The Narcissist's Daughter (14 page)

“Sticking people all you do for a living?”

“Such as it is,” I told him.

When I’d taken the needle out, he held the cotton to the puncture and said, “I thought they called you Syd.”

I looked at him and said, “Who are you?”

“Ah,” he said.

“You work here or something?”

“Well, I don’t work here. But I’m working.”

I wanted suddenly to get out of there. I said, “Whatever,” and cut the needle and picked up my tray.

“Don’t get snotty.”

Maybe they should’ve added a lithium level to the enzymes. I’d ask the doc on the way out. Then the guy said, “Syd, the child-fucker.”

My scalp tightened. I thought to move but didn’t, as if what was happening was too fascinating for me to budge from it.

“You know who I am?” he asked.

“No.”

“Sure you do. I drive a VW Rabbit. Yellow. Quick little thing, isn’t it?”

“I’m going to get security.”

“Pansy-asses. Whyn’t you call the real cops? Or let me. I know plenty of ’em. Used to be one, in fact. Let me tell you something, you horny little prick—” I shook my head. I was so shaken and angry and confused and frightened I felt like just screaming at him, but I only stood there. “—starting now, Jessi Kessler is off limits to you.”

“You piece of shit,” I said, while making the concurrent mistake of stepping toward him, which was when his hand shot out and he grabbed my package, my jewels, so tightly that the breath was propelled from me and I could only let out a kind of wheezing grunt. I dropped the tray (the vacuum tubes cracking and imploding) and sagged, but he held me up. The needle hole opened and a thick line of blood ran down across his forearm.

“Watch your mouth, lover boy, and don’t fuck with me. You want to play rough, I’ll teach you some things but I’m giving you this warning first, and that’s all this is—a warning. Knock it off. Leave her alone.”

He let go, and it was all I could do not to drop to my knees. He swung his legs over and stood up. He was as short as he was thick but looked down at me because I was bent over, holding myself, trying to breathe, and said, “Oh, you can throw that blood out. There’s nothing wrong with me.”

I looked up at him.

“I took a pill to turn me yellow, so they’d be sure and call you up here.”

I skipped Physics in the morning and went home but only slept until noon. For a moment when I woke up I was able to convince myself that the damage had healed. Then I moved. It had dulled, though, from a sharpness in which I could feel my heart beat into something deeper and achier. If I adjusted my stride a little I could walk without charges shooting down my legs as they had for the remainder of the night. (At one point Phyllis told me I didn’t look well and offered to let me go home, but I said no. Thankfully the night stayed slow.) I put in toast and was frying an egg when the front door bell rang and then I heard the door opening before I could answer it.

I stopped in the archway to the living room. In the midst of all of Brigman’s trash stood Joyce. It was the oddest sensation, seeing her like that in our house—she looked too big for the place, too alive, as if it couldn’t possibly hold her and had no right to try.

I said, “What are you doing?”

“I was afraid you’d turn me away.”

“Other people live here, you know.”

“They left. I saw them.” They’d both gone to work. (Chloe was full time now. She’d turned out to be one of the best workers the Pretzel Bitch had ever hired, and had even developed a following of mall rats who waited to get their carb fix from her.)

“So now you’re watching them, too?”

“No, Syd. I just didn’t want to cause trouble. I wanted to surprise you.”

“Well, I’m surprised.”

“I meant while you were sleeping.”

“That’s not a good idea.”

“It was never a good idea.” She came across to me, picking her way between the stacks and piles.

“Why would you come here?”

“I wanted to see you.”

“I mean, all this crazy shit is going on—”

“I think you’re embarrassed.” She looked around.

I didn’t say anything.

“You think you’re the only one who comes from poor? You think you know something about white trash?”

“I guess I do now.”

Her eyes moistened again as they had in the Jacuzzi. “It doesn’t go away, you know,” she said. “You’re as much proof of that as I am.” Then she came closer, until we were nearly touching, and said, “I know how angry you’ve been. I feel that way, too, sometimes. But we can help each other.” She put her hand between my legs and cupped me in a way that normally would’ve been nice but now, in my condition, sent out flares so that I grunted and bent forward.

