The Wisdom of Perversity (18 page)

Julie blanched. “You're kidding,” she mumbled.

“I was so shocked I couldn't answer him.” He laughed grimly. “I stared my shock, my slow horror, my idiotically naive outrage.” Brian leaned back and mused, having thought about this moment a thousand times, “It would take a great actor, a total genius like Brando, to reproduce the complexity of what went on in my eyes in just a few seconds, the seamless shift from shock to understanding to disgust. No,” he amended. “That's wrong. Betrayed. I was betrayed all over again, as if no time had passed, as if I were still a dumb, trusting child. Anyway,” Brian snorted with disgust at that former self, “Jeff's face suddenly changed, looked like he understood. He got it, I was convinced. Like when we were boys, he got what I was feeling just from my look. But I was desperately wrong. You know what he said? It speaks volumes. Jeff said, ‘Oh! No, no. You don't understand. Don't worry. Cousin Richard's not interested in us anymore. We're too old.' ”

“Oh my God.” Julie covered her mouth with both hands.

“I think until that moment I had forgiven Jeff,” Brian said. “Actually, until that moment, I don't think I was wise enough to know there was anything to forgive.” Julie lowered her hands to ask exactly what he had forgiven Jeff for, but Brian interrupted with his own question: “So you haven't been in regular touch with him? Just as cousins, family stuff?”

“What?” she said, momentarily stalled, accustomed to not telling the whole truth. “No. But everyone thinks that's because of Dad's fight with Uncle Saul after he finally figured out Harriet couldn't possibly be dying of breast cancer.”

“So you never told your parents she was lying about that?”

“No. I never told them anything. Not even that.” She sighed. “Mom and Dad figured out Harriet wasn't dying soon enough. I mean, my God, she didn't have any surgery, she didn't lose her hair, there was absolutely no sign of treatment. I guess it took a year, but Dad finally challenged Uncle Saul and he admitted she'd made it up to buy him some time to repay Dad. And he did repay Dad—in fact, he repaid him with interest—but still, you know, my mother and father were easygoing up to a point, but once you lost their goodwill, you kind of lost it forever. So my dad and Saul stopped talking altogether, much to my mom's relief. And then, when I was in college, my mom died suddenly and Dad really didn't want to talk to Harriet, the fake-fatal-illness-lady.”

“Oh, Julie,” Brian said, instantly sympathetic. It seemed obvious that this woman needed her mother to be strong and alive. “I'm sorry about your mom.”

“It was a long time ago,” Julie said casually. “Even losing Ma was a long time ago.”

“I'm sorry. I lost my mother five years ago,” Brian said. “It was hard. Very hard. Much harder than I expected. I don't know why. Yes, I do. Before she died, in some way death simply hadn't been real.”

“Did you ever tell your mother about Klein?” Julie asked.

“No,” Brian said. He reflected on the questions again and repeated, “No.” He thought some more and said, “That would have been cruel.”

“Cruel?” Julie was puzzled.

“She was already beating herself up for ruining my life by divorcing her faithless ne'er-do-well husband.” He sighed. “I guess we should straighten this out right away—outside of shrinks, no one knows about me and what happened. And you?”

“Not really. I told two people in college, but I don't know them at all now, so no one who is close to me knows about me.” She grunted. “That's a really sad thing to say, isn't it?”

Brian nodded. “I wanted to talk about it at one point. With Jeff of all people. When I got into therapy for the first time, in my midtwenties, I was all hot to talk it out, you know heal myself.” Brian laughed derisively. “I was so desperate for a happy ending, a so-called normal life, I was even prepared to forgive the Knicks ticket business. I called him a few times. He never returned my calls. Of course, by then he was a really hot director so I thought maybe he was just dodging me for career reasons.” Brian took an enormous bite of his Linzer cookie, white dust and crumbs collecting on his lips.

Julie offered her napkin as if he were her very own messy boy. She was pleased he took it and cleaned himself up. “It's funny,” she said. “While waiting for you here I realized I never really knew if Klein . . .” She grimaced rather than say the word.

“You didn't know if Klein molested me?” Brian said very loudly.

