The Wisdom of Perversity

by Rafael Yglesias

  As he approached, he heard a soft slapping of water. His mother must be in the tub, soaking, as she liked to when tired, or upset at his father for staying out very late, sometimes so late he slept over at an actor friend’s apartment. Brian knocked.

  “Oh, I’m so glad you came back, honey. Come in. It’s open,” Rose said in a lilting voice. Years later, when an adult Brian thought back on the many mysteries of this day, he realized she reserved that singsong for her husband.

  Brian entered. His mother lay in a tub of clear water, wrinkled toes in the air, pubic hair afloat, as if levitating off her white belly. “Mom,” he leaned on the glass doorknob while staring at the curious sight of the black patch of hair swaying in the water. “When you get out, could you make me a grilled cheese sandwich?”

  No answer was forthcoming. Brian raised his eyes to meet his mother’s. They were wide with alarm. Her hands were on either side of the tub’s rim, as if she were about to push off to rise, but she didn’t move, didn’t appear to draw a breath. “You okay, Mom?” Brian asked. Her eyes were red rimmed and swollen.

  “Uh . . .” His mother glanced at the towel rack. Instead of reaching for one, as Brian expected, she lowered herself as much as she could, nipples sinking below the clear water’s surface. Periscopes down, Brian thought to himself. She met his eyes, then immediately looked away. “Go to the kitchen while I’ll dry off, and I’ll come make you lunch.”

  “Can I have grilled cheese?” Brian persisted, to make sure she understood that he definitely wanted grilled cheese and not tuna fish.

  “What?” Her hands continued to grip the porcelain rim as if she were about to boost herself up. But she made no other move to rise; the opposite, in fact, slipping lower, water up to her chin, knees rising to put her back flat, drowning the floating black forest.

  “I want grilled cheese. Do we have grilled cheese?”

  “I—don’t—know,” she stammered. “Why don’t you look in the refrigerator and see?” She nodded at the door.

  That was the moment he understood. A faint message that she had been transmitting since he entered the bathroom was finally received. He wasn’t supposed to see her naked. Worse, he was supposed to know he wasn’t allowed to see her naked. Lingering at the door, studying her body was wrong. Now that he understood how important it was for him to get out of there, he was too overwhelmed to leave. He wanted to explain that he hadn’t meant any harm. “Go,” she ordered.

  In the kitchen, he tried to make amends for his error. He took out the tin-foil-wrapped American cheese, removed the butter from its tray, searched in the lower cabinet for the small frying pan she used to grill sandwiches, and set a plate beside the stove. He prayed she wouldn’t say anything about his mistake.

  Could he distract her by telling her that Harriet had lied to her about being sick? No, stupid. The only way he could know Harriet had lied was because of the secret taping. Besides, he wasn’t sure he wanted his mother to have this latest information on Harriet. Harriet was so nutty Rose might forbid him from playing with Jeff at all.

  Brian sat down to wait at the white Formica kitchen table. Almost immediately he got up, worried if he was doing nothing when she entered the kitchen that might invite a lecture. He spied one of his Superman comics, bought and read yesterday. Not a good one. It featured Mxyzptlk, a villain Brian didn’t enjoy, a whimsical imp who used magic to confound the Man of Steel, creating more dangerous mischief than actual harm. Brian preferred his bad guys to be made of sterner stuff. He sat at the table and opened it, pages high to cover his face.

  Rose appeared in a long red robe, hair damp. She silently surveyed the kitchen. “You put out everything I need,” she noted with surprise. “Thank you.” Brian kept his eyes on a panel depicting a befuddled Superman flying upside down, cape flopped over his face, blind to the fact that was about to collide with a plane. He heard crinkling of tin foil, whoosh of a gas burner, sizzle of butter hitting the skillet. The yummy odor of cheese cooking reached him as his mother said, “I thought you were having lunch with Jeff.”

  “He went out,” Brian said. He didn’t want to talk about that either. Why didn’t you want to go to lunch? Because of Mr. Klein. Why? Don’t you like him? “Dad went out?” he asked.

  “Yes. To yet another reading in Greenwich Village,” she emphasized the location as if it were damning. “Jeff went out for lunch with Harriet?”

