Undone

by John Colapinto

  She pursed her lips into a moue to make Dez laugh. But Dez didn’t laugh. He simply turned back to the television—although now (she noticed) he had a strange look on his face, his eyes wide, his mouth slightly open, as if he were watching the approach of something huge from beyond the flickering screen. And, strangely, he had not turned the sound back on.

  “Anyway,” she said, digging around for a final bite and speaking more to herself than to Dez, who was hurting her feelings by ignoring her that way, “looks like this Ulrickson guy got rich. I could’ve used a rich daddy.”

  “Yes,” Dez said in a soft, faraway voice. “Yes, you certainly could.”

  And it was from that innocent exchange that he hatched the plan. Of course, in matters of creativity, an artist often conveniently forgets the anguished hours that go into honing an idea, sanding away its rough edges, solving its internal problems. Still, its basic shape, its gestalt, came into being on that morning of the first day of April, in that flash of inspiration which Dez would later think of as the moment at which he began to claw his way out from the pit of poverty, squalor and despair into which he had allowed himself to sink.

  Not that his motives were purely, or even primarily, mercenary. For the scheme, if he could make it work, offered something more lasting, more satisfying, than mere money. As a man who had fallen so far in life—all due, he believed, to the hypocrisy of a society that punished men like him, men who had the courage to live out their animal nature, and exalted men like this Ulrickson, who could so convincingly masquerade as a dutiful, disciplined, decent male—Dez felt he had something to prove: namely, that when you stripped men to their primal essence, they were all the same, all equally prey to the ferocious, feral appetites that roiled, secretly, behind even the most saintly exterior. What had Ulrickson said in reply to Tovah’s question about his enforced celibacy? We can control ourselves. The sanctimoniousness of that boast! The self-congratulation! That was the gauntlet thrown down; that was the challenge which fired Dez’s determination to test Ulrickson’s smug resolve, to prove that, for all his success and wealth and fame, he was no better than Dez, no better than any other man (as Dez understood all men to be)—and, perhaps, given the right conditions, a good deal worse.

  A movement in his peripheral vision made him look up. Chloe had risen from the sofa. Seeing his sharp glance, she said, on a note of apology, “I’m just going to take a shower.”

  She turned her back and peeled her T-shirt over her head, then slid the Y-fronts down her legs. She was stepping toward the flimsy accordion door of the bathroom when she heard Dez say, in an oddly thickened voice, “Actually …”

  She stopped and turned. She saw a look on his face—a look she hadn’t seen in weeks and which she had despaired of ever seeing again. All things being equal, she might have preferred to see softness and sympathy on his features, an understanding smile, as if he cared about her sadness over her mother—rather than this leer of wolfish appetite. But she was ready to settle for any kind of attention from him, just so long as she could be sure that he still loved her. And that’s what this ravening animal grin meant—didn’t it?

  With an upward flick of his chin, he beckoned her.

  “I just remembered,” he said as she moved obediently toward him, “that no one can resist you. No one. And that has given me a naughty—a very naughty—idea.”

  Plus, of course (Dez reasoned), there was bound to be money in it.

  2

  The paternity complaint, sent from the Department of Children and Families of Vermont, was delivered to Jasper’s house in the town of Clay Cross, Connecticut, on an afternoon at the beginning of May, four weeks after his appearance on Tovah’s show. He did not recognize the missive as a legal summons, arriving, as it did, with the usual avalanche of letters and packages sent by fans of Lessons from My Daughter. It was unusual for a letter (in an eight-by-ten-inch manila envelope) to be delivered by hand (he hastily signed for it), but by now nothing could truly surprise him: over the last month he had received, by UPS delivery, a crate containing a life-sized pastel portrait of him and Pauline rendered by a septuagenarian fan in Dallas; he had fended off, from his doorstep, a pair of Swedish fans wheeling a carry-on packed with first editions of his memoir for signing (and obvious resale on eBay); just two days ago, a local farmer had appeared bearing a truckload of spring asparagus for Jasper and his family. So a hand-delivered business envelope from an unfamiliar address raised no immediate alarms, its bulk suggestive of, perhaps, a brochure outlining the activities of one of the hundreds of stroke or head injury charities that continually approached him for endorsement, cash or speaking engagements.

