She moved her face a millimeter closer in the darkness and whispered, “I wish you could carry me to my room, just like you carried Maddy to bed tonight.”
He smiled. “You’re very slender, but my back …”
“But if you carried me, I would feel even more like your daughter. Just like Maddy.”
“You are my daughter,” he said. “As much as Maddy is.”
“I know,” she whispered, “but I want you to show me.” She drooped her face close to his, as if to graze his lips with her own, but she simply lowered her head onto his shoulder again. He felt her moist mouth touch his neck. He really was so tired now and, despite what he believed to have been a relatively modest wine intake, could feel the effects of the alcohol. With his eyes closed, he felt her shift her body, her clothes releasing a fresh wave of warmth and bodily scent. The aroma filled him with a spreading sensation of well-being. She murmured into his ear, “Will you show me?”
Muzzy-headed, he could not recall what they had been talking about. “Show you what?” he said, his eyes shut against the world.
“That I’m your daughter, silly.”
He chuckled and nuzzled her soft neck. “Aren’t I showing you right now?”
“Mmm hmmm,” she said, tightening her arms around him. Yes—she was getting somewhere, finally. Wasn’t she? She shifted her buttocks on his lap, trying to detect the giveaway sign of his arousal, but failed, amazingly, confusingly, to feel anything except the tense muscles of his upper thighs. On the other hand, he did now embrace her more tightly, crushing her slim but cushioned body against him. “Oh!” she laughed. “Don’t break me!” Then she whispered in a thunderous rush of hot breath, her lips against his ear: “Let’s just go to sleep here!”
“Here?”
“Your bed is so big and I’ll make myself very small. You won’t even know I’m here.”
Jasper laughed softly, assuming she was joking. “Can you imagine?” he murmured. “I’ve only just trained Maddy to stay in her own room all night—and then to have to train you? A grown-up girl?”
“Not so grown-up,” Chloe said in pretend baby talk, sticking out her lower lip. She continued in her normal voice: “And what if I have a nightmare? And don’t know where I am?”
Intoxicated by the smell of her hair and skin, his judgment blurred by the wine, he asked himself what harm could there be in letting her share one side of his king-size bed? She was his daughter, after all. And she made an excellent point about having a bad dream and waking in a strange and unfamiliar place. But no, he immediately thought, through the thicknesses of his exhaustion and the confusions of the wine. No, no—that would be wrong. Wouldn’t it?
He felt her arms around him, felt her shift her warm, mobile weight on his lap. The aroma of perfumed flesh breathed from within the interstices of her blouse, and he felt the resilient double cushions of her buttocks against his legs, the concomitant pressure of her breasts against his shirtfront. He swooned with physical love and tenderness for her, and he began to say, “Yes, yes, of course you can sleep here”—when he heard a small voice say, “Daddy?”
“Mmmm?” he said in reply, nuzzling her neck, opening his lips slightly to take a forbidden sip of her sweet skin. But why “forbidden”? Could a father not kiss his daughter? He pressed his lips against the flesh over her throbbing carotid artery. She moaned softly. The voice came again, more insistent this time, and on a note of whining complaint: “Daaaddy!”
He opened his eyes and looked at Chloe, whose eyes were closed, her head tipped back in a swoon. There was a movement in the edge of his vision.
He turned and saw Maddy.
She was standing by the bedroom door in her nightie, screwing one small fist into her eye and squinting at him and Chloe with the other.
He jumped to his feet—nearly throwing Chloe onto the rug. She caught herself awkwardly with one foot on the floor, an arm around his neck. She pulled herself up straight, retreated a few steps from him, then stood, staring wide-eyed at the little girl.
Maddy jutted out her chin. “You said Chloe was gonna sleep in her own room!”
“She is,” he said. He turned and gaped at Chloe, who was hastily adjusting her skirt and tucking in her blouse. “See?” he said to Maddy. “She’s getting ready right now.”
“But she’s putting her clothes on,” Maddy said. “You take your clothes off for bed.”
