Undone (38 page)

“About what?” she asked, peering into the iPad propped on her knees. She was sitting on the begrimed and tattered Roche Bobois, smoking a menthol Benson & Hedges. As he contemplated her naked, monkey-thin body, breastless and smoothly tanned, her flat-ironed blonded hair, her affectless, empty-eyed, sad-mouthed dead end of a face, he realized, with a soft shock, that he was a little afraid of her.

“About us,” he ventured. “About what we’re doing. About last night. I think it’s time—”

“Huh,” she interrupted, dull eyes still on the screen. “That perv just got out of jail.”

“What?”

“That guy—writer guy, whatever? Who was doing his daughter?” She held up her iPad for him to see. Dez, sitting opposite her on the matching white leather armchair, equally soiled, could make out only the bright red letters “TMZ. com” and a headline: Daughter Despoiler Free after Five-Year Stint. He jumped up and grabbed the device from her. “Hey,” she stated tonelessly, “I was looking at that.”

Dez ignored this limp protest and walked off to a far corner of the loft, peering into the screen, sweeping his fingertips with increasing speed across its smooth surface, flicking through the pictures. The first showed a stooped, impossibly aged, infirm, blind man, a white cane extended in front of him, stepping with obvious caution through a wide gate onto a stretch of sidewalk. Then a series of photographs, each at closer range, of this same man, confused, frightened, his mouth a black hole, waving his helpless cane, surrounded by paparazzi. Finally, a sequence that
showed the arrival on the scene of the home care worker—Padma? Deepak? (he could no longer recall)—pushing away the lensmen, waving her hands, shouting—and finally leading the halting old man down the sidewalk to a car, photographers in pursuit. The final shot was of the expressionless man, hair shaved down to a glinting white stubble, slumped into himself in the passenger seat, an explosion of reflected flashes bursting from the black lenses of his glasses.

Dez brought the iPad back to the living area. The photographs, to his surprise, had given him no pleasure.

“Funny, right?” she said as she took back the computer. “He looks like an owl. I saw his daughter on
Tovah.
What a low-rent skank.”

Dez, who had begun walking toward the kitchen in search of some steadying vodka, stopped and turned. “What did you say?”

“This girl,” she said, “his daughter, was on—whatever—
Tovah
? And like giving this whole big sob story about how her dad, like, fucked her or whatever and how she sued him and got him put in jail? And I mean, my friends and I were like, ‘Uh,
yeah
, if we all went on
Tovah
and talked about our dads, every man on the Upper East Side would be in jail.’ It’s like, ‘Uh, grow up, attention whore.’”

Dez stood contemplating her. She was flicking and clicking listlessly now on the iPad, probably on a shopping Web site. That the incident at the center of the disaster he had visited upon Ulrickson’s family could be perceived—by this denizen of Manhattan’s serenely untouchable, ultra-privileged money class—as simply a dreary, dull, quotidian occurrence hardly
worth mention; and that Chloe’s emotional devastation could be seen merely as a sign of how hopelessly déclassé she was, how
poorly bred
—this brought him up short. Dez was hardly naive or unworldly. But suddenly, and for the first time ever in his adult life, he felt the urge to go home to North Carolina.

He did not, of course, go home. Instead, he lived on, in the ruined loft, with Isabel, in that grim parody of his former relationship with Chloe. Their sex life, inevitably, dwindled to nothing, a casualty of overfamiliarity and rampant drug use. Other pursuits filled the void. They became habitués of the casinos in Atlantic City, staying in a succession of high-roller luxury suites in the hotels overlooking the bleak expanse of sandy swamp and watery wasteland that stretched to infinity around them. Buoyed by whatever concoction or combination of substances was their current favorite, sipping the free cocktails borne on serving trays by the miniskirted waitresses, they joined in the gloomy gaming halls the tobacco-tinged senior citizens bused in every day from their old folks’ homes to play the computer poker machines, eat the Early Bird specials and ply the nickel slots. Desiccated Dez, with a spectral, hollow-eyed, skeletal Isabel draped upon him, started at the blackjack tables, placing heavy bets, and it took him a mere four months to work his way, with steady deliberation, through the fortune Chloe had been awarded.

