The Wisdom of Perversity (17 page)

“What?” Jeff shook his head to indicate he wasn't following. “What was that?”

“It's got something to do with money. Your mom told your uncle she has breast cancer so you wouldn't have to grow up poor. Or something. Anyway, she doesn't have cancer. It was just something she made up for your uncle.”

Jeff wiped away a lingering tear from his left eye. “Yeah, but she also said it to your mother,” he pointed out.

“Yeah,” Brian agreed. “Why'd she do that?”

“She's crazy,” Jeff said, rather sadly, as if that were a matter of regret more than anything else.

Klein shook the door again, harder. “Come on. You heard your mother, Jeff: Locked doors are rude.”

Jeff shouted, “
JUST ONE SECOND
.” He grabbed Brian's bicep, squeezing to emphasize the crucial nature of this detail. “Did she talk about the money Dad owes my uncle for starting his store?”

“Yeah, that's it!” Brian agreed. “She didn't want your dad to pay him back—”

Jeff interrupted, “He can't pay him back. The store's not making any money.”

“Oh,” Brian said, understanding now. “I guess that's why she told him she has cancer. It doesn't really make sense. But that's why she made it up.”

Jeff's eyes were clear of tears. “She's crazy,” he said, sounding himself again.

“Jeff! Your mother says you should—” Before Klein finished, Jeff crossed to the door, flipped the hook up, and opened the door.

“Well, well . . .” Klein entered with a knowing smirk. Old Spice immediately snaked into Brian's nostrils. “What were you boys doing in here”—he flicked the dangling hook playfully—“with the door locked?”

“We were talking. Is Dad home?” Jeff spoke imperiously, as if the vice president were his secretary.

Klein appeared ready to object but then frowned and reported dutifully, “Everybody's here. Your cousins, your aunt, your uncle. Everybody's in your mother's room.”

“Great.” Jeff pushed past him, disappearing into the hall.

Brian was stunned to find he was suddenly alone with Klein. Before he could recover and dash out, Klein said to someone obscured from Brian's view, “Come in. Don't be shy, Sam.”

Sam appeared, eyes downcast. Klein put his hands on Sam's waist and positioned him in front of Brian. “Well? What do you have to say?”

Sam glanced at Brian from lowered lids, barely able to sustain the contact. “I'm sorry I lost my temper. I don't like being called stupid. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you. I just . . .” His eyes seemed to lose all hope, falling to the floor permanently. “I just got upset for a second,” he said, a whisper. “I'm sorry.”

Klein nodded at Brian. “Sam was a bad boy. This is what we do to bad boys.” He raised his right arm high, holding it up in the air long enough for Brian to anticipate what he was going to do and then brought the flat of his hand down on Sam's behind, hard. The teenager's jeans muffled the noise of impact. Sam blushed but didn't wince or object. “That's what we do, right, Brian?” He ordered Sam, “Turn around.” He gave his back to Brian. “Why don't you spank him, Brian? That way Sammy will know you forgive him.”

Brian was appalled. “But he didn't hurt me!” He moved alongside Sam, talking to his profile. “You didn't hurt me. Understand?” It was very important to make them understand that the whole thing was something no one should talk about. “Nothing happened.” Brian made this point to Klein. The adult cocked his head, regarding Brian with a puzzled frown. “It was no big deal,” Brian insisted. “Okay? Don't talk about it.”

Klein considered this carefully. He nodded once, pursed his lips, nodded again, then looked very solemn. “Of course, Brian, we won't talk about it.” He put a hand around the back of Sam's neck, lowering the teenager's head enough to speak directly into his ear. “Right, Sam? You understand? Brian doesn't want us to talk about it.”

Sam seemed to smile a little but then looked very serious. “Okay.”

Klein released Sam. He grinned at Brian. “It'll be our secret, Brian.”

“It's not a secret,” Brian said, irritation in his tone. “I just don't want people talking about it.” His cheeks felt hot: the strain of expressing himself was almost unbearable.
Run,
he thought.
Just run.
But that had failed before. And then there would be more talk, more questions, more lies.

Richard raised a hand to the corner of his mouth. “Our lips are sealed,” he said, then zippered them shut. He turned to Sam. “Now that you two are friends again, why don't you give Brian a hug? Show him you're sorry.”

Sam opened his arms and came toward him. Brian stuck out both hands and said firmly, “No.”

