Undone

by John Colapinto

  Jasper could see the doctor’s reasoning. He could see why turning a cold shoulder to Chloe—”shunning” her, as the doctor put it—might have served only to exacerbate the problem, clouding the atmosphere with unspoken feelings that had further curdled into perverse taboo desire. But the thought of adopting the kind of uninhibited displays of physical affection that the doctor was proposing struck Jasper dumb with terror—and for no better reason than that even the contemplation of such acts caused his mutinous body grotesquely to react.

  “And of course,” Dez went on, “you will be aided in your program of physically expressed affection by Chloe, who will be making every effort to curtail her unconscious efforts to arouse you. We have spoken of the possibility that you have been experiencing a countertransferential erotic desire for her, so she is alert to the dangers.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jasper said, not sure he had understood. “You’re saying that Chloe knows about my feelings for her?”

  “I expressed to her the likelihood that she has stirred you to a symmetrical state of desire, yes. She came to the insightful conclusion that your standoffishness might reflect your efforts to deny incestuous urges. She is a sensitive child, quite alive to the undercurrents.”

  “Good Lord,” Jasper said, mortified that she knew his horrendous secret. On the other hand, he now knew hers. Perhaps this state of mutual unmasking would serve to defuse the situation.

  “Trust me,” Dez said as if reading Jasper’s mind, “it is far, far better to have things out in the open, to throw open the shutters, so to speak, on a house formerly cloaked in darkness. Sunlight, Mr. Ulrickson, is the best disinfectant! And I’m sure you will find that, by indulging in the very physicality that you fear will have an aphrodisiac effect, you have, paradoxically, neutralized that effect, robbed Eros of the strength it draws from secrecy and hiding and denial, thus to enter that state of perfect asexual innocence enjoyed by middle-aged fathers and their budding teenaged daughters the world over!”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” said Jasper doubtfully.

  “So you understand the prescription? Greater physical affection, greater expressed love. More cuddling, touching, kissing. Do you have any questions?”

  “I do have a question,” Jasper said.

  Dez started, grew alert. He had not been expecting this. “Please,” he said.

  “It concerns my wife,” Jasper said. “I’m accustomed to telling her about any and every momentous event in our lives. I was wondering if it would be appropriate for me to talk with her about what we’ve been dealing with here today? I’ve hated having secrets from her. Those secrets have caused me as much anguish almost as the feelings themselves. Now that everything’s out in the open between me and Chloe, I’d like very much to be able to explain to Pauline what’s going on. As you say, throwing open the shutters. Shouldn’t that apply for all the adults in the house?”

  Now it was Dez’s turn to be blindsided. He had assumed that Ulrickson would do everything possible to keep his wife in the dark about the novel therapy he had been prescribed. But then, Dez had not accounted for the man’s almost crazed virtue and transparency. At first, he thought that this unexpected development might impede his plan. But on reflection, he sensed an opportunity.

  “Why, yes,” he said at length. “I do think your wife should be informed. And I was just about to suggest it. In situations like this, where a strong complex reigns, the whole family is drawn into the destructive dynamic, thus exacerbating it. Indeed, it would be my guess that Pauline has been less than accepting of Chloe? I would imagine that she has acted suspicious of her, rejecting—almost as if she believed Chloe not to be your legitimate daughter? Almost as if she believed the child were an impostor?”

  “But that’s it exactly!” Jasper cried, stunned at the doctor’s perspicacity. He described Pauline’s strange reversal, from initial, ready acceptance to outright rejection of Chloe overnight. “Things have thawed a little lately because Chloe is simply so loving and affectionate and solicitous with Pauline. But tensions remain.”

  “A classic case!” Dez cried. “Your wife recognizes the threat to her domain by the invasion of a competing daughter-figure. She has been pulled into the Electra dynamic. She cuts off the daughter—as she would an offending penis! She becomes the castrating mother and vies, as best she can in her state of paralysis, for ownership of your phallus. Your wife’s helplessness makes it impossible for her to hang on to the organ, so she spurns Chloe, who aches to receive it. An extraordinarily volatile situation. We must bring her into the equation.”

