The Wisdom of Perversity (11 page)

Julie's brain was racing, but she couldn't figure out what had to be said, what should be said, what she wanted to say. She said nothing.

“Honey? Are you there?”

“I'm here. Let's talk about this when I get home. I'll be there at three,” she said, a lie. She could be home by one, had planned to be, in fact. And Amelia would let her go immediately if she asked.

“No, babe, I can't wait. If this is a story I have to recuse myself from writing about, I need to know that now. I blogged a teaser about my column and I'm already in a blog shoot-out with some right-wing schmuck who—can you believe this?—blogged that child molestation has become epidemic because our society espouses homosexuality, as if being gay is the equivalent of raping children. Jesus!” Gary cleared his throat. “Anyway, I've got to know right away if this is something I can't write about. Not 'cause of Klein—he's not a relative—but because of your cousin Jeff.”

“You can't.” The words came out without her considering the ramifications.

Those arrived immediately. “Why not? What do you know about his involvement?”

“I don't know anything about his involvement. I don't know anything about him. You know that. We haven't spoken at all since my father died and before that I hadn't seen Jeff since I was a teenager. That's two conversations in thirty years.”

“So then I can write about it. Right? I mean, there's no conflict of interest if he's a virtual stranger. Remind me. What was the fight about? Something about your dad owing his dad money?”

“No,” Julie said. “Other way around. His father owned a store and my father loaned him money and Saul didn't pay it back in a timely fashion so the brothers stopped speaking, and so we stopped having Seder together.” Amelia was hovering outside the glass partition, pretending not to be looking through.

“Well, that's gonna sound loopy. Your father, Hy, who died almost broke after all those stupid real estate deals in Florida, claiming one of the richest men on earth owed him money?”

“Not Jeff. Jeff didn't owe him money. Jeff was a child at the time. It was his father.”

“I know that, but that's what it's gonna sound like. Anyway, the point is, you don't mind if I write about it, right?”

“I do mind,” she snapped. “I just said you can't. Aren't you listening?”

“Why?” he demanded, a willful toddler. “Why can't I write about it?”

She spoke without thinking it through: “I have to speak to Jeff. I never quarreled with Jeff. It's not fair to him. He's still my first cousin.”

“Okay. So when will you speak to him?”

“When? I don't know . . . I don't how long it's going to take for me to get in touch with him. I don't even have a number for him.”

“I do,” Gary said, pouncing as if he had been waiting for her to step into this trap. “I have a number for his private personal assistant, not some receptionist at his company, so he'll get your message quick. I'll give you the number and wait for you to call him, but first, I just want to understand why you think you have to talk to him? If you don't have a relationship with him and you don't care about him—”

“I do care.” Her mouth dried out. Her upper lip stuck to her teeth and she licked them so she could go on. “Someday . . . I don't know. Maybe someday Jeff can be of help to Zack.” She grabbed for that blindly, but she was delighted by the discovery.

“Help . . . Zack?”

“What if Zack's interest in acting keeps up? Who knows? Someone like Jeff, he's so important, who knows in what way he might help Zack, right? For college, maybe a letter of recommendation? No matter what school Zack wants to go to, a letter from Jeff Mark will help, right? Who knows?” She sounded so unlike herself, eager to sell an idea. To Gary of all people. When had she ever convinced Gary of anything?

Now. “You're right. When you're right, you're right,” he said. “Okay. You should call him first. But listen. You gotta do it fast. You can't procrastinate, like usual. You really can't. These days this stuff goes around the world in minutes. Any second someone else could stumble on to Jeff's being on the board, then I might have to comment if they Google him and see your family name and eventually bring it back around to me, so I need to know. Anyway, I can't keep quiet about the case unless I shut down altogether and I'd have to do that today. Okay, sweetie? You'll call him right now?”

“Yes,” she hissed, furious now. “Bye.” Pushing her. Always pushing her. She hung up, took a step to the door, saw Amelia entering, and turned her back to hide her rage.

“Everything okay?”

She nodded. She had to think, figure this out.

Amelia came around to peer at her face, saw distress. “You sure you're okay?”

