The Wisdom of Perversity

by Rafael Yglesias

  While they had waited for Klein and Rydel to arrive, Jeff had been bursting with anxiety. He had settled in a chair only to jump up immediately and once again check his hidden recording devices or to press buttons on his iPhone, presumably checking e-mails. He had announced the time every ten minutes. He had seemed so nervous Julie couldn’t imagine he’d follow the plan. But now, having finally gotten his cue, he looked calm. He even managed a pleasant smile as he said, “Hi, Cousin Richard. Been a while. Twenty years?” Klein’s magnified eyes stared up at Jeff with the curiosity of a three-year-old. He appeared interested but puzzled, as if Jeff were speaking a foreign language. Brian thought it was a first-rate performance. Klein wasn’t pretending he didn’t know someone was talking to him. Just that he had no idea who he was or what this person was saying.

  “I told you,” Rydel said. “This past year he really declined. He doesn’t know who anybody is. He thinks I’m one of his nurses.” Rydel addressed Klein in a loud voice, enunciating each word meticulously. “Dick, this is Jeff. Harriet’s son. You remember Jeffrey. Jeffrey Mark. You’re so proud of his success as a director and producer.”

  Klein nodded once and managed a thin parting of his lips, revealing teeth that were either dentures or caps, Brian couldn’t be sure. Then the smile faded and he looked away, as if embarrassed that he didn’t know Jeff and felt too tired to keep up the pretense he did. That was another brilliant stroke, Brian decided. A clumsy faker would rely on drooling stupefaction or that he mistook Jeff for someone else.

  Jeff bent over Klein’s wheelchair, hands on his knees. He spoke in kind and gentle tones. “That’s okay, Cousin Richard. You don’t have to pretend with me. And you don’t have to pretend you don’t know what’s going on because Brian and Julie are here. They don’t want anyone to know what you did to them, either. I’m sure you remember them. They were two of your favorite victims. This is Brian Moran.”

  As Brian stepped up to Klein’s wheelchair, he glanced at Rydel. Rydel goggled at him. Rydel knew who he was now. Brian bent over to let Klein see his face.

  Klein’s fish eyes came up to investigate him. The old man nodded slowly, as he had with Jeff. Again Klein smiled hesitantly, and again his eyes slid away, face expressionless, eyes focused dully on the middle distance, which happened to be Brian’s chest at the moment.

  “And this is Julie Rosen,” Jeff said, continuing to speak in the friendly tones of a host. “Better known to you by her maiden name, a name I’m proud to share with her, Julie Mark.”

  Julie had been watching Klein’s reaction to Jeff and Brian. She was surprised that he had light blue eyes, so light they were almost white; she had remembered them as hazel or some other brownish color. Otherwise she recognized Klein’s features as a decaying version of the middle-aged man she once knew. But the confident, wheedling, energetic personality really did seem gone. She pushed that thought away. He’s faking, she insisted to herself.

  When Jeff finally said her name, she saw in the periphery that Rydel’s body language had changed from sullenness to alarm and that he took a step as if to get between Jeff and Brian and the wheelchair. But they cut him off as she stepped up to Klein.

  Rydel called out in a desperate voice, “He doesn’t know who you—”

  Before he could finish, she had bent down toward those enormous limpid eyes, rising to look at her, taking her in with a wondering puzzlement, his head, like with Jeff and Brian, nodding, a sliver of smile appearing. It was the smile, she decided later, that got her so angry she went off script. She spat on him. Only a thin stream of watery saliva came out and landed square on his pale, spotted forehead.

  “Hey!” Rydel shouted, and collided with Brian, trying to reach her.

  She was busy watching Klein’s reaction. He cried out like a startled baby. Two bony hands that looked too big to be supported by their frail wrists came up to shield his face. They trembled uncontrollably. He made more noises of fear or pain, but they weren’t words.

  “Get her off him!” Rydel shouted. Brian, taller and stronger, was easily keeping him away. Jeff stood beside her, watching Klein as if he were directing him in a scene, a hand on his chin, brow furrowed thoughtfully. Julie also watched the old man’s hands flail, trying both to hide his face and to push away an invisible attacker. Her disappointment deepened that faking or not, this feeble creature was nothing like the vigorous, crazily bold man who, in her own home, her mother and father a split-level floor away, had grabbed a fistful of her hair and pushed her head onto his purple swollen penis.

