Undone

by John Colapinto

  Chloe, who (incredibly!) had been having so many of the same feelings, the same reservations and the same fears, emitted a strangled sob. She got to her feet and rushed over to Mr. Dezollet, throwing her arms around him and pouring out her confession of reciprocated adoration and desire. Somehow, she had managed to remain, despite every effort of nature to militate against it, a virgin—a happenstance she was now ready, desperately ready, to rectify. “Please,” she cried, “please make love to me.”

  Dez, after a great show of inner struggle, obliged her.

  3

  Even in his most polluted fantasies, Dez had never dared to imagine a girl like Chloe (and this was saying something)—a girl whose very inexperience paradoxically made her so wanton and free, so without inhibition or shame, so pliant and passionate. She came to him every night after dark, sneaking from her mother’s small house down the River Road, riding her bike to his apartment above the Mill.

  He knew that it was madness to have her come to him every night, this way, for five or six hours of undreamed-of exertions on those sofas, on that shag rug, on the kitchen counters, in the bath, on that lurching water bed. He was risking not only his job but his freedom. (He had been expressly warned that another transgression would result in a long incarceration.) But it was a measure of the spell she had cast over him that he was willing to risk everything to be with her, to experience those hours of savage bliss—before he sent her home, in the wee hours of the morning, and they met up again a few hours later at the school, in the blameless roles of teacher and student, his fingers and face still redolent of her musk and sweetness—a subterfuge whose practical joke aspect only further fueled his lust.

  And something more than lust. He was surprised, mystified, by the depth of his feelings for her. His desire seemed to go beyond his insatiable appetite for her flesh. He felt an unfamiliar possessiveness, a desire to have her wholly to himself and under his control. She was something new in his experience. Certainly he could be contemptuous and cutting about her ill-informed opinions; he could be brutally derisive about the thoughts she set down in the essays she wrote for him in class (“In Catcher in the Rye J. Slinger has a great writing style of sounding like a teenage boy …”). He was annoyed by the regimen of diet and exercise, culled from Glamour and Seventeen magazines, that she used to tone her already lean and graceful body; he mocked her for her fascination with the celebrities she had been trained, by her television shows, to be enraptured by. But on a deeper level, shielded, hidden, he recognized some profound connection between them. He felt an almost frightening reliance on her, an emotional dependence. The feeling was unprecedented for him and brought him a form of happiness.

  If Dez could not bring himself to use the word love in connection with Chloe, she had no problem whatever applying the term to her feelings for him. In her diary, she described herself as “totally and completely head over heels in LOVE with Dez”—a feeling that went beyond the sexual. She had developed a pure, unswerving devotion to his soul. She idolized him as a “genius.” She lived to please him.

  By this time, she was barely speaking to her mother. Holly had long since noticed the painful shift in interest on the part of her “boyfriends” from herself to her blossoming daughter, and this had given rise to that oldest of familial rivalries, one no less real for being a cliché. As the mortifying awareness of her own vanished charms was borne home to her, Holly, who had once confined her drinking to weekends, now sat guzzling wine or beer in front of the television every night, while at the same time discoursing, in an increasing slur, about how she had wasted her life by staying in New Halcyon, by failing to go to college, by having a kid, especially such an ungrateful, lazy, scheming little kid as Chloe. Chloe hated listening to these monologues, which modulated seamlessly from self-pity to castigation. But at the same time, she welcomed them as a prelude to the moment when Holly would drop into alcoholic unconsciousness, allowing Chloe to slip out, undetected, to see Dez. Indeed, so low had Holly sunk, by mid-March of that year, that she failed even to respond with any surprise or outrage when Chloe’s principal telephoned, one afternoon, to notify her of the scandal.

