The Wisdom of Perversity

by Rafael Yglesias

  “No, no, I didn’t mean you could have done anything.” He reached for her but gave up halfway and picked up his coffee instead. Was he scared to touch her now? Was she damaged goods? He said, “I just don’t understand what your parents were so busy doing. And Jeff! Jesus, I mean, he did it again in front of Jeff?”

  “No, not Jeff, who was a little boy, remember. You can’t expect him to have done anything about it. After the first time, only with Sam Rydel. Anyway, your grandmother and grandfather had a house full of people. He came Memorial Day, July 4, then Thanksgiving—”

  Zack interrupted. “So he turned Sam Rydel into a pervert,” he said with a kind of excitement at this discovery. “That’s why Rydel did the same thing to the Huck Finn kids.”

  She winced at his labeling, the pleasure he seemed to be taking in identifying a weak and damaged person. But was Rydel weak? Maybe becoming a monster is a sign of strength.

  “And why didn’t your mother and father suspect anything about this weird guy showing up?”

  “He wasn’t weird to them. He was a success.” She sighed. “People in those days didn’t think it was possible that an adult would do such things—”

  “WHY!” Zack half-shouted, incredulous. “After the Nazis? They didn’t think ordinary people could do horrible things? Why the fuck not!” He covered his mouth. “Sorry.”

  “They just didn’t, honey. Not in the suburbs. There were no Nazis in Riverdale.” She laughed helplessly, then sighed in despair. “Me too. I didn’t think it was something that happened to anybody else but me. And I felt it was up to me to deal with, that I had done something wrong, and I had to stop it. I made sure I never went to Aunt Harriet’s anymore, and after Thanksgiving I made sure to be at a friend’s house for the next holiday weekend barbecue. But then Klein showed up at the house with a fake dental emergency and finally I . . . I don’t know why, but finally I had the nerve to risk a scene. I threw a chair at him. A folding chair.” She laughed. It suddenly seemed absurd that having an object to hurl had inspired self-defense. “And I ran to my mother and I stuck myself to her like glue.”

  “But you still didn’t tell her?”

  “I never told her. I never told . . .”

  “Did you think she wouldn’t have believed you?”

  She sighed. “Zack, you have to understand, I thought it was shameful it had happened at all. I thought I had brought it . . .” She stopped, not for discretion. She was flooded by a vivid memory of being ambushed by Klein on Thanksgiving, on her way to obey Ma’s request she fetch two more seltzer spritzers from the delivery crate. He grabbed her ponytail in the pantry room off the attached garage, only one window, its shade drawn, the air stifling. He kicked the door shut behind them, turning her against the plaster wall. To this day, she could feel its coolness on the backs of her arms as Klein pressed up against her, a hand reaching down her puffy blouse to her flat eleven-year-old chest. Now in the coffee shop, a middle-aged woman with a grown son, she felt the male’s warm thumb and index finger frame her nipple and squeeze, very hard, an angry pinch, a mean, invasive, entirely unpleasant sensation only . . . only it seemed to bring her child’s breast to life, the first time she could remember feeling, for lack of a better word, sexy up there. Klein’s fingers had mapped how to please herself there and over the years, by extrapolation, all over. In midsentence, while Zack waited patiently for her to continue, this always dimly understood revelation emerged starkly, really an admission to herself: Klein had been her introduction to pleasure; his mean-spirited act of power had been her virginal introduction to lovemaking.

  “Mom, you don’t have to talk about this anymore, okay? I’m glad you told me, but . . .” He bowed his head penitently. “I’m sorry, I’m really sorry all that happened to you.”

  His pity melted her heart. To stop tears, she looked through the dirty window at Broadway in winter, an avenue of solitary pedestrians hunched against the February chill. Her eyes burned. She squeezed them dry. She had to impress him with this next point, dangerous though it was for their relationship. “What I’m trying to tell you . . .” She looked right at him, patted the back of his hand. “What I’m trying to tell you, Zack, is that the things people do when they’re young can last much longer and become something they can’t get rid of or forget so easily. Of course, you’re not a child. I was a child. But some of the girls you know may not be as grown up as you or they think. And what you do with them may last longer, much much longer, than you realize.” This wasn’t coming out right. She didn’t mean to scold or scare him about sex. That was her problem. She was ashamed and frightened. No one should feel that way.