  At forty-one years old, Jasper had been a professional writer all his adult life, producing, at a rate of one book every two years, a series of mystery novels featuring his blind private eye, Geoffrey Bannister. The books had never put him in the first rank of mystery writers, but they had won him a small, dedicated following. He had never imagined, for himself, anything like the success of Lessons from My Daughter. The memoir was already in its sixth printing, and had, to date, earned more than all his novels combined and multiplied by a factor of twenty.

  Although he had always known that a single book could make a writer wealthy—In Cold Blood helping to fund Capote’s decades of drinking and dissipation; Catcher in the Rye buying Salinger fifty years of publishing silence—Jasper had never seriously pondered such a fate for himself, or even longed for it. He had not needed to. With the death of his parents in a private plane crash when he was twenty-three, he had come into the inheritance that put him beyond financial worries.

  His father, a mild, sweet-tempered man, had been heir to the frozen fish fortune amassed by Jasper’s enterprising immigrant grandfather from Oslo. His mother, an accomplished triathlete in her youth, had enjoyed a vigorous middle age as a devoted kayaker on nearby Long Island Sound. Raised in a happy and loving home in the tenets of his parents’ devout Lutheranism, Jasper decided early in life to eschew the family business and become a writer, an ambition touched off in him, at age fourteen, when he first read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Whereas stories of the famous sleuth were, for some aspiring writers, a springboard to more sophisticated reading (and writing) in later life, something perennially boyish, not to say naively innocent, in Jasper inclined him to see the Baker Street polymath as a permanent hero and inspiration, and apart from a short-lived phase directly after earning his postgraduate degree, when he flirted (unconvincingly) with growing his beard stubble, smoking unfiltered Gitanes and writing abstract poetry in an East Village garret, he had never had literary ambitions greater than to invent a detective modeled, without apology, on Conan Doyle’s great creation.

  Most critics dismissed his Bannister series as a pale imitation of Sir Arthur’s masterworks, and sales were decidedly mid-list, but large royalty statements, important awards and critical bouquets were not necessary prods to Jasper’s muse. Materially secure, after his parents’ passing, he was able to write his detective novels simply because he loved writing, and because he relished the difficulty of showing how a sightless man, with the aid only of his sharpened senses and his faithful Seeing Eye dog, Smokey, could ferret out, through Holmesian feats of deduction, criminals. (Never one to cheat, Jasper took it as a point of pride and honor always to lay before the attentive reader the necessary clues for solving the mystery one step ahead of blind Bannister.) He had written his memoir of Pauline’s stroke with a similar lack of commercial ambition—had written it, in fact, with no other motive than to exorcise his grief and horror over his wife’s incapacitation, to celebrate her strength and endurance, and to tell the world about the inspiration he drew from the example of Maddy, their only child.

  The invitation to appear on Tovah’s show had arrived quite out of the blue, without Jasper’s either hoping for or expecting it. Any slight reluctance he might have felt about appearing on a program infamous for its lachrymose wallowing in tragedy, its tabloid-like exploitat
ion of others’ suffering, was outweighed by what he understood to be Tovah’s unique power to publicize a book, and thus to spread more widely the message of hope and inspiration that was his main reason for publishing the memoir in the first place. And so he had agreed to go on the program. To date, the only truly regrettable fallout from that decision was the massive increase in his mail, which he felt obliged to sift through, and answer, each day.

  Stooping, he gathered up the fifty or so letters that lay on the carpet below the mail slot and, with the mystery envelope tucked among them, walked from the foyer into the large, sun-filled open-plan kitchen at the front of the house. He sat at the table and began going through the mail. He had opened and read only one letter when he heard a car pull up in the drive: Pauline, arriving home from her daily physiotherapy.

  He walked back out to the foyer and opened the door on a fresh, flower-scented May afternoon. Standing on the front step, he saw, through the play of confetti-like light and shadow cast by the maple tree that grew from the front lawn, Deepti, Pauline’s live-in caregiver. She was standing by the back of the car, operating the hydraulic lift that lowered Pauline’s wheelchair from the retrofitted SUV onto the gravel driveway.