“Something wrong?”

“I…hurt myself,” I said.

She said, “Oh,” but instead of letting go, she squeezed a little harder. She said, “Do you understand what I mean, about helping each other?”

At first I didn’t but she squeezed harder still, so that I could hardly breathe, and then I found I did understand. I felt not only a kind of reactive indignation at the pain but a concurrent thrill as well—a dizzying rush at the deeply illicit darkness, the dirty danger she was offering up, the implicit suggestion that this was one of those tit-tat deals, the old give-and-get—that I had not felt before even with her and that immediately and thoroughly intoxicated me. I reached around with my free hand and slid my fingers into her hair, made a fist and tightened it and looked down into her upturned face, the opened mouth, the breath coming hard now as she held me so tightly that the pain had turned white. I twisted her hair until she cried out, then opened my mouth and lowered it onto hers.

M
asterson called to tell me about an undergraduate fellowship that had just opened up in the fall down in Columbus, at Ohio State. It was a one-semester deal where you’d live in a dorm, take some classes, and also work as an assistant in a cancer research lab. Most of the cost would be covered by a grant, but we’d need to get off an application right away if I was interested.

“It would beef up your credentials,” he said. “Look great on your apps. Think about it. Oh, and you’ll need a letter of reference, too, of course. I was talking to Dr. Kessler this morning so I took the liberty of mentioning it to him.”

“What’d he say?”

“He said he’d consider it. You’ll need to ask him yourself, though.”

I told him thanks and said I’d stop in and fill out the forms.

Then, as if I had drifted somehow into a parallel world of normalcy and plain work, a chunk of time (the week of mid-terms) slipped past during which I laid eyes on no Kessler. It was, I guess, my summer vacation. Jessi and I agreed that I would just go through it with my head down, and then we’d have the rest of the summer, at least until finals week and she had to leave for Cleveland. Joyce did not come over again. I think she was waiting for me to make contact this time, but she would’ve known of my exams. I took some vacation days for cramming and so only worked one night that week, and on that morning Ted was late, which allowed me to take the chicken’s way out vis-à-vis the letter request—I left a note on his desk. I was obligated to ask because of Masterson (who knew nothing, of course, of any of this weirdness) but figured that this way Ted could just ignore it and we could avoid another messy face-to-face. I hadn’t seen him since his goon accosted me in the ER and didn’t know what might come out of my mouth.

But I thought about them, and they each appeared regularly in my dreams. And I thought about just not going back over, about letting it all go. Surely at that point I could have called it even, and just as surely the possibility of any further benefit from Ted had long since been ruined. Jessi would be gone in the fall, anyway. It’d hurt her, and maybe Joyce, but wouldn’t the pain be greater the longer things continued? Or was that it—that my vengefulness was not yet satisfied? I admit that when Ted gnashed his teeth or Joyce teared up or Jessi whined it satisfied some small black spot in my heart.

But it was also true that I’d come to care for Jessi, had moved perhaps into that dangerous land of affection, that Joyce left a vacuum in my gut, an ever-present hunger, and that my always fermenting hatred of Ted ran so hot after this latest incident that it constituted a kind of sentimental attachment. I’d even come to feel some fondness for that stupid little beast Dog, and he in turn, probably precisely because I’d always been cold and distant, refusing to coo and pet like the rest of them, had taken to celebrating my arrivals by promptly peeing on the floor at my feet, then rolling on his back and spreading his legs.

As specious as it sounds, I held a kind of power over an entire family of wealthy, intelligent, beautiful beings. And since I had apparently now forgone any real chance of becoming like them (successful, that is), perhaps that explains as well as anything my inability to quit. I think I could have walked away from entanglements with any one of them, but all together? I was not that strong. So, power? Was that why I stayed, and what led to the remarkable events that would come to pass in the remainder of that summer? Perhaps. Though, on writing it, I must say that it looks not quite right. Love, I think, with all its contradictions and inconsistencies and the precarious place it occupies just across that old thin line from you-know-what, comes closer.

