The Narcissist's Daughter (9 page)

“They’re erased, Daniel.”

I rushed out into the anteroom, to the row of tapes on the shelf above the video player and began madly pulling them out, looking at the labels, tossing them aside. I tried to fit one into the machine, tried to turn it on, then let out a gurgling cry of rage and yanked the television set off the shelf. It imploded when it landed, and a faint cloud—of fine glass dust perhaps or of the shadows of images—rose around it. I leaned forward, placed my hands on my knees and began to gag, great heaving spasms that rolled up from my lungs and stomach racking me until I vomited bile.

Now she stood again, now she came to me, to clean me, for she took off the robe as she came and wadded it up. But I straightened and put my hand on her bare chest and shoved. She stumbled backward and landed hard on her bottom.

I picked up the robe. I said, “You weren’t modest. It was just so you had an excuse to lock the door, after.” Even in that moment, that confusion, I wondered for how long I would have these little revelations, pieces snapping into place, moments recast.

I looked at her and said, “I didn’t mean for you to fall.”

“It’s fine, Daniel.”

I hurried back into the bedroom and dressed. She pulled herself up and leaned against the doorframe and watched me until I shoved past her and started down the stairs, then limped after, calling out, “Daniel! Wait! Please! You need to talk. You need to listen. You’ll hurt yourself like this!”

She chased me downstairs, and when I tore open the front door and went out she followed me still and stood on the walkway, stooped forward, knees pressed together, hugging herself. I backed so hard down the driveway that I veered and slid off into the yard, and when I pulled forward the wheels threw up dirt and grass and left ugly black furrows on the lawn.

As if her nakedness belonged to someone else, she remained there on the walkway, and I would later imagine her in that way—exposed in front of a doctor’s great house in the estate section, looking around at the neighbors and at the road again as if there might be someone still somewhere who cared to look back at her.

I
t was a small school of the wealthy and when, on the Monday after her party, in front of her fellow students, Jessi Kessler climbed into this raw-looking muscle car driven by some new guy, blooms of satisfaction rose in her white cheeks. Kids swarmed around looking in and some of the boys gave thumbs up or raised their fists. When a bloat-bellied man in a suit stepped outside to watch (the buttons of his vest nearly hopping off into space), I did not light it up, did not so much as rev it, but even at a crawling idle the ’Cuda sounded dangerous, each percussive burst discrete and sharp and amplified by the new glass packs Brigman had put on. You knew just from listening what lay beneath.

“So how’re the folks?” I said.

“Not back yet. Some flight thing. They’ll be in today.”

Do they know? I was itching to ask. Did you tell them?

For someone who claimed to disdain her classmates she seemed awfully preoccupied with them. I nodded and glanced over now and then into the stream of her nervous yakking while holding out before myself (envisioning it there on the road ahead) that moment when it dawned on the Two Shits who their daughter was hanging out with, and the delicious possibilities beyond that. We drove south and then east into the city and it wasn’t until we were at the edge of the downtown that I realized she’d shut up.

“You okay?”

“Where’re we going?”

“Nowhere.”

“Can we go over the bridge?”

I turned on to Broadway, then the on-ramp.

“I like to think about it,” she said.

“The bridge?”

“Well, the river. Water. If you were going to commit suicide, how would you do it? I mean, you know, theoretically.”

There was a pull-out up at the top that I think was for emergencies but I stopped so we could look out at the city, in one direction the buildings and street-maze of the downtown and in the other the old loading docks and elevators and warehouses along the shoreline.

“It’s so beautiful,” she said.

It wasn’t at all really except to an odd eye but I had one, too, had often wondered if it was only me who took so much pleasure in the grimy worn-out soot-stained vistas of my childhood, who loved, too, the bouquet of that burned air, who felt regaled by the raucous sounds of artificiality, of the man-made. A strange girl, I thought, strangely attuned.

I said, “I don’t think about it.”

“But if you did.”

“I don’t know.”

“They say guys usually do it fast and violent. Shoot themselves in the head or crash into a tree or something. And girls do it quiet, like pills or whatever.”

“Is that what you’d do?”

“I’d jump.”

“From here.”

“Yep.”

“Why?”

“I’ve heard drowning is supposed to be cool.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Not painful at all—you see colors and like go outside yourself.”

“I wonder how they know that. I mean, who’d they interview?”

