Undone (7 page)

Dez, however, insisted that the treatment be continued and, over time, learned to counteract the imagery through a meditative technique that involved imagining scenes of sickness and torture as the teen beauties were projected before him. In time he achieved, through this act of “self-blinding,” the flaccidity Geld was seeking. When the doctor switched to showing him “therapeutically positive” images of age-appropriate women—female business executives climbing out of taxicabs in tight pencil skirts; an aproned mother bending at the waist to remove a well-browned turkey from the oven—Dez brought up from the storehouse of memory, and superimposed on the projected pictures, visions of adolescents bending in skirts to pick up tennis balls, or pale girls in private school uniforms retrieving heavy books, on tippy-toe, from a high shelf. Thus did he induce the hearty erectile response his doctor was looking for.

Geld’s long, complicated paper on Dez’s case was published as a lead article in the
New England Journal of Medicine
and was covered by
Time
and
Newsweek.
In a
Dateline
TV documentary, Dez (shown in darkened silhouette and identified only as Patient X) was described as being among the world’s very rare examples of a successful sex aversion therapy, his case reviving the debate over whether it was, after all, possible to “cure” homosexuality (the Holy Grail of all sexological research in America). Dez’s name was duly removed from the state’s sex registry. He was, however, barred from working in any profession in which he had authority over young females. For instance, teaching.

But it so happened that Dez had always been drawn to pedagogy and the opportunities it offered for expanding the horizons
of young people, and after some six months working as a clerk in a shoe store (Men’s Department only—Dez, again, was trying to be good), he enrolled in a teacher’s training program and earned his certificate as an instructor of high school–level English. Not long after that, he came across an advertisement for a position in rural Vermont and on a whim sent off a fanciful résumé. (Dez had seen the many news reports over the years of convicted sex offenders slipping through the cracks and figured, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”) He was granted an interview, which was conducted by a panel of three teachers, two of whom were pretty, thirtyish, unmarried women of precisely the kind who always warmed to Dez’s sly, cruel good looks (and who left him utterly cold). Dez got the job (by a vote of two to one) and that September took up duties at New Halcyon High, a coed institution housed in a brick one-story building of sixties vintage perched on the brow of a hillside that overlooked the town’s post office, tiny bank, grocery store and log cabin–themed diner. The school catered to the sons and daughters of the local farmers and the year-round workers of the small lakeside town—a pretty hamlet that, Dez was told, became a vibrant summer cottage resort area for the moneyed clans of the Northeast during July and August.

D
ez had his extra-professional reasons for being overjoyed about his new position. But he also needed the job. Judge Dezollet had died the previous year, of a fast-moving cancer, leaving his son (a deep disappointment to him) nothing in his will. Penniless and in debt, Dez had undertaken his teaching duties with every intention of obeying the law. His paycheck was not princely, but it would serve until a new opportunity arose. In the meantime, he had no compunction about a little surreptitious voyeurism, some window-shopping. He was human, after all. But he vowed to himself that he would never, ever touch. He was determined to be strong.

That was before the start of his third class, on his first day at the school—an eleventh-grade class that began in the period just after lunch. Dez was standing at the blackboard, in his adult guise of black jeans, white button-down shirt and dark sports jacket, watching the group of twenty or so bored teenagers straggling into the room. Suddenly the air went thick and his body began to tingle with that special sensation so familiar to him. At the back of the group was a slender girl with two curtains of glossy, streaky-blond hair framing a round, baby-like face. Dressed in a white halter top and short denim skirt, she hugged a stack of notebooks to her breasts and moved slowly, in a maddening drag-toed gait, her pink-painted toenails exposed in a pair of grubby flip-flops (also pink)—a girl herself disguised in the everyday costume of the female adolescent but whom Dez, a connoisseur in these matters if ever there was one, recognized instantly, with every sense available to him, as a rare and exceptional specimen.

Chloe, for her part, immediately felt the teacher’s eyes upon her. At seventeen, she was hardly a stranger to the attentions of men; as early as thirteen, when she lost all that baby fat and shot up four inches in height, she had been fending off their exploratory glances, or worse, but never had she been visually devoured as was now happening as she moved across the classroom (she could practically feel the exposed skin of her legs and arms tingle under the pressure of his gaze)—and never by a man at once so boyish yet worldly-looking, so sweetly attentive yet so rakishly handsome, as Mr. Dezollet.

