The Narcissist's Daughter (3 page)

Then he leaned back, put his arms over his head, and gripped the hook with his good hand. “I didn’t date much in college, either. No time. Didn’t meet my wife until I was almost through med school—Case Western, did I say that?—and even that was sooner than I’d planned on getting involved, sooner than I wanted, but, well, you’d have to know her. You’d understand. Anyway, you’re young. Plenty of time.”

“Not that young.”

“Oh, yes, I forget that you’re the old man of the group. I went through late, too, you know. Korea.” He let the hook go and held it out in front of him, as if it offered some kind of explanation.

“I’ve just been working.”

“That’s better than getting your ass shot at.”

And I heard it there again, or maybe it was the way he looked at me—but I caught that hint of a desire for something.

“Does it bother you,” I asked, “talking about it?”

“This? No. Old news. But it’s an ugly story.”

“Yeah?”

Now I was the one to lean forward, feigning fascination. He had work to do and I had class but he couldn’t help himself as I had known he would not be able to. He talked for a long time and it occurred to me that I was doing what I knew how to do, and what was necessary, and also how transparent things became in the world when you had been in it long enough. He should’ve seen my ruse but maybe he’d been away from the street too long and his edges were dulled now, so he didn’t recognize a manipulation, or maybe as I’d thought before he just didn’t care.

It wasn’t that ugly, as it turned out, but I ate it up.

One night soon after that I was struck with a violent stomach flu. I eventually managed to call the night shift clerk to say I wouldn’t be in that morning, stopped heaving sometime around four, and fell into a coma-like sleep. I didn’t wake until nearly noon. The following morning when I came down from my rounds, Barb hooked a finger at me from the door of Ted’s office. He sat impassively behind his desk, hand over hook upon it while she informed me that I was being written up for not calling in. A write-up was a serious reprimand; two in a six-month period could lead to dismissal.

“But I did call in,” I said.

She wagged a bitchy finger and said that, no, in fact, I had not. It was my responsibility to inform her
directly,
not to rely on someone from the night shift to do it for me. She came in early, at five o’clock, for precisely that reason.

I looked at Dr. Kessler (not quite believing this) and when he just nodded, a wave of the dizziness of disbelief, of the spank of surreality, struck me. The room felt suddenly small and hot and too close to breathe in.

“It’s not fair,” I said. “I called.”

“This is a complex place, Syd,” Kessler said. “Only by rules and protocols is it able to function at all.”

What assholes! And him a flake on top of it, so driven by the itch of the moment, which just then apparently was to play god for the benefit of his little hanger-on. His side-squeeze. His spare piece of ass (oh, I’d heard that rumor more than once and found it plenty easy to believe). I felt set up and betrayed, and had the urge to tell them both to fuck off.

But I’d just had a birthday that month and was looking at what I saw as my last shot at what I wanted most. Even through the haze of my rage I managed not to lose sight of that. I hastened out into the hallway to get away from them, and practically ran into a night-shift tech named Ray Vollmer who seemed to know just from looking at me what was up.

“You off?” he said.

“Not till nine.”

“You know Ziggy’s up on Madison?”

“I guess so. Yeah.”

“Meet me.”

It was a small dirty place and I drank quickly. Ray laughed while I fumed, then told me about the opening for a phlebotomy tech on thirds.

“Jesus,” I said, “Kessler’s been pushing it at me.”

“Well, take it,” Ray said. “Get away from him and the rest of those pricks. Nights are great, man. You’d love it.”

And for a moment, a brief sodden flash, I saw it all—Barb knocks me down and Ray’s there to pick me up and point me where Ted has already decided I’m going to go. I’ve been motivated.

And for a minute I believed it, and seethed. But only for a minute. I mean, really. Why would Ted Kessler spend a single one of his golden moments thinking about me, let alone conspiring?

