The Narcissist's Daughter (7 page)

Joyce stepped onto the bed as if it were a stage. She reached back and unsnapped the bra and then came forward to let me lift it away. When her breasts fell into my hands I felt something click deep inside myself—they were not only large, these breasts, but denser than any I had ever held, with stretch marks along the bottoms and tight puckered nipples, and I thought that I had never felt anything so soft and heavy at the same time. And it wasn’t just her breasts I found as I touched her. It was her belly, soft like an old woman’s and slightly protuberant and flaccid but substantial beneath, renitent. It was the heavy flesh that had just begun to loosen behind her arms or at the insides of her thighs, the skin at the small of her back, or her wide dimpled bottom. It all had the same velvety texture, the same gravity.

She got on her knees and I sucked a nipple into my mouth. As she held my head against her the sounds of her cooing and sighing came to me directly through the wall of her chest. I slid a hand up between her legs to the panties and rubbed her there as she moved against it, and ran a finger inside the elastic and felt her thick matted hair all damp and hot and beneath that the swollen nub of her clitoris and then the slick wide opening. Then she got off the bed and rubbed her hands across me and as she began to undo my belt she said, “I’ve been thinking about this.”

“Me, too.”

“Have you? About me?” She held me and spoke very softly near my ear as if it were some secret between us.

“All the time. I can’t sleep.”

“About doing what to me?”

“Kissing you. Touching you.”

“Is that all?” she said. “Don’t you want to fuck me?”

“Yes.”

“But you could have any girl you wanted.”

“I want you, Joyce. I want to fuck you.”

“How do you like to fuck a girl?”

“What do you mean?”

“Hard?”

“Sometimes.”

“How else?”

“Slow.”

“Mm, another excellent choice.” She let the trousers fall and lowered my shorts and pushed me back onto the bed. She slipped off my shoes and socks and my pants, then crawled over me and kissed me and unbuttoned my shirt. Her hand was warm and she slid it inside and touched me in the center of my chest and then on my nipples, rubbed each one (moving her thumb in quick circles) until it stiffened, then pushed the shirt back and slid it off so that I was exposed to her.

“There you are,” she said. “Such a pretty picture.”

W
eeks passed in which Chloe heard nothing about the job, but she refused to call. It was early February when I came home from class one afternoon and saw her in Donny’s Road Runner, him holding her, hugging her, actually. I stood on the porch and watched until I heard Brigman behind me. He was smoking and watching from the door again. When I asked what was up he just glared. It wasn’t until dinner (Church’s Chicken on paper plates in front of the TV), at which Donny ate Chloe’s share because she was upstairs in her room sobbing, that Brigman, several beers looser, his mouth full, said, “Hope you’re happy.”

“About what?”

“Didn’t get the job,” said Donny. “’Cause of her face.”

I looked at him.

He nodded.

“You see?” said Brigman.

I went up and sat on her bed but she wouldn’t look at me.

“What’d she say?”

She turned just enough for me to hear her and said, “Go away.”

“Chloe. Tell me.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Well, I do. I need to know.”

“Why do you need to?”

“I just do.”

She sniffed and turned her face a little more. “She said people wouldn’t want to buy food from someone who looked like me.”

“Look.” When she did I saw blood-crusted welts where she’d gouged the stain. “Someone like that is an asshole,” I said, “a fool. You can’t listen to that shit.” But of course she did listen, and had been listening all her life.

It was only then that it struck me how much I had wanted her to get it, to begin to do something constructive in the world.

Weeks passed, too, after my morning with Joyce in which I awoke every day with my stomach knotted by concurrent emotions—self-loathing and disbelief at the carelessness with which I might have thrown away my nascent career, and fear that it would not happen with her again.

It was hard to tell. When I saw her at work she always smiled, and we talked and sometimes ate together as we had before. But she made no mention of our moment, not even a passing reference to there being anything like a relationship, an affair, going on between us. Until one night I ran into her in the cafeteria, and she leaned into me and said, “Can you come over this morning?”

The first time had been furious and fast, a voracious alcohol-fueled muscle-fuck of the simplest sort. This time (though I would have been happy enough with what we’d had before) she seemed to want to linger over each moment, to manage it almost, to savor it, suckle it. She insisted on undressing me one slow peeled-off piece at a time, then positioned me crosswise on the bed and began kissing me, on the mouth at first, lifting up and lowering herself again and again as if I were a fountain she was drinking from, and then my chin and throat and down over my chest and belly. When she got there she lifted my cock and regarded it (eyebrows furrowed, mouth pursed), blew on it, then crouched between my legs and rubbed it over her forehead and her eyes and her cheeks before taking it in.

