The Narcissist's Daughter (5 page)

“She sick?” I said.

“No.”

“What’s going on?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. Everything’s fine.”

I went up and found her not in her room, which was next to mine at the rear of the house, but sitting on Brigman and Sandy’s bed in the front, looking out at the street. Her nose was plugged, her face swollen from crying. I gathered there had been a fight.

“He didn’t go to work,” I said. “You know what that means?”

She nodded.

“How much has he had?”

“Not that much yet, I don’t think. Couple cans.”

“What happened?”

“He just treats me like such a baby.” She continued to stare out the window as Donny crawled in under the dash to poke at something. “I want to get a job.”

“What job?”

“A job job, for money. I have a friend who works at the mall, selling those hot pretzels. She said they need someone a couple nights a week and weekends.”

“How you gonna get there?”

“You could drive me—”

“You can’t count on that.”

“Right. So, I was thinking I could drive Mom’s car.”

Sandy’s ’64 Buick Skylark hadn’t been moved from our garage since the last time she drove it, in 1973, a few months before she died. The idea of the brand-newly licensed Chloe driving it now sort of shocked me, and yet it made sense—assuming we could get it running, why shouldn’t she use it? Except that Brigman would never allow it. It was some holy thing with him, the last vestige of Sandy on the earth, a parked shrine out there covered in dust.

“So he said no.”

“Like,
really
no. He got all pissed off.”

“And what’s Donny got to do with it? You all three didn’t just happen to skip on the same day.”

“He was gonna take me over to apply—the lady who owns it is only there during the day—but now Dad won’t even let me do that. He told me I have to stay up here.” Her face contorted and she squeezed her eyes shut as new tears came. The stain seemed almost to fluoresce when she got this upset. I had the urge to touch her, to feel her hair or the still little-girl-soft skin on the white side of her face, to try to smooth out somehow the confusion and anger that seemed so often to burn in her.

“I’ll talk to him later,” I said.

“It won’t matter.” She was right. It wasn’t just the car. It was her going out to be exposed to the world in that way that he dreaded. But I was too tired to think about it. I went across and lay on my narrow bed and listened to Chloe start crying again and Brigman knocking around downstairs, and imagined I could hear Donny Tooman hammering out in the street.

Donny and Brigman had struck an odd sort of friendship when Donny and I were in our early teens, a kind of master and disciple thing when Brigman was still the Guru of Hot Rod and Donny would come over and help him work on his cars, and go with him sometimes to Motorhead. It was around that same time that Donny began baby-sitting for Chloe. She was maybe five, which would have made him thirteen. I don’t know if it was so much a formal arrangement (I mean I could have sat for her if Sandy and Brigman had really needed me to) as a matter of convenience and keeping everyone happy. Even at that age, Chloe seemed to have a need to get away from home, and Sandy and Brigman seemed happy enough letting her go. So Sandy would phone across the street and Donny would come out to the berm and wait for Chloe to cross over. She was gone sometimes for hours over there. I was somehow aware that Brigman slipped Donny a wad of cash now and then to cover his time, though I believe Donny would have done it regardless.

As I drifted off, an image wafted back from the day before. I met Dr. Kessler outside as I was leaving. He carried a box of Dunkin’ Donuts in his good hand—snitch food. I was just going to say good morning but he stopped and looked at me seriously and said, “If you have trouble with Ray, let me know.”

“Trouble?”

“He can be hot-headed and careless. I don’t mean in his work. His work is fine. It’s other things.”

I didn’t know what to say, but I nodded.

“Just stay in touch. Stop by sometimes.”

“Okay,” I said, and though I had no intention of turning into another one of his informants I could feel the pull of his vortex, the desire he seemed able to instill that made people want to please him, to be on his side, and the headiness of the power of having his ear.

He said, “So I hear you’ve gotten to know the wife.”

“I have, yes.”

“Well?”

I kept my expression as blank as I could.

He said, “What do you think?” Again, I had no idea how to respond. It seemed like another snitch question, a followup to his having asked me to keep an eye on her, but he said, “Isn’t she something?”