  Principal Heinrichs explained, in an urgent murmur, that one of Chloe’s teachers—”a Mr. Dezollet, who teaches English”—had been witnessed, by a fellow faculty member, behaving toward Chloe in an “inappropriate manner.” The incident had occurred when the two were alone in a classroom—or thought themselves alone. Miss Simmons, the art teacher, had entered Mr. Dezollet’s room, between periods, with the intention of asking him if her art students might paint a mural depicting the literary history of Vermont on his wall (and, it might be added, with the shy hope that Mr. Dezollet might notice, and comment upon, the new dress Miss Simmons, who had been so taken with Mr. Dezollet at his job interview, was debuting that very day). She had slipped in just as Mr. Dezollet, standing behind the girl, was removing his pursed lips from her swan-like young neck. It was, to be sure, just a peck, a quick pressing of the lips to an area where her shoulder met the turn in her clavicle. But it was done with a familiarity that left no doubt in Miss Simmons’s mind that she had seen something worthy of severe sanction. Dez, who had seen Simmons flee the room, soon heard himself being summoned to the principal’s office over the school’s PA system. He elected not to obey the invitation, and instead quit the school with a haste that suggested the building was in flames or in imminent danger of exploding. When Dez failed to appear in the principal’s office, Miss Simmons, her breast heaving with indignation and hurt, demanded Principal Heinrichs notify the authorities of his flight. But Heinrichs, assured by Chloe that Mr. Dezollet had simply been innocently demonstrating a scene in a book (The Scarlet Letter), and eager to avoid a scandal, declined to call the police. However, when he recounted all of this over the phone to Holly, he did add: “This does not preclude you, as Chloe’s mother, from pressing charges, if you so choose.”

  Holly had already begun her afternoon cocktail hour. Drink always made her belligerent. Her response was blunt. “If anyone should be locked up,” she said, “it’s that little slut of mine.” She did, however, attempt to question her daughter when Chloe returned from school that afternoon. But the child simply ran past her and vanished into her room, slamming the door behind her.

  Chloe threw herself on the bed. Her heart and mind were in turmoil. After her last class, she had rushed to Dez’s apartment above the Mill—but found it empty, his belongings cleared out. He was gone. She would never see him again. She wept inconsolably. Then, shortly before midnight, the phone rang. It was Dez! He told her, in a hurried whisper (he was speaking from a pay phone at a pizza parlor ten miles down the lake, in Sayer’s Cliff), that he had moved to a trailer park, where he had rented a single-wide motor home. The location was secluded and would suit their needs for now. He told her how to get to him—”just follow the main road around the lake until you come to the sign for Black Point; take the next right, and then follow the narrow dirt path that leads into the woods and terminates at the grounds of the trailer park. I’m in a white and blue Tartarus.”

  She went to him, pedaling furiously through the icy dark, past jagged, leafless black trees, with a sliver of silvery March moon keeping pace with her both above, in the sky, and below, in trembling reflection, in the thawing lake. And it was from Dez’s new location—the scrubby clearing in the woods, with the ramshackle collection of trailers and RVs parked in rows amid the surrounding black pines and maples—that they resumed their romance. Dez insisted that she continue to live at home, continue attending school (“You’ve got to act like nothing happened—let them forget”); but he also insisted that she come to him, every night, without fail. And he vowed that he would think of a way to better their lot.

  So matters rested for the next two weeks, until that morning at the end of March when Chloe arrived home from Dez’s trailer, at dawn, to discover a police cruiser in front of the house. Her mother’s car was not out front, in its usual spot. Dropping her bicyc
le, she ran up to the policeman, who was standing on the porch ringing the doorbell. She asked what was going on. Where was her mother? The cop, a young man with strangely lush, feminine-looking eyelashes, removed his hat. The cruiser’s red light kept spinning, intermittently bathing Chloe’s stricken, uncomprehending face in its harsh, hellish glow.

  The cop asked if she had any relatives with whom she could stay. She said that she had no one—her father was dead; both sets of grandparents likewise; and she had no aunts or uncles. The policeman informed her that it was against the law for a minor to live alone, so he would be delivering her to the Department of Children and Families, in Newport. He told her to go and wait in the back of the cruiser while he finished his paperwork.

