The Narcissist's Daughter (12 page)

I said, “Jessi—it’s not…it’s not time for this yet.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Don’t you think it’s something we should discuss?”

“We need to dis
cuss
this?”

“Yes.”

“Syd, are you a virgin?”

“God. No.”

“Well, neither am I. So what’s the problem?”

“It’s—I just don’t want to do anything wrong. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“I don’t think it’ll hurt.”

“Please—”

“It’s my father, isn’t it?”

“No—”

“He’s got you scared.”

“Jessi, stop it. It’s not that at all. It’s just, you.”

“You don’t want me.”

“No. I mean, yes! It’s not that.”

“It is.” She pulled the jeans back up and fastened them (bye-bye silken panties; bye-bye hips) and snatched up her bra and turned away to re-attach it (so long, beautiful breasts) and put on her blouse and stalked back toward the car as she buttoned it. I gathered what was left of the beers and chased her, calling out, but she began to run and by the time I got to the car she was already there and seat-belted in, arms crossed over her chest, staring mutely ahead into the darkness.

I didn’t hear from her the next day (she generally called if I failed to call her). With Brigman at the garage much of the time either working for real or working on the ’Cuda, Chloe (who was putting in twenty hours a week now for the Pretzel Bitch) and I blew the hearts out of some perfectly functional weekdays watching TV and smoking cigarettes and sipping beers. On this very morning of Jessi not calling, Chloe said to me, out of nowhere and apropos of nothing, “Do you have a girlfriend?”

“Why?”

“Just, do you?”

“No.”

“That’s not what I heard. Someone saw you with a girl at the mall. You were holding hands.”

“So?”

“So do you?”

“Holding hands doesn’t mean anything.”

“It means something.”

“Something, but not necessarily they’re your girlfriend.”

“A da-ate.”

“Whatever.”

“Is that who calls here sometimes?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you having sex with her?”

“Jesus, Chloe.”

“That means you are.”

“I’m not. And she’s not my girlfriend.”

“How old is she?”

“Old enough.”

“I heard she’s still in high school.”

“Where do you hear this?”

“Is she?”

“No.”

“When did she graduate?”

“Last week.”

“And you talk about me and Donny?”

“You’re sixteen.”

“And what’s she, seventeen?”

“Eighteen.”

“As of?”

“Week before last.”

“So she was seventeen when you started.”

“Was it true what Brigman said about Donny?”

“No.”

“But you were seeing him.”

“Are.”

“What?”

She looked at me with a pained expression and shook her head at my global cluelessness, and said, “Am. Is.”

“Still?”

“Don’t do anything stupid, all right?”

“He’ll find out. He found out before.”

“Only because Donny was trying to be decent about it.”

“Donny told him?”

“And god what a mistake that was.”

“You should wait anyway.”

“Till when I’m seventeen in like two months?”

So she’d made her point—that it was no different really than what I was doing, and if I thought she should stop, then I should stop, too. And she was right, but for different reasons. I didn’t know whether the pit in my stomach was from the images of my sister and Donny the Dumb or of a girl who was falling in some kind of love with a guy who’d led her under very false pretenses into thinking he cared something for her but had instead just set about giving her the reputation of a deviant nymphomaniac.

On Monday Ted showed up finally, bearing not the look I had been anticipating but one of haleness and vigor. “Syd,” he said in the hallway. He practically opened his arms to me but allowed a pat on the shoulder to suffice. Phyllis looked suspicious when he pumped her hand as if they’d been missing each other for years. “It’s good to be back,” he said.

“Where were you?” she asked.

“Nowhere,” he said. “I didn’t go anywhere. Just stayed home, did some writing, reading, caught up on a lot. And man, I feel good. Mental health week, let’s call it.”

She nodded, regarding him.

“You should take one,” he said. “Worlds of good.” He looked at me again and winked before prancing off to Chemistry. A little later Ray wandered up and said, “What the fuck’s up with him?”

I was afraid I knew, but wasn’t sure until I was putting away my tray in the equipment room. The student part-timers and regular day-shifters were loading theirs when Ted came in and over to me. He straightened the lapels on my lab coat and said, “Walk you out?” It got very quiet.

In the hallway he walked close beside me and as we came to the door to the back stairwell, said, “I’ve always trusted her. The fact that you made me doubt that for the first time is a shame. But at least now I see how full of shit you really are.”