  Jasper offered to go and fetch Pauline.

  “Allow me,” said Dez. “It is important that you remain, both physically and psychologically, in the session.”

  7

  Outside, in the corridor, Dez mastered an urge to crow in triumph, and instead proceeded at a sober, thoughtful pace down to the living room, where Chloe had resumed reading to the brat and the cripple.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” he told her, “but I’m afraid I must borrow Mrs. Ulrickson for a few minutes. You may go on reading to the young one.”

  “Borrow her?” Chloe said doubtfully. He had said nothing about bringing Pauline into this. She did not like the sound of it.

  “Her husband wishes her to join the session,” Dez said, giving her a hard warning stare.

  “Are—are you sure you need her?” Chloe said. She was determined that nothing be done to hurt Pauline. She was blameless.

  Dez stepped behind the wheelchair and took the handles. “Quite sure,” he said. “Do you object?”

  “I’m just not sure that—”

  “Is everything all right?” said Deepti, sticking her head out of the kitchen door.

  “Everything is fine,” Dez called out. “Mr. Ulrickson wishes for his wife to join the session. Young Chloe is not convinced that this is wise.”

  “Chloe,” Deepti said in an admonishing tone. “Your mother is quite capable.” She pulled her head back into the kitchen.

  Chloe shifted Maddy off her lap and stood. “Can I speak to you?” she said to Dez.

  “Certainly.” He stepped out from behind the wheelchair and they retreated a few steps from the living area into the dining room. Dez left the wheelchair pointing toward the hallway, Pauline in profile to them, so that she could not watch their whispered colloquy.

  “Why do you need her?” Chloe said.

  “An inspired improvisation. She’s become crucial to the plan. To stopping Ulrickson.” He shot a glance into the living room at Maddy, who was now standing beside her mother, stroking her cheek. “Or have you forgotten?”

  Chloe’s eyes lingered for a moment on the little girl. She turned back to Dez. “Okay,” she said. “But don’t hurt Pauline. He’s the one.”

  “Of course,” Dez said soothingly. He started to move off, but Chloe grasped his forearm.

  “I’m serious,” she hissed. “Don’t hurt her.” She looked again at Pauline and saw that Maddy, in climbing onto her mother’s lap, had turned the wheelchair in their direction. Chloe pulled her hand from Dez’s arm. But too late. She saw Pauline’s eyes widen.

  “It’s good of you to be concerned about the welfare of your stepmother,” said Dez, who also saw that Pauline had witnessed that intimate, familiar touch. What did it matter? The woman could say nothing. “But as Deepti says,” he went on, “there is really nothing to worry about.”

  Dez strolled back into the living room and shooed Maddy off Pauline’s lap. “I’ll bring your mommy right back,” he told the child. He stepped behind the chair and seized the handles. Chloe watched helplessly as he rolled Pauline out of the room.

  As Dez proceeded down the hallway, he suppressed an antic urge to lean on the handles of the wheelchair and pop it into a wheelie. He might have done so too if not for fear that Ulrickson, wondering what was delaying things, would stick his head out the door and spoil the fun.

  Jasper, sitting in a pose of despondency, elbows on his knees, head hanging
between his shoulders, looked up when Dez and Pauline entered the room. He greeted his wife with a smile that looked like a grimace. Dez parked her facing the sofa and then resumed his seat in the wingback armchair. Pauline’s eyes darted nervously back and forth between the two men, who sat facing her.

  “I think,” Dez said to Jasper, “that it would be best if you were to explain to your wife what has come to light in the sessions.”

  “Me?” said Jasper.

  “You must break the silence.”

  This seemed to make sense. Jasper cleared his throat. He began, haltingly, to tell Pauline about Chloe’s “emotional confusion,” her tendency toward regression “around issues relating to her lack of a father while growing up.” He traced, as Dez had explained it to him, Freud’s theory of erotic orientation and gender identity in females. Eventually, meanderingly, he arrived at the crux of the issue: Chloe’s Electra complex; her desire to “repossess the male member stolen from her at birth.” Pauline’s face flooded scarlet. Jasper, alarmed, looked at Dez.

