PART FIVE
1
There was, of course, the question of where they should live.
Chloe, now with a fortune at her disposal, faced the unaccustomed conundrum of too many choices—the dilemma of no monetary restrictions on her future. Dez, however, had ideas.
He pushed for a move to Manhattan, where he thought that the anonymity conferred by the biggest and busiest of American cities would aid him in maintaining a useful incognito. Chloe liked the idea because New York was a center of modeling and acting—careers she hoped, finally, to pursue (despite Dez’s scoffing objections). On Dez’s urging, they set out to find one of those soaring-ceilinged, sun-pervaded, floor-through lofts in Lower Manhattan. They looked first in SoHo, but settled finally on a vast space—an entire floor—in a former sewing-machine factory in Tribeca, a neighborhood (the real estate agent explained) thick with movie stars, models, musicians and trust-funders, and which afforded to its inhabitants a paradoxical privacy, based on the blasé disregard the denizens studiously affected when glimpsing a fellow notable or scion in the street or elevator. The dreaded European and Asian tourist mobs rarely ventured into the area, as it was, deliberately, lacking in any of the amenities—clothing boutiques, Michelin three-star restaurants—designed to lure them. A matrix of treeless, rather forbidding streets lined in gray-façaded thirties-era high-rises, it was as close to a gated community as any Manhattan had to offer.
After the cramped, dim confines of the malodorous trailer, this oceanic twelfth-floor loft swimming in pure ether was almost too much for Dez’s nervous system to absorb. At first, he felt a kind of vertiginous agoraphobia that made him frightened to leave the building. But he soon adapted, venturing out with Chloe for short walks in the narrow canyons of the streets, tentatively investigating the neighborhood. Soon, he was striding those sidewalks with confidence, and he found that he loved to explore all of Manhattan, going to and fro, from the East River to the Hudson, and walking up and down in it, from Battery Park to the Cloisters. He found himself infected by the spirit of louche creativity that animated so many of their wealthy, artist-manqué neighbors. Dez revived an old, adolescent ambition to “take photographs.” He bought an array of vintage Hasselblads and made over a corner of the loft as a photography studio with lights on adjustable stanchions, colored paper backdrops on great rolls, fancy tripods and a small walled-off darkroom. At first, he applied himself with some assiduousness to taking moody shots of city architecture, the jagged slices of sky between the buildings, stark girders silhouetted against a livid sunset on a construction site, gritty black-and-white shots of subway platforms. But he soon recognized these efforts for what they were—amateur visual clichés—and began to address matters closer to his own heart, training his long lens surreptitiously on the passing private schoolers in their short pleated skirts and starchy blouses, creating some pretty pictures that proved useful for fueling his solo sessions on those nights when Chloe proclaimed herself “not in the mood.” (Which was happening, come to think of it, with increasing frequency.)
It was on a day in late June, three weeks after they moved in, when Dez, feeling frisky, ignored Chloe’s objections and pulled her down onto one of the absurdly luxurious, semicircular Roche Bobois white leather sofas (together, they cost an unimaginable eighteen thousand dollars and had just been delivered by an army of sweating movers from a shop on Spring Street) and possessed her, twice. He was sprawled voluptuously on the glove-soft leather, regally naked, watching Chloe, also naked, clatter around in the vast open-plan kitchen at the opposite end of the space. She was searching for a rag with which to wipe up the mess he’d made on the upholstery. Propped on one elbow, he called out to her, “Forget it. So we buy another sofa. Or two.”
He rolled onto his opposite side and looked out through the vast casement window, a wall-sized, fifteen-foot-long, eight-foot-high expanse of wavery old glass panes between oxidized strips of greenish copper. It framed a stunning view of Manhattan, from the foot of the island, through the picturesque tenements of the East and West Villages, to the skyscrapers of Midtown, past the emerald green of the bucolic park with its amoeboid blue lakes and lagoons, straight up to the blocky, dirt-hued brick projects of Harlem, the graceful arches of bridges sprouting, at intervals, over the rivers, west and east, decorated here and there with white sails and powerboats pulling their frothing wakes, all of it under a summer sky of purest blue with only a few flat-bottomed puff clouds, as in an Old Master painting, to help point up the endless, receding perspective.
“So,” he continued languidly, “only one more thing to do, in order to wrap things up.”
“Wrap things up?” she said as she returned with a moistened dishcloth in her hand.
