The Narcissist's Daughter (16 page)

“So. What?” said Chloe.

“Brigman would like you to come home.”

“Well, I’m not.”

“He’s worried.”

“Joyce had the Safe Sex talk with me, if that’s what you mean.”

“No—I mean, that’s good. I’m glad. You should listen to her. But there are things going on, Chloe, some trouble, and you should be there, at home.”

“I’m safe here.”

“The trouble
is
here.”

“Jessi told me.”

“No, she didn’t.”

“Yes, she did.”

“Chloe—trust me on this.”

“Syd—”

“Listen—”

“I’m staying. Good-bye.”

The next morning I took a rear booth where Joyce told me to meet her for breakfast (a quick call to the hospital, a command, a click, no chance to refuse), a nicer place than I usually dined, especially this early.

When she sat down across from me, I said, “So, what’d Ted have to say?”

“About your new friend? Not much. I didn’t think he would.”

“You didn’t know about it before last night?”

“That you were being beaten? You think I’d have let it go on?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course you do.” She let her fingers play lightly across mine on the table top, then said, “So, how often do you see her?”

“I don’t know. Now and then.”

“What do you do?”

“Have lunch.”

“That’s all?”

“More or less.”

I should have told her then. And I told myself I would have if she’d asked directly—are you having sex? But she didn’t. She said, “I don’t understand how having lunch with you has influenced this decision about college.”

“I think she’s just not sure what she wants to do, and needs some time.”

“Is that what she told you?”

“In so many words.”

She looked away for several moments and seemed to consider things, then wiped at her eyes and said, “It’s going to stop now. Everything. All this violence. You and Jessi. You and Ted. It’s over.”

“Joyce—”

“I told him, Syd. About us.”

I had raised my iced tea to my lips but couldn’t swallow.

“About you and me. That that’s how it’s going to be now.”

It was I who wanted to cry then, who saw with a horrible clarity the knot of forces that had been set loose to twist and turn on itself, writhing and furious and self-consuming.

“I’m not sure you understand.”

“Syd,” she said, “I have a surprise. Come on.” She put some cash on the table. We took her car, though she gave me the keys and had me drive. She guided me onto a quiet leafy boulevard of large frame houses in the Old West End and into a driveway, and she led me not into the house but the backyard, to the garage, and up the flight of wooden stairs fastened to the side of it. She produced a new key and unlocked the door at the top.

“For us,” she said.

It was a studio apartment outfitted with nothing but two modest though upholstered chairs, a gymnasium-sized bed, and a wooden trunk, which I found held an array of tools and devices and scarves and ropes and oils and unguents and penetrating implements the likes and uses of many of which I had barely imagined let alone used before that.

When she told me to lie down, I did.

Masterson called that afternoon. “I’m sorry, Syd,” he said.

“I didn’t get it?”

“Well—no.”

“Okay.”

“The truth is, I never sent in the application. There was a…problem. The situation changed.”

“I see.”

He apologized again and hung up, as if he couldn’t bear to hear my voice anymore.

Brigman had several old tire irons in the garage. I took one, angled and tapered at one end for prying off hubcaps with a socket at the other end for fitting over lug nuts, and put it on my passenger seat. So when that night after I turned off the thoroughfare into the neighborhoods behind the med center (I often came this way, traversing a few blocks of ghetto to use the rear entrance, which fed straight into the parking garage) his front grill came up hard on my rear bumper and his big face leered in my mirror, I felt a calmness come over me. And with it the old anger came back. I wondered where it had gone. Though I stopped he pulled around anyway to cut me off.

They were big houses along here, clapboards and shingle-sides and bricks, some duplexes, most with wide front porches where families sat to watch the street, though they didn’t stay out at night. The place was dark and dead and I knew that if I were to leap from my car and scream for help, for someone to call the cops, no light would go on, or if it did it would snap off again just as abruptly. The ER got a guy in once who was stabbed right here a block from our entrance and had to drag himself out to the lights of Cherry Street before someone dared to stop and help him.

I rolled down my window and the thick humid air poured in, but he sat looking at me as if (like the animal he was) he smelled a change, sensed that I was done taking his shit. But if he was waiting for me to mosey up so he could nut-grab me again he was kookier than I already thought. He got out so slowly you could practically hear him grunt, as if having to actually work was some big inconvenience. I gripped the iron.

He stood away from my door, a little in front of it, and crouched to look in. He said, “Heya, fuckface. Whyn’t you get on out.”

I said nothing.

“Come on, otherwise I might have to mess your car up, too.”