  Zack didn’t like her comment either. He pulled his hand free, appalled. “I don’t do anything like that! Jesus, Mom, what makes you think I do anything—”

  “I’m not talking about child molesting, Zack. I mean there’s the body and there’s the heart. What the body likes doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with what the heart wants. You feel frustrated about your father and school and what you’re going to do in life. You’re very handsome, Zack. I know you’re fifteen and you may feel some pretty odd things about yourself these days, but whatever you feel about yourself inside, on the outside you’re a confident, attractive young man and young women are going to want to please you . . .” She stopped. She didn’t know what she was saying. Zack’s diary entry had seemed to her to be a catalog of acts of rape. In her mind, there was a rough equivalency between Klein and her son’s diary, and hearing herself say it aloud she realized that was just plain crazy. He was a teenage boy bragging about getting laid, acting macho about lovemaking at just the age boys were supposed to. She reversed course: “I’m sorry. I’m not being clear. I’m implying things I don’t mean at all. I’m just trying to tell you that I was hurt, very deeply hurt, by what a sick man did to me when I was young and now I’ve got a problem, a big problem that I don’t know how I’m going to deal with, but . . .” Again, she took possession of the hand she had created. There was simply no other way she could feel about Zack, although she knew perfectly well that he would be infuriated by the notion that he belonged to her—he was her only decent, lasting achievement and therefore she ought to have control over everything he might become. “But whatever I do about it, I wanted you to know. It’s a secret. It’s been a secret my whole life. That day when your father fell in the bathroom, that was the very first time I told him.”

  She had expected this would astound Zack, and it did. He absorbed it, then nodded with satisfaction. “Wow” is all he said, his face clouding. He shifted, looked grave. “You don’t have to go public about all this, Mom, if you don’t want to. Let me take care of him,” Zack said, his jaw set grimly.

  She chuckled at his joke.

  Zack’s hands clenched. “I’m serious. First I’ll deal with Klein. Where is he? Where does he live? Is he in New York? Don’t worry, I won’t hurt him, not really, but I’ll scare the shit out of him.” Zack tapped his fists, looking as ferocious as possible for a beardless, wide-eyed boy with tumbling locks of chestnut hair and cherry red lips.

  How silly. And how wonderful. A lightness buoyed her above every sad thing. Her bones were glad. Her soul was singing. She smiled her delight.

  Zack was insulted. “I’m really serious!” He shook his fists, becoming the fighter he never was in the sandboxes of Riverside Park.

  She tried to suppress this ridiculous happiness. She covered her angel’s hand, saying as solemnly as she could, although a little laugh of delight escaped anyway, “I know you are, honey. And I’m”—she thought this a peculiar feeling, but admitted it—“flattered. You honor me. But Klein is eighty-four, probably very frail. Anyway, the law can deal with him and Rydel much more harshly than you can.” She stood up, towing her son by the hand to his feet, as if they were going to dance, and she did take him into her arms, or rather at his greater height he took her into his, and she pulled his head and its thick hair down, to whisper into his perfect ear, “Thank you. Yo
u don’t have to rescue me, Zack. You already have.”

  The Artist’s Muse

  February 2008

  BRIAN WATCHED THE audience enter. Nearly every man, woman, and teenager cradled an enormous bucket of artificially buttered popcorn next to their heart, to leave their hands free for a complimentary container of soda the size of a small dug well. They were dressed in hideous casual clothes: sneakers puffed up with extra layers of rubber as if their owners were racing cars; T-shirts and sweatshirts emblazoned with ads for their manufacturers; pants with pockets big enough to swallow Job. And their various manifestations of hair, including its shaved absence on young men who would have full heads, were grotesque. Locks were purple, orange, fluorescent red, white blond, and opaque black, then sprayed to skyscraper heights, or swirled and teased to cover baldness. No one looked the way nature had made them. Thank God for that anyway, Brian thought. Without their tasteless fashions, they would have been merely ugly.

  Was it his work in the film business, surrounded by exceptionally beautiful men and women who labored day and night to sustain and improve their lovely outsides, that made the civilians seem so revolting? Had he lost the capacity to gauge normal?