  Chloe walked to the curb, but instead of getting into the squad car, she bent, slowly, never taking her eyes off the policeman, who remained on the porch, scribbling in his pad. She righted her bicycle, mounted it, then glided off, glancing behind her every few seconds to see if he was following. He was not. She rounded the corner, then stood up on the pedals and pumped hard, racing back to the trailer park in the woods at the far end of the lake, back to Dez.

  4

  She was surprised at the keenness of her grief. Long-buried memories of her mother—young, slim, sober, beautiful, smiling down at her in a garden somewhere, tickling her on a sofa long ago in some forgotten room in a slant of sunlight, a smell of talc and lilies of the valley … the nubbly texture of a white cotton bedspread at nap time with Mommy … These vague, jumbled impressions were joined by memories from a few years later, when she was a shy, melancholy preteen—fat, freckled and docile—and her mother, not yet addled by booze, was Chloe’s best, her only, friend. They would sit together on the sofa, in the evening, and Holly would reminisce about her various boyfriends, including Hughie Soames and Jasper Ulrickson, about the original confusion over which one of them was Chloe’s father. She loved to hear these stories of her mother’s life, stories that took on the coloration of high Romance and that sharpened Chloe’s appetite for the days when she would be the object of rival males’ affections. “Tell me again about when you were young,” she would say as she lay with her head in Holly’s lap, her mother’s soft hand absently stroking the hair at Chloe’s temple. These were the memories that haunted her after Holly died, when Chloe, having taken refuge with Dez in the Tartarus, buried herself under the sheets and blankets on his bed and cried and cried and cried.

  True, she wished that Dez could be more sympathetic toward her in her grief. But she knew that he was dealing with his own problems. After losing his teaching job, he had sunk into a dangerous lassitude, unable most days to get out of bed until noon and only then to sit, unshaven, unwashed, in front of the television. He had even lost all interest in sex, pushing Chloe away when she made an advance or, on those rare occasions when he had tried to make love to her, rolling off with a muttered curse, sweat-slicked and shame-faced, but offering no excuses, no explanations for his failure. She had even begun to worry, after her mom died, that he had fallen out of love with her. But then came that Tovah show. And the moment when Chloe heard the name Jasper Ulrickson and told Dez, in all innocence, that her mother had been with a man of that name. The words had acted on Dez like a spell from a fairy tale, woke him from his slumber, brought him back from the dead. For weeks, he had barely budged from the sofa. Now, he barely slept. In fevered bouts of pacing the tiny trailer, he thought aloud, talking out the plan, throwing out his hands, and laughing when he found his way around some blockage that threatened to ruin the scheme.

  So glad and relieved was she to see him alive and happy again, she would have been willing to go along with any plan he dreamed up. But this scheme in particular, the plan for her to seduce, then expose, Jasper Ulrickson, struck her as right and just—especially after Dez patiently explained to her why Ulrickson deserved to have the trick played on him. Dez had made her see how Ulrickson had cruelly used her mother, taken advantage of her, then tossed her aside to go and pursue his education, his career, his fame and wealth, while poor Holly, in the years and decades that followed, sank into poverty and despair and drink. Had Ulrickson ever called to ask how Holly was? Had he ever offered to help her out a little financially? Think of the difference that would have made to Holly—and to Chloe! And what if Ulrickson had ever deigned to return to New Halcyon to visit the woman he so casually seduced and then shunted aside? “Do you think for a minute that your mother would have become a desperate alcoholic?” Dez asked. “Do you think she would have been trawling the singles bars every weekend? Chloe, do you think she’d be dead?”