Sam stopped, looked at Klein for direction.

“Okay,” Klein said. “Sam has to go now anyway. You'll be gone for an hour, right? Running that errand?”

“You bet!” Sam was abruptly very cheerful. “Thanks again, Brian, for understanding. See you soon.” He walked around Klein and pulled the door shut behind him.

Brian was appalled. He was exactly where he didn't want to be. Despite his best efforts, he was all alone with Richard Klein.

Whom Do You Trust?

February 2008

BRIAN DIDN'T RECOGNIZE
Julie; he recognized her eagerness to see him. As soon as he entered the restaurant, a silver-haired woman's head bobbed above a customer who was blocking her view of Brian; then she weaved around an obstructing waiter to maintain her sight line.
What's happened to her?
he thought with dismay as he approached her table, then reminded himself,
Of course. She's forty years older.

He offered a smile of welcome, cautioning himself not to reveal any awareness she had aged. “You look great,” he planned to say no matter what. Perhaps she did. His habit of meticulously assessing physical attractiveness was momentarily impaired by the shock that Julie's long raven locks were gone, replaced with a cropped gray hairdo that bordered on butch. As she stood up to greet him, he was favorably impressed that she had retained as much of her lean, girlish body as could be reasonably expected. Her narrow face was fuller, but that was an improvement; she looked less stern, friendlier. More good news came as he got close enough to see that she was genetically very fortunate. He could tell it wasn't Botox or surgery that allowed her skin to look a decade, maybe two, younger than her age—parentheses around her mouth but few wrinkles elsewhere. Her black eyes were still bright with that intense curiosity he remembered. Her smile was eager too. She hadn't subsided, as had so many of his friends, into the frowning smugness of middle age. Best of all, although she had put on a makeup base that dulled the two beauty marks under each eye, they were still there—old friends.

He noted all that while he leaned in for the obligatory peck on the cheek between the sexes expected by all New Yorkers—unless the person you were greeting had recently made an attempt on your life. Julie stiffened as his lips came near the beauty mark at the point of her high right cheekbone. She relaxed when, as was Brian's custom, he kissed air, not flesh. He assumed he knew why she was shy of contact and felt sorry for her, but then immediately scolded himself:
Don't be a hack writer. You don't know that Klein had any effect on her. Not everyone is a fragile flower like you.

“You look great,” he said and, as it turned out, meant.

“You look so different!” Julie exclaimed. “You're a man.” The latter was said as if that were an unlikely development.

“I doubt that.” Brian eased himself onto the tippy metal chairs of Not Your Mother's Kitchen on Hudson, a block from his expensive, very cramped so-called two-bedroom apartment. (He couldn't fit more than a twin bed in the second room in which he had installed his father this past January, when Danny's health began a severe decline.) Not Your Mother is where he preferred to meet someone he didn't know well. The espresso was strong and—an amazing bonus in a hip emporium—they offered a vegan version of Linzer cookies. They were as thoroughly covered in confectionery sugar, and the raspberry jam center was as sweet as his idealized memory of Zolly's Linzers, but of course spelt, sunflower oil, and agave nectar didn't reproduce exactly the butter and egg yolk base of the old neighborhood treat. Still, pleasant memories, even imperfectly reproduced, were in short supply. And the virtue of meeting at Not Your Mother was that should the person prove, as people so often did, to be hostile or a bore, the espresso would keep Brian awake while the Linzer cookie salved his wounds.

“I didn't mean that the way it came out.” She nervously brushed the short white hairs at her temple as if she too missed her long raven hair. “It's just that last time I saw you, you were a little boy and now you're a tall, beautiful man.” She got very flustered. “Handsome. I mean, handsome.”

“I didn't know you were in the movie business, Julie. Your flattery is so good you could be a member of the academy,” he said.

Julie winced. “I'm not flattering you.”

Brian patted the top of her hand gently. “I'm sorry. I guess I spend so much time listening to insincere people, I can't hear a true melody anymore.” At his touch, her fingers reacted skittishly, fanning out, on alert. He immediately registered that reaction as further proof she had shut down sexually, confirmed by her mannish do, sparing makeup, and menopausal clothes—jeans a size too large to properly show off her lean body and a shapeless wool sweater.

