Undone (2 page)

“Well,” the man replied, “those vows did say ‘in sickness or
in health’ and ‘for better or for worse.’ I was granted the worst, from which I must try to extract the best.”

“But it must be so difficult,” Tovah pressed, “to commit, at your age, to a life of celibacy?”

“Perhaps not as difficult as we men would have you believe,” he replied, glancing up into the studio audience with what Dez perceived as a self-satisfied little smile. “We plead biological necessity when caught straying. But that’s often just a convenient rationalization to explain away a moment of moral failure—of weakness. We
can
control ourselves.”

In the moment of stunned silence that greeted this utterance, the director cut to a wide shot of Tovah’s studio audience, a crowd of some 350 mostly middle-aged women. They were staring at Tovah’s guest with mouths agape, as if (Dez thought, with an inward spasm of delighted contempt) the man were a member of some alien species—a species that produced creatures who looked identical to human males but whose souls were blessedly free of all the worst male characteristics: the selfishness, the obliviousness, the immaturity, the grotesque, ungovernable lusts.

“Ladies?” Tovah said. “What did I tell you? A
mensch.
Are we talking to a
mensch
or what?” An avalanche of answering applause crashed down from the seats. The man on the screen dipped his head, as if too shy to accept this outpouring of adulation.

Dez snorted. The exchange epitomized why he never missed the show; it was what he called a Pure Tovah Moment—a mixture of mendacity, sentimentality, self-congratulation and
self-promotion. “That’s right, buddy,” he muttered. “Sell them books.”

Chloe, finding nothing in the cupboards, had excavated a canister of ice cream from the frosted-over freezer and plucked a spoon from the sink. She stepped back to the sofa and settled in beside Dez, sucking the ice cream off the spoon like a lollipop. Tovah had gone to commercial—an elaborate Busby Berkeley–style production about the joys of a wonder mop that used only static electricity to clean up dust and crumbs. Dez muted the TV. Chloe seized her opportunity.

“Want some?” she said, digging out a fresh bite of ice cream and holding the spoon toward him. “Mom always said that it’s good for you, because it has milk in it.”

“Not hungry,” he grunted. Nor did he particularly care to listen to her prattle on about her suddenly sainted mother’s theories about nutrition.
Ice cream, for God’s sake! Good for you!
He tuned out her further babbling—she was discoursing now on her late mother’s favorite recipes, most of them culled from the menu of the Snak Shak diner where the poor woman had toiled as a waitress. He shushed her violently when his show resumed.

“Welcome back,” Tovah cried. “My guest is the author of the magnificent new memoir
Lessons from My Daughter
—Mr. Jasper Ulrickson.”

Chloe looked up sharply. She could not believe her ears. And she could not stop herself.
“Jasper Ulrickson?”
she cried. She swung around on the sofa and stared at Dez. “Mom knew a guy called that!”

His first thought was that this was some new manifestation
of the child’s inexplicable sorrow over her mother’s death, a grief-induced delusion. But she looked in earnest; her eyes popped wide, her lips ajar. He again hit the mute button.

“What are you talking about?”

“Before I was born,” Chloe said excitedly. “When Mom was working as kitchen girl at the New Halcyon Country Club. He was the tennis teacher! They had a fling. Wait—let me see if it’s him!” When the camera cut to a shot of Tovah’s guest, Chloe pointed with her spoon and screamed, “That’s the guy!”

The man on the screen was heavier than the handsome, sun-reddened youth in white T-shirt and shorts in her mom’s old photographs of that summer, but he was the same person. Definitely. Those slightly bulgy blue eyes, that high brow and forehead, that sandy hair and nice, shy smile.

“That’s him!” she repeated. “When I get Mom’s stuff from her house, I can show you! That’s him! I swear!”

Dez had never met Chloe’s late mother—had, indeed, taken some pains to avoid such an encounter—but he’d glimpsed her often enough when he drove through New Halcyon: framed like a three-quarter-length portrait in the Snak Shak’s takeout window (
Portrait of Dejection
), or humping up the steep sidewalk to the VistaVue Motel where she had a second job as a chambermaid; a woman well past her prime at thirty-five, with over-dyed blond hair, a barrel-shaped body and a drinker’s flushed face ringed in cigarette smoke. He’d often wondered if the woman had, when young, possessed any of her daughter’s fanatic allure. Probably—if this Ulrickson had bothered to take a run at her.

