Undone (6 page)

“Lucky me,” the man said. He pulled his sunglasses down to the tip of his nose and regarded Jasper with pale eyes. “I always root for the bad guys.”

Jasper smiled. “Well, don’t we all—in a way? But we like seeing them caught in the end.”

“Not me,” the man said, grinning. He poked his glasses up his nose and stepped out the door.

Jasper watched him walk down the flagstone path to his car at the curb. Slightly odd parting, he thought. He closed the door, then glanced at his watch. Alas, not even a minute to spare for rushing back to his computer and getting down a few more thoughts. It was time to wake Maddy.

On her bed, she lay, as usual, sprawled starfish-wise, her mouth a small black O as she snored gently at the ceiling. Pauline, however, was awake and greeted Jasper with a strangely fixed and unwavering stare. He crouched in front of her wheelchair and asked, “Are you all right?” She blinked twice:
No.
He asked a series of rapid-fire questions—”Are you in pain?” “Is
it your breathing?” “Do you need to go to the hospital?” To each, she answered No. “Is it something with Maddy?” he asked, glancing at the bed, where the child continued to snore serenely. Pauline blinked once,
Yes.
“Did she wake up?”
No.
“Was she frightened—a nightmare?”
No.

He kissed Maddy awake and, as she sat stretching and yawning, asked her if anything bad had happened during her nap. She said no. He sent her to go and see Deepti in the kitchen.

Jasper then spent the next ten minutes asking Pauline questions, trying to hit on the right prompt that would elicit the reasons behind her strange upset. But her answers only seemed to carry him further from any understanding. He realized that, for the first time since the stroke, they had run up against the limits of their communication. He simply could not understand what she was trying to tell him. The expression in Pauline’s eyes, meanwhile, grew only more distressed. It was heartbreaking—that look of shock, mixed somehow with urgency and alarm. And something else, something wild and frightened. Almost as if she were trying to impart to him a warning.

T
he scheme, when you got right down to it, was really nothing more than an elaborate practical joke—and Dez had always loved practical jokes. His decision, after college, to become a lawyer had been motivated not by any love for the profession or, still less, a desire to aid his fellow man, but as a kind of prank on his grim old widower of a father, Judge Dezollet. Known throughout North Carolina as “The Hanging Judge” for the serene lack of mercy he demonstrated toward those convicted murderers unlucky enough to come before him for sentencing, the Judge had, in his forty years on the bench, put on death row some eighty people (“or hardly enough,” as he liked to quip).

Dez knew how ardently his father wished him to follow his footsteps onto the bench—the old man had made it clear enough in his stentorian hectoring and shouted demands. Dez (considerably more obedient at age twenty-two) duly enrolled at the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover, graduating in the top third of his class. How his father smiled upon him that day! But that’s when Dez put his special ironical twist on things—the practical joke aspect. Instead of his coming home, as Judge Dezollet expected, to take a job with the North Carolina prosecutor’s office (so that he could begin his ascent to the bench), Dez joined the New England branch of the Innocence Project, the group of crusading defense lawyers dedicated to freeing wrongly convicted murderers from death row. Again, he felt no special drive to exonerate the falsely accused. Instead, it was his ambition to return to his home state and save someone sentenced in his father’s own courtroom—oh, the delicious irony of seeing one of the unfortunates whom the Judge had marked for death walk free! Sadly, he never got the chance. Shortly after joining the Innocence Project, Dez ran into a problem in his personal life, his extremely personal life.

Dez was then twenty-six, and it was not the first time he experienced trouble over his sexual nature. He had long known that his tastes differed subtly from those of his male peers—or, at least, the tastes his peers would admit to. Teenaged girls, anywhere from fifteen to eighteen—but strictly confined to those age limits—were his sole erotic interest; and it was an interest that amounted to obsession. This was not a problem when he was, himself, younger; certainly not in eleventh grade, when he,
at seventeen, had his first serious girlfriend, a lissome ninth-grader. Back then, his male peers admired him for his sexual success; they exalted him as a “player,” a ladies’ man. As a college senior, he took as a girlfriend a seventeen-year-old from a local girls’ private school. Except for his friends’ jocular (and, as Dez saw it, secretly envious) cries of “Baby snatcher!” and “Cradle robber!” he suffered no stigma.

