Undone (24 page)

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 days—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.

“He wants to talk to you about something I told him,” she whispered. “Something … private. I hope you won’t be mad.”

His mouth went dry. What had she said to this man? What was going on? The doctor had expressly said that he did not need to speak to anyone but Chloe. He looked at Pauline. She stared at him with that inexplicable message of warning.

“He wants to talk to you now,” Chloe said.

There was no escape. He could not very well refuse to meet with his daughter’s court-ordered therapist. And so, with a deep sense of foreboding, like a man mounting the gallows, he turned and walked down the hall.

D
ez, watching Jasper’s approach, was struck now by the clear signs of psychological distress that he had, earlier, stupidly misread as overwork: the haggard face, the haunted stare, the weight loss, the hangdog, sheepish, guilty look in the eyes. This was a man in the end stages of acute sexual despair. How could he have failed to read the symptoms! In any case, he read them now, and they told him that his work would not be difficult.

“Thank you for taking the time to talk to me,” Dez said, stepping aside to allow Jasper to enter the room. He followed his victim inside, then shut the door behind them.

“So what’s this all about?” Jasper asked, turning to face Dez. He spoke in as casual a voice as he could muster. “I thought you said you needed to speak only to Chloe.”

“If you wouldn’t mind,” Dez said, indicating with a wave of one hand the sofa that Chloe had recently vacated. “This won’t take a minute. Something has come up. I think it best we nip it in the bud.”

Jasper felt a fresh jolt of panic. Had he been less successful than he supposed in disguising his yearning for Chloe? Had she noticed something—and spoken of it to this man? She had seemed so happy, so well adjusted, so serenely untroubled by any of the evils her transitioning social worker had told him to look out for, and so unaware of his toxic lust. But was she? He tried to keep his features and voice neutral when he said as he sat down on the sofa, “I hope it’s nothing—nothing serious.”

“Well,” Dez said, resuming his place in the armchair, “I’m afraid it could
become
serious if it is not attended to in a timely fashion.”

Jasper studied Dr. Geld’s face: a lean, handsome face, but one whose skull-like qualities were not much mitigated by the presence of the short dark beard that clung to his jaws and chin. The man was scrutinizing him with a slight smile, and Jasper was suddenly filled with the odd conviction that he
knew
this man, that he had seen him before, talked with him: something about the almost mocking, insolent frankness in his pale, colorless eyes. Jasper dismissed this as a play of nerves.

Dez, in turn, studied Jasper’s face, cataloging the tics and twitches that made his victim’s pale, perspiring cheek flicker and spasm and that pulled one corner of his mouth into a desperate attempt at a smile. This was sheer delight! He could have stared at it all day—but there was work to do.

“Mr. Ulrickson,” he said at length, “would it surprise you to learn that your daughter has been harboring strong sexual desires for you?”

From thinking that Geld was going to ambush him with questions about his criminal lust for Chloe, he had been hit from a wholly unexpected direction—like the boxer who, feinting from the anticipated left jab, is all the more stunned by a strong right hook. He could do nothing but helplessly move his lower jaw up and down. He produced no sound.

“Your daughter,” said Dez, “has volunteered to me, in her session, that she has an overwhelming desire to make love to you. She has, to be frank, alleviated these feelings, as best she can, through onanism—but such a palliative can be only so successful when true obsession is at work, and I’m afraid that that is what we have in this case. Obsession. Compulsive, neurotic, sexual obsession. Now, before you judge her too harshly—before you accuse her of deviancy—I think it is essential that you understand that these erotic reactions are, within the situational matrix in which she finds herself, not only quite predictable but quite normal.”

“Normal,” Jasper said in a parched whisper. He was dazed, dizzy, barely able to form the word.

“Quite normal,” Dez reiterated. “How familiar are you with the tenets of Freudian psychotherapy?”

Jasper shook his head. “Not very.”

Dez happened to be well versed in the subject. While in the care of Dr. Geld, he had received many lectures on Freud. And indeed, in his younger days, when struggling to understand and
curtail his compulsions, he had read widely in the Master and his followers—all to no avail, of course.

“Even in some psychoanalytic circles,” Dez said ruefully, “Freud has lost favor, his theories replaced by belief in the all-powerful pharmaceutical. I reject such fashionable apostasy and profess myself to be a strict adherent to the urtexts, and to what they tell us of the invisible currents of motivation and desire that shape our minute-to-minute, second-to-second actions. To say nothing of the fundamental building blocks of identity, which is what concerns us at present.” Dez scrutinized Jasper for a few silent seconds over his joined fingertips. “You are, undoubtedly, familiar with the term ‘Oedipus complex’?” he went on. Jasper nodded weakly. “Most people are—at least in rough outline,” Dez said. “Boys, Freud tells us, arrive at a healthy sexual identity by the successful working through of certain deep-seated urges. Namely, to remove the rival for his mother’s affections, and thus consummate desire for her. Bluntly put, to kill the father and sleep with the mother. But I would wager that you are less familiar with Freud’s theory of how
female
sexual identity is formed?”