He rushed forward. “You’ve got to get to bed too,” he said, taking her by the shoulders. He turned her around and steered her out of the room. “Chloe was just saying good night to me.” He marched her across the hall. “She’s going to her room, right after you get back in bed.”
“Promise?” Maddy said, her head lolling as they entered her room. “Because it’s naw … naaww …”—her mouth stretched in a yawn—”not fair.”
“I promise,” Jasper said.
Maddy climbed into bed and under the covers. She was immediately unconscious.
Jasper hurried out into the dark hall and nearly collided with Chloe. She smiled and reached up her arms, as if to continue their embrace. She was sure that he would resume hugging her, sure that she had set in motion the fateful sequence, and that he must lead her back into his bedroom, to continue the shadow play of wordless flirtation that must result, eventually—if not tonight, then a week or a month from now—in her joining him under the covers of his bed. But for Jasper a spell (that he had not consciously realized he was under) had been broken, and he stepped back from her. She looked at him quizzically. His earlier sense of warning restored, and for some reason magnified, he turned away, embarrassed, and said, pretending nothing had happened to interrupt their tour, “… and your bedroom is at the other end of the house. I thought that, as a teenager, you’d appreciate the privacy.”
He strode off without looking back at her, down the hall, across the living room and dining area, through an arched doorway, to the suite of rooms at the far end of the house. These included the television room, a bathroom and a second bedroom where Jasper’s sister had slept when they were children, and which Pauline had converted into a home office when they married. Last week, Jasper had finally rid the room of Pauline’s desk and shelves, replacing them with a twin bed, black lacquered dresser, matching bedside table and modernistic white desk with hutch shelves. He had not put down a rug, hung curtains or put anything on the walls, thinking that a teenaged girl would undoubtedly want to decorate the room according to her own taste. He explained all this as he pushed open the door, then stood back against the doorjamb to let her pass.
With slow steps, using both hands to hook her loose hair behind her ears, she came forward, almost cautiously, tiptoeing. She moved past Jasper to the center of the room and turned a slow circle. “It’s so big,” she said in an entranced voice. “Bigger than our whole house!”
Her eye fell on the desk, on the presents Jasper had assembled for her over the previous weeks: the sleek aluminum Mac laptop, the iPhone and audiophile headphones, the Xbox, the flat-screen TV monitor. She turned and looked at him in confusion.
“For you,” he said, smiling. “And a few other things …” He turned his gaze to the bed. She followed the direction of his eyes.
That’s when she saw the new clothes laid out in boxes on the white duvet—items chosen according to sizes he had collected, in a secret phone call with Mrs. Gaitskill last week, when Chloe was out. With the help of a salesgirl at Urban Outfitters (a store that his sister, Laura, had assured him would pass muster with a female teen), he had bought an array of summer and fall dresses; faded denim jeans and jackets; wispy linen and cotton and silk T-shirts; and a selection of shoes: Converse Chuck Taylors in three different colors (turquoise, pink and black), suede ankle booties, a pair of flat-soled, strappy silver sandals.
She picked up and inspected each item, lifting them to the light, sometimes holding a blouse up to her shoulders and peering down at herself, then reverently laying it down again. She looked at him. Her face registered
not the happiness he expected to see but a confused anguish. She did not run to him. Instead, she simply stood there. Her shoulders began to shake. Her features crumpled and she buried her face in her hands. “No one,” she said through jerking sobs, “ever … I never had—anything … like … this.”
Jasper went to her. He felt emboldened, once again, to put his arms around her. This time, it was Chloe who grew stiff, rigid, in his embrace.
“I don’t deserve this,” she said. “I don’t deserve it.”
He petted her hair and said soothingly, “You deserve everything—and more.”
“No, no,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t. I don’t.”
“Shhh,” he said. He held her closer, and eventually she cautiously placed her arms around him. They stood, joined, for several minutes, until her crying subsided. Jasper kissed her hair, and then whispered softly, “Time for bed. Have a nice long sleep—lie in as late as you wish. You’ve had a big day.” He bestowed a final kiss on her forehead, and then went off to his own end of the house.