Her cell buzzed against her thigh. She dug it out. Gary. When she answered, he scolded, “You didn't ask for the number I have for Jeff. Pretty hard to call him without it. Do you know how to put your phone on speaker so you can copy it in?”

“I'll write it down.” She looked at Amelia, pointing at her memo pad. “Can I . . . ?” Amelia nodded. “Give me the number.” She wrote it down, folded the paper neatly, slid it into the back pocket of her jeans.

“Do it right away like you promised, okay?” Gary said, talking to her as if she were five.

She hung up without a good-bye. “Fuck,” she said. Her voice warbled, more pain than anger in the curse.

Amelia's jaw set. Her tone was harsh. “Is Gary being a shit again?”

“No, no, it's not that,” she said in a hurry to forestall Amelia from a misapprehension provoked by what always remained uppermost in Amelia's mind about Gary and their marriage: his affair five years ago with a young assistant district attorney, his tearful pleas for forgiveness, and Julie's quickly granted pardon. Amelia had not and would never forgive Gary for a betrayal of Julie that didn't truly bother Julie—as long as Zack never found out. After all, she couldn't blame Gary for wanting more than she could provide. “Gary's just dumping his family's nuttiness on me. I have to go home early. All right?”

“You're the best wife in the world. He's lucky to have you,” Amelia said. She let her go with a kiss on the cheek and a pat on the shoulder. Didn't even press for details. What a doll.

An hour later, Julie was at home, smoking while she kept an eye on her cell, waiting for Jeff to return her call, as promised by his assistant. She hoped the message she had left would be provocative without being indiscreet: “It's his cousin Julie calling about a family emergency.”

During her vigil, she perched on her bedroom window's ledge, neck and face chilled by a steady wind off the Hudson, legs and butt baked by the radiator while she took a drag and exhaled.
Last puff,
she thought in sadness.
This is my last puff ever.
She crushed the ember on the mortar between the bricks, using the filter to brush the remains away before she flicked it into the alley below. She watched to make sure it didn't hit anyone.

Now that her eyes weren't on the phone, it rang. Caller ID read “Satisfaction,” the name of Jeff's producing company. Her heart began to pound. “Hello . . . ?” Her voice was faint and high, a shy little girl.

“Hello,” answered a brash woman's voice that echoed slightly, as if the speaker were in a tiled room. “Julie Mark, please. I have Jeff Mark returning.” It had taken twenty-two minutes. That was quick. “Hello!” the woman standing in a shower demanded.

“Uh, yes, this is Julie—this is her. This is she, I mean.”

“Hold on for—”

A clattering noise interrupted the secretary and Jeff's voice came on, deeper than when he was a child, yet still nasal and congested by complaint. “Who died? Just tell me straight out. I can take it. I'm terrified. But I can take it. Who died?”

“What?”

“The message was family emergency and I haven't heard from you since the last family funeral. Who died?”

“Oh.” Julie attempted a chuckle but instead made the noise of a stalled car. “No one. Everyone's fine.”

“Your brother?”

“Yeah. He's fine—”

“Your husband? Your kid? Your dog? Your goldfish?”

At last he got a laugh from her. “They're all fine, Jeff.”

“And you? You're fine?”

“Well,” Julie reached for one more cigarette, to survive this conversation. “I've been better. I'm still kind of recovering from the shock of—”

“What?” Jeff interrupted. She heard noise in the background. Sounded like lots of people walking in a circle around Jeff and telling him things. “Recover? Recover from what? Were you in an accident?”

“I wasn't.” Julie paused to light her cigarette.

“Oh thank God!” Jeff addressed someone with him. He made no effort to mute his voice, inviting her to eavesdrop. “We're about to get on a plane and I thought she was telling me she was in an accident. I swear I wouldn't get on, Grace. I would not get on this plane if she told me she'd been in an accident. It's a bad juju.” He returned to Julie, so loudly she moved the receiver away from her ear. “You mean you were grief-stricken. You had to recover from being grief-stricken.”

“Grief-stricken?” Julie repeated, puzzled. She exhaled a thin stream of smoke at the open window and repeated, “Grief-stricken?” Over Rydel and Klein?

“From losing your parents. What's it been? Five years since you lost your father?”