This puzzled me, too, that it should matter to him what I thought of her, or perhaps I wasn’t puzzled so much as just surprised, but then I thought it went back to that impulse I’d seen in him before, that she was a part of the package of his achievements he needed to have recognized by whoever had the capacity to appreciate them. But the fact is he was right—she
was
something. As it happened in the few weeks after I’d found her dead patient, Joyce made a point whenever I went up there of stopping to say hey or at least to throw me a broad smile. If I was eating dinner alone in the cafeteria when she came in for her nightly tea, she’d sit across from me to talk for a few minutes. She was nice to talk to and to look at, and I began timing my breaks to coincide with hers, which were on a fairly regular schedule as long as things on the unit were under control. She commented on it once, saying, “You must spend all your time up here. Every time I come down, here you are.”

“I’m just lucky, I guess.” She smiled and looked away and I could tell that my saying it had pleased her.

I was thinking of this, but all I said to Ted was, “She’s nice, a nice person.”

“She’s certainly given you an A plus.”

He studied me for another moment as if he were looking for something, then said, “Well, remember, keep me in the loop. It’s important. I can be a help to you, Syd.”

Then he offered me his hook. I took it as I would a hand, and even a day later, as I lay in bed, I could feel how strange it had seemed to hold something so cold and dead but that moved as a functioning part of a human body.

I rumbled out of the hospital one December morning in the 610, the Tubes cranked, white punks on dope, and passed another Datsun, a sleek black 280Z pulled over with its hood up. Two women stood beside it huddled into their long coats against the wind and the first traces of new snow it carried. I could see their faces. I looped around and pulled up behind them. The license plate read Path 2.

Joyce said, “Well, aren’t you just what the doctor ordered.”

“You all right?” I said.

“The light came on. I pulled over but it started smoking.”

“You didn’t turn it off?”

“Well, then I did.”

“Hey, that was good thinking. Was it smoke or steam?”

“I don’t know. Steam?”

“You probably didn’t burn it up completely.”

“Did you just stop to be sarcastic, or are you going to actually help us?”

“I suppose I could help.”

“Not that I’m not very good at taking sarcasm. Loads of practice, you know. It’s just that we have to be somewhere.”

“I can give you a lift. But let me take a look, first.”

“You don’t have to, Syd, really. I can call triple A.”

I got a rag and a blanket from my trunk. When I came back, she said, “I’m sorry. This is my daughter.”

“Jessi,” the girl said. “Hi.” She wore little rectangular glasses that seemed to hold her tormented bangs out of her eyes.

“Syd works in daddy’s lab,” Joyce told her, then said to me, “She rode in with Ted so I could take her over to the U for an interview. Just as a backup, you know. She wants to go to Case. Isn’t that right?” She reached up and pinched the girl’s bangs between her extended fingers and flipped them back away from her eyes.

I wrapped the rag around the radiator cap and unscrewed it, and snatched my hand back as it hissed and popped. I looked in, then spread the blanket and lay down and stuck my head under.

“Syd,” Joyce said, “I can have it towed.”

I slid back out and stood up. “Cracked hose. Probably been leaking for a while. Duct tape’ll hold it for now. I have some.”

“Are you serious?”

“Sure.” There was a gas station up at the corner. I said, “You can get some antifreeze there.”

“Will it be safe?”

“Till you can get it fixed right.”

She looked at her watch. “Can you do it in fifteen minutes?”

“If you go get the antifreeze. And some water.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

I walked back to my trunk and got a utility knife and the roll of tape. I found the jack in her trunk, raised the right front wheel, then slid under again. As I worked, I heard them come back, and my car open and close. I’d left it running. Then Joyce was squatting beside me. I could see her ankles and her coat and the back of her skirt heaped in folds around them, and a little ways up inside, into the darkness between her thighs.

“She got in your car, if that’s all right. She’s cold.”

“Sure.”

