Just how block-headed am I? Brian wondered when it took him until ten minutes from the end to realize this was a portrait of Jeff’s life with his mother and Cousin Richard. Perhaps it was based on a particular trauma in his teenage years, something that had happened after their friendship ended. Jeff wasn’t merely obsessed with entertaining a huge audience. Like Aries Wallinski, like a real artist, he was trying to get at personal truth, to organize and illuminate life as he understood it. Maybe, as Brian leaned forward, thoroughly absorbed by wondering how the story would end, maybe Jeff, like Aries, wanted to heal.
Not surprisingly, the slower, more human storytelling of the second half engaged the audience. No longer stupefied by deafening special effects, they began to laugh, louder and longer, at a few verbal jokes about the evil mother’s motivations and the awkward son’s wooing. Not Oscar Wilde, to be sure, but they were genuine witticisms about the characters.
At the climax, loud special effects in the style of its unworthy first hour returned, but now Brian was emotionally invested in the action. His chest constricted and sweat broke out on his forehead as the monstrous mother filled the screen. Jeff had him now. He was awed and terrified by the unleashing of his friend’s soul. All around him the audience guffawed while the mother was mistakenly consumed by the Alien because her son had miniaturized her and stuffed her into a giant box of human-flavored popcorn. (Again, don’t ask about the plot’s logic.) And while she was hoisted by her own petard, eaten alive by the same monster whom she had planned to feed her son’s lover to, the climactic lines of the picture were shouted by her geeky son in an extreme close-up, provoking hysterical laughter in nearly every seat. “My mother’s a monster,” the teenager announced. “She’s in the popcorn and you just ate her alive!” The Alien, who can only survive on a young female’s reproductive organs, is poisoned by those of a menopausal human female. He dies while mumbling in agony, “I can’t believe I ate his whole mother.”
The audience loved this portrait of Jeff’s mother, the monster in the popcorn, and they ate her alive with gusto. Brian didn’t rise from his seat when the movie ended; around him the audience was harassed by marketing assistants: “Please fill out the cards we gave you when you came in and hand them to one of the people standing by the exits on your way out. Thank you for taking the time to give us your reaction.”
Brian was stunned. No, the picture wasn’t great. Probably wasn’t good at all. Probably wasn’t even first-rate entertainment. But it was art. Jeff had found his way through the gloom of the past—unlike Klein, unlike Sam, unlike, he feared, Julie. Jeff had learned the wisdom of perversity and made his lonely secret into art.
Jeff arrived with a lurch, past hovering studio executives and Grace, to stumble into the seat next to Brian. “I’ll be in the lobby in a sec,” he said to a man Brian recognized as the studio president of production. “Just want to get Brian’s reaction. Fresh eyes,” he explained. The studio head squinted at Brian, then shrugged and left.
They waited in silence for the audience to exit, the all-important taste makers climbing up the sloping aisle with their postcard verdicts. Several peered at Jeff and Brian, who had made themselves noticeable as the only two who lingered. One woman called to Jeff, “Awesome, Mr. Mark. The movie’s awesome!”
“Thank you,” Jeff said, then turned his back to the aisle until they were all gone.
“All clear,” Brian reported.
Jeff still spoke in a whisper: “The truth. Remember? You promised. Is the ending worth fighting for?”
“They want you to change it?” Brian was amazed in spite of knowing better from experience. It was always the most striking scene, the best work, the most disturbing emotion and unsettling idea that attracts criticism.
“The studio thinks it’s too dark.”
“It’s absurd, not dark.”
“Absurd?” Jeff blanched. “You think it’s ridiculous?”
“Sorry. Absurdist. Not absurd.”
“Oh.” Jeff nodded.
“Anyway, you have nothing to worry about. The audience loved it. They won’t ask you to change it now.”
“Yes, they will. The studio thinks the audience’ll like it even better if the mother survives and apologizes to her son for all the bad things she’s done.”
“What?” This hurt Brian’s brain. They were attacking the only thing in the film worth preserving. Worse, the suggested change was neither funny nor believable.
“The studio thinks we won’t get a PG-13 rating if the mother dies.”
“What?” Brian was confused by the introduction of the laughable Motion Picture Association’s rating system.
“An R rating would cost us at least thirty million,” Jeff explained.