“That’s true,” Jasper said.

“Oh, the casual male chauvinism of our sexist culture!” Dez lamented. “Well, in any case, as with boys, the process begins in earliest childhood and is activated by rivalry with the same-sex parent. Girls experience ‘penis envy’—a syndrome stemming from the small child’s conviction that the male sex organ, which she believes herself to have been born with, has been
stolen
from her in an act of parental castration—by the mother.
To regain the penis, the child looks to the man closest by, usually her father, literally to ‘take back’ the lost member. It is in this yearning for possession of the father’s phallus that the daughter resolves her rage against the castrating mother and forms the underlying heterosexual erotic orientation which will, in later years, fuel her drive for marriage and procreation—a dynamic that Freud’s colleague Jung dubbed the Electra Complex.

“The point I am trying to get to, Mr. Ulrickson, is that your Chloe is currently in the throes of a most severe Electra conflict. And little wonder! We have, in her, a girl who grew up never knowing her father, a girl whose adolescence was characterized by flagrant Electra struggles with her mother—the denying, rivalrous and increasingly jealous mother who happened, tragically, to die before any of these universal mother-daughter tensions could be resolved.

“Then, at the tender age of seventeen, the child bravely speaks up about the secret of her true father. At eighteen, she goes to live with that father, who proves to be a deeply understanding, loving and openhearted man: a
good
man. Well, Mr. Ulrickson, should it surprise any of us who are students of the mind—and you, sir, a writer and artist, are every inch an expert in the universal truths that I speak of; Freud himself admitted that everything he ever discovered about the mysteries of human nature was first said by Shakespeare—should it surprise us if a girl with the history of your Chloe should, once accepted into the secure embrace of her long-lost father, find awakened in her breast those very conflicts never worked through during the requisite phase, the critical window, of childhood? A century of psychoanalytic thought has
taught us nothing if not that those earliest childhood wounds do not magically heal themselves, but rather fester in the unconscious, distorting our growth and maturation, until they erupt in some form of neurotic, or worse, behavior. And that, Mr. Ulrickson, is what we see happening in your Chloe today.”

“My God,” Jasper whispered.

“I hasten to add,” said Dez, “that she feels especially guilty because you have been such a good father—one deserving of nothing but her chaste devotion. Yet, instead, she burns with this terrible, ungovernable lust for you.”

Jasper was dumbstruck.

“Do I understand, by your silence, that you had no knowledge of this?” said Dez.

“None,” Jasper said weakly. “None whatsoever.”

Or was this true? He suddenly recalled that doe-eyed, submissive, somehow come-hither look she gave him in the courthouse, when he first came into the small antechamber, and that charged, mischievous glance she pierced him with when she settled into the passenger seat of his car, tugging at the hem of her short skirt. The way she had displayed her legs on that car ride, and during her yoga stretches, and then, later, in his bedroom, how she had hiked herself onto his lap, crushed herself against him and stared into his eyes as if trying to hypnotize him into a kiss. Then her whispered request to sleep with him in his bed—a request that would, later (he now surmised), trigger that shattering dream.

“Perhaps …” Jasper said haltingly. “Perhaps there were some
small
signs, after all.”

“Aah, so,” said Dez.

“But tell me,” Jasper said, “how did she tell
you
? About her feelings for me?”

“The truth,” Dez said, “emerged quite without my prompting, in a spontaneous free association the revelatory power of which has left your daughter in a dangerous state of shame, confusion and embarrassment. What concerns me now is that we take proper action to neutralize, and
normalize
, Chloe’s psychological situation. May I speak plainly? I think unvarnished frankness is imperative. You say that you ‘never suspected.’ But, Mr. Ulrickson, in my experience, few men in your position fail to notice what is going on inside their child, owing to the unconscious ways that we—all of us—communicate with one another. In psychoanalysis, we call it the transference and countertransference.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” Jasper said.

“It would be perfectly understandable, within the dynamics of the transference and countertransference, that you should, due to Chloe’s invisible—and quite unconscious—machinations and projections, begin to feel an ‘answering’ response. Not because of any deliberate, cold-blooded or (to cast this in outmoded moral terms)
evil
effort on the part of your daughter to
seduce
you. We are speaking of purely subliminal, subconscious actions on her part to arouse in you a reciprocal erotic response—all in the interest of resolving her Electra complex, all in her bid to repossess the male organ stolen from her, and thus feel
whole.
Do you see?”

Jasper was beginning to—and the illumination filled him with dread.

“Mr. Ulrickson, what I am trying to say, in my albeit roundabout and jargon-filled manner, is that your daughter has been trying to provoke a
response
in you. May I prevail upon your admirable honesty and ask if you have experienced
any
such countertransferential reaction? Please understand that anything you say in this session is protected under patient–doctor confidentiality; nothing can or will be used to undermine your custodial rights—quite the opposite. I am groping to understand the dimensions of poor Chloe’s complex in the service of
strengthening
the bond between the two of you and thus ensure that nothing occur that would lead to her forcible removal from the home.”