The Wisdom of Perversity (40 page)

“Julie won't agree to that,” Brian said. He was hiding behind her skirts, but he had to; he wasn't impressing this lawyer at all.

“Yeah, she won't agree to that, Ed,” Jeff said. “She thinks every day we don't say anything, we're responsible for every bad thing Rydel does.”

“And she's right,” Brian said.

“That's another point I want to raise,” Sugarman said. “You have to be very careful here, Jeff, you in particular. You were on the board of the American Broadcasting Academy.”

“I wasn't paid!” Jeff said, voice rising with outrage. “In fact, my crazy mother made me give Cousin Richard money to start the fucking thing and I never took a penny. I was long gone when he took it public.”

Sugarman chuckled. “I'm not talking about who gave what to whom, Jeff. Your name on the board makes it conceivable that Klein's or Rydel's victims could sue you for failing to do your due diligence—”

“Oh, for fuck's sake!” Brian's temper took over. Words rasped out of him recklessly. “Even for a lawyer, this is chickenshit bullshit. Jeff cut off all communication with Klein and Rydel twenty-five years ago, right, Jeff? Are you telling the truth about that? 'Cause if you're not, then fuck you. I hope they all sue you. I hope you fucking lose everything.”

“Okay, let's settle down,” the high-handed lawyer said.

Nothing came from Jeff's end. Brian soon discovered why.

The bedroom door flew open. Jeff, red-faced, screamed at Brian: “
FUCK YOU
!” He slammed the door behind him. “
HOW DARE YOU FUCKING ACCUSE ME. NOTHING HAPPENED TO YOU, YOU FUCKING WHINER. HE TOUCHED YOU A FEW TIMES, SO THE FUCK WHAT! HE SHOVED HIS COCK IN MY MOUTH OVER AND OVER. HE MADE ME—
” He stopped as if shot. He was tilted forward, arms akimbo, a teetering statue.

“Jeff?” Brian said.

Jeff straightened, face blank. He backed up into a chair by a small desk, facing the bed. He sat erect, avoiding eye contact, a passenger in a crowded subway car. There was a long silence. A fan buried somewhere in the ceiling turned on. Brian felt hot air drift down to them. He was sweating. He thought about lowering the thermostat but didn't want to disturb whatever was happening inside Jeff. His mind drifted, wondering how Julie was doing.

Eventually someone knocked timidly.

Jeff didn't move, fixed on a inner landscape.

He hoped it was Julie. “Come in?” Brian said.

Grace entered. She looked at Jeff. He didn't acknowledge her presence. “Should I tell Ed you're done talking?” she asked his profile.

Jeff blinked, his nose twitched; otherwise he didn't move.

“Yeah,” Brian said.

Grace nodded. She seemed hesitant to go. She looked at Brian. “Are you going to write a play about this?”

Startled, Brian laughed. “What?”

“I think you should write about this. I know it'll be very painful, unimaginably painful, but it'll be your best work.” She opened the door and added as she left, “Make a great movie too.”

Brian asked Jeff, “Can you believe that shit? Child molesters—producers. Is there really a difference?”

No laugh from the grim Jeff, agape at nothing. Was he catatonic?

Eventually Jeff crossed his legs, took a deep breath, and fixed on Brian. “We're gonna do this, right?”

“Yep.”

“All of us, just like we agreed before?”

“Julie's not gonna back out. And I'm not.”

“My mother loved me,” Jeff said. “Lots of people say they love me. Maybe they do. But I know, I fucking know, my mother loved me. She was the only person I can be sure really, really loved me.”

Brian nodded. “I loved you, Jeff.”

“As long as I was a good friend. But Ma loved me no matter what.”

Brian nodded. The buried fan shut off. The funnel of heat stopped. From the other room, Brian smelled fresh coffee. More room service? He supposed he had to say the obvious, but he took no pleasure in telling Jeff, “But your mother was a monster.”

“Yeah,” Jeff agreed. “But she was
my
monster.”

“I understand,” Brian said, and he did.

Jeff released a long sigh. He leaned forward, engaged again, solemnly resolved. “So . . . one question.”

“Just one?” Brian smiled.