On that Saturday, after a hard night, the phone woke me.

“I’m sorry,” Jessi said. “Chloe said you’d be up by now.”

“I was,” I said, trying to sound awake. I felt frozen in my stupor; I didn’t know what to do with her now, in the space this distance had opened, where it stood or what I’d done or what would happen anymore if I kept doing it.

“Come over?” she said. “Just for a little while?”

It stung, how she said that—so buoyed by us, so hungry. The thought of breaking it off with her made my stomach clutch, and not just because it would hurt her. I missed her. It occurred to me then what she’d said.

“Did you say Chloe?”

“Hmm? Will you come?”

“Maybe.”

“Dinnertime? I’ll make you something.”

“You cook?”

“Melted cheese globs and beer. You know that.”

“Mmm. Your parents, though—”

“Things are different.”

“Did you have another talk with them?”

“What?”

I waited. My face felt hot.

She said, “You said ‘another’ talk.”

“Did I?”

“Yes. But I never told you I talked with them.”

“You must have.”

“I know I didn’t. I’m positive. I thought about telling you.”

“Then I guess I assumed it. Things seemed to change at some point.”

I could hear her clicking something against the phone. She said, “What would I have said to them?”

“I don’t know. That I was psychotic and if they weren’t nice to me I might do something really crazy.”

“That was it,” she said. “You must have a spy here.”

“Dog and I talk.”

“Come over?”

“All right.”

Ted opened the door. He held a folded-over newspaper pinched in his hook and continued to read without ever looking at me. I offered no greeting, either, nor did I ask about the letter. Anything civil I said at that point would’ve been as much an affront as something nasty. And how would the conversation have gone?

Hey, Ted, that was pretty good, hiring a thug to squeeze my nuts. I mean, you really got me there.

Thanks, Syd. He does nice work. Tell him I said hey, won’t you, next time when he beats the shit out of you?

I found my way through the dining room and kitchen and sun porch to the back where they—I counted four heads in the pool—floated or splashed and shouted.

“Hey, you,” Jessi said, and then another of the bobbers, who turned out to be Chloe, lifted an arm and waved, and then the third. “Heya, Syd,” said Donny. Joyce did not wave but watched me walk toward them.

“Get on your suit,” said Jessi. I nodded but sat in one of the row of rubber-slatted aluminum-tube-framed deck chairs. As I sat watching them play I grew…well, I wanted to get mad. It felt justified. You can see what’d happened—that the week or so of my and Jessi’s separation had been filled for her by a surrogate, my sister. And in turn, she, Chloe, had been granted a haven, a little love-nest sanctuary in which she could see as much of her banished boyfriend as she wanted. But I didn’t feel mad. Tired, maybe. Sad. A little dumbfounded at how prodigiously I had mismanaged things, let them slip away from whatever modicum of control I once had over them. But it all seemed such a smooth continuum—this led to that and now here I sat watching these four inhabitors of my life cavort together.

“’Bout your car?” Donny said.

“I’m still thinking.”

“You all right?” It was Jessi.

I nodded.

“Come on in.”

I shook my head.

“You’re not all right. What’s wrong?”

“Just tired.”

“You want to lie down?”

“I don’t know.” I stood up.

“Where are you going?”

“Talk to your dad.”

“Oh,” she said. She looked as surprised as I felt at having said it. The notion came to me that I might still turn it back, call the whole thing off, return to Ted his daughter and his wife, and then grovel to try to resurrect my future. I went to the library and from the window glimpsed his car backing down the driveway hard enough that you could tell he was all mad again. Probably going to meet the ex-cop, have a couple of drinks and figure out what to do to me next.

“Did he leave?” Joyce had come up behind me wrapped in a towel. “Jessi said you don’t feel well.”

“I’m fine.”

“Are you still having pain?”

“No. A little.”

“Are you angry?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come.”

I followed her back to the kitchen. She stood at the sink, facing the window, which looked out through the sun room to the backyard where we could see the three others.

