Brian spoke in a deliberately measured monotone, to keep mockery at bay. “Dad, you’re forty years older than Veronica, not thirty.”
“Don’t be silly. Makeup, toupee, and Spanx”—Danny sucked in his cheeks and presumably his Guinness stomach, although it didn’t shrink an inch—“and I won’t look a day over fifty-five.”
Brian was enraged. He knew that to be an insane reaction. He couldn’t wait to be able to laugh about this, probably by telling the story to Pamela Wright, his cattiest and closest friend in the business. Pamela was a gifted and unusually modest actress who, after a good laugh, would console him by saying, “Darling, please forgive your father. He can’t help himself. He’s a toddler. Like all of us actors, he’s just a child who wants to play.”
“Dad . . .” Brian paused to inject some gentleness into his crabby tone. “We can’t get financing for the movie unless we have an international movie star playing opposite Veronica. Presales to foreign markets, cable, that kind of thing—we have to have a big male star in that part.”
Danny raised an eyebrow. He could lift the right one a full two inches while keeping the left down. He used this mannerism when cast in one of his small off-off-Broadway roles, usually playing an officious bureaucrat or a shocked grandparent. “I thought when you got Veronica to sign the contract last week that meant you had all the financing.”
Brian was ready for this; in fact he had led Danny to believe he had uncovered an inconsistency in order to refute it and end this humiliating discussion. “Because with Veronica in hand, the financiers assume we’ll have no problem getting a big star. All the biggies want to play opposite her. If, by some miracle, we don’t get George Clooney or Matt Damon or the like, then you’re right, we’ll lose our financing.”
Danny goggled. He retracted his double chin, jaw hanging open, rheumy eyes opening wide, brows shooting up—a parody of a horror double take. This was his favorite mannerism, in life and on stage: Danny Moran astonished. “Well . . .” he sputtered, “I, for one, don’t think Clooney or Matt Damon are up to the demands of this part. They’ll ruin your script.”
Brian’s iPhone buzzed in his jeans pocket. Brian’s heart skipped: Jeff had thought better of dodging him. “I’ll take this in the other room, Dad,” he said as he hurried out toward the kitchen, the room farthest away from Danny’s nosiness.
When he whispered hello, “Brian,” he heard Julie say his name with alarm in her voice. Hers was part of a chorus coming through the earpiece of his iPhone. He heard an urgent American news broadcast in the background, that peculiar combination of resonant, measured voices speaking with the hurried staccato emphasis of someone on the verge of hysteria. “Have you heard?” she asked.
“What happened?”
“They’re dropping the charges against Rydel! It took even Gary by surprise that they’re just dropping them altogether. No psychiatric supervision, nothing. All the witnesses, they . . . I can’t think of the word, damn it! They took everything back.”
“They recanted,” he said.
“Right! And there’s nothing about Klein. Not even that there were witnesses against him. Turn on your TV . . . Rydel’s lawyer is reading a statement. He’s resigning from the Huck Finn board, which doesn’t make sense if he’s innocent. There! You can see Sam. Turn on your TV.”
“I can’t right now.”
“Why can’t you turn on your TV?”
“My father lives with me, remember?” he said, irritated.
Danny called from the study, “Bri! Are you on the phone? Who is it?”
“My agent,” Brian called out.
“How’s your father? Feeling better?”
“Not good. He’s really not breathing right and he can’t stay steady on his feet. My guess is that second-rate cardiologist in SAG’s network doesn’t know his ass from his aorta—why am I talking about this? What does Gary say? Have you told him yet?”
“No! I haven’t even seen him since you and I talked three hours ago. He called on his cell while running to the press conference. This is Jeff, right? He’s got to be part of this cover-up, right?”
“I dunno. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. I hope not. He doesn’t have to be.”
“Right.” Julie was quick to agree. “Rydel and Klein are rich. They don’t need Jeff’s help buying off those kids.”
“Right. But—” Brian cut himself off.
“But . . . ?”
“Klein must know that if Jeff spoke up he can’t get away with a whitewash. Statute of limitations or no, if Jeff talked the world would listen.”