I ripped a strip of tape. The wind sang and shook the car, but it was strangely comfortable under there, sheltered and heated by the engine, and quiet. Joyce did not speak. And then I felt something on my thigh, above the knee, and looked down and saw that it was her hand. I finished the taping but continued to lie there. I closed my eyes and listened to the engine ticking as it cooled and felt her warmth and the slight pressure of her fingertips, and the stirrings of an erection, until she took it away.

After I filled the radiator and started the engine she said, “Amazing.” Her face was flushed. Tiny beads of perspiration sparkled in the faint blond hairs over her lip.

“Because I put some tape on a hose?”

“Because here you are.” She looked back toward my car, toward her daughter, then said, “I owe you a drink, at least. Do you ever go out?”

“Sure.”

“What are you doing Thursday?”

“Nothing. I’m off.”

“I’m working second, filling in. Some of us are supposed to go out after. Ever been to Krystal’s?” It was the area’s newest biggest disco, out on Route 3 south of the city.

“Once.”

“Well, maybe I’ll see you then.”

“Maybe,” I said.

She got in behind the wheel and Jessi came up and got in beside her. When I put my hand on the doorsill, Joyce placed hers over it. “Thank you so much,” she said. I stood back as she drove off, and felt the dampness from her palm lingering still on the skin of my fingers.

I
t was twenty minutes from our house through the far south city and southward still until, after passing through a semirural truck-stop intersection of competing diner–gas stations and into the country, you came upon the incongruity of a neon-lighted building nailed down at the edge of a vast farm field, alone there fending off the night. Beneath the signs it was perfectly nondescript—rectangular, flat roofed, built of cinder block and painted brown. It could have been a warehouse, and as I thought about it I realized it probably once was. The deep gravel lot was lighted only near the building.

Past the bouncer and the cashier’s stall you came in through a long dark hallway that emerged into one end of a single cavernous room. The newness of the place didn’t save it from the usual tackiness, and it had already in its few months been impregnated with the permanent stenches of cheap cologne and stale smoke and beer. The centerpiece was a raised underlighted dance floor above which spun the requisite mirrored ball with colored spots and laser beams reflecting and refracting from it. It was surrounded by wide swathes of tables and chairs, and along the right-hand wall stretched a mammoth bar.

I sat there and had just finished my first beer when I saw her come in. She was alone. She wore a kelly green dress, knit so that it hung onto her everywhere it could. I wasn’t the only one watching as she came along the bar. She sat beside me and fitted a slender cigarette between her lips and lit it, then squinted her eyes and exhaled at the ceiling and said, “I don’t smoke, really.”

“Just on special occasions.”

“Something like that.”

Joyce ordered a Black Russian and another Little Kings for me and laid a twenty on the bar. Her hair was a little ratty and puffed out from her shift, and the effect along with the streaking made her look wild. We sat drinking, not talking, until I said, “How’s that gunshot?”

A flight’d come in the previous night, a married man who was discovered by his mistress in bed with yet another woman, a new girlfriend. The mistress had gotten hold of a .357 and tried to shoot his cock off. She missed it but hit both femoral arteries. Phyllis sent up twenty typed and crossed units before they got him stabilized and through surgery. How he hadn’t bled out no one knew but he was a young man, strong and thick, and though he was still unconscious they said his EEG looked okay.

“Fine,” she said. “Do you want to talk about that place?”

“Not really.”

“It’s just that I have so much of it when I’m there. And then again at home.”

“What happened to the others?”

“Who?”

“You said some of you were going out after work.”

“I guess they were too tired.” She opened her purse and took out a tin box and opened it and removed a black and white pill, then offered the tin to me.

“What are they?”

“Quaaludes.”

“I never tried one.”

“They’re fun. And you don’t have to drink so much.”

I swallowed one and we drank a moment before I said, “So what do you like to do?”

“What?”

“When you’re not having so much of it at the hospital or at home, what do you really like?”

She laughed and put her hand on my forearm and said, “I don’t think anyone’s ever asked me that.” She sipped from her glass and adjusted it on the mat so that it fit back into the wet circle it had made, and said, “I like to sail.”

“You have one? A sailboat?”

