The Narcissist's Daughter Read online

  “What’d he say?”

  “He said he’d consider it. You’ll need to ask him yourself, though.”

  I told him thanks and said I’d stop in and fill out the forms.

  Then, as if I had drifted somehow into a parallel world of normalcy and plain work, a chunk of time (the week of mid-terms) slipped past during which I laid eyes on no Kessler. It was, I guess, my summer vacation. Jessi and I agreed that I would just go through it with my head down, and then we’d have the rest of the summer, at least until finals week and she had to leave for Cleveland. Joyce did not come over again. I think she was waiting for me to make contact this time, but she would’ve known of my exams. I took some vacation days for cramming and so only worked one night that week, and on that morning Ted was late, which allowed me to take the chicken’s way out vis-à-vis the letter request—I left a note on his desk. I was obligated to ask because of Masterson (who knew nothing, of course, of any of this weirdness) but figured that this way Ted could just ignore it and we could avoid another messy face-to-face. I hadn’t seen him since his goon accosted me in the ER and didn’t know what might come out of my mouth.

  But I thought about them, and they each appeared regularly in my dreams. And I thought about just not going back over, about letting it all go. Surely at that point I could have called it even, and just as surely the possibility of any further benefit from Ted had long since been ruined. Jessi would be gone in the fall, anyway. It’d hurt her, and maybe Joyce, but wouldn’t the pain be greater the longer things continued? Or was that it—that my vengefulness was not yet satisfied? I admit that when Ted gnashed his teeth or Joyce teared up or Jessi whined it satisfied some small black spot in my heart.

  But it was also true that I’d come to care for Jessi, had moved perhaps into that dangerous land of affection, that Joyce left a vacuum in my gut, an ever-present hunger, and that my always fermenting hatred of Ted ran so hot after this latest incident that it constituted a kind of sentimental attachment. I’d even come to feel some fondness for that stupid little beast Dog, and he in turn, probably precisely because I’d always been cold and distant, refusing to coo and pet like the rest of them, had taken to celebrating my arrivals by promptly peeing on the floor at my feet, then rolling on his back and spreading his legs.

  As specious as it sounds, I held a kind of power over an entire family of wealthy, intelligent, beautiful beings. And since I had apparently now forgone any real chance of becoming like them (successful, that is), perhaps that explains as well as anything my inability to quit. I think I could have walked away from entanglements with any one of them, but all together? I was not that strong. So, power? Was that why I stayed, and what led to the remarkable events that would come to pass in the remainder of that summer? Perhaps. Though, on writing it, I must say that it looks not quite right. Love, I think, with all its contradictions and inconsistencies and the precarious place it occupies just across that old thin line from you-know-what, comes closer.

  On that Saturday, after a hard night, the phone woke me.

  “I’m sorry,” Jessi said. “Chloe said you’d be up by now.”

  “I was,” I said, trying to sound awake. I felt frozen in my stupor; I didn’t know what to do with her now, in the space this distance had opened, where it stood or what I’d done or what would happen anymore if I kept doing it.

  “Come over?” she said. “Just for a little while?”

  It stung, how she said that—so buoyed by us, so hungry. The thought of breaking it off with her made my stomach clutch, and not just because it would hurt her. I missed her. It occurred to me then what she’d said.

  “Did you say Chloe?”

  “Hmm? Will you come?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Dinnertime? I’ll make you something.”

  “You cook?”

  “Melted cheese globs and beer. You know that.”

  “Mmm. Your parents, though—”

  “Things are different.”

  “Did you have another talk with them?”

  “What?”

  I waited. My face felt hot.

  She said, “You said ‘another’ talk.”

  “Did I?”

  “Yes. But I never told you I talked with them.”

  “You must have.”

  “I know I didn’t. I’m positive. I thought about telling you.”

  “Then I guess I assumed it. Things seemed to change at some point.”

  I could hear her clicking something against the phone. She said, “What would I have said