The Narcissist's Daughter Read online

  My disappointment was that, aside from not knowing the details of how Ted found out, I couldn’t even see how he looked because he was gone. The day after the rumors broke, he stopped coming to the lab. This was in itself remarkable—he only ever stayed away when he was out of town, and I knew he wasn’t out of town. I mentioned it one night that week to Phyllis, that I hadn’t seen him around. (I didn’t suppose she’d heard the rumors. She wasn’t the sort anyone would have cared to tell.)

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” she said. “He must be sick but I haven’t heard. Not like him.” Sick, I thought. Sickened would have been more accurate. As I had been. Ted, I hoped, I dreamed, was feeling something approaching the rage/shame/ blind-anger/bitterness I’d been dealt.

  At first it merely thrilled me, but as his absence stretched to a week I became almost frightened at how deeply I must have wounded him, that I had cut him in probably the most devastating manner I could have conceived. It surely affected him more this way than if I’d actually but quietly done the things to Jessi I claimed. I’d made Ted and his family a kind of prurient spectacle in front of his subjects. It was perfect, really.

  I wanted to catch at least a glimpse of him but Jessi insisted now that we meet away from the mansion, leading me to gather that things were not pleasant and getting less so. It had begun to become familiar between us and all she said she wanted to do that Saturday night was take some beer to Ottawa Park where we’d drunk before. I talked her into seeing a movie first (Grease), then bought an eight and we went.

  It was a city golf course but also a park, part of it, with a broad triangular-shaped section of playground equipment and sand boxes and horseshoe pits set off from the grounds of the course by a small angling road on one side and a creek on another. It was on this road that we parked, a dark spot known for car trysts and so patrolled fairly regularly by the city cops.

  We drank a couple of the Schoenlings in the car, then went tripping into the night. She wanted to play on the canvas swings first (she swung with her feet out and her head tipped back so that her hair brushed the ground), then made me go back to my car and get the blanket in my trunk because the thought of sitting on the bare ground was icky. We crossed the creek on an arched wooden bridge and wound farther into the darkness and hills until settling on the leeward slope of a ridge exposed to the half-moon so that it wasn’t especially dark. I was afraid I knew what was coming, but just lay back and sipped a beer and watched the sky. We did not talk much and that part of it was pleasant, but then, of course, she leaned over and started to kiss me and soon she was playing with my shirt and then I felt her fingers graze my belt buckle. They did not do anything there, just touched it by way of suggesting, I suppose, that things were allowed to move in that direction. I did not touch her. She pulled away and took off her glasses and then she did a surprising thing—she sat up and unbuttoned her blouse (I could see her clearly) and took it off, then reached behind herself to undo her bra.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Undressing. Is that all right?”

  “I—” I froze. I said, “What was that?”

  She was quiet, having heard it, too—what sounded to me exactly like the sliding of a shoe on slightly damp golf course grass in the middling moonlight.

  But she said, “Nothing.”

  “It was.”

  “Are you scared?”

  “No, of course not.”

  She took her bra off then. She had nice breasts, I’ll say that, the breasts of a slightly overweight just-turned-eighteen-year-old, which is to say that they were more substantial than the typical breasts of a young woman of average weight and yet still retained all the firmness and height and profile of the newly budded, with nipples (pale they appeared in that light) that tipped ever so slightly moonward and underbulges that hung ever so nicely earthward and round lateral edges that extended beyond her chest wall so that if she were to turn away from you and raise her arms slightly you would still be able to see the arcs of them protruding from the sides. This was, to a twenty-three-year old man whose lover had betrayed him terribly so that for weeks and weeks on end he’d had nothing but the dry appeasement of his own rosy palm, one mighty enticing sight. Then she stood and unzipped her jeans.

  “Jessi!” I said.

  “Syd, I’m ready. I want this. I want you.”

  “And I want you.”

  “Okay, then,” and the jeans slid down to reveal silken pale panties (well, I imagined them as silken, though in that ancient light it was impossible to say for sure—they had that shine of silk, though I suppose, of course, they could have been rayon or something) and her ever-so-slightly pouty but still firm little belly and the ridges of what appeared to be quite a womanly set of hips. Oh, my own jeans felt small.

  I said, “Jessi—it’s not…it’s not time for this yet.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Don’t you think it’s something we should discuss?”

  “We need to discuss this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Syd, are you a virgin?”

  “God. No.”

  “Well, neither am I. So what’s the problem?”

  “It’s—I just don’t want to do anything wrong. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “I don’t think it’ll hurt.”

  “Please—”

  “It’s my father, isn’t it?”

  “No—”

  “He’s got you scared.”