  She stepped back and looked at Brian to signal he could let Rydel go. She had no more spontaneous anger to release. If she was going to get angry enough again to attack him, she’d have to work herself up to it. She felt utterly exhausted, her muscles struggling to support her. She would have been glad to lie down and take a nap.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Rydel complained. He knelt beside Klein, a monogrammed handkerchief in his right hand while he gently lowered the old man’s bony hands with his left. Klein whimpered and shut his eyes tight, wincing as if he expected to be hit.

  Does he beat him? Brian wondered with horror and a trace of glee that he was immediately ashamed of.

  “He doesn’t know who any of you are. He doesn’t even know me,” Rydel insisted while wiping Klein’s forehead clean. The old man stopped whimpering. His hands relaxed, dropping into his lap, but he kept his eyes shut tight. He had almost no lashes, Julie noticed. “It’s okay,” Rydel said softly to Klein. “No one will hurt you again. I promise.”

  Someone hit him recently. Brian was convinced, again appalled, again a little pleased, and then he realized he was starting to believe Klein was senile.

  Rydel got to his feet. He confronted Jeff, who was still regarding Klein thoughtfully. “What the fuck is going on? I agreed to see you and you alone. I told you Dick is suffering from dementia. It’s been happening to him gradually for five years. This past year he’s fallen apart. I brought him to prove it to you. You said if I did, you’d agree how we were going to handle everything. Is there a problem? If there’s a problem on your end, I’m outta here.” He abruptly added, as if just reminded that he ought to ask this, “And who the fuck are they?” He nodded at Brian and Julie.

  “You know who they are, Sam,” Jeff said, back to their script. He didn’t seem thrown by Julie’s ad-lib. “I certainly don’t have to remind you, Cousin Richard,” he said, leaning around Rydel, trying to talk to the wheelchair’s occupant. Jeff immediately gave that up and addressed Rydel: “You remember, Sam, giving Brian and me a tour of The Tonight Show set. And you also enjoyed the services of Julie’s father as your dentist for several years.”

  This was Julie’s proper cue. She almost couldn’t pick it up she felt so tired, so hopeless. She had to take a deep breath—at least now she could inhale properly—to get the words out. “You watched at Aunt Harriet’s apartment while you . . .” She bent down to address Klein. His eyes were open, unfocused, in the general direction of their feet. His mouth and jaw were working as if he were chewing. What unsettled her the most was that he no longer appeared to be fearful. He glanced up at her with untroubled curiously, as if he had never met her. “You put your fingers in my vagina. You did it in front of Brian and Jeff and”—she turned away from the wheelchair, relieved to be able to look from Klein’s vacant gaze to Rydel’s cornered, knowing eyes—“you watched. And you smiled. You enjoyed watching him molest me. But that wasn’t the most fun you had. What you really enjoyed was when Klein pushed my mouth onto his penis. Remember what you said? You said, ‘Put it in her pussy. I want to see it in her pussy.’ ”

  “I never said—” Rydel stopped himself. For one second Rydel seemed to collapse from remorse and guilt. He brought his hands up to his mouth, face breaking apart from an overwhelming need to sob. Just as suddenly he mastered himself, face numbing, restored to wary sullenness. Now he backed up without looking where he was going, until he bumped into one of the fake urn
s. He glanced at it, surprised that it was made of papier-mâché.

  “Watch it,” Jeff said. “That’s a prop, a prototype for my next picture.”

  “I’ve had enough of this bullshit,” he said, then walked purposefully to the back of the wheelchair, grabbing the handles, releasing its brake.

  “Go on, Jules,” Jeff said. “Tell him.”

  “Tomorrow we’re going to hold a news conference,” Julie said. “We’re going to tell what you and Klein did to each of us.”

  Rydel tilted the wheelchair up to turn it around. Klein’s head flopped back as if he had no neck muscles. Rydel paused to say, without a trace of defensiveness, “I honestly don’t know who you are.”

  It enraged Julie enough for her to admit in front of Brian, “I’m going to tell them how after he shoved my mouth onto his penis, he said I wasn’t being fair, that I had to kiss yours, and you took yours out and put it my mouth.”