She didn’t respond.

“You’d probably be killed, anyway,” I said, “or at least knocked out when you hit.”

She looked away from me, out over the water.

I said, “I guess it would depend on how you hit. I mean, if you hit feet first maybe you’d stay conscious so you could enjoy the drowning.”

“We don’t have to talk about it anymore.”

I drove down into the east side, and past the refineries and the rings of neighborhoods and small plants into the far countryside where it was a flat even mile between each intersection.

“Hey,” I said, “mind if I stretch it out a little?” I was anxious to see what Brigman had wrought.

She nodded but looked pale.

“You sure?”

She shrugged.

I turned onto a desolate stretch and stopped and then put it down. The blacktop was warm, so the tires gripped like they had teeth and you felt the back end lurch then hold and the front end lift as your brain settled back in its pan. The sensations—the Gs, a raw high scream of explosion and compression, a shuddering of dash and doors, a wafting of fuel—piled up as I wound out each gear, watching the tach, punching the clutch, every shift bringing a bark of the tires on the soft asphalt (which said all you needed to know about what Brigman had done to the back end). We’d just hit one-thirty, the next intersection rising up, when something in front let go. It was a tiny tock, a brittle snapping that I felt as much as heard but enough to send the car listing heavily to the right. At a normal speed it would’ve been no crisis but over a hundred if I put so much as the edge of a tire off the road we’d’ve rolled a dozen times. As I fought it (arms vibrating) and braked (so that now the pressure flew forward into our eyes) the right tires touched the berm and sent a swarm of pebbles clattering up against the door and the underbody. Jessi screamed. I leaned and pulled and braked and gritted my teeth and the tires caught and we came back and I was careful or dumb-lucky enough not to overcorrect and send us off the other side and we came to a hard squealing stop.

“Did you hear it?” I said, mostly, I suppose, to make the point that something had gone wrong mechanically, that it wasn’t just my bad driving. She opened the door and I thought she was going to get out and walk the twenty-five miles home in justified anger, but she leaned forward between her knees and threw up. I found some cleanish rags in the trunk to give her.

“I’m sorry—” I began, but she shook her head.

“I just get motion sick sometimes.”

“I mean—something let loose. In the suspension.”

She nodded. We sat until she seemed to breathe a little easier and a bit of color came up in her face, then I drove us back. The something clicked now in the right wheel, caught and released with a shearing sound, and I drove tensed against it. Jessi sat with her head back, eyes closed, breathing through her nose, and it occurred to me that it was maybe the end already, that I had ruined Brigman’s car and my beautiful plan of reprisal all in one careless moment. By the time we passed beneath the trees on her street she’d gone pale again—forehead damp, hands trembling, blouse matted with sweat. I caught her faint sour scent. Ted’s BMW sat in the drive. When I said, cruelly, I suppose, “I still owe you that bite,” she put her hand to her mouth and did not look at me. She opened the door and ran toward the house. I noticed a face in one of the upstairs windows.

In the early morning we got in a bad gunshot. There were so many people crowded around that I couldn’t get in to do a draw (this notwithstanding the fact that the guy likely didn’t have enough blood pressure for me to get anything, anyway), and Phyllis was waiting right there in the ER for anything she could use to do a type and cross and they could get off the O neg they were pumping in. So I crawled under the cart and scooped up some large clots for her to spin down. I had to wait around then for the docs to do a femoral stick for a blood gas, etc., so when I finally got down and dropped off my bloods it was well after seven, the day shift was in high gear, and Ted was standing in the hallway by his office. Waiting, apparently. He pointed at me.

“Sit down,” he said when I came in, then shut the door and stood behind his leather chair, arms resting on its back. He seemed relaxed except that his lips were white. He said, “What happened?”

“Guy got shot.” I had blood all over my corduroys and shoes and lab coat.

“You know what I mean. You broke the rules, didn’t you?”

“Rules?”

He regarded me for a long and uncomfortable moment, then said, “I know about it.”

“It was an accident.”

“An accident?”

“The—what are we talking about?”

“You have no business doing anything with my daughter. None. Let alone making her sick.”

Well, sick, yes, I thought, but I also almost killed her. Did she happen not to mention that? “So she told you—”

“She didn’t tell me anything. I heard her come in retching. I saw the car backing out and got to some binoculars and read the license.”

