The sight of her sitting there, her face brimming with pitying compassion for him, was enraging. If he could do anything to disrupt the life that Chloe was imagining for herself, he would do it; he would do what it took to destroy both her and Ulrickson. But what?
An idea came to him—a sad compromise in comparison with the original plan. But better than nothing.
He jumped to his feet and hurried to the desk. He gingerly slid open the central drawer and peered inside. He carefully lifted a notebook and looked underneath it. He riffled through a small stack of papers. He moved aside pencils and bottles of ink, then replaced them in their exact positions.
“What are you doing?” Chloe said, having risen from the sofa. “Don’t do that!”
Ignoring her, he slid open a deep drawer to the right of the kneehole. It contained a set of hanging file folders. He thumbed through the identification tabs: “Insurance,” “Maddy’s drawings,” “Bannister contracts,” “Royalty statements,” “Lessons from My Daughter MS.” He pushed in the drawer and opened another. Chloe appeared beside him. She reached out to stop him, but he gave her a murderous glare and she instantly stepped back.
“At least tell me what you’re looking for,” she said.
“Numbers,” he said, paging through a ledger book he’d found in a bottom drawer. “Social Security, ATMs, bank accounts, investment accounts, PINs. If I can’t take him down as planned, I’ll do it this way. Cruder, less elegant. But better than nothing. I can probably empty two or three accounts—funnel them into a Swiss bank—before he notices a penny is missing.”
“Dez, no. Please don’t.”
He pulled open a shallow drawer. It was filled with antiquarian ink bottles, crow quill pens, paper clip boxes and other vintage office supplies. He pushed it closed. “Fuck!” he said. His gaze fell on Ulrickson’s computer. What he needed must be in there! Who used bankbooks and tellers anymore? He tapped the keyboard. An alert box popped up requesting the password to waken the computer. He looked at Chloe.
She held up her hands. “I don’t know it,” she said, quite honestly.
“Does he have a pet?” Dez asked. He’d read somewhere that everyone with a filthy animal used the pet’s name for a password.
“No pets,” she said with enraging satisfaction.
He cursed. Then he typed m-a-d-d-y and hit Return. The alert box wiggled back and forth, in one of those coy animations that mimicked a head shaking. He could have smashed the machine to pieces. He tried the wife’s name. Then Chloe’s. He looked at his watch. Eight minutes until the end of the session. A thought struck him. He wrenched open the middle drawer and grabbed up the passport he’d seen lying there. He turned to the page listing Jasper’s birthdate. September 10, 1965. Forty-two years old as of two days ago.
He typed in 0-9-1-0-6-5. The alert box wiggled. He tried 1-0-9-6-5. Then he tried s-e-p-t-1-0-6-5. And several other variants. Nothing. He dropped back in the chair. He could spend the next hour coming up with variations on that date. And who knew if the man’s birthdate was even the key to his password? Dez stared vacantly, his unseeing eyes directed at the wall opposite, where a framed poster for one of Ulrickson’s detective novels, Blind Man’s Cuffs, hung. It featured a painting of the sightless detective, Geoffrey Bannister, in a narrow hallway, one hand holding a set of handcuffs, the other grasping the harness of his faithful Seeing Eye dog. As the image came into focus for Dez, the epiphany was immediate: as if Dez, himself blind, could suddenly see. He shot forward in the chair, typed s-m-o-k-e-y, then hit Return. The hard disk revived with a muffled clunk, there was a humming sound, and the screen sprang to life, flooding his face with light.
“No!” Chloe said, reaching for his hands on the keyboard. He swung his elbow and hit the point of her pelvis. “Ow!” she cried. She retreated, massaging her hip, backing toward the door. “If you don’t stop right now,” she said, “I’ll tell him.”
He ignored her. His eyes moved over the screen, darting back and forth as if he were watching a speeded-up tennis match. A look of disbelief on his face.
“What is it?” she said.
“My God,” he whispered. His eyes continued moving side to side, his fingers on the mouse.
