Undone (21 page)

The problem was that every imagined seduction would, at a certain indefinable point, go from plausible, believable flirtation to something wildly, laughably unreal—as crude and coarse as
one of those online video clips that he was addicted to in the days when he could afford a computer. Those movies that purported to show “stepfather” and “stepdaughter” unable to contain their illicit passion for each other, the “teen” girl actually a battle-scarred veteran porn actress of twenty-nine summers grotesquely tattooed at the base of her spine with the wings of an eagle, and mimicking the lisping tones of a near child; the “stepfather,” a reputed straitlaced middle-class professional man in boxy suit and garish tie, with a ridiculously incongruous ponytail and a porn industry goatee and (once his clothes came off) a prison-pumped body also writhing in tats. The illicit lovers flatly proclaiming their lines at each other. “Hey, Cyn
dee
, what the heck are you doing?” “Don’t worry. I won’t tell my mom. If
you
don’t.” “But you’re my stepdaughter!”

Incidentally, Dez asked himself, was there some reason that the porn purveyors always called those girls “stepdaughters” as opposed simply to “daughters”—some wrinkle in the federal pornography laws, perhaps, that forbade depiction of that final frontier of erotic fantasy? Or was this the result of some squeamishness on the part of the porn makers themselves? Were they all too traumatized by the actual parental abuses they had suffered as children (and that had driven them into sex work in the first place) to depict such events as fuel to erotic fantasy? Lord knows, they were willing to show just about anything else: acts whose memory could actually turn Dez’s stomach, ten years later. Pee. Vomit. Poop! But to show a man, posing as a girl’s father, engaged in an act of illicit love?
That
was too far?

Perhaps, he thought with a stab of terror, it
was
too far! Was
this why his attempts to envision the seduction kept running aground? Were there laws of biology and nature that protected the species against the impulse to inbreed? There were—there assuredly were. And yet the man
must
succumb! There must exist a point at which Ulrickson’s natural revulsion at the idea of biblically knowing his daughter would meet the urgency of raw, untamed, biological need. Perhaps such surrender was not inevitable in
every
man. But a man in Ulrickson’s uniquely vulnerable position? A man forced into celibacy by fate and his own puritanical determination to adhere to a set of silly vows? A man teased to the point of internal rupture, who is then subjected to the satiny charms of an eighteen-year-old seductress whom custom could allow to climb onto the sofa and curl up in his lap, snuggling against him with a warm, contented sigh, a slight squirm of her body against his, a gentle, loving, innocent caress of her hand on his thigh, a languid tilting up of her face to him and a murmured appeal for a kiss? A girl, furthermore, who did
not
share his DNA, who would thus fail to emit whatever scents or vibrations or emanations presumably help to protect the species against the dangers of inbreeding? Yes! Yes! It was more than possible that he would succumb. It was inevitable! That is what Dez, the artist, the plot-maker, needed to believe: that the capitulation would not be
forced
into being by clumsy acts of routine, clichéd seduction, but instead that it would flow out naturally, as a spontaneous organic outgrowth of their situation, as an act inevitable, a fait accompli. Yes! It was going to happen! He need only sit tight.

Then his doubts would rise again.

If only, he thought, he could
talk
to the girl. Get a progress report. But by Dez’s own Draconian decree, they could not communicate with each other. Determined to leave no trace of connection between them, he had given her the express order not to phone him except in the direst emergency. Thus cut off, he was like a lone astronaut stranded in a disabled space capsule slowly orbiting the dark side of the moon and knowing that his return to Earth, his survival, depends on the actions of the engineers and scientists back home with whom radio contact has been severed. Were they getting anywhere in their invisible ministrations to return him to Earth? Were they even trying anymore to bring him home?

It was near the end of August, almost four weeks into this ordeal, when Dez was assailed with the paranoid conviction that the silence emanating from Connecticut had subtly changed in tone. An ominous note had entered into the vibration, like a dog whistle above human hearing but which Dez alone could detect, a flesh-crawling squeal with a subliminal hysterical edge.
Something had gone wrong with the plan.
But what? Detection? Chloe’s arrest? Was she even now being held in a jail somewhere in Connecticut, bravely refusing to give up Dez’s name as her accomplice? And more to the point, was she
about
to? He would work himself into a panic, then catch himself—and remember that this unbearable, inhuman silence was precisely what he had been hoping for; indeed, what he had demanded of her. This silence, this all-embracing nullity, meant that everything was going exactly to plan and all he had
to do was calm down and wait for the signal that it was time to spring the trap.