“When, exactly, was this?” Dez rapped out.

“Sumavore eyes bore,” Chloe said, speaking around a bolus of ice cream that she was trying to keep off a sensitive molar. She swallowed, giggled and repeated, “The summer before I was born.” Then she dropped her voice, as if to impart an off-color secret. “Actually, it’s kind of funny. Mom told me that when she found out she was pregnant with me, she wondered if I might even be his kid.”

Dez was not sure he had heard her properly. “
His
kid?” he said, pointing at the screen. “She thought you might be
his
kid?”

“Well, for like two secs,” Chloe explained. “See, she did it once with him—at the very end of the summer, at the closing dance. So when she found out she was pregnant, at first she didn’t know who did it. But then she realized it could only be Hughie, her boyfriend, my real dad.”

“How?” Dez said sharply. “How could she be so sure?”

Startled by his harsh tone—he spoke as if his life depended on her answer—she said, with exaggerated calm, “It was easy, silly. She realized she got her period right
after
this Jasper guy went back to school. So it couldn’t’ve been him. Plus, I look just like Hughie. Mom showed me a picture. We have the same sexy mouth!”

She pursed her lips into a moue to make Dez laugh. But Dez didn’t laugh. He simply turned back to the television—although now (she noticed) he had a strange look on his face, his eyes wide, his mouth slightly open, as if he were watching the approach of something huge from beyond the flickering screen. And, strangely, he had not turned the sound back on.

“Anyway,” she said, digging around for a final bite and speaking more to herself than to Dez, who was hurting her feelings by ignoring her that way, “looks like this Ulrickson guy got rich. I could’ve used a rich daddy.”

“Yes,” Dez said in a soft, faraway voice. “Yes, you certainly could.”

And it was from that innocent exchange that he hatched the plan. Of course, in matters of creativity, an artist often conveniently forgets the anguished hours that go into honing an idea, sanding away its rough edges, solving its internal problems. Still, its basic shape, its
gestalt
, came into being on that morning of the first day of April, in that flash of inspiration which Dez would later think of as the moment at which he began to claw his way out from the pit of poverty, squalor and despair into which he had allowed himself to sink.

Not that his motives were purely, or even primarily, mercenary. For the scheme, if he could make it work, offered something more lasting, more satisfying, than mere money. As a man who had fallen so far in life—all due, he believed, to the hypocrisy of a society that punished men like him, men who had the courage to live out their animal nature, and exalted men like this Ulrickson, who could so convincingly masquerade as a dutiful, disciplined, decent male—Dez felt he had something to prove: namely, that when you stripped men to their primal essence, they were all the same, all equally prey to the ferocious, feral appetites that roiled, secretly, behind even the most saintly exterior. What had Ulrickson said in reply to Tovah’s question about his enforced celibacy?
We
can
control ourselves.
The sanctimoniousness of that boast! The
self-congratulation! That was the gauntlet thrown down; that was the challenge which fired Dez’s determination to test Ulrickson’s smug resolve, to prove that, for all his success and wealth and fame, he was no better than Dez, no better than any other man (as Dez understood all men to be)—and, perhaps, given the right conditions, a good deal worse.

A movement in his peripheral vision made him look up. Chloe had risen from the sofa. Seeing his sharp glance, she said, on a note of apology, “I’m just going to take a shower.”

She turned her back and peeled her T-shirt over her head, then slid the Y-fronts down her legs. She was stepping toward the flimsy accordion door of the bathroom when she heard Dez say, in an oddly thickened voice, “Actually …”

She stopped and turned. She saw a look on his face—a look she hadn’t seen in weeks and which she had despaired of ever seeing again. All things being equal, she might have preferred to see softness and sympathy on his features, an understanding smile, as if he cared about her sadness over her mother—rather than this leer of wolfish appetite. But she was ready to settle for any kind of attention from him, just so long as she could be sure that he still loved her. And that’s what this ravening animal grin meant—didn’t it?

