Undone by John Colapinto

Author:John Colapinto [Colapinto, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781443434706
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2015-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

2

Work, at first, seemed as if it might provide a useful distraction from what was turning into a mad and maddening obsession. The tavern’s raucous talk and laughter, the jukebox tunes, those pretty young girls crowding up to his bar, guzzling their drinks, and slipping ever deeper into drunkenness—all of it should have helped him forget Chloe and Connecticut, at least for a few hours. But no. He remained indifferent to all distractions and enticements, blind to everything except that scenario that kept playing, over and over in his mind, without a resolution.

The problem was that every imagined seduction would, at a certain indefinable point, go from plausible, believable flirtation to something wildly, laughably unreal—as crude and coarse as one of those online video clips that he was addicted to in the days when he could afford a computer. Those movies that purported to show “stepfather” and “stepdaughter” unable to contain their illicit passion for each other, the “teen” girl actually a battle-scarred veteran porn actress of twenty-nine summers grotesquely tattooed at the base of her spine with the wings of an eagle, and mimicking the lisping tones of a near child; the “stepfather,” a reputed straitlaced middle-class professional man in boxy suit and garish tie, with a ridiculously incongruous ponytail and a porn industry goatee and (once his clothes came off) a prison-pumped body also writhing in tats. The illicit lovers flatly proclaiming their lines at each other. “Hey, Cyndee, what the heck are you doing?” “Don’t worry. I won’t tell my mom. If you don’t.” “But you’re my stepdaughter!”

Incidentally, Dez asked himself, was there some reason that the porn purveyors always called those girls “stepdaughters” as opposed simply to “daughters”—some wrinkle in the federal pornography laws, perhaps, that forbade depiction of that final frontier of erotic fantasy? Or was this the result of some squeamishness on the part of the porn makers themselves? Were they all too traumatized by the actual parental abuses they had suffered as children (and that had driven them into sex work in the first place) to depict such events as fuel to erotic fantasy? Lord knows, they were willing to show just about anything else: acts whose memory could actually turn Dez’s stomach, ten years later. Pee. Vomit. Poop! But to show a man, posing as a girl’s father, engaged in an act of illicit love? That was too far?

Perhaps, he thought with a stab of terror, it was too far! Was this why his attempts to envision the seduction kept running aground? Were there laws of biology and nature that protected the species against the impulse to inbreed? There were—there assuredly were. And yet the man must succumb! There must exist a point at which Ulrickson’s natural revulsion at the idea of biblically knowing his daughter would meet the urgency of raw, untamed, biological need. Perhaps such surrender was not inevitable in every man. But a man in Ulrickson’s uniquely vulnerable position? A man forced into celibacy by fate and his own

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