Undone

by John Colapinto

  He had been obliged to go back to work over a month ago, at the beginning of August, as the credit card bills for his recent orgy of plane travel and car rentals began to arrive, on top of the usual expenses: rent, phone, food. He could have defaulted on some of these payments but was determined not to draw any undue attention to himself. Toe the line. Keep his nose clean. Fade into the background as he awaited the moment when the plan came fully to fruition. Then reap the payoff.

  He had chosen this place, the Lantern—a dark tavern on a stretch of highway on the outskirts of Sayer’s Cliff—not only because he could reach it by bicycle from the trailer park but because it was notorious for its leniency toward underage drinkers. He had no intention of jeopardizing his freedom, and thus the entire scheme, by indulging in an indiscretion, but as long as he was forced to join the ranks of the gainfully employed, there seemed no reason not to mitigate the horror with some voyeuristic pleasures. His vantage point from behind the Lantern’s long, beer-stained wooden bar afforded him an ideal view of the nightly offerings, which had swelled lately with the arrival of September and the return of these high school and college kids from their summer vacations. Dimpled coed freshman girls. Tanned high school seniors. But Dez found, to his surprise, that he had no interest in his young female customers. All he could think about was Chloe and her progress in Connecticut.

  When dreaming up the scheme, Dez had tried to prepare for every contingency, tried to imagine, in advance, every part of the plan and how it would play out. Up until now, everything had gone as he had hoped—indeed, better than he had hoped. It was as if he had foreseen every obstacle to success. And those for which he had not minutely preplanned (like Ames’s removal) had solved themselves like gifts from a well-disposed fate. What he had failed properly to foresee was the long stretch of silence that followed upon the custody hearing last month; the period he was living through now, when Chloe had moved into Ulrickson’s home, there to begin, and complete, the seduction.

  Dez had always understood, and strove to make Chloe understand, that this period’s duration would be, by definition, indeterminate. It could not be planned to the minute, hour, day, week or even month. It would be contingent upon the state of Ulrickson’s morals and the strength of his nervous system. What Dez had not anticipated was how excruciating this period would be for him.

  His first inkling of the torments that awaited him came on the very day of the custody hearing, six weeks ago, when he felt the euphoria of knowing that the plan was finally under way—that his two principal players were finally meeting—but at the same time the frustration that he could not be there, in the courthouse, to witness that meeting. He had toyed with fantasies of donning a simple disguise (janitor’s uniform, mop and pail), to lurk in the hallways in the hope of glimpsing the newly united “father” and “daughter” as they emerged from the hearing room. But he had quickly recognized the folly of such a plan. Courthouses, police stations, legal offices: these were places Dez was born to avoid. So in the end, he had resigned himself to letting his carefully crafted scenario play out beyond his witness and outside his control.

  Consequently, he felt like old, deaf Beethoven who could know the glories of his Ninth Symphony only theoretically, because the actual music was swallowed up into his deafness. Except that Beethoven, at least, could conduct the orchestra that performed his masterpiece, could see the bowing of the silent violins, the clashing of the noiseless cymbals, could, through the gesticulations of his baton, influence the pace and emphasis of the performance. Dez was forced to remain at a complete remove from his creation, blind to its unfolding, wholly unable to influence, affect or otherwise control its course.

  To be sure, he had meticulously coached Chloe before her removal into foster care with the Gaitskills. He had attended to every detail, down to her wardrobe for the hearing, which he decreed should have a formality in keeping with the occasion, but with a subtle, though unmistakable, element of seductive sexuality. On a trip to the Burlington shopping mall, he had chosen for her the white blouse that was in unimpeachably “good taste,” but with a decidedly body-conscious fit, the cunningly darted seams following closely the contour of her slim torso and the plump heft of her breasts; likewise, the dark skirt that hugged the outline of her hips and buttocks and allowed a generous glimpse of her firm, long thighs. The shoes were cheap Louboutin knockoffs, but they brought her high on her toes, throwing her body into a sinuous S-curve, accentuating the play of rounded forms and the long lyrical lines that ran from the nape of her neck to the curve of her Achilles tendons. These shoes, to whose height she was unaccustomed, also introduced a poignant teeter and tremble to her gait, which emblematized how her body was so precariously perched between foal-like childhood and the full, fecund effulgence of erotically charged womanhood.

