The Narcissist's Daughter (13 page)

It was barely ten o’clock and sweltering, and I felt frozen. I didn’t know what to do with her now, didn’t know what I’d done.

“So,” Donny said, “you want me to start on it?”

Brigman turned as if he had only then registered Donny’s presence and said, “What are you doing over here?”

Donny moved his mouth a little but nothing came out.

“You don’t have no business here, do you?”

“I can fix it.”

“
I
can fuckin fix it.”

“And paint it? You can’t paint it. You ain’t even got the equipment.”

“I can have it fucking painted, Donny,” Brigman said. “Go away.”

“
Stop
it,” Chloe said. Brigman pointed at her but she didn’t let him get started. “Don’t tell me to shut up,” she said. “You don’t have to treat him like dirt just because you think you know something. You don’t know anything.”

“Chloe—” he said.

“Hey,” I said. “Donny. I’ll talk to you about it later. All right? Maybe we can do something.”

“Shut up, Syd,” Brigman said.

“
You
shut up,” said Chloe. He froze. We all froze, but I’m not sure if it was because of the words or her look that stopped us, because it was exactly the look my mother gave. I’d forgotten it really until I saw it, saw her, in Chloe’s face like that. It was kind of scary, a thing Chloe had never conjured up before, but here it was now, here she was, our mother incarnate.

Then Brigman unfroze and said, “What’d you say to me?” and I could hear him saying it to Sandy, remembered him saying it to her in exactly that voice, that tone, and remembered the feeling that something had just precipitated out that was maybe going to poison us, felt in fact that same prickling in my upper spine I’d felt as a kid when I knew they were going to fight.

“You heard me.”

“Don’t you ever—”

“It’s my life,” she said.

“Not yet, it’s not.”

“It is. And I’ll do what I want.
See
who I want.”

“Not under my roof.”

“Well,” she said calmly, as if some decision had been reached, “if that’s how you want it.” And she turned and walked deliberately, careful to show no anger, into the house.

To Donny, Brigman said, “Happy?”

“I’ll talk to you about the car, Donny,” I said.

“Really?”

I nodded.

“Okay, Syd,” he said and tripped back across the street. I expected Brigman to rip into me but he just stared at the ground.

“She said he told you what was going on with them, that they were going out.”

“Just that. I known for a long time, Syd. And it’s my fault.”

“What is?”

“What they been doing.”

“But what is that, Brigman?”

“You know.”

“
How
do you know?”

“Jesus, Syd, I caught her, more’n once. When she was just still little.” And his eyes filled and his shoulders and belly moved in the tight painful clutchings of what I thought then was anger and guilt but recognized only many years later as broken-heartedness. The only other time I’d seen him cry was in the hospital when Sandy finally let go.

“You caught her with Donny?”

He shook his head. “But she started spending a lot of time with him again after Sandy went, her over to his house or him up there with her, and I’d find stuff, you know, she’d leave around. I knew.” But Donny was taking her off his hands, so Brigman didn’t say anything and drank until he forgot it, or didn’t care. He sniffed hard and breathed in to clear himself and looked down the street. Only now that she was grown had he decided apparently to make amends.

That evening despite the fact that I had to work I met Jessi for dinner and afterward followed her to Ottawa Park. It was just dark when we got there, and as I put the Datsun into park and shut the engine off, high-beam headlights came hard up behind us and stopped, filling the car with such light that I could see dust particles hanging in the air. I said, “Shit,” but after a moment the car tore around, angrily almost it seemed, as if we had usurped some prime parking spot. I caught a flash of yellow as it passed.

“That was weird,” Jessi said. We walked (me carrying a blanket) and found a spot on a hillside again and this time we accomplished what we had not there before. It was easy this time—despite my misgivings and doubts and confusion the deed had already been done and doing it again felt natural. Unlike in my car it lasted this time, and when she finally cried out, viscerally, primally, in a way I had not imagined her ever sounding (such abandon! such release!), and wrapped her legs around mine and squeezed me to her, pulled me in as far as she could, it not only surprised me but sent me over along with her, and the coming seemed to last and last for us both as we strained there in the darkness each into the other. Afterward, as we lay watching the stars and the pre-Fourth drive-in pyrotechnics on the horizon I’m sure I made some lame crack about making her see fireworks.

Later, I said, “Chloe said you got that guy’s license plate.”

“I did.”

“Thank you.”

“At least it makes up for some of it.”

