The Wisdom of Perversity Read Free

squealing fear of spiders, odd for a New York City boy. Although cockroaches were plentiful, spiders were almost unknown.
    â€œNo!” Brian shouted. “Look!”
    â€œJesus, lower your voice,” Jeff complained. He lurched forward, then hesitated by the corner of Johnny’s desk. “You sure it’s not a spider?”
    â€œIt’s a secret shelf,” Brian resorted to a stage whisper. “Look.” Brian pushed his chair away to make room.
    Jeff kneeled, peering into the hiding place. Brian leaned in. Together they inspected its shadows. They discovered two precious items: a coffee mug and a glass ashtray. Jeff reached into the darkness—“No,” Brian objected—and drew a royal blue cup into the light. “Put it back,” Brian pleaded.
    Jeff dipped his nose into its cylinder and sniffed.
    â€œPut it back,” Brian repeated.
    â€œHere,” Jeff thrust it at him. “Smells funny.” Brian reluctantly accepted the mug. Jeff took out the ashtray. “He smokes?” he asked the empty seats. “I’ve never seen him smoke.” He bumped Brian’s shoulder. “You ever see him smoke?”
    Holding Johnny’s mug had entranced Brian. He understood this was trespass, sitting in Johnny’s chair, fingers curled about Johnny’s cup, and yet he felt at home. Briefly the child Brian had an hors d’oeuvre of the paradox that would become the main course of his adult life: how could he feel at once so comfortable and so out of place?
    â€œI’ve never seen him smoke,” Jeff declared. He returned to the hot seat, cradled the heavy glass ashtray between his legs, and stared pensively at a prism of colors dancing across its surface. “He can’t use this. We’d see the smoke.” He sat up, inspired. “What’s that smell of ?” Jeff nodded at Johnny’s mug.
    Brian put the mug down. He gripped the desk’s edge, braced as if the odor might blast him, then bent over the cup’s empty well. He paused to glance at Jeff and wink mischievously (as Johnny would, to involve his audience) before taking an elaborate whiff. “Milk?” Brian joked.
    â€œCut it out! Is it booze?”
    Brian didn’t think he had ever heard Jeff, or anyone in real life, say “booze.” It was the kind of word Jimmy Olsen might say on
Superman,
or a gangster on
The Untouchables.
Jeff was right, though—must be booze. Otherwise, why hide the cup? Brian cleared the air several times with his hands and gradually lowered his nostrils over the mug. Brian inhaled noisily, nodded in solemn deliberation, and delivered another punch line: “Yoo-hoo?”
    â€œCut it out,” Jeff said. “Smell it.” Jeff folded over until his head rested on his knees. “This is serious! We have to figure it out!”
    Perhaps this was why they had become best friends: no matter how shallow, unreflective, and thoughtless Jeff could be about the great issues (for example, whether Roger Maris had broken Ruth’s single-season home-run record fair and square), Jeff had an insistent desire to unscrew the back panel of the adult world and inspect its works. They had that in common: an impatient, humorless need to know. Jeff was right to scold him. Brian knew he should take this question seriously. Brian dipped his nose below the mug’s lip, shutting his eyes to concentrate.
    He smelled . . . soap.
    â€œBrian,” Jeff called.
    To maintain peak concentration, he kept his eyes shut. “It doesn’t smell of any booze. It smells like they washed it.”
    â€œBrian,” Jeff said urgently.
    â€œBrian!” came a different voice, an authoritative bass belonging to Richard Klein, NBC vice president. “Put Johnny’s mug down!”
    Brian’s heart exploded. That was the sensation: a terrible thump in his chest, followed by a ghastly feeling that all of his blood was leaking into his