“Really?” Brian was astonished.
“You don’t know that?” Jeff in turn was shocked that Brian could be ignorant of this basic tenet of his own trade. “In the five top-grossing movies of all time, there are no Rs,” Jeff said, reciting a cherished statistic.
“Don’t you have your rating yet?” Brian asked.
“It’s an R with this ending and with”—Jeff lowered his eyes, as shy as a bride—“the waffle iron stuff. The spanking has to go too. The board thinks it’s too intense for children to have a mother hitting her child and then show the child murder her.”
“He doesn’t murder—”
Jeff anticipated Brian’s objection. “What he does leads to her being killed. That’s bad enough.”
Brian stared off at the dizzying rows of raked empty seats. It went without saying that to remove the spanking and the killing of the mother would mean the film was destroyed for Jeff. For a moment, they sat side by side, air redolent of artificial butter. The feeling of being in a deserted theater with Jeff worrying over how they would impress the world felt familiar, but he couldn’t place it exactly. The eeriness of that dislocated memory shook his resolve. Did he really have the right to urge Jeff to put his extraordinary access to the population of the earth in jeopardy? He had forgiven victim-rapist Aries for the sake of his art. Wasn’t it unjust to treat Jeff, solely a victim, more harshly? No matter how much harm Klein and Rydel had done, hadn’t Jeff created much more good?
Grace entered from the lobby. She kept her back against the door, speaking from twenty rows away like a telegram. “Jeff. The prez wants you. He’s freaking. Thinks you’re dissing him.”
Jeff stood. He shook himself like a wet dog. He put a hand on Brian’s shoulder and squeezed. “What do I do?”
Brian didn’t want to say.
Jeff grinned. “Don’t look so worried. Just tell me your opinion. Doesn’t mean I’ll do it.”
“The ending is beautiful, Jeff,” Brian said, telling exactly how he felt. “Teenagers’ll love it. And young parents’ll love it and they’ll buy the DVD for their kids and the kids will love it because kids are not the cute, softhearted blank slates adults think they are. Kids know the world is full of grotesque and mean grown-ups, and they’ll be very glad to see a monster they know well die and see one of their own find happiness. Stand your ground. The studio’ll thank you when it grosses a billion dollars.”
Jeff squeezed Brian’s shoulder again. Brian forced himself to ignore the impulse to shrug off the hand. Instead he grabbed him by the wrist and demanded, “What are you going to do about Klein and Rydel?”
“Tomorrow—” Jeff began.
“Don’t give me tomorrow. You know what you’re going to do.”
Grace, still twenty rows away, shook her fist, presumably trying to look threatening. “Jeff! They’re waiting.”
“Go away, Grace. Go”—he paused for effect—“away.”
She thought for a moment about arguing. Then she left.
Jeff pulled his wrist free. “What’s the point of our going public, Bri? It’s too late and it’s not proof of anything they did to those Huck Finn kids. We’re just gonna look like kooks and somehow we’ll come off sounding like accomplices. Especially me. Let’s be honest about
this. I’m the one who’s gonna get hurt because Cousin Richard made me speak at his school.”
“Made you? Come on. He didn’t make you do that.”
“Until I got my first gig, he paid for everything! Dad’s stupid store, their retirement house in Florida, my schooling. I couldn’t say no to going on the board and speaking and all that bullshit.”
“To Harriet!” Brian shouted, losing patience. “You couldn’t say no to your mom. As soon as she was dead you stopped. You already admitted that to Julie, or did you forget? You didn’t deny that was the reason when I said it in your limo.”
Jeff sighed. “Yeah,” he mumbled. “I did it for Ma.”
“So why couldn’t you say no to Harriet? Why didn’t you tell her what Klein had done?” Brian had been waiting to ask this. No, not waiting. He had been afraid to hear the answer to this question.
Jeff met his eyes. They were in pain, old, exhausted pain. They told Brian what he had suspected was right. He stood, as if the truth had ejected him from his seat. “She knew,” he answered for Jeff. “Harriet knew. And she was blackmailing him. Right? That’s why Klein paid for everything. You couldn’t refuse to help him while she was alive because you were keeping up your mother’s bargain with the devil.”
