The Narcissist's Daughter Read online

  It was all too happy. We were like some goddamn gas station Brady Bunch sitting there together around the dingy dinner table.

  “Doing any surgeries yet?” Freddy asked me.

  “Not authorized ones.”

  “You get as good on bodies as your old man here is on cars, you won’t be able to spend it all.”

  “We’ll help him,” Chloe said.

  I said, “Hand me the board.” It was a grimy eight-inch length of two by four with a hole drilled in one end and the rest room key chained to it, I guess so no one walked off with it. The bathrooms were around at the rear, alongside a pile of worn tires and a couple of rusted engine blocks and the decaying carcass of an old Mustang.

  I had a date. Jessi and I had met for lunch earlier in the week, clandestinely but not far from her house, at a Coney Island restaurant. She suggested we meet somewhere Friday away from the house to avoid aggravating her parents, but I sulked, squeezed out all the hurt inside me for her to see, and after a few minutes of my silence she asked what was wrong. I asked if it was wrong of me to want to ring her bell like any other guy, to have a normal date instead of some sneaky tryst. I said, “If we set the pattern now, it’ll always be that way.” It was terribly effective, demonstrating not only strength on my part but a whiff of the suggestion of commitment, of looking forward to more us.

  “You’re right,” she said, finally. Her voice was hushed and throaty, and she would not look at me. “Come get me. Please.”

  The concrete floor of the men’s room was damp, the air per-fused with the stench of piss. Fingers of rust pointed down from the top of the urinal. I breathed through my mouth. On the condom machine a bounteously racked lingerie-clad woman threw back her head and laughed as she embraced her man—she knew what was coming. Safety! Strength! Sensitivity! the sign shouted, and all for a quarter. I looked at it for a moment, then dug out the change I made sure was in my pocket before coming over here so I didn’t have to embarrass myself asking for it.

  No one answered. I pressed the button again and again before finally hearing feet pounding down the staircase. Jessi opened the door, her face red and her bangs hanging in her eyes.

  “They are such assholes!” she whisper-hissed. “I’m sorry. I’m not quite ready, as if you couldn’t tell.”

  “It’s okay.” I went in and when she ran back up the stairs I stepped further into the deadly quiet, and listened, and then stepped into the darkened library, which I’d never been in before. It was maybe the best room in the house, I decided, with high rows of oak shelving all around and the ladder and leather furniture and an antique library table and a huge roll-top desk that must have been worth some kind of fortune. I dragged my fingers down across the rows of rounded slats, then noticed a wooden bar on the far wall, with shelves of liquor behind it. I had just started over to examine them when Ted, from the doorway, said, “What are you doing?”

  “Just looking at all your nifty stuff.”

  “You have no business.”

  “No business looking? That’s a good one, Dr. Kessler.”

  It threw him, that line. Though he was backlighted I knew it from the pause and then the tightness in his voice—“I want you out of here”—at the edges of which I heard the first fraying of his control.

  I said, “She’ll be ready in a minute, then we’ll go.”

  “Do you really think you’re going to get away with this?”

  “With what?”

  “Whatever it is you think you’re doing.”

  “But what is that? What is it you think I’m doing?” As I walked toward him he backed up a step or two into the foyer, so now I could see his expressions tightening and twisting in on themselves. I said, “Maybe I’m sincere.”

  Ted aimed a finger and said, “I can fuck you up.”

  “Have someone smash up my expensive car? Embarrass me in front of all my esteemed colleagues? Molest my daughter?”

  “Get out.”

  I thought of what Brigman had said, how Ted had learned to kill with his hands, but I was surprised to feel nothing, no sweating, no quaking, no thudding heart. I’d never before felt the coldness that ran through me (though I have since then). I simply waited. But Ted didn’t move. I stood still, taking in that moment of the cracking of his facade, then went toward him again. When I was close enough to see the veins in his nose, I said, “I don’t know when she’ll be home, Ted. You never know what might come up.”

  His hook jerked up toward me but stopped between us. We both looked down at it. I said, “I heard you cut your own arm off. Is that true?”

  “She’s not going with you.”

