The Narcissist's Daughter Read online

  “We’re not exactly gonna be legal, or safe. I don’t need us to get caught up in rush hour.”

  “All right.”

  “Get dressed.”

  The sky was open and clear and you could still see the stars, and though it was spring now the air this early still held a chill. I wore a thermal hooded sweatshirt under my denim jacket. We hooked the ’Cuda to the Skylark with twenty feet of chain and he sat behind the wheel so he could steer it and brake when I braked. I wondered if we got stopped would it be considered a violation—was steering a car that was being towed really driving?

  In any case, we didn’t get stopped. The station was dark. We left the ’Cuda, and on the way home he motioned for me to turn onto Dale Avenue, near our house, and then into the Red Dog Diner. We took a booth by the long window looking out on the parking lot. Brigman took out his pack of Marlboros with a book of matches tucked into the cellophane and laid it on the table. The waitress wore a brown nylon dress and white tights with a long run above one ankle. She brought Brigman a heavy bone-colored mug of coffee without asking and one for me, too, when I nodded. It had a dime-sized chip out of the rim that was stained the color of tobacco.

  “Oatmeal,” I told her.

  “That it?” She looked at Brigman and said, “Usual?” He raised his chin.

  I put my hands around the mug. Brigman shook a Marlboro from the pack and took up the matches and lit it and blew the first lungful out hard through his nose so that it struck the tabletop and spread out across it like a fog. A police cruiser raced silently past with its lights washing off the window glass of the cars in the lot. I took one of the Marlboros and lit it and said, “You ever thought of killing someone?”

  “I did kill someone.”

  “I didn’t mean like that. I didn’t mean—”

  “It don’t matter. Don’t got to pretend it didn’t happen.”

  “I know. I meant something else.”

  In 1971 he bought a repossessed ’70 Chevelle LS6 454 Big Block, one of the very hottest production cars ever manufactured in Detroit. After his modifications he figured it was putting out a fantastic 475 horsepower and 550 foot-pounds of torque. It hardly belonged on the street anymore, candy apple red with twin white stripes down its center (Donny, who would’ve been around sixteen, helped him paint it), a scoop, 1.65 Rockers, low-hanging glass packs Rally IIs. Even I could see that it was a kind of artwork, though one that would go from zero to sixty in well under four seconds and top out somewhere in that sparsely populated land north of one-eighty.

  One night at Motorhead Brigman had some beers. He was not a drunk back then; though he drank, he was generally careful not to do it if he was racing. But on this night, after he’d started, a guy showed up from clear over in Muncie, Indiana, in a Goat loaded for bear. Brigman couldn’t say no to it. Instead of going out somewhere in the country they torqued right down Reynolds Road, a four-lane west side strip that was busy even then. Coming up out of a railroad viaduct they happened onto a Valiant stalled in the right lane. Brigman’s lane. There was an old couple sitting in it, waiting for a tow. The paper said they’d been married fifty-two years. The cops calculated that Brigman went into it still at around eighty. There wasn’t much left of either car, nor of the old people. Brigman himself didn’t regain consciousness for forty-eight hours but when he did he was all there but the spleen they’d had to remove to stop the bleeding, with two broken arms and some ribs. The city had been chasing Motorhead, so Brigman became a showcase for the prosecutors, a political stunt. His lawyer said normally on a first offense, even such an egregious one, you got probation, maybe loss of license. Brigman did six months with the county, and it was Sandy’s life insurance that finally paid off the fine. The GTO from Muncie just kept going, and was not seen again in our city.

  The waitress brought my meager bowl and a large oblong platter of eggs and bacon and hash browns with a side of buttered toast for Brigman. We ate, me taking up small spoonfuls of the oatmeal and blowing on them while Brigman bent over and shoveled hard and steady until his was mostly gone. Then he sat back and pushed the plate away. He drank half the coffee, lit another smoke, and said, “You can’t think about that shit.”

  “What?”

