Undone (37 page)

She hesitated.

Jasper could summon no words. He simply stared imploringly at the hunched, dark shape of the girl he had once believed to be his daughter.

“That’s—” Her voice caught, and she fell silent.

“Who is it?” the cop barked at her.

“Come on, Chloe!” the Latina girl cried.

“That is my father,” Chloe said.

The police spun him around. They disarmed him of his cane and pulled his hands behind him. The precious drawing tablet, which had been under his arm, fell to the floor. He felt the familiar sensation of handcuffs closing over his wrists. They tightened, biting into the flesh.

“Chloe!” Jasper cried as the police wrestled him toward the door.

Deepti stepped in front of the policemen. “Please,” she entreated, “let me explain! You must let him go!”

Chloe’s roommates crowded over and yelled, “Take him away! Take him!”

Chloe wailed, “Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!”

One of the policemen roared at everyone to
shut up.
The room went silent.

“This man is under arrest,” the cop said. “There is an APB out on him in three states. He is a fugitive from justice. Now, stand aside.”

They pulled him out the door. Jasper went limp in their arms. They half carried, half dragged him down the stairs. They would put him away for years. He thought about Pauline. Of how he would never see her again. She would never survive.
Maddy would be in her late twenties, her thirties, before he was free. Lost to him.

They had manhandled him as far as the second floor when he heard a noise from above. A door wrenched open. The sound of footfalls pounding along a corridor.

Chloe stopped in the hallway and, bending over the railing, looked down at Jasper’s hopeful, upturned face on the landing below, his shriveled figure sandwiched between the two policemen. Her voice reverberated down the stairwell.

“Wait!”

O
n that day when she left him—a day not long after her twenty-first birthday—Dez woke around noon, as usual. Finding her not in the loft, he assumed that she had gone to one of her absurd modeling or acting classes (for all her natural grace and beauty, she had proved, thank God, peculiarly wooden when posing for photographs or trying to impersonate anyone but herself). Then he found the note, helpfully taped to the coffee machine, where he could not fail to see it.
I have left you
, it read.
I am not coming back.

He did not believe it at first. She would soon return. After all, she had no money (he had not yet noticed the three hundred dollars missing from his wallet) and nowhere to stay. Besides
which, she loved him. It could only be a matter of time before she dragged in through the door of the loft, a bag over her shoulder, looking sheepish and apologetic. He even, that night, took the trouble (thoughtful Dez!) of ordering in one of her favorite dinner treats—a noxious Hawaiian pizza, with salty ham and virulently sweet pineapple slices. (Dez contented himself with a couple of garlic knots.) When she failed to return by nightfall, he slid the execrable pie into the garbage. So the little minx intended a more thorough punishment. Fine. He could wait her out.

A week passed. Then two more days. At which point he was forced to accept that she was well and truly gone. His reaction was one of puzzled indignation—the way a grand master chess player might respond when, through a massive oversight (owing to a too-deep calculation into an impossibly elegant thirty-move forced mate combination), his queen is captured by a patzer. The prankish inversion of the way things were meant to unfurl reduced him at first to a state of almost amused confusion, mouth slightly ajar, eyebrows up, an idiot smile trying to tug at the corners of his lips. Bitterness soon followed. Then rage. But a certain instinct for self-preservation made him decide that it was really
he
who had pushed
her
out, banished her to the streets—and under those circumstances, he could feel only glad that she was gone. After all, this is what he had long ago dreamed of—years before now, as she lay in the trailer’s bedroom, sniveling and weeping for days on end after her mother’s death. He recalled how he had fantasized about slipping out while she slept. Slipping out to freedom!

Well, he had that freedom now—and a great deal of money with which to enjoy it. Why, when you got right down to it, he had been insane to tie himself down to a domestic partnership with Chloe! Chloe—who, at twenty-two, was an
adult
now, a mature creature, with hips as wide as her ample bust and a wasp waist that only accentuated the distasteful
womanliness
of her voluptuous curves. How could he miss such a creature?