  “Need help?” he called.

  “No, no, Mr. Jasper,” Deepti sang out in a lilting Indian accent. “I am fine.”

  Maddy, whom Deepti picked up from preschool every day on the way home from the hospital, unclasped her seat belt, clambered from the backseat and ran up the flagstone path through the mobile green-filtered light. “Daddy!” she cried, throwing herself into Jasper’s arms.

  “Hey, Muffin!” he said, swinging her up off the ground. She was almost five now and, as the twinge in his lower back told him, getting too big for him to lift in this way. He nuzzled her neck, then pulled his head back and studied her face, the soft bow-shaped lips, the near-transparent skin glowing as if lit from within. Her dark bangs and the dimple in her right cheek were exact replicas of Pauline’s. From Jasper she had inherited only his blue eyes and the suggestion of a cleft, really just a shallow dent, in her chin. “How was House of Wee Folk?” he asked.

  “Great! I can sing the whole ABC song!”

  “Wonderful,” he said. “I’d love to hear it.” He lowered her, gingerly, to the floor. “But right now, I want you to go wash all that preschool off your hands.”

  “Kay!” she said, and ran off into the house.

  Deepti, in the meantime, had wheeled Pauline up to the front door.

  She looked strikingly as she had before the stroke: smooth-skinned, large-eyed, dark-haired, her almond-shaped face as beautiful as ever, save for the slight droop of the right side of her mouth and her right eyelid. Her once-animated hands, through disuse, were curled permanently into fists in her lap. But there was no doubt, in her alert gaze, of her undiminished awareness and intelligence. She returned Jasper’s greeting and kiss with a blink and a kind of twinkle that Jasper, who had known her for over fifteen years, recognized as true contentment.

  When first told by Pauline’s neurologist that her locked-in status did not necessarily mean a shortened lifespan—”Indeed, with good care, she can live as long as you or me,” Dr. Carlucci told him—Jasper had been assailed with horror. He thought of Pauline trapped, indefinitely, within her isolating paralysis. Might not death be a welcome escape? Dr. Carlucci had quickly reassured him, saying that recent long-term studies showed that locked-in patients who were well cared for and encouraged to communicate, to be engaged with their world, reported levels of contentment equal to those of healthy people—stunning results that, frankly, called into question the most basic assumptions about human happiness. “Of course, the patients who do best are those who feel that there is something to live for,” the doctor added. “A great many are parents of young children, like your Maddy.”

  Pauline was proof of all that Carlucci had said. She had, since coming home twenty-two months ago, made remarkable strides. Increased diaphragm strength meant that she no longer breathed with a ventilator; she no longer fed through a gastrointestinal tube, and was able to swallow smooth purees and thickened liquids; improved bladder control meant that she no longer relied on a catheter—all advances that had resulted in a marked uplift in her mood, which in turn gave her doctors hope for continued improvements. So, despite what was undeniably a difficult circumstance, Jasper refused to surrender to despair. Pauline would not have allowed that, in any case.

  Deepti pushed the wheelchair through the foyer and into the kitchen, parking it by the table where the pile of mail lay. She went to fill the kettle, and Jasper sat down beside Pauline. “Today’s haul,” he said, gesturing at the stack of letters. He liked going through the fan mail each day with Pauline, soliciting her opinion on which letters to answer, which to discard. “Shall I?” he said, lifting one. She blinked.

  These blinks (once for yes, twice for no) were her sole means of communication. Pauline had tried to master the art of dictating messages to Jasper by blinking at the appropriate time as he recited the alphabet to her, picking out sentences letter by letter—some locked-in patients managed to write entire books with this method—but deficits in her short-term memory (an effect of the stroke, Carlucci surmised) so far made it impossible for her to hold a phrase of any length or complexity in her mind while laboriously spelling it out. A retina scanner to aid her in choosing letters from a computer tablet with movements of her iris had proved little better, since this too required holding an utterance in the mind for extended periods. Much of her current physiotherapy was aimed at improving her memory and overall mental and physical stamina so that she might, one day, accomplish the task of writing by dictation. Her therapists, lately, had noted some improvements. But for the time being, she relied solely on the binary, yes-no responses of blinking. Jasper had been duly trained in how to avoid asking open-ended questions, how to start and stop conversations, and how to recognize when Pauline wished to “speak.” For all its initial cumbersomeness, the method had proved surprisingly effective.