“You really think it'll help? I mean, after I tell my story, and go into intensive therapy, real therapy, not the whining I've been doing, but really try to call up all the memories, learn yoga, cry on
Oprah,
whatever. You really think, Bri, after all that . . .” He stopped, staring, stiffening again into paralysis.

“Yeah?” Brian prompted.

Jeff was solemn, reverent: “You really think this'll help me win an Oscar?”

Last Chance

February 2008

JULIE WAS SURPRISED
to find glamorous Grace waiting for her as she stepped off the elevator onto the penthouse floor. As the producer hooked her arm, she announced with glee that Ann Barnes and Gil Fleider, “genius hair and makeup,” had set up shop in the suite's cavernous master bathroom and were waiting “to make you beautiful.”

Julie was thrilled. She pretended to be offended: “Jeff thinks I need a makeover?”

“Honey, I didn't mean just you. They're here to do Jeff and Brian. I'm even having them do me and I won't be on camera.” Grace led the way into the suite.

While Julie was downtown, the place had been transformed, crowded with people and high-tech equipment, as well as littered with half-eaten room-service trays.

“Wow,” she said.

Brian appeared. “You okay? You were gone three hours. Something happen?”

“Gary was there. I told him we're done,” she said. Brian blanched. That was irritating. “Don't look so scared,” she said. “It's got nothing to do with you.”

Brian glanced pointedly at Grace, who was openly eavesdropping.

“So,” Julie asked the producer, “when are they going to make me beautiful?”

Gil, a young black man with a completely shaved head, wearing black jeans so tight they could be subcutaneous, spoke in an English accent from the master bedroom doorway. “With your lovely bone structure, I won't have to do very much.” He extended a beckoning hand, offering more compliments as an incentive. “Look at those cheeks. Just a shading here and there”—he waved his hand, illustrating—“to highlight what God has given you.” He led her into the bathroom, put her in an armless leather chair borrowed from the suite's dining room, facing a floor-to-ceiling mirror. With every touch of his brush, Gil covered her with praise. She wasn't sure what made her feel more lovely, the makeup or his flattery.

Meanwhile Ann, whose own hair was pulled back into an efficient ponytail, studied Julie's shapeless gray helmet. When she took over from Gil, she quickly shaped the sides and back into an elegant cap, mysteriously managing with a blow-dryer to give it body. While snipping here and there, Ann made a hair color suggestion. “I love this dramatic silver—frank aging—but I think some contrast would be really nice. Salt and pepper. Nothing punk. Distinguished. And you have thick, lustrous hair; you should let it grow out, all the way, down your straight back to emphasize your great posture.” Ann turned to Gil. “She has great posture, doesn't she?”

“Fabulous,” Gil said.

“Be a woman warrior,” Ann whispered as she removed the smock.

Julie laughed. “A warrior? Me?” But she knew she looked confident and younger, the best she had in years.

They brought in Jeff to approve, as if she were the leading lady. Brian, glum and pale, appeared at the door. “You better do something about that pale face.” She nodded at Brian's reflection.

“I'll get color onto that Irish pallor,” Gil said, tugging Brian into the chair.

Jeff teased, “You'd better trim him around the ears. He's looking like a scruffy old man.”

Brian balked, trying to rise. “I don't need this. I'll just keep my head down and read my statement. They won't see my face.”

Gil pushed him back down. “Writers. Scared of the camera.”

“Yeah,” Jeff said. “That's always been Bri's problem. He's too shy.”

“I'm not shy,” Brian complained.

“You've always been too shy. Didn't you know that?”

Brian frowned, became thoughtful, passively accepting Gil and Ann's ministrations. Julie stood behind him, smiling encouragement into the mirror while Gil erased the shadows under his eyes, filled in the scar of worry marring his high forehead. Then Ann snipped a few hairs atop but mostly trimmed his nose hairs and ears. “Don't watch me. This is humiliating,” he said to Julie's reflection in the glass.

“I like looking at you,” she said. “It's comforting.”

He stared at her. A mischievous glint appeared. He stood up before Ann was done. “It's fine,” he said impatiently, pulling off the smock. “I have to talk to you.” He took Julie's hand, towing her through the rush-hour mob into the living room. She noticed Jeff was looking at a video of himself on TV, huddled with Grace and three young men in jeans and sweaters, all of them talking over each other. Brian pulled her into a second bedroom and shut the door.

