The Wisdom of Perversity (13 page)

Rose pressed: “Harriet told me he invited you.”

Brian returned to the table and shielded his face behind the inferior Superman comic. “Probably,” he mumbled.

There was a long silence broken only by the sizzling pan. Brian considered asking her to take his temperature. If she looked away while the thermometer was in his mouth he could hold it under his tensor lamp; Jeff claimed that had worked for him once. She wouldn't suspect a faked illness on a Sunday. The plan seemed sound. He thought it through again, mostly just for the pleasure of contemplation. He didn't have the nerve to try.

She turned off the stove. Her robe appeared at the periphery of the comic book. He was presented with an evenly browned sandwich, just like the picture on the Broadway Diner menu. He took a bite, tongue pressing the mix of warm soft cheese and crunchy toast against the solid roof of his mouth.

“You know, honey,” his mother said as she ran a hand through his hair, “you shouldn't come into the bathroom while I'm using it.”

Brian nodded. He had no desire to make the accurate defense that he had been invited into the bathroom.

She kissed him on top of the head, then sat in the chair opposite, watching as he took another bite. “Mmm,” he said. “This is good.”

“Brian,” she said in an ominous tone and waited.

What is it now?
“Yeah . . . ?”

“Jeff is your best friend,” she pointed out. “He may not have said anything, but this is a special day for him, the day they're really celebrating his birthday. So after you finish your sandwich I think you should go back upstairs. In fact, I have to visit Aunt Helen this afternoon. I also don't know when your father will get back so this would be a good night for you to have a sleepover with Jeff.”

“But I have school tomorrow.”

“So? You'll come downstairs when you wake up. I'll give you breakfast. You'll have plenty of time to get ready for school. You're the one who's always saying you should be allowed to sleep over on school nights.” He didn't answer. She stroked a lock of his hair off his forehead. “What's going on, honey? Did you have a fight with Jeff?”

“No!” He was vehement. Fight with Jeff? Sometimes they argued about whether to pinch hit for Whitey Ford, or whether
The Outer Limits
was really scary, but they never really had a fight. Brian took another bite of cheese and toast, tongue cradling the soft and the crunchy. He could fake getting sick by sticking his finger down his throat. Jeff said that would make you throw up.

Rose stood. She picked up the white phone mounted on the wall. “I'll call Harriet,” she said as she dialed, “and arrange it.”

Unfortunately Brian hated throwing up. He would go. And he would sleep over. Anyway, the sleepover wouldn't be a problem; by nighttime, Klein would be gone. Brian resumed reading the inferior Superman comic. The citizens of Metropolis laughed at the Man of Steel as he walked down the street with his famous uniform on backward, tripping over his cape. That was stupid. It made no sense. People wouldn't laugh at Superman no matter how confused he got.

Childhood's End

February 2008

FINISHED WITH HER,
Gary rolled onto his back, and asked, “Why?”

“Why what?” Julie looked away from her horrified fascination with the beach ball of his belly, up to the plaster ceiling, brilliantly illuminated by the afternoon sun. She noticed cracks, flaking, and a dark spot where a leak from somewhere had penetrated before their grumpy superintendent stopped it. We have to repaint.
When can we do that? Everything will have to be packed up.

“Why did you start smoking?” Gary asked.

She didn't want to add another charge to Gary's indictment of Zack as criminally adolescent. “I don't really know. Just happened.” She yanked the top sheet up to cover her breasts, flattened by gravity and aging. They had been a constant focus of anxiety throughout life: when they would appear, then their size, then nurturing, then death. The latter was the most time-consuming anxiety: probing, mammograms, confusing articles in the Science section of the
Times,
the disappearance of one woman she knew fairly well from ten years of morning drop-offs at school. Breasts: start to finish a worry.

Gary groaned as he made the effort to rise from the bed. She looked at his back's expanse of pale flesh, dotted by three enormous moles that were a yearly dermatological concern.
We are repulsive creatures lumbering to our deaths.
“You don't know. How can you not know what the impulse was?” He reached for his pants. He wondered out loud, “Do I have to take a shower?” then returned to his interrogation. “Don't you think it has something to do with me quitting?”

“Definitely not. Everything I do doesn't have to do with you, Gary. It's just that at work I see all the young people on their breaks smoking outside and talking together so intensely. They all looked so . . . I don't know . . .”

“Young?” Gary offered, looking out the window at the Hudson, naked but for the draped fig leaf of his relaxed-fit corduroys. “Why should I quit if you're smoking?”

“I'm stopping,” she said firmly.

“You'd better. Or I'm starting again.” He stared as sternly as he could from above the essential cheerfulness of his chubby cheeks and the essential neediness of his brown eyes. “I mean it.”

“I'm quitting,” she promised, and meant it.

He considered that for a long moment, then commented, “Although the sex was good,” before ducking into the bathroom.

She lay there, relaxed and happy to feel cool air on her still warmed skin, glad to be free of clothing, listening to the faint waterfall of Gary's shower. She wished for summer: to bake in the sun with eyes shut, head encased by heat and light, ocean roaring, worries silenced. The beach.
Is that where Cousin Jeff lives? Malibu?
The Colony she had read about? He was so rich he probably owned houses in all the major cities. But whom did he have sex with?