“Why, yes,” he said, rolling over to look at her. “The Tovah show. Obviously.”
That Chloe would appear as a guest on that program—to share with Tovah’s audience the sordid details of the crime committed against her by her father—was more than an incidental sideline in Dez’s plan. It was the plan’s secret raison d’être—its pièce de résistance. More than any dreams of avarice, more than the sadistic fun of engineering an eminent man’s fall, it was the denunciation of Ulrickson on Tovah’s show that had so awakened Dez’s artistic impulses over a year ago, when the scheme first burst into his consciousness. Chloe’s visit to Tovah’s show would be the symmetrical bookend to Ulrickson’s triumphal appearance to promote his saccharin memoir. Furthermore, Dez wanted—he needed—to see America’s collective Puritan nose (in the person of Tovah’s hypnotized audience of millions) rubbed in the reality of rank male desire. Fully to feel his own ascent from the ignominy, shame and poverty of the trailer park to his current position of easeful privilege in this ethereal loft, Dez needed to see Ulrickson vilified by the very people who had formerly raised him up. And now Chloe wanted to pretend that she didn’t know what he was talking about?
Chloe did, in fact, know. He had talked of little else for weeks, months. But she had hoped that he would, over time, drop his strange insistence that she go on the show. She could not understand his obsession with it. It seemed, to her, that they had achieved their goals with Ulrickson: they had gotten him away from Maddy and had seen to it that he was punished for what he had done to Chloe’s mother. The press had widely covered the criminal and civil cases, exposing the lie behind Ulrickson’s saintly public image. Why was it so important that she appear on Tovah and further publicize his crime?
She had not admitted this to Dez, but she didn’t want to go on the show. She wanted people to forget about that part of her life—she wanted to forget it, especially that final, horrible act of dissembling when she had lured Ulrickson, a man then so hateful to her, into her bed and submitted to the strenuous, repeated expression of his lust. She wanted to forget it all so that she could get on with her future. She had signed with a boutique downtown modeling agency and just last week had enrolled in an acting class in Greenwich Village—all of this over Dez’s angry objections. (He told her that she was rich now and should not be rubbing elbows with the penniless scroungers doing Off-Off Broadway and toting their modeling portfolios on the Q train from Brooklyn.) But she had to do something with her time. She couldn’t just lie around the loft—like Dez wanted her to do. But that was another argument for another time. For now, she had to try to deflect him from his insistence that she go on the show.
Without looking at him, she said, quietly, as she dabbed at the stains on the leather, that maybe they’d already paid Ulrickson back and so maybe it wasn’t necessary for her to go on Tovah.
Dez scrambled to his feet. He stood over her, his skinny chest heaving as if he had just run up a flight of stairs. He spoke through shaking lips, and his voice, thin and reedy and tight, sounded as though he were being strangled. He told her that he had stood by, uncomplaining, when she defied him and enrolled in acting classes; he made no protest when she signed on with the modeling agency; he did not complain when she disappeared for hours
every day to run around with her ridiculous portfolio. But if she ever again attempted to break her promise about going on Tovah’s show—for she had promised, he reminded her, all those months ago, when he had concocted the plan—if she ever again so much as breathed a word of defiance on this point, he would have no choice but to put her out on the street.
The loft and all other assets were Chloe’s, but she was still so much in the habit of thinking of herself as Dez’s dependent, so used to looking up to him for guidance, advice, direction—so accustomed to being under his complete emotional and mental control—that she took with deadly seriousness his threat of throwing her out. Frightened, she relented a little, saying that maybe she could appear on the show if it really meant that much to Dez.
“Oh, it means nothing to me,” he said airily. “I am entirely indifferent to what you do. But it should mean everything to you—to expose Ulrickson’s sickness to as wide an audience as possible, so that people like him don’t continue to get away with their sick perversions against children like Maddy. Your selfishness on this matter is beyond me. Just because you now enjoy a life of luxury, free from that man’s clutches, does not mean that there are not hundreds—no, thousands—of girls, some younger than Maddy, who are suffering the most appalling and unthinkable abuses at the hands of men like him. I’m frankly amazed to learn of the heartlessness that this new life of ease has given rise to in you.”
The words cut into Chloe like a whip. Dez, of course, was right; he was always right. She was forgetting about Maddy—and all the Maddys in the world. She was rich now and comfortable and free of any threat from men like Ulrickson. And so she had forgotten. She was letting her own ambition for a career as an actress or model drive thoughts of others out of her head. She had become like so many girls she had met in Manhattan, at cattle calls and auditions, thinking only of themselves, of success at any cost.
