Undone (30 page)

“Oh, it means nothing to me,” he said airily. “I am entirely indifferent to what you do. But it should mean
everything
to you—to expose Ulrickson’s sickness to as wide an audience as possible, so that people like him don’t continue to get away with their sick perversions against children like
Maddy.
Your selfishness on this matter is beyond me. Just because
you
now enjoy a life of luxury, free from that man’s clutches, does not mean that there are not hundreds—no, thousands—of girls, some younger than Maddy, who are suffering the most appalling and unthinkable abuses at the hands of men like him. I’m frankly amazed to learn of the heartlessness that this new life of ease has given rise to in you.”

The words cut into Chloe like a whip. Dez, of course, was right; he was always right. She was forgetting about Maddy—and all the Maddys in the world. She was rich now and comfortable and free of any threat from men like Ulrickson. And so she had forgotten. She was letting her own ambition for a career as an actress or model drive thoughts of others out of her head. She had become like so many girls she had met in Manhattan, at cattle calls and auditions, thinking only of themselves, of success at any cost.

She began to cry. She told Dez that she was sorry. “I’ll go on the show,” she said. “I
want
to go on the show! I swear I want to go on the show!”

“As I say,” Dez sniffed, “it’s entirely up to you.”

Nevertheless, he put in a call to Havot Productions that afternoon. Tovah’s producers were ecstatic at the prospect of this world-exclusive journalistic “get.” Tovah, told of the scoop, scrapped the week’s taping schedule and told her senior producers, “Let’s get this thing in the can by Friday, before she changes her mind.”

And so it was that, two days later, Chloe, in an elegant dark sleeveless dress that stretched to mid-calf and a pair of flat black pumps, descended in the elevator from her loft, hurried across the sidewalk and climbed into the waiting limousine—a Havot Productions car dispatched by the show’s producers. She was ferried from Tribeca, through the late morning traffic, uptown to Tovah’s studios housed in a four-story converted carriage house in the far west Fifties. There, she was ushered past the dauntingly intense, airport-like security (“Tovah has a pretty serious stalker,” the limo driver confided) to the greenroom, where a motherly woman patted antiglare makeup onto her face, smoothed her hair, then passed her off to a headset-wearing, clipboard-wielding production assistant (not much older than Chloe herself), who led her through a maze of corridors, past tool belt–wearing technicians, over thick cables snaking underfoot, to the edge of the brightly lit stage. On a hand signal cue from a man crouched in the opposite wings, the PA propelled Chloe with a light push at her back into a maelstrom of applause and cheering and music and lights, as Tovah, galvanizing in an olive green jumpsuit and flaming orange neck scarf, opened her arms wide, then enveloped Chloe in a bear hug.
“Just relax,” Tovah whispered into her ear over the cacophony of clapping. “It’s just you and me talking.”

Fighting down panic, Chloe recalled Dez’s injunction simply to tell the truth of what had happened to her—or at least the
emotional
truth. Thus did she describe, sitting across from Tovah in a deep powder blue armchair, cameras looking on, how she had, in the wake of her mother’s death, found her biological father, Jasper Ulrickson, the famous memoirist, and gone to live with him, and how everything had crumbled when this man whom the world held up as an inspiring model of family duty and sacrifice, and whom she revered as a father—the only father she had ever known—was revealed as a monster, a man boiling with lust for her. Tovah took her time parsing out every painful detail of the betrayal, eliciting from Chloe descriptions of how, precisely, she came to realize that her father harbored these unwholesome feelings. Chloe described the clinging glances, the surreptitious looks, the overt ogling that she had gradually become aware of—and then the discovery of the terrible diary.

“I don’t want you to have to relive your whole ordeal,” Tovah said. “But you’ve been brave enough to bring the video that you secretly shot of your father—and you have said that we can air a few minutes of it.” Chloe wordlessly nodded.

Tovah turned and spoke directly into one of the cameras mounted on a dolly stage left. “Please believe me when I say that it is not with an air of sensationalism or exploitation that we show you the following video. It is in the earnest hope that its horrors bring fully home the nightmare that is incest and parental child abuse—crimes too often hidden in the shadows.
I ask viewers who might find the following images too difficult to bear to please turn away and, of course, any children should be asked to leave the room.”

