The Wisdom of Perversity

by Rafael Yglesias

  Brian said softly, “Our press conference is scheduled for five. If we don’t hear you’ve made a deal by then, we’ll go public.”

  Rydel looked deliberately at each of them, an enraged inventory. Then, without a word, he returned to the wheelchair. He slapped Klein’s raised right hand, hard. “It’s a floater! It’s in your eye!” he yelled, slapping the hand again, although Klein was lowering it. Klein whimpered and cowered, hands shielding his face. Rydel jerked the handicapped chair up, spun it on the rear wheels to do a one eighty so they were facing the hallway. He dropped the front wheels down hard, again shaking Klein violently, then rapidly rolled Klein, wheelchair and himself into the hallway, disappearing.

  “Did they really go?” Jeff asked after several seconds of not hearing the door shut.

  Brian went to investigate. Julie felt woozy. She fell into a deep leather club chair, shut her eyes, and wished she could go to sleep on the spot. Brian reappeared, confirmed Rydel and Klein were gone.

  Jeff was unscrewing the bottom of a Maltese Falcon prototype. “We didn’t get anything, did we?”

  “No,” Brian said. Julie thought, Good. Now Jeff can’t back out.

  Jeff was still squirming for an exit. “What about when he talked about how what Klein did to him was worse than what he did?”

  Brian shook his head. “Implication is not confession.” He sighed. “There’s no way out, Jeff. We don’t have a lot of time to arrange the press conference. Who are you going to use to manage it?”

  Jeff removed a small black piece of plastic—Brian later explained to Julie it was a flash drive—from the Falcon statue. “I’ll talk to Sugarman first. He’ll get us a crisis manager.”

  “Right. Everything starts and finishes with a lawyer. Can we piggyback on your legal and PR?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Jeff tossed the flash drive across the room. It landed noiselessly on the thick carpet. “My people will arrange everything. Take care of you,” he mumbled.

  “You’d better call. It’s eleven thirty already.”

  “I’ll call,” Jeff said. He took out his iPhone. He paused. “The old fuck really is senile,” he announced. “Right?” he checked with Brian.

  Brian nodded. “You should have stuck by your fake medical report.”

  Jeff grunted. “And you said it was bad storytelling.”

  “God’s a hack,” Brian said. “Only thing I wondered about . . .” He let that hang.

  Julie and Jeff looked at him. “What?” Julie said.

  “I think Rydel’s abusing him. I don’t mean sexually. I mean I think he’s hitting him.”

  There was a silence. Julie sighed.

  “I hope so.” Jeff set his iPhone down on the couch, shut his eyes, and put his retro Converse sneakers up on the coffee table. He didn’t starting dialing until Brian walked over and kicked their soles.

  The Truth

  February 2008

  BRIAN ORDERED TEA, coffee, bagels, and two vegan banana muffins while Jeff made a series of calls. He was famished. He ate both muffins in minutes. After a few sips of Earl Grey, Julie recovered from the fatigue and nausea she’d felt in the aftermath of being in Klein’s and Rydel’s presence.

  When Jeff reported that Grace and a “handler” were coming over to brief them on the press conference, Julie said she’d better go home and change. “How do you dress,” she asked Brian, her black eyes glistening, “for a sex abuse confession?”

  “You’re not confessing,” he reminded her. “You weren’t the abuser.”

  “Good point. But I’m serious. What should I wear? Not jeans. Not an evening gown. Slacks and a demure blouse?”

  “Do you have a simple black dress?” he asked.

  “Two.” She smiled. “I live in Manhattan.” By the time she left for home, he felt sure the shock was past, that she wouldn’t require his company. He wanted to stay with Jeff, make sure of his resolve.

  After Julie’s departure, the suite filled up with Jeff’s people. Grace appeared first. Then two assistants: one from the production of the film, the other his year round personal assistant. They were followed by two young lawyers from Sugarman’s New York office, male and female, oddly resembling each other in their matching pin-striped suits, short haircuts, and solemn, subdued voices. They asked to hear in detail what Jeff and Brian intended to say.