Soon enough, he could not even afford the two roundtrip bus tickets from Lower Manhattan to Atlantic City and they were reduced to playing online betting games on Isabel’s iPad, gambling via PayPal. Meanwhile, each day’s mail brought frightening threats from Dez’s various creditors: MasterCard,
Visa, American Express. When the condo folks started to write to him, and then phone, about his nonpayment of the five-thousand-dollar monthly fee, he was obliged to admit that things were getting serious. Forced to switch from premium cocaine and the purest of heroin to cheap street meth and cough syrups to keep sickness at bay, they soon found that even these substitutes were beyond their means. (By now, they’d pawned everything pawnable.) Isabel, cut off by her family, was game to sell the only item left to them of any value, but Dez put his foot down, at first, insisting that he had more pride than that—not because he was especially averse to trading on the sexual allure of a girlfriend (what, after all, had his plot against Ulrickson hinged upon?), but because of the sheer lack of imagination—the inelegance—inherent in being a pimp. But when the illness became too acute (Dez spent a dreadful two days and two nights lying on the bathroom floor, hugging the toilet bowl between bouts of seizures), he let her go. She first raided Chloe’s now almost empty clothes closet, and emerged dressed in the immortal denim skirt, white halter and pink flip-flops. “Not those,” Dez weakly protested, “not those.” But she had already slipped out, shivering, sniffling, into the cold March night.

When the phone rang less than an hour later, he pulled himself along the stained broadloom and answered it. She was phoning from the police station. Her first customer—or what she, in her illness and misery, took to be her first customer—turned out to be a pair of uniformed cops in a marked squad car. She was in the precinct house, under arrest, and she didn’t know what to do.

“Call your father,” he said, and hung up.

He dragged himself back to the bathroom for a fresh bout of vomiting and shaking. As he lay there, he was, for some reason, visited with a hallucinogenically vivid memory of
her
voice, from that day he masqueraded as Dr. Geld. She was trying to convince him that she was a changed person, that life with Ulrickson and his family had imbued her with goodness, purified her. “I’ve changed, Dez,” he heard her saying in the bright cadences of one of Tovah’s spiritual converts. “And you can too. I swear. It’s never too late. You just have to learn to see the good in people! And in yourself.”

The good in himself! Dez had to laugh, even as he lay, groaning, in agony, on the cold bathroom tiles. He had spent his whole life staring into the abyss of his own personality, had shivered in horror, even in childhood, at its impenetrable depths, and had set himself the task of sounding those depths, of taking the true measure of his malice and spite, his lust and cruelty. Where was the good? What good had ever existed in him? What good had he ever
known
? His mother? Yes—except that her slow, excruciating death from motor neuron disease, when he was fourteen, had only confirmed for him that “goodness,” like white-bearded old God himself, was an illusion, a rumor, a jape played on credulous little boys and other innocents. Life was a sick prank that always ended in tears.

Suddenly, his fever broke. One minute he was dry-heaving into the spattered toilet bowl, the next he was rising to his feet, the pain in his guts—the slashing, knifing pain—turned off, as if by the flick of a switch. He had ceased to shiver, and his skin,
which had prickled with rough gooseflesh, had smoothed out, warmed, become that of a human being once again. Scarcely able to believe that the agonies of his cold turkey were over, he stepped to the sink, splashed his face with cold water, then straightened up and looked in the glass. If he had always been gaunt and pale, he was now a skull: bone white, fleshless, with eyes sunk deep into blackened sockets, his lips withered and receding, exposing his unmentionable teeth and gray gums. But he was alive, and the pain, the
pain
, was gone. He felt a rush of euphoria, of hope, more potent than any drug.

In the living room, he stood and surveyed the condition to which he and Isabel had managed to bring the loft. All of the furniture had been pawned or sold. For weeks, they had slept on old boxes smuggled from the garbage room. These torn pieces of corrugated cardboard lay strewn among the shreds of old clothes, broken dishes, empty pill bottles, bent syringes and pulverized coke vials. Evidence of the sickness of their withdrawal was splashed everywhere on the floor and on the walls.