With his wife,
she reminded herself. Jeff had a wife and four children, although not all with that wife.
Four children.
It amazed her that a boy who was so much a child could evolve into a parent. She got up, put on her robe and slippers waiting for the bathroom to be free. In the meantime she could clean.

She wandered into Zack's room, deciding that the pile of books, magazines and video game cases could no longer wait for that hoped for day when Zack would spontaneously neaten them. Why worry about Jeff's sex life? He was a big Hollywood success. They got to fuck whoever they wanted.

Zack's books and papers were in an ungovernable pile on his Ikea desk. She dug into it. Did he know his chemistry book was under a mound of
Rolling Stone
magazines, a fourteenth-birthday subscription she had renewed even though he claimed not to read them, and . . . My God, a copy of
Variety!
Zack's love affair with acting must be more than a high school romance. Still it shouldn't be taken seriously, she decided. Didn't every teenager dream of becoming a movie star?

Although in Zack's case she judged the ambition made sense. He was handsome. Take your breath away handsome. God had cherry-picked otherwise ordinary features of hers and Gary's and rearranged them into a flawless miracle of beauty and strength, the soulful face of a tragic Prince. He had Gary's sturdy bones, her lean, limber flesh. And he had his father's voice: a resonant, confident instrument that invited you to listen uncritically. She suspected her husband's success as a legal analyst could be credited more to a felicitous stringing of vocal chords than Columbia Law School.

She thoughtlessly, she later told herself, removed an unlined black bound sketchbook from the bottom of the pile, opening it casually (not realizing she was invading his privacy, she would have sworn) scanning a page of black ink produced by Zack's compact and surprisingly—given the condition of his room—neat handwriting. She saw the word—
Cunt
—and forgot every other concern but the rest of the sentence.

S.'s Cunt
—Zack had capitalized the word, as if it were a proper noun, a personality to reckon with—
smelled. Not like V's. V's didn't stink. I thought I was going to gag, but S. was so wet, I took a deep breath through my mouth and got to work. After a minute I got used to her stink. Even got to kinda like it. I'm getting good with my tongue because she came. Came hard. No faking. Couldn't be faking. She arched her back, pushed her Cunt up at me like a bitch in heat and grabbed my hair. She pulled so hard I thought I was gonna end up as bald as Dad.

When she discovered Zack's cigarettes, she had staggered until she was forced to sit on his bed to avoid fainting. This time she remained on her feet. Seventy-two hours had made her impervious to the shock of her son's capacity for depravity; a teenager who ruined his lungs was capable of any degradation. She wasted no time on imagined alibis, this was unmistakably her baby boy's hand, the same tight letters he used to write from summer camp.
Dear Mom & Dad. Last night was Campfire. Uncle Tom told a really really scary Ghost story. I toasted lots of marshmallows. Yum. Miss you, Zack.

She flipped to another page. More despicable writing:
F. gave me head. Her teeth were a little rough on my Helmet, but she's pretty good. Better than S. She swallowed all of it
. . . Was this a grotesque joke? The girls Zack knew were bright, well educated, choking with self-esteem. Maybe this was Zack's attempt at pornographic fiction? She read on in a hurry, hearing Gary had shut off the shower.
Afterward, she asked if I liked her. So pathetic. Brandon
—no, this was not fiction, Brandon was his closest male friend—
says I should try to get her to take it in the ass. That's too gross. But it's great how she'll do anything to please me. I am truly evil.”

“Honey!” Gary called. She shoved the notebook back under the chemistry text.
I am truly evil,
she echoed, hustling out of her son's room, down the narrow hall to the kitchen where Gary entered from the other side dressed in his favorite traveling outfit—a safari shirt and L.L. Bean cargo pants whose endless pockets he filled with an iPhone, a charger, earphones, a reporter's notebook, two pens, and lots of gum. “Here you are,” he said, sealing the flap over his iPhone with the intense concentration of a toddler. “Where did you go?”

I am truly evil
were the only words in her head, so she kept mum.

“Honey, the reason I came home is to make sure you get ahold of Cousin Jeff today. My source in the DA's office says they're getting formal statements today from other witnesses. And guess what: they may indict Klein too. Probably not for a few days, but Paula”—Gary was referring to the producer of
American Justice
—“wants me at the scene to answer questions remotely from outside the gates of Rydel's mansion, so if I'm begging off this story I have to do it tonight. She's booked me into the Dis-Comfort Inn in East Hampton. He's out on bail and supposedly Klein is with him, but that's not confirmed. I thought about asking Bill and Sue if I could use their place, but—I don't know—then I'd have to feed them tidbits and where the fuck do I stand, right? Can I cover this or not?” The afterglow of sex had dimmed; he was back to his usual state of anxiety, competitiveness, nagging, fault finding. “You gotta get some clarity about this situation with your cousin Jeff for me by tonight. So, please, please—”

“Maybe you should just tell Paula you can't cover this story,” Julie said.
They don't need my two cents,
she thought.
No one needs to know about me.