He knew I hadn’t laid a hand on her, that the only ones I’d been fucking with were him and Joyce, and he’d called my bluff. I didn’t even have the presence of mind to try to bluff back, to fake like he was wrong or even to act like I didn’t care. I just nodded blankly and wandered off.

I had classes all morning (it was the summer of Statistics, Physics, and Genetics), so I didn’t get to sleep until the afternoon, and woke when it was getting dark. When I got to work, Ray caught me in the stockroom and said Barb was going around saying I’d made it all up.

“You listen to her?” I said.

“No. But are you? Seeing Jessi Kessler?”

“Yeah.”

I knew he wanted to ask the next question, whether I’d been bullshitting him about her or not, but it would’ve been an asshole thing to ask and we both knew he wasn’t going to. It was up to me to volunteer something more, and by so doing ameliorate Barb’s anti-rumors, begin my counter-counter-offensive. When I didn’t say anything, Ray left.

In the morning, stares and whispers pinged around me. A bench tech who with the first round of rumors had taken to calling me Dr. Stud, now said, “Dr. Dud,” and laughed. It was that kind of juvenile shit. I felt sickened, not at what they said or even what they thought (I mean, really), but at being shamed once more by Ted. He had turned it around, reversed it so it was I now who had become the prurient spectacle, the lab joke-butt of the week.

I felt like getting drunk and thought about asking Ray to go out but then thought better of it because if we drank the subject would surely come up and then I’d either have to tell him I used him by lying to him, or else lie to him some more, and I really didn’t feel like doing either one.

Jessi left messages that I did not return, and the week passed until that Friday, the day of the Ramones concert.

“
I
’m surprised,” she said, when I called. “I wasn’t sure you remembered.”

“Why wouldn’t I? You still want to go, don’t you?”

“I don’t know. I guess.”

“Are we or not?” I snapped, and as it had in the library the annoyance in my voice did something to her.

“Yes,” she said, softer.

“I should get you by eight.”

She said she’d be waiting at the end of her driveway, so could I please not be late, then hung up. My teeth ached.

When I got there, though, she wasn’t at the end of the driveway at all but inside somewhere so that I had to park and go up and knock and who should answer the door but Ted himself.

“Oh, ho,” he said, “did you forget something?”

“Jessi, actually.”

He did his best to carry on the act from the hospital but with no audience to play to he was pretty transparent, redness creeping up his neck, the muscles in his jaw working.

“Really?” he said. “Playing that game again?”

“I bought her tickets to a concert for her birthday. It’s tonight.”

“Well, have fun. And maybe afterward you’ll have time for a walk in the park.” Then he slapped my arm as if we were the best old buddies in the world.

Jessi came down the stairs. “Oh,” she said, “I see you’ve met my father.”

The tickets turned out to be a great deal, given that the opening act alone seemed to go on for hours. It was a local band that had discovered in punk the thesis that music was egalitarian, that you didn’t even really have to know how to play an instrument to make a band. So they didn’t. At the end of it (finally) the guitarist brilliantly smashed his guitar and the lead singer just as brilliantly threw the mike stand into the crowd. People cheered and held up their middle fingers. Debbi’s Domino Club, a place I’d never heard of before, was a pole barn on a gravel lot on a dirt road far out east of the east side. Tables and chairs sat crammed onto broad risers around an open section in the front where people could dance or just stand and look at the band, and waitresses came by and took your money. Jessi and I sat and drank and did not talk (not that we could’ve heard anything anyway).

The second act, the Fabulous Poodles, was a gimmick band with a catchy single called “Rumbaba Boogie,” but they were English, I think, and at least knew how to play their instruments. It wasn’t for another forty-five minutes after they finished, near midnight, that the Ramones finally came on.