But as a professional man, an adult of twenty-six, a practicing lawyer whose colleagues had already started to marry and even, in some instances, have children, Dez found that he could not openly date a girl of sixteen, or even voice an interest in such females, without drawing puzzled (or worse) looks from his coworkers. This was especially true in a state—Massachusetts—where the age of consent was eighteen. (Back home in North Carolina, it was two years younger—a difference Dez found out too late).

The problem was that normal, attractive, sexually available and demonstratively interested young women of twenty-two or twenty-four or (God forbid)
thirty-four
simply awoke no sexual thrill in him. They lacked what Dez saw as the exquisite fragility of limb and grace of movement in females of the middle teenaged years, a combination of innocence and womanliness that vanishes by the time they cross into their buxom, matter-of-fact twenties. He was not a pervert, a pedophile. Dez had no interest whatsoever in prepubertal girls—in children. Such men were, indisputably, criminals, creeps. Like any normal male, he thrilled to the sight of womanly secondary sexual characteristics: the fullness of a pair of breasts under a
cotton T-shirt; the swell of buttocks in second-skin denim. But he liked these manifestations of femininity not in their fullest flower, but rather in the act of blossoming, of
becoming.

His first significant scrape had actually occurred when Dez was just twenty-three and newly arrived in Andover to study law. He committed the gaffe of approaching a girl at a bus stop. Mistaking her shy glances as an invitation, he was frank in his proposals to her. She turned out to be the fifteen-year-old daughter of a local doctor who had told her to wait for him on that street corner, where he would pick her up in his car after her piano lesson. That car happened to pull up to the curb at the moment when the girl was recoiling from Dez’s eager, sharklike smile and pointed proposition. He tried to flee on foot, but the doctor—a jogging enthusiast—caught up to him in a few strides, collared him and began yelling for the police. (Hence the special care Dez took ever after to learn the whereabouts of fathers.)

Dez managed, somehow, to convince the authorities that this bus stop contretemps was all a misunderstanding—he was new in town and merely inquiring about the transit schedule—but he was less lucky a year later, when he invited to his room a seventeen-year-old visiting her older brother in the building where Dez had an apartment. She was a milk-pale redhead with eager green eyes and a dusting of what looked like cinnamon across the tops of her breasts (exposed by the V-shaped opening of her much-too-low-cut sweater). She threw a blushing look at Dez in the elevator and he intercepted her before they reached her sibling’s floor. After several glasses of rum-spiked Coke in Dez’s living room, the girl energetically succumbed
to his importuning and the next day she returned to his apartment, this time in much more conservative attire, and with two police officers and her brother in tow. The cops informed him that the age of consent in that state was eighteen and that he had, in completing an act of “penetrative intercourse” with the complainant, committed a Class B1 felony.

Judge Dezollet, in that instance, came in handy. Pulling God knows what interstate strings, he got all charges dropped on what lawyers call the “Romeo and Juliet laws,” which provide for dismissal of statutory rape charges in cases where the victim, although a minor, is not more than six years younger than the perpetrator. In this instance, she was
seven
years younger, but owing to her relatively advanced age (her birthday was in two months) and whatever favors Judge Dezollet was able to call in from whatever legal cronies, Dez got off with nothing more than a stern reprimand and a court-ordered year of therapy with a sexologist, Dr. Cyril Geld, a reputedly brilliant British implant famous in psychological circles for his work on the so-called paraphilias, or sexual disorders.

Dez met with Geld once a week in the doctor’s home office, a dark, oak-paneled room at the back of a narrow Victorian row house in a surprisingly down-at-heels neighborhood in Boston, next to the tenderloin district. Geld had a lean aristocratic face, an upper-class accent and mobile blue eyes that moved restlessly behind the lenses of his wire-rimmed spectacles, like some form of transparent sea creature in dual aquariums—until such time as his patients began truly to open up about their most private sexual peccadilloes, at which point his pupils would dilate
and his roving irises would train themselves on his interlocutor unwaveringly, like twinned predators stalking what nourished them. After close-questioning Dez about his erotic leanings, Geld informed the patient that he, in sexological terms, belonged to a “perfectly identifiable classification.”