A waitress appeared to ask what he wanted. He surveyed her thoroughly: two toned hair, half pale blue, half straw yellow; a line of pimples across the ridge of her forehead; left nostril pierced three times to accommodate the decoration of three thin silver-colored rings, an elaborate floral tattoo that covered her right shoulder like a skin tight epaulette, then flowed down, wallpapering her forearm. He looked away from those desecrations to the purer Julie. She was drinking a cappuccino. “That all you're having?” Brian asked. She nodded, rested her chin in her hands, and studied his face with disconcerting meticulousness. A taste of his own medicine. He didn't care for it. He ordered the espresso and Linzer cookie. “My madeleine,” he explained.

She was following her own train of thought. “Is Jeff good at flattery?” she asked.

It took Brian a moment to catch up. “I have no idea. Haven't spoken to Jeff in twenty-five years. At least. And even that was only a two-minute phone call to congratulate him on his first picture. I really haven't spoken to him in any depth or at any length since we were eleven years old.”

“So you really don't talk to him. That's what he said.”

“You've spoken with Jeff?”

She nodded guiltily.
Guilty about what?

“So that was a trick question?” Brian asked. “It wasn't especially tricky. If Jeff and I really were in touch, he could have called me and warned me to pretend we weren't.”

Julie laughed, very pleasantly. “That
was
dumb of me.”

Brian thought her clumsiness at deception endearing. “Julie, why would we lie about being in touch? Of all the things to lie about, why that?”

“I just can't believe it. I know it was forty years ago, but . . .” She paused.

He was intensely curious about what she might say, but his Linzer cookie arrived. “Your espresso will be right up,” the waitress said.

“Could I have a glass of water?” he asked, looking up at the waitress' beringed nostril and wondering how messy it all became when she got a head cold. Once she was gone, he prodded Julie, “Go on. Why can't you believe we're no longer friends?”

“I don't know, I guess it's all frozen in time for me. That's crazy, isn't it? Also, you two were so close,” Julie added wistfully, as if she missed their friendship.

“We were,” he admitted. “I think I saw Jeff every day of my life from when our mothers pushed us in baby carriages in Rego Park until I was almost twelve. A mere eleven years. I mean, I've had lots of friendships that lasted longer, but there's nothing quite like the intensity, the complete trust you feel for that first best friend you make. Think about it. After puberty, you look to one sex for more than friendship and to the other for less-than-complete intimacy.” His espresso appeared. He took a sip, mostly to stop talking. He had said way too much.

“You're right. And even for best childhood friends, you two were really close. I remember that so well. You were very important to Jeff. He loved you.”

Brian's throat closed. He blinked back tears. How humiliating.
Now
I'm a sentimental hack. Maybe it's the new meds. Maybe I've let the doc go overboard on de-balling me. Next thing I know I'll be menstruating.
“You really think I was so important to him?” he asked coyly.

“Oh yeah. Jeff was not a popular little boy. You were. And you were a good athlete. You were smart and handsome and popular. Weren't you class president?”

“We didn't have a class president. It was a public school in a working-class neighborhood. We couldn't even afford a class clown.”

“But you were popular. Right? I remember Jeff bragging about how popular you were. Don't be modest. Tell the truth. Weren't you a seriously popular kid?”

The question felt like a trap. He agreed quickly, “Yeah I was popular.” And was quick to retract, “Wasn't hard, in that group of misfits.”

“So why did you stop being friends?” She was earnest. She was a very earnest woman. He didn't really care for earnestness. It wasn't the same as honesty. In this case, for example, he didn't think she was being sincere. She knew why. “I'm afraid by eleven, for reasons I'm sure you understand, I decided dealing with Harriet and Richard Klein was not worth the effort of being friends with Jeff.”

Julie nodded. “But why at age eleven? Did something happen when you were eleven that was different from what happened when you were eight, nine, ten?” She put her chin in her hands and waited with the determination of a child to get an answer.