“It wasn’t your fault—”

“Syd.”

“What?”

“I just like to say it. Syd. Is that all right?”

It wasn’t. But lying there in a postcoital cloud, in the air of a summer night with a young and bounteous and intelligent woman, I could not bring myself to murmur anything but a mild “Mmm,” which she of course took as approval.

At our cars on that quiet park street we kissed and then I followed her to where she turned west toward the estate section and I turned toward the downtown. I was pretty much alone on that middle-city road when these bright lights lit me up again. They appeared so suddenly and so close that the only possibility was that the driver had come up on me with his lights off. For the first time, perhaps because I was alone now, I felt fear.

Though I sped up, pushed the Datsun to sixty-five, hoping for a cop to pull me over, my pursuer had no trouble keeping his bumper in tight proximity to mine. Under a streetlight I saw yellow in my mirror as I had before.

There was no one behind us that I could see, so I hit my brakes. My car was already ruined—let this one hit me, too. But he didn’t hit me. He stopped as short as I did. He was good. And then we sat there, looking at each other. I couldn’t make out his face. Another car came up behind him and honked, then tore around us. I watched it, and when I looked back, the yellow car was gone. But I understood.

It was how Ted knew nothing was happening between me and Jessi when he’d been so happy at the hospital that morning. He’d hired someone, who I heard on the golf course that night, and who, when he heard me refusing Jessi, reported that back. But now on this evening he had seen something very different and so after harassing me was surely phoning his boss. So Ted knew already, almost as soon as I did, that it was not nothing happening between his daughter and me anymore.

O
n the morning of Wednesday, the Fourth of July, I slept after work and the moment I got up Chloe met me in the hallway to say that Jessi had called.

“Hey,” she said, when I reached her, “if you’re not doing anything today, come over. Bring your swimming suit.”

“Really?”

“Bring your sister, too.”

“Chloe?”

“Do you have any others?”

“No.”

“Then her.”

“Your parents—”

“Don’t worry. Just come over.”

Like a weakling, like a fool, like the sadist I was becoming, I said, “Sure.” I hung up and clutched at my stomach, sickened at the obscenity of how happy she sounded, and somehow blaming Ted for all of it.

“What’d she want?” Chloe said. She’d been listening.

“We’re going swimming.”

From the spuriously cavalier manner in which she said, “Cool,” I knew that Jessi had asked her already when they’d talked the first time.

It was the largest backyard swimming pool I’d ever seen (I would learn later that it was actually one of the largest private pools in the entire country at that time), the size of a basketball court it seemed to me, with two black lane lines painted on the bottom on one side of it and separated on the surface by a string of orange floats. I’d never been back here before, never seen it up close (and never realized the full extent of the grounds as they extended back through foliage so heavy and deep you couldn’t begin to see beyond it—it was at least two acres, I figured, right in the middle of the city). The pool itself was constructed of thousands of aqua and navy tiles, and surrounded by a broad apron of concrete that burned white in the sun. A stainless steel whirlpool off the shallow end whirred and chugged. At the rear stood two redwood-shingle-sided structures, one a cabana with sliding glass doors and the other (Jessi told us), much the smaller of the two, a cedar sauna.

I had seen neither hair nor hook of Joyce and Ted and assuaged myself with the supposition that they must not be around, that their absence (perhaps even another out-of-town trip?) was all that Jessi had meant when she said not to worry—T and J were away, so the kids could play. I even relaxed a little, floated on an inflatable raft and watched the deep clear sky.

The recommended itinerary, Jessi instructed us, was to swim first, get your muscles warmed up and your skin cooled down, then to run into the sauna where the steam would pull the impurities from your now nicely circulating blood. The effect of walking into that matrix of humidity, that gelatinous air, and the overpowering scent of cedar immediately upon leaving the water was dizzying. Benches ran around the entire perimeter and it was a good thing because I think I’d have fallen down if I’d had to stand. I opened my mouth and gasped fish-like, pulled at the thickness and heat of it, and felt the pores of the skin of all my body open and weep. Chloe and Jessi sat opposite me, across the raised central bed of heated lava rocks, and close enough together that they could speak without my really hearing them over the hissing. Every so often Jessi lifted a ladle full of water from a built-in steel bowl beneath a faucet and poured it on the rocks, which hissed all the more loudly. (As I watched the two of them talk I felt frankly surprised at Chloe. I imagined her cooing and oohing over every rich-person knick and knack in this wonderland, Car and Dog and Persian Rug and Microwave Oven, etc., but she acted as if she were a secret heiress and this was all pleasant but not any real big deal. She dived without comment into the mammoth pool, hung on the edge chatting with Jessi, sunned herself, then lounged in the sauna as if she’d been going every day for years. And not an awed or ogling or covetous gawkish-teenage-working-class comment about any of it beyond a polite thank-you-for-inviting-me to Jessi when we arrived.) It seemed an hour in the steam, though it was only probably ten minutes before the girls stood and I followed them, blinded by sweat and light, into the relative crispness of the day.