Dez was an
ephebophile
—in plain English, someone whose sexual preference is restricted to partners in mid- to late adolescence. (“Tell me something I don’t know,” Dez inwardly remarked.) This was not a passing condition, Geld warned, not something that would “clear up” or “go away” when Dez reached some magical stage in life when age-appropriate females would suddenly hold an allure for him.

“Increasingly, we are coming to see such quirks as genetically based,” Geld said, “as inextricably in-wound with the DNA, and thus as a matter of microscopic differences in the makeup of the prenatally organized brain.” Furthermore, it was a curious complication that the sufferer’s erotic response to girls of the mid- to late teen years often coincided with his demonstrating a more than ordinary degree of attractiveness to the young female—”a phenomenon we, in sexology, have not readily been able to account for in hormonal or pheromonal terms,” Geld said. “But the effect is pronounced and can much complicate the life of the ephebophile who, despite aging into his forties, fifties and even sixties and seventies, often retains what we call a ‘Peter Pan quality’ that is perceived and responded to, erotically, by the teenaged love object. You can imagine the tragic difficulties this inter-echoing of libidinal call-and-response can cause to the aging ephebophile who
seeks to master and control his condition but who is, constantly, made the object of shy, flirtatious glances and sometimes playfully bold ‘come-ons’ from the pretty teenagers he so ardently seeks
not
to desire.” (Dez could indeed.)

“But that’s the bad news,” Geld hastened to say. “The good news is that ephebophilia is not classified, by science, as a disease as defined in the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
; and in the vast majority of cases, even severe ephebophilia can be managed, controlled—and not with drugs, but with simple, open, frank conversation.”

Dez, for the next year, engaged in that simple, open, frank conversation with Dr. Geld, describing in detail his torments of lust, his masturbation fantasies, his little slips; and Geld counseled him on how to curb and control his impulses. In a year’s time, the doctor pronounced Dez, if not cured, then at least properly conditioned to manage his compulsion. And all credit to Geld, Dez briefly tried to be good; he really did. Shortly after being released from therapy, he (now freshly graduated from law school) joined the local branch of the Innocence Project and threw himself into the work with gusto. He garnered glowing assessments from his bosses and was told that he had a fine future with the outfit. But at the end of his first year—a year that had seen a sharp increase in the responsibilities conferred upon him by his superiors—he once again slipped; this time with the young niece of one of the partners in the law firm: a raven-haired, black-eyed beauty of no small experience who, her antennae quivering at the Peter Pan waves Dez helplessly (innocently!) emitted, boldly propositioned him one day when she dropped by the office to see Uncle on
some family matter. Dez disappeared with her into a stationery supply closet. He might have gotten away with this moment of stolen pleasure had he and his now quite disheveled paramour not elected to slide from their hiding place at the precise moment when Uncle was hurrying past clutching a “While You Were Out” memo and asking, “Has anyone seen Emily?”

This time Judge Dezollet declined to use any influence to soften the hand of justice. Dez pled guilty to two counts of statutory rape. He was fired from the Innocence Project, disbarred and sentenced to five years’ parole, placed on the state’s registry of sexual offenders and enrolled in yet another course of sex counseling, this one far more rigorous, as it entailed daily hour-long sessions of talk therapy as well as a course of experimental “aversion therapy” of Geld’s own devising—a course Dez agreed to undergo on the promise that, if successfully completed, Geld would see to it that his name was expunged from the register after five years.

After filling out the mountain of paperwork that absolved Geld of all legal liability, Dez had his chest and loins shaved, then hooked up to a set of electrodes. Geld sat, his delicately tapering fingers on a small switch. Dez was shown photographs and film clips of teenaged females and was administered electric shocks every time his humiliatingly exposed manhood betrayed him. At the end of three weeks of treatment, Geld pronounced himself “stunned” at the tenacity of Dez’s fixations—his erections seemed to be growing
more
powerful under the combined stimulus of the imagery and the electric jolts. “I cannot say that the prognosis is good,” Geld told him.