The Narcissist's Daughter (11 page)

“Do you really think you’re going to get away with this?”

“With what?”

“Whatever it is you think you’re doing.”

“But what is that? What is it
you
think I’m doing?” As I walked toward him he backed up a step or two into the foyer, so now I could see his expressions tightening and twisting in on themselves. I said, “Maybe I’m sincere.”

Ted aimed a finger and said, “I can fuck you up.”

“Have someone smash up my expensive car? Embarrass me in front of all my esteemed colleagues? Molest my daughter?”

“Get out.”

I thought of what Brigman had said, how Ted had learned to kill with his hands, but I was surprised to feel nothing, no sweating, no quaking, no thudding heart. I’d never before felt the coldness that ran through me (though I have since then). I simply waited. But Ted didn’t move. I stood still, taking in that moment of the cracking of his facade, then went toward him again. When I was close enough to see the veins in his nose, I said, “I don’t know when she’ll be home, Ted. You never know what might come up.”

His hook jerked up toward me but stopped between us. We both looked down at it. I said, “I heard you cut your own arm off. Is that true?”

“She’s not going with you.”

“I think she is. You just don’t know where. But, oh, if you did.”

He opened his mouth but the stairs creaked and Joyce said, “That’s enough.” She came over and touched his arm and he turned and walked off a few steps toward the dining room.

“Two, three in the morning, I figure,” I said, “by the time we’re done.”

He spun back but Joyce said to him, “Go!” and then to me, “You stop it! Now! Both of you stop it!”

“Stop what, Joyce?” I said. “Do you even know?”

Ted remained in the dining room doorway.

“Hey,” I said, “I know. How about if I make you guys a videotape? That’ll give you a good idea. You might even learn something from it.”

She started to cry then. I knew she would. I’d worn a light jacket against the evening chill and reached into the pocket now for my handkerchief and pulled it out to offer it to her, and as I did the condom I’d folded inside it fell onto the wooden floor between us. We looked at it, the three of us, lying there in all its red-wrapped tawdriness.

“Oopsy,” I said. Then I heard Jessi. I scooped it up as she came down, her eyes wide.

“I don’t get you,” she said to them and that had to be the simple truth. How could she have fathomed such anger and resistance to this simple thing of our dating?

“Please don’t go,” Joyce said.

“Why?”
she said, and now she was close to tears, too. “Why are you doing this to me? What is
wrong
with you?”

“Just…trust us,” Joyce said.

“Why can’t you trust me?”

Ted said, “Enough. You don’t talk to your mother like that. You’re not going. That’s all there is to it.”

“I am going,” she said.

Joyce said, “Then you don’t need to come back here.”

“Oh,
stop
it!” Ted said to her. “Just shut up, will you?”

Jessi regarded them, then turned to me and said, “Can we go?” and she went, leaving me to follow. I lingered a moment, looked at them, then said, “Don’t wait up.”

For greatest effect I needed to keep her out late and wasn’t sure at first how to engineer it—she couldn’t get into bars or clubs for a couple more weeks, when she turned eighteen. With a slow dinner and a late movie I could stretch it to midnight, and had resigned myself to that when I heard some X-ray techs at work laughing about
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
. It ran at midnight every Friday down in the old Anselm Theater, which had become (appropriately) a porn house except when it sold out showing camp to fans who recited dialogue and screamed at the actors, brought squirt guns and toast and newspapers to act out scenes and dressed in drag. Jessi squealed when I suggested it. First we had pizza and walked around the mall. From some distance I made out Chloe in her brown smock, her hair in a white gauze net, behind the counter of The Pretzel Man. She was busy, so I didn’t go over. I didn’t want her to see me with Jessi anyway. When the mall closed, I bought an eight of Shoenlings and we took it to the Ottawa Park golf course, not far from the theater, and parked and walked in and drank sitting on a bench at the first tee. She put her face against my arm, her breath dampening my sleeve, then turned and said, “Well, now you’ve got me tipsy in a deserted park.”

“Are you scared?”

“No.”

“I am.”

She laughed, and I laughed at her laughing. She said, “Are you going to take advantage of me?”

“Should I?”

“That’s a complicated question. And there’s the other one.”

“What’s that?”

“Do you want to?”

She kissed me then. I kissed her back some but when she moved her hand across my chest I pulled away.

