The Wisdom of Perversity (5 page)

“Yeah.” Brian was glad to accept the insult if it allowed him to escape.

“I'll call her,” Harriet said, as she had promised the other four times they had this conversation. “I owe her a call anyway. Did she take the job because your father isn't getting any parts?”

This too had been asked before and answered as he did now: “Dad has a job teaching theater at the High School of Performing Arts.”

“Ah.” Harriet nodded wisely. “Well, he gave acting a try. That's all any of us can do, right? Try to do what we love. Even if we fail.”

Brian nodded and waited.

“Go on,” Harriet said. She adjusted her blanket to cover her feet, heels and big toes blackened with dirt. She definitely walked sometimes, Brian noted. “Hurry up,” she said as if he had been dawdling. “Jeff is dying to show off his birthday present.”

When Brian arrived at the sanctuary of his friend's room something shiny flashed at him. He screeched and jumped away.

“It's a mike.” Jeff displayed a narrow silver tube connected by a long black cord to the tape recorder. He explained how the machine worked, that one of the black buttons controlled whether the tape played for a half hour or one hour (the difference being a loss of recording quality for the longer time) and finished with a lecture on the delicacy of how to properly thread the narrow shiny tape through the spools and recording heads. He did not allow Brian to touch it. Jeff was jealous of the pleasures of his toy and who could blame him? It was better than the best of toys because it wasn't a toy at all. This was an object from the grown-up world, hurled down to their lesser realm by a beneficent god.

Brian soon learned that the gift giver was not Jeff's parents, as first he had been led to believe. While Jeff finished threading the reels, he said, “You know what's great?”

“What?” Brian's eyes were fixed on the fascinating tape, one side gleaming, the other dull. Jeff had explained the shiny side had to face the recording head.

“No kid in the world has a machine like this,” Jeff said. “In fact, nobody in the whole world has one. You know why?”

“Why?” Brian dutifully asked.

“Because it's a sample. RCA gave one to all the NBC executives. My cousin gave it to my parents to give to me. RCA's not even putting it on the market until Christmas. So nobody has it. Nobody in the world has it.”

“You mean, your parents got this from . . .” Brian caught himself from saying Richard's name. He hadn't said it since visiting NBC. In the meantime, Jeff had talked about Klein a lot, quoting Cousin Richard's gossip about
The Tonight Show
and laughing about Brian's having knocked over the plant. Brian had limited his responses to grunts. Vaguely Brian felt it was a kind of confession to say Klein's name, the first step to telling what had happened in the bathroom. And how could he do that? He had no words to explain the experience and he didn't want to try to describe his penis's amazing reaction to the spiderweb caress of Richard's fingers. Without a vocabulary, he was silenced, even with the friend who knew everything about him.

“Yeah, from Cousin Richard,” Jeff said. “He got it for free and gave it to my parents to give to me for my birthday.” He pressed the Play and Record buttons simultaneously, picked up the mike, and shoved it under Brian's nose. “Say something.”

“Something,” Brian said. He pointed to the two depressed buttons. “Why did you press both buttons?”

“You have to press
both
Play and Record to record.”

“Why?”

“So you don't accidentally press Record. Because Record tapes over things, you don't want to accidentally start recording.”

“Oh . . .” Brian said as understanding came to him (from his logical mind, not Jeff's foggy explanation) that having to press both buttons made an accidental erasure less likely since all other functions could be accomplished by pressing one button. He became lost in fascination at this procedural brilliancy of the RCA Corporation.

“Speak!” Jeff insisted. He bobbed the mike for emphasis. It bumped Brian's nose.

“Ow,” Brian complained, then sneezed with sudden violence onto the fine mesh of the microphone's head.

Jeff jerked it away. “Jesus!” he complained. “That's disgusting.” He hit the Stop button. The Record and Play buttons popped up and the reels stopped. “Go get a tissue.”

“I don't have to blow my nose,” Brian said.

“To wipe off the mike,” Jeff said. “Jesus, you're disgusting.”

“You're the one who stuck it up my nose.”

Jeff angrily unplugged the mike from the machine and stood up. “I'm going to wash it off.”