  “I was looking at this letter when you arrived,” he went on, smiling, to signal that it belonged to that category bound instantly for the trash. “It struck me as amusing—in an end-of the-American-Empire kind of way.”

  Pauline’s eyes twinkled in anticipation.

  “It’s from a man, Scooter Reece, in Atlanta. A so-called marketing entrepreneur. He suggests I travel around the country preaching what he calls the gospel of Daughter. Ten thousand per speech—guaranteed. As a nondenominational lay minister, I won’t pay taxes on any monies brought in through my ministry. Scooter will get this house listed as our parish—no more pesky property taxes. We’d have to cough up 60 percent to Scooter, but he’s a man with ideas, including a special limited edition American Girl Maddy doll. Do we go for it?”

  Pauline’s eyes sparkled with mirth. Just to be sure, she blinked twice, in quick succession.

  “Thought so,” he said with mock disappointment. He tossed the letter onto the pile reserved for the trash. “I knew your integrity would ruin everything!”

  Maddy ran into the kitchen and climbed onto Jasper’s lap.

  “Hey, don’t get too comfy,” he warned. “Nap time in five minutes.”

  Deepti brought over to the table a tray laden with a teapot and cup for Jasper. He pushed the pile of letters aside. “So,” he asked Pauline, “did you have a good day?”

  She blinked once. She waited a beat, then blinked again, asking the question back to him.

  “Not bad,” he said. “I’m still trying to start this new Bannister. But I’m not getting anywhere. By now I should have an entire outline.”

  “Mr. Jasper,” said Deepti sternly as she poured him a cup of tea. “It is too soon for a new book, with all the excitement over your memoir. The Tovah show. All this mail to answer. You must take a break.”

  Jasper smiled across the table at Pauline, whose eyes glinted in response. “You’re right, Deepti—very sage advice,” he said. “But you know t
he saying about the devil and idle hands.”

  “What kind of hands?” Maddy piped up.

  Jasper explained that unless you keep busy, you start doing bad things. “For instance, not getting ready for your nap.” He lowered her to the floor and playfully swatted her bottom. “Go forth,” he said.

  She ran off down the adjoining hallway, shouting, “Come and tuck me in! And bring Mom!”

  “In a minute,” he called after her. He turned to Deepti, who was fussily laying out cookies on a small plate. “Please, Deepti,” he said. “Take your break.”

  She thanked him, finished with the cookies and then repaired, as she did every day at this time, to the guesthouse out back to phone her daughter, an undergraduate at Brown University.

  Jasper again took up the subject of his stalled Bannister mystery with Pauline. “I’ve actually drawn up a list of possible crimes and solutions and characters,” he said. “But everything feels so familiar.” Serial killers, rapists, forgers, counterfeiters, kidnappers—he’d done it all before, sometimes more than once. He needed a fresh crime, something that would stretch Bannister’s powers of detection, and Jasper’s powers of invention. “Maybe we could talk about this tonight, after dinner?”

  Pauline blinked.

  It was amazing to Jasper how helpful Pauline could still be with his writing. They had met, fifteen years ago, when she was an assistant to Maxwell Smythe, his first editor at Crucible. She had been one of the earliest and most enthusiastic champions of his Bannister series, and after four years, with the unexpected death, by heart attack, of Smythe, she had taken it over, vastly improving it in all aspects. They had, as a natural outgrowth of their work together (her desk at Crucible strewn with marked-up manuscript pages and half-full Chinese food cartons, or having a post-work drink in one of the old-fashioned bars on Third Avenue), fallen in love and, in their fifth year together as editor and writer, married. Pauline remained a crucial collaborator. During his composition of Lessons from My Daughter, he read every new draft passage to her at the end of each working day, pausing often to ask: “Is that too sentimental?” or “Is that too private?” or “Is that how you remember it?” Her advice was indispensable, and it was only because of her strenuous refusal that he agreed to leave her name off the book as coauthor.