As seductions go, Chloe proved to be one of his more delicate
conquests. After administering to the class a test devised to determine their relative knowledge of books and writing, he placed her in a program of after-school tutoring (her grasp of basic spelling and grammar was, to be fair, atrocious). There, over the course of a few weeks, he casually drew out her story: he heard about the early loss of her father, and about her single, overworked, underpaid waitress-cum-chambermaid mother—a pathetic creature who, Chloe said, relieved the boredom, drudgery and disappointment of her existence with regular weekend visits to the dive bars strewn along the highway between Shelburne and Charlotte, and from which she brought home a steady stream of one-night stands: beery farmers, sad-sack seed salesmen, tractor mechanics. To Dez’s concerned questioning about whether or not these men ever interfered with
her
, Chloe sorrowfully admitted that, lately, they had started trying to, but that she had, so far, managed to fight them off. Nevertheless, the experience, Dez discerned, had imbued Chloe with a deep suspicion of, and even dislike for, the attentions of men and boys. This would have been more discouraging for Dez had she not, almost in the same breath, admitted to a deep yearning after a father-figure protector, a man unlike the sloppy would-be seducers her mother brought home: a strong, warm, handsome, witty, intelligent older man to guide and shape her. Such inchoate desires, coupled with a loathing for life in New Halcyon and unformed dreams of a career as a model or actress in a vaguely imagined New York, Paris or London, inclined her to see in Dez (he easily divined) not only an attentive and caring teacher but a man of thrilling worldliness, of a poise and sophistication
that spoke of worlds beyond the oppressive and confining hills of New Halcyon.

In early November, Dez announced to Chloe his conviction that, for her own academic good, she should attend extra tutorial sessions, on weekends, at his home. At the time, Dez was living in an apartment above a local restaurant, the Mill, conveniently tucked away from the prying eyes of the town’s busybodies and tattletales behind the general store on a blighted plot of sandy ground between the gas station and the marina. The Mill’s appropriateness as an illicit trysting spot was further enhanced by its operating hours: it closed every evening at ten, after which the building was inhabited by no one but Dez, whose attic apartment ran the length of the building’s peaked roof, the walls on either side of his rooms slanting steeply upward to a high point in the center. With its brown shag broadloom, zebra-striped foam couches and woozy water bed, the place was a time capsule from the seventies, a sybarite’s ironic paradise.

Chloe’s first weekend tutorial was on an evening when a cold snap had rimed the windowpanes with delicate patterns of frost and made the ancient radiators groan and clank like monsters. Dez chased away the chill with hot cocoa spiked with Kahlúa (“This tastes so nice and chocolaty,” Chloe innocently observed). They were an hour and a half into the session, and on their third refill, when Dez lowered his hand onto Chloe’s, which lay, so invitingly, beside the foolscap page filled with examples of subject–verb agreements. She started, blushed and looked up at him through her lashes. He confessed, haltingly, to how very, very lonely he was in New Halcyon, how he had
failed to find, among the farmers and day laborers, or indeed his fellow teachers, any soul mates—except for Chloe herself. He felt such a special kinship with her, a connection that went beyond that of teacher and student, like friends, like equals. Dez quickly withdrew his hand and said, No—no, it was worse than that. He was not being entirely honest with her—or with himself. He jumped to his feet and began to pace. He confessed that his feelings for her had crossed into a region of emotion strictly forbidden to any pedagogue—a region so unprofessional as to be criminal. His feelings were especially unforgivable given what she had confided to him about the men her mother brought back from the bars, those drunken louts who attempted to seduce her. He was really no better than them. Actually, he was worse—given the position of authority he held over her! But truth be told, lately, he had not been able to keep from his mind dreams of touching her, of kissing her, of holding her so very, very close. And it was for that reason, he said, turning to face her, that she must go. Go away! Right now.

Chloe, who (incredibly!) had been having so many of the same feelings, the same reservations and the same fears, emitted a strangled sob. She got to her feet and rushed over to Mr. Dezollet, throwing her arms around him and pouring out her confession of reciprocated adoration and desire. Somehow, she had managed to remain, despite every effort of nature to militate against it, a virgin—a happenstance she was now ready, desperately ready, to rectify. “Please,” she cried, “please make love to me.”

Dez, after a great show of inner struggle, obliged her.

E
ven in his most polluted fantasies, Dez had never dared to imagine a girl like Chloe (and this was saying something)—a girl whose very inexperience paradoxically made her so wanton and free, so without inhibition or shame, so pliant and passionate. She came to him every night after dark, sneaking from her mother’s small house down the River Road, riding her bike to his apartment above the Mill.