  Julie glanced at Brian, to check whether he was hurt that she had kept this detail from him. He nodded encouragingly. She looked back at her tormentors.

  Rydel made a disgusted face. “That’s bullshit,” he said.

  With Klein tilted back like that, the suite’s floor to ceiling windows beyond the couch were front and center for his watery eyes. “Park,” he said pleasantly, the first word he had spoken. “Park,” he repeated.

  “Yes, that’s the park,” Rydel said irritably but, Brian noticed, also reflexively as if he were in the habit of humoring a demented old man.

  “Once we tell what happened to us, the floodgates will open,” Jeff said. “Everyone in the past forty years who you and Cousin Richard molested and raped will come forward.”

  Brian spoke his lines: “And sooner or later the statute of limitations and your wallet won’t be enough to stop an indictment.”

  “Cousin Richard won’t go to jail,” Jeff taunted Rydel. “Especially if you corroborate that he’s senile. But you will. You’ll lose all your money and you’ll spend the rest of your life in prison.”

  Rydel let go of the wheelchair. Klein’s head flopped forward. He moaned. “And this is all gonna happen,” Rydel said in a sneering tone, “because of what you say I did when I was fifteen?”

  “No, of course not just because of that,” Brian said. “Think of who is saying all this. At the very least your reputation is fucked. You know what Julie can say about Klein and your relationship to him. You know what I can say. Everyone will believe us. First of all, it’s true, and second of all, why would we make it up?”

  Rydel reached into his jacket, removed the Yankees hat and put it on. “Good-bye,” he said to Jeff.

  “You’re not going yet,” Jeff said softly.

  Rydel froze. Klein’s right hand came up and made a waving motion in front of his right eye as if he were shooing away a fly. Rydel glanced at Klein, then looked back at Jeff, waiting on him.

  “Let me try to make your options clear.” Jeff yawned. “Sorry,” he said with another yawn. “I didn’t get any sleep. I was up telling my wife all about you and Cousin Richard so she would be prepared for what I’m going to say at the news conference. Such as you watching Klein rape me. And making me put your little blond cock in my mouth.”

  Brian and Julie both looked at Jeff, surprised.

  Rydel was not surprised. He was ready to respond immediately. “Nothing I did forty years ago can be prosecuted. And I was child myself.”

  “You were fifteen when you—” Jeff started.

  “I was a child! Emotionally I was more of a child than you.” He addressed only Jeff, as if they were alone. “Are you going to tell the world what Dick was? You gonna tell the truth about your cousin?”

  Jeff nodded. “Everything.”

  Rydel snorted. “Yeah? You gonna tell them the deal your mother made to keep quiet?”

  “Yes,” Jeff said, lingering on the s for emphasis.

  Klein’s hand came up again to wave at something in front of his right eye. This time he kept it raised, staring intently at nothing, then reached with his fingers, trying to catch an object that wasn’t there.

  “Stop that. Put your hand down. There’s nothing there,” Rydel told him impatiently. Klein kept it up, as if waiting to catch whatever it was the next time. Rydel refocused on Jeff. “Really? You’re going to tell about all the money he gave your mother? To keep quiet about the others. How you kept quiet?” He looked pointedly at Brian.

  Since Jeff had admitted his mother’s involvement, Brian’s thoughts had returned again and again to this point, but he didn’t want to investigate it. That Rydel was trying to drive a wedge between them, and he had found an effective way to do it, infuriated Brian all the more.

  “I don’t have to say I kept quiet about what I knew,” Jeff said, coolly. “Obviously I did. I was a victim, that’s why.”

  Rydel wasn’t through being skeptical. “You’re really going to tell the world everything he did for you?” he asked Jeff. “How he paid for your education? How he made you a star?”

  “That’s bullshit,” Brian answered for Jeff. “Complete bullshit. So Klein paid for film school, made a few introductions. So what? Klein was a middle-management nobody in marketing. He didn’t have some magical access in Hollywood. Jeff is one of a handful of the world’s greatest directors. He would have made it without anybody’s help and he probably would have made it sooner if Klein hadn’t ruined his childhood.”

  Hearing this, Jeff turned from Rydel to gawk at Brian with delight and surprise.