The answer was that he could not. He
would
not. Indeed, on the day when it was finally borne home to him that she was gone for good—the echo of her non-goodbye reverberating off the spare white walls of the suddenly vastly-too-big-feeling loft—Dez resolved that the last thing he would do would be to sit around listening to that mocking silence. Instead, he sprung from the sofa (where he had spent the better part of the afternoon and evening) and lit out for the downtown nightclubs and dance halls on the hunt for a teenaged beauty to soothe him. Only
now
, he would not have to listen to Chloe’s endless whining about not wanting to “share” him, about how she didn’t really
like
having sex with other girls. Now, he could flash his bankroll and entice back to his abode an entire
harem
of oh-so-young, oh-so-jaded teen beauties—and not have to answer to anyone.

He dismissed as sheer sentimentality—as a sign of his
own
woeful aging—those piercing moments when the image of Chloe, in all her wide-hipped womanly adultness, would flash before him and cause a kind of gulping sensation in his diaphragm, as if he’d been winded by a punch to the gut. At times—for instance, when he recalled the particular purring
softness of her speaking voice or the rough, burred sound of her laughter, or her way of waving helplessly a loose-wristed hand when Dez said something she deemed funny—he could even feel an aching sensation, like a bruise, in that part of his chest where he had reliably been told the heart resides.

All of this was too ridiculous to be true, of course, but on those occasions when he could not dismiss these maudlin reactions, he learned that he could douse them with a few tumblers of iced vodka; and when that failed to work, with the mounds of equally icy white powder supplied to him by his grinning doorman.

His reliance on both chemical prophylaxes increased sharply in the months following Chloe’s departure. How was it that remembered images from their first year together—of her tenderly protruding pelvic bones or the girlish gap between her thighs—could grow
more
anguishing over time? More to the point, how was it possible that the memory of her broadened hips, her thickened legs, her increased breast size—all those manifestations of dreaded maturity—could cause him equal pain? A pain that only two thick lines laid out on the surface of his iPad, rinsed down with a tumbler of vodka, could numb?

On a night in December, six months after Chloe’s vanishing act, Dez, wild-eyed and teeth-chattering on two large lines of a lightly saffron-tinged coke, found himself in an unmarked after-hours basement dance dungeon on the
extremely
Lower East Side, his ephebophile antenna twitching in his silk boxers, pointing him through the crowd like a dowsing rod. Through an atmosphere thickened by dance beats that seemed to convert
the air into a solid substance that pounded against his brain and body like oversized hammers swaddled in foam rubber, he spotted her through the DJ’s strobing lights: a willowy young blonde in a shoulderless, second-skin spandex microdress, the concavity at the sides of her narrow nates, the folded-wing protrusions of her delicate scapulae and the telltale negative space between her slender thighs revealing that this was a sylph who had slipped into the club on a borrowed ID, one that misstated her age by at least two years, probably three. But more than these tender indices of illicit youth, it was a certain heart-lifting resemblance, a thrilling echo of gesture and outline, that made Dez halt, then circle in and gently interpose himself into the protective phalanx of girlfriends with which such beauties always surround themselves.

Up close, and in the flashing of the colored lights, the resemblance seemed uncanny—as if the years separating him from that day when he stood at the front of an eleventh-grade classroom in New Halcyon, Vermont, never took place. Dumbstruck, flustered, his heart trying to flee up and out through his esophagus like a panicked man escaping a fire, he could only extend, between quivering fingers, the business card he had had made for just such occasions, a card that stated his name (a pseudonym) and occupation (Professional Photographer, equally specious). He had little hope that she would call, but the very next day, when he was out on a coffee run to the corner bistro, he felt his iPhone stir in his pocket, vibrating against his flaccid member, soon stiffening in sweet anticipation.
Yes
—
yes, of course he remembered her. Certainly, he took model portfolio shots!
Why, no—she did not need to have an agent. Yes, of course they could set up an appointment. How about later today? At his photographer’s loft in Tribeca?