He turned and saw the notices that had been shoved under his door by the condo company. Notices of pending eviction. Yes, he had certainly allowed himself to sink low. But he had been low before and dug himself out. And now, standing there in the detritus, he allowed himself to daydream about a new strategy for survival. It involved Ulrickson’s daughter—the one from whom he had stolen the DNA sample. He smiled as he imagined how he would bide his time, patiently wait until the child, now nine or ten (and, according to Chloe, living in San Francisco with her aunt), turned a delectable fifteen, that
age Dez liked best, when the face still holds significant baby fat but the breasts have swollen almost to full size, the limbs gawkily sprouted to supermodel length, as if in sheer surprise at the pubertal changes taking place. He would travel to San Francisco, insinuate himself (somehow!) into Ulrickson’s sister’s home—perhaps as a tutor?—then woo and win the girl. When she turned eighteen, he (an elegant yet still Peter Pan–like forty-five-year-old) could wed her! And thus win access to the other third of her father’s fortune.

He was amusing himself with these idle fancies when there was a knock on the door. He started. Visitors were not allowed up to a tenant’s apartment unless announced by the security team in the lobby. Could it be the condo people coming to enforce an eviction order? No, their last notice still gave him three months to make good on his debt to the building. He crept on tiptoe across the living room toward the peephole, but halted several paces from the door when he heard a jingling sound in the hall, followed by the rattle of a key pushed into the lock. His heart rose on an irrational hope.

“Chloe?” he said.

The door swung open and into the apartment stepped Pete, the building’s short, stocky, white-haired superintendent. In his hand was a key, attached to a massive ring of similar-looking keys. He had a strange look on his face. “These men,” he said in his thick Bulgarian accent, “they need to see you.”

Two men in long dark overcoats stepped into the loft from the hallway. Dez recognized them instantly, from their taciturn,
slablike faces, as lawmen. He turned, intent on making a run for the vast window, to hurl himself through its lucent membrane of glass and copper, to cast himself to the earth twelve stories below. But, enfeebled by his recent illness, he was able to hobble only a few paces before he felt hands grab at him and wrestle him facedown onto the filthy rug. A boulder-like knee pressed into his fragile spine as the cuffs tightened. He assumed that he was being arrested on a charge of aiding and abetting Isabel’s hopeless attempt at prostitution. Only later, when he was in an interrogation room at the First Precinct House, on Varick Street, under questioning by the detectives, did he learn about the drawing tablet containing the messages Pauline dictated to Maddy; about Chloe’s confession and the immunity that protected her from prosecution; about how Ulrickson, although nearly as blind as his absurd fictional detective, Geoffrey Bannister, had brought Dez’s master plan to ruin.

Adding grotesque insult to unspeakable injury, the cops informed him of how the family, including little Maddy, had now been reunited in a house in Ulrickson’s old neighborhood, Deepti once more caring for Pauline—and Chloe, having transferred to Jasper’s nearby alma mater, Yale, happily ensconced in the house as helpmeet, friend and surrogate daughter to the man Dez had tried to destroy. An eye operation on Ulrickson had been a big success. He was writing again.

For those in the police station that day—cops and criminals alike—it was an unusual and eerie occurrence when, from behind the closed interrogation room door, there came a sound
rarely, if ever, heard in those dour purlieus: laughter. First quiet, then rising on an out-of-control note, on a pitch of hysteria that seemed to border on madness.

They drove him across town to Manhattan Central Booking, the grim gray stone edifice that housed the criminal courts and the subterranean holding cells known, colloquially, as the Tombs. In a ground-floor office, he was fingerprinted and photographed.

Quiet and cooperative, Dez (already plotting his escape, his return, his revenge) was led downstairs.

A number of people were instrumental to this novel’s seeing the light of day, first as a manuscript, then as an actual published work.

I conceived the plot in 2001, but not until summer 2009 did I start writing—inspired, in part, by my friend Oivind Magnussun, who quit his job to start his own (successful) business, and who warned me that a life lived sailing close to shore in safe harbors was no real life. That I found a two-week stretch of quiet to begin a rough draft, I owe to my friends Chris and Erinn Deri, who happened to have invited my then ten-year-old son to Florida to visit with their daughter, Katie. My wife was visiting her parents in Canada, so I found myself alone in our Upper
East Side apartment, where I wrote some thirty thousand words in a two-week-long, round-the-clock marathon of scribbling.