“Well, there’s a threat,” I said.

“Listen, I want to talk. I want to know—I mean, you proud, getting the girl to drop out of college? This your big wet dream come true? You like ruining people’s lives?”

I said nothing.

“Perfectly happy healthy family, and you gotta come in from your white trash ghetto and fuck it up. Don’t look shocked. I know where you live. I watched you and your grease-monkey dad and your freak of a sister. I know what kind of toilet you crawled out of. Thing is, you picked the wrong family. So now you gotta pay.”

“What does that mean, Ron?”

“Well, whyn’t you tell me? I’d like to know what it’s gonna take with you. But we’ll figure it out.”

“Fuck you.”

“Yeah? Get out.” Then he made his mistake. He stepped up to my door and pulled the handle, which was locked, so he raised his left hand to the sill and lifted the lock. I swung the iron across in front of me, wrist-slapped with it really, because there was of course no room to take a good swing, but it was one of those unconscious physical things that sometimes work because you haven’t planned it to death, you just react and let the old eye-hand work its magic. It put a nice dent in my door, so you can imagine what it did to him. He howled and leapt, his bulk coming straight up off the ground, and spun while he was airborne in a kind of grotesque pirouette, and then danced, swearing, moaning, gurgling in his throat, hands pressed between his fire-hydrant thighs.

This was when I made my own mistake—instead of pulling it into gear and taking off, I watched him (fascinated frankly and a little stunned at what I’d done), so I was unprepared for his sudden recovery. All in a motion, as he leapt in pain and fury, spinning like a cartoon, he spun right back to my door and yanked the handle, which this time worked, and then reached in and grabbed my shirt and dragged me out so that I found myself on the graveled asphalt.

I struggled up, frantic to get to my feet before he could plant a boot in my face, and had just made it when in his spinning and howling he drove his fat head into my chest and knocked me so hard into the car that my own head snapped back and I went down again and didn’t move this time. I was conscious but only marginally (much of this I reconstructed later). I dimly remember lying with my head under my car. It was still running; I smelled exhaust. And I remember him kicking me, as I knew he would.

I don’t know how long I lay there. I knew I had broken bones. When I was able to sit up, blood ran into my face, and I felt it running down under my collar as well. I managed to crawl back into my car and drive somehow, hanging on the wheel, wiping my eyes to find my way in through the rear gate of the compound and around the great building itself to the entrance of the ER. Then I seemed to be sliding down some slope, though I was aware enough to remember resting my bloody pounding face on the pad in the center of the steering wheel and the horn going off as I slipped away.

I
retain dim fragments of images from that night—Phyllis and Ray alternately leaning over me, Brigman showing up frantic and frightened. And strangely, Ted. I remember seeing him with Phyllis at one point in the walkway outside the curtained stall, and later in the room with me, though I was to wonder eventually whether it was a vision, an illusion, a dream perhaps, for even as I saw it I slid away down the slope again.

When I woke finally and knew where I was (though I wasn’t sure why yet) I turned my head, painful as that was, and saw Brigman dozing in a chair. Beyond him someone walked past in the dimly lighted hallway. He stirred then and said, “Heya.”

We regarded one another.

“You remember what happened?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You got your clock cleaned.” I had, he told me, a concussion, twenty-five stitches in my head, a broken wrist, and several cracked ribs. He added, “They think you got mugged.” He let that sit a moment, then said, “You understand anything?”

“Starting to.”

“I mean, are you really awake now? You feel groggy?”

I was, still, but I said, “I’m pretty clear.”

“They been worried about you sleeping.” He slid his chair closer to my bed and said, “So was it him?”

“Yeah. I think I broke his hand.”

“You should’a broke his fuckin neck.”

“Next time.”

“Fuck that.” He got up and went over to the window. Dawn was turning, the sky just cracking with first light. “There ain’t gonna be a next time.” He pulled out a cigarette and put it in his mouth but didn’t light it. He said, “You gotta stop it. Clean up your mess. And we gotta get Chloe. Then we’ll take care of this motherfucker.” It occurred to me to ask which motherfucker he was talking about, Ted or Ron, but I didn’t. I just let it float there between us.

He sat with me until I dozed again. When I woke into the full morning he was gone. They came in to take a temp and b.p. and shine a light in my eyes and when they went out someone else came in. I must have started because he, Ted, said, “Shh. Just relax.”

“What are you doing here?”

“We need to talk.”

“No, we don’t. It’s past that now. You don’t know what you’re in for.”

“Syd—” He shook his head. “I’m frightened.”

