Undone

by John Colapinto

  But as a professional man, an adult of twenty-six, a practicing lawyer whose colleagues had already started to marry and even, in some instances, have children, Dez found that he could not openly date a girl of sixteen, or even voice an interest in such females, without drawing puzzled (or worse) looks from his coworkers. This was especially true in a state—Massachusetts—where the age of consent was eighteen. (Back home in North Carolina, it was two years younger—a difference Dez found out too late).

  The problem was that normal, attractive, sexually available and demonstratively interested young women of twenty-two or twenty-four or (God forbid) thirty-four simply awoke no sexual thrill in him. They lacked what Dez saw as the exquisite fragility of limb and grace of movement in females of the middle teenaged years, a combination of innocence and womanliness that vanishes by the time they cross into their buxom, matter-of-fact twenties. He was not a pervert, a pedophile. Dez had no interest whatsoever in prepubertal girls—in children. Such men were, indisputably, criminals, creeps. Like any normal male, he thrilled to the sight of womanly secondary sexual characteristics: the fullness of a pair of breasts under a cotton T-shirt; the swell of buttocks in second-skin denim. But he liked these manifestations of femininity not in their fullest flower, but rather in the act of blossoming, of becoming.

  His first significant scrape had actually occurred when Dez was just twenty-three and newly arrived in Andover to study law. He committed the gaffe of approaching a girl at a bus stop. Mistaking her shy glances as an invitation, he was frank in his proposals to her. She turned out to be the fifteen-year-old daughter of a local doctor who had told her to wait for him on that street corner, where he would pick her up in his car after her piano lesson. That car happened to pull up to the curb at the moment when the girl was recoiling from Dez’s eager, sharklike smile and pointed proposition. He tried to flee on foot, but the doctor—a jogging enthusiast—caught up to him in a few strides, collared him and began yelling for the police. (Hence the special care Dez took ever after to learn the whereabouts of fathers.)

  Dez managed, somehow, to convince the authorities that this bus stop contretemps was all a misunderstanding—he was new in town and merely inquiring about the transit schedule—but he was less lucky a year later, when he invited to his room a seventeen-year-old visiting her older brother in the building where Dez had an apartment. She was a milk-pale redhead with eager green eyes and a dusting of what looked like cinnamon across the tops of her breasts (exposed by the V-shaped opening of her much-too-low-cut sweater). She threw a blushing look at Dez in the elevator and he intercepted her before they reached her sibling’s floor. After several glasses of rum-spiked Coke in Dez’s living room, the girl energetically succumbed to his importuning and the next day she returned to his apartment, this time in much more conservative attire, and with two police officers and her brother in tow. The cops informed him that the age of consent in that state was eighteen and that he had, in completing an act of “penetrative intercourse” with the complainant, committed a Class B1 felony.

  Judge Dezollet, in that instance, came in handy. Pulling God knows what interstate strings, he got all charges dropped on what lawyers call the “Romeo and Juliet laws,” which provide for dismissal of statutory rape charges in cases where the victim, although a minor, is not more than six years younger than the perpetrator. In this instance, she was seven years younger, but owing to her relatively advanced age (her birthday was in two months) and whatever favors Judge Dezollet was able to call in from whatever legal cronies, Dez got off with nothing more than a stern reprimand and a court-ordered year of therapy with a sexologist, Dr. Cyril Geld, a reputedly brilliant British implant famous in psychological circles for his work on the so-called paraphilias, or sexual disorders.

  Dez met with Geld once a week in the doctor’s home office, a dark, oak-paneled room at the back of a narrow Victorian row house in a surprisingly down-at-heels neighborhood in Boston, next to the tenderloin district. Geld had a lean aristocratic face, an upper-class accent and mobile blue eyes that moved restlessly behind the lenses of his wire-rimmed spectacles, like some form of transparent sea creature in dual aquariums—until such time as his patients began truly to open up about their most private sexual peccadilloes, at which point his pupils would dilate and his roving irises would train themselves on his interlocutor unwaveringly, like twinned predators stalking what nourished them. After close-questioning Dez about his erotic leanings, Geld informed the patient that he, in sexological terms, belonged to a “perfectly identifiable classification.”