“Stop it!” she said. Her back came into contact with the door. She grasped the knob. “I’m serious. If you don’t stop right now, I’ll open this door. I’ll call him. I swear!” That this was an empty threat, and that she had now been assailed with a terrible premonitory sense of doom over what Dez was seeing on that screen, was obvious to her when she failed to make a move, allowing Dez to continue his rapt study of whatever was on the computer. A full minute passed.
“You might want to take a look at this,” he said at length. He looked up from the screen and lifted his hands from the keyboard and mouse and held them, palms outward, at shoulder height. He pushed the chair back, stood and stepped away from the desk. “See for yourself. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
With a terrible foreboding, yet unable to resist, she came forward, came around the corner of the desk and bent close to the screen. She hoped to see a banking document or a spreadsheet. Figures, balances. Instead, she saw words—a text document, something Jasper had been writing. She assumed it was his novel, which he’d been working on relentlessly, eight hours a day. But why did Dez want her to read that?
She leaned closer. She saw the words: “… her unbearably lovely legs, her weepingly beautiful skin, her thrilling breasts.” Her eyes skittered off to another part of the screen: “… consumed by guilt and shame but I cannot end this madness.” She glanced down to the last phrase he had written: “… masturbate three times a day; still, the mere sight of her, the smell of her, the sound of her soft voice makes my tortured member rise again—”
She looked at Dez, who was standing beside her, his arms folded across his chest. “What is this?” she said.
Dez reached for the mouse and scrolled up. She saw the words: “… figure out why the merest movement of her hand does this to me? The sway of her walk? The sound of her laughter? My own child. My Chloe. This insane life-crippling lust that moves me to acts of vile degradation …”
“You wrote this!” she cried. “Just now—you wrote this! He never, he couldn’t, he wouldn’t …”
Dez continued to scroll, past entries written weeks ago, carefully dated. He paused so that, together, they could read: “… was getting ready for her bath and me like some insane fiend, trying not to look and yet unable to stop looking …” He scrolled higher: “… thank God has noticed nothing and must never notice anything. I will keep her inviolate, pure, innocent of my illness. With the aid of this diary, where I hope to purge and exorcise this madness, I pray that I can conquer …” He scrolled higher: “… I crept into her room after she went out to see friends and, to my shamed horror and disbelief, on the pretext of ‘tidying up,’ lifted from the floor the underwear that lay, like a figure eight, on the carpet, and raised it to my face …”
She clapped her hand over her mouth.
Dez began to pace ruminatively in front of the desk. “I confess, it’s a shock—even for me,” he said. “Given what you told me about his goodness. His virtue. The purity of his fatherly feelings.” He halted and looked at her. “Of course, you know the worst of it.”
She stared at him, uncomprehending.
“Why, poor Maddy, of course,” he said, as if this were self-evident. “Well,” he shrugged, “in a few years.”
“Maddy?” she said. Then understanding dawned. “Maddy!”
“Certainly,” Dez said. “These men all follow a pattern.”
In reality, he felt certain that Ulrickson posed no threat to Maddy—or any other girl. It was Dez who had created the special circumstances necessary to waken the beast in Ulrickson, with Chloe as his instrument, his weapon. But there was no reason to point this out to her. Just the opposite. Indeed, now he began to wonder, aloud, about precisely when Ulrickson would start to interfere with the younger girl.
“Will he wait until she’s a teenager, like you?” he mused. “Or will he get started earlier? At seven or eight? Or will it be tomorrow? Or later today?”
“Stop!” Chloe said, putting her hands over her ears.
Dez stepped nimbly around the corner of the desk. He crouched beside her chair. “But we can stop it,” he said urgently. “If we go back to our plan. This”—he gestured at the computer—”this shows that he’s inches from the edge. He just needs a little shove; a little encouragement. Then he can never hurt anyone again, never exploit or abandon anyone—the way he abandoned your mother. The way he was planning to do with you. And, one day, Maddy.”
Chloe was reeling from the revelations of the diary. Of how the man whom she had assumed loved her as a father had actually been seeing her. She felt the cathedral of love and trust that she had built, within herself, for Jasper crumble to dust; and she saw the truth of Dez’s warnings about Maddy. Appalled at her own gullibility, and at Jasper’s sickness, she clutched at Dez. “I’m sorry,” she cried into his shoulder. “I’m sorry! He fooled me! He fooled me!”