“So why won’t Jeff talk? I was thinking about what you said, you know America turning on him. Really? Just because Klein paid for him to go to film school? Or do you mean ’cause Jeff was molested too? They’d hate him for that? Really?”
Brian sighed. He knew and he didn’t know. He was sure and couldn’t be. But he was sure. Basically.
“You know why,” she said. “Please tell me. Don’t keep secrets from me. You don’t have to. I swear. You don’t have to keep secrets from me.”
Brian couldn’t show his cards to this lovely, kind woman who was hopelessly in over her head. Too much was at stake to trust someone this decent. “There might be more to it. I can’t talk about it on the phone right now.”
“Can we talk later tonight? Gary’s coming back from East Hampton. I’ll tell him over dinner what I’m going to do, what I hope you and I will do together, and then I’ll try to call you. How late can I call you? It means so much to me to be able to talk about all this with you.”
“For me too, Julie.” He felt strange about her tone, however. There was ardor there, implying more than talk was promised.
“Bri!” a hoarse Danny called from study.
“One minute, Dad! Julie, I have to go. And remember, the first step is for you to tell your husband.”
“But can I? Can I really do it, Brian?” she asked earnestly. “If I can’t tell my own husband, how am I going to tell the world? God, I’m such a coward. I know you said I’m not. But I am. All my life I’ve been a coward. Do you think I can be brave, Brian?”
Her tone was so utterly sincere Brian laughed. He cut it off. “Actually, Julie, I don’t think the reason you’re not telling Gary is cowardice.”
“You don’t! Wow.” She was delighted. “What is it?”
“You don’t want to give up your secret because your secret is what makes you superior to Gary. He’s the big dope who doesn’t know what’s going on in his own life. He thinks he’s the star of the marriage, pushing you around, but really it’s you who know it all. You don’t want to tell him because then you’re merely equals: he’s got problems, you’ve got problems, you’re both shmendreks trying to figure it all out.” He was proud of this speech. He waited for her to thank him, hang up and rush off into the movie climax of her life, boldly telling Gary her secret and resolving all the story problems.
She wasn’t impressed. “Honestly, Brian, keeping this secret doesn’t make me feel superior to Gary. I feel stupid and cowardly. I kept it secret all these years because Gary can’t really understand. And because he’d tell his friends about me.”
“Tell his friends about you?” Brian was surprised. “Why?”
“He just would. Eventually he’d tell them, to get sympathy or just to be a little more interesting to everybody.”
Brian was accustomed to disagreeing with people’s explanations of themselves. Typically he would listen to a speech like Julie’s and discover self-delusion or self-aggrandizement or sentimentality or some other understandable yet corrosive agent in their self-regard. Julie struck him as essentially unexamined, a woman who had allowed too much of her life to go by without the sort of analytic filtration he valued so highly, the professional as well as self-directed self-study that he believed had saved his sanity during the tumultuous years of adolescence and raw youth. And yet his reflex was to trust her instinct, not his expensively acquired by-the-book psychology. After
all, like him, she was a scarred veteran of a nearly invisible trauma whose aftereffects had no true experts.
“Brian!” his father’s impatience had brewed into action. He tramped heavily down the hall. Brian worried every step Danny took might provoke a fatal strain on his faulty heart.
“I gotta go. Call me after you tell Gary. Bye.”
Danny appeared, leaned on the kitchen wall, skin ashen. “Was . . . that . . . Wallinski?” he gasped out.
“No. I told you. Just my agent. Sit down.” Brian pulled a Bentwood chair clear of his butcher-block table and urged his father onto it.
Meanwhile Danny gasped out, “Okay. I guess if you and Aries don’t have the balls to pull off the brilliant stroke of casting me as Veronica’s hubby, I’ll have to settle for the chief justice. Just two dull expositional scenes, but I can do something with them.”