  He decided yes, felt cheered by this exposure to the average. After decades of spending time with dazzling movie stars and surgery-enhanced executives, Brian had been beaten down into thinking of himself as very plain. In fact, the overwhelming majority were like him: so generously endowed with ungainly features that the odd good one seemed to be a flaw. Like him, everyone was all only a few weeks of gluttony away from sickly puffiness, only months of snacking from becoming a swollen bag of mottled flesh.

  “Scary, huh?” Jeff’s voice cooed in his ear without preamble, startling him. “Can you believe we work our asses off for these bozos?”

  Brian turned away from the mob to study his old friend. He noted that if Jeff didn’t have a slight tan, if he weren’t draped in cashmere, if his glasses (and why was he suddenly wearing glasses?) weren’t so nerdishly hip, Jeff would look as ordinary as his fans. “But, Jeff,” he said, “I read in your New Yorker profile that you’re just one of them, that your movies are so popular because really you’re the same person today as that little boy who went to Saturday matinees and couldn’t figure out how Buck Rogers was going to escape next week.”

  Instead of Jeff’s objecting that he would be a fool, worse a criminally negligent member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, if he told the truth about how he felt toward his audience in an interview, he nodded at a particularly imbecilic couple. The man was in his thirties, receding hair slicked up, as if he were an Apache warrior who had suffered a bad scare, black leather motorcycle jacket over a white T-shirt with an arrow, labeled THE MAN, pointing up to his face and an arrow pointing the opposite direction below labeled THE LEGEND, presumably intending to indicate the crotch of his jeans, only the arrow was intercepted by his inflated belly so the myth seemed to refer to his eating prowess. His companion for the evening was a bloated woman with blotchy, freckled skin. Her huge braless breasts were prevented from reaching her waist by a tube top whose orange color could not be found in nature. The rest of her quivered like Jell-O inside skin tight stretch pants.

  “Check out that pair,” Jeff said. “If I hadn’t made it in the biz, I’d look like him and I’d definitely be married to her. And you know what’s worse? As him, I’d have more to say about what’s in today’s movies than as a director.”

  “You’re so full of shit,” Brian said amiably. “You don’t need them. They need you. You’re the highlight of their year.”

  “I’m their slave, Bri. My last two movies have flopped. I’m one bomb away from becoming the studio’s bitch.”

  Brian made a sour face to discourage his friend from continuing this nonsense. Was this why Jeff had insisted Brian come? To feel sorry for the poor A-list director forced to pander? “Come on. You’ve made billions for the studios. They’ll let you flop at least five more times.”

  “No more. Industry’s being squeezed by piracy, by streaming, most of all by video games. These days three strikes and you’re out. This picture tanks, they’ll take away my Get Out of Studio Notes Free card. You watch. If this mob tonight doesn’t like my ending, I’ll have to change it.”

  “Bullshit,” Brian said with a smile.

  “It’s not bullshit. Sure, I could insist on the integrity of my ending, but I’d have to put everything on the line. Threaten to go public. To preserve a farcical ending in a broad comedy I’d have to risk a lifetime’s worth of capital.” Jeff snorted. “Integrity. What a fucking joke. Who am I kidding? I’m popcorn.”

  “Even popcorn,” Brian said, “can have integrity.”

  “How can popcorn have integrity?”

  “It can have the integrity of being good popcorn.”

  Jeff grunted. He nudged Brian with his shoulder. “Before they give me the Cards find me.” “The Cards” referred to the most unsettling aspect of the test preview. After the movie ended, the audience would be handed index cards, sometimes a sheet of paper, with multiple-choice questions. Did they think the movie was Excellent, Very Good, Good, Fair, or Poor? Would they Definitely Recommend, Recommend, or Not Recommend to friends? And at bottom, most perilous of all for the director, were a few blank lines for them to scrawl what they wished could be changed about the picture. “You find me,” Jeff said, “and tell me the fucking truth before the hyenas hit me with the numbers. So I got something to hang on to while they flay me alive. Okay, buddy? Promise? If my ending sucks, tell me. I don’t want to defend the Alamo over nothing.”