“You’re strange,” she said.

“You noticed.”

“I mean, most guys just look for an opening. But you have respect, and self-control. You’re amazing. You’re going to make a great doctor.”

“That’s me,” I said. “Just full of respect.”

We kissed again a little bit, and then it was late and time thankfully to go.

I didn’t get her home until nearly two-thirty. I needed us to sit there for enough time that something could seem to happen (I had no doubt Ted was up) but she was understandably nervous. I said, “I want to do something for your birthday and graduation and all.”

“You don’t have to. Really.”

“I was thinking—” What I was thinking was how badly I wanted to avoid some emotional thing. And I’d had an idea. “—I heard the Ramones are going to be here…” So much for emotion, I figured. But she screamed and grabbed me.

“Oh, my god!” she said. “Oh, my god! Can you get tickets? I heard it was sold out already.”

I pulled them out, two scalped seats for Friday, June 30, at a place called Debbie’s Domino Club. So of course it required us making out again and this time it went on some, until finally I pulled her over the parking brake onto my lap so that she was straddling me—and though of course we were fully clothed I thought that perhaps in the dark through binoculars from an upstairs window that detail might be open to interpretation. Finally she said she had to go in. I walked her to the door. She touched my face. We said nothing.

In my car, I reached under the seat for the baggie I’d stashed there. Inside it was another of the condoms I’d bought at Garvey’s. I had used it, filled it in my bedroom before I came over here (filled it imagining Joyce) and sealed the open end with a paper clip, which I now removed. I opened my window and tossed the slimy thing up on the walkway where it would be clearly visible to whoever came out first in the morning to get the Saturday paper, and who I was pretty sure wouldn’t be Jessi.

I
t was not my plan to precipitate some crisis or blowup but rather to let it linger, to keep it lodged in their craws, them wondering if I was out doing to her the worst things they could imagine. So in the next week I saw her only once. We met for dinner, since for some reason I was not invited to the big family graduation/birthday gig they threw. After that dust settled, we took to meeting every second or third afternoon.

I had been considering my next thrust when on the day before her birthday she let me pick her up at home. We drove far out of town to a huge disorganized used-book store and spent the afternoon browsing. It was nice, actually. It was brilliant out that evening when we returned, clear and sunny and vibrant. In the driveway, as she leaned back against the Datsun, waiting for my usual insipid peck on the lips, I noticed a face again in one of the upstairs windows, and a dual refraction that was just maybe the long late sunlight coming off binocular lenses. I grabbed Jessi and mashed my mouth to hers. It had been pretty chaste between us since that necking in my car the night of
Rocky Horror.
I made it deep and long and even ground into her a little.

When I let up, she said, “Well, hello, Mr. Syd.”

I just looked at her. She smiled as if she knew something, as if something new had come to light.

The next night Kathy was on again, so Ray and I pretty much had the lounge to ourselves. Sometime after one when things had slowed and we were having coffee I said, “You hear about when Kessler came in a couple weeks ago on a Saturday night?”

“No. What the hell for?”

“To talk to me. He cornered me in the parking garage.”

“What?” Ray was reading an old
Sports Illustrated
with his feet up on the table, but he put them down.

“I’ve been going out with his daughter. Did you know that?”

“How would I know that?”

“I don’t know. Shit gets around.”

“Well, not that shit. That’s why he cornered you, for taking her out? He ought to be kissing your ass.”

“Well, he’s not. I might get fired.”

Ray slapped the table and said, “You know, there’s an office here called labor management. They’d love to hear about this.”

“No,” I said, “it’s probably better.”

“Syd—are you guys serious?”

“I guess.”

“I’ve met her a couple times. She doesn’t seem like your type, if you want to know the truth. Sort of prissy rich, you know. I mean, no offense.”

“No. I know what you mean.”

Then he sat back and grinned. He was a reliable guy, Ray, and he didn’t disappoint me. “You getting some off her?”

I shrugged.

“Is that what it’s about?”

I nodded.

“What, you can’t get any ass but Kessler’s daughter?”

“Sure,” I said. “But—” I shook my head. “You never had any like this.”

“Don’t bet on it.”

“Then maybe you have. So you know.”

“What?”

I leaned in and lowered my voice and said, “Ray, she’s crazy.”

“She likes it?”

“I mean she can’t get enough. She’s a nympho. My dick’s about to fall off.”