  Brian shook his head.

  “With his cousins?”

  “Yeah. That smells good, Mom. You make the best grilled cheese sandwich on earth.”

  The compliment wasn’t enough to detour her. “Didn’t they invite you?”

  Brian had an answer ready. “They were going to the deli for franks. I wanted a grilled cheese sandwich.” He dropped the disappointing Superman comic, got up, and stood beside his mother to observe her virtuoso technique. “I wanted to have your grilled cheese sandwich.” He rested his head against the soft shoulder of her robe.

  She tensed. “But Jeff wanted you to go to lunch?” She shifted, shoulder slipping away.

  Brian took the hint and straightened. “He didn’t care, Mom.”

  “Today’s his birthday, right?”

  “Not really. Monday is his birthday.”

  One side was browned, the cheese oozing, sticking to the pan. Rose flipped the sandwich and pressed it flush with the spatula, forming stripes on the bread. “Aren’t Harriet and Saul having a party for Jeff today?”

  “They’re not having a party, Mom.”

  “You know what I mean. His cousins from Riverdale are there. And isn’t that cousin of Harriet’s, that nice man who took you to NBC, isn’t he coming over?” She turned to him, spatula up, a fencer ready to spar. He lowered his eyes to the bubbling cheese. “That’s what Harriet told me. We were talking on the phone less than an hour ago and she told me they were inviting you to stay for a special dinner to celebrate Jeff’s birthday with all his family. Didn’t Jeff invite you?”

  He hadn’t. But he probably just assumed. Brian’s weekend dates often lasted through dinner. “I don’t know,” he said.

  Rose pressed: “Harriet told me he invited you.”

  Brian returned to the table and shielded his face behind the inferior Superman comic. “Probably,” he mumbled.

  There was a long silence broken only by the sizzling pan. Brian considered asking her to take his temperature. If she looked away while the thermometer was in his mouth he could hold it under his tensor lamp; Jeff claimed that had worked for him once. She wouldn’t suspect a faked illness on a Sunday. The plan seemed sound. He thought it through again, mostly just for the pleasure of contemplation. He didn’t have the nerve to try.

  She turned off the stove. Her robe appeared at the periphery of the comic book. He was presented with an evenly browned sandwich, just like the picture on the Broadway Diner menu. He took a bite, tongue pressing the mix of warm soft cheese and crunchy toast against the solid roof of his mouth.

  “You know, honey,” his mother said as she ran a hand through his hair, “you shouldn’t come into the bathroom while I’m using it.”

  Brian nodded. He had no desire to make the accurate defense that he had been invited into the bathroom.

  She kissed him on top of the head, then sat in the chair opposite, watching as he took another bite. “Mmm,” he said. “This is good.”

  “Brian,” she said in an ominous tone and waited.

  What is it now? “Yeah . . . ?”

  “Jeff is your best friend,” she pointed out. “He may not have said anything, but this is a special day for him, the day they’re really celebrating his birthday. So after you finish your sandwich I think you should go back upstairs. In fact, I have to visit Aunt Helen this afternoon. I also don’t know when your father will get back so this would be a good night for you to have a sleepover with Jeff.”

  “But I have school tomorrow.”

  “So? You’ll come downstairs when you wake up. I’ll give you breakfast. You�
�ll have plenty of time to get ready for school. You’re the one who’s always saying you should be allowed to sleep over on school nights.” He didn’t answer. She stroked a lock of his hair off his forehead. “What’s going on, honey? Did you have a fight with Jeff?”

  “No!” He was vehement. Fight with Jeff? Sometimes they argued about whether to pinch hit for Whitey Ford, or whether The Outer Limits was really scary, but they never really had a fight. Brian took another bite of cheese and toast, tongue cradling the soft and the crunchy. He could fake getting sick by sticking his finger down his throat. Jeff said that would make you throw up.

  Rose stood. She picked up the white phone mounted on the wall. “I’ll call Harriet,” she said as she dialed, “and arrange it.”