  “I think she is. You just don’t know where. But, oh, if you did.”

  He opened his mouth but the stairs creaked and Joyce said, “That’s enough.” She came over and touched his arm and he turned and walked off a few steps toward the dining room.

  “Two, three in the morning, I figure,” I said, “by the time we’re done.”

  He spun back but Joyce said to him, “Go!” and then to me, “You stop it! Now! Both of you stop it!”

  “Stop what, Joyce?” I said. “Do you even know?”

  Ted remained in the dining room doorway.

  “Hey,” I said, “I know. How about if I make you guys a videotape? That’ll give you a good idea. You might even learn something from it.”

  She started to cry then. I knew she would. I’d worn a light jacket against the evening chill and reached into the pocket now for my handkerchief and pulled it out to offer it to her, and as I did the condom I’d folded inside it fell onto the wooden floor between us. We looked at it, the three of us, lying there in all its red-wrapped tawdriness.

  “Oopsy,” I said. Then I heard Jessi. I scooped it up as she came down, her eyes wide.

  “I don’t get you,” she said to them and that had to be the simple truth. How could she have fathomed such anger and resistance to this simple thing of our dating?

  “Please don’t go,” Joyce said.

  “Why?” she said, and now she was close to tears, too. “Why are you doing this to me? What is wrong with you?”

  “Just…trust us,” Joyce said.

  “Why can’t you trust me?”

  Ted said, “Enough. You don’t talk to your mother like that. You’re not going. That’s all there is to it.”

  “I am going,” she said.

  Joyce said, “Then you don’t need to come back here.”

  “Oh, stop it!” Ted said to her. “Just shut up, will you?”

  Jessi regarded them, then turned to me and said, “Can we go?” and she went, leaving me to follow. I lingered a moment, looked at them, then said, “Don’t wait up.”

  For greatest effect I needed to keep her out late and wasn’t sure at first how to engineer it—she couldn’t get into bars or clubs for a couple more weeks, when she turned eighteen. With a slow dinner and a late movie I could stretch it to midnight, and had resigned myself to that when I heard some X-ray techs at work laughing about The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It ran at midnight every Friday down in the old Anselm Theater, which had become (appropriately) a porn house except when it sold out showing camp to fans who recited dialogue and screamed at the actors, brought squirt guns and toast and newspapers to act out scenes and dressed in drag. Jessi squealed when I suggested it. First we had pizza and walked around the mall. From some distance I made out Chloe in her brown smock, her hair in a white gauze net, behind the counter of The Pretzel Man. She was busy, so I didn’t go over. I didn’t want her to see me with Jessi anyway. When the mall closed, I bought an eight of Shoenlings and we took it to the Ottawa Park golf course, not far from the theater, and parked and walked in and drank sitting on a bench at the first tee. She put her face against my arm, her breath dampening my sleeve, then turned and said, “Well, now you’ve got me tipsy in a deserted park.”

  “Are you scared?”

  “No.”

  “I am.”

  She laughed, and I laughed at
her laughing. She said, “Are you going to take advantage of me?”

  “Should I?”

  “That’s a complicated question. And there’s the other one.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Do you want to?”

  She kissed me then. I kissed her back some but when she moved her hand across my chest I pulled away.

  “You’re strange,” she said.

  “You noticed.”

  “I mean, most guys just look for an opening. But you have respect, and self-control. You’re amazing. You’re going to make a great doctor.”

  “That’s me,” I said. “Just full of respect.”

  We kissed again a little bit, and then it was late and time thankfully to go.

  I didn’t get her home until nearly two-thirty. I needed us to sit there for enough time that something could seem to happen (I had no doubt Ted was up) but she was understandably nervous. I said, “I want to do something for your birthday and graduation and all.”

  “You don’t have to. Really.”

  “I was thinking—” What I was thinking was how badly I wanted to avoid some emotional thing. And I’d had an idea. “—I heard the Ramones are going to be here…” So much for emotion, I figured. But she screamed and grabbed me.

  “Oh, my god!” she said. “Oh, my god! Can you get tickets? I heard it was sold out already.”