  For the seduction, he schooled her to work with deliberation, but not too quickly—to draw out the torment, the titillation and the torture, so that once the man succumbed, his capitulation would be that much more annihilating. Though the girl was an inveterate flirt hardly in need of tutelage from him or anyone (for that was what the plan hinged upon: her almost unknowing irresistibility, her flower-fresh erotic appeal that came, to paraphrase Keats on poetry, as naturally as leaves to the trees), Dez had yet thought it wise to remind her that she must play innocent, must never be the overt seductress. Their prey must not detect any conscious attempt to arouse. Their new life together as father and daughter must be one of half glimpses of an “accidentally” exposed leg or a glossy bare back (as she emerged perhaps from a shower or bath, the door left open a crack to allow a surreptitious glimpse by an unsuspecting father passing through the hallway), followed by a shy, embarrassed smile, or a dimpled blush and a soft giggle. Yet she must also slowly increase the glimpses and the amount revealed in a steady, ascending, unbroken curve while never seeming to rush the operation, never revealing her intent to excite. She must, in short, seem benignly chaste, even as she turned his entrails into a molten furnace of lust—a devilishly difficult equipoise to establish and maintain; and indeed, as the days went by and he tried to imagine the individual steps in the seduction, from initial half glimpses to full coital submission, he found that he kept encountering a blind spot.

  Where was that turning point at which “unconscious,” unintended arousal tipped into actual invitation? Trying to envision this moment—this critical shift—he would encounter a gap, a hiatus, a blank. He would back up and play the imagined events over again in his mind, to get some forward momentum into the psychological sequence, but every time he would hit the same sticking place, the same cul-de-sac.

  How easily he could imagine those opening gambits, those subtle flashes of skin, those freighted, silent glances, those curly half smiles that would set the fuse alight. An accidental look up her skirt to a shaded area of her inner thigh, or down her boat-neck shirt for a peek at a swaying, half-seen breast. Then slowly to move to affectionate hugs, spontaneous clasping of hands, and, in the evenings, after the invalided stepmother and the little sister had been taken off to bed, and father and teenaged daughter were alone—all alone!—a session of oh-so-innocent cuddling on the sofa as the television, only half noticed, burbled away to itself. Inklings, peeklings, ticklings … soft sudden kisses on the side of the neck … quivery, hot exhalations of breath into a flaming ear during a hug that goes on just a fraction of a second too long … shy peeks over the top of a magazine during hushed reading times and the eyes snatched away just a moment too late … tremulous exhalations …

  Yes, yes, he could see how the man’s fuse could be made to smolder toward the powder keg. But the words and touches and smiles and kisses that would take Ulrickson from those dulcet, tender-eyed, clinging glances, those moist-lipped smiles of innocent invitation, to actual, purposeful erotic caresses, to something criminal, to plunging penetration and the actual explosion? He could not see it!

  2

  Work, at first, seemed as if it might provide a useful distr
action from what was turning into a mad and maddening obsession. The tavern’s raucous talk and laughter, the jukebox tunes, those pretty young girls crowding up to his bar, guzzling their drinks, and slipping ever deeper into drunkenness—all of it should have helped him forget Chloe and Connecticut, at least for a few hours. But no. He remained indifferent to all distractions and enticements, blind to everything except that scenario that kept playing, over and over in his mind, without a resolution.

  The problem was that every imagined seduction would, at a certain indefinable point, go from plausible, believable flirtation to something wildly, laughably unreal—as crude and coarse as one of those online video clips that he was addicted to in the days when he could afford a computer. Those movies that purported to show “stepfather” and “stepdaughter” unable to contain their illicit passion for each other, the “teen” girl actually a battle-scarred veteran porn actress of twenty-nine summers grotesquely tattooed at the base of her spine with the wings of an eagle, and mimicking the lisping tones of a near child; the “stepfather,” a reputed straitlaced middle-class professional man in boxy suit and garish tie, with a ridiculously incongruous ponytail and a porn industry goatee and (once his clothes came off) a prison-pumped body also writhing in tats. The illicit lovers flatly proclaiming their lines at each other. “Hey, Cyndee, what the heck are you doing?” “Don’t worry. I won’t tell my mom. If you don’t.” “But you’re my stepdaughter!”