She began to cry. She told Dez that she was sorry. “I’ll go on the show,” she said. “I want to go on the show! I swear I want to go on the show!”
“As I say,” Dez sniffed, “it’s entirely up to you.”
Nevertheless, he put in a call to Havot Productions that afternoon. Tovah’s producers were ecstatic at the prospect of this world-exclusive journalistic “get.” Tovah, told of the scoop, scrapped the week’s taping schedule and told her senior producers, “Let’s get this thing in the can by Friday, before she changes her mind.”
And so it was that, two days later, Chloe, in an elegant dark sleeveless dress that stretched to mid-calf and a pair of flat black pumps, descended in the elevator from her loft, hurried across the sidewalk and climbed into the waiting limousine—a Havot Productions car dispatched by the show’s producers. She was ferried from Tribeca, through the late morning traffic, uptown to Tovah’s studios housed in a four-story converted carriage house in the far west Fifties. There, she was ushered past the dauntingly intense, airport-like security (“Tovah has a pretty serious stalker,” the limo driver confided) to the greenroom, where a motherly woman patted antiglare makeup onto her face, smoothed her hair, then passed her off to a headset-wearing, clipboard-wielding production assistant (not much older than Chloe herself), who led her through a maze of corridors, past tool belt–wearing technicians, over thick cables snaking underfoot, to the edge of the brightly lit stage. On a hand signal cue from a man crouched in the opposite wings, the PA propelled Chloe with a light push at her back into a maelstrom of applause and cheering and music and lights, as Tovah, galvanizing in an olive green jumpsuit and flaming orange neck scarf, opened her arms wide, then enveloped Chloe in a bear hug. “Just relax,” Tovah whispered into her ear over the cacophony of clapping. “It’s just you and me talking.”
Fighting down panic, Chloe recalled Dez’s injunction simply to tell the truth of what had happened to her—or at least the emotional truth. Thus did she describe, sitting across from Tovah in a deep powder blue armchair, cameras looking on, how she had, in the wake of her mother’s death, found her biological father, Jasper Ulrickson, the famous memoirist, and gone to live with him, and how everything had crumbled when this man whom the world held up as an inspiring model of family duty and sacrifice, and whom she revered as a father—the only father she had ever known—was revealed as a monster, a man boiling with lust for her. Tovah took her time parsing out every painful detail of the betrayal, eliciting from Chloe descriptions of how, precisely, she came to realize that her father harbored these unwholesome feelings. Chloe described the clinging glances, the surreptitious looks, the overt ogling that she had gradually become aware of—and then the discovery of the terrible diary.
“I don’t want you to have to relive your whole ordeal,” Tovah said. “But you’ve been brave enough to bring the video that you secretly shot of your father—and you have said that we can air a few minutes of it.” Chloe wordlessly nodded.
Tovah turned and spoke directly into one of the cameras mounted on a dolly stage left. “Please believe me when I say that it is not with an air of sensationalism or exploitation that we show you the following video. It is in the earnest hope that its horrors bring fully home the nightmare that is incest and parental child abuse—crimes too often hidden in the shadows. I ask viewers who might find the following images too difficult to bear to please turn away and, of course, any children should be asked to leave the room.”
The studio lights dimmed and the blue backdrop behind Chloe and Tovah faded to black. Then it was illuminated by a bright rectangle of light. This turned into a low-resolution shot of Chloe’s bedroom at 10 Cherry Tree Lane, filmed with the camera in her laptop: a static shot of one wall containing her bookshelves, the bed and her bedside table. Chloe, onscreen, stepped into the foreground, close to the camera, bending over it. The room lights were low. She was wrapped in a duvet, which she held closed around her throat. Looking into the camera with an expression of furtive desperation (just as Dez had demonstrated to her all those months before), she whispered in an urgent undertone: “I don’t know if he’ll come again tonight.” She cast a nervous glance to the left. “But he’s been drinking, and that usually means bad things.” She turned back to the camera. “I’ll leave this on, just in case.” She ran to the bed and climbed under the covers. She left the bedside lamp on. An excruciating half minute passed—during which not a sound was heard in Tovah’s audience. Then came the crunching turn of a doorknob on the soundtrack—and someone in Tovah’s audience screamed.