He whooped and slapped the table again.

I said, “I need a vacation from it.”

“So, details. Let’s hear it.”

I shook my head.

“Oh, come on. What are you, a gentleman now?”

“Anything,” I said.

“What?”

“That’s what she lets me do.”

“Bullshit.”

“You name it.”

“No.”

“I mean it. Name something, anything you can think of. If I wanted, she’d do it. Probably already have.”

Ray looked at me strangely and shook his head.

I said, “I’ve even asked her things, you know, just to see how far I could push it.”

Ray stood up and put his hands on his head and was pacing the length of the room when Kathy came in. To me, she said, “What’s got him going?”

“Jesus,” Ray said, “you don’t want to know.”

“Probably not.”

“About Syd the Stud.”

“Oh, goodie, boy talk,” she said as she filled her mug. “Syd has a girlfriend and Ray the Masher gets to hear about it.”

“He’s going out with Kessler’s daughter.”

She looked at me and said, “Jessi?”

“Yeah, baby,” said Ray.

“You’re not doing anything with her.”

“Right,” Ray said.

“Are you?”

I shrugged.

“I told you,” Ray said, and laughed in her face.

“God,” Kathy said, “she’s still in high school.”

“She just graduated.”

“Still,” said Kathy, “you could have a little respect.”

“Oh, fuck that,” Ray said. “How old is she?”

“Eighteen, today actually.”

“So what’s wrong with it?”

“I just think that’s a little young to be taking advantage.”

“It doesn’t sound like he’s the one taking advantage,” Ray said, and laughed again.

“What’s going on?” Kathy said. “What are you two doing?”

“About everything, it sounds like,” said Ray.

She sat down at the table and looked at me seriously. “What is it, Syd?”

“Nothing,” I said, “that she doesn’t want.”

“Jessi Kessler?”

“She’s kind of wild, Kathy.”

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not,” I said. “I like her, you know. She’s a nice person. It was just kind of an accident that we started going out at all. But then it’s just become, I don’t know—”

“Slam-o-
rama!”
Ray said.

“Shut
up,
Ray,” Kathy said. “Everything’s such a goddamn joke with you. I think this is serious.”

“Yeah, it sounds serious to me,” he said.

She grunted in frustration and pushed herself up, stalked to the door, then turned and said, “Listen, Syd, I don’t know what’s really going on. I always thought you were a nice guy. And what you do in your private life is your business. But it’s only your business, you know? Sitting here telling this jerk about it is kind of scummy. I thought you were better than that.” She left.

Ray looked at me a moment, then said, “Yeah, you fucking lowlife. What’s wrong with you? So, okay, now I want details.”

I gave him some.

Later, near dawn, I came down to find Ray in the blood bank. Kathy was sitting at the bench and he was leaning over her, his lips near her ear. It was historic. After I clocked out I heard the cacophony of snitches buzzing in the lounge. I went down to listen but it wasn’t necessary. I knew what all the fuss was about.

I’d’ve killed to see the look on his face, and I wanted to know, though of course I couldn’t exactly, how the rumors came to him. It had to’ve been through Barb—“Um, Dr. Kessler, you know, people are talking…there’s this rumor, uh, about your daughter? I just thought you should know.” How would he have looked at that moment? What would he have said and, more intriguing, what would he have revealed about how it wounded him (and there was no doubt, there never has been, that it wounded him)? For though he relied on Barb’s nosiness and nastiness and her pleasure at serving his compulsions and whims, I do not think he particularly admired her or trusted her or wanted anything from her other than that she venerate him and grovel and snitch and maybe give him a little sugar now and then (though when I discovered the truth about Ted and Joyce’s games I have to say it cast some doubt on the Ted-Barb tryst theory). Anyway, I suspect that the thought of revealing anything too personal to her, or anyone in that lab, would have horrified him. But now (presumably) here it was, laid out by her right on his desk. “Everyone’s talking about it—what she’s doing with Syd Redding—that
he’s
doing…things to her. Awful things. That she
lets
him.” (This is, of course, conjecture on my part, but over the many years since then I’ve learned things, gathered bits here and there.) Would she have been graphic? One of the myriad of small ironies was that as the co-subject of these rumors I was not directly privy to them, though Ray fed me pieces that floated back to him. I knew what I’d told him, of course (and it wasn’t really all that much, composed as much of innuendo as actual images, though I’ll grant that some of those images were on the odd side), but we know what happens to rumors when they propagate. On that I had counted.