He knew that it was madness to have her come to him every night, this way, for five or six hours of undreamed-of exertions on those sofas, on that shag rug, on the kitchen counters, in the bath, on that lurching water bed. He was risking not only his job but his freedom. (He had been expressly warned that another
transgression would result in a long incarceration.) But it was a measure of the spell she had cast over him that he was willing to risk everything to be with her, to experience those hours of savage bliss—before he sent her home, in the wee hours of the morning, and they met up again a few hours later at the school, in the blameless roles of teacher and student, his fingers and face still redolent of her musk and sweetness—a subterfuge whose practical joke aspect only further fueled his lust.

And something more than lust. He was surprised, mystified, by the depth of his feelings for her. His desire seemed to go beyond his insatiable appetite for her flesh. He felt an unfamiliar possessiveness, a desire to have her wholly to himself and under his control. She was something new in his experience. Certainly he could be contemptuous and cutting about her ill-informed opinions; he could be brutally derisive about the thoughts she set down in the essays she wrote for him in class (“In
Catcher in the Rye
J. Slinger has a great writing style of sounding like a teenage boy …”). He was annoyed by the regimen of diet and exercise, culled from
Glamour
and
Seventeen
magazines, that she used to tone her already lean and graceful body; he mocked her for her fascination with the celebrities she had been trained, by her television shows, to be enraptured by. But on a deeper level, shielded, hidden, he recognized some profound connection between them. He felt an almost frightening reliance on her, an emotional dependence. The feeling was unprecedented for him and brought him a form of happiness.

If Dez could not bring himself to use the word
love
in connection with Chloe, she had no problem whatever applying the
term to her feelings for him. In her diary, she described herself as “totally and completely head over heels in LOVE with Dez”—a feeling that went beyond the sexual. She had developed a pure, unswerving devotion to his soul. She idolized him as a “genius.” She lived to please him.

By this time, she was barely speaking to her mother. Holly had long since noticed the painful shift in interest on the part of her “boyfriends” from herself to her blossoming daughter, and this had given rise to that oldest of familial rivalries, one no less real for being a cliché. As the mortifying awareness of her own vanished charms was borne home to her, Holly, who had once confined her drinking to weekends, now sat guzzling wine or beer in front of the television every night, while at the same time discoursing, in an increasing slur, about how she had wasted her life by staying in New Halcyon, by failing to go to college, by having a
kid
, especially such an ungrateful, lazy, scheming little kid as Chloe. Chloe hated listening to these monologues, which modulated seamlessly from self-pity to castigation. But at the same time, she welcomed them as a prelude to the moment when Holly would drop into alcoholic unconsciousness, allowing Chloe to slip out, undetected, to see Dez. Indeed, so low had Holly sunk, by mid-March of that year, that she failed even to respond with any surprise or outrage when Chloe’s principal telephoned, one afternoon, to notify her of the scandal.

Principal Heinrichs explained, in an urgent murmur, that one of Chloe’s teachers—”a Mr. Dezollet, who teaches English”—had been witnessed, by a fellow faculty member, behaving toward Chloe in an “inappropriate manner.” The incident had occurred
when the two were alone in a classroom—or thought themselves alone. Miss Simmons, the art teacher, had entered Mr. Dezollet’s room, between periods, with the intention of asking him if her art students might paint a mural depicting the literary history of Vermont on his wall (and, it might be added, with the shy hope that Mr. Dezollet might notice, and comment upon, the new dress Miss Simmons, who had been so taken with Mr. Dezollet at his job interview, was debuting that very day). She had slipped in just as Mr. Dezollet, standing behind the girl, was removing his pursed lips from her swan-like young neck. It was, to be sure, just a peck, a quick pressing of the lips to an area where her shoulder met the turn in her clavicle. But it was done with a familiarity that left no doubt in Miss Simmons’s mind that she had seen something worthy of severe sanction. Dez, who had seen Simmons flee the room, soon heard himself being summoned to the principal’s office over the school’s PA system. He elected not to obey the invitation, and instead quit the school with a haste that suggested the building was in flames or in imminent danger of exploding. When Dez failed to appear in the principal’s office, Miss Simmons, her breast heaving with indignation and hurt, demanded Principal Heinrichs notify the authorities of his flight. But Heinrichs, assured by Chloe that Mr. Dezollet had simply been innocently demonstrating a scene in a book (
The Scarlet Letter
), and eager to avoid a scandal, declined to call the police. However, when he recounted all of this over the phone to Holly, he did add: “This does not preclude
you
, as Chloe’s mother, from pressing charges, if you so choose.”