  Dez was an ephebophile—in plain English, someone whose sexual preference is restricted to partners in mid- to late adolescence. (“Tell me something I don’t know,” Dez inwardly remarked.) This was not a passing condition, Geld warned, not something that would “clear up” or “go away” when Dez reached some magical stage in life when age-appropriate females would suddenly hold an allure for him.

  “Increasingly, we are coming to see such quirks as genetically based,” Geld said, “as inextricably in-wound with the DNA, and thus as a matter of microscopic differences in the makeup of the prenatally organized brain.” Furthermore, it was a curious complication that the sufferer’s erotic response to girls of the mid- to late teen years often coincided with his demonstrating a more than ordinary degree of attractiveness to the young female—”a phenomenon we, in sexology, have not readily been able to account for in hormonal or pheromonal terms,” Geld said. “But the effect is pronounced and can much complicate the life of the ephebophile who, despite aging into his forties, fifties and even sixties and seventies, often retains what we call a ‘Peter Pan quality’ that is perceived and responded to, erotically, by the teenaged love object. You can imagine the tragic difficulties this inter-echoing of libidinal call-and-response can cause to the aging ephebophile who seeks to master and control his condition but who is, constantly, made the object of shy, flirtatious glances and sometimes playfully bold ‘come-ons’ from the pretty teenagers he so ardently seeks not to desire.” (Dez could indeed.)

  “But that’s the bad news,” Geld hastened to say. “The good news is that ephebophilia is not classified, by science, as a disease as defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; and in the vast majority of cases, even severe ephebophilia can be managed, controlled—and not with drugs, but with simple, open, frank conversation.”

  Dez, for the next year, engaged in that simple, open, frank conversation with Dr. Geld, describing in detail his torments of lust, his masturbation fantasies, his little slips; and Geld counseled him on how to curb and control his impulses. In a year’s time, the doctor pronounced Dez, if not cured, then at least properly conditioned to manage his compulsion. And all credit to Geld, Dez briefly tried to be good; he really did. Shortly after being released from therapy, he (now freshly graduated from law school) joined the local branch of the Innocence Project and threw himself into the work with gusto. He garnered glowing assessments from his bosses and was told that he had a fine future with the outfit. But at the end of his first year—a year that had seen a sharp increase in the responsibilities conferred upon him by his superiors—he once again slipped; this time with the young niece of one of the partners in the law firm: a raven-haired, black-eyed beauty of no small experience who, her antennae quivering at the Peter Pan waves Dez helplessly (innocently!) emitted, boldly propositioned him one day when she dropped by the office to see Uncle on some family matter. Dez disappeared with her into a stationery supply closet. He might have gotten away with this moment of stolen pleasure had he and his now quite disheveled paramour not elected to slide from their hiding place at the precise moment when Uncle was hurrying past clutching a “While You Were Out” memo and asking, “Has anyone seen Emily?”

  This time Judge Dezollet declined to use any influence to soften the hand of justice. Dez pled guilty to two counts of statutory rape. He was fired from the Innocence Project, disbarred and sentenced to five years’ parole,
placed on the state’s registry of sexual offenders and enrolled in yet another course of sex counseling, this one far more rigorous, as it entailed daily hour-long sessions of talk therapy as well as a course of experimental “aversion therapy” of Geld’s own devising—a course Dez agreed to undergo on the promise that, if successfully completed, Geld would see to it that his name was expunged from the register after five years.

  After filling out the mountain of paperwork that absolved Geld of all legal liability, Dez had his chest and loins shaved, then hooked up to a set of electrodes. Geld sat, his delicately tapering fingers on a small switch. Dez was shown photographs and film clips of teenaged females and was administered electric shocks every time his humiliatingly exposed manhood betrayed him. At the end of three weeks of treatment, Geld pronounced himself “stunned” at the tenacity of Dez’s fixations—his erections seemed to be growing more powerful under the combined stimulus of the imagery and the electric jolts. “I cannot say that the prognosis is good,” Geld told him.

  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.

  2

  Dez 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.