The next morning Ray introduced me to Phyllis Myers, the night supervisor. I had a week left in my probationary period, so she couldn’t offer me the job until then, but she made it clear it was mine if I wanted. I had time to think, though there wasn’t much to think about. It would be four shifts, thirty-two hours a week, with a pay increase and a shift differential to boot. I’d take home more than I was now from both jobs combined, and be eligible for the hospital’s tuition reimbursement plan on top of that. And still I thought about refusing it. But it would have been so purely out of some kind of misguided spite that even I knew how foolish it would be. I took it.

Dr. Kessler stopped me one morning shortly after I’d made the decision and said, “This’ll be good for you. And for us. I appreciate it.”

I nodded.

“I’m glad it’s shaping up for you. Oh, and listen, I found someone to help with the Organic. You know Kathy Rudner in the Blood Bank? If you can stay after a morning or two a week—”

“Sure. Of course.”

“Good.” He smiled and turned away, then stopped and turned back. “You know,” he said, “my wife works the night shift.”

“Here?”

“Yes, she’s a nurse.” Then he said, “She’s something, you know.”

“Yeah?”

“You’ll have to keep an eye on her for me. Will you do that?”

I had no idea what to say or in what spirit he would make such a comment to someone so far beneath him. He winked at me again before walking off.

A
short woman with red eyes and pendulous hair that swung nearly to her knees opened the front door as I approached—had she been watching for me?—and said, “Hey, man.” She led me through the foyer and into the darkened parlor where the smell of burned reefer hung on the air. A woman sang in French from the huge speakers there in a voice so tragic and smoky it seemed like a parody of something except that it was perfect, and though I understood only a little of that language then, I got it.

“How’s it goin?” someone said. A few of the people sitting around the room in the chairs and on the couches and the floor looked to be Jessi’s age but most were in their twenties, a couple of the men with ponytails. I stood for a minute watching them pass a pipe but thought getting stoned would be a bad idea in that house, to let any sort of unnecessary new paranoia creep in, there being enough generated already by my thinking in the ways I was thinking then, so before it got to me I wandered back into the hallway.

The dining room table held a tray with chunks of cheese and Triscuits and bowls of chips and pretzels and Fritos and an opened container of French onion dip. In the lighted kitchen Jessi peered into the oven. A woman around my age stood beside her holding a glass of white wine while a balding bearded man cut vegetables over the sink. The music played here, too, through smaller speakers set into the walls.

Jessi looked up and said, a little loudly, “
Hey,
there. This is Edith Piaf. I love her.”

“Oh,” I said and nodded at the other woman, who started to laugh. She said, “I’m Nancy, actually. That’s Joel. Edith’s the one singing. And Jessi’s drunk.”

Jessi said, “I am not, you bitch.”

“Oh, right,” Nancy said, “I forgot.”

“Syd’s pre-med and he’s a tech in my father’s lab, so I figured I at least owe him a few beers, in sympathy.”

“Really?” Nancy said.

“Well,” I said, “just a phlebotomist.”

“What’s the difference?” Joel asked.

“Really,” said Nancy. She took a tray of some melted yellow things from the oven and said, “Dr. Syd, can you carry?” I took it into the dining room and Nancy brought another tray behind me and Jessi and Joel ones behind her, and as if some order had been given, everyone crowded in from the parlor and loaded up plates and then wandered back to find their seats again. Later I volunteered to help clean up the kitchen—I wasn’t stoned or drinking very much and was glad of something to do while I waited for my opening. When we were finishing up (Nancy washing, Joel and me drying, Jessi putting away), Joel wiped his hands on a towel and pulled from his front pocket a small brown bottle and sprinkled a mound of white powder on the surface of a glass cutting board. Cocaine was still somewhat exotic at that time, in that place, anyway, and I had never seen it before. He chopped it and cut it into lines with one of Joyce’s wooden-block-housed set of German bone-handled steak knives. I watched the others, then sniffed up a line myself, and now instead of paranoid I felt wired. My hands and neck were sweaty, and I wanted to go then and begin tearing the place apart. But I made myself follow the three of them into the parlor and sit.