  “What you were talking about before. I know what you meant. Just get all worked up when you know you ain’t gonna do it because it ain’t in you to.” He tapped ashes onto his plate, where they stuck to the remnants of the egg. “Maybe you could without meaning it, you know, hit a guy so he falls and cracks his head or something. But to think about it and then go do it, there’s something missing in someone who can do that.” He drank again from the big mug. “You’d get caught anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “I knew a guy when I was in, waitin’ for his trial—cold ass fucker and even he didn’t get away with it.”

  “Some do.”

  Brigman nodded.

  “I just meant did you ever want to?”

  “Shit,” he said, and laughed a bitter laugh and looked out the window at the new dawn. “Best to just let it go, you know? Let it pass.”

  I was pulled upward out of a long deep library night before my last two exams by the sensation of someone hovering behind me, and turned to find Jessi there.

  “I’m really sorry,” she said. “I know you’re busy and I’m bugging you, but I just saw you here and…I wanted to thank you for the other day, and apologize.”

  It was Thursday, three days since our near wreck, and though I’d meant to call her on every one of those days, though I had taken her father’s ignorance as some small hope that I still had a chance to use her, I had not called and suspected it was due to some last shred of decency or perhaps the instinct of self-preservation, some final urge not to destroy the life I was trying to build for myself.

  “Apologize?” I said. “I’m the one…”

  She shook her head and looked contrite, as if she were waiting for me to send her away or bludgeon her with my tongue—to humiliate her again. And I understood what her presence meant. She hadn’t just stumbled across me. I’d told her enough about my life—she knew where I hid. I’d endangered her and made her sick but it was she who felt she’d failed, felt shamed, felt she needed to make amends. But of course she would, I thought. Who was she, after all? And I saw then that I’d read it all wrong, read her all wrong, and yet my ennui or whatever it was had led me to play it just right.

  “It’s okay,” I said, “but don’t come here like this again.”

  She stared at her feet.

  “Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” A whisper.

  “Come on,” I said and stood up.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Didn’t I ask?”

  “Yes.” Whispered again.

  I’d been there already six hours. It would be enough or it wouldn’t, and what difference would it make anyway now? All the As in the world weren’t going to help me after this. It was one of those rare clear junctions, a point from which I could see the consequences of either choice, to be smart and safe and to go forward toward what I’d been working for, or to shoot my wad on a righteous but unwinnable fight.

  I took her to the union, where they sold low beer and never carded. Even low worked eventually. She wobbled when we got up. Outside, I slipped my hand beneath her puffy arm and squeezed.

  At her car, I said, “You sure you can drive?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll follow you anyway.”

  “That’s so sweet.”

  She pressed herself to me and turned her face up. Though it had a certain hunger behind it, hers was not the aggressive expert mouth of her mother. She opened it too wide, for one thing, so that the suction wasn’t right, and then just held it against mine in all its softness and flaccidity, a wet hole waiting for me to fill it. When I did not, her tongue fluttered across my teeth, probed tentatively beyond them, but I kept mine well back in its own dark cave, withheld. The beer bubbled in my belly.

 
; She drove me to my car in a far lot and leaned across and kissed me once more. Then I followed her as promised and pulled into the driveway behind her, though I stopped out near the road. Through the trees the great house looked as impressive as in the daylight, but different—warm lamplight streamed from the windows of both parlor and library and from the entrance and two upstairs rooms. As I watched, the light from an upper window dimmed as if someone had passed before it or perhaps stopped to look out. Jessi pulled back to the garage. I sat for another moment or two watching and thought to myself that I had done exactly what I’d set out to do. It was set up now. It was set. What remained was only to let it unfold. The beer turned again and now it was I who had to open the door and lean out. It came up then, propelled by vicious contractions, and splashed stinking and hot there on the asphalt at the end of the doctor’s driveway.

  TEN

  A black woman in a white uniform, her face shiny with sweat, looked up from a stove heaped with pans and skillets.

  “Hiya, Rose,” Jessi said. “This is Syd. Everything all right?”

  “Everything fine,” Rose said and huffed and bent back to her cooking.

  In a breezeway beyond the kitchen Jessi plucked at my shirt and said, “She’s just the cleaning lady but they like to show off for these brunches every Saturday—‘oh, look, we even have our own cook.’”