That signal would be a call from Chloe to Dez’s cell phone. Using Ulrickson’s home landline, she was to leave a voice mail saying, simply, “Sorry, wrong number”—then instantly hang up: at which point he would know that she had completed her mission and that they could embark on phase two. Such thoughts calmed him. But only momentarily. Soon he would be back to conjuring, from her silence, the darkest imaginings of failure, exposure, arrest and imprisonment.

Added to all his usual torments, he felt a stab of indignation. Of hurt. Did she not miss him? Did she not wonder about him, about his state of mind and heart? How could she so coldly obey his orders not to call? How could she leave him out in the interstellar darkness, orbiting alone? And, strangely, it was this question, as much as his concern for the progress of the plan, that finally prompted Dez, on a chilly, blue-bright morning at the beginning of September when the deciduous trees around his trailer had begun to turn orange at their tips like matches photographed at the precise moment they were struck, and the snowbirds in their neighboring RVs were already packing up to begin the long trek to Florida, chasing the sun—almost a month and a half after she had left Vermont—to realize that he could stand it no longer. He must make contact.

Telephoning was out of the question. He refused to leave, as a trail for the lawmen, any record of connection between their two cell phones. But neither could he, say, bike to the
pizza parlor and use the pay phone to call Ulrickson’s landline. Even assuming that he could dream up a plausible pretext to get around the man and have Chloe summoned to the phone, he could too clearly imagine Ulrickson hovering in the background while she tried to talk, or (far worse) listening in on the call. To hope that he might happen to phone when Chloe was home alone was pure fantasy: Ulrickson was a writer, and thus a virtual shut-in.

No. There was one way, and one way only, to satisfy his gnawing, cancerous, killing curiosity. He would have to go to Connecticut. He would have to risk once again invading Ulrickson’s home. He would have to
act.

H
e rose the next day at dawn after a sleepless night of planning. At six, he phoned his boss and, pinching his nose between index finger and thumb, left a voice mail saying that he’d been laid low by flu and would not be able to make it into the bar tonight. Then he called jetBlue and loaded onto his already overburdened MasterCard the price of a return ticket from Burlington to JFK, departing at 10:50 that morning. He showered, then addressed his reflection in the misty postage stamp–sized mirror above the sink in the bathroom cubicle. He had not shaved in weeks. A dark, curly, unpleasantly pubic-looking growth now covered the lower half of his face. He dispensed a mound of shaving cream onto his palm and was about to
apply it to his wetted beard when he abruptly came to his senses. Peering at the unfamiliar face in the mirror—a gaunt, dark-bearded, hollow-eyed, pre-fame Dr. Freud—he realized that he had, unwittingly, prepared the perfect disguise for his planned exploit. No one would mistake this sensitive-looking, bearded intellectual for the overall-clad, peaked-capped furnace repairman whom Ulrickson had met back in May. Beard intact, he rinsed off his hand and set down his razor.

He donned the slightly out-of-date dark suit that had done duty in his role as Innocence Project lawyer at the G-Tek Clinic. Then he mounted his bicycle and rode into Sayer’s Cliff, where he bought a fried egg sandwich and a Greyhound ticket to Burlington airport. It felt inexpressibly good to be on the move again, no longer passively waiting.

His flight (another blessedly uneventful passage) landed at JFK a little after noon. Driving a new rental car north into Connecticut, he watched the flow of oncoming traffic across the median and tried to imagine how he would be feeling when he was traveling along this stretch of highway back to the airport, mission accomplished. Would he be in despair over discovering that the plan had capsized, or in a state of exultant triumph?

He glided into Clay Cross’s wealthy purlieus, swooshing smoothly along the well-tended, tree-lined streets. He felt the usual surge of preperformance anxiety and excitement, a fluttering in the stomach and a racing of the pulse. Turning onto Cherry Tree Lane, he progressed a quarter of a mile beneath the thinning canopy of turning, late summer leaves, until he saw
Ulrickson’s house appear a few hundred yards ahead, on his left. Drawing closer, he noticed that there were two cars parked out front: Ulrickson’s Jeep and a boxy black SUV—the retrofitted minivan that the home care worker used to ferry the stroked-out wife back and forth to the local hospital for her physiotherapy. He’d read about it in the memoir. There was also a bicycle lying on its side on the front lawn.