The dope-smoke cloud had grown thicker; Jessi’s eyes glowed like fog lights in it and I couldn’t help watching them, her looking as lit up as I felt, and so when yet another lid went around and she hit off it and handed it to me wet from her mouth I took it, of course, and had to hit it too, though shallowly, gently, in order not to get too high but to seem a part of the scene, to camouflage my true status of interloper-cum-coked-up-vandal—but the thing is it was really potent stuff (Maui, someone said) and I didn’t smoke much in general and so was sensitive to it, and soon it crept up my neck and over the top of my head and took me in its grip. And for a bleak moment I regretted everything, regretted ever coming here, first for the carnal reasons I’d come before and why I’d come now into a gathering of depressing dopers who were clearly here only because it was a place they could go. I regretted everything I had done practically in my whole life.

Then somewhat abruptly and unexpectedly the chemicals struck a balance and I felt myself relax into it yet remain sharp in my senses, sharp as an absurdly expensive bone-handled coke-cutting steak knife in the modernized kitchen of an old mansion, but calm, too, and ready. Before the balance shifted or faded, I thought, it was time. The beer tasted good to me (these were St. Pauli Girls—you never forget your first girl) and I went out to the kitchen for another one. Then, instead of going back to the parlor, I stopped in the hallway and peered up the wide staircase.

Never had I been so conscious of the creaking of those stairs. But once up, I was alone in the quiet. To get to the master bedroom you passed first through a sitting room, which now held only a couch and a desk. It got darker the farther in I went until, by the time I got to Joyce’s dresser, I could hardly see my hand before my face.

I placed my fingertips on the surface and breathed in the faint trace of her perfume, lowered my face to try to see what was there—a tray with bottles on it, I remembered, and a jewelry box. I opened the top right drawer and felt inside—it was all just hard surfaces and edges (small boxes, papers). The next one down held nylons. In the upper left I found her brassieres, and held one up, rubbed my thumbs inside the cups, then put it back. When I felt inside the next drawer down, my breath caught—panties. I plunged my hand into the silky pool and grasped a pair and pulled it out, and knew then what I wanted to do. It didn’t solve the problem of my revenge, of what to do to strike some fear or angst or anger into them (I still had no idea) but it felt like just the thing at that moment.

I backed up to the bed and unzipped my jeans. The mere act of baring myself again in that room in that house of course stiffened me right up. I pushed my jeans to my ankles and lay back and began to work the silk vigorously and unceremoniously up and down and was just getting close to the edge, that sudden upramp toward release, when the floorboards creaked and someone at the doorway said, “Hello?”

As calmly as I could manage, I said, “Don’t turn on the light.”

“All right.” It was Jessi.

I found an afghan folded at the foot of the bed and pulled it over myself. I said, “Sorry. I was just being nosy.”

“In the dark?”

“Well, then I just felt like lying here. I was tired.”

“It’s fine,” she said. “I don’t care.”

I thought she’d leave then but she came in and around the bed and sat on the other side.

“I haven’t been in here in like a year.”

“Why not?”

“They’re weird.” She huffed and lay back. “I just think they’re into weird shit.”

“What does that have to do with coming in here?”

“I can
hear
them, you know. In here. And they’re in here a lot. And I don’t want to, like, accidentally
see
anything.”

“You mean them having sex?”

“I can’t believe we’re talking about this.”

I lay back, too, close enough that I could hear her breathing.

“It’s other things, too,” she said.

“Such as?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“They watch porno or something?”

“Oh, my
god
. How did you know that? Is that like something everyone does?”

“Well, not everyone can afford a video deck or they probably would.”

“I mean you can
hear
it, you know? If you listen?”

“So you listen?”

“Well, I mean—no. No! Not like that. God, Syd.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. We lay for a while then without speaking, me naked under her parents’ afghan and her breathing loudly enough that I took it to mean she was pissed off, though not enough apparently to make her leave. Finally she rolled toward me and said, “Do you like Leo Kottke?”

“What?”

“The guitarist?”