  All of this strengthened her resolve to play her part in the scheme. But her motivation was less about punishing Ulrickson than it was about making Dez happy. And he was happy! Suddenly, he was voracious—alternating his bouts of planning with absolutely brutal attacks upon her body. Sometimes, he continued to plot and plan even during their lovemaking. Thrusting into her, he would grunt into her ear that she was his “secret weapon,” his “equalizer.” Sometimes it frightened Chloe to know that the fulfillment of all his dreams rested on her. One night, after a particularly fierce session—which Dez had punctuated, at climax, with a triumphant shout about how the plan was going to “change everything!”—she began to cry.

  “What if I mess it up somehow?” she asked tearfully, in the panting aftermath. “I don’t want to wreck all your dreams.”

  She was lying on her back on the trailer’s narrow bed, her wheat- and honey- and rope-hued hair fanned out around her flushed face. Dez, sitting cross-legged beside her in a stupor of sexual satisfaction, simply laughed as he looked down at her Eden-naked body. He dreamily swept his hand from her collarbones over her improbably full and shapely breasts (she was otherwise so slender), down the incurved bare belly, which still rose and fell rapidly, to the poignant points of her pelvic bones, down her legs until he cradled one of her delicate feet in his hands. “I assure you,” he said, kissing the tips of her pink toes. “You are the one element of the plan about which I have no doubts. No doubts whatsoever.”

  5

  On a Friday morning seven days after her mother’s death, Chloe rode her bike into Sayer’s Cliff, bought a ticket at the greasy spoon–cum–bus terminal, then boarded a Greyhound bound for the city of Newport. She was dressed in the sober ensemble that Dez had picked out for her at the local mall the day before: white blouse, black blazer and matching slacks. Her hair was in a no-nonsense ponytail, her face free of makeup.

  She arrived in Newport (a down-at-heels resort city perched on a peninsula at the southern end of Lake Memphremagog, on the Canada-US border) just before noon. As Dez had instructed, she walked six blocks east to the Division of Family Services district office, a large gray government building at 100 Main Street, across from a block-long dollar store. On the second floor, she spoke to a receptionist, and a minute later a heavy, pear-shaped man in shirtsleeves, crumpled tie and brown slacks appeared and identified himself as Mr. Stubbs, Family Services Division Officer. He invited her back into the rat’s maze of work cubicles, to a small corner office. There, he invited her to sit in a chair facing a desk heaped with papers and file folders from which a brownish-gray computer sprouted like a mushroom.

  “You are classified, by the Vermont state police, as a runaway,” Mr. Stubbs said, peering at the computer screen. “You fled the custody of a police officer.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said. “I did run away, but there was a reason.”

  (“You’re going to tell them about your mother’s history with Jasper Ulrickson,” Dez had told her when he coached her about this meeting. “You’re going to say that she told you never to tell anyone that he is your father.” He warned her that the agency people would doubt her—at first. “So you’re going to tell them that the proof is in your mother’s house—the diary and photos.”)

  Chloe did as Dez instructed. She even drew on the acting skills she had honed in her role as a fairy in a middle-school play, and pr
etended to weep. Stubbs listened, impassively, then tapped at his computer. He said that a police officer would be dispatched to her mother’s house to collect the diary and photos. In the meantime, Chloe would be kept in Department of Children and Families custody. “Which means,” he said, “we will place you in short-term foster care while we work to resolve the paternity issue.” (Dez had told her, in advance, not to panic; that her time in foster care would be brief.)

  Stubbs was able immediately to place Chloe with an elderly, childless, Christian couple, the Gaitskills, on the Capeville Road in a house filled with lace doily–draped furniture, porcelain Nativity scenes, crucifixes and a baby grand piano with keys the color of yellowing teeth and upon which old Mr. Gaitskill played hymns from a songbook while Mrs. Gaitskill sang along in a quavery voice. They did not own a television, but they did listen, after dinner, to the “wireless,” an ancient radio on which they tuned in a religious program broadcast from Burlington. At bedtime, Chloe would retreat to her room and, under the gaze of various framed saints, call Dez in the trailer—their sole form of contact for the time being, since it was, he said, far too dangerous for them to see each other while the plan was in its early, delicate, stages of development.