7
In his bathroom, a few minutes later, Jasper inspected his naked torso in the mirror above the sink. He was startled to see how much weight he had put on lately. His pectorals were flabby and seemed to droop a little over his swollen belly. The area under his chin held a ridge of fat. And there were, he noticed, two symmetrical areas of shiny skin visible on his temples where his hair was receding. Maybe he should think about growing his hair out a bit—cover those bald spots. And he should definitely get out and do some running. To think of how his body had changed from those days when he had taught tennis at the New Halcyon Club, as a lean twenty-two-year-old with rocklike deltoids and sharply cut abdominal muscles. Funny, he hadn’t until now noticed any of these changes. Hadn’t, perhaps, cared about them. Was it something about Chloe, about her youth and freshness, that had made him suddenly so conscious of how he had aged and of how quickly time was passing? Had her power to pull him back, in memory, to that summer almost twenty years ago underlined the toll that the years had already taken on him? Perhaps that’s all it was. But then, he was going to be forty-two in a few weeks.
Forty-two. This struck him now with unexpected force. They called it middle age (he thought as he finished brushing his teeth and began to wash his face), but could anyone expect necessarily to make it to eighty? Or, rather, eighty-four? And if he was one of the lucky ones, what would that final decade and a half be like, with its infirmities and creeping fears of death? Reasonably, then, he could expect maybe twenty more good years, if that. He wondered if he had taken full advantage of his youth. All that scribbling, scribbling, scribbling. And then, of course, the last four years, shuttered away in the house, tending to Pauline and Maddy. He was visited by a wave of that weariness, or ennui, he had acknowledged in himself a few weeks ago on his way to the DNA clinic, now joined by a pang of something that felt almost like resentment, a qualm of self-pity. And now forty-two, he thought, as he toweled off his face. People said age was “only a number.” But that was wrong. Forty-two felt like something. Something new and unexpectedly ominous. It felt like cresting the hill at the halfway point on a car journey and seeing, in the valley below, one’s rumored destination, that terminal town which, up until then, had existed only as an unseen abstraction, but was now a concrete reality toward which one was hurtling. Had he lived enough? Experienced enough?
In his bedroom, he donned boxers and a T-shirt, then climbed under the covers. He lay there, waiting for sleep to overtake him. But despite his earlier exhaustion, he found that his brain would not quiet itself. His thoughts, however, had taken a happier turn.
He was thinking now about Chloe, about the events of the evening, and specifically Pauline’s reaction to the girl; and Maddy’s too. All things considered, it had gone rather well, he thought. Pauline had shown definite signs of thaw and he assumed that this would only continue. Maddy was clearly mad for Chloe, and apart from that ridiculous misapprehension she voiced when he put her to bed—and that unfortunate incident a few minutes ago—she was clearly delighted to have her older sister living with them. Chloe, meanwhile, had been a perfect angel: wonderfully polite and well mannered—saying “please” and “thank you” at dinner, helping clear the dishes, exhibiting great patience with Maddy, standing when Deepti took Pauline off to bed—and, finally, calling Pauline “Mom.” In his most optimistic dreams of how this day could have gone, he had not dared to imagine that she would, so quickly, accept Pauline as her mother! Say what the social workers might about Holly’s shortcomings, Jasper had to give her credit: she had raised Chloe to have wonderful manners, and great poise. Thinking of all this, his earlier depressive thoughts about aging and death were swept away and he was flooded with a sense of excitement about tomorrow, when he would rise from bed and see Chloe again.
If he had any concerns at all about her, it was that she seemed excessively innocent sexually—hardly a worry in anyone less amply endowed with feminine allure. But, as matters stood, he could not help wishing that she, for her own protection, were inclined toward a greater awareness of men’s impulses and intentions and would thus take care to demonstrate a higher degree of physical modesty. The blithe, uncalculating frankness with which she displayed, for instance, her legs suggested to Jasper someone with little or no understanding of the effect her physical being was having on others. Specifically men. He recalled how she had unconsciously exposed the gleaming backs of her naked thighs to that gawking desk clerk at the bed-and-breakfast. For that matter, how she had, just minutes ago, so trustingly undertaken her yoga stretches on the sofa, waving around her lovely long nether limbs in that minuscule band of fabric that passed for a skirt. He was her father and thus she could not be accused of “immodesty,” in the abstract, but he was, still, a man, and he might have wished that she would instinctually feel inhibited from demonstrating quite so much naked flesh to any male’s eyes.