Brian stared down at his father, not bothering to conceal his resentment at his father’s delusional grandiosity. “I’ll talk to Aries about it, Dad. But no promises. Even that part will be offered to stars. But there is a part I’m pretty sure I can get you. The court clerk. It’s a one-liner, but you’re in the background shots for two weeks, so that’s a pretty decent payday. Since Aries wants me there for the shoot, they’ll rent me a two-bedroom apartment in Paris. I’ll pay for your ticket over and back, so you’ll be a local hire and won’t cost the production much.”
Danny goggled again, a hammier version, adding a groan: “Court clerk! That’s practically being an extra!” The surprise and outrage were fake. One-line parts were the only kind Brian had been able to arrange for Danny on his other movies, and his father had been grateful to get them. Up close, his father’s goggling emphasized the wrinkled skin of his forehead, damp and translucent, and showed off a turkey neck that with his recent weight loss had replaced his double chin. He’s ill, Brian scolded himself. Cut him some slack.
“But why won’t you pitch me to Aries as the chief justice?”
“I said I would talk to Aries about it.”
“Bri, for once just be straight with me: you don’t think I’m good enough.”
He wanted to kick his father. Instead he turned his back on him. Calm down, he urged himself. His mouth was dry, lips sticking to his teeth. He pictured the Red Head waiting patiently while his manicured nails reached for a tender pink nipple.
Jesus, isn’t the Paxil working anymore? He looked out the kitchen window facing the backyard of a nineteenth-century townhouse with a plaque that claimed Edgar Allan Poe had lived there. Two years ago, an investment banker had gutted it. The neighborhood rumor was that he had poured twenty million into the renovation. From Brian’s daily observations, that was likely: the contractor had built a full swimming pool in the basement and two levels of gracious porches—the wood looked to be teak or something equally costly—jutting out over the elaborately landscaped garden. He focused on the denuded branches of a pair of cherry trees. Last spring their blossoms burst like floral fireworks.
He spoke but kept his back turned. “Dad, I think you’re perfectly capable of winning an Academy Award as the chief justice, but I have to talk to you about something else right now. There’s something very important I have to tell you. Immediately. It can’t wait.” Brian glanced at his father. Danny was mugging a question mark out of his expressive features so the last seat in the back row of the mezzanine could see he was in great suspense. It never failed to amaze Brian how clownish and over the top Danny was in real life. His father couldn’t even give a convincing performance as himself.
“Don’t be scared to tell me,” Danny said, filling the silence. “Is it AIDS? Are you HIV positive?”
That shoved Brian past caring whether he was going to upset his father. “Do you remember Jeff Mark’s older cousin? A middle-aged man, worked at NBC?”
Danny overacted recollection: hand on chin, eyebrows furrowed to a line, eyes blinking as if changing slides of memory until he found the right one. “Oh!” he exclaimed. “Executive at NBC who gave you a tour of the television studios? And he gave you a record album, didn’t he?” Brian nodded. “I remember,” Danny continued cheerfully, “because it was a very thoughtful gift. Irish folk songs, right? Pretty good memory for an old man, eh?”
Of course Danny remembered. His father had called Harriet after the album arrived to ask if this NBC vice president had anything to do with casting TV series. Years later, Brian had to explain to his shrink, but never to himself, why his father didn’t think it peculiar that a grown man had bothered to give a little boy who wasn’t a relative a gift designed to make a definite connection. Danny had certainly enjoyed Klein’s present. He played the LP right away, singing out of tune to the ditties. And when Harriet called, inviting Brian to accompany Jeff and Klein to a young people’s concert at the New York Philharmonic, Danny agreed without first asking Brian. Klein was a showbiz success; that was the only bona fide Danny Moran required to hand over his son.
The acceptance led to Brian’s being alone for ten minutes with Klein while Jeff was supposedly in the bathroom, before they went downstairs to get into a hired car. Klein sat on Jeff’s bed while he lowered Brian’s pants and put the boy’s little wrinkled penis in his mouth, where it swelled into a paradox of pleasure and terror: was he going bite It off?
Brian didn’t speak for a while. Danny decided to fill the silence with more recollections about those happy times: “You were a very charming, very talented boy. The NBC chappie must’ve picked up on your abilities right away. I remember that madwoman Harriet telling me he was very taken with you.”