  I pulled them out, two scalped seats for Friday, June 30, at a place called Debbie’s Domino Club. So of course it required us making out again and this time it went on some, until finally I pulled her over the parking brake onto my lap so that she was straddling me—and though of course we were fully clothed I thought that perhaps in the dark through binoculars from an upstairs window that detail might be open to interpretation. Finally she said she had to go in. I walked her to the door. She touched my face. We said nothing.

  In my car, I reached under the seat for the baggie I’d stashed there. Inside it was another of the condoms I’d bought at Garvey’s. I had used it, filled it in my bedroom before I came over here (filled it imagining Joyce) and sealed the open end with a paper clip, which I now removed. I opened my window and tossed the slimy thing up on the walkway where it would be clearly visible to whoever came out first in the morning to get the Saturday paper, and who I was pretty sure wouldn’t be Jessi.

  ELEVEN

  It was not my plan to precipitate some crisis or blowup but rather to let it linger, to keep it lodged in their craws, them wondering if I was out doing to her the worst things they could imagine. So in the next week I saw her only once. We met for dinner, since for some reason I was not invited to the big family graduation/birthday gig they threw. After that dust settled, we took to meeting every second or third afternoon.

  I had been considering my next thrust when on the day before her birthday she let me pick her up at home. We drove far out of town to a huge disorganized used-book store and spent the afternoon browsing. It was nice, actually. It was brilliant out that evening when we returned, clear and sunny and vibrant. In the driveway, as she leaned back against the Datsun, waiting for my usual insipid peck on the lips, I noticed a face again in one of the upstairs windows, and a dual refraction that was just maybe the long late sunlight coming off binocular lenses. I grabbed Jessi and mashed my mouth to hers. It had been pretty chaste between us since that necking in my car the night of Rocky Horror. I made it deep and long and even ground into her a little.

  When I let up, she said, “Well, hello, Mr. Syd.”

  I just looked at her. She smiled as if she knew something, as if something new had come to light.

  The next night Kathy was on again, so Ray and I pretty much had the lounge to ourselves. Sometime after one when things had slowed and we were having coffee I said, “You hear about when Kessler came in a couple weeks ago on a Saturday night?”

  “No. What the hell for?”

  “To talk to me. He cornered me in the parking garage.”

  “What?” Ray was reading an old Sports Illustrated with his feet up on the table, but he put them down.

  “I’ve been going out with his daughter. Did you know that?”

  “How would I know that?”

  “I don’t know. Shit gets around.”

  “Well, not that shit. That’s why he cornered you, for taking her out? He ought to be kissing your ass.”

  “Well, he’s not. I might get fired.”

  Ray slapped the table and said, “You know, there’s an office here called labor management. They’d love to hear about this.”

  “No,” I said, “it’s probably better.”

  “Syd—are you guys serious?”

  “I guess.”

  “I’ve met her a couple times. She doesn’t seem like your type, if you want to know the truth. Sort of prissy rich, you know. I mean, no offense.”

  “No. I know what you mean.”

  Then he sat back and grinned. He was a reliable guy, Ray, and he didn’t disappoint me. “You getting some off her?”

  I shrugged.

  “Is that what it’s about?”

  I nodded.

  “What, you can’t get any ass but Kessler’s daughter?”

  “Sure,” I said. “But—” I shook my head. “You never had any like this.”

  “Don’t bet on it.”

  “Then maybe you have. So you know.”

  “What?”

  I leaned in and lowered my voice and said, “Ray, she’s crazy.”

  “She likes it?”

  “I mean she can’t get enough. She’s a nympho. My dick’s about to fall off.”

  He whooped and slapped the table again.

  I said, “I need a vacation from it.”

  “So, details. Let’s hear it.”

  I shook my head.

  “Oh, come on. What are you, a gentleman now?”

  “Anything,” I said.

  “What?”

  “That’s what she lets me do.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “You name it.”

  “No.”

  “I mean it. Name something, anything you can think of. If I wanted, she’d do it. Probably already have.”

  Ray looked at me strangely and shook his head.