  Tell me the fucking truth, Brian repeated to himself while he was ushered to a seat by an assistant Jeff signaled. Tell me the fucking truth, Jeff had begged, and as the lights came down he wondered whether he should. What if Brian thought Jeff’s movie to be ghastly and told him so? How would that affect Jeff’s weighing whether or not to reveal to the world that a man who had paid for Jeff’s film schooling, perhaps gave him a leg up in the business, had also molested him as a child? Or that Jeff had been on the board of a company that had enriched two men accused of multiple sex crimes? And was that the worst of what would come out? Maybe Jeff had conspired with Sam Rydel to suppress the testimony of his victims. Gary said that fake medical report mirrored what Rydel was claiming to the DA about Klein’s condition. Had it originated with Jeff? It was put together awfully fast. Maybe Rydel had given it to him. The reality is that he couldn’t trust Jeff, so should Brian be ruthlessly honest when he needed Jeff to cooperate with finally striking a real blow in the real world for real truth, real justice, and the actual American way?

  No. Brian decided no matter how awful the picture, he would tell his friend, as he was sure all of Jeff’s associates did, that the movie was brilliant, the ending perfection.

  Good thing Brian had decided to lie before the movie started. During the first hour, he distracted himself from its awfulness by preparing phrases of false praise. He hated the first hour so intensely that at one point he thought the swelling of loathing in his chest cavity might stop his heart. He had to restlessly shift in his chair in a vain attempt to avert his face from the blaring chaos, presented in a slow-paced, flat tone with great self-confidence as if the filmmaker were convinced that what is grotesque is funny if you also make it very dull. His head began to throb from the cranked-up sound track that pushed each overacted, slapstick calamity to be as loud as the bombing of Dresden. He winced at the parade of beautiful actors squeezed into grotesque costumes and made up like clowns—again as if exaggeration and comedy were synonyms.

  Then, abruptly, in the second hour Jeff calmed his film down. He elaborated a thin and rather strange love story that had seemed a throwaway in the first half. In keeping with the picture’s overall style, the lovers were a grotesque physical contrast. The boy was played by the once adorable child actor Billy Frederick, who had evolved into a thin and, in other films, appealing adolescent. In Jeff’s hands,
he became concentration-camp skinny, outfitted with contacts to simulate walleyes, wearing a prosthesis to sport a pair of chipmunk buck teeth. The look was reminiscent of an old Jerry Lewis character, a boyhood favorite of Jeff’s. During the bombardment of the first hour, Brian had assumed it was intended as a wry homage to Lewis, but then an offbeat love story developed between the buck-toothed, walleyed skin-and-bones teenager and a very WASPy, innocent, and clumsy Veronica Stillman, cast as a nerdy scientist. Jeff’s personal inspiration for this plot became clear to Brian when the mother of the buck-toothed boy, played by the comic actress Charlene Boxer in an immobilizing fat suit and makeup that simulated four double chins, learns of her son’s crush on Veronica. Enraged, Boxer proceeds to whack him repeatedly on his ass with a hot waffle iron kept beside her chaise longue, from which she never rose during the course of the film. After she spanked her son, Brian realized the preposterous mother was a portrait of Harriet, and the hideously unappealing young man was disguised autobiography.

  So Jeff saw himself as a vulnerable and awkward teenager, yearning for love and nurture. Since he had grown into a balding, self-satisfied, wealthy, middle-aged man, the connection probably would escape others, but to Brian it wasn’t far-fetched. The walleyed, whiny, lonely, skinny boy on that screen was no doubt exactly how Jeff had felt and still felt about himself.

  Brian wondered about why Jeff’s character loved Veronica the scientist. Did Jeff mean her to represent filmmaking with her technical expertise, her emotional simplicity, her ability to find Alien bones? (The plot—don’t ask.) The picture evolved into shameless sentimentality about the geeky teenager’s love for Veronica, building to a climax as the mother’s opposition becomes murderous. She enters into a conspiracy with an Alien, played by Chris Zaban with his usual frenetic bombast. Zaban’s Alien needs to consume young female organs to survive. He has come to earth in disguise as an advertising executive for TV. The evil mother decides to thwart her son’s planned union with Veronica by offering his true love to the Alien as a midnight snack.