Something changed for me then when Joey in his ripped-up jeans and rose-colored glasses spread his legs and pressed the mike to his mouth and they ripped into an ass-kicking prototype of their as yet unreleased next hit—twenty twenty twenty-four hours to go, I wanna be sedated. It smoked. It sizzled. It was over in about a minute. But before the feedback had even faded the bassist (Dee Dee he turned out to be) screamed One Two Three Four and they hammered into “Blitzkrieg Bop” (I didn’t know the titles then, of course, and couldn’t understand many of the words, but in later years I would listen over and over to the studio versions and re-create that sliver of the night in my mind). It was worth the extortionary price I paid for the tickets, worth sitting through hours of white noise, worth this uncomfortable stonewalling with Jessi, who apparently I would not be seeing much of anymore. But just then for that moment I had the first and maybe best punk band in history not ten yards from me, and they were on and I had discovered something real and concrete, a new music, the vista of punk, which I think now on looking back was not only the most honest and straightforward of all the genres of that tenuous posttraumatic pulse-taking self-conscious polyester era but also the most apt commentary on it. I’d seen some shows over the years as I said, probably as many as thirty of them, from Aerosmith to Zep, but as the band segued from “Blitzkrieg” into the sensitive and insightful “Sheena Is A Punk Rocker,” I knew, even then, even inside the moment, that this was the zenith, that I had found rock-and-roll deliverance in a weirdo barn-lounge somewhere in the wasteland east of the east side.

Then Jessi stood up and said something. She said it loudly so I’d be sure and hear.

I said, “What?”

“I’m leaving!”

“Where?”

“Bye!”

She pushed off between the tables and went down the risers into the screaming air-punching crowd and Joey and Tommy and Dee Dee and Richie were on fucking fire as they bashed from “Sheena” into “Teenage Lobotomy” (now I guess I’ll have to tell ’em, that I got no cerebellum) and what was I going to do, let her walk off into the night and get hit over the head by some east side punk? Shit, I thought. “Shit!” I said. Some leather chick at the next table shrugged in commiseration.

At the steel door the bouncer eyeballed me and I knew I wasn’t getting back in. Then I was in the cool of a midsummer night, the noise behind me fading into the distance of history as Jessi stalked off toward my car, which I’d parallel parked along the main drive because there were no regular spaces left by the time we got there. I thought at first that the night was weirdly silent until I realized it was just that I couldn’t hear anything.

I caught up to her and unlocked the passenger door and went around and got in. I looked at her. She said something.

“What?”

“I want to go home!”

“You were so excited about it. About seeing them.”

“I was excited about a lot of things!”

“You’re mad at me.”

“Oh, god, Syd—”

“I didn’t call you. I’m sorry.”

She shook her head.

“Jessi—”

“It’s not that,” she said.

“It’s me,” I said. Or shouted.

“It’s everything! My parents are horrible. They hardly even talk to me anymore. And when they do they accuse me of having sex. With you! And we don’t do anything! You don’t even touch me! It’s so stupid!” She leapt back out of the car and bolted into the driveway just as another car came tearing in. Stones flew as it braked and I thought for sure she was hit but somehow it missed her, apparently by turning and coming right alongside my car so fast and close that it smacked the door Jessi’d left open—my passenger door—and wrapped it clear around so it now touched the front fender. Then everything got quiet again.

The car backed away from mine with a rending shriek of unfusing metal. The guy who got out from behind the wheel looked at my door and said, “Oh, shit, man. I’m fucking sorry.” He had long blond hair, I remember, pretty hair, and he staggered sideways, then leaned back against my rear fender because he was too drunk really to hold himself up. Jessi was there now in the driveway again, staring, hands over her mouth. The bouncer wandered over.

“Can you call the police?” Jessi asked him.

“Private property,” he said. “They won’t do nothing.”

“Are you okay?” I asked her. She nodded.

“I’m really fucking sorry,” the blond guy said.

The bouncer helped me pull the door back around, creaking and moaning, until, heaving against it, we were able to snap it back far enough that the latch caught and held it more or less closed.

“Don’t try and open it again,” the bouncer said.

“Yeah, thanks,” I told him.

“I am really
really
fucking sorry,” the blond guy said. He leaned into his car, then brought something over and handed it to me. It was, of all things, half an eight pack of Little Kings.

He said, “I don’t need it no more.”

I thanked him.

Jessi got in through my door and crawled across. I made sure she put the belt on. Even as we were pulling out I swear I could hear Joey singing “Now I wanna sniff some glue,” or maybe it was just a little voice in my head.

Jessi opened two of the beers. We drove and drank (breathing recovering settling) until she said, “Where are we going?”

“You said you wanted to go home.”

“I don’t want to.”

