished,” she explained to Brian. “I only eat the tips,” she added with an apologetic shrug. “It’s a shameful waste. But the stalks are yucky. Like eating soggy celery.”

  Brian smiled. “I’ll have to tell that to my father.”

  “Really?” Veronica leaned her elbows on the table, the long fingers of her hands forming a plateau for her chin to rest on. “Your father would be interested in my eating habits?”

  “Fascinated.”

  “Did you get your lovely coloring from him, your Irish father? And those china blue eyes?” She gazed at Brian as if he were the only male on Earth.

  Ignore it, Brian ordered himself. That’s the autonomic seductiveness of her profession. “Thank you. Actually the eyes come from my Jewish mother. I ha
ven’t answered your question.” He glanced outside the tall window. New York was wearing its gray flannel sky today, the surly town of finance. “You asked why Aries wanted to make Sleep of the Innocent. People assume it’s a kind of apologia, and I suppose some will think it’s a weird form of community service, that the rapist in the play is a metaphorical equivalent of what he was accused of. That’s all crap.” Brian returned to look at Veronica. He was relieved to see she had dropped the flirtatiousness. She was squinting with concentration while she smiled slyly, another signature look, the scheming murderess in Passage Home, the desperate gambler in Hole Card, the brilliant scientist in Curie. “Aries knows, better than anyone I can think of, what it is to live a life haunted by the past. His mother, friends, family, were murdered by the Nazis. And yet he rebuilt that life, became a success as a Polish filmmaker and made a family out of the film community there. Then, because of Soviet censorship he had to flee that home, that family. And when he created a third life for himself as a director in Hollywood, that too was destroyed, first by a madman who murdered his wife and unborn baby and finally by his own act of rape. This play is about the destruction of three people’s lives by evil social forces: the doctor, a healer who is turned into a torturer; our brave heroine who is left dysfunctional by his torture; and her husband who is forever branded as a coward for betraying her. The movie is about trying to resolve the past for all three of these damaged people. At one time or another Aries has been each of them. He isn’t doing this story to reclaim his reputation or make excuses. Aries lived without a family from seven to thirteen. At thirteen, he got into film school. He boarded there, a child among adults, and there he learned how to act, how to write, how to operate a camera, how to direct. He grew up at last, up and out of the terror of his childhood, all the while surrounded by people who wanted the same thing: to make movies. They became his family. And they are still the only family he can rely on. He’s making this picture with us, with members of his family, to heal himself.”