Undone (29 page)

The judge imposed a permanent restraining order preventing Jasper, upon his release, from coming within one hundred yards of Chloe, and barring him from seeing his younger daughter, Madeline, until she was eighteen years of age, at which point she could decide for herself what kind of relationship, if any, she wished to have with her father. His name and mug shot would be entered onto the state’s sex offender registry and he would have to abide by the rules and regulations of the governing statutes, which included notifying his neighbors of his offender status, attending regular therapy, and meeting, thrice weekly, with his parole officer.

The judge asked if he would like to make a statement.

Jasper rose and, head hanging, spoke in a raspy, nearly inaudible whisper. He said that he wished to apologize to his family, his friends, his publisher, his readers and everyone who had ever
respected him. Most especially, he wanted to apologize to Chloe, upon whom he had inflicted irreparable psychic and emotional damage. “Although I recognize,” he said, his voice breaking, “that it is far too late for apologies.”

F
or his own safety, he was placed in the Administrative Segregation Program—solitary confinement—away from the other inmates, whose code dictated that they beat or kill those prisoners convicted of crimes against children.

He spent twenty-three hours a day in a seven-by-twelve-foot cell, with one hour for solo exercise, which he took by walking in a circle in a small yard bounded by high walls of gray brick, a postage stamp of sky visible overhead. His only other glimpse of sky was through a small barred window a few inches from the ceiling of his cell. He pored again and again over the letters that arrived, almost daily, from his sister, who told him of Maddy’s adjustment to life in San Francisco. “She’s
settling in well,” Laura wrote. “She already feels like a member of the family, a twin sister to our Josie. She of course asks after you and Pauline, and we have told her that she will eventually be returning to Connecticut, but that at present you need to be able to devote all your time to Pauline.” In a letter one month later, Laura wrote that Maddy’s questions about her parents had dwindled almost to nothing—news which, for Jasper, was bittersweet: he was glad that the natural resilience of childhood had made Maddy bond so quickly and closely with her new family, but he was heartbroken to think that he and Pauline had already dimmed for her to ghostly presences, posthumous people.

Three months into his sentence, he received notification of Chloe’s civil suit. As with the criminal trial, he refused to offer any defense. The judge entered a default judgment in Chloe’s favor, and her lawyer (an aggressive New York attorney famous for winning record-setting cash awards, and recommended by Dez) argued strenuously for damages commensurate with the horrors of Jasper’s crime and as a warning to abusers everywhere. The judge agreed and seized Jasper’s bank accounts, securities, investments, cars and future royalties, as well as the Connecticut house. The property and possessions were sold at auction. The judge ordered the accumulated proceeds divided evenly between Jasper’s dependents: Maddy’s share put in trust until her eighteenth birthday; Pauline’s held in escrow against the day she either revived or passed away (at which point her portion would be split between daughter and stepdaughter); the final third for Chloe, who would take immediate possession, having passed her eighteenth birthday.

News of his destitution was curiously comforting to Jasper, who felt that he had, in raping his daughter, abrogated all claims to humanity, including wealth and possessions. What character was it in the Bible who, stripped of everything, said that he came into this world naked and would leave it that way?

He refused all visitors—saying that he would not, could not, face anyone from his former life. Deepti, however, wrote to him regularly with news of Pauline, whose condition, she said, remained unchanged. MRIs and other scans showed that her brain was alive, but she remained unresponsive.

A daily, one-hour session of mandatory group therapy with a hangdog, mostly silent group of serial sex offenders—prison-pale, shifty-eyed men, with uniformly rounded shoulders and halting, whispery voices—was his sole human contact, save for the shouted orders of the guards (“Get back in there!”) and the implied presence of whoever it was that slid open the small hatch on his cell door to push in his three meals a day, an array of rubbery eggs, cold toast, greasy stews, gristly meats and vegetables boiled to limp, pale flavorlessness. His nights were filled with despairing dreams of Maddy and Pauline, and also of Chloe—dreams steeped in helplessness, hopelessness and horror, as when, in one recurring nightmare, he came to her weeping, begging forgiveness, touching her cheek with one hand as she looked down with troubled, confused eyes and he, in following her gaze, saw that he was, with his free hand, working deep into her spilling entrails a rusty blade.

T
here 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.