“Wash it?” Brian said, appalled by this reckless plan. Jeff hurried out with the cord trailing between his legs and vanished around the corner. Brian followed. When he caught up, he found Jeff at the edge of Harriet's bedroom doorway, crouched against the wall in a pose Brian immediately recognized as Vic Morrow, the star of the television show
Combat!,
positioned behind a ruined wall of a war-torn French village, calculating how he could take out the Nazi machine gun. Brian took his cue, hunkering behind Jeff, and whispering in his ear, “Want me to take the point, Sarge?”

Jeff answered with the growling urgency of
Combat
!
's star. “Get the tape machine.”

“What?” Brian asked.

“Kraut's on the move,” he said. He stood up, stepping boldly into the doorway, exposing his presence. He was not ripped apart by machine-gun fire. Jeff continued on in all the way, checking to make sure his mother's bedroom was empty, and turned back to Brian. “Must be chowing down. Get the machine, Corporal. On the double.”

Brian didn't know why Jeff wanted the tape recorder, but at least the madness of washing the mike had passed. He hurried to Jeff's room and grabbed the machine. He cradled it tenderly while carrying the marvel to Harriet's bedroom. Entering, he was shocked to discover Jeff's head and torso under her bed, legs and feet sticking out.

Brian whispered, “Jeff, what the hell are you doing!”

“Bring it here,” came the urgent reply.

Brian's knelt beside the box-spring mattress, uneasy to be so near the subterranean gloom under Harriet's bed. Jeff's face appeared from the shadows, demanding, “Give me the plug.”

“What are you doing?” Brian repeated, although he knew and was already complying.

Jeff made a failed effort to lend a snooty British accent to his nasal whine: “Surveillance, James.”

Brian did his best to sound as sly as Sean Connery. “Well, Q, let's hope this little toy of yours doesn't blow up in our faces.”

“Hurry up! Give it,” Jeff said, abruptly dropping out of character. Brian handed him the plug and waited, the tape machine in his lap. Jeff complained. “You have to get under here.”

This demand was full of dread for Brian: first, the prospect of crawling under Harriet's bed, and second, the danger of both of them being deaf and blind to her return. But to waste time by protesting seemed just as dangerous. He put the recorder on the floor and crawled in on his belly, pushing the machine ahead of him into the dusty, claustrophobic space, feeling doomed, as if he were entering a mummy's tomb in a horror movie.

“I'm trying to find the outlet to plug it in,” Jeff said as he propelled himself deeper into the shadows.

Something touched Brian. A furtive creature brushed his cheek and nibbled at it gently. He screamed. Jeff panicked, forgetting he was under a bed, and tried to stand. His head whacked into a metal spring. “Ow!” he complained while Brian retreated from the animal chewing on his face, abandoning the tape recorder, pushing himself backward with enough force to clear the frame with a single shove. His withdrawal allowed him to see what had taken a bite out of his cheek. It was a balled-up woman's stocking. Brian touched his cheek. No blood. “What is it!” Jeff was shouting. “What the fuck is it?”

“Nothing,” Brian admitted glumly.

“Nothing! Is my mother coming?” he demanded.

Brian stuck his head out into the hallway. Something strange was on his face. He wiped at it, his palm coming away with a thick layer of dust. It was filthy under Harriet's bed, and something about how dirty it was convinced him that if they were caught putting the recorder under her bed Jeff would be forgiven, but he would not.

Heart pounding, Brian whispered frantically at the soles of Jeff's Keds, “Hurry up!”

“I've plugged it in,” Jeff's muffled voice replied. “But I can't see the buttons to start it recording.”

Desperate to get the dreadful enterprise over with, Brian dropped on all fours and slid on his belly under the bed. He found the tape recorder with blind fingers, and from memory located the Play and Record buttons. He pressed them simultaneously. They locked in place. The soft whirring movement of the reels confirmed his success. “Let's go!” he whispered to Jeff. They banged heads shimmying out from under the mattress and banged shoulders going through his mother's bedroom door.

When they arrived breathless in Jeff's room, Brian laughed at Jeff. “Look at you.” Brian took hold of Jeff's shoulders, planting him in front of an oval mirror attached to his dresser. His kinky hair was gray with dust. 
“Oh yeah?” Jeff honked, turning Brian to show him the right leg of his Levi's, a wide stripe of dust running from thigh to cuff. The boys studied their twin dirtied images in the mirror with pleasure, Jeff's hand perched on Brian's shoulder, Brian's arm resting on Jeff's.