“He molested me, Dad.” Brian met his father’s eyes briefly. He couldn’t hold them. The embarrassment he felt, at fifty years of age, overwhelmed as much as if he were eight. He hurried on, “Nothing horrendous. Just”—Brian gestured at his groin—“played . . .” Shame covered him like a hangman’s hood, forcing his eyes down. He stared at the narrow oak boards, gouged from use, darkened with age. “Anyway,” he said, breathing out, expelling the stupid embarrassment. “He molested me and Jeff, and I know of two others, a girl and a teenage boy, whom he apparently . . . I guess the teenager was his catamite. ”
“What?” Danny’s theatricality had fled in favor of a movie actor’s mumble. “I don’t understand. He had a lover? He was gay?”
“Catamite doesn’t mean that, Dad. It means a boy kept for unnatural purposes.”
“I know what catamite means,” his father said haughtily, a little of Broadway restored. “I’ve worked in the theater for fifty years. Some gay writers don’t use it pejoratively. They use it to mean an older man’s young male lover.”
“Richard Klein was a pedophile, Dad. He took charge of this teenager when he was much younger, a ten-year-old orphaned boy. Even as a fifteen-year-old he still looked very young. He had no beard at all, he was immature and . . . well, like a boy. Klein molested boys and girls. He didn’t care what gender they were. He was a pedophile. Maybe he was primarily a pedophile who liked boys, but that doesn’t make him gay. He wasn’t gay anymore than it would have made him heterosexual if he were only molesting girls and fucking a very young looking fifteen-year-old girl. He was a pedophile. He wanted to have sex with children. He was a pedophile!” The repetitions were angry and angrier, escalating to rage. At their crescendo, Brian was finally able to meet his father’s eyes, only now Danny refused the contact. It was his turn to gaze at the multimillionaire’s winter garden.
Brian waited for a response. When none seemed forthcoming, he told his father’s profile, “The teenager, the catamite, was named Sam Rydel. It’s the same guy who is all over the newspapers and TV, the man accused of sodomizing and raping all those disadvantaged boys at the charity camp he runs.”
“I don’t understand,” Danny mumbled. “I’m not following.” His eyes flitted about the room, landing everywhere but on Brian. “You mean, the catamite of this man who bothered . . .” Danny gestured at Brian before continuing in an irritated tone, “What did that NBC exec do?
Masturbate children, is that what we’re talking about?” He said children as if they were speaking of strangers.
“Yes. With Jeff and me and a girl, more or less, that’s what I witnessed Klein do. I don’t know how far he went with Jeff or others out of my sight. There was no penetration with me, if that’s what you’re asking. In fact, to finally answer your stupid suspicions, no man has put his dick in my ass or my mouth. I’m not gay, Dad. I wish I were. That would be a normal thing to be.” Brian knew he must be wounding his father. He wanted to, to flay him with the information. “I don’t know the extent of what Klein did with Rydel. But he had control of him physically, financially, and psychologically through all of his formative years and ever since, as far I can tell. So I’m sure it went much farther, horribly farther with Sam, and I assume Klein got Rydel to participate in molesting children with him, but that’s speculation.” Brian paused, then answered a skeptic: “But not very speculative. I had one hint of what young Sam’s life with Klein was like and I’ve read a lot about all this and it’s not surprising that Sam became a child molester himself because of his prolonged experiences with Klein and his emotional dependency on him. Lots of people like to think this kind of monstrous behavior is genetic. I don’t. I’m willing to keep an open mind about the existence of God or whether or not Joyce’s Ulysses is a great novel, but I have no doubt that one way or another child molesters are nurtured, not born.”
This drew Danny’s eyes his way. The fear there was not playacting. His mouth opened, presumably to ask a logical question about Brian. Brian had never married or had roommates. There had been putative girlfriends during his tumultuous adolescence and raw youth but only platonic friends since. Brian knew Danny thought he had settled the mystery of Brian’s sexuality when the old man had switched from saying “fags” to “gay” fifteen years ago; but this other appalling possibility was brand new.
The Wisdom of Perversity Page 22