“What's Jeff doing?” she asked as Brian moved close.

“They're fussing over his statement. Tone, bullshit, whether to add anything about Halley and his wonderful children. PR crap.” Brian stared into her eyes while he somberly laid a hand below her mother's pearls, on the bare skin above her scoop neck. His fingers skimmed down beneath the black fabric, two fingers insinuating under her strapless bra cup until he found and framed her nipple. He sighed with relief. “Watching you all dressed up in a room of people. It was making me crazy.” He pinched once, hard, and released. She was immediately deboned, loose everywhere. “Again please,” she said.

He stepped away, hand departing roughly, jangling her pearls. “Can't do this now,” he said in a husky voice.

“We'll ask Jeff to get us a room after the conference.”

He didn't care for her joke. He frowned. She reached for him, but he stepped back. “I'm teasing,” she said.

“I wish you'd stayed with Gary,” he mumbled at the carpet.

She thought about getting angry, decided not to. “Why?” she asked.

He didn't answer.

“You don't have to marry me,” she said. “You don't even have to live with me. I think you'd be happier, I know I would be, but you don't have to.”

“You don't understand. Sex has always been a dirty thing, a shameful secret I cherished, something that was all my own, the only thing that truly belonged to me. I don't know if I can enjoy it if it's okay . . . just a fun game I share. I don't think so. It will have lost its purpose.”

“Why are you trying to figure everything out in advance?” She sat on the bed, smoothed her dress, picking off white lint here and there, hoping her casualness would soothe him. “We'll see what happens. I'm not going to stay with Gary. Period. Doesn't have anything to do with what happens with us.”

“Then marry someone else so we can cheat.”

She smiled at his joke. He looked grim. “You're . . . serious?” she asked, for the first time unsettled by his attitude. “You won't just let us be whatever kind of couple we can be? It has to be secret . . . ?” She groped for another word, something else that it was: “It has to be perverted?”

“It
is
perverted,” Brian said. “What we have together is born out of perversion. We can't make it into something healthy.”

“Why not?” she argued. She was, for the first time in her life, confident of her desires, assured of their rightness. “What we can't do is try to bury it, pretend it never happened, that we're normal. But we can make it ours. All ours.”

He covered his face with his hands, to get away from her, it seemed. When he lowered them, he looked very sad. “You know what Jeff's lawyer advised me?”

“Not to go public, right? Jeff called me while I was on my way here. He said that's what his lawyer advised all of us.”

“But especially me. You know why? 'Cause I'm irrelevant.” Half of a sob escaped Brian. He choked it off and said bitterly, “My fucking life is irrelevant. My work is crippled, I have no children, I'm scared to fall in love, and my story is fucking irrelevant.” His makeup-smoothed face shattered.

She hurried over, gathering him as he keened, laying his wet cheek on her scoop collar, temple resting on her mother's pearls. She held him while he wept without restraint, squeezed him tight and kissed the top of his trembling head. He was whispering something through his tears, and when she shifted, to bring her ear closer, to her amazement she heard something from a man she loved that she had never heard before. “Thank you,” he whispered. “Thank you.”

WHILE GIL FIXED
him up again for the cameras, Brian listened to the excitement building in the suite. Even Jeff and Julie seemed to be vaguely happy about this humiliating act of public revelation. He wondered if Jeff had understood his life better than his shrinks, better than himself. He was shy. That was all. Shy of fighting for what he wants. Yes, he had pushed Klein away, but he had never embraced himself.

When they transferred to a small room adjoining the Four Seasons' banquet space where the press was gathering, Julie became unhappily nervous, asking Grace for a bottle of water, saying that her mouth was dry. Jeff too got edgy, after his second phone call from what sounded like a very agitated Halley. Brian listened more to Jeff's tone than to what he said to his third wife. He was reassuring and soothing in an unnaturally patient way, as if he were dealing with someone who was slightly mad and certainly someone he feared at least a little.
He's handling his mother,
Brian thought, and then dismissed that explanation as being too easy.