  Through a window and then a sliding glass door the breezeway looked over a sun porch that held a suite of rattan furniture, a table for ten, and several chaise longues and armchairs. Ted held down the head of the table. Around him sat several comfortable-looking middle-aged couples. Beyond the porch, past the garage, a pool shimmered in the morning sunlight. I didn’t see Joyce.

  “Doctors,” Jessi said, in answer to my unasked question.

  “Hey, that’s Masterson,” I said.

  “You know him?”

  “He’s my adviser. I thought he was a Ph.D.”

  “He is. He taught anatomy at Case when my dad went there.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “No. That’s his wife, Dotty. I don’t know any of the others.”

  “What about me?”

  “I know you. You’re not a doctor yet.”

  “Really? I meant, have you said anything?”

  “I said I was bringing someone I’d seen a couple of times but it was a surprise.”

  I followed her out, and though I felt Ted watching me he did not move or utter any sound.

  “Jessi,” Masterson said, and stood and hugged her and congratulated her on her imminent graduation, then turned to me and shook my hand and said, “Already dating the boss’s daughter.”

  To his wife, I said, “Dr. Masterson’s my adviser at the U.”

  Dotty beamed. I looked at Ted. He wore khakis and an Izod shirt and over them a navy silk dressing gown. He glared, eyes extruded, face burning, but was cool enough to just sit there and choke out the other introductions.

  Dotty said, “We’ve already started. Go on and eat, you two.”

  The table held a large cut-glass bowl of bagels and smaller matching bowls of flavored cream cheeses, platters of lox and bacon and sausages and freshly pressed waffles, a chafing dish of scrambled eggs, bowls of grated cheeses and chives and sour cream and capers and onions, pitchers of hand-squeezed orange and grapefruit juice and a decanter of coffee. It was kind of sick, really. I’d worked buffets like this at the club but never imagined seeing one in someone’s house. I took only coffee and sat next to Jessi on a chaise. I was looking out at the pool when someone came out and one of the other women said, “Joyce.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “I was just…”

  She held a hand beside her face but not quite touching it, as if she had reached there for something and then forgot in mid-gesture what it was.

  “So have you met the new boyfriend?” Masterson said.

  “Oh, they know each other,” said Jessi, “from when Mom was working. Syd even rescued us once. We were broken down and he saw us and fixed the car right there on the road.”

  That old look of long-pain-endured, the one I loved, came into Joyce’s face. I found I had missed it, and that I was glad to be able to watch her again. I had always been glad to watch her, even from before the time we first spoke over the body of a hundred-year-old woman, from the first time I saw her before I had any idea who she was.

  She said, “Well, hello, Syd,” and then looked at her husband (who clearly had not informed her of his discovery that I’d been driving their daughter). She stepped forward and I thought then that she would fall. Several of the men leapt to catch her but she did not fall, though her face had gone chalky. They helped her into a chair and one of them poured her a glass of juice.

  “I’m fine,” she said, waving it away. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  “She hasn’t been well,” said Ted. “That back injury. You should rest.”

  She nodded but looked at me. I thought the incredible crackling in the air must be audible but none of the others seemed to notice anything. She said, “I am so terribly sorry. But I believe I am going to go lie down,” and stood up to leave.

  “Let me help you,” Ted said, but Joyce did not wait for him. As he followed her out he threw me a long last gaze, more of curiosity and surprise, I thought, or regard even, than of anger or angst.

  Not much later (though long enough for me, appetite recovered, to dive into that feast) Jessi and I excused ourselves. As we passed the staircase in the foyer I heard, far up inside the great house somewhere, the faintest sound of shouting or screaming and a concurrent tinkling that sounded very much like something, a small ornate mirror, say, or a cut-glass decanter, smashing as if it had been thrown against a wall.

  I dressed early for work and watched TV with Brigman. That afternoon I’d found him smoking again at the front door. He said, “That woman called.”

  “What woman?”

  “About them pretzels.”