  “Jessi, stop it. It’s not that at all. It’s just, you.”

  “You don’t want me.”

  “No. I mean, yes! It’s not that.”

  “It is.” She pulled the jeans back up and fastened them (bye-bye silken panties; bye-bye hips) and snatched up her bra and turned away to re-attach it (so long, beautiful breasts) and put on her blouse and stalked back toward the car as she buttoned it. I gathered what was left of the beers and chased her, calling out, but she began to run and by the time I got to the car she was already there and seat-belted in, arms crossed over her chest, staring mutely ahead into the darkness.

  I didn’t hear from her the next day (she generally called if I failed to call her). With Brigman at the garage much of the time either working for real or working on the ’Cuda, Chloe (who was putting in twenty hours a week now for the Pretzel Bitch) and I blew the hearts out of some perfectly functional weekdays watching TV and smoking cigarettes and sipping beers. On this very morning of Jessi not calling, Chloe said to me, out of nowhere and apropos of nothing, “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “Why?”

  “Just, do you?”

  “No.”

  “That’s not what I heard. Someone saw you with a girl at the mall. You were holding hands.”

  “So?”

  “So do you?”

  “Holding hands doesn’t mean anything.”

  “It means something.”

  “Something, but not necessarily they’re your girlfriend.”

  “A da-ate.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Is that who calls here sometimes?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you having sex with her?”

  “Jesus, Chloe.”

  “That means you are.”

  “I’m not. And she’s not my girlfriend.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Old enough.”

  “I heard she’s still in high school.”

  “Where do you hear this?”

  “Is she?”

  “No.”

  “When did she graduate?”

  “Last week.”

  “And you talk about me and Donny?”

  “You’re sixteen.”

  “And what’s she, seventeen?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “As of?”

  “Week before last.”

  “So she was seventeen when you started.”

  “Was it true what Brigman said about Donny?”

  “No.”

  “But you
were seeing him.”

  “Are.”

  “What?”

  She looked at me with a pained expression and shook her head at my global cluelessness, and said, “Am. Is.”

  “Still?”

  “Don’t do anything stupid, all right?”

  “He’ll find out. He found out before.”

  “Only because Donny was trying to be decent about it.”

  “Donny told him?”

  “And god what a mistake that was.”

  “You should wait anyway.”

  “Till when I’m seventeen in like two months?”

  So she’d made her point—that it was no different really than what I was doing, and if I thought she should stop, then I should stop, too. And she was right, but for different reasons. I didn’t know whether the pit in my stomach was from the images of my sister and Donny the Dumb or of a girl who was falling in some kind of love with a guy who’d led her under very false pretenses into thinking he cared something for her but had instead just set about giving her the reputation of a deviant nymphomaniac.

  On Monday Ted showed up finally, bearing not the look I had been anticipating but one of haleness and vigor. “Syd,” he said in the hallway. He practically opened his arms to me but allowed a pat on the shoulder to suffice. Phyllis looked suspicious when he pumped her hand as if they’d been missing each other for years. “It’s good to be back,” he said.

  “Where were you?” she asked.

  “Nowhere,” he said. “I didn’t go anywhere. Just stayed home, did some writing, reading, caught up on a lot. And man, I feel good. Mental health week, let’s call it.”

  She nodded, regarding him.

  “You should take one,” he said. “Worlds of good.” He looked at me again and winked before prancing off to Chemistry. A little later Ray wandered up and said, “What the fuck’s up with him?”

  I was afraid I knew, but wasn’t sure until I was putting away my tray in the equipment room. The student part-timers and regular day-shifters were loading theirs when Ted came in and over to me. He straightened the lapels on my lab coat and said, “Walk you out?” It got very quiet.

  In the hallway he walked close beside me and as we came to the door to the back stairwell, said, “I’ve always trusted her. The fact that you made me doubt that for the first time is a shame. But at least now I see how full of shit you really are.”

  He knew I hadn’t laid a hand on her, that the only ones I’d been fucking with were him and Joyce, and he’d called my bluff. I didn’t even have the presence of mind to try to bluff back, to fake like he was wrong or even to act like I didn’t care. I just nodded blankly and wandered off.

  I had classes all morning (it was the summer of Statistics, Physics, and Genetics), so I didn’t get to sleep until the afternoon, and woke when it was getting dark. When I got to work, Ray caught me in the stockroom and said Barb was going around saying I’d made it all up.

  “You listen to her?” I said.

  “No. But are you? Seeing Jessi Kessler?”

  “Yeah.”

