UNDONE
A NOVEL
JOHN COLAPINTO
Dedication
To Donna and Johnny,
and to my mother
Epigraph
And the LORD said unto Satan,
Hast thou considered my servant Job,
that there is none like him in the Earth,
a perfect and an upright man, one that
feareth God, and escheweth evil?
—Job 1:8
Satan Trismegistus subtly rocks
Our ravished spirits on his wicked bed
Until the precious metal of our will
Is leached out by this cunning alchemist:
The Devil’s hand directs our every move—
The things we loathed become the things we love …
—Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal
(tr. Richard Howard)
Table of Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
PART ONE
1
2
3
4
5
6
PART TWO
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
PART THREE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
PART FOUR
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
PART FIVE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Advance praise for Undone
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART ONE
1
For two days the girl did nothing but lie in bed and cry. It was driving Dez crazy. The sobs, the shuddering intakes of breath, the sudden wails of “Why, God? Why?” before the diminuendo of sniffles and nose blows; then the whole process repeating itself. True, she had just lost her mother—abruptly, violently—in a car crash. But how much was a man expected to take? He was on the point of yelling at her to Get a grip when, on the afternoon of the third day, she lifted her head from the pillow and said, in a blurry, tear-muffled voice, “I’m hungry.” Dez found this an improvement over her blubbering, but he wished she could have chosen a better moment to start talking to him. His show was about to start.
He was slouched on the sofa—really just a narrow padded bench—that ran along one wall of the trailer where he had been holed up, like a fugitive, for almost two months, ever since losing his job (or, rather, fleeing from it). The trailer, a three-decades-old Tartarus model, sat among other sagging relics much like it in a clearing in the woods of northern Vermont. With its cracked concrete parking areas, ill-tended grass and communal bathroom hut, the trailer park made a sharp contrast to the privileged neighborhood in Raleigh, North Carolina, where Dez had grown up, to say nothing of the ivied quadrangles of Duke University where he got his BA, or the stately lawns of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover where he earned his legal degree. But there were compensations. His neighbors were mostly retirees on a tight budget, a low-key community ignored by the local authorities, and thus the perfect place for Dez to be sojourning until he figured out his next move.
The day was hot and humid, the trailer stifling. He was dressed in a pair of jeans, no shirt or shoes. His skinny torso might have been that of an underfed eighteen-year-old, but Dez was, in reality, thirty-one, a fact betrayed chiefly by the triangular areas of balding above his temples, and the deeply carved smile lines (pentimenti of more carefree days) bracketing his lipless, downturning mouth.
“Come and make me feel better,” Chloe whimpered from the sleeping nook at the end of the trailer.
“Can’t,” he said. “Show’s started.”
He kept his eyes on the television’s small, static-riddled screen. He’d bought the set for eight dollars at a swap meet in Sayer’s Cliff and was running it on a pair of bent rabbit ears (couldn’t afford satellite, if such a luxury were even available in these godforsaken woods). Despite the abysmal reception, he never missed Tovah in the Afternoon, the top-rated daytime talk show that specialized in true tales of human fortitude, the endurance of the human spirit, the likely existence of Angels, and the healing powers of love. Dez considered Tovah’s show the crystallization of all that was pitiable in the American character: the sentimentality, the infantilism, the dithery-headed optimism, the lust for success disguised as a quest for the spiritual. (He particularly loved those episodes devoted to the perils of material desires, which ended with each member of the studio audience practically wetting herself with joy over receiving a 100% genuine Rolex watch!) The show always buoyed him; it was living proof that his own dramatic fall from a life of comfort and respectability (a fall precipitated by the most natural and insistent of all human impulses) was anyone’s fault but his own: it was the fault of a sick, silly, hypocritical society, a society in its death throes.
To the sound of the show’s raucous theme music—a blend of balalaikas and soft rock guitars—Tovah burst from the wings, a short, heavyset woman with a mannish, square face and tear-misty brown eyes behind her trademark pink-framed glasses. She strode to the lip of the stage and threw her arms wide, as if to embrace the studio audience, which unleashed a storm of cheers and clapping. When this died down, she swept her gaze over the crowd and said, in an accent flavored by her native Queens, “Welcome all! Today, we bring you a story of inspiration. A tale of hope and courage and survival; of choices made, of hurdles crossed, of deep loss and terrible sacrifice, and—always—the power of Love.”
Dez’s favorite guests—the ones who best lent themselves to his sardonic ridicule—were the spirit mediums, the life coaches and ghost-whisperers, the angel-summoners and “relationship experts.” Alas, today’s show featured a mere memoirist, author of the book Lessons from My Daughter, the true story of the catastrophic stroke suffered by the writer’s wife while she was giving birth to their only child, the titular daughter, now almost five years old. The episode promised to be a dreary bore.