In stark daylight, and when Dez was relatively sober (he had drunk only a single vodka-spiked coffee and quickened his reflexes with a single, small key bump), he found the resemblance not as convincing—the skin less ethereally perfect, the features not as sculpturally pure, the hair a little dull, at least in comparison with the remembered gossamer, the movements devoid of that floating, fluid grace that haunted his memory almost more than any other aspect of her ghost—but she was a passable simulacrum and it was a stroke of pure genius when Dez, while snapping pictures against a blue paper background in his “studio,” had the inspiration for her to “try on a few outfits.” They visited Chloe’s closet and for the next four hours, fueled by regular bumps of his yellowy powder, he found himself in an ecstatic dream state, as the increasingly convincing doppelgänger modeled his lost girl through the ages—not just in that period of prosperity following the civil suit, when Dez showered her with Prada and Lanvin, Burberry and Stella, but right back to that first glimpse, in that costume that he had never permitted her to throw out, the one in which he had first seen her: the faded, homemade denim skirt, cheap white halter top and grubby pink flip-flops.

Her name was Isabel and, like so many New Yorkers (Dez had come to notice), she conformed perfectly to the set of clichés and stereotypes assigned to her by the city: like the red-faced Irish bartenders; the bespectacled Ivy League journalists; the turbaned taxi drivers; the pin-striped, pig-faced bankers; and
the bearded artisanal cheese–making househusbands of Green-point, Isabel played her role as faithfully as if her words had been scripted for her, her clothes selected by a costumer, her pose and attitude shaped by an offstage director. She was an Upper East Side princess: the spoiled but neglected eldest daughter of a wealthy philandering restaurateur much in the society pages; a girl jaded, embittered; a sixteen-year-old-going-on-forty Brearley junior with daddy issues and a taste for any drug that could blunt the pain of her infinite, bottomless boredom. To Dez’s initial naive fears that someone would object to her being out all night, she rolled her eyes, then gave him a withering “You’re kidding me” glance.

They holed up for days—weeks—at a time in the increasingly sordid loft and indulged their mutual appetite for what Dez’s doorman cheerfully supplied. Isabel, who had connections of her own, introduced Dez to the dangerous delights of the speedball, and to an array of prescription medicines culled from the vast pharmacopoeia of her father’s medicine cabinet. Isabel’s own antidepressants and antianxiety pills also came in handy, as did the street Ritalin for which she bartered with her school pals, trading this or that frock bought (or stolen, just for the dangerous thrill of it) from Bergdorf’s or Barneys.

Sex is also a drug of sorts, and, as with any drug, one builds up tolerances. So it was that the pair, around the one-year anniversary of their union, went in search of ever-greater novelty and began to bring home a parade of playthings: teen girls, of course (Isabel had exactly no restrictions against sapphic excursions), but also an increasingly eclectic array of men,
women and boys, a confused and confusing mass of random limbs such that Dez would often awake, at some unknown, ungodly hour, with the sky outside the window a predawn purple with a single bright red slash, like an incision, along the horizon of distant Queens, to find himself afloat on his king-size mattress like one of those half-dead survivors piled any which way in Géricault’s painting
The Raft of the Medusa
, bodies hanging off the bed edge, with one lone figure, Dez, atop the pile and waving a grotesquely come-stained and-stiffened white T-shirt for rescue.

On one of those hungover, coke-jangled, OxyContin-numbed mornings, he surfaced to find himself in the spooning embrace of a reeking, white-bearded, tawny-toothed leprechaun—the amiable, if addled, outpatient who begged for change by holding open the door to the local Associated grocery store for patrons and who kept up a running commentary on everyone and everything in a squeaky voice like an unoiled wheel. Shouting in alarm, Dez leapt from the bed, which, he only then became aware, was peopled by three or four other entwined couples, including the floppy-haired Gallic-faced fruit seller who operated a stand at the corner of Morton Street, the apparently less-prim-than-Dez-thought female clerk (an exceptionally pretty black girl) at their local Tribeca branch of the New York Public Library, and Isabel herself, her ankle encircled by a chain looped through the nipple ring of the dreadlocked, white, trustfundian piercing enthusiast who lived one floor below them.

“We need to talk,” Dez told her later that day, once their guests had been redistributed through the neighborhood.