“Don’t wait!” Jessi commanded. “Dive!”

And she did and Chloe did, and so I did, and the shock of that seeming iciness, of such a rapid reduction in my body temperature, again made me wonder if I was about to lose consciousness (it was beginning to occur to me that I might not have the constitution to be wealthy). I came up in the sloping netherworld between the shallow end and the deep, shook the water from my face as I trod, then found the bottom with my toes, and looked around at Jessi and Chloe sitting on the edge already, thigh to thigh. Only then did I notice the bathing-suited foursome walking toward us, towels over arms—it was the Mastersons, Dotty-’n-Dave, and their hosts, the Mr. and Mrs. Ted Kesslers—and feel my scrotum shrivel even more than it already had.

“Halloo!” old Masterson shouted.

Jessi turned and waved and set about introducing Chloe. Ted nodded and gave her his left hand to shake, then walked around toward the sectioned-off lanes. You could see the whole apparatus of his artificial arm now, the almost flesh-colored plastic that fitted up over his stump and the cables and wires that allowed him somehow to control the hook. Except now the hook was gone, replaced (or covered) by a kind of paddle. For swimming, of course. I wondered how many different attachments he had for the various activities of his weird life. As I watched (without him so much as glancing at me) he began turning laps.

Joyce stood at the pool’s edge for several moments shading her eyes, watching Ted and me, I suppose, in the water together. Then she said, “Hello, Syd,” and dived.

She slid beneath the surface toward me, her image rippled from the refraction of the water (even beneath that wavering surface I could make out the swell of her black-Speedo-clad bottom) so that I thought for a moment we were going to collide. In that tiny moment—Ted swimming oblivious, Jessi and Chloe turned away talking to the Mastersons—Joyce and I were alone among them. And she must have been as aware of it as I was (or more frighteningly she wasn’t) for as she glided alongside me, still beneath the surface, so close that I felt her hair brush my thigh, she reached over, placed her hand on the front of my bathing suit and squeezed me firmly enough that I nearly doubled over, but at the same time sweetly, if that’s possible. Lovingly, even.

Later that very holiday afternoon, after the spread of deli meats and cheeses and buns and toppings and salads and iced beers laid out on the glass table in the glass porch (Chloe still acting as if this were all old hat), after Chloe and Jessi slipped up to Jessi’s room for some serious girl talk and the Mastersons and Ted retired, scotches in hand, to the woody library, I took a Molson back out to the whirlpool. I was sipping and soaking contentedly, eyes closed, when I sensed something and looked up to find Joyce, still in her Speedo, watching me. She squatted and reached for my beer, which I handed her, took a sip, handed it back, and then got in. She sat on the seat for a moment, then slipped to the floor so that the water came up to her chin.

“So, how are you, Syd?” she said.

“Passable.”

“Only passable. It could be so much better, couldn’t it?”

“I guess that depends on what you want it to be better than.”

“Jessi had a talk with us.”

“Did she?”

“She thinks it’s getting serious between you two.” I wondered what she knew, if she and Ted talked much anymore. “It’s time to stop, don’t you think? Or are you trying to hurt her, too?”

“No.”

She got back on the seat and lay her arm along the edge so that her fingers just reached my shoulder, and stroked me there. “I’ve been miserable, Syd. I miss you. Does that upset you, that you haven’t made me hate you yet? That I want to touch you? Does that disappoint you?”

“Or maybe that you’re having me followed?”

“What?”

“Tell me you don’t know about it.”

She shook her head. She said, “I have to say I’m not surprised. He’s done it to me.”

“I thought that was the point.”

“Before, I mean. He hired people to watch me, photograph me. He even had them set me up. I was out with some friends once, girls’ night out, and this guy kept hitting on me. So finally I danced with him. It was no big deal, believe me. Later Ted produced pictures and a tape recording and tried to make out like I’d been the one coming on.”