So I drove us around out there on the dirt roads (somewhere actually in the general vicinity of where I’d nearly killed her a month earlier), drinking the beers, until she said she was starting to feel a little carsick again and could I stop? I found a rutted turnoff into some trees, a farmer’s tractor access or something, and bumped in a little ways. It was about as perfectly dark as you can get in the real world. We sat for a few moments before she said, “I am so sorry about your car. And leaving—”

“It’s all right,” I said. “Really. I’ve been shitty. I know. I deserved it.”

“No. Don’t say that.”

“I’ve just been—”

“Busy. I know. You have summer school and work and I’m just this bored spoiled girl and I am so sorry about everything.”

“No,” I said. “I’m really the one who should apologize.”

We were both quiet again. And then as if it had been agreed upon or some voiceless signal passed between us we lurched toward each other and met over the parking brake, met and began tearing, she at my clothing and I at hers. It was a lot of tearing and there were those very nice breasts involved and lips, too, and finally it required my showing her how to put the seat back all the way as I opened the glove compartment and dug out the last of those stupid condoms I’d bought at Freddy Garvey’s Gulf station, and my crawling over her and sort of kneeling on the floor so I wasn’t crushing her, and then me touching her, touching her and kissing her and showing her in some awkward front-seat way my version of how it was supposed to be and finally me lifting up and pressing against her as she made quiet sounds in her throat, a muted held-in crying out, and instead of just fucking her as I imagined she had been fucked, I stopped and held myself up. I thought I could make it decent, I could make it good, or at least I thought I could make it last. But it didn’t last, not at all. It was over in a high school minute.

In her driveway, she leaned against me. I wondered what she felt about what had happened. I felt mostly confused. It had never been my plan to do in actuality what I pretended to have done for her parents’ benefit. And I’d never had any desire to make her pay for their temerity and exploitiveness but now I knew I had, or would when it came to its inevitable end. And I had to ask myself—had I done it because of what Ted did to me, to invert the tables yet again, simply because I could? Or had it been something else between us, Jessi and me, some growing thing fed by angst and relief and sadness?

What was strange was that I slept hard that night for the first time in weeks, for the first time really since Ted figured out I wasn’t doing anything to his daughter and so gleefully rubbed my face in it.

And having slept hard I awoke early enough that the birds were still singing, clawed my way up and out of bed and into some shorts and ran. The world felt new and unfolded and wet and I could smell the fecundity of summer—sap and spores and rich rotting humus. There are certain scents I have always associated with running, as if somehow the olfactory senses are awakened or sharpened by the quickened flow of body fluids. I came back glowing because even that early it was already over eighty and was supposed to hit ninety-five by midday.

On my return, Brigman and Chloe were standing in the driveway, coffee mugs in hand, inspecting my mangled passenger door. Across the street Donny pretended to work under the hood of the Road Runner.

“You get clipped or backed into?” Brigman said when I ran up.

“Hit.” Sweat ran off my chin and elbows and nose. I gave a somewhat edited version of events.

“You get information?”

“No.”

“Plates?”

“No.”

“Fuck, Syd,” he said, “you can get insurance for this.”

“I can fix it,” said Donny. He’d slipped over and stood now at our periphery, eyeballing the damage (which he’d obviously been over to look at earlier) and Brigman at the same time, ready to run if Brigman lashed out, but Brigman simply ignored him. “Paint it, too,” Donny said.

Chloe smiled and motioned him closer. He took a sliding step in her direction.

I said, “They said the cops wouldn’t come because it was private property.”

“You can still file a claim,” said Brigman. “There witnesses?”

“Yeah.”

He looked off in frustration at my dimness.

Chloe said, “Jessi got the number.”

He said, “Who?”

I said, “How do you know?”

“She called while you were running.”

“You talked to her?”

“Oh, my god. I talked to Syd’s girlfriend.”

“She is not my girlfriend.”

“She got the license?” Brigman said.

“I can do it cheap,” said Donny. “Bank the insurance.”

Chloe said, “She has like a photographic memory or something, I guess. Did you know that?”

I said, “Why the hell did you talk to her?”

“Why the hell shouldn’t I?”

“Lucky for you she did,” said Brigman.

“Change that shitty color if you want, too,” said Donny.

“Shit,” I said.

Chloe said, “What’s wrong with you? She seems nice. Funny, too.”

“Funny about what?”

“What an asshole you are.” They all laughed, even Donny, then she said, “Kidding. I think she really likes you.”