“Jeff!” Harriet howled from her room.

They jumped at the shock, holding onto each other, not moving.

“Jeff!” she repeated sharply.

“What?” he shouted back. “We're playing.”

“Get in here. Right now.” Harriet's demanding a face-to-face implied she'd found the recorder; usually Harriet was satisfied by yelling at them from her bed, using the hallway as a megaphone. Jeff shook his head to rid it of dust. Brian grabbed the loose fringe of Jeff's Fruit of the Loom T-shirt, fluttering it to free the droppings. “Jeff!” she insisted.

“Come with me,” he whispered as he walked out. Brian brushed off his Levi's, following without much hope of getting rid of all the evidence. They were doomed. So stupid. Of course she could hear the machine. And it was such an obvious thing to do with a tape recorder! Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Jeff stopped on the sill of his mother's doorway without warning. Brian bumped into him. Jeff shoved him away. “Get off me.”

Harriet was settled on her bed, sipping from a steaming mug. The tape recorder wasn't in evidence. “Uncle Hy is bringing your cousins over today to celebrate your birthday. I want you to be nice to them. Especially your cousin Julie. Her mother praises her to the skies, so she expects everyone to make a fuss over her. And Noah is just a hopelessly spoiled brat. But I want you to make an extra effort to play with them. Don't close your door and ignore them.” Harriet sipped her tea while she shifted her baleful gaze at Brian. “And Brian, I want you to make sure Jeff is nice to his cousins. You're a polite boy. You wouldn't ignore your cousins. So you make sure Jeff is a good boy.”

Brian's throat constricted. That they hadn't been caught intensified his nervousness about what would happen when they were. He nodded. Harriet seemed satisfied and dismissed them.

Back in Jeff's room, they resumed their marathon Monopoly game, doomed never to conclude because they were both allowed a credit line of fifty thousand dollars from the bank. While Jeff easily paid out the fifteen hundred for landing on Brian's hotel on Park Place, Brian asked for information about Jeff's cousins, whom he had never met and rarely heard mentioned. “Julie's eleven. Noah's little, still a baby. They're Uncle Hy's kids. Hy is my dad's brother. He's a dentist.”

Brian accepted that as a thorough briefing. He did not ask about the implications of these children's being the offspring of Saul's more successful older brother, Hyram. He didn't know that Harriet despised them for having more money, and since they were richer, she also desperately wanted their good opinion. He didn't know that there was a practical consideration to Harriet's anxiety about how Jeff treated these relations: Saul owed his brother Hy twenty-seven hundred dollars, borrowed a year ago to start Saul's new business, a stationery store near the new Lincoln Center complex in Manhattan. It would never have occurred to Brian that any relation of Saul's was capable of intimidating Harriet because Jeff's father, in appearance and behavior, was the least scary adult Brian knew. Saul resembled a beagle: mournful watering eyes, big snout begging for love, easily cowed when refused, as frightened of Harriet as Brian was, maybe more so. Jeff also bossed his father shamelessly. On the rare Sunday that Saul took the boys to a Mets game (he worked Saturdays and every other Sunday at his store), Jeff honked orders for treats and souvenirs and never failed to get what he wanted out of his dolorous father.

While they alternated paying rents on each other's hotels, Jeff left his door ajar, listening for an opportunity to recover the tape recorder. After a half hour, given Harriet's talent for noiseless jaunts on slippers, Jeff removed his Keds before executing a visual check on her, careful to place his stocking feet along the edges near the wall where the oak floorboards didn't creak.

He returned, reporting that Harriet had stayed put. Half an hour later he tried again. He was gone much longer, and when Jeff reappeared the nervous excitement of surveillance had been replaced by a lowered head and sluggish feet.

“What is it?”

“Shut the door,” Jeff ordered.

Brian obeyed. “What's happened?”

“She was on the telephone.” Jeff stared through Brian. “Mom was crying,” he added.

Brian relaxed. “So what?” Harriet's crying on the phone didn't happen every day, but it did at least once a week.