But then, he thought, maybe he should be glad of Chloe’s innocence, her apparent lack of awareness of, or interest in, the opposite sex. Maybe this meant that he would not have to face an endless stream of be-pimpled boys on the doorstep—to say nothing of the fears of teenaged pregnancy. And maybe he should, furthermore, be glad that Chloe was already so innately trusting of him that it would not even occur to her that there could be anything untoward about him seeing so very much of her bare legs. As, of course, there could not.
That slant on things helped to quiet his concerns. A delicious tingle overcame him, a fuzzy warmth that muddled his thoughts, and soon he was asleep.
It was sometime later, at a deep, uncharted hour of the night or very early morning, the weak stripes of illumination from the venetian blind swallowed by darkness and his bed seeming to float, like a raft, in the middle of an ink-black ocean beneath a moonless and starless sky, when Jasper swam up from a profound sleep and broke the surface of consciousness. Groggy, disoriented, he looked at the red digits that hovered just to the right of his head: 4:02. He closed his eyes again and cuddled still more closely to Pauline, who lay spooning with him, her back and buttocks and legs conforming to the protective curve of his sheltering body, his arm draped over her waist. He had been having a harrowing nightmare that she had suffered a stroke and been reduced to total silence and immobility. He was inexpressibly relieved to feel her in the bed beside him, to know that it had been only a dream.
He nestled his face into her hair and felt her stir. She turned her head on the crepitating pillow and kissed his mouth. “Mmmm,” she murmured sleepily. Through the veils of his slumber, he realized how terribly long it had been since they last made love—it seemed like years—and he instinctively began to move his hands on the smooth skin of her thighs and hips, surprised to feel not her remembered womanly curves but narrow, boyish nates, no less arousing for their slender firmness. She answered in the affirmative to his questing touch, emitting a soft moan and pushing her buttocks against his tumescence. His engorgement was total, but he wished to savo
r the moment, so instead of moving to slip her underwear down, he instead withdrew his body a little and lightly turned her around on her back. With his eyes still closed, he kissed her cheeks, her eyes, her open mouth. Eager, now, to drink in her beauty—it seemed so long since he had seen her face pillowed beside him—he lifted his heavy lids and saw: Chloe.
A noise reverberated in his ears and he realized that it was the lingering echo of his own startled, horrified shout bouncing off the walls of the bedchamber. He was sitting up, his chest heaving, his mouth gaping as he fought for breath. Slowly, flinchingly—horrified at what he knew he would find there—he turned and looked at the space beside him in bed.
It was empty, the sheets and blanket undisturbed. He was alone. He had been dreaming.
Heart hammering, body slicked with sweat, underwear disgustingly distended in a telltale tent-pole stretch, he stumbled to the bathroom, drank a draft of water from the toothbrush cup, then crept back into bed. But he did not try to sleep. He could not risk a return of that dream. Instead, he sat up rigidly against the headboard, staring in front of him, trying to master himself, trying to will his insurgent body to subside. He was still sitting that way, wide-eyed and staring, when dawn began to brighten the horizontal gaps between the slats of the venetian blind.
PART FOUR
1
Girls and boys. Some as young as fifteen, the oldest maybe eighteen—twenty at the most. Lined up five deep. Clamoring for Dez’s attention, waving at him, calling his name. Shouting out orders. Actually, almost always the same order—for these were cash-strapped high school and college kids. They wanted beer, draft beer. Gallons of cheap draft beer. The odd rich-kid smart-ass asked for a martini or a manhattan. Whereupon Dez would give him a look, snatch up his cocktail shaker, then dust off the skills he’d learned back in his college days, when he had spent a summer tending bar.
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