  “Go on,” Dez prompted him.

  “So what this has resulted in,” Jasper said carefully, “is a quite predictable state of compensation in Chloe. One in which she has deluded herself into thinking that she is experiencing a kind of, well, infatuation with me.”

  “There is no need to speak in euphemisms,” Dez cut in. “Your wife is an intelligent woman, fully capable of understanding the psychodynamics. To speak in anything but direct terms is to condescend needlessly.” Dez turned to Pauline. “Your husband is saying, or trying to say, that his daughter has formed a strong erotic desire for him. Furthermore, her unconscious desires have, predictably, awakened a countertransference response in your husband. In short, they strongly desire each other.”

  “I have never acted on these feelings,” Jasper hastened to tell Pauline. “And I have made every effort to keep them hidden from Chloe. But, as Dr. Geld has made clear to me, the problem only continues to fester. I must stop sweeping all of this under the carpet. That’s why I’m telling you this. You, who are the most important person in my life. I know it’s difficult to hear, and God knows it’s difficult to speak about, but Dr. Geld is committed to helping all of us resolve this, and that’s why you need to know.”

  He paused, waiting for a reaction. Pauline glared at him. The blush had drained from her face. Her pupils had dilated, crowding out the light brown of her irises and making all but the whites of her eyes into gaping black holes. He looked at Dez with concern.

  Dez avoided his eye. “I have prescribed,” Dez said to Pauline, “a regimen of physical closeness and expressed affection between father and daughter that would mimic, and thus make up for, the kisses, caresses and cuddling that Chloe missed from her father during the all-important childhood developmental stage. You might call it a form of regression therapy. The aim is to bring father and daughter closer together, to bring them, as it were, to the point of symbolic consummation.”

  Pauline began to blink rapidly.

  “Hold on,” Jasper said. “I think something’s wrong.”

  “Yes—she’s resisting,” Dez said. “In denial. A not uncommon reaction.”

  Pauline continued to flutter her eyelids.

  “I don’t know if that’s it—” Jasper started to say, but Dez cut him off.

  “Mr. Ulrickson,” he rapped out, “you alluded to a diary that you keep in an effort to exorcise your feelings toward your daughter. It would be beneficial for you to read some entries aloud, to impress upon Pauline the severity of your affliction and thus help her understand why I have prescribed such a course of treatment.”

  “Read from my diary?” Jasper said, incredulous.

  “If you would.”

  Pauline stared at Jasper with a strangely glazed, empty expression.

  Dez repeated, with an irritated emphasis, “If you would.”

  Jasper, surrendering his will to the doctor—believing him the only person who could extricate his family from the deadly trap it had fallen into—rose and walked, with the heavy tread of a sleepwalker, over to his desk. He sat and typed in the password. He stared for a moment at the screen, and then looked at Dez, who nodded.

  Jasper began, stumblingly, to read aloud. “‘No matter how I—I abuse myself, it is as if I cannot … cannot leech from my guts the poison that breeds there. It is Chloe’s face, Chloe’s limbs, Chloe’s scent, Chloe’s gestures and movements that stir this poison to life within me …’”

  He read on in a robotic, stilted monotone, while Dez, his back to Jasper, grinned at Pauline. Oh, she recognized him all right: that was obvious from the look of freezing hatred that had come into her eyes. That touch on his arm from Chloe must have swept away any doubts.

  “‘It is as if Chloe,’” Jasper’s voice read on, “‘were a stranger to me, an erotically intoxicating stranger not of my flesh, not of my blood—’”

  Dez, his back to Jasper, grinned at the helpless woman. Pauline closed her eyes. A terrible grating noise came from her throat.

  Jasper jumped to his feet and hurried over.

  “She appears to be having a seizure,” Dez said coolly.