“My brother-in-law. He’s down in Coral Gables. Have you ever been out? No sound but the wind and the water. The boat lifting and falling. It’s like flying. The sad thing is we only made it down once last year.”

“You can’t afford your own boat?”

“Oh, we have a power boat here at the harbor—forty-foot Chris-Craft with twin custom Mans. But sailing, I don’t know enough about it, and god knows my husband doesn’t. We’d buy it and then have to hire someone to take us out in it. So we wouldn’t go.”

“It’s so sad.”

“Shut up,” she said and laughed and touched me again, this time on the front of my shirt. She rubbed the fabric between her fingers and then opened her hand and pressed it against my chest.

“You know what else I like?”

“What?”

“Dancing.”

“Ah.”

“You’re not going to tell me you don’t.”

“Aren’t I?”

I took off my sport coat and hung it over the stool and she took my hand and led me onto the floor. It was “Le Freak” by Chic. I felt silly, as I always did dancing, but as the beers and the pill spread through me and I watched her, I began to let myself go into it, let her pull me in, and at some point knew I didn’t look silly anymore because Joyce moved so evocatively that she made us both attractive. I became now simply a reflection of her.

We grooved through “Dancing Queen” and “That’s the Way (I Like It)” before the set slowed into “How Deep Is Your Love” and she moved in so I could feel her breath on my neck. I put my hands on her hips and as we moved together she pressed into me until I felt my cock swell. She ran her hands up and down my arms and I let mine wander back from her hips to the top of her ass. As I rubbed her there I felt no line, no impression, and knew that she was wearing nothing beneath the dress. She put her arms around my neck and pulled me tightly to her, and I pressed my pubic mound into hers and felt her rhythm, her slight thrusting. She kissed my neck and my cheek, and my cock was hard against her. The song ended and she gave me a little kiss on the lips and led me back to the bar, then excused herself.

I could feel the pulse of the bass in my eyes now as if I had become a part of it. In the mirror behind the bar I watched the light from the spinning ball cascade down over the dancers and dapple their faces. When the reflected lasers, riding in on the rails of the Quaalude Express, struck my retinas, they seemed to pop in my head like little fireworks and left me blinded to anything but bleeding spreading patches of color.

She came back and sat close beside me. I looked at her until she looked back and smiled, then I looked away. I felt her fingers on my arm again. She leaned over and said, “It’s okay.” I nodded but I did not know what that meant.

“I’m really hot,” she said, and took my hand off the bar and put it on her thigh. “Feel?”

“You are.”

“I need ice.”

I sat for a moment before I got it, then reached into her drink and took out a piece. When I touched it to her she jerked and gripped the bar with both hands, then turned toward me as I moved my hand in little circles above her knee.

Her legs were pressed tightly together and I could feel the water gathering there in the valley they formed. I got a fresh sliver and slid it along her leg. The burn must have increased as it moved up but she seemed to relax into it. She turned toward me and let her legs spread slightly so that the water ran down between them. I pushed up beneath the hem of her dress and higher still until she made a noise, a kind of exhaling, then turned away.

“I’m leaving,” she said.

“What?”

“For Florida, I mean. We are.”

“Oh.”

“We’ll be gone through the holidays. It’s too hot in here. I need some air.”

I put on my jacket and as we walked along the bar and down the hallway she held my arm. She got her coat and we went out into the moonlight, and the delicious night chill burned my wet neck and armpits. I lit us both cigarettes as we walked across the gravel lot toward the 280Z, which she’d parked far out away from the building.

I stopped and watched her. In that moment in the cold pale light on that gravel in that field I thought of the weight of her, of her experience, of her jadedness, of her damage, and I wanted terribly for her not to leave me there. I say this as if it came upon me suddenly, but it was not sudden. I had begun in some measure to care about her, to contemplate her, to invent her for myself, from that moment in the ICU when she took my hand.

She unlocked her car door and said, “Are you okay?”

I went over. My head felt light and the breath came hot and dry through my lips. She looked up at me. Her eyelids were heavy and her mouth open. I thought I knew what she did not.