The studio lights dimmed and the blue backdrop behind Chloe and Tovah faded to black. Then it was illuminated by a bright rectangle of light. This turned into a low-resolution shot of Chloe’s bedroom at 10 Cherry Tree Lane, filmed with the camera in her laptop: a static shot of one wall containing her bookshelves, the bed and her bedside table. Chloe, onscreen, stepped into the foreground, close to the camera, bending over it. The room lights were low. She was wrapped in a duvet, which she held closed around her throat. Looking into the camera with an expression of furtive desperation (just as Dez had demonstrated to her all those months before), she whispered in an urgent undertone: “I don’t know if he’ll come again tonight.” She cast a nervous glance to the left. “But he’s been drinking, and that usually means bad things.” She turned back to the camera. “I’ll leave this on, just in case.” She ran to the bed and climbed under the covers. She left the bedside lamp on. An excruciating half minute passed—during which not a sound was heard in Tovah’s audience. Then came the crunching turn of a doorknob on the soundtrack—and someone in Tovah’s audience screamed.

A man lurched into view from the left. He walked unsteadily, stumbling over to the bed. The profile against the lamp-lit wall behind him was clearly that of Jasper Ulrickson. In his right hand he carried a bottle. Chloe turned onto her back and pulled the covers up, in a protective gesture, to her chin. She could be heard on the video’s muffled soundtrack saying, “Daddy?” Jasper
asked, in a slurred voice, if she had been asleep. She asked what he was doing in her room. He raised the bottle, took a slug, then slammed it down onto the bedside table. He swayed a little. She pulled the covers over her nose. Then he began to tear off his clothes. Tovah’s producers pixelated the offending parts of his anatomy. He stood for a moment over her, and then, with a shout, he dropped, like a felled tree, onto the bed. The audience let out a collective cry of horror.

The video was paused, showing Ulrickson on top of Chloe. The lights in the studio came up and the image abruptly disappeared, replaced once again by the blue background with the word
Tovah!
in flowing off-white script.

Chloe was sitting, turned away from the screen, a tissue to her face. Tovah, holding Chloe’s free hand, addressed the camera. “We cannot show you what takes place next on that video,” she said gravely, “but it is gut-wrenching, and it offers solid proof of Jasper Ulrickson’s guilt—as was determined in both a criminal and a civil trial.” She turned to Chloe. “What do you think when you see that recording?”

“I can’t look at it,” Chloe said, quite truthfully.

“I don’t think any of us blame you,” Tovah said. “It’s hard enough for me to imagine that that man sat across from me, in that chair, on this very stage—and that I praised him as a model husband and father!”

“He tricked everybody,” Chloe said quietly.

“And yet
you
had the bravery to expose him,” Tovah said. “To let us all know the truth. Girl, you
rock
!” The audience burst into wild applause. Chloe flushed and lowered her head. When
the clapping died down, Tovah asked, “What will you do now?”

Chloe shook the hair off her face. “I’m nineteen now, so I don’t have to live in foster care anymore. I found a place to live. I don’t want to say where. But a place where I can try to have a normal, private life.”

“We made every effort,” Tovah said, “to contact your father in prison, to notify him that we would be airing this interview with you, and to get comment from him. But we were not able to get through. If he is watching, what would you say to him?”

Dez had warned Chloe that this moment would be coming. He had told her simply to speak the truth, to speak from her heart. She looked into the camera. “I trusted you,” she said. “You were the only father I ever knew. When I got to your house, I felt loved. For myself, as a person. I loved Pauline, and I loved Maddy. And I loved you. And none of this had to happen.” She began to cry. “None of this.”