Julie ducked as if he'd thrown something at her, and she put a finger to her lips. Brian looked around. At eleven, too late for breakfast, too early for lunch, the place was nearly empty. Only the nose-pierced, blue and yellow hair waitress, standing behind the counter near their table, was near enough to have heard him. Judging from the way she was staring at him Brian decided she had heard, and he understood her surprise. He must look the picture of staid middle-aged respectability in his sensible Ecco walking shoes, his Banana Republic chinos, his Paul Stuart black cashmere crew neck sweater, covering all but the collar of his Armani white shirt, balding hair neatly trimmed, face carefully shaved with the white-tipped beaver brush and cream for sensitive skin from the Art of Shaving. Hearing such an obviously square man declaim “molested me” had jarred the tattooed lady. He met her young eyes with a knowing smile and asked in his head,
Want to sit on my lap, little girl?
She intuited his look, dropped her eyes, and pretended to fuss with something on the counter.

“How would I know for sure?” Julie asked Brian. “I didn't see him do anything to you. I assumed it eventually, much later. I thought about it and figured he must have. That's why . . .” She didn't finish.

Brian completed her logic aloud: “That's why I didn't tell on Klein about what I saw.” He winced at this realization. “Jesus, before you figured out I was also a victim, you must have hated me.”

“Hated you?” Julie looked so surprised he was relieved. “Why?”

“For not rescuing you.”

She smiled tolerantly. “Oh no. I didn't expect you to save me. You were a little boy.”

“Who then?”

Her eyes flickered.
Was that mischief?
Then they dulled into disappointment. “Me, of course.”

She was lying.
Who was supposed to rescue her? Her pompous father, probably. Little girls always think their fathers will save them. Women know better.
He let it go. “Here's something I don't know: did Klein bother you more than that one time?”

Julie rolled her lips inward and nodded. Fear came into her eyes and they slid away to the door.

“Do you not want to talk about this?” Brian asked, flooded with pity for her. “I'm sorry, I thought that's why you wanted to meet.”

“No. I mean, I'm glad to talk to you about—well, not glad—but it's a relief to talk with someone who really understands. But no. I called you to talk about the
Rydel
case.” She paused, looked right at him with dread, as if she were faced with a high dive into cold waters.

“Well, sure, I guessed that much,” Brian said. “Since it broke in the paper last week of course Klein's been on my mind too. I gotta say, I'm not happy to be thinking about him again. I stopped thinking and talking about him in therapy twenty-five years ago. And of course since I never followed what Klein was up to—I didn't even know about his dumb-ass school and charity—it never occurred to me to get in touch with you, but my excuse is that until today I assumed you never saw Klein again.” Her expression made it clear that was quite wrong. Brian waited for her to volunteer more. When she seemed to be waiting on him to speak, he continued, “Revolting about Rydel, isn't it? I read today, in a sickening background piece in the
Times,
that after Klein founded that phony school he adopted Rydel. At first I assumed that was a gay legal workaround to get the equivalent of marital rights in the eighties, but when I got to the end of piece I realized, no, it's because he was proud of Sam. After all, Sam's a real chip off the old block.” He chuckled. Julie looked horrified. “What?” he asked.

“That's what you thought,” she said, unable to conceal her disgust. “That's all?”

“What else is there to think?”

“He's alive. Klein is alive,” she said.

“Yeah.” Brian remained puzzled. “I was surprised by that too. He's been dead in my head for years, so I assumed he really was dead.”

Her black eyes flashed what looked like outrage.
Does she expect me to do something? I'm Batman, she's Catwoman, and we'll avenge our childhoods? No. Stop thinking like a hack writer. She can't be here for something practical.

“Tell me, Julie. I can't guess what you're thinking.”