The few times I’d had it before were tentative and faltering and begrudging and incomplete and marred by teeth and thin lips, but this, the fullness and heat of it, the incongruity of the pressure of her tongue and lips and the roof of her mouth juxtaposed against the pull of the vacuum she created with her slight sucking, the unending wetness, was like nothing I’d felt. What was more she seemed to relish it. As if I were somehow working on her at the same time, as if my imminent orgasm was magically causing her own, she made more noise than I did. It did not last long before I called out and thrust into her, the pumping and emptying seeming to go on longer than I had anything to give.

She kissed up along my hip then and came to lie with her head against me, breathing as hard as I was and in the same rhythm, as if she were taking air from the rising and falling of my belly. After a moment, though, she got up and as she had the first time went to the armoire (which stood slightly open), slipped her arm in and brought out the short silk robe, shut the door tightly and went into the bathroom. When she came back she lay with her head on my arm and we were still.

After a little while, she said, “Do you think I hate him?”

“I don’t know. Do you?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Us,” I said.

“Why?”

“I mean me. Why am I doing this?”

“Don’t worry, Daniel.” She’d taken to calling me that in private.

“You don’t think he could blackball me?”

“I suppose he could find ways.”

“Shit.”

“Daniel. Listen to me—it’s okay.”

“You always say that.”

“Do I? Well, I must think you worry too much.” I remembered that he’d said that, or something very like it, once, too.

Outside a flurry of new blown snow batted against the window. The sky was low and heavy, and so it was dark there in the doctor’s house and we dozed. When we awoke she smiled at me, and I kissed her. At first she seemed distant, tight and preoccupied as if she were going to get up, as if it were time for me to leave, but I kept on until she relaxed into it. We made love carefully this time, with her on top and my arms wrapped around her, and when she came she simply put her face into my neck and gave a single quiet cry. I held her against me for a long time, and we were still again, listening to the wind and the house and each to the breathing of the other.

Only a night or two later I heard Phyllis and Oween sniping about the pathology conference in Vail Dr. Kessler had jetted off to that afternoon, just in time for some late-season skiing. At first a delirious wave of hope washed over me, carrying images of the two of us, Joyce and Syd, together alone for a week. But the more I thought, the more I knew better, and when in the ICU I overheard one nurse say to another, “Must be nice, no notice. Just fly off skiing whenever you want,” I knew Joyce had gone, too. It seemed odd that she wouldn’t have mentioned it, but I didn’t think about it much. It was during this time that I was to learn, or to hear at least, a couple of things that shocked me and began, I can see now, or at least marked, all the changes that were to come in our lives.

The first came at home. I was watching TV with Brigman, waiting for it to be time to leave for work. He was pretty hammered, having just finished a sixer. Chloe was upstairs—she’d taken to spending more and more of her time in the weeks since the pretzel debacle either cloistered in her room or across the street at Donny’s house, her long-time refuge from the strains of her life. It was dark but for the luminescent screen that lit Brigman’s face and the smoke that filled his opened mouth because he’d forgotten to exhale again. His eyes shined as he stared at Mary Hartman’s rerun pigtails and bangs (she turned him on, I think). When Mary said something stupid but smart Brigman cackled and phlegm cracked down in his throat and set him off into a round of cigarette coughing. Then the front door opened and Donny came in with a rush of cold air and said, “Heya.”

Under his breath but loudly enough for us both to hear, Brigman said, “Fuck.”

I didn’t know what was up, but Donny just turned and slipped back outside without a word. Brigman mumbled something that sounded like “Asshole,” but I didn’t ask him to elaborate. A second later Chloe came down.

She said, “Thought I heard the door.”

“It was Donny. Brigman swore at him and he left.”

“Shit.”

“Watch your mouth,” said Brigman.

Now, after a six-pack, was the time to keep quiet, to let it lie. She knew that, but she had been changing for a long time, since junior high really, toughening up, growing flip and nasty and careless, and it made me sad. I did not like to think about what she did with the boys she hung out with, though I knew. I had overheard her once on the telephone, a couple years earlier, talking to another girl with the sort of candid frankness, the carnal familiarity, that I knew older women had with each other but which shocked me to hear from a girl. And it was not speculative talk but a kind of comparing of notes, of how far, of where, of what hurt after. Brigman got regular calls from school about her attitude or something she had been caught doing—smoking in a john or making out in an empty classroom or being dressed inappropriately. But there in the dimness in the face of Brigman’s silly admonition, when I watched her cross her eyes and look down across her nose and push her lips way out so she could see them and say, “Shh-hit,” I laughed.

