The Wisdom of Perversity

by Rafael Yglesias

  Julie sat up, head straight above her spine, chin forward, neck long, shoulders relaxed. “An exclamation point, that’s what you are,” her ballet teacher used to say. Julie summoned her from long ago, that good girl who knew right from wrong, to tell the solemn boy of yesterday, “I’m not a child anymore. That excuse doesn’t work. And I don’t care if what I have to say is of any use in court. I won’t let Klein die unpunished. I won’t let Rydel bury what they are. I’m going to the press. I’ll tell Gary about it, about all of what happened to me, or as much of it as he needs to know, and he’ll figure out the best way to go public. And I’m not going to warn Jeff because I think he’s helping Klein and Rydel cover up—”

  “Of course he is,” Brian said, interrupting. “He tried to buy you off and now the victims are being bought off. It’s got to be Jeff who’s behind that strategy.”

  “I know!” Julie nodded, pleased they had figured that out. “But why? Why is he protecting them? He’s not . . .” She couldn’t say it. “You don’t think he’s also . . . ?”

  “Jeff? No! It’s his reputation. He’s the most beloved director in America. Or the most successful, anyway. If all this comes out, that he got his start thanks to a child molester, you know what they’ll do to him. Nothing on earth is more vicious than a disappointed American public.”

  Julie nodded. Yes, that would be unfair to Jeff, she thought, very unfair, but shielding Jeff isn’t worth ruining a single child’s life. She took her final, her greatest, leap of faith with Brian: “I’m going to tell what I know about Klein and Rydel, although it’s not evidence, although probably no one will care or do anything about it. I’m going to tell what happened so they can’t hide anymore.” Julie panted. She felt as if she had been running as fast as she could for as long as she could. “I’ll also be exposing you. So I came here today to figure out if you deserved a warning. If I’m wrong to trust you, and you go to Jeff, maybe you can mess me up, concoct some story about how I’m unstable, discredit me or whatever, but . . . well, I trust you. I didn’t think there was anyone I could trust. But I can. And it’s you.”

  Original Sin

  April 1966

  RICHARD KLEIN SHUT the door. He lifted the hook off Jeff’s lock, aiming it at the eye without letting go, as if figuring out how they worked together.

  “Don’t do that,” Brian said.

  With a mischievous smile, Klein let the hook dangle freely. He turned to give the boy his full attention. “Why not?”

  “You’re not supposed to lock Jeff’s door unless he’s here.”

  Klein pointed at his chest with a smirk. “I’m not?”

  “Nobody is. Jeff isn’t supposed to lock it without permission from his mom.”

  “Then what’s the point?” Klein laughed. He took a step toward Brian, who took a step back. Klein took three more steps forward and Brian retreated three. Klein noticed. Brian saw he noticed. “Why have a lock if you can’t use it to keep your mother out?” Klein chuckled.

  Brian shrugged. “She has to knock.”

  Klein nodded. “You’re very smart, aren’t you?” He veered away from Brian, seeming to be abruptly fascinated by Jeff’s bracketed system of shelves. He ran his fingers across the colorful spines of Landmark in History books. “Harriet was just telling me you’re very very smart. Actually she said you’re smarter than Jeff.” Klein smirked, as if they were sharing a joke. “I didn’t know Harriet thought it was possible for anyone to be smarter than her precious Jeff.”

  Brian shrugged. That he was smarter than his best friend was hardly news. He ought to go find Jeff, presumably in Harriet’s bedroom with all the others, but he didn’t. He wasn’t in danger. Everyone was just a few feet away. The door was unlocked. Still, he wished Jeff would return.

  Klein turned, facing the shelves, his wandering eyes dropping down a level to a deeper shelf where Jeff had stowed the portable tape recorder. Klein’s hand hovered above the machine for a moment before he depressed the Play button. The large plastic reels jerked to life, the lax tape tightening to begin their journey through the heads.

  “Don’t!” Brian raced over to shut off the recorder before Klein could hear a syllable of the secret recording.

  Klein’s hand closed around the back of Brian’s neck. He twisted Brian’s head up, bringing the boy’s abashed face close to his delighted one. “What a reaction!” He put his index finger on the bridge of Brian’s nose. With insinuating gentleness, he trailed slowly down to the tip while he said in a teasing lilt, “Have you boys been doing something naughty with my present?”