“What?” Gary put his hands on the hips of his ballooning cargo pants, astounded. “Why would I do that? How do we know Jeff will give a shit whether I write about it? And if he does, as you very astutely pointed out to me, shouldn't we get something out of it? Jesus, I'm giving up a great story that I have an original angle on. This is lots of columns, lot of TV appearances, maybe a book, maybe a raise.” He stared, in a stubborn pose, indicating he would wait for an answer until hell froze over.

There was no point in trying to debate Gary. She confessed: “I called him. I spoke to Jeff.”

At first, Gary was delighted. Then his exasperation and anxiety worsened when she explained that their conversation had been interrupted; and he wasn't reassured that Jeff had promised to call back after he landed. “For chrissakes, he flies in a private plane. He didn't have to hang up. They make schmucks like me turn off their cells, not Jeff Mark in his very own plane! He was stalling you.”

“Stalling me about what?” she argued. “I never got around to explaining why I was calling.”

“Oh.” That gave Gary pause. Not for long. “Well, my point is he can talk while on the plane. Even if they didn't let him use his cell during the flight, his private plane must have a goddamn phone. Call his office. Say you can't wait until he lands, you have to speak to him in flight.”

“Okay,” she stalled. “I'll take a shower and call him.” She moved to push past him.

He took her arm and bussed her. “I love you,” he apologized.

He loved her but didn't trust her to place the call to Jeff's assistant. After her shower, while she dressed in the closet, he stood a few feet away, focused on his iPhone. He said, “Here's the number,” twice, to prod her. She dialed on their landline while he mouthed suggestions of what to say to convince the director's gatekeeper to let her, a nobody relative whom Jeff hadn't talked to in years, through immediately. Hopeless. No concession other than “I will give Mr. Mark your message.”

Even Gary gave up, leaving for the Hamptons. After he was settled at the motel, he texted her twice asking if Jeff had called, before her cousin finally did call back, six hours after their first contact.

Julie was mindful that everything he said was more or less a lie. Her father used to say about Jeff, after the famous quarrel when he learned that Harriet wasn't dying of anything except the acute desire not to have Saul repay him, “Lying's in Jeff's genes. Harriet was the biggest liar on earth, so you can't blame the poor kid. He can't help himself.”

Jeff lied, “Julie, that was the worst flight I've ever been on. It was a total nightmare—” He interrupted himself to interject to the caravan around him, “No way that was turbulence. An engine must've fallen off the fucking plane.” His voice returned to speak to her—deeper than when he was a boy, to be sure, yet still imbued with a kid's energy and lack of reserve. “Julie, believe me, that was the worst experience of my life. I've got to get out of this business. Too much fucking flying. Nothing is worth being that scared. Do you like to fly?” he asked before supplying her answer. “Of course you do. Everybody loves to fly except for me. Or at least everybody says they love it. Yeah, they do!” he squawked to the murmur of a female voice in the background. “Everybody says they don't think about it. Lies. All lies. As soon as the plane hits a little bump, everybody's praying to God. What's the line about foxholes?” A female voice mumbled something. Jeff shouted, “Right! Well, it's true of jets. There are no atheists during takeoff.
SO . . .
” Julie moved the phone a few inches from her ear. He had returned to speaking directly to her. That, and some other improvement in his cell phone's broadcast amplified his voice into a shout. “
YOU HAVE A TEENAGE SON. I CAN'T BELIEVE IT. HOW OLD
—?” Abruptly there was a bomb of static and Jeff was gone.

By the time he called back, she had moved to the maid's room, settling at the little desk in the pantry/office. She didn't turn on a light, intently watching a window directly across the wide courtyard of their prewar apartment building. That apartment's kitchen and maid's room had been renovated to make one large eat-in kitchen. It looked very clean and new: recessed halogen lights, granite counters, super-high-tech appliances with glowing LED lights. A handsome young man—late twenties, she guessed—dressed in a conservative gray suit stood at a black laminate round table under a brilliant spotlight, unloading take-out food from the new Thai restaurant around the corner on Broadway.

“Julie! Sorry.” Jeff spoke without a hello. “Cell phone networks in America are like a third-world county. So . . . what's your boy into?”

“What's he what?” she asked, watching the young man open a bottle of beer and sit down to deal with a pair of tin foil containers. He seemed to have big hands. Or long fingers anyway, since they wrapped around the bottle with room to spare. His head of black hair was thick. She couldn't really see his features but they were strong. From this distance he vaguely resembled the actor who played Don Draper in
Mad Men.
He removed his jacket, tossing it with a boy's sloppiness over a chair. There wasn't a hint of a bulge at his belly. The shirt was flush, disappearing seamlessly into narrow gray pants. He was too handsome to be alone. Since he moved in a year ago, she had never spotted a girl guest, or a boy for that matter. But she couldn't see into the window of his bedroom; that faced away, toward West End Avenue. Probably his guests had better things to do than eat. Still, a solo dinner seemed a lonely activity for such a looker.