  Unfortunately Brian hated throwing up. He would go. And he would sleep over. Anyway, the sleepover wouldn’t be a problem; by nighttime, Klein would be gone. Brian resumed reading the inferior Superman comic. The citizens of Metropolis laughed at the Man of Steel as he walked down the street with his famous uniform on backward, tripping over his cape. That was stupid. It made no sense. People wouldn’t laugh at Superman no matter how confused he got.

  Childhood’s End

  February 2008

  FINISHED WITH HER, Gary rolled onto his back, and asked, “Why?”

  “Why what?” Julie looked away from her horrified fascination with the beach ball of his belly, up to the plaster ceiling, brilliantly illuminated by the afternoon sun. She noticed cracks, flaking, and a dark spot where a leak from somewhere had penetrated before their grumpy superintendent stopped it. We have to repaint. When can we do that? Everything will have to be packed up.

  “Why did you start smoking?” Gary asked.

  She didn’t want to add another charge to Gary’s indictment of Zack as criminally adolescent. “I don’t really know. Just happened.” She yanked the top sheet up to cover her breasts, flattened by gravity and aging. They had been a constant focus of anxiety throughout life: when they would appear, then their size, then nurturing, then death. The latter was the most time-consuming anxiety: probing, mammograms, confusing articles in the Science section of the Times, the disappearance of one woman she knew fairly well from ten years of morning drop-offs at school. Breasts: start to finish a worry.

  Gary groaned as he made the effort to rise from the bed. She looked at his back’s expanse of pale flesh, dotted by three enormous moles that were a yearly dermatological concern. We are repulsive creatures lumbering to our deaths. “You don’t know. How can you not know what the impulse was?” He reached for his pants. He wondered out loud, “Do I have to take a shower?” then returned to his interrogation. “Don’t you think it has something to do with me quitting?”

  “Definitely not. Everything I do doesn’t have to do with you, Gary. It’s just that at work I see all the young people on their breaks smoking outside and talking together so intensely. They all looked so . . . I don’t know . . .”

  “Young?” Gary offered, looking out the window at the Hudson, naked but for the draped fig leaf of his relaxed-fit corduroys. “Why should I quit if you’re smoking?”

  “I’m stopping,” she said firmly.

  “You’d better. Or I’m starting again.” He stared as sternly as he could from above the essential cheerfulness of his chubby cheeks and the essential neediness of his brown eyes. “I mean it.”

  “I’m quitting,” she promised, and meant it.

  He considered that for a long moment, then commented, “Although the sex was good,” before ducking into the bathroom.

  She lay there, relaxed and happy to feel cool air on her still warmed skin, glad to be free of clothing, listening to the faint waterfall of Gary’s shower. She wished for summer: to bake in the sun with eyes shut, head encased by heat and light, ocean roaring, worries silenced. The beach. Is that where Cousin Jeff lives? Malibu? The Colony she had read about? He was so rich he probably owned houses in all the major cities. But whom did he have sex with?

  With his wife, she reminded herself. Jeff had a wife and four children, although not all with that wife. Four children. It amazed her that a boy who was so much a child could evolve into a parent. She got up, put on her robe and slippers waiting for the bathroom to be free. In the meantime she could clean.

  She wandered into Zack’s room, deciding that the pile of books, magazines and video game cases could no longer wait for that hoped for day when Zack would spontaneously neaten them. Why worry about Jeff’s sex life? He was a big Hollywood success. They got to fuck whoever they wanted.

  Zack’s books and papers were in an ungovernable pile on his Ikea desk. She dug into it. Did he know his chemistry book was under a mound of Rolling Stone magazines, a fourteenth-birthday subscription she had renewed even though he claimed not to read them, and . . . My God, a copy of Variety! Zack’s love affair with acting must be more than a high school romance. Still it shouldn’t be taken seriously, she decided. Didn’t every teenager dream of becoming a movie star?

  Although in Zack’s case she judged the ambition made sense. He was handsome. Take your breath away handsome. God had cherry-picked otherwise ordinary features of hers and Gary’s and rearranged them into a flawless miracle of beauty and strength, the soulful face of a tragic Prince. He had Gary’s sturdy bones, her lean, limber flesh. And he had his father’s voice: a resonant, confident instrument that invited you to listen uncritically. She suspected her husband’s success as a legal analyst could be credited more to a felicitous stringing of vocal chords than Columbia Law School.