“You should be. I can sue your ass off.”

“Will you shut up? If you weren’t so full of…” He held up his hand and said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. But you’re missing my point. You can’t hurt me in that way. You don’t have anything. Call a lawyer. Call the FBI if you want. I don’t care, except for one thing, the thing you’ve always known would scare me—”

“I’m not going to hurt her.”

“Really? Do you think she has any idea what’s going on?”

“No, of course not.”

“And if she finds out? She’s changed her life because of you. I don’t know if you realize what you’ve done to her—”

“She just needs time to think—”

“Oh, bullshit. She’s in love with you. She thinks you love her.”

“I never meant her to.”

“What you meant hardly matters at this point.”

Of course he was right. He surely wasn’t telling me anything I hadn’t known since that July Fourth afternoon when Joyce squeezed me in the pool and I knew what was going to happen, knew that I could never say no to her, could never not go back.

“Her welfare is my only concern now,” he said. “The rest is just history. I don’t know how you really feel about her. I don’t know if you even know. But if you care anything for her, outside of whatever else has happened, how you feel about me or Joyce, then you should be frightened, too.”

“I am.”

“Then do something about it. Stop this nonsense with Joyce. Not because of me—because frankly I don’t care anymore—but because of her.”

I could only nod.

“You’ve won,” he said. “You got me back. But now it’s time to stop. Then, when the time comes, I’ll help you.”

“Like you did with that fellowship?”

“What do you mean? I wrote the letter.”

“Must’ve been great. Masterson didn’t even submit the application.”

He looked at me for a moment, then smiled and shook his head. “You have no idea what you’ve got yourself into.”

“What do you mean?”

“I wrote a perfectly good letter, Syd.”

“Then what happened?”

“Who wants you to stay here? Who’s manipulative and selfish and crazy enough to make sure you do?”

“She called Masterson?”

“I’d guess she called Dotty. Little chat, you know. And said just enough that Dotty had to tell Dave. Enough that he’d smell the stink and drop you.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“Ask yourself something—who was it on those videotapes, being watched? Who was the focus of all that? Who can turn her emotions on and off like hot water to make them whatever the situation demands? Who craves going to bars to be hit on while at the same time being watched? Whose idea was that? Who
begged
me to be allowed to play, to be seen in that way?”

“That’s a lie. She said—”

“What? What’ve I ever done, Syd, besides fulfill her desires, by watching or whatever, and then to be there for her, with her, after? And for that matter, what have
you
ever done but the same thing?”

I felt dizzy and nauseous.

He said, “I know what people say about me, even in my own house. Jessi calls me a narcissist. On some level it’s become a family joke. Ha ha, Daddy’s looking in the mirror again. And I’m the first to admit that I have an ego. But I’m not dysfunctional. There’s a mental illness called narcissistic personality disorder.
I
don’t have that. I’m not sick. I’m just a guy who likes to succeed, and keep his hair trimmed. And I like running a big lab and having influence and making money and driving a nice car. Is that horrid? You’re no different. And neither of us is by any measure pathological.”

“And she is?”

He didn’t answer that. He said, “Rest, now. It’s not too late. Are they discharging you?”

“I think so.”

“Take whatever sick time you need.” He touched me just briefly on the shoulder and turned to leave and nearly ran into Brigman. I saw Brigman’s eyes flick to the hook and back up, and braced for whatever threat or profanity was going to come out of his mouth, but he said nothing. And strangely (because he was looking not at me when he said it but at Brigman) Ted said, “Thank you,” and brushed past him and went out.

Later when I saw how we were getting home—Donny was waiting under the portico in his Road Runner—I knew what it meant. And when, a few hours after he’d dropped us off, he showed up again, this time with Chloe and her suitcases, and after that took my car (which he and Brigman had picked up from the police lot where it’d been towed) across to his side of the street and began pounding out the ruined sheet metal, it merely confirmed it. The forces had been marshaled. Rifts had been, if not healed, then patched over. Chloe was to be given some autonomy, which meant that what she did with Donny was her business. In return for that, what Brigman would get was the most unquestioningly loyal muscle-bound muscle-headed mechanically gifted minion a marine going into battle could ask for.

Though I slept through the afternoon it felt even then as if I were waiting. Toward evening Jessi came. It had been arranged. Brigman and Chloe both had to work. She sat with me on a dining room chair someone had carried up until it was dark out, until Chloe came home and I listened to them downstairs chattering and laughing together until I drifted off again.