Jeff’s voice cracked as he pleaded, “What was I supposed to do, Bri? Turn my mother in? Huh? What was I supposed to do?” Tears welled in his eyes. He shook his head angrily and they subsided. “I didn’t know what Rydel was up to. I’m not lying about that. It was Cousin Richard I was worried about. I should have done something about him, okay, okay. And you too! You should have done something,” he accused Brian, but then abruptly let that go with a sigh. “But we don’t have any evidence that’ll hurt them, Bri. We really don’t. We’ll just make a spectacle of ourselves for nothing.”
“We have you, Jeff. Your talking will encourage others to come forward. You’re rich. You’re famous. You’re beloved. That makes you credible. If you stand up and say what Klein did to you, others will come forward and that will finish both of them.”
“Rydel’ll buy them off. He’s got more than enough to buy them all off.” Jeff retreated two steps up the raked theater aisle, regaining the high ground on Brian.
“If you speak up, one of the victims will refuse to be silenced by money or anything else.”
The president of production banged the theater door open, entering in a huff. “Mr. Mark! We’re trying to figure out how to make you even richer than you already are. Care to join us?”
Jeff held up a finger, silently demanding another minute. It was an impressive proof of his movie-business power that the studio head caved. “Keep me waiting one fucking minute more and I’m shooting a new ending myself!” he said, barging back out to the lobby.
Jeff shut his eyes, communing with his exasperation at studio interference before resuming, “Look, Bri, be fair about this. You don’t have a wife and four kids. Halley doesn’t know a fucking thing about any of this. I can’t just call a news conference and dump it all on her and the children.”
Brian smirked, “Ah, the new Hollywood cliché: you’re only protecting your family. Okay, you want a third-act socko realization, Mr. Jeff, here it is: You’ve become your mother. You just admitted that she knew about Klein. That she blackmailed him. But that wasn’t the worst of it. It’s only taken me twenty years to be certain, but I suspected, for years I suspected. You kept inviting me up, lying to me about whether Klein was in your apartment. You did it again and again, and each time you disappeared, leaving me alone with him.”
“He made me lie to you—”
“Bullshit!” Brian yelled over him. “She made you pimp me out to him, right? Come on, say it! You pimped me to him.”
Jeff’s mouth opened to protest, weak chin disappearing entirely, but he made no sound.
Brian closed on him, nose-to-nose, as befitted payoff dialogue. “Okay, you were a kid, a scared kid with a monster for a mother. But protecting Klein and Rydel for the sake of your reputation—you’re the monster now.”
There’s your exit line, Brian told himself as he walked away, up the aisle.
He had reached the doors when Jeff yelled after him, “That’s a disgusting thing to say. And it’s a lie. It’s a fucking lie. I didn’t pimp you out.”
“It’s not a fucking lie!” Brian lost control. He turned and charged down the aisle’s slope. Jeff cowered against a seat back, averting his face from the spittle of Brian’s rage. “She sacrificed me to make you a star! And it cost me. I would have been a great artist except for what you let him do to me.”
Brian shut himself up. He was near tears for one thing, which was humiliating. For another, he was astonished by what he had just said. That his talent had been damaged by Klein had never come into his head before. Was he sitting on that feeling all these years? For someone who considered himself analyzed—rinse, repeat, analyzed—a self-discovery this basic was stunning.
“What . . . ?” Jeff shared Brian’s amazement. He remained tilted against the theater seat as if Brian were about to strike him, but he wasn’t afraid, he was flabbergasted. “What are you talking about? What has this got to do with your career?”
“Not my career, you fucking idiot! I’m not talking about money and fame,” Brian said. “I’m talking about being emotionally crippled. I can’t write about love and trust and marriage and having kids. I don’t know what most of the world feels . . .” Brian was trembling, flooded by his terrible discovery. “I can’t be what I should be, what I was supposed to be, what I want to be. I’ve worked so hard at it, Jeff. Art was my salvation and I can’t do it right, I can’t get it right because your fucking mother took the real me from me—and you helped her, you helped her steal my soul.” He staggered to an empty seat and fell into it, covering his wet eyes.
He waited for Jeff to come to him, to console or to argue, to justify or to apologize. He heard the lobby door open and whoosh shut. When he looked up to see who had entered to interrupt them, Jeff was gone. Brian was the only member of the audience left.
