Undone (20 page)

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 savor 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.

G
irls 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.

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!

W
ork, at first, seemed as if it might provide a useful distraction 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.