  She thoughtlessly, she later told herself, removed an unlined black bound sketchbook from the bottom of the pile, opening it casually (not realizing she was invading his privacy, she would have sworn) scanning a page of black ink produced by Zack’s compact and surprisingly—given the condition of his room—neat handwriting. She saw the word—Cunt—and forgot every other concern but the rest of the sentence.

  S.’s Cunt—Zack had capitalized the word, as if it were a proper noun, a personality to reckon with—smelled. Not like V’s. V’s didn’t stink. I thought I was going to gag, but S. was so wet, I took a deep breath through my mouth and got to work. After a minute I got used to her stink. Even got to kinda like it. I’m getting good with my tongue because she came. Came hard. No faking. Couldn’t be faking. She arched her back, pushed her Cunt up at me like a bitch in heat and grabbed my hair. She pulled so hard I thought I was gonna end up as bald as Dad.

  When she discovered Zack’s cigarettes, she had staggered until she was forced to sit on his bed to avoid fainting. This time she remained on her feet. Seventy-two hours had made her impervious to the shock of her son’s capacity for depravity; a teenager who ruined his lungs was capable of any degradation. She wasted no time on imagined alibis, this was unmistakably her baby boy’s hand, the same tight letters he used to write from summer camp. Dear Mom & Dad. Last night was Campfire. Uncle Tom told a really really scary Ghost story. I toasted lots of marshmallows. Yum. Miss you, Zack.

  She flipped to another page. More despicable writing: F. gave me head. Her teeth were a little rough on my Helmet, but she’s pretty good. Better than S. She swallowed all of it . . . Was this a grotesque joke? The girls Zack knew were bright, well educated, choking with self-esteem. Maybe this was Zack’s attempt at pornographic fiction? She read on in a hurry, hearing Gary had shut off the shower. Afterward, she asked if I liked her. So pathetic. Brandon—no, this was not fiction, Brandon was his closest male friend—says I should try to get her to take it in the ass. That’s too gross. But it’s great how she’ll do anything to please me. I am truly evil.”

  “Honey!” Gary called. She shoved the notebook back under the chemistry text. I am truly evil, she echoed, hustling out of her son’s room, down the narrow hall to the kitchen where Gary entered from the other side dressed in his favorite traveling outfit—a safari shirt and L.L. Bean cargo pants whose endless pockets he filled with an iPhone, a charger, earphones, a reporter’s notebook, two pen
s, and lots of gum. “Here you are,” he said, sealing the flap over his iPhone with the intense concentration of a toddler. “Where did you go?”

  I am truly evil were the only words in her head, so she kept mum.

  “Honey, the reason I came home is to make sure you get ahold of Cousin Jeff today. My source in the DA’s office says they’re getting formal statements today from other witnesses. And guess what: they may indict Klein too. Probably not for a few days, but Paula”—Gary was referring to the producer of American Justice—“wants me at the scene to answer questions remotely from outside the gates of Rydel’s mansion, so if I’m begging off this story I have to do it tonight. She’s booked me into the Dis-Comfort Inn in East Hampton. He’s out on bail and supposedly Klein is with him, but that’s not confirmed. I thought about asking Bill and Sue if I could use their place, but—I don’t know—then I’d have to feed them tidbits and where the fuck do I stand, right? Can I cover this or not?” The afterglow of sex had dimmed; he was back to his usual state of anxiety, competitiveness, nagging, fault finding. “You gotta get some clarity about this situation with your cousin Jeff for me by tonight. So, please, please—”

  “Maybe you should just tell Paula you can’t cover this story,” Julie said. They don’t need my two cents, she thought. No one needs to know about me.

  “What?” Gary put his hands on the hips of his ballooning cargo pants, astounded. “Why would I do that? How do we know Jeff will give a shit whether I write about it? And if he does, as you very astutely pointed out to me, shouldn’t we get something out of it? Jesus, I’m giving up a great story that I have an original angle on. This is lots of columns, lot of TV appearances, maybe a book, maybe a raise.” He stared, in a stubborn pose, indicating he would wait for an answer until hell froze over.

  There was no point in trying to debate Gary. She confessed: “I called him. I spoke to Jeff.”