The Past Recaptured
February 2008
JULIE BLURTED OUT, “Are you gay?” and immediately regretted it. “Sorry. I’m being very rude.”
“Rude? Wow. A New Yorker worried about being rude.” Brian rose from his desk, a slab of gray slate atop cast-iron legs outfitted with wheels that looked cannibalized from an old sewing machine. She admired his high-tech worktable: no surface to scar, no drawer for secrets. Brian shut his study’s door, presumably to keep this conversation private from his father, although he had said on her arrival that Danny Moran was already sound asleep.
Brian didn’t return to his space-age mesh desk chair. He moved to the couch he had assured her was a pullout and could accommodate her for tonight’s vigil, waiting out Jeff’s decision. It was almost midnight. They had given Jeff until tomorrow at five.
Julie sat patiently in a wing chair directly across from the couch while Brian settled himself, took his time answering. “Anyway, aren’t we way past the discretion vis-à-vis matters of a sexual kind? What I do in private will soon become a public matter, right? I assume that’s why you’re asking: not if I’m gay but if I’m something else, something Klein can use on me?”
“No!” Julie was horrified. “That never occurred to me. I just wanted to know.” She didn’t have the courage to say why; then she did: “I want to know you. The real you.”
“The real me. I wonder if he exists. Fair enough,” he said. He looked up at the ceiling. Searching for what? Was he going to make up something?
During that pause, his earlier comment registered. She interrupted his musing. “You really think Klein will try to find some dirt on us?”
“Or Rydel,” Brian told the ceiling. “If Jeff doesn’t join us. Jeff would scare them. They’d make a plea, settle, whatever they have to do to preserve as much of their freedom and fortune as possible. But just you and me, two small fry whining about ancient history? Yeah, there’ll
be a counterattack. If they could smear us, it would cast doubt on our accusations. So I guess it makes sense to warn you what they might find out about me.” He uncrossed his legs, bowed his head penitently, staring at his Persian rug. “I’ve never told anyone other than shrinks . . . and”—there was the flicker of a smile—“the other professionals who help me.” He took a deep breath and exhaled tension. “Okay. Here goes.”
Thrilled, she remained very still, not wanting to disturb his progress. In their two intense meetings, and a half-dozen long, intimate phone calls, she had grown very fond of him, his dry, embittered humor, his fussy manners and restricted diet, his persistent gloom and gentleness in everything he did, like Eeyore. He could well be the first man she had ever truly made friends with, and he knew everything about her—except the one thing no one knew and that she didn’t believe a thousand of Klein and Rydel’s private eyes could discover.
Brian told his secret to the rug. “I’m not gay. Everyone thinks I must be. Fifty years old and never married. Never lived with a woman or a man or even a dog. Had a cat once. Never really coaxed him from under the bed. Didn’t really want to. But I’m not gay. I’m a pervert.” He looked up to check her reaction. She froze, to control the thrill of hearing it. That sent his eyes away, to the room’s pair of windows, glass black from the overcast night and shimmering from a light snowfall that melted on contact. Waiting for him to elaborate was unbearably suspenseful. He cleared his throat and continued in a strong voice, “I guess I’m a heterosexual pervert, if you want to be technical about it. ‘What does that really mean?’ you’re wondering. In my case, it means the only sex I like is to remain fully dressed while I watch a woman I have paid strip, someone whose behavior I can trust because it’s a business transaction, someone I have no emotional investment in, someone whom I can’t hurt emotionally and who has no reason to hurt me. I have her strip naked while I watch, and then I grope her roughly, I spank her and pinch her nipples . . .” He paused, shook his head. “I don’t really want to go into every detail, but it’s all consensual and safe. Basically what happens is that I bring her to orgasm. They are sex workers, so that can take some time, since they prefer to pretend to climax and that doesn’t work for me. I pay them extra to show me exactly what they like, which vibrator to use, which . . . you don’t need to know this. Sorry. If necessary, they take over and finish themselves, although I really don’t prefer that. After she finally climaxes I have her turn around so she can’t see me—I don’t ever let them see me—and I masturbate until I come all over her back.” He had never raised his eyes from the Persian design. He swallowed hard, queasy with shame. “Pathetic, isn’t it?” he mumbled.
The Wisdom of Perversity Page 31