A red, adult-sized ten-speed.

Chloe’s, he surmised. This boded well. If she’d been arrested, surely Ulrickson would not have left her bike out front.

He parked by the curb, got out and eased the door shut. The stealth of his mission made him reluctant to fling it shut with a neighborhood-rousing slam. He ran a nervous palm from back to front over his hair, straightened his tie, then walked up the flagstone path to the front door and pushed the bell. He could hear activity inside—a muffled female voice, with an Indian accent: “I will get it.” Footsteps. Then the door opened and he was looking into the face of a short, plump, dark-skinned woman who smiled at him, clearly puzzled. This, he realized, must be the home care worker, Deepti. He had not had the pleasure on his last visit.

“Dr. Geld,” Dez said in a lightly inflected Teutonic accent. He extended between two fingers a business card bearing the name and phone number of his old psychotherapist. The legendary sexologist had passed away a few years earlier. Dez, during his treatments, had had the foresight to steal a small stack of Geld’s business cards, on the theory that they might be useful to him someday.

Deepti took the card, looked at it, then back at Dez, uncomprehending. “I’m sorry …?” she said, handing the card back.

“I have a four o’clock meeting,” Dez said, repocketing the card. “With Mr. Ulrickson’s daughter. Vermont Department of Children and Families arranged it. A routine status follow-up.”

“Mr. Ulrickson is expecting you?” she asked.

“I believe so,” Dez said.

“He did not mention anything.”

Dez pulled a notebook from his jacket pocket, glanced into it, then put it back. “Yes,” he said. “Wednesday, four o’clock.”

She asked him to step inside. “Your name again?”

“Dr. Geld.”

She hastened away.

Dez consulted his reflection in the gilt-framed mirror that hung on the wall above a small crescent-shaped mail table. He admired his beard and modified Caesar hairdo (he had thought to finger-comb forward his thinning hair to mitigate the widow’s peak that was such a distinctive feature of his face). He flexed his lips and tongue, like an actor before taking the stage. Gradually, as his nervous system calmed, he became aware of a sound emanating from a nearby recess of the house: a young woman’s voice speaking in a gentle, incantatory manner. He had dismissed it as the murmur of a radio or television, but something in its familiar cadences made him realize that the voice belonged to Chloe.

He moved on silent tiptoe to the end of the vestibule, where he stopped and peered into the living space.

She was some ten feet or so down the room, seated, facing
him, on a beige sofa. The younger child, the one he had stolen the sample from—the brat Maddy—was on her lap. Chloe, with one hand, stroked the child’s bobbed brown hair, and with the other she held a book from which she was reading aloud. Dez could just make out the title:
The Little Prince.
Directly in front of Chloe, with her back to him, sat Ulrickson’s wife in her wheelchair, immobile, hunched.

It was a picture of happy, healthy domesticity—of family harmony—the likes of which Dez had, in all his nights of recent insomnias, never once conjured as a possibility. He could not have said what, exactly, he expected to find at the house on this visit of inspection, but this wholesome tableau was not it. What could it portend?

He was about to pull his head back around the corner of the door frame, to feint back into the foyer, when Chloe caught the shadow of his movement, looked up and saw him. The beard and suit could not for a moment disguise him. The shock jolted her whole body. Dez saw a deep blush flow upward from the neck of her baggy gray sweatshirt into her face. With her eyes locked on him, she shifted Maddy onto the sofa and rose quickly to her feet.

She was plumper, better fed than he had ever seen her, and if he was not hallucinating, those shorts she was wearing (her legs were, if anything, more beautifully sculpted for all their extra muscle mass) were
tennis
shorts, and she wore anklet socks with pom-poms and a pair of those revolting puffy running shoes with the thick molded soles and despicable bands of nylon and rubber and webbing and God knows what else forming a garish pattern from heel to toe. With her hair pulled back into
a ponytail, her lashes free of mascara and lids free of eyeliner, her mouth innocent of gloss or lipstick, she looked for all the world like a scrubbed and buffed upper-middle-class Connecticut preppie, a pampered daughter of the Northeast, jock-like, essentially sexless.