The program, recorded live to tape, aired the following Monday. Chloe refused to watch it and fled to Crunch gym. Dez, however, would not allow her mutiny to dampen his spirit of celebration. He had prepared carefully, putting on ice a case of Veuve Clicquot and laying in, from Petrossian, eight ounces of beluga caviar, a tin of crème fraîche and a dozen of the restaurant’s tender blini. Upon hearing the opening strains of Tovah’s theme music, he popped a cork on the champagne and poured himself a flute. Installed on the Roche Bobois, in front of the seventy-eight-inch plasma high-definition screen mounted on one of the loft’s huge white walls, he munched and sipped and watched, as Tovah exposed Ulrickson’s perfidy.
With the champagne coursing through his veins, the delicate caviar popping against his palate, he felt as if he were ascending, like a Renaissance angel on a ceiling painted by Raphael, into the sun-suffused air, raised up into a state of glory and grace, of purest accomplishment and joy. He felt the completeness that comes with seeing a creative vision realized, to perfection, in all its parts. And when, toward the program’s denouement, he felt a slight, inevitable diminishment in his joy, the first fading of the endorphins off his synapses, he dug from his wallet the little treat he had decided to indulge in, just for this occasion: a gram of very pure Colombian cocaine that he had bought from the building’s doorman—a sly young fellow who had, almost immediately upon Dez’s entry into the building four weeks ago, caught Dez’s eye and given him a knowing lift of the eyebrow. Dez had not partaken in many years, not since his days at the law firm, and then only a few times in moderation, but he thought it the perfect way to celebrate his triumph. Chloe frowned on all drug use,
of course
, even a little light pot smoking. But with her out of the loft, there was no reason not to pour out a small mound on the top of the glass coffee table. He chopped it lovingly with his credit card, then laid out two thick lines. Through a rolled hundred, he sucked them deep and then sat back, smiling, restored to delirious ecstasy.

J
asper was not among the seven million Americans who watched Tovah’s show that afternoon. Like his fellow sex offender inmates, he was forbidden from viewing any photographs, books, movies, television shows or Web sites that featured teenaged girls, and he was expressly barred from looking at images of the daughter he had violated. Many others at the Beckford Correctional Center, however, did watch—a cohort of murderers, muggers, robbers, wife beaters, drug sellers and other criminals who had long known that Jasper Ulrickson, the notorious daughter-rapist, dwelled within their walls. Now, galvanized by the outrage and horror that Tovah was so good at evoking (several prisoners were reduced to sobs), they resolved,
by whatever means necessary, to exact some jailhouse justice.

The day after the show, Jasper was taking his daily exercise, plodding around the perimeter of the yard, the looming prison walls around him, the taunting rectangle of sky above with its one tender, lone cloud. He had completed two circuits when he heard a noise that anyone who had not performed this routine day after day for weeks would have failed to register, but which to Jasper was as unusual, as unexpected, as the sudden striking up of a brass band. The sound was the muted click of the computer-controlled safety lock on the door that let him into and out of the yard. This door was always kept locked during his exercise hour, to protect him from the rest of the prison population. The lock was on a timer that could be manually overridden only by, say, a crooked guard bribed by, for instance, one of the well-heeled inmate drug dealers.

Jasper looked toward the door and saw two men—heavily muscled habitués of the weight room—approaching across the yard. They had eager grins on their faces and for a distorted moment he mistook their bright eyes and bared teeth for expressions of friendliness. He turned toward them. The first blow was to his chin, a roundhouse punch that made his teeth grind together and lifted him off his feet. He landed on his back on the ground. A stomping kick to his stomach knocked the breath from his lungs. A boot came down on the side of his head. Gasping, he curled into a fetal position, arms over his face. They beat and kicked and stomped—Jasper heard and felt things snapping and fracturing and splintering and tearing within him—until a guard not on the dealer’s payroll noticed the commotion on a
security monitor and dispatched guards with cattle prods and Taser guns to halt the attack. The beating had lasted only thirty seconds, but it left Jasper with a fractured skull, two missing molars, a ruptured spleen, six broken ribs, a shattered pelvis and a broken scapula. His right eye had been kicked out of its socket and lay on his cheek.

He spent three months in the prison infirmary, his head bandaged, his torso tightly bound in restrictive bandages, his right leg in traction. His eye proved unsalvageable and was surgically removed. His remaining eye, already dimming because of an unusual sensitivity to the flickering fluorescent lights that illumined the prison’s interior, had been further damaged in the attack. He could, if he squinted, make out objects at very close range—he could read print if he held it an inch from his face—but anything at arm’s length or greater disappeared into a fog, a blurriness that reduced the world to indistinguishable soft-formed blobs of weak, watered-down color.