Grace left the trio alone to make sure everything was ready. Jeff turned into an eight-year-old, teasing Brian that Ann spent more time removing hair from his nose than his bald head. Brian replied that Jeff should have asked Gil to give him a chin. After Julie finished an entire pint of water in three slugs, he took her hand and she moved into his arms. Jeff was silenced by that sight. Brian shot him a warning look.

“I'm not saying anything,” Jeff said, and then, behind Julie's back, fucked his left palm with the right hand's index finger.

Grace reappeared to warn them, “Five minutes.”

“I need to pee,” Julie said, and went off with Grace.

Jeff sighed, tried to rub his face off but stopped when Brian said, “Makeup.”

“Fuck,” Jeff said. “Do I need a touch-up?”

Brian shook his head.

“Bri,” Jeff asked in a sweet tone, the innocent wonder of a child, “you think Rydel had a choice?”

“Doesn't matter,” he said. “We still have to say what we know.”

“Yeah, yeah. But. I just want your opinion. As a fucking expert in character. Do you think he had any real choice about what he became?”

“No,” Brian admitted. “I don't. Klein took that away from him. But we have to make sure Rydel doesn't rob another child of that choice.”

They were silent, Jeff pacing, breathing faster, Brian watching him anxiously until Grace returned with Julie and said it was time. The producer couldn't suppress her excitement, as if this were the release of a movie. She breathlessly reported they had a great crowd of all the entertainment and crime-beat reporters, including the
Times
and all the networks.

“Did we get them something to nosh?” Jeff asked as they gathered at the banquet door.

“You kidding? Of course I put out a big spread,” Grace said. “You have to feed the press or they'll eat
you
.”

The growls coming from the banquet room sounded as if they were still famished.

“Ready?” Grace asked, a hand ready to open the double doors.

Jeff was breathing shallowly and rapidly. Julie wobbled. Brian caught her elbow. He told himself,
I'm here for them. That's my relevance.
“You've got your statement, right?” he asked her.

Julie nodded, opening a black purse, taking out a folded page of yellow legal-pad paper. The lines were filled to the bottom in a meticulous hand.

“Jesus.” Jeff swallowed hard. “Listen to them. They're fucking animals.”

“You took something, right?” Brian asked. “Beta-blocker, something?”

“Yeah, old school. A Valium. I'm okay,” he said. He nodded at Grace and she opened the doors.

The sounds and lights of the press washed over them like a wave breaking. They drowned in the flashes, whirring cameras, predatory microphones. He looked at Jeff. What he saw was alarming. In the last few days, Brian thought he had been exposed to the full spectrum of his childhood friend's emotions: anger, defensiveness, fatigue, amusement, sadness, superiority, defeat, and that old friend, anxiety. But now there was pure fear in those bugged-out eyes, the frantic terror of a cornered animal—he was ready to bolt. “Come on.” He took Jeff's elbow. With his other arm, he hooked Julie's. He led them forward.

Either Jeff wasn't up to resisting or he was too frightened to. He allowed Brian to tow him. The plan was for Jeff to sit in the center with Brian and Julie on either side, but Jeff took the chair on the right, leaving Brian in the middle.

Facing the mass of people and equipment overwhelmed him. He dropped his eyes to his lap, down from the blossoms of microphones and three dozen rows of chairs filled with journalists ranging from heavily made-up perky television personalities to the gloomy, pale faces of cynical beat reporters. Brian looked to Jeff. He was supposed to speak first. Jeff's panicked eyes raked across Brain, seeking the door.
He's going to run. It's too late and it makes no sense, but he's going to run anyway.

Grace, at one side of the table, announced to the crowd, “This is Jeff Mark, Brian Moran, and Julie Rosen. They're each going to make a statement and then you can ask questions.” She cued them, then ducked away.

Brian looked up. Peering into the flares of camera lights, he could only make out a row of legs, a woman's stockings, a man's gray slacks. Jeff was staring at the microphones as if they were going to eat him alive. A line of sweat ran down the side of his cheek, through the pancake, a fine streak of dust appearing at its edges.
Poor man, what have I done to him?
He turned to Julie and whispered, “You ready?”

She nodded. “You start,” she said. She stared boldly at the crowd, chin up, black eyes glittering with curiosity, and she abruptly smiled with joy.
Was she crazy to look forward with happiness?