My disappointment was that, aside from not knowing the details of how Ted found out, I couldn’t even see how he looked because he was gone. The day after the rumors broke, he stopped coming to the lab. This was in itself remarkable—he only ever stayed away when he was out of town, and I knew he wasn’t out of town. I mentioned it one night that week to Phyllis, that I hadn’t seen him around. (I didn’t suppose she’d heard the rumors. She wasn’t the sort anyone would have cared to tell.)

“I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” she said. “He must be sick but I haven’t heard. Not like him.” Sick, I thought. Sickened would have been more accurate. As I had been. Ted, I hoped, I dreamed, was feeling something approaching the rage/shame/ blind-anger/bitterness I’d been dealt.

At first it merely thrilled me, but as his absence stretched to a week I became almost frightened at how deeply I must have wounded him, that I had cut him in probably the most devastating manner I could have conceived. It surely affected him more this way than if I’d actually but quietly done the things to Jessi I claimed. I’d made Ted and his family a kind of prurient spectacle in front of his subjects. It was perfect, really.

I wanted to catch at least a glimpse of him but Jessi insisted now that we meet away from the mansion, leading me to gather that things were not pleasant and getting less so. It had begun to become familiar between us and all she said she wanted to do that Saturday night was take some beer to Ottawa Park where we’d drunk before. I talked her into seeing a movie first (
Grease
), then bought an eight and we went.

It was a city golf course but also a park, part of it, with a broad triangular-shaped section of playground equipment and sand boxes and horseshoe pits set off from the grounds of the course by a small angling road on one side and a creek on another. It was on this road that we parked, a dark spot known for car trysts and so patrolled fairly regularly by the city cops.

We drank a couple of the Schoenlings in the car, then went tripping into the night. She wanted to play on the canvas swings first (she swung with her feet out and her head tipped back so that her hair brushed the ground), then made me go back to my car and get the blanket in my trunk because the thought of sitting on the bare ground was icky. We crossed the creek on an arched wooden bridge and wound farther into the darkness and hills until settling on the leeward slope of a ridge exposed to the half-moon so that it wasn’t especially dark. I was afraid I knew what was coming, but just lay back and sipped a beer and watched the sky. We did not talk much and that part of it was pleasant, but then, of course, she leaned over and started to kiss me and soon she was playing with my shirt and then I felt her fingers graze my belt buckle. They did not do anything there, just touched it by way of suggesting, I suppose, that things were allowed to move in that direction. I did not touch her. She pulled away and took off her glasses and then she did a surprising thing—she sat up and unbuttoned her blouse (I could see her clearly) and took it off, then reached behind herself to undo her bra.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“Undressing. Is that all right?”

“I—” I froze. I said, “What was that?”

She was quiet, having heard it, too—what sounded to me exactly like the sliding of a shoe on slightly damp golf course grass in the middling moonlight.

But she said, “Nothing.”

“It was.”

“Are you scared?”

“No, of course not.”

She took her bra off then. She had nice breasts, I’ll say that, the breasts of a slightly overweight just-turned-eighteen-year-old, which is to say that they were more substantial than the typical breasts of a young woman of average weight and yet still retained all the firmness and height and profile of the newly budded, with nipples (pale they appeared in that light) that tipped ever so slightly moonward and underbulges that hung ever so nicely earthward and round lateral edges that extended beyond her chest wall so that if she were to turn away from you and raise her arms slightly you would still be able to see the arcs of them protruding from the sides. This was, to a twenty-three-year old man whose lover had betrayed him terribly so that for weeks and weeks on end he’d had nothing but the dry appeasement of his own rosy palm, one mighty enticing sight. Then she stood and unzipped her jeans.

“Jessi!” I said.

“Syd, I’m ready. I want this. I want you.”

“And I want you.”

“Okay, then,” and the jeans slid down to reveal silken pale panties (well, I imagined them as silken, though in that ancient light it was impossible to say for sure—they had that shine of silk, though I suppose, of course, they could have been rayon or something) and her ever-so-slightly pouty but still firm little belly and the ridges of what appeared to be quite a womanly set of hips. Oh, my own jeans felt small.