The Narcissist's Daughter Page 13
She pushed off between the tables and went down the risers into the screaming air-punching crowd and Joey and Tommy and Dee Dee and Richie were on fucking fire as they bashed from “Sheena” into “Teenage Lobotomy” (now I guess I’ll have to tell ’em, that I got no cerebellum) and what was I going to do, let her walk off into the night and get hit over the head by some east side punk? Shit, I thought. “Shit!” I said. Some leather chick at the next table shrugged in commiseration.
At the steel door the bouncer eyeballed me and I knew I wasn’t getting back in. Then I was in the cool of a midsummer night, the noise behind me fading into the distance of history as Jessi stalked off toward my car, which I’d parallel parked along the main drive because there were no regular spaces left by the time we got there. I thought at first that the night was weirdly silent until I realized it was just that I couldn’t hear anything.
I caught up to her and unlocked the passenger door and went around and got in. I looked at her. She said something.
“What?”
“I want to go home!”
“You were so excited about it. About seeing them.”
“I was excited about a lot of things!”
“You’re mad at me.”
“Oh, god, Syd—”
“I didn’t call you. I’m sorry.”
She shook her head.
“Jessi—”
“It’s not that,” she said.
“It’s me,” I said. Or shouted.
“It’s everything! My parents are horrible. They hardly even talk to me anymore. And when they do they accuse me of having sex. With you! And we don’t do anything! You don’t even touch me! It’s so stupid!” She leapt back out of the car and bolted into the driveway just as another car came tearing in. Stones flew as it braked and I thought for sure she was hit but somehow it missed her, apparently by turning and coming right alongside my car so fast and close that it smacked the door Jessi’d left open—my passenger door—and wrapped it clear around so it now touched the front fender. Then everything got quiet again.
The car backed away from mine with a rending shriek of unfusing metal. The guy who got out from behind the wheel looked at my door and said, “Oh, shit, man. I’m fucking sorry.” He had long blond hair, I remember, pretty hair, and he staggered sideways, then leaned back against my rear fender because he was too drunk really to hold himself up. Jessi was there now in the driveway again, staring, hands over her mouth. The bouncer wandered over.
“Can you call the police?” Jessi asked him.
“Private property,” he said. “They won’t do nothing.”
“Are you okay?” I asked her. She nodded.
“I’m really fucking sorry,” the blond guy said.
The bouncer helped me pull the door back around, creaking and moaning, until, heaving against it, we were able to snap it back far enough that the latch caught and held it more or less closed.
“Don’t try and open it again,” the bouncer said.
“Yeah, thanks,” I told him.
“I am really really fucking sorry,” the blond guy said. He leaned into his car, then brought something over and handed it to me. It was, of all things, half an eight pack of Little Kings.
He said, “I don’t need it no more.”
I thanked him.
Jessi got in through my door and crawled across. I made sure she put the belt on. Even as we were pulling out I swear I could hear Joey singing “Now I wanna sniff some glue,” or maybe it was just a little voice in my head.
Jessi opened two of the beers. We drove and drank (breathing recovering settling) until she said, “Where are we going?”
“You said you wanted to go home.”
“I don’t want to.”
So I drove us around out there on the dirt roads (somewhere actually in the general vicinity of where I’d nearly killed her a month earlier), drinking the beers, until she said she was starting to feel a little carsick again and could I stop? I found a rutted turnoff into some trees, a farmer’s tractor access or something, and bumped in a little ways. It was about as perfectly dark as you can get in the real world. We sat for a few moments before she said, “I am so sorry about your car. And leaving—”
“It’s all right,” I said. “Really. I’ve been shitty. I know. I deserved it.”
“No. Don’t say that.”
“I’ve just been—”
“Busy. I know. You have summer school and work and I’m just this bored spoiled girl and I am so sorry about everything.”
“No,” I said. “I’m really the one who should apologize.”
We were both quiet again. And then as if it had been agreed upon or some voiceless signal passed between us we lurched toward each other and met over the parking brake, met and began tearing, she at my clothing and I at hers. It was a lot of tearing and there were those very nice breasts involved and lips, too, and finally it required my showing her how to put the seat back all the way as I opened the glove compartment and dug out the last of those stupid condoms I’d bought at Freddy Garvey’s Gulf station, and my crawling over her and sort of kneeling on the floor so I wasn’t crushing her, and then me touching her, touching her and kissing her and showing her in some awkward front-seat way my version of how it was supposed to be and finally me lifting up and pressing against her as she made quiet sounds in her throat, a muted held-in crying out, and instead of just fucking her as I imagined she had been fucked, I stopped and held myself up. I thought I could make it decent, I could make it good, or at least I thought I could make it last. But it didn’t last, not at all. It was over in a high school minute.
In her driveway, she leaned against me. I wondered what she felt about what had happened. I felt mostly confused. It had never been my plan to do in actuality what I pretended to have done for her parents’ benefit. And I’d never had any desire to make her pay for their temerity and exploitiveness but now I knew I had, or would when it came to its inevitable end. And I had to ask myself—had I done it because of what Ted did to me, to invert the tables yet again, simply because I could? Or had it been something else between us, Jessi and me, some growing thing fed by angst and relief and sadness?
What was strange was that I slept hard that night for the first time in weeks, for the first time really since Ted figured out I wasn’t doing anything to his daughter and so gleefully rubbed my face in it.
And having slept hard I awoke early enough that the birds were still singing, clawed my way up and out of bed and into some shorts and ran. The world felt new and unfolded and wet and I could smell the fecundity of summer—sap and spores and rich rotting humus. There are certain scents I have always associated with running, as if somehow the olfactory senses are awakened or sharpened by the quickened flow of body fluids. I came back glowing because even that early it was already over eighty and was supposed to hit ninety-five by midday.
On my return, Brigman and Chloe were standing in the driveway, coffee mugs in hand, inspecting my mangled passenger door. Across the street Donny pretended to work under the hood of the Road Runner.
“You get clipped or backed into?” Brigman said when I ran up.
“Hit.” Sweat ran off my chin and elbows and nose. I gave a somewhat edited version of events.
“You get information?”
“No.”
“Plates?”
“No.”
“Fuck, Syd,” he said, “you can get insurance for this.”
“I can fix it,” said Donny. He’d slipped over and stood now at our periphery, eyeballing the damage (which he’d obviously been over to look at earlier) and Brigman at the same time, ready to run if Brigman lashed out, but Brigman simply ignored him. “Paint it, too,” Donny said.
Chloe smiled and motioned him closer. He took a sliding step in her direction.
I said, “They said the cops wouldn’t come because it was private property.”
“You can still file a claim,” said Brigman. “There witnesses?”
“Yeah.”
Chloe said, “Jessi got the number.”
He said, “Who?”
I said, “How do you know?”
“She called while you were running.”
“You talked to her?”
“Oh, my god. I talked to Syd’s girlfriend.”
“She is not my girlfriend.”
“She got the license?” Brigman said.
“I can do it cheap,” said Donny. “Bank the insurance.”
Chloe said, “She has like a photographic memory or something, I guess. Did you know that?”
I said, “Why the hell did you talk to her?”
“Why the hell shouldn’t I?”
“Lucky for you she did,” said Brigman.
“Change that shitty color if you want, too,” said Donny.
“Shit,” I said.
Chloe said, “What’s wrong with you? She seems nice. Funny, too.”
“Funny about what?”
“What an asshole you are.” They all laughed, even Donny, then she said, “Kidding. I think she really likes you.”
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 even
ing 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.
PART FOUR
They got a name for the winners in the world
I want a name when I lose
—STEELY DAN (1978)
THIRTEEN
On 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.