  I said, “I’ve even asked her things, you know, just to see how far I could push it.”

  Ray stood up and put his hands on his head and was pacing the length of the room when Kathy came in. To me, she said, “What’s got him going?”

  “Jesus,” Ray said, “you don’t want to know.”

  “Probably not.”

  “About Syd the Stud.”

  “Oh, goodie, boy talk,” she said as she filled her mug. “Syd has a girlfriend and Ray the Masher gets to hear about it.”

  “He’s going out with Kessler’s daughter.”

  She looked at me and said, “Jessi?”

  “Yeah, baby,” said Ray.

  “You’re not doing anything with her.”

  “Right,” Ray said.

  “Are you?”

  I shrugged.

  “I told you,” Ray said, and laughed in her face.

  “God,” Kathy said, “she’s still in high school.”

  “She just graduated.”

  “Still,” said Kathy, “you could have a little respect.”

  “Oh, fuck that,” Ray said. “How old is she?”

  “Eighteen, today actually.”

  “So what’s wrong with it?”

  “I just think that’s a little young to be taking advantage.”

  “It doesn’t sound like he’s the one taking advantage,” Ray said, and laughed again.

  “What’s going on?” Kathy said. “What are you two doing?”

  “About everything, it sounds like,” said Ray.

  She sat down at the table and looked at me seriously. “What is it, Syd?”

  “Nothing,” I said, “that she doesn’t want.”

  “Jessi Kessler?”

  “She’s kind of wild, Kathy.”
/>   “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not,” I said. “I like her, you know. She’s a nice person. It was just kind of an accident that we started going out at all. But then it’s just become, I don’t know—”

  “Slam-o-rama!” Ray said.

  “Shut up, Ray,” Kathy said. “Everything’s such a goddamn joke with you. I think this is serious.”

  “Yeah, it sounds serious to me,” he said.

  She grunted in frustration and pushed herself up, stalked to the door, then turned and said, “Listen, Syd, I don’t know what’s really going on. I always thought you were a nice guy. And what you do in your private life is your business. But it’s only your business, you know? Sitting here telling this jerk about it is kind of scummy. I thought you were better than that.” She left.

  Ray looked at me a moment, then said, “Yeah, you fucking lowlife. What’s wrong with you? So, okay, now I want details.”

  I gave him some.

  Later, near dawn, I came down to find Ray in the blood bank. Kathy was sitting at the bench and he was leaning over her, his lips near her ear. It was historic. After I clocked out I heard the cacophony of snitches buzzing in the lounge. I went down to listen but it wasn’t necessary. I knew what all the fuss was about.

  I’d’ve killed to see the look on his face, and I wanted to know, though of course I couldn’t exactly, how the rumors came to him. It had to’ve been through Barb—“Um, Dr. Kessler, you know, people are talking…there’s this rumor, uh, about your daughter? I just thought you should know.” How would he have looked at that moment? What would he have said and, more intriguing, what would he have revealed about how it wounded him (and there was no doubt, there never has been, that it wounded him)? For though he relied on Barb’s nosiness and nastiness and her pleasure at serving his compulsions and whims, I do not think he particularly admired her or trusted her or wanted anything from her other than that she venerate him and grovel and snitch and maybe give him a little sugar now and then (though when I discovered the truth about Ted and Joyce’s games I have to say it cast some doubt on the Ted-Barb tryst theory). Anyway, I suspect that the thought of revealing anything too personal to her, or anyone in that lab, would have horrified him. But now (presumably) here it was, laid out by her right on his desk. “Everyone’s talking about it—what she’s doing with Syd Redding—that he’s doing…things to her. Awful things. That she lets him.” (This is, of course, conjecture on my part, but over the many years since then I’ve learned things, gathered bits here and there.) Would she have been graphic? One of the myriad of small ironies was that as the co-subject of these rumors I was not directly privy to them, though Ray fed me pieces that floated back to him. I knew what I’d told him, of course (and it wasn’t really all that much, composed as much of innuendo as actual images, though I’ll grant that some of those images were on the odd side), but we know what happens to rumors when they propagate. On that I had counted.