  I knew he wanted to ask the next question, whether I’d been bullshitting him about her or not, but it would’ve been an asshole thing to ask and we both knew he wasn’t going to. It was up to me to volunteer something more, and by so doing ameliorate Barb’s anti-rumors, begin my counter-counter-offensive. When I didn’t say anything, Ray left.

  In the morning, stares and whispers pinged around me. A bench tech who with the first round of rumors had taken to calling me Dr. Stud, now said, “Dr. Dud,” and laughed. It was that kind of juvenile shit. I felt sickened, not at what they said or even what they thought (I mean, really), but at being shamed once more by Ted. He had turned it around, reversed it so it was I now who had become the prurient spectacle, the lab joke-butt of the week.

  I felt like getting drunk and thought about asking Ray to go out but then thought better of it because if we drank the subject would surely come up and then I’d either have to tell him I used him by lying to him, or else lie to him some more, and I really didn’t feel like doing either one.

  Jessi left messages that I did not return, and the week passed until that Friday, the day of the Ramones concert.

  TWELVE

  “I’m surprised,” she said, when I called. “I wasn’t sure you remembered.”

  “Why wouldn’t I? You still want to go, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know. I guess.”

  “Are we or not?” I snapped, and as it had in the library the annoyance in my voice did something to her.

  “Yes,” she said, softer.

  “I should get you by eight.”

  She said she’d be waiting at the end of her driveway, so could I please not be late, then hung up. My teeth ached.

  When I got there, though, she wasn’t at the end of the driveway at all but inside somewhere so that I had to park and go up and knock and who should answer the door but Ted himself.

  “Oh, ho,” he said, “did you forget something?”

  “Jessi, actually.”

  He did his best to carry on the act from the hospital but with no audience to play to he was pretty transparent, redness creeping up his neck, the muscles in his jaw working.

  “Really?” he said. “Playing that game again?”

  “I bought her tickets to a concert for her birthday. It’s tonight.”

  “Well, have fun. And maybe afterward you’ll have time for a walk in the park.” Then he slapped my arm as if we were the best old buddies in the world.

  Jessi came down the stairs. “Oh,” she said, “I see you’ve met my father.”

  The tickets turned out to be a great deal, given that the opening act alone seemed to go on for hours. It was a local band that had discovered in punk the thesis that music was egalitarian, that you didn’t even really have to know how to play an instrument to make a band. So they didn’t. At the end of it (finally) the guitarist brilliantly smashed his guitar and the lead singer just as brilliantly threw the mike stand into the crowd. People cheered and held up their middle fingers. Debbi’s Domino Club, a place I’d never heard of before, was a pole barn on a gravel lot on a dirt road far out east of the east side. Tables and chairs sat crammed onto broad risers around an open section in the front where people could dance or just stand and look at the band, and waitresses came by and took your money. Jessi and I sat and drank and did not talk (not that we could’ve heard anything anyway).

  The second act, the Fabulous Poodles, was a gimmick band with a catchy single called “Rumbaba Boogie,” but they were English, I think, and at least knew how to play their instruments. It wasn’t for another forty-five minutes after they finished, near midnight, that the Ramones finally came on.

  Something changed for me then when Joey in his ripped-up jeans and rose-colored glasses spread his legs and pressed the mike to his mouth and they ripped into an ass-kicking prototype of their as yet unreleased next hit—twenty twenty twenty-four hours to go, I wanna be sedated. It smoked. It sizzled. It was over in about a minute. But before the feedback had even faded the bassist (Dee Dee he turned out to be) screamed One Two Three Four and they hammered into “Blitzkrieg Bop” (I didn’t know the titles then, of course, and couldn’t understand many of the words, but in later years I would listen over and over to the studio versions and re-create that sliver of the night in my mind). It was worth the extortionary price I paid for the tickets, worth sitting through hours of white noise, worth this uncomfortable stonewalling with Jessi, who apparently I would not be seeing much of anymore. But just then for that moment I had the first and maybe best punk band in history not ten yards from me, and they were on and I had discovered something real and concrete, a new music, the vista of punk, which I think now on looking back was not only the most honest and straightforward of all the genres of that tenuous posttraumatic pulse-taking self-conscious polyester era but also the most apt commentary on it. I’d seen some shows over the years as I said, probably as many as thirty of them, from
Aerosmith to Zep, but as the band segued from “Blitzkrieg” into the sensitive and insightful “Sheena Is A Punk Rocker,” I knew, even then, even inside the moment, that this was the zenith, that I had found rock-and-roll deliverance in a weirdo barn-lounge somewhere in the wasteland east of the east side.

  Then Jessi stood up and said something. She said it loudly so I’d be sure and hear.

  I said, “What?”

  “I’m leaving!”

  “Where?”

  “Bye!”