“Yes, he did,” Dez said soothingly. “Just like he fooled your mother. Just like he fooled all the readers of his book, and all the people who watched him on Tovah. They all think he’s a saint. And they’ll think he’s a saint even when he’s diddling Maddy.” He took her head between his hands and lifted it from his shoulder. He looked into her eyes. “Unless we stop him,” he said. “Unless you stop him.”
Chloe stared, stricken, into his eyes. She knew, now, what he was suggesting, what he was urging her to do. To return to the plan, to continue on the path of destroying Ulrickson. She was revisited by the fear that had gripped her upon first entering this house: of how the plan would destroy the family, blow it apart as surely as a bomb planted under the living room sofa. But even as this thought formed, she saw how events would unfold if Ulrickson was not stopped—the sickening scenario that Dez had painted: Ulrickson’s eventual molestation of Maddy. And that would be worse, far worse for the little girl, than the consequences of enacting Dez’s plan. Indeed, it was only by returning to the scheme that she could save Maddy. Dez was right. She was wrong ever to doubt him.
“Chloe,” Dez said softly. He had seen the capitulation in her eyes. “Are we back on track?”
She stifled a sob, and nodded. Then a thought occurred to her. A terrible impediment. “But he says right here that he’d never do it,” she said, pointing at the computer screen. “He says he’d never actually give in.”
“Oh, that,” he said dismissively. “All he needs is some enabling. Some …” He paused, looking for the right word. “Some permission.” He smiled. “And that’s where Dr. Geld comes in.”
5
Sitting silently on the sofa beside Maddy and Pauline as he waited for Chloe’s therapy session to end, Jasper turned over and over in his mind the subject that had obsessed him for weeks, occupied his every thought to the exclusion of all other interests, preoccupations, duties or ambitions. His monstrous sickness. His vile lust. Specifically, he was thinking about the distance it had placed between him and the two people who sat next to him. For quite apart from the suicidal self-loathing that his lust gave rise to, it was this intergalactic gap between him and his family that caused him the greatest pain, the greatest grief.
His reaction to his grotesque secret had been to absent himself from the family, to skulk off to his office at every opportunity—not to write his new Bannister mystery, as he would ostentatiously announce. That project, about an impersonating psychopathic trickster, was now as dead to him as everything else about his former life. He had not written a word of the novel since Chloe’s arrival. Instead, he would sit at his computer and pour out feverish diary entries, confessing his shame and humiliation, his yearning and desire, his self-disgust, meanwhile cataloging every tiny aspect of her physical beauty, as if fixing these phenomena in words could expunge their effect on his soul. Yet no amount of written description, no amount of self-abasing confession, no amount of self-abuse, could dispel the insane desire. It only deepened, grew more obsessive. And he drifted further from everyone and everything he once loved.
When not writing diary entries, he searched the Internet for books and essays about incest, trying to understand his sickness. That he happened to fall into that category of male most at risk for transgressing—celibate middle-aged men who meet their daughters for the first time when the girls are in their teens or twenties—offered no comfort. Jasper believed all people to be masters of their own appetites and destinies: no excuse could exist for such feelings. He felt this with particular shame when reading the case histories of incest victims—and of the other family members affected by a parent’s monstrous betrayal. The shattered trust, the broken spirits, the shame and self-blame of the victims—this was unbearable to read about. And yet, even knowing this, his desire for the child only grew! That pheromone-based fail-safe system about which he had mused on the drive down from Vermont apparently did not exist—or was powerless to check his fatal lust.
He looked at his wife and child. Like people glimpsed through the wrong end of a telescope, they seemed strangely diminished, distant figures. Pauline’s gaze shifted to him, and he saw in it a desperate yearning to connect. He looked away, avoiding her beseeching gaze, pretending he did not see it, directing his eyes back to the unseen book open on his lap. This weasel-like evasiveness had been his strategy for weeks. Adopting a brittle tone of false normality, he would announce that he had reached a “difficult passage” in his novel and didn’t want to “lose the momentum”—hence his need to retreat, to disappear to his office for a bout of supposed novel writing.