She was asking without asking, like a clever interrogator.
But this isn't an interrogation,
Brian thought.
It's her mystery too.
He focused on the Linzer cookie. They had supplied a knife and fork for its consumption. That was misguided. Cutting it would scatter the confectionery sugar and crack the top layer off the bottom, eventually breaking the whole into pieces. The true pleasure was in biting through the two hardened layers to the sweet layer of jam. He usually acquiesced to decorum and spoiled his own treat by using silverware. Confronted by Julie's naive gaze he picked up the cookie and chomped. That left a line of white sugar on his mouth. When he spoke, sugar sprayed and flecked Julie's blue sweater. “Around when I was ten—after almost two years of fending him off—I finally figured out the only way I could handle Richard Klein was not to be in the same room with him. Sorry,” he said, pointing to her sweater and dabbing his lips with a napkin. Julie glanced down at the damage, demurely wetted the tip of her pinky, and lifted off the dots of sugar. Brian drank some of the water, then took a sip of espresso, composed himself, and resumed, “So I told Jeff not to invite me up when Klein was around. In fact, I told him we should always play at my apartment.” Brian sighed. He had no desire to continue. Without regret he could rise from the table and walk away from her forever. What sentimental insanity had made him think any good could come out of talking with someone who had shared his past? She was as ignorant about all this as any civilian.

“And what happened?” she asked.

“What happened! He kept doing it.” Brian heard his anger, still green. He sighed. He wanted to stop but forced himself to go on. “It would happen every few months, spaced out so I'd sort of forget that it might happen again. I'd speak to Jeff in the morning about what we were gonna do that day, like always, we'd make plans for me to play at his apartment, like always, and then Klein would be there.”

“And Jeff never warned you he'd be there?”

“No. He'd let him ambush me. First time it happened I yelled at him. He promised it wouldn't happen again. Then a few months later it happened again. Again, I yelled at him. Again he promised. Then it happened a third time. That ended our friendship as far as I was concerned. Eventually I went to Horace Mann, a private school—”

“Sure,” she said. “I know Horace Mann.”

“Yeah, well, Richard Klein turned out to be a good preparation for that place.”

Julie frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Oh there were a couple of Kleins there, but I could spot them immediately.” Brian chuckled. “That was the only favor Klein did for me—he prepared me to deal with our world of predators. I can't tell you what a dimwitted boy I was. It took me way too long to realize that Richard Klein wasn't all that unusual.”

“What!” Julie sat up straight. For a moment, in that pose, he saw the proud, striking girl who wanted to be a ballet dancer. She's really a handsome woman, he decided, high brow, black eyes and pale skin suggesting an old-world grace that evoked not the Jews of Riverdale but the doomed artists of Prague. “Klein was a monster,” she declared.

“Exactly. The world is chock-full of monsters. Anyway, with me at Horace Mann and Jeff going to the public junior high we were no longer in the same school, and that, as far as everyone else was concerned, ended our friendship. When I was eleven, my parents, after two trial separations, finally legally divorced, and just before my twelfth birthday Mom moved us out of Rego Park.” Brian paused. He realized that this collection of facts about his life, told in this way, had never been discussed outside of the soft couches of therapy. There they had become commonplace, the chitchat of trauma: easily said, easily understood, easily accepted. Not here. Telling Julie, the words scalded his throat and left a foul taste. He felt as if he'd vomited. “I'm sorry.”

“For what?” She frowned. Crow's-feet appeared. He liked those lines. They lent her earnest face a needed dose of skepticism.

“Being flip. I don't mean to be flip.”

“I don't mind. But I'm confused. I thought you said you saw Jeff once when you were both grown-up. In your twenties, maybe?”

“No, I didn't.”

“Really? I thought you did.” Once again, she didn't do a good job of lying.

“I'm sure I said nothing of the kind. Where did you get that tidbit? From Jeff?”

Julie confessed, “Yeah, he said he saw you after he graduated from film school.”

“I bet the fucker didn't tell you what happened,” he said, the ancient anger new again. He wanted to apologize, then balked.
Apologize for facts?
“Jeff came to see me when he got his first job directing a TV movie. Wanted to know if I'd do a polish on the script—I had already had two plays on at Playwrights Horizons and I was making a living writing for
As the World Turns
—so he wasn't doing me any favors. On the contrary. But I was pleased. I admit it, I was a fool, my heart skipping with delight to have my old buddy back. So we met at my apartment. It was just like the old days for about half an hour. Then Jeff, remembering I was a Knicks fan, asked me if I still liked them. Those were days when nobody had cable and you could only get the Knicks on cable. I said I was obsessed with them. So Jeff offered to take me to a Knicks game. He said we could use Klein's seats, that he had great seats. Said that Cousin Richard would be happy to give them to us whenever we wanted.”