  Klein’s Old Spice aftershave enveloped Brian. Brian squirmed against the hand on his neck. Klein held on by slightly emphasizing his grip, as if it were a leash. He reached across Brian’s body with his free hand, threatening to press the Play button. While doing that he locked his forearm around Brian’s chest and shifted his feet to stand directly behind him, pressing tight against Brian.

  Brian’s body wanted to free itself. It could have. Klein’s grip on his neck felt firm, not imprisoning, but Brian was preoccupied by the urgent need to stop Klein’s other hand from turning on the tape. He grabbed at the adult’s chubby fingers with his skinny, smaller ones, tugging on the knuckles, trying to lift them clear of the Play button.

  Klein could easily have won the struggle and turned on the machine. Instead, he splayed his fingers and captured Brian’s. Brian brought his other hand over as reinforcements. Klein matched the maneuver, letting go of Brian’s neck. He captured this new contestant by the wrist and pushed up tight against Brian’s back.

  Brian froze. He felt Klein’s Thing, stone hard and impossibly long, nestling into the groove of his spine. Klein leaned his chin on Brian’s head. His aftershave fell over Brian like a caul. Brian didn’t move. He could break free only by abandoning the recorder, but that wasn’t what held him there. He was unable to think. There was this amazing and appalling object that made nonsense out of everything. Klein’s voice whispered, suffused with pleasure, “What have you bad boys been up to?”

  “Nothing,” Brian mumbled.

  Klein covered the back of Brian’s hands with his own and moved them away from the tape recorder to Brian’s Levi’s. He was a skinny eight-year-old. The gap between skin and waist easily accommodated the double thickness of the quartet of hands that Klein forced, his fingers wiggling, digging below for It.

  For the second time in his life, Brian’s body reacted in an astonishing way to being touched. On this occasion, there was confusion in the overwhelming sensation, confusion about whose fingers were teasing It. He was touched and touching. Richard Klein no longer existed and Richard Klein was all that existed. There was tremendous heat pulsing in his chest, his belly, throughout his groin. His mind shut off. The world was his body’s remarkable reaction to those twenty fingers, irrevocably altering his understanding of what the universe could offer.

  He felt a whoosh of air from the direction of the door as it opened. Klein’s head twisted to look. Brian jerked to get away. In that moment, he learned two lessons. First, his body, although hesitant to fight to free itself, was instantly willing to fight not to be discovered. Second, Klein easily held him in place, destroying the illusion that he could always escape. Klein spoke in the direction of the door, voice husky: “Hi, Jeff.”

  Brian opened his eyes. He hadn’t realized until then he had shut them. He violently tried to pull his hands out of his Jockey shorts and Levi’s, but they were stopped by the obstruction of Klein’s forearms at his waist. Klein’s fingers remained. He continued to stroke Brian’s Thing, which felt so hard and jumpy he worried it would break off.

  “Come in, Jeffrey,” Klein whispered. “Shut the door.”

  Brian expected horror and disgust from Jeff. The only secret he had ever kept from his best friend was exploded.

  Jeff, head down, solemnly shut the door.

  Klein took a firm hold on Brian’s Thing, fat hands enveloping It, as if he were taking ownership. He whispered to
Jeff, “Lock the door.”

  Jeff put the hook in the eye. He spoke to the floorboards. “Mom wants us to be with everybody.”

  “Come here.” Klein’s breathy voice was hardly audible, but it was infused with command. Eyes averted, Jeff obediently moved toward the awkward embrace of adult and child. Klein roughly removed his right hand from Brian’s jeans; the left remained anchored there. With Klein’s withdrawal, Brian’s hands exited gladly, but then they did nothing with their freedom, hanging limply. He watched as Klein took possession of Jeff’s elbow, dumbfounded that his friend did not protest. Klein stepped sideways, one hand in Brian’s pants, the other towing Jeff, forcing them into a clumsy group walk to the twin bed against the wall, a maneuver as silly as anything out of The Three Stooges, only it wasn’t funny.