She said, “Thank you, Syd. It was nice.”

“Don’t go yet.”

“I have to.”

I leaned into her and waited and felt her breath on my face coming as hard as mine, then opened my mouth against hers. She put her arms around me and I pushed her against the car and ground into her and she spread her legs a little to let that happen. She turned her face away and I kissed her neck.

“Oh,” she said.

I pulled the coat away and bit her on top of her shoulder.

“Oh, god,” she said. “Stop.”

I stepped back.

She said, “I’ve got to go, sweetie,” and got in and started the car and closed the door and threw me a smile. As she drove away I felt the aching already radiating up through my pelvis.

In the morning I came down to find Brigman as I usually did now watching television, but on this morning he looked up at me with such longing anticipation that I felt it like a slap and remembered only then in my exhaustion, my mind reeling with images of Joyce, her scents still fresh, that I’d promised to take him over to the east side to look at a Plymouth. He’d been with Donny already to see it once, though he had no money and besides he was an old GM man and had made a minor avocation out of badmouthing Donny’s Road Runner. And this car, whatever Brigman did to it, would never out-muscle the Road Runner, but it had called out to him somehow. This was all of course notwithstanding the central facts that 1) he was looking at a hot rod at all after having committed lethal carnage with one and sworn off them forever and 2) that he had lost his license after the wreck and never tried to reinstate it. But he’d always liked to look, even after jail.

“Come on,” I told him.

As I drove, he sipped from a can of beer and watched the wide seedy world flash past, and it seemed to make him happy, as odd things did in those days.

I said, “How’s Chloe?”

“Okay, I guess. Why you asking me?”

“I was just thinking about her and Sandy’s car.”

“She was your mother. Why you call her Sandy?”

“I don’t know. Why shouldn’t Chloe drive it?”

He looked out the window. There was no good reason but that the thought of it ate at him and I didn’t know if it was because of his desire to keep the car safe and locked away, or to keep Chloe that way.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“I’d help you get it ready,” I said. “It’ll take some work.”

“Some,” he said. “It’s pretty clean. I drained the gas out back when, so it ain’t gunked or nothin. Needs new rubber.”

I nodded, surprised that he was even talking about it, then (stupidly) I pushed. “She really wants that job.”

“She wants this, she wants that. What’s this all about?”

“Why shouldn’t she work? She’s old enough.”

“She’s got school to worry about.”

“We’re talking about a couple nights a week.”

“I don’t care.”

“She needs to do something. Learn how to work. It’s time, don’t you think?”

“You don’t even know, Syd,” he said. “You just—
fuck
.”

He stared out the window, chewing on his teeth. A little later, he said, “So how’s the job?”

“Fine.”

“You like nights?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

As we came onto the High Level, the great suspension bridge over the river, he said, “There a guy there who’s missing a hand?”

It crawled down my back when he said it and burrowed in and turned around a couple times in my stomach. “What?”

“A doctor. I remember an article in the paper when he first came on at St. V’s, one of those profile things. While ago. You were a kid. He lost it in Korea.”

“Ted Kessler?”

“I don’t know. He missing a hand?”

“Yeah.”

“You call him by his first name?”

“Not to his face.”

“But you know him?”

“Pretty well.”

“No shit.”

“Why?”

“He was 1st Marines.”

This had some significance to Brigman. He’d been himself a marine in the later 50s, wedged in between the wars, so he saw no real action, though he went to the Philippines, I knew, and Cuba. He was booted with a dishonorable discharge after only a year but once in the club I guess you were in forever.

“They were the first ones in over there. Talk about the Shit. And he had this rep, I guess, of being a real bad ass. He made major. He had this small platoon of guys who were as crazy as him. He could get them to do anything. And supposedly he carried this big knife and liked to whack gooks bare-handed. Quiet, you know.”

“This was in the newspaper?”

“Not that part. A guy at the plant knew him. After that article came out we were talking, he said he was this stone killer. Now he does autopsies and shit, right?”

“Yes.”