  Brian bore down on Sam. “You were the one Klein had to pay off handsomely because you were his main victim. That’s mostly what I’m going to talk about, how Klein corrupted the young, stole their childhoods, turned them into his creatures. How he tried to convince his victims that they liked what he did to them, how he tried to get me to spank you, how he humiliated and used you—”

  “Then why are you doing this to me?” Rydel said. “If you understand how horrible Dick was, how he destroyed my . . .” His mouth trembled. He mastered himself and said coolly, “I’m a victim. That’s what you should be telling the world. That I’m a victim, not those boys. I was good to those boys. I loved them. I wasn’t cruel like Dick.” He slammed both hands on the wheelchair’s handles, shaking its occupant.

  Klein startled in the chair and cried out fearfully.

  Rydel was still ranting. “I didn’t humiliate them the way Dick—” He stopped.

  Julie could see it occur to Rydel that it might not be safe to talk. He looked around as if expecting the police to show up. “I don’t want to hear your litany of excuses,” she said, following Brian’s advice to keep him talking by pretending not to care. “We told you what we’re going to do. Nothing you’ve said has changed my mind.”

  Brian turned to her. “Can you believe the self-delusion of this guy?” he said mockingly. “ ‘I was good to them.’ I’m sure that’s what he said to you.” He bent over to direct this at Klein, one last try at getting him to react. “Isn’t that what you said to young Sam here? How you rescued and loved Sam, the poor little orphan boy.”

  Klein looked at Brian, but he was too interested in the invisible thing flying near his right eye to give him more than a glance. He returned to it, right hand grabbing at air.

  “I’m not like him,” Rydel said to Brian, then shouted, “Dick was cruel! I’m not cruel. You don’t know what it was like with him . . . You think you do, but it was worse, much worse. I’m the victim.”

  “Yeah, yeah, you had your reasons for what you did,” Jeff said, sneering. “Well, as Renoir said, ‘The real hell of life is that everyone has their reasons.’ ”

  “You didn’t have to become who you are,” Julie said, fighting off an emerging feeling of pity for this man. This prince who had become a toad wasn’t a cold monster; he was an angry, bitter, and pathetic man. Sympathy for this devil vibrated inside her, along with the relief of having released her rage at Klein and seeing for herself that he no longer knew his victims. The true v
illain was forever beyond her reach. Disappointment, relief, and pity mixed into a strange combustion. With its ignition, her legs trembled, chest quaking, erupting into a fireball of sympathy for Rydel, for herself, for all the ruined children of the world. “I know Klein was horrible to you. I’m sorry for that boy you were, the boy he used. But what you became, that’s you. You didn’t have to become him. You weren’t strong enough to fight for yourself, your real self. I know. I wasn’t strong enough . . .” She was shaking too much to go on and Brian took her in his arms. Her mouth was pressed against his chest, silencing her with affection.

  Sam Rydel’s gray eyes faded into a colorless fury. He glared at her while working his jaw. “I was strong,” he said. His mouth looked like it was chewing on something hard and bitter. “You don’t know how strong.” He was breathing hard through his nose. “I was strong,” he insisted.

  “Then stop covering up for him!” Jeff shouted, pointing at Klein who was the calmest of the four, slowly waving a hand in the air as if he were a politician in a parade greeting his supporters. “Confess and tell the world about Dick,” Jeff said. “You probably won’t go to real prison—they’ll put you in a psychiatric hospital. Give the millions you squeezed out of the school to the boys you raped—”

  “I didn’t rape them. I loved them. I took care of them. Everything I did was out of love. I understand my boys better than anyone because I was one of them.”

  “Okay,” Jeff said. “You love them. So give them your money. Do that and we’ll shut up about what you did to me and to Julie. You can frame your life story so it sounds like you were just a victim of Cousin Richard, that he made you sick. But stop the bullshit that you’re innocent and your accusers are liars.”

  “You self-righteous creep,” Rydel said, self-pity boiling into rage. He abandoned the wheelchair and moved threateningly at Jeff. Brian eased out of Julie’s arms and got between Jeff and Rydel. Julie flashed back to them as boys, remembering that the polite Brian was always ready to back up loud-mouth Jeff.