  Her eyes had rolled up into her head. The grating noise continued to come from her throat. Jasper bellowed for Deepti—needlessly, since she had heard the sounds of Pauline’s distress and was already rushing down the hall. She burst in through the closed door, ran to Pauline and pried open her mouth. “I don’t see any obstruction,” she said.

  Another set of footsteps came rapidly down the hallway. Then Chloe stepped through the open door into the office. She gaped at Pauline, screamed and looked at Dez, who imperceptibly shrugged. “What have you done?” she began to ask, when she was interrupted by the patter of small feet advancing up the hall. Maddy’s voice came from outside the office: “What’s everybody doin’ in there?”

  “Take the little one outside,” Deepti said. “She must not see this.”

  “Right,” Chloe said, backing out of the room. She pulled the door closed behind her.

  Deepti stood. “Call 911,” she said.

  Dez had already strolled over to the desk and punched in the number. He handed the ringing phone to Jasper, who, when he heard the operator’s voice, began to wail, “It’s my wife! She’s dying! We need an ambulance.” The operator asked for the address. His mind went blank. “Where are we?” he cried helplessly.

  Deepti took the phone and Jasper stumbled back to the wheelchair. “It’s my fault!” he cried, falling to his knees and putting his head in Pauline’s lap. “I insisted on bringing her into the session! Oh God, Pauline, I’m sorry! Hang on, honey!”

  Dez was starting to find the emotionality of the scene tiresome, and he was also beginning to detect in his stomach ominous stirrings of nausea at the sight of the woman’s white, upturned eyes and frothing lips. He announced his intention to venture out onto the front lawn so that he could direct the ambulance when it arrived.

  “Good idea!” Jasper said. “Thank you!” He buried his face again in Pauline’s lap.

  Dez ambled to the front of the house, opened the door and stepped out into the cool tranquility of the autumn evening. No sign of Chloe and the little brat. They must have gone out back. He thought about nipping around the house, but something in the beauty and stillness of the evening held him. The sun, low in the sky, shone through the canopy of changing leaves, igniting them into a glowing membrane of yellow and plum and pumpkin. A powdered light seemed to hang in the air, shrouding the housefronts, opposite, behind their mauve lawns. Dez was not much for scenic splendors, but in his present state of relief over how beautifully his exploit had played out, he found himself strangely receptive to the delights of the waning day.

  He had been standing for only a minute or two on the flagstone walk, inhaling deeply the perfumed air, a mix of sourly rotting leaves and fragrant wood smoke, when he saw, in the misty reaches at the end of the street, a blinking red light. Almost immediately, the sound of a siren reached his ear
s. As the ambulance drew nearer, he stepped along the front path and waved it down. The vehicle, boxy white with Beckford Emergency Medical Services emblazoned on the side, swerved into the driveway and halted with a spray of gravel from under its tires. Four uniformed BEMS personnel jumped out, three men and a woman in dark blue uniforms, squawking walkie-talkies on their waists, and ran toward Dez. “End of the hall on your left,” he said, pointing toward the open front door. They rushed inside, bearing a wheeled gurney and boxes of equipment. Dez did not follow.

  Less than five minutes later, the emergency team emerged from the house. They rolled the gurney, upon which the woman lay. An L-shaped device was down her throat and a bag dripped liquid through a tube inserted into the crook of her arm. Jasper and Deepti followed behind. As Pauline was loaded into the back of the ambulance, one of the emergency personnel pointed Jasper toward the front passenger seat. He climbed in. “I’ll phone when I know something,” he told Deepti through the open passenger window. To Dez he added, “Please don’t blame yourself—it was my idea to bring her into the session.”

  Dez bowed wordlessly. The engine caught, the siren wailed to hysterical life, and the vehicle swung off the driveway, then roared down the street.

  “It is a terrible thing.”

  Dez turned toward the voice. The home care woman was standing at his elbow, looking at him closely.

  “Can you tell me,” she said, “what brought this on?”

  “Search me,” Dez said bluntly. “I’m a shrink, not a neurologist.” Why coddle this woman?

  Deepti stared at him in surprise, then said, “Well, it is in God’s hands now.”