Still looking offended, she held his gaze for another long beat. When at last she spoke, she answered a question he had asked earlier: “Klein became a patient of my father's. A favorite patient because he knew celebrities. So he was invited to our house in Riverdale four, I don't know, it may even have been five times over two years. I'm older than you. When I met you I was eleven, so I was thirteen the last time Klein showed up. I had breasts, real boobs by then. Each time he managed to get me alone. He was really clever about figuring a way to fool my parents into leaving us alone long enough for him to . . .” She paused. She frowned. “The first two times he came without Sam. He just used his hands. I didn't fight. He stopped each time because somebody was coming. But then one Sunday he showed up with a dental emergency that turned out to be nothing, a cap had fallen out, on very short notice, and that time he brought Sam. After fixing Klein's cap my father decided to start a barbecue and Mom had to clean up . . .” Her voice had been a calm monotone until this phrase. It broke without warning, threatening tears. She swallowed hard and then resumed in that emotionally neutral voice. “Noah had squirted ketchup all over himself and Mom had to get him changed. While they were all distracted, Klein and Sam both, they both came into my room, where I had gone specifically to stay away from him, and he put it in my mouth. With Sam watching. He put it in my mouth. I don't know why I didn't bite it off. I really don't.” She looked at Brian as if he knew.

“You were protecting your parents,” he offered.

She dismissed that quickly. “Yes, but not just them. It sounds crazy, but I was protecting me too.”

“That's not crazy to me,” Brian said.

Julie nodded. “There was a lot I was afraid of. So many things I was afraid of. I don't know if I'll ever know what all my fears were. But it still makes no sense to me that I did nothing that time, because the very next time, when he trapped me in the basement, I was getting a spare folding chair in the basement, he trapped me there and I threw the chair at him and ran upstairs and stood next to my mother, one inch away from Ma, for the rest of the afternoon. And that stopped it.” At last there was something other than gloom and self-recrimination in her expression. She looked faintly and distinctly proud. “He never came to the house again,” she said.

“You stopped him, Julie. That was brave.”
This is what she wants. Absolution. And approval.
“You were very brave, Julie.”

Both hands came up and covered her eyes. “I'm not brave,” she mumbled. “I'm not brave,” she repeated, her shoulders quaking, voice breaking up with tears.

While he watched her struggle for composure he wanted to get up, kneel beside her chair and hug her, but he couldn't budge. He remained stuck in his chair and felt a fool, an utter fool. All along he had thought he was the worst wounded at this table, but there was her old pain staring him in the face, much worse than his, and now there was fresh pain in the world, worse than both of theirs.
You see, I'm not the hack. God is. And the Old Fart doesn't know how to write a conclusion that'll satisfy his audience. He leaves that to us, his lost children, doing his dirty work, inventing uplifting endings to erase his mistakes.

HE'S A MAN,
Julie observed, and was surprised. Not surprised that Brian had aged but that he had matured. Men were usually adolescent or boyish: on the phone Jeff sounded like a teenager; her husband rarely showed more restraint than a toddler. Yet when she blurted out that Brian was a man, he said, “I doubt that.” Self-deprecation only made him seem all the more grown-up. Indeed, Julie was soon persuaded that at least about the subject of Richard Klein, he was wiser than she. The question was whether his wisdom would be of any help.

Is he gay? she wondered as she probed him over coffee and the Linzer cookie he ate with a kind of desperation after she said that Jeff had loved him. Was she unsure about his sexual preference because he had been molested by a man? Or simply because he was single and unmarried at fifty?

After she told him what Klein had done to her, had embarrassingly wept into her hands and confessed that she was a coward, she continued to muse in the background about Brian's sex life while she told him some—not all—of what Gary had found out so far and all about her agreement with Jeff to keep their connection to Rydel a secret. She held back the bombshell, the latest news about the case that Gary had phoned in from the Hamptons last night. Meanwhile, watching Brian react was fun. With each twist and turn, his expressive face shifted rapidly from world-weary nods to wide-eyed surprise. He listened without interrupting. Even when she was finally done, he paused for a moment before commenting, “So if Jeff told you to forget about me, and you agreed to keep quiet to jump-start your son's acting career, why are you talking to me at all?”

“Because of new information Gary has about the case. No one knows it. It's not public.”

“What? What did he find out?” Brian, like her, was instantly panicked. Was that because he knew all along this could never end easily for them?
Why do we keep hoping for a way out?