  I wanted to shout but in respect of his paternal frown and the badness he was so afraid would come at Chloe in the world, I just slipped upstairs and found her in her room. She squealed and threw her arms around me—she kept saying she couldn’t believe that after all this time the woman would just call like that out of the blue. She was only getting one four-hour shift a week to start, but she didn’t seem to care.

  Now, as Brigman and I watched and he smoked (somehow managing to fret and sit still at the same time), the phone rang.

  “Oh, my god,” Jessi said. “They are so weird.”

  “What happened?” After brunch we went to the old Stranahan Estate, which was now owned by the city, and walked trails, and as we walked she let her hand brush against mine until I took it.

  “They were waiting when I came home. My dad started in about older men and what business did I have and I was leaving soon anyway for Cleveland and mixing business with pleasure. I guess because you work for him he thinks it’s inappropriate for us to go out. I said that was stupid and he got really pissed but I don’t get it. Since when do they care, anyway? But the weirdest thing was my mom. She just sat there until I said I really liked you, and she started crying.” She waited, then said, “Syd?”

  “I’m here.”

  “It won’t scare you off from seeing me? I mean, if you want to. Keep on, I mean. Seeing me.”

  “I do. Want to.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  I was crossing the top open floor of the parking garage to the stairs when a car squealed hard off the ramp and stopped in front of me. The door opened and I felt the old fight or flight, then recognized the car.

  “I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” Ted said, his damaged arm resting on the roof, “but it’s going to stop.”

  I said, “Are you threatening me?”

  “You certainly aren’t doing yourself any good.”

  “I guess that’s my problem.”

  “You will not see her again.”

  �
��Isn’t that up to her?”

  “It’s up to me. She’ll do what I tell her to do.”

  “I guess I heard something different.”

  “Don’t fuck with me, Syd. You have no idea.”

  “I had no idea, Dr. Kessler,” I said. “Ted. But I do now.”

  “Who do you think you are?”

  “Nobody. We both know that. The question is, who are you to think you can do whatever you want to people and no one will say anything?”

  “You have proof of nothing.”

  “What I have is your daughter.”

  He sneered then or grimaced; in any case it was a hideous face that I found I liked on him. A security car pulled up beside us. The guard said, “Everything okay? Oh, hi, Dr. Kessler.”

  “We’re fine,” he said. “I had to drop in for something and ran into Mr. Redding here. He just needed some advice.”

  “All right,” she said, and went past us and turned around and came back slowly so she could look at me. Ted said, “You’ll get hurt. I told you the other morning, and I came by to tell you again, to give fair warning, but this is it. Stop it, now.”

  I walked backward toward the stairwell, facing him, and said, “There’s something I wonder if you’ve thought about in this, Doc. In the end, of the two of us, who really has more to lose?”

  The following Friday I grilled cheese sandwiches and heated tomato soup for Chloe’s and my supper and put the rest of the soup in a Thermos and a couple of the sandwiches in Brigman’s old black steel lunch box and had Chloe drive us to Garvey’s Gulf. Brigman seemed happy to see us—he was in a good mood, anyway. We sat together at the greasy cluttered glass counter while he ate and Chloe and I drank cold Cokes from the slot-pull bottle machine. Things seemed to have changed since she got the job (which was a success apparently—she’d already been moved up to twelve hours a week, including one weekend shift). I hadn’t seen her with Donny at all, and she acted as if she actually wanted us for her family again. I had the wild hope that now with her being engaged in the world more, her relationship with boys in general could take a rest. So we were all there together, even the cars, Sandy’s Skylark in the lot and the ’Cuda in the bay beside us. (I’d cracked a rocker arm, it turned out, or rather it had cracked under me. It’d been going to go anyway, Brigman said, and he was doing a whole suspension and alignment job on it in his spare time.) Freddy came out of his office then to say hey and ask how things were going. He was always around on Fridays to bag the register proceeds every hour and throw them in the safe. Freddy was okay, though, and in addition to letting Brigman work on the ’Cuda he didn’t say much if Brigman came in late or took a little extra break—it turned out Brigman was bringing in some business, guys who remembered him from the old days and liked the idea of someone like that working on their station wagons—so it looked like Brigman might stay employed this time for a while.