“He’s all right.” I’d never heard of him.

“What do you listen to?”

“Mostly I tape my lectures and listen to those.”

“God.”

“I know.”

“Do you like jazz?”

“Uh, sure.”

“Who?”

“I don’t really know the names.”

“I bet you’re into rock.”

“Pretty much.” Pretty much entirely. I was firmly, that is to say exclusively, of the arena-band head-banger school of that era, Boston, Aerosmith, Sabbath, Thin Lizzy, Queen, Nazareth, Zep, Rush, Mahogany Rush, Uriah Heep, ELO, Nugent, Cheap Trick, Seger, Mott the Hoople, T-Rex, AC/DC, Black Oak Arkansas—I could go on; I’d seen nearly all of them.

“Like?”

“You heard of Van Halen?”

“No.”

“They’re pretty new.”

“Are you into punk? I love the Clash. I
love
the Ramones.”

“Some,” I said, meaning not at all. I didn’t like what little I’d heard of that stuff. My musical taste was really pretty breathtakingly narrow.

The floorboards groaned again and I sat up.

“Who is it?” Jessi said.

“Nancy.”

“Don’t turn on the light.”

“Awww,” she said, “I’m telling.”

“Shut up,” said Jessi.

“Who’s with you?”

“Me,” I said.

“I knew it,” said Nancy. “Don’t you two get in any trouble.”

“Nancy, god,” Jessi said, “we’re just talking.”

“Sure.”

“We
are
.”

“Your parents would be so shocked.”

“God!” Jessi said.

“All right, all right. Listen, some people are getting ready to take off.”

“I’ll be down in a minute.”

“Have fun,” Nancy said. “Bye.”

Jessi said, “Anyway—” but I was quiet, distracted by what was then the merest glinting of a reflection cast by what Nancy said—your parents would be so shocked. Imagine, I remember thinking, if she knew the depth of the truth of that statement. The idea didn’t come to me then. Not yet. But I would later mark that as the central moment in all that had happened and was about to, as the moment of my becoming.

“I should go down, I guess.”

“I’ll wait a minute,” I said, “so we don’t come together. Down, I mean. Stairs.”

“Oh, I don’t think it matters. But that’s fine.” She stood up. “You can crash here if you want.”

“That’s all right.”

“Whatever.”

When she’d gone, I dressed and was going to put the panties back, then thought better of it and stuffed them in my pocket.

Jessi walked me to my car. The night was warm and as our bare arms brushed, Nancy’s comment floated back and I saw it then—my answer, whole, fully formed, delivered unto me like some goddamn apocalypse of insight and cunning and circumstance all come together as if by voodoo. It was perfect; it was exactly poetically what they deserved; it would ring their bell more soundingly than almost anything else I could do, than anything I’d thought of short of some pyrrhic act of hyperviolence that would ruin me along with them. It was the sort of dawning that was almost enough to make you believe in something. It even happened (as if the whole thing had been orchestrated, ordained) that I’d driven Brigman’s new-old ’Cuda which, when Jessi saw it, inspired her to grab my arm and shriek, “Oh, my god! Is that yours?”

“Sort of.”

“It is
amazing
.”

“You’re into muscle?” (Who knew?)

“I went out with this guy who had a Nova SS so I got to know a lot about it. He even raced some. My parents hated him.”

I said, “This one’s only got a 340 in it, but it’ll be nice when it’s ready.”

“It looks great now.”

“I could take you for a ride sometime.”

“For real?”

I waited. I said, “And maybe we could grab a bite or something then.”

She laughed, then got quiet. She looked up at me. She said, “Really?”

“Really.”

“All right. Yeah. That’d be great.”

“Call you?”

“You don’t have the number.”

“I think I can find it.”

“Not my private line.”

Ah. I found a pen and she held my hand and wrote on my palm, and then, bracing herself against my arms, reached up and brushed her lips across my cheek. She had that ability to be immediately familiar, the gift of affable touch. But of course she would have, I thought. It was, after all, a part of her endowment.