A man lurched into view from the left. He walked unsteadily, stumbling over to the bed. The profile against the lamp-lit wall behind him was clearly that of Jasper Ulrickson. In his right hand he carried a bottle. Chloe turned onto her back and pulled the covers up, in a protective gesture, to her chin. She could be heard on the video’s muffled soundtrack saying, “Daddy?” Jasper asked, in a slurred voice, if she had been asleep. She asked what he was doing in her room. He raised the bottle, took a slug, then slammed it down onto the bedside table. He swayed a little. She pulled the covers over her nose. Then he began to tear off his clothes. Tovah’s producers pixelated the offending parts of his anatomy. He stood for a moment over her, and then, with a shout, he dropped, like a felled tree, onto the bed. The audience let out a collective cry of horror.
The video was paused, showing Ulrickson on top of Chloe. The lights in the studio came up and the image abruptly disappeared, replaced once again by the blue background with the word Tovah! in flowing off-white script.
Chloe was sitting, turned away from the screen, a tissue to her face. Tovah, holding Chloe’s free hand, addressed the camera. “We cannot show you what takes place next on that video,” she said gravely, “but it is gut-wrenching, and it offers solid proof of Jasper Ulrickson’s guilt—as was determined in both a criminal and a civil trial.” She turned to Chloe. “What do you think when you see that recording?”
“I can’t look at it,” Chloe said, quite truthfully.
“I don’t think any of us blame you,” Tovah said. “It’s hard enoug
h for me to imagine that that man sat across from me, in that chair, on this very stage—and that I praised him as a model husband and father!”
“He tricked everybody,” Chloe said quietly.
“And yet you had the bravery to expose him,” Tovah said. “To let us all know the truth. Girl, you rock!” The audience burst into wild applause. Chloe flushed and lowered her head. When the clapping died down, Tovah asked, “What will you do now?”
Chloe shook the hair off her face. “I’m nineteen now, so I don’t have to live in foster care anymore. I found a place to live. I don’t want to say where. But a place where I can try to have a normal, private life.”
“We made every effort,” Tovah said, “to contact your father in prison, to notify him that we would be airing this interview with you, and to get comment from him. But we were not able to get through. If he is watching, what would you say to him?”
Dez had warned Chloe that this moment would be coming. He had told her simply to speak the truth, to speak from her heart. She looked into the camera. “I trusted you,” she said. “You were the only father I ever knew. When I got to your house, I felt loved. For myself, as a person. I loved Pauline, and I loved Maddy. And I loved you. And none of this had to happen.” She began to cry. “None of this.”
The program, recorded live to tape, aired the following Monday. Chloe refused to watch it and fled to Crunch gym. Dez, however, would not allow her mutiny to dampen his spirit of celebration. He had prepared carefully, putting on ice a case of Veuve Clicquot and laying in, from Petrossian, eight ounces of beluga caviar, a tin of crème fraîche and a dozen of the restaurant’s tender blini. Upon hearing the opening strains of Tovah’s theme music, he popped a cork on the champagne and poured himself a flute. Installed on the Roche Bobois, in front of the seventy-eight-inch plasma high-definition screen mounted on one of the loft’s huge white walls, he munched and sipped and watched, as Tovah exposed Ulrickson’s perfidy. With the champagne coursing through his veins, the delicate caviar popping against his palate, he felt as if he were ascending, like a Renaissance angel on a ceiling painted by Raphael, into the sun-suffused air, raised up into a state of glory and grace, of purest accomplishment and joy. He felt the completeness that comes with seeing a creative vision realized, to perfection, in all its parts. And when, toward the program’s denouement, he felt a slight, inevitable diminishment in his joy, the first fading of the endorphins off his synapses, he dug from his wallet the little treat he had decided to indulge in, just for this occasion: a gram of very pure Colombian cocaine that he had bought from the building’s doorman—a sly young fellow who had, almost immediately upon Dez’s entry into the building four weeks ago, caught Dez’s eye and given him a knowing lift of the eyebrow. Dez had not partaken in many years, not since his days at the law firm, and then only a few times in moderation, but he thought it the perfect way to celebrate his triumph. Chloe frowned on all drug use, of course, even a little light pot smoking. But with her out of the loft, there was no reason not to pour out a small mound on the top of the glass coffee table. He chopped it lovingly with his credit card, then laid out two thick lines. Through a rolled hundred, he sucked them deep and then sat back, smiling, restored to delirious ecstasy.
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