  Brian reached underneath his black cashmere sweater and produced two sheets of paper from his shirt pocket. “Here’s my statement.”

  “You wrote it down!?” Jeff asked, startled.

  “I’m a writer,” Brian said.

  The lawyers looked pleased. The male removed a device as wide as a sheet of paper, but only an inch long, and asked if he could scan and e-mail Brian’s statement to Sugarman in LA. “Sure,” Brian said. “But tell him not to give me notes.”

  “Excuse me?” the female lawyer said.

  Jeff explained in a grumble, “He means he’s saying what’s in the statement no matter what.”

  “You don’t want legal advice?” the male asked. “We understood that the firm is representing you.”

  “I’m sure Mr. Sugarman will have something useful to say,” said his twin.

  “I hate advice,” Brian said. “Especially when it’s useful.”

  Jeff extended a hand. “May I read it first?” Brian handed his pages over to the director, a letting-go he had never enjoyed.

  Only Jeff’s eyes moved while he read. “I didn’t know that,” he said when he was done. “Believe me, I didn’t know about the Horror’s calling your mom to have you come up while I was at Hebrew school.” He gave the pages to the scanner bearer. He glanced shyly at Brian. “I’m sorry.”

  This was the grievance Brian had been fretting about since Jeff admitted his mother had known about Klein, that Jeff had conspired with Harriet to use him as a shield. He had told himself to let it go, but he hadn’t. His heart zoomed from calm to rage. “You had me over two more times—”

  “I know!” Jeff said. “But I was there those times and figured I could stop him from doing the really bad stuff.”

  “What the fuck is the really bad stuff? It was all really bad.”

  “Let’s stay calm,” the preternaturally calm woman lawyer said.

  “Why don’t you stay calm by keeping your fucking mouth shut!” Brian yelled, instantly regretting it. He rolled his lips inward, folded his hands in his lap.

  “You’re right,” Jeff said. “I’m glad you fought him off.” He sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should’ve known.”

  “You were nine, for chrissakes,” Brian said. “It wasn’t your responsibility.”

  Jeff looked right at him and demanded, “But you thought it was my fault.”

  “Yeah,” Brian admitted to Jeff. But that had to be wrong. “It wasn’t,” he told his old friend and, as he did, at last truly forgave him. “You were a child. Just a child. What happened to me wasn’t your fault.”

  A bald man with severe black glasses, introduced by Grace as “a genius crisis manager,” and two young women who worked for him at his PR company appeared with a video team, a camera operator, a lighting supervisor, and their gofer. The crisis manager put his glasses atop his hairless skull, explained they should make their own record of the conference in case the press did a poor job but, more important, to provide their own cut to local television stations around the country to “control the story.” Grace then suggested they rehearse Brian’s statement first and that’s when he got to his feet, walked to the second bedroom in the vast suite, and locked the door.

  In a moment, Jeff followed him and knocked. “You don’t have to do a run-through, okay? That was a terrible idea. Sorry.”

  “I need to take a nap,” Brian said. “I didn’t get any sleep either.”

  “Okay, I’ll come get you in a hour.”

  Brian used his cell to call home. The nurse answered, said his father was doing well, and put Danny on. “So?” His father huffed and puffed into the phone as if he had jogge
d five miles to the receiver. “You’re going through with this fiasco?”

  Brian explained what would happen, that it might hit the news as early as six, but probably cable first. “Try CNN if you’re curious. Don’t worry about what they say about me, Dad, if they bother with me at all. Jeff is the real show.”

  “They’ll talk about everyone and everything. That’s what they do. You aren’t going to go into all the gory details of what that awful man did to you, I hope?”

  “Yes, Dad. The details are important. The details are everything.”

  “Oh sweet Jesus. Why didn’t you at least time this to the opening of your next play and do it on Oprah?”

  “Never was good at self-promotion, Dad. Didn’t have your genius for it.”

  “No need to bite me,” Danny said breathlessly. “I’m not the child molester.”