“Nine,” Julie said.

“Nine! I'm old. Well, don't be embarrassed by it taking a long time. Your parents were great. Your mother was really great. Smart, witty, and holy shit, what a great cook. I can still remember her
rugelach.
She was somebody to grieve. Not like my mother.” (“You're terrible!” a woman chided in the background, followed by laughter.) “I'm terrible,” Jeff informed Julie, and then answered his companion (or companions—Julie heard several people in the background). “She knows what I'm talking about. This is my first cousin Julie. She knows what a horror I grew up with. The reason Julie and I didn't see each other outside of funerals for thirty years is because of my horror of a mother, the compulsive liar.” To Julie, he commented, “Isn't that right, Jules? The family quarrel was all my mother's fault?”

This bravado he was displaying, glibly summing up the painful truth about his mother with easy mockery, was that a bluff? Had Jeff really learned to embrace his past in public hallways? Was Julie the straggler, a little girl stuck in her pathetic closet of shame? “Uh, well, I think, my father was also a little to blame—” Julie stammered.

“You don't have to be nice. I remember that about you, Julie. You're very nice. Well, I'm not nice. How could I be? I was raised by Eva Braun. So, what's up? If nobody's dead, what's up?”

Julie's stomach grumbled. She took a long draw on the cigarette to calm herself. She exhaled away from her cell, then chose to start with the most cowardly of her alternatives. “My husband, Gary, a lawyer, I don't know if you know, is also a TV legal analyst and columnist and he's been investigating the Rydel story—”

“Are you smoking?” Jeff interrupted. “Are you still smoking? I'm talking to a white middle-class mother who is smoking,” he commented to the others. “You are a mother, right?”

“Yes, I have a son. Zack. He's fifteen.”

“Wow. Fifteen. Wow. I have four kids, you know that, right? Oldest is sixteen, the baby just one. And you're smoking? How did you get away with it? You don't live in LA, that's how. They'd shoot you in LA.” (His audience enjoyed that; there was a chorus of laughter.) “They would.” Jeff milked the joke. “A mother who smokes? They would shoot you. No, I'm sorry. I'm wrong. First, they would take away your illegal Nicaraguan nanny and then they would shoot you.” (The female laughter got raucous; someone called, “Jeff, you're hilarious.”) “I'm on my way home to LA now,” Jeff continued. “We just tested in Houston. Can you believe it? Houston fucking Texas. In fact, I have to get off, we're about to board. So, can I call you back? What were you calling about, anyway?”

“I was calling because my husband tells me it's not going to stop with Sam. It's going to come out about . . .” She was about to say “your cousin,” but Jeff was talking nervously over her: “You said something about your son. What's his name? I'm sorry, I forgot.”

“Not my son. His name is Zack.”

“Zack, that's a good Jewish name.” (A woman giggled and said in a southern accent, “He's terrible, he's god-awful terrible.”)

“Actually, his father's not Jewish,” Julie said.

“Really. Married a goy, eh, Jules? Smart move. Jewish men are too much work.” (“You can say that again,” a woman with a baritone voice called out.) “Look, I have to turn the phone off because I'm about to board a plane with the most powerful scumbag in Hollywood.” (She heard a man grumble, then laugh.) “And he expects me to hold his hand during takeoff. Actually for the entire flight. Can I call you back after I land in LA?”

She should say no; she had promised Gary.

Like Gary, Jeff didn't wait for her to agree. “Glad nobody's dead. After we land in LA, I'll call you. That is,
if
we land.” (“Don't say that!” the deep-voiced woman said. “That's real bad juju.”) “Talk to you later,
bubelah.
”

When the line went dead, it felt to her that not an individual but an entire world had disappeared. Despite his bitter jokes, he was full of confidence—that certainly was a contrast to her. Was this the true value of being world famous: no more shame, no more guilt? She shivered at a gust off the Hudson, pressed out a second this-is-my-last cigarette, and decided to confess to Gary that she was smoking. And to Zack. How could she expect them to quit (
Gary has quit,
she reminded herself) if she continued in secret? Besides, she knew that only by removing the guilty pleasure of the secrecy would she be able to surrender the narcotic.