With an upward flick of his chin, he beckoned her.

“I just remembered,” he said as she moved obediently toward him, “that no one can resist you. No one. And that has given me a naughty—a
very
naughty—idea.”

Plus, of course (Dez reasoned), there was bound to be money in it.

T
he paternity complaint, sent from the Department of Children and Families of Vermont, was delivered to Jasper’s house in the town of Clay Cross, Connecticut, on an afternoon at the beginning of May, four weeks after his appearance on Tovah’s show. He did not recognize the missive as a legal summons, arriving, as it did, with the usual avalanche of letters and packages sent by fans of
Lessons from My Daughter.
It was unusual for a letter (in an eight-by-ten-inch manila envelope) to be delivered by hand (he hastily signed for it), but by now nothing could truly surprise him: over the last month he had received, by UPS delivery, a crate containing a life-sized pastel portrait of
him and Pauline rendered by a septuagenarian fan in Dallas; he had fended off, from his doorstep, a pair of Swedish fans wheeling a carry-on packed with first editions of his memoir for signing (and obvious resale on eBay); just two days ago, a local farmer had appeared bearing a truckload of spring asparagus for Jasper and his family. So a hand-delivered business envelope from an unfamiliar address raised no immediate alarms, its bulk suggestive of, perhaps, a brochure outlining the activities of one of the hundreds of stroke or head injury charities that continually approached him for endorsement, cash or speaking engagements.

At forty-one years old, Jasper had been a professional writer all his adult life, producing, at a rate of one book every two years, a series of mystery novels featuring his blind private eye, Geoffrey Bannister. The books had never put him in the first rank of mystery writers, but they had won him a small, dedicated following. He had never imagined, for himself, anything like the success of
Lessons from My Daughter.
The memoir was already in its sixth printing, and had, to date, earned more than all his novels combined and multiplied by a factor of twenty.

Although he had always known that a single book could make a writer wealthy
—In Cold Blood
helping to fund Capote’s decades of drinking and dissipation;
Catcher in the Rye
buying Salinger fifty years of publishing silence—Jasper had never seriously pondered such a fate for himself, or even longed for it. He had not needed to. With the death of his parents in a private plane crash when he was twenty-three, he had come into the inheritance that put him beyond financial worries.

His father, a mild, sweet-tempered man, had been heir to the frozen fish fortune amassed by Jasper’s enterprising immigrant grandfather from Oslo. His mother, an accomplished triathlete in her youth, had enjoyed a vigorous middle age as a devoted kayaker on nearby Long Island Sound. Raised in a happy and loving home in the tenets of his parents’ devout Lutheranism, Jasper decided early in life to eschew the family business and become a writer, an ambition touched off in him, at age fourteen, when he first read
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
Whereas stories of the famous sleuth were, for some aspiring writers, a springboard to more sophisticated reading (and writing) in later life, something perennially boyish, not to say naively innocent, in Jasper inclined him to see the Baker Street polymath as a permanent hero and inspiration, and apart from a short-lived phase directly after earning his postgraduate degree, when he flirted (unconvincingly) with growing his beard stubble, smoking unfiltered Gitanes and writing abstract poetry in an East Village garret, he had never had literary ambitions greater than to invent a detective modeled, without apology, on Conan Doyle’s great creation.

Most critics dismissed his Bannister series as a pale imitation of Sir Arthur’s masterworks, and sales were decidedly mid-list, but large royalty statements, important awards and critical bouquets were not necessary prods to Jasper’s muse. Materially secure, after his parents’ passing, he was able to write his detective novels simply because he loved writing, and because he relished the difficulty of showing how a sightless man, with the aid only of his sharpened senses and his faithful Seeing Eye dog, Smokey,
could ferret out, through Holmesian feats of deduction, criminals. (Never one to cheat, Jasper took it as a point of pride and honor always to lay before the attentive reader the necessary clues for solving the mystery one step ahead of blind Bannister.) He had written his memoir of Pauline’s stroke with a similar lack of commercial ambition—had written it, in fact, with no other motive than to exorcise his grief and horror over his wife’s incapacitation, to celebrate her strength and endurance, and to tell the world about the inspiration he drew from the example of Maddy, their only child.