  But you were, he thought bitterly as he hung up. Lying fully clothed on the made bed with his shoes on, like a corpse awaiting the undertaker, he admitted that he blamed Danny as much as anyone. He listened in a fury to the increasingly loud hubbub coming from the suite’s living room. Sounded as if a thousand people were in there. He covered his eyes with the crook of his elbow and in that blindness thought, I blame Jeff, I blame his mother, I blame his father, I blame my mother, I blame my father, I blame Klein, I blame Rydel, I blame me.

  He felt again the shock, the naive and stupid shock, of arriving at Jeff’s door, having been ordered by his own red-eyed mother after yet another long phone call with the “dying” Harriet, to go up and play Jeff’s brand-new board game, Risk. In fact, Jeff was at Hebrew school. Klein greeted him, pulled him close, putting his lips on Brian’s, sticking his tongue between his teeth and down his throat. He had pulled away, revolted, retreated (again, stupidly) into the living room, thinking it too public for Klein to follow him there, as Klein then did, too public for Klein to dare, as Klein then did, to push him down on the sofa. The perfumed man opened his gray slacks—they must have been unbuttoned and unzipped already, his ridiculously big Thing growing out of a slit in his boxers. “It’s nice to touch, isn’t it? So hard and smooth . . .” His hand encircled Brian’s skull and pushed him toward it. “Give it a little kiss . . .”

  He had acted, for once, the real Brian at last, punching Klein as hard as he could in his bulbous stomach, and ran, out the door, down the stairs, onto the street, knowing he couldn’t go home without explaining . . .

  I should have told. Julie’s right: I would have saved dozens of others. Jeff, Julie, Sam, the academy kids, the Huck Finn boys, everyone else was ignorant or greedy or scared or confused or overwhelmed by bullies, but I was strong enough—I could’ve pushed him away. I did push him away. I saved myself and let everyone else suffer. Me and the god of creation—we’re the villains of this story.

  BRIAN WAS RIGHT, of course. Simple black. And her mother’s pearls to go with its mournful elegance. To have Ma for company, courageous and right-thinking, was a comfort.

  “You look beautiful,” Gary said in the unnaturally gentle voice he’d been using since she had told him about her past. She was heading for the front closet. He had been home unexpectedly, had forgone the weekly meeting at American Justice over developing stories. His eye had cleared up. There was a dashing bruise underneath, but otherwise eager neediness had returned to his chubby face. “When do we have to be at the news conference?”

  She was irritated by his faux-innocent helpfulness. “I have to go back to the hotel now,” she said. “I’m not sure if Jeff has scheduled the conference for five or six.”

  “I’ll go with you,” he said.

  She shook her head.

  “Honey, I know these people, the legal beat reporters. I can be helpful. Believe me, there are ways I can make sure they’re civilized about this.”

  “Gary, I appreciate everything you’ve done, but I have to do this on my own.”

  His eager-to-please manner vanished. He breathed hard through his nose. “Are you coming home tonight?”

  She shook her head. “I’ll stay with Amelia. And I’ll ask around, start looking for a place. We’ll figure out about what to do about Zack when things calm down.”

  “What?” His startled reaction was genuine.

  “It’s not fair for you to have to move.” She looked away from the astonished hurt contorting his features.

  “You gotta be kidding. Right? You’re kidding.”

  “This isn’t the time to talk about it. I’ve already said it and I feel this way more than ever—I can’t stay in our marriage. I can’t be with you and be an honest person. I’ve been lying too long about every feeling. It’s . . .” She paused, unable to figure out a way to make any kinder what she was doing to poor, needy Gary. “Nothing I do is going to be fair to you, so the sooner I get out of your way, the sooner I let you move on. That’s the best I can do.”

  His eyes narrowed. His jaw set. He clenched his fists. He glared. He said, “I love you.”

  She nodded. “I have to go.” She moved toward the closet.

  Gary stepped in her way. He sneered. “You’re not even going to have the decency to say a merciful ‘I love you too’?”

  “I do love you, Gary. I’ve lived my life with you. But that’s not relevant to whether we can go on living together.”

  “Just tell me what you want in bed and I’ll do it!” He laughed mordantly. “I might even like it, for chrissakes.”