“You had it traced?”

“Yes.”

I was impressed with this and also cognizant of the real importance of what he was saying—that his oh-so-bright and alienated seventeen-year-old had said nothing about me or what had happened, and that this could be interpreted as her protecting me, shielding me from their wrath. Or just that she hated them and didn’t really tell them anything at all of her life.

I said, “Wow.”

He nodded (almost proudly I thought), then said, “So, what is it you think you’re doing?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “She liked the car, you know.”

“Don’t play with me, Redding.” Now, finally, he sat down and his face seemed to sag and he looked wearier than I’d ever seen him. “You’re a good worker. You seem smart enough. I told you before it was about not fucking up. Remember?”

“Yes.”

“Then why are you trying to so hard? First you assault my wife—her back still hurts her, you know.” I didn’t know. I hadn’t seen her in the month since I found the camera. She’d never come back to work. “And now you take my daughter out in some death trap.”

A distant ringing sounded far inside my head. I wanted to leap up and scream at him—who’s the sicko here, Doc? Who put all this into play? But I could not make my mouth form the words, could not force the breath through my larynx.

He said, “You know what she told me? Our marriage was just, how did she put it—‘an arrangement of housekeeping and a partnership of business.’” His voice had risen to the point it bordered on the shrill, and he stared at me, not in anger anymore I thought but a kind of need—I had the clear sense that more than anything he just needed to talk about all this shit in his life and there was really no one else but me to listen. I mean, who else knew? He took some breaths then and calmed himself and said, “Let’s not make it any harder on each other. All right?”

Outside the sun was well up and the heat of the air surprised me. In the parking garage I passed the special doctors’ section at the front of the ground floor, Benzes and Porsches and Caddys. Especially nice was the big new silvery-green Beamer with the Path 1 license plate. I looked around. The shifts had already changed so I was alone. I stepped over to it, Ted’s new car, gripped the antenna and pushed it forward until it snapped off.

She was not fat and doughy like her pretzels but thin to an unpleasant degree and pinched around the mouth and with streaked white and black hair that she tied back in the same manner my mother had. Perhaps it was a thing of working women, to have the hair neutralized in this way (Joyce’s was a little too short to tie back and anyway she’d had the benefit of surgical caps when she needed). This woman had large coffee-stained teeth behind the pinched lips and wore a black polyester smock. She happened to be alone at this hour of the afternoon, before her student-girl employees came in to handle the rush of evening traffic. She simply looked at me, as if she sensed that I was not there to buy anything.

“My sister’s name is Chloe Reed. She applied for a job here. Around the new year.”

She shrugged and shook her head.

“She has a hemangioma on her face. A port-wine birthmark.” I put my hand, fingers spread, over the right side of my face, spanning it from chin to eye, and her mouth opened and her eyes lit up with comprehension.

“I told her—”

“I know what you told her. You should be ashamed.”

“Pardon me, young man—”

“I will
not
pardon you. Listen—saying that to a girl who obviously has struggled with this thing her whole life, who would be considered beautiful without it—who could do that?”

“I have a business to run.”

“And I’m a law student.” I waited a moment, let it sink in (for both of us; I had not premeditated this, had not in fact thought of it before that moment; it just popped out). “I’ve been discussing the situation with one of my professors. He seems to think it’s actionable. And believe me, he’s one who would know.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means we can sue you for discrimination. You want to run your business, go ahead and run it—while you still can.”

“Look—”

“
You
look,” I said. “I understand that you have to sell pretzels to make a living. But who’s to say that Chloe’s working here is going to hurt sales? How do you know that?”

“People don’t want to see—”

“You don’t
know
. You don’t know that at all. Try her one night a week.”

“I—”

“One night a week. If sales fall, then let her go, no more questions asked. I won’t show up here again. But just see.”

I didn’t work that night, and though I was up late I woke when it was still dark. In my dream there had been a loud noise, a sound like a fist, say, pounding on a door as someone walked past it. As I lay there, listening, the TV came on downstairs, too loudly for that early hour. I found Brigman in the living room tying his boots. He had on an old pair of Carhartt coveralls. For his new job, at a Gulf station owned by an Old Motorhead acquaintance of his named Freddy Garvey, he had to wear a navy shirt with his name in script on a patch on the left breast, and matching trousers.