  Incidentally, Dez asked himself, was there some reason that the porn purveyors always called those girls “stepdaughters” as opposed simply to “daughters”—some wrinkle in the federal pornography laws, perhaps, that forbade depiction of that final frontier of erotic fantasy? Or was this the result of some squeamishness on the part of the porn makers themselves? Were they all too traumatized by the actual parental abuses they had suffered as children (and that had driven them into sex work in the first place) to depict such events as fuel to erotic fantasy? Lord knows, they were willing to show just about anything else: acts whose memory could actually turn Dez’s stomach, ten years later. Pee. Vomit. Poop! But to show a man, posing as a girl’s father, engaged in an act of illicit love? That was too far?

  Perhaps, he thought with a stab of terror, it was too far! Was this why his attempts to envision the seduction kept running aground? Were there laws of biology and nature that protected the species against the impulse to inbreed? There were—there assuredly were. And yet the man must succumb! There must exist a point at which Ulrickson’s natural revulsion at the idea of biblically knowing his daughter would meet the urgency of raw, untamed, biological need. Perhaps such surrender was not inevitable in every man. But a man in Ulrickson’s uniquely vulnerable position? A man forced into celibacy by fate and his own puritanical determination to adhere to a set of silly vows? A man teased to the point of internal rupture, who is then subjected to the satiny charms of an eighteen-year-old seductress whom custom could allow to climb onto the sofa and curl up in his lap, snuggling against him with a warm, contented sigh, a slight squirm of her body against his, a gentle, loving, innocent caress of her hand on his thigh, a languid tilting up of her face to him and a murmured appeal for a kiss? A girl, furthermore, who did not share his DNA, who would thus fail to emit whatever scents or vibrations or emanations presumably help to protect the species against the dangers of inbreeding? Yes! Yes! It was more than possible that he would succumb. It was inevitable! That is what Dez, the artist, the plot-maker, needed to believe: that the capitulation would not be forced into being by clumsy acts of routine, clichéd seduction, but instead that it would flow out naturally, as a spontaneous organic outgrowth of their situation, as an act inevitable, a fait accompli. Yes! It was going to happen! He need only sit tight.

  Then his doubts would rise again.

  If only, he thought, he could talk to the girl. Get a progress report. But by Dez’s own Draconian decree, they could not communicate with each other. Determined to leave no trace of connection between them, he had given her the express order not to phone him except in the direst emergency. Thus cut off, he was like a lone astronaut stranded in a disabled space capsule slowly orbiting the dark side of the moon and knowing that his return to Earth, his survival, depends on the actions of the engineers and scientists back home with whom radio contact has been severed. Were they getting anywhere in their invisible ministrations to return him to Earth? Were they even trying anymore to bring him home?

  It was near the end of August, almost four weeks into this ordeal, when Dez was assailed with the paranoid conviction that the silence emanating from Connecticut had subtly changed in tone. An ominous note had entered into the vibration, like a dog whistle above human hearing but which Dez alone could detect, a flesh-crawling squeal with a subliminal hysterical edge. Something had gone wrong with the plan. But what? Detection? Chloe’s arrest? Was she even now being held in a jail somewhere in Connecticut, bravely refusing to give up Dez’s name as her accomplice? And more to the point, was she about to? He would work himself into a panic, then catch himself—and remember that this unbearable, inhuman silence was precisely what he had been hoping for; indeed, what he had demanded of her. This silence, this all-embracing nullity, meant that everything was going exactly to plan and all he had to do was calm down and wait for the signal that it was time to spring the trap.

  That signal would be a call from Chloe to Dez’s cell phone. Using Ulrickson’s home landline, she was to leave a voice mail saying, simply, “Sorry, wrong number”—then instantly hang up: at which point he would know that she had completed her mission and that they could embark on phase two. Such thoughts calmed him. But only momentarily. Soon he would be back to conjuring, from her silence, the darkest imaginings of failure, exposure, arrest and imprisonment.