“Please,” Chloe said, drawing out the word. “Come.”
Dez did not budge. He felt an uncharacteristic pang of self-reproach at his disinclination to console the child in her grief. But he was at a loss for how to do so. Partly this was owing to that simple lack of human empathy which Dez freely and unapologetically acknowledged in himself. Then there was his own experience of parental loss, clearly so different from Chloe’s. (When his despised father, a judge, died last year, Dez was ecstatic—not because the old man had left him any of his considerable fortune; he hadn’t, not a penny, which explained in part, but only in part, Dez’s current reduced circumstances.) Finally, there was Dez’s fear that any tenderness he might display toward the girl would be mistaken for an overture toward a different kind of intimacy—the sexual intimacy that had been his reason for pursuing her in the first place but which, lately, had become a physiological impossibility, ever since his job loss and the subsequent depression that had settled over him, rendering him, humiliatingly and for the first time ever, impotent.
“Well, then, I’m getting up,” Chloe said.
He turned toward the sleeping nook and watched as she threw back the sheet and climbed from the bed. Dressed only in a pair of white Y-front underpants and a shrunken T-shirt, she stood in
profile to him, lifting her elbows high as she swirled her hair into a ponytail, the gawkiness of her elongated limbs contrasting with the roundness and resilience of her womanly curves. At seventeen, she had not fully left childhood, but neither had she fully entered adulthood, and it was the teasing, teetering balance between the two states that so stirred Dez—or used to, before this gloom killed all desire.
She tiptoed into the living space and curled up beside him, pulling her feet onto the sofa and cushioning her head in his lap. He kept his eyes on the television.
“Look at me,” she softly admonished him.
He glanced down into her upturned face—a round, pertly pretty face that still retained a cushioning layer of baby fat but through which the angled cut of her cheekbones was just beginning to show. There was some puffiness under her wideset green eyes, patches of pink raw skin around her delicate nostrils, and her lips had a more swollen quality than usual, from all that crying. But none of this could mar the overall impression of youth and freshness in her face. She was peering up at him, Dez noted, with an expression of unsettling emotional ardency and need.
“Feeling happier?” he said, turning his eyes back to the TV.
“I guess,” she said. “But know what I was thinking, just now? Before I got up?” Dez made no response. She went on, undaunted: “Now that my mom is gone, you’re the only person I have left in the world.”
This was, unfortunately, quite true. She had told him, when they first met, of how her father had drowned when she was an infant: slipped below the ice on frozen Lake Sylvan during some bibulous antics with friends. Dez had expressed the conventional condolences over her loss, but had secretly applauded it: he knew from bitter experience that when courting a girl as young as Chloe it was best there be no potentially enraged father in the picture. But now, with her mother having contrived to join her father in violent, untimely death, she was officially an orphan, Dez her sole protector. He did not relish responsibility even at the best of times, and these were hardly that, with his bank balance fast dipping toward zero and no plans for how to replenish it.
He had thought more than once about ditching her—packing his few possessions into a bag and slipping out while she slept, lighting out for California, Florida, Mexico—anywhere but here. But he had somehow not been able to do that. There was something about this one that had gotten under his skin. The same thing, apparently, that had made him risk everything by seducing her in the first place, despite the warnings, the legal threats, the second chances, the therapeutic interventions, the sober promises to reform.
“See what I mean?” Chloe said.
“Hmmm?”
The television show, despite its dismal guest, had started to interest him. With her usual breathtaking invasiveness, Tovah had just asked the hapless memoirist about his sex life—inquiring how he “managed,” given that his wife was confined to a wheelchair, unable to speak or to move any body part, save for her eyelids. The guest, a tall, sandy-haired man of around forty with bulging blue eyes and a diffident smile, was staring at Tovah in apparent shock, evidently having failed to anticipate her question.
“I’m saying,” Chloe repeated, “all we’ve got is each other.”
“Absolutely,” Dez said, his eyes on the screen. He was straining now to catch the answer produced by Tovah’s guest, who had begun mouthing some platitudinous euphemisms about how he missed “physical closeness of that kind” with his wife. “But,” the man went on, “having resolved to take my marriage vows seriously, I’ve been forced to accept that love is about more than the purely physical act, an act that partly—but only partly—defines marriage.”
“Dez?” Chloe said.
He grunted rudely, dismissively, in reply.
“Oh, forget it,” she said, giving up and rising from the sofa.
She stepped across to the kitchenette—an arrangement of camp stove, icebox and sink beneath an overhang of shallow cabinets—and began to hunt for something to eat.
Dez sat up now and leaned toward the television screen, where Tovah continued to badger her guest about the demands of his frustrated libido. “You’re only forty-one years old,” she said, “still in the prime. Yet you’re saying that you remain faithful to Pauline?”
“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!”
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