“He ain’t comin in here,” Brigman said. I gathered this was still about Donny.

“Fine,” she spat back.

“What the hell—” I said.

“Stay out of it,” Brigman told me, and Chloe said, “Syd,” and shook her head and came over and sat on the arm of my chair. It was a commercial now for Alka Seltzer (he couldn’t believe he ate the whole thing).

“I mean it,” Brigman said to her.

“All
right
,” she said. “Jesus. Drop it.”

“No,
you
drop it, Little Miss Jailbait.”

“God—”

“What
is
this?” I said.

“Ask her,” he said, “what she does with him over there.”

“Just stop it,” she said.

“What she’s
been
doing with him, I’d like to know for how long. Good ol’ Mr. Baby-sitter.”

Chloe stood and pointed at him and said, “Don’t you say that. Don’t you
ever
.”

“It’s true, ain’t it? What were you, twelve when it started? Thirteen?”

“Brigman, come on—” I said.

“
Ask
her.”

But it scared me in that moment that he was telling the truth or some version of it—that Chloe and Donny had begun something together and that maybe it went back between them to when she was a little girl. It would never have occurred to me, Chloe and Donny in that way. They’d always had this weird bond (he was the one she went to as if even as a young child she sensed who it was would stick around—these parents might fall away but Donny would always live across the street). And it suddenly made a certain sick sense that something more than that had grown between them. Maybe that’s even where it had started with her, in those unprotected years with Sandy dead and Brigman lost in his grief and his beer. I felt dizzy and nauseous.

The door opened again and Donny stood there holding up a six of Blatz like it was a trophy and he was the champion of something. I tensed but all Brigman said was, “Piss water.”

But when Donny came in and held it out to him, Brigman, after hesitating a moment, pretending to consider it, pretending that he might refuse it and kick Donny out, of course accepted it and tore off a can for himself and one for Donny. What a scheme! I knew Donny could sometimes be perceptive for a stupid shit, and of course he knew how things worked (that with six down Brigman could get damn mean, but a few beyond that would put him out cold until morning), but this guile, this blatant manipulation, was nothing I’d have thought him capable of.

“You ain’t hangin out here,” Brigman said.

“Just come over to say hey.”

He looked at Chloe and I saw something pass between them, then she went upstairs. After he finished the beer, Donny said, “Well, take it easy,” and left as well.
Mary Hartman
was over. By the time the early news came on, and I had to leave, Brigman was snoring in his chair. Chloe stepped around the wall from the staircase. She’d changed into fresh jeans and a nice blouse, and I smelled Charlie, the perfume she wore. She opened one of the remaining cans of Blatz and squeezed into the big easy chair alongside me, our hips mashed together, and said, “He wants it so bad for you.”

“Who?”

“Brigman, stupid.” She sipped and handed the can to me. “You don’t know how much. Doctor Syd.”

A sudden tide of regret flooded through me. We were both, my sister and I, fuck-ups in a literal sense—we were fucking our lives away. And at that moment I cared less about mine than I did about hers. I wanted so terribly for her to have something decent and normal, a real job, a healthy family. Nothing spectacular. Just to learn how to live in the world without destroying herself out of some kind of self-loathing. I wanted her to sell goddamn pretzels at the mall, to wear the little jacket and hairnet and get a paycheck every week, and to come home and not go out and ride around in cars and drink and give blowjobs to pimply little shits who cared not a whit about anything beyond her body and what she could do with it. And maybe to go to college but even if not to make enough to live in a good place and not always be scraping for everything she needed. Though perhaps I had gone a long way toward ruining that possibility, too. Because if I got into medical school, found entrée to that life, surely I could pull her up with me. I was fucking it up as surely as she was. Beyond that, I had thought about what other consequences my sinning might lead to—this was a long-standing marriage I’d tampered with. Maybe what was really frightening was the danger I saw in me, not of action but its opposite, of just letting things carry on until it was too late to save anything.

Chloe took another slug from the can, then pried herself up and went to the front door and looked at me, waiting it almost seemed for me to say something. When I didn’t, she said, “Night, Little Syd,” and was gone.