“I should go be sociable,” I said. “I mean, I came over to see her.”

“You didn’t come over to see her. That’s why you’re angry.”

“It is?”

“Get rid of it, Syd.”

“I’m not—”

“Touch me.”

I put my hand on her shoulder.

She said, “Ted uses a belt.”

“What?”

She pushed the straps of her suit down over her shoulders, then pulled the suit down over her hips and peeled it off. She put her hands on the edge of the counter and leaned forward, legs slightly spread.

She said, “Do you like that?”

I didn’t answer.

“Do it.”

“Joyce—”

“Hurry up. They’re coming.”

Donny and Jessi were climbing out as Chloe toweled off.

“I don’t—”

“Do it! Get rid of it!”

In the motion you would use to pitch a fast softball, I reached back and swung my hand forward. Her ass felt cold and dense, and the sound was stiff and muffled.

“Oh, god!” she said. “Take off your belt. Hurry.”

It was an old worn canvas thing with a sliding brass buckle. I slid it off, doubled it over and cracked it against her.

“Harder!”

They were walking toward the house.

I swung again and again, whipping her especially robustly with the last few strokes, which left pink welts that I guessed would rise and darken. Only as they stepped onto the sun porch did she gather her suit and towel and look at me and say, “You’re not so different, you know, the two of you,” and hurry out.

I stuffed the belt in my pocket and was sitting at the table when they entered. “You okay?” Jessi asked.

I nodded.

“Hungry?”

“Starved,” I said.

Later the four of us were in the kitchen, Jessi and Chloe drinking Cokes, Donny and me having a beer, when Joyce came in and started banging around. She kept looking at me (though I don’t think the others noticed). At one point she even motioned with her head toward the door—she wanted to see me outside. I pretended not to get it, and when I held Jessi’s hand on the table, Joyce glared at me (oh, it was hateful) and stalked out and slammed the door.

“Jesus,” Chloe said. “What’s with her?”

Jessi just rolled her eyes, as if to say, Who knows this time? We could hear the 280Z tearing down the drive.

A little later Jessi said, “Swim?” I nodded, but Chloe said no and went with Donny into a little television den off the dining room. It was dark out. I’d have to leave for work in an hour. I got my suit from the car but when I started into the cabana, Jessi, who was already in the water, said, “Don’t put your suit on. I didn’t.” She hadn’t turned on the lamps around the concrete apron or the powerful underwater spot.

“What if they come out?”

“They won’t.” From the way she said it I knew there was an arrangement.

I met her in mid-pool where I could just reach the bottom, and held her, and we began a kind of dance, a twirling under the warm summer night supported by the water so that even if we tipped and went under I had only to kick to right us, and she did not let me go. I felt all the parts of her against me, her breath and her breasts, her thighs and her belly, her mouth against my mouth, breathing my air, our tongues playing, teeth clicking, and ever so faintly, against the upreaching tip of my erection, the wetted wooliness between her legs, and the different slicker wetness beneath it. Sometimes she lowered herself just enough that she nipped the tip of my cock with that mouth, pulled it in a bit and let it go, and I was so hard then, so teased, that I could feel the aching remnants of the bruising.

I slipped my arms beneath her legs so that my elbows rode in the crooks of her knees and lowered her so that I penetrated her gradually and in a way over which she had no control, until I was planted and she made a sound deep in her throat. We held like that for a long time, turning still, dancing, then I raised her up again and set her down. It went on in that slow aqueous way, and even at our climax I tried not to speed up too much, and she did not move against me, so that it happened in the same slow motion as our dance, the breaking waves of it making us shudder so that we must have sent out ripples. Like fishes we spilled ourselves into the water and each other.

Then we heard a sound in the blackness at the back of the estate.

“Dog?” she said.

No answer came, and then a sound again.

“Who is it?” she said.

“Shh,” I whispered, and let her go and slipped to the side and out into the cool darkness, and ran, naked and wet, and heard it again, though farther away now, because it, whatever it was, had run away.