  “Gary, this isn’t something you can fix. You haven’t done anything wrong. I was wrong. I’ll tell Zack it’s my fault. You can tell everybody I was very damaged, that I’m having a terrible crisis, a breakdown. All that’s true and I won’t contradict you. I’m the bad guy, no question about it. I have to go…” She tried to step around him.

  He grabbed her arm and squeezed hard. He was flabby everywhere but in his arms; they had always been strong. “Ow,” she complained, trying to tug away, but he clamped down, pulled her flush to him. His eyes were horrible in their honesty: shot through with hurt and fury, pain and loathing so complete she felt justly condemned. She surrendered. “Go ahead,” she said. “Hit me. I deserve it.”

  “Is that what you like?” He grimaced saying each word, as if spitting up stones.

  “Of course not.” Her arm was going numb.

  “I never stopped cheating on you.” He pulled her closer, until their noses touched. “She wasn’t the first and she wasn’t the last. You wouldn’t put out so I got laid whenever I felt like it.” His breath was stale from coffee and, yes, cigarettes. “It was better, a lot better than fucking you.”

  “I’m sure,” she said, waiting for him to finish this contest, because that’s what he needed—to be the winner. “I’m broken, Gary. I don’t work. Of course I can’t satisfy you in bed. I can’t satisfy you anywhere.”

  A dimming overcame his enraged eyes, hatred going out, a waning, like death. “Okay.” He released the compression of her arm, although he held on. He let her move a step away from the stench of his angry fear, the odor of defeat. Poor man. The lie of our marriage was good enough for him. I’ve spoiled his victory over love.

  “I’m sorry, Gary. I really am.”

  “I don’t give a fuck you’re sorry. If you can’t see I’m doing everything for you, I’m bending over backward for you, that I’ve been patient for twenty-four years and you don’t appreciate that I’m willing to be patient for the rest of my life . . .” His voice warbled. He released her with contempt. “Fuck you. Go to hell, you frigid bitch.”

  She was angry enough, then, to tell him she believed he was incapable of true sympathy, too selfish to feel as another feels, to defer his desires even for a few seconds. But she said nothing. She left mute and ashamed of her timidity. Any truth, even a mean one, she couldn’t speak to the man she had wasted so much of her life on.

  JEFF COAXED BRIAN out of hiding in the bedroom into the center of a three-ring circus, consisting of the PR people, their camera crew, the original two young lawyers, and a pair of dour
, middle-aged lawyers who had joined them, Grace, her personal assistant, Jeff’s pair of assistants, and several others in casual clothes, new to Brian, whom he couldn’t immediately assign a role to. The hubbub of parallel conversations died down when he and Jeff entered, a Broadway audience readying itself for the show. They stared at Brian and Jeff, some with open curiosity, others with rueful looks that Brian supposed were meant to be sympathetic. It’s no big deal, he wanted to shout. I’m okay. It didn’t do anything to me.

  He realized then his shallow, opportunistic, desperate-for-attention father was right—from now on all anyone would see was a little boy who had been diddled. And to make sure that’s all they thought, since they’d soon forget his statement, he’d probably have to figure out a graceful way of slipping into every getting-acquainted conversation that he had merely been diddled, no cock shoved down his throat or up his ass, just masturbated, one disgusting kiss, his little penis put in Klein’s mouth one time, his hand and lips refusing to touch Klein’s one-eyed monster. He only played with my penis! Brian wanted to shout. Maybe he should have that printed on his business cards, right above his e-mail address.

  “Could you show Brian the video?” Jeff asked. The hubbub resumed. Jeff had lured Brian out by saying he wanted to show him a recording of the statement he planned on making. Grace ushered Brian to a club chair opposite an enormous flat-screen TV, which the video crew had hooked up to the output of their camera. Brian noticed that three of the new people in the room, dressed in jeans and rumpled sweaters, were huddled around their laptops, consulting each other about something on their screens. He leaned over and saw that they all had the same file of prose up. So they were writers. Jeff had brought in three writers to tell his deepest secret.

  “Am I supposed to give you notes?” Brian asked of Jeff, who was sipping a Diet Coke, pacing behind him, surrounded by employees who kept whispering questions, as if he were on a set between takes.