  Added to all his usual torments, he felt a stab of indignation. Of hurt. Did she not miss him? Did she not wonder about him, about his state of mind and heart? How could she so coldly obey his orders not to call? How could she leave him out in the interstellar darkness, orbiting alone? And, strangely, it was this question, as much as his concern for the progress of the plan, that finally prompted Dez, on a chilly, blue-bright morning at the beginning of September when the deciduous trees around his trailer had begun to turn orange at their tips like matches photographed at the precise moment they were struck, and the snowbirds in their neighboring RVs were already packing up to begin the long trek to Florida, chasing the sun—almost a month and a half after she had left Vermont—to realize that he could stand it no longer. He must make contact.

  Telephoning was out of the question. He refused to leave, as a trail for the lawmen, any record of connection between their two cell phones. But neither could he, say, bike to the pizza parlor and use the pay phone to call Ulrickson’s landline. Even assuming that he could dream up a plausible pretext to get around the man and have Chloe summoned to the phone, he could too clearly imagine Ulrickson hovering in the background while she tried to talk, or (far worse) listening in on the call. To hope that he might happen to phone when Chloe was home alone was pure fantasy: Ulrickson was a writer, and thus a virtual shut-in.

  No. There was one way, and one way only, to satisfy his gnawing, cancerous, killing curiosity. He would have to go to Connecticut. He would have to risk once again invading Ulrickson’s home. He would have to act.

  3

  He rose the next day at dawn after a sleepless night of planning. At six, he phoned his boss and, pinching his nose between index finger and thumb, left a voice mail saying that he’d been laid low by flu and would not be able to make it into the bar tonight. Then he called jetBlue and loaded onto his already overburdened MasterCard the price of a return ticket from Burlington to JFK, departing at 10:50 that morning. He showered, then addressed his reflection in the misty postage stamp–sized mirror above the sink in the bathroom cubicle. He had not shaved in weeks. A dark, curly, unpleasantly pubic-looking growth now covered the lower half of his face. He dispensed a mound of shaving cream
onto his palm and was about to apply it to his wetted beard when he abruptly came to his senses. Peering at the unfamiliar face in the mirror—a gaunt, dark-bearded, hollow-eyed, pre-fame Dr. Freud—he realized that he had, unwittingly, prepared the perfect disguise for his planned exploit. No one would mistake this sensitive-looking, bearded intellectual for the overall-clad, peaked-capped furnace repairman whom Ulrickson had met back in May. Beard intact, he rinsed off his hand and set down his razor.

  He donned the slightly out-of-date dark suit that had done duty in his role as Innocence Project lawyer at the G-Tek Clinic. Then he mounted his bicycle and rode into Sayer’s Cliff, where he bought a fried egg sandwich and a Greyhound ticket to Burlington airport. It felt inexpressibly good to be on the move again, no longer passively waiting.

  His flight (another blessedly uneventful passage) landed at JFK a little after noon. Driving a new rental car north into Connecticut, he watched the flow of oncoming traffic across the median and tried to imagine how he would be feeling when he was traveling along this stretch of highway back to the airport, mission accomplished. Would he be in despair over discovering that the plan had capsized, or in a state of exultant triumph?

  He glided into Clay Cross’s wealthy purlieus, swooshing smoothly along the well-tended, tree-lined streets. He felt the usual surge of preperformance anxiety and excitement, a fluttering in the stomach and a racing of the pulse. Turning onto Cherry Tree Lane, he progressed a quarter of a mile beneath the thinning canopy of turning, late summer leaves, until he saw Ulrickson’s house appear a few hundred yards ahead, on his left. Drawing closer, he noticed that there were two cars parked out front: Ulrickson’s Jeep and a boxy black SUV—the retrofitted minivan that the home care worker used to ferry the stroked-out wife back and forth to the local hospital for her physiotherapy. He’d read about it in the memoir. There was also a bicycle lying on its side on the front lawn.