The next day I could feel the effects of the concussion ameliorating, a fading of fogginess as my mind brightened and the world came into focus again. I walked over to look at my car. Donny had already made huge progress. He’d picked up a whole new door at a junkyard, and pounded the fender out so it was ready to be Bondo’d and sanded back to its original smoothness. He said he could fix the crease in the driver’s door, too, where I’d broken Ron’s hand. After that, all he had left was the painting, and that was his finest talent. As I turned to leave, he said, “I never done nothing with her. Not even now.”

“What?”

“If you think I would, you’re an asshole.”

I stood for a moment and looked at him, then walked down to the thoroughfare at the end of the block, and around to the next street and was just coming back when the yellow Rabbit slowed beside me and Ron leaned across and looked out his open passenger window. I may have yelled. I don’t remember. He didn’t say anything. Just reached across and flipped me the bird with his left hand. He couldn’t use the right one for that purpose, since it was casted from fingertips to mid-forearm. Then he pointed at me, as if to say I was marked, and drove off.

Later, when I told Brigman, he didn’t respond except to set his jaw and nod a little.

I called my professors and explained what had happened, and figured out what I’d missed. Finals were barely two weeks away.

I rested another day. Then the following morning, which dawned overcast and wet and looked as if it would stay that way, Jessi drove me to school. Later Chloe got me before she had to go to work. That afternoon, Donny came over to say it was ready. He’d painted the whole thing, replaced the drab army gray-greenness with a deeper more verdant autumnal shade. I thanked him several times and asked what I owed him. (I’d filed a police report after Jessi gave me the license number. A few days later an insurance agent called, asked a few questions, then mumbled something about how I wasn’t the first victim of this guy but I was sure going to be the last that that company covered. A week later I got a check for nearly eight hundred dollars.) He said Brigman’d taken care of it. I was okay to drive by then, steering with the casted hand and shifting with the good. So I took it around the block at first, then farther out into the city.

I thought I was just driving, seeing how it felt, but I ended up somehow on the block of Scottwood where Joyce had rented her little pad and drove past and saw that her car was not there. I wasn’t sure why I was doing this. Would I have stopped if I’d seen the 280Z? I didn’t know. But now, sure that she wasn’t there, I did stop. I wanted to leave her a note. I tore out a piece of notebook paper and climbed the wetted steps to leave it in the storm door. It was going to say something profound and considered like “I’m all right. Let’s talk. Syd.” But it didn’t get written because as I reached the top of the staircase, Joyce opened the door.

“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t see your car.”

“It’s in the alley in back.” She was barefooted, and though it was oddly chilly for an August day, even a rainy one, she wore only a bright yellow sun dress.

“I’m sorry—”

“Would you like to come in?”

“Is it all right?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Have you talked to Ted?”

“About what?”

“Everything.”

“I know what’s going on, Syd, if that’s what you mean.”

I went in after her. She closed the door behind us, and I put my hand on her arm because I needed to touch her and she smiled, and said, “You look like hell.”

“Thank you.”

“I don’t just mean the injuries. You’re greasy.”

“Yeah, well, it’s kind of hard to wash.”

“It hurts?”

“Plus with only one hand.”

“It just takes practice.”

I sat in one of the easy chairs while she went back to the kitchenette where she’d apparently been cleaning.

“How come you’re here?” I asked.

“I’m pretty much living here.”

“Really? God. Joyce—”

“I’m happy, Syd. I just—I get lonely. Listen—how would you like me to wash your head?”

“Really?”

“I won’t hurt you. Much.”

I took my shirt off and went to the sink and leaned into it and was struck not only by a pulsing (though not exactly pain) in the contusions themselves but a deeper thrumming inside the cranium that after a moment segued to a staggering vertigo. I had to kneel with my hands on the edge of the basin and close my eyes.

She said, “Are you okay in the shower?”

“Yeah.”

“Then we’ll do that.”

How she meant, I wasn’t sure. She pulled the last few slices from a plastic bread bag and shook the crumbs in the sink and slid it over my cast and taped it. It was an old-looking bathroom, from the thirties I figured, done in pink and black tiles and heavy porcelain fixtures, the freestanding tub high and claw-footed with a double curtain that went all the way around it on a wire, and a retrofitted showerhead connected to the faucet via rubber tubing. After I got under it, I heard the door open and close.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s try this.” She separated the curtains and reached in and I sort of squatted while she squeezed on the shampoo and tried to work it in, but it was a reach for her—I was taller anyway and the old tub increased that difference by another five inches—and she was getting pretty wet. She said, “Hang on.”