  Brian tried to meet Jeff’s eyes. They remained downcast. He’s not happy about this either, Brian realized, and couldn’t understand why he obeyed. This wasn’t the whiny, argumentative Jeff he knew. Brian counted on Jeff to resist grown-up craziness on his behalf, especially from members of Jeff’s family.

  Klein sat on the bed, pulling Brian down beside him on his left, tugging Jeff down with his other hand to lie on his right side. Out of the corner of his eye, Brian saw Klein reach into Jeff’s Levi’s. Brian looked away, to the windows. Framed by the city’s sky he saw the top floors of their public school. They were double height to accommodate the gym and its glistening wood floor. He thought: I’m not going to think.

  “I know you boys play with each other,” Klein informed them. “You like doing this,” he said, accompanied by the clink of Jeff’s belt buckle being released.

  “Don’t take them off,” Jeff pleaded.

  “The door’s locked,” Klein answered in a soothing tone. “You boys like doing this. All boys like playing with themselves. When you have sleepovers, you like playing with each other, don’t you?” Klein stopped stroking Brian. He pulled his hand out of Brian’s jeans. The relief—and the confusion that this relief was accompanied by a loss of pleasure—was short-lived. Klein flicked opened Brian’s waist button, pulling one side down, unzipping him. His white Jockeys and the lump of It were exposed. He looked away to the school’s roof.

  Klein gripped Brian’s right wrist, pulling it toward Jeff.

  This time Brian resisted. He jerked violently, sure his hand would come free. But Klein didn’t give an inch. He tugged harder, painfully forcing Brian’s fingers at Jeff’s opened pants. Brian’s eyes went to the struggle. His friend’s white Jockeys were pulled halfway down. The head of his Thing was sticking halfway out, smooth and very swollen, looking too large for its own good. Above his captured hand, Brian saw Klein’s other hand towing Jeff’s fingers toward the lump in Brian’s underpants. Lying between them, Klein’s ridiculously big Thing was making a tent of his gray slacks.

  If Brian had known the word grotesque, that’s how he would have thought of the scene, everything distorted like a comic book’s drawings. For the first time since Jeff came in, their eyes met. Jeff’s eyes looked as if they were covered by cellophane: dimmed and sad.

  Brian stopped resisting. Klein placed the palm of Brian’s hand onto Jeff’s Thing, half on cotton, half swollen flesh. He was surprised that It felt like regular skin. Klein pushed Jeff’s fingers under the elastic to touch Brian’s. The boys didn’t move their hands.

  “Rub like this.” Klein put his one hand on top of each of theirs, forcing their hands to rub each other’s Things back and forth a few times. Then he released them, Klein’s hands burrowing underneath his own belt, inside his tent, frantically jerking the pole up into the fabric in a way that looked like it must hurt.

  Again Brian’s eyes met Jeff’s cellophane-covered eyes, a stranger he didn’t want to know. He removed his hand from Jeff’s Thing, not caring what Klein would do.

  Jeff’s hand also departed from Brian’s body and he was quickly on his feet, zipping his pants, fastening his belt. “Mom’s calling,” he said, a preposterous lie. The only sound was the friction of Klein’s hands moving furiously underneath his slacks. Otherwise the silence in the room was profound, the silence of places Brian had not yet been: gazing at the lifeless body of a beloved, the echo of a lost illusion, the tinnitus of betrayal.

  Jeff crossed to the door.

  “Don’t go,” Klein commanded in a low voice.

  Jeff halted. He kept his back to them, head bowed, shoulders slumped.

  Klein’s chubby hands reappeared. He leaned over Brian, tugging at his underpants, his aftershave rolling in like a fog. Brian pressed his ass down on the bed as hard as he could to prevent Klein from lowering his Jockeys. Klein pulled the front elastic band away with his left hand, stretching the material to its limits, while his right showed Brian a part of Brian he no longer recognized: once soft, now swollen; once wrinkled, now smooth; once shriveled, now long. He was mesmerized by the sight of the transformation. He had felt Its stiffness once before in the NBC bathroom but not seen it. That day Brian had kept his eyes up the entire time, looking at his face in the mirror. Now Klein displayed It thoroughly, cradled in the warm hollow of his hand while he whispered compliments, “Yours is very long for a little boy. And your stomach is so flat, so soft. I like how your belly button goes in. And I can see your hip bones!” He touched the peak of one. “And I like that you have no hair,” he said, running the back of his hand lightly over the boy’s concave stomach. Klein closed his fingers around Brian’s Thing and began to stroke it roughly. That the pumping felt very painful and also very good was stupefying. Brian stared at his body, the features Klein had pointed out, as if he had never seen them before. He hadn’t, this way, and forever more he would see himself through his molester’s eyes.