“So—why do you do it now? I mean
for
him.”

“In the beginning I hated it. Hated him for it. But once the secret was out, that he’d watched me, he kept bringing it up. He wanted to talk about it, ask me questions. What I felt like with other men. Did I find them attractive? Did it turn me on when they hit on me? He got off on it, knowing other men wanted his wife.

“So, I made things up—a man touched me or I felt drawn to someone. It drove him crazy. We started going to bars and sitting apart so he could watch men buy me drinks. I didn’t do anything with them, just talked. In the beginning it didn’t take much. We’d just have a drink, then I’d meet Ted outside and it was all he could do to get home before—sometimes we didn’t make it home. Eventually he wanted to see me with someone else.”

“And so I wandered in.”

“No. There were others. Not videotaped, though.”

“You mean he watched? Secretly?”

“But it drove him crazy. What he really wanted was to have something, possess something, a trophy.”

“Weren’t there—couldn’t you find someone, you know, to just do it with him there?”

“It was never about the sex itself. It’s always about control. Power. His owning it. His owning this other person, and me. If he just participated, then he wouldn’t own anything. It would just be sex. He’d be equal to us.”

“Christ.”

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I just want you to touch me again.”

“So you can tell him?”

Her mouth tightened and her eyes grew big and moist, then she got out and retreated to the cabana. It had drapes across the sliding glass door but she did not pull them and did not close the door. She stood to the side of the opening so that I could see her but someone looking from the house could not and peeled her suit down from one breast, then the other, and pushed it to her feet and knew exactly what it was doing to me under the foaming water, stood waiting for the part of me that wanted terribly to go to her and lift her up right there against the wall. Then someone came out of the house—it was Jessi and Chloe. When I looked back at the cabana, Joyce had pulled the drapes.

The girls wanted to see fireworks. I suggested one of the drive-ins that still shot them off but they insisted on a park out of the city that supposedly had the biggest display in the county. I had to work but Jessi said we could both drive, then she’d take Chloe home. A little later I whispered to Chloe not to let Jessi in the house. She just gave me her “do-I-really-look-that-stupid?” look.

We’d been there fifteen minutes, with about that long to go until it would be dark enough for the show to start, when Donny walked up, hands in pockets and a glow in his cheeks. He said, with as much verve and linguistic invention as I had ever heard him muster, “Hey, you guys.”

“Oh,” said Chloe and jumped up and was going to kiss him, but thought better of it and just took his hands in hers. She said to Jessi, “This is Donny.”

I regarded the three of them, feeling well and truly set up. None of this had anything to do with fireworks, at least not of the pyrotechnic variety.

“You think you know what you’re doing?” I asked Jessi.

She smiled, shyly, slyly, and blinked those big bang-battered black-framed peepers. When I grunted, she took my hand, the romance of the moment just about overwhelming all of us. We watched the sky for the first ascending trails of light and the explosions they portended.

I smoked two cigarettes on the way back, daring Ted’s follower to come up behind me again and trembling to visions of my Other Self locking it up, then leaping out to pummel him. But nothing happened, and the hospital was pretty quiet for a Fourth of July. I didn’t get called to the ER until after one, and then only for a routine draw—liver enzymes for a rule-out hepatitis. The main trauma suites at the front were sectioned off from each other by drapes but the smaller treatment rooms had hard partitions, thin walls and doors, to afford the conscious a little privacy. I went in to find a middle-aged man, beefy and big-headed and balding, with thick darkly hairy forearms that lay on the sheet covering him. He had the slightest amber cast about him. A common scenario in a case like this was a junkie who’d got a dirty spike but this guy had nothing like the pallid emaciated look most of them did. The opposite, in fact. He looked like he could have broken one of them in two. Maybe an experimenter, they try it not knowing what they’re doing and end up here, jaundiced and with a swollen gut.

He watched me. He said, “Close the door, will you, pal?” It was a bit of an unusual request but I kicked the door shut. When I approached him, he looked at my ID badge, then said my name, “Daniel Redding. So you want to stick me.”

“That’s the idea.”

“Enjoy it while you got the chance.”

“What?”

He put his arm out and balled a big hard fist.

“Relax it,” I said, and tied on the rubber and put the needle in. He didn’t flinch and had no problem watching the blood come, so again I thought maybe he’d been needle experimenting, but his arms were as clean as mine.