Sitting there now, on the sofa, he asked himself, when did healthy paternal love turn into this unspeakable sickness? In retrospect, it was obvious that the spark of obsession was immediate, from the moment his eyes first fell upon her in the courthouse. That instinct to hold her at arm’s length—he recognized that reflex now as a subconscious reaction to the desire he knew he could not allow himself to feel or acknowledge. On the car ride from Vermont, he had willed himself to stop staring at her. Any erotic flickerings that he might have acknowledged were successfully dismissed as the action of memory—memories of Holly, whom Chloe so closely resembled. Then came that glimpse of her on the driveway; on the sofa as she showed him her yoga exercises; those moments when she sat on his lap in the semidarkness of his bedroom and leaned her face so close to his, so close … yet still he had successfully fooled himself. Denied what was so obviously taking place within him, allowed himself to believe that the stirrings were only the wholesome surges of normal fatherly love. That is, until the shattering moment of revelation: that dream he had had of Chloe spooning with him in bed, pressing her buttocks against him—after which he no longer was able to deny what had been silently breeding, incubating like a virus, within him. He had not been able to sleep or eat in the weeks since that vision. His life had become a waking nightmare.
Gone was his routine of reading with Pauline his daily fan letters; no longer did he sit with Maddy in his lap after preschool and ask about her day. He ate his meals hurriedly, eyes on his plate, evading Pauline’s pleading stare and trying not to look at Chloe, with whom he adopted a pose of cool paternal reserve even as he engaged in the most revolting, unconscionable, unforgivable, surreptitious voyeurism; for despite all the chilly distance he attempted to put between them, despite his efforts not to feast upon her with his eyes, he could not keep his gaze from straying over when she was not aware, from trying to gulp down great stolen glimpses of her beauty on which he would later sustain himself. Thinking of this now, he was engulfed by a wave of agonizing guilt the more potent for the mocking libidinal excitement those memories of her awoke within him.
In a bid to arrest the dreadful tumescence, the humiliating hardening, he again turned his attention to his wife and daughter. Maddy was lightly chanting a song—the same song she had been singing now for day
s—the alphabet song she learned in preschool. She never sang it through to completion. Her habit was to chant a few bars, then abruptly break off, sometimes near the beginning, or middle, or near the end, only to begin again from the start. A few weeks ago, he would have delighted in her singing, fetched his video camera to tape it. Now, he found inexpressibly irritating her unending repetition of this simple tune, its minor scale sung on a dying fall—incomplete, oddly joyless and dutiful. Unable to bear for a second longer the sound of her voice feeling its way cautiously along that melody, he turned and snapped at her, “Why do you keep singing that?”
She was scribbling with a crayon. She stopped and looked at him. “I learned it from the butterfly man,” she said.
“Who?”
“You know. That man. The butterfly man.”
He frowned and opened his mouth to ask what this could possibly mean—but at that moment, he heard the click and creak of his office door. His heart kicked in his chest and all thought of Maddy was driven from his mind. He turned and saw his obsession step into the hallway. Even in that baggy sweatshirt, those formless shorts and those terrible running shoes, she was a vision, a deadly virus of desire.
“Chloe!” Maddy cried, bouncing her bottom on the sofa. “Keep reading to us!”
“Of course,” she said, approaching from down the hall.
Jasper stood and stepped quickly away from the sofa, to make room for Chloe to sit down again with Maddy. As was his habit, he kept his eyes directed down and away from her. But she veered over to where he stood and stopped in front of him, forcing him to look at her. She whispered: “The doctor wants to talk to you.”
“Me?” Jasper said, startled. He looked down the hall. Dr. Geld was standing in the office doorway, arms folded, one foot crossed jauntily over the opposite ankle. Watching them. Jasper turned back to Chloe. She had an unreadable look on her face. Her eyes were red, as if she had been crying. Panic bucked in his chest.
Undone Page 18