  “Turn around, Jeff,” Klein said. “Look how excited Brian is.”

  “Jeff! Where are you?” Harriet’s screech penetrated the door. Klein’s hands released him. Jeff pressed against the door as if to barricade it. Brian stopped breathing. “Dick! Are you with the boys? Bring them here!” Brian realized she hadn’t moved from her bedroom.

  Jeff pleaded in a whisper, “We have to go.” Then he shouted. “COMING MA.” He fumbled with the hook and eye to undo it.

  Klein released Brian, standing up and moving fast despite the bulge in his slacks. He paused to button his jacket, using the fabric to cover his Thing’s shape. He followed Jeff out.

  Brian had the most trouble repairing himself. While zipping up he was distressed that this time, unlike in the bathroom, the manifestation of his excitement wasn’t subsiding once Klein let go. Was he permanently damaged? Would everyone know just by looking at his Levi’s?

  He pushed his swollen Thing to the side. He punched It. He tried to walk nonchalantly while looking down to see if It was visible. He tried to convince himself It could look like a Swiss Army knife in his pocket—only he knew the position at his groin was hopelessly wrong. He paused outside Harriet’s bedroom door, squeezing the bulge through the denim, hoping to compress It down to unobtrusive utility. As he strained to squash It, he sensed someone coming out of the room and managed to get his hand away only a second before Julie’s solemn face appeared.

  “Hi, Brian,” she said with a chime of delight, smiling in a wonderfully friendly way. She had a tiny beauty mark below her right eye at the point where her cheekbone appeared. It was interesting. And there was another one directly beneath her left eye. “There you are! Everyone was wondering.” She twisted toward Harriet’s door. Brian’s eyes roved over her long raven hair, cascading down her red sweater. “He’s here!” She turned back. “I’m making tea for Aunt Harriet. Want to help me?”

  He nodded. Recent events made him wish to be a mute from now on. He followed her past the open door of Harriet’s room, which was experiencing a rush hour of unprecedented proportions. Noah was perched on the bed next to Harriet, his legs crossed while peering intently at a Superboy comic. The Mark brothers, Saul and Hy, were seated in folding chairs arranged beside the invalid, squeezed into
the narrow passage between dresser and bed. Richard Klein was occupying the most comfortable seat, the wing chair on the far side of the bed, in the corner, in front of heavily draped windows. He was angled away from a direct view of the invalid, favoring another of Klein’s gifts, the RCA television console, its curved glass screen currently a dormant gray. Jeff sat on the floor near his father, back propped against the closet door, as far from Klein as was possible in his mother’s cramped bedroom.

  As Brian passed the open doorway he was acknowledged by Saul’s sad beagle face: watery eyes peering from above dark half-moons, permanently tattooed by the insufficient sleep he was granted as a partner in a failing business and as occupant of a queen-size bed with lesser rights to its expanse than his wife. “Hi, Bri.” He raised a hand in greeting. He rarely had much to say to Brian but he always seemed glad to see him.

  Brian nodded, hurrying down the hall after Julie’s white legs, flashing ahead of him through the dark foyer, the almost never used dining room, and on into the kitchen. She walked with her head held high. He was fascinated by the graceful flutter of her long black hair against her straight back. He felt safe as long as he was with her. Or safer.

  The kitchen was a long galley with dark green cabinets, lit by a circular fluorescent fixture that gave off a sickly yellow light. “Do you want tea?” she asked while filling a kettle. Brian shook his head. He sat at the Formica table by the window where he and Jeff would savor Nestlé instant hot chocolates in the winter, egg cream sodas in summer. The window looked onto the building’s interior courtyard.