The Narcissist's Daughter Page 14

  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.

  “Sticking people all you do for a living?”

  “Such as it is,” I told him.

  When I’d taken the needle out, he held the cotton to the puncture and said, “I thought they called you Syd.”

  I looked at him and said, “Who are you?”

  “Ah,” he said.

  “You work here or something?”

  “Well, I don’t work here. But I’m working.”

  I wanted suddenly to get out of there. I said, “Whatever,” and cut the needle and picked up my tray.

  “Don’t get snotty.”

  Maybe they should’ve added a lithium level to the enzymes. I’d ask the doc on the way out. Then the guy said, “Syd, the child-fucker.”

  My scalp tightened. I thought to move but didn’t, as if what was happening was too fascinating for me to budge from it.

  “You know who I am?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Sure you do. I drive a VW Rabbit. Yellow. Quick little thing, isn’t it?”

  “I’m going to get security.”

  “Pansy-asses. Whyn’t you call the real cops? Or let me. I know plenty of ’em. Used to be one, in fact. Let me tell you something, you horny little prick—” I shook my head. I was so shaken and angry and confused and frightened I felt like just screaming at him, but I only stood there. “—starting now, Jessi Kessler is off limits to you.”

  “You piece of shit,” I said, while making the concurrent mistake of stepping toward him, which was when his hand shot out and he grabbed my package, my jewels, so tightly that the breath was propelled from me and I could only let out a kind of wheezing grunt. I dropped the tray (the vacuum tubes cracking and imploding) and sagged, but he held me up. The needle hole opened and a thick line of blood ran down across his forearm.

  “Watch your mouth, lover boy, and don’t fuck with me. You want to play rough, I’ll teach you some things but I’m giving you this warning first, and that’s all this is—a warning. Knock it off. Leave her alone.”

  He let go, and it was all I could do not to drop to my knees. He swung his legs over and stood up. He was as short as he was thick but looked down at me because I was bent over, holding myself, trying to breathe, and said, “Oh, you can throw that blood out. There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  I looked up at him.

  “I took a pill to turn me yellow, so they’d be sure and call you up here.”

  I skipped Physics in the morning and went home but only slept until noon. For a moment when I woke up I was able to convince myself that the damage had healed. Then I moved. It had dulled, though, from a sharpness in which I could feel my heart beat into something deeper and achier. If I adjusted my stride a little I could walk without charges shooting down my legs as they had for the remainder of the night. (At one point Phyllis told me I didn’t look well and offered to let me go home, but I said no. Thankfully the night stayed slow.) I put in toast and was frying an egg when the front door bell rang and then I heard the door opening before I could answer it.

  I stopped in the archway to the living room. In the midst of all of Brigman’s trash stood Joyce. It was the oddest sensation, seeing her like that in our house—she looked too big for the place, too alive, as if it couldn’t possibly hold her and had no right to try.

  I said, “What are you doing?”

  “I was afraid you’d turn me away.”

  “Other people live here, you know.”

  “They left. I saw them.” They’d both gone to work. (Chloe was full time now. She’d turned out to be one of the best workers the Pretzel Bitch had ever hired, and had even developed a following of mall rats who waited to get their carb fix from her.)

  “So now you’re watching them, too?”

  “No, Syd. I just didn’t want to cause trouble. I wanted to surprise you.”

  “Well, I’m surprised.”

  “I meant while you were sleeping.”

  “That’s not a good idea.”

  “It was never a good idea.” She came across to me, picking her way between the stacks and piles.

  “Why would you come here?”

  “I wanted to see you.”

  “I mean, all this crazy shit is going on—”

  “I think you’re embarrassed.” She looked around.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You think you’re the only one who comes from poor? You think you know something about white trash?”

  “I guess I do now.”

  Her eyes moistened again as they had in the Jacuzzi. “It doesn’t go away, you know,” she said. “You’re as much proof of that
as I am.” Then she came closer, until we were nearly touching, and said, “I know how angry you’ve been. I feel that way, too, sometimes. But we can help each other.” She put her hand between my legs and cupped me in a way that normally would’ve been nice but now, in my condition, sent out flares so that I grunted and bent forward.

  “Something wrong?”

  “I…hurt myself,” I said.

  She said, “Oh,” but instead of letting go, she squeezed a little harder. She said, “Do you understand what I mean, about helping each other?”

  At first I didn’t but she squeezed harder still, so that I could hardly breathe, and then I found I did understand. I felt not only a kind of reactive indignation at the pain but a concurrent thrill as well—a dizzying rush at the deeply illicit darkness, the dirty danger she was offering up, the implicit suggestion that this was one of those tit-tat deals, the old give-and-get—that I had not felt before even with her and that immediately and thoroughly intoxicated me. I reached around with my free hand and slid my fingers into her hair, made a fist and tightened it and looked down into her upturned face, the opened mouth, the breath coming hard now as she held me so tightly that the pain had turned white. I twisted her hair until she cried out, then opened my mouth and lowered it onto hers.

  FOURTEEN

  Masterson called to tell me about an undergraduate fellowship that had just opened up in the fall down in Columbus, at Ohio State. It was a one-semester deal where you’d live in a dorm, take some classes, and also work as an assistant in a cancer research lab. Most of the cost would be covered by a grant, but we’d need to get off an application right away if I was interested.

  “It would beef up your credentials,” he said. “Look great on your apps. Think about it. Oh, and you’ll need a letter of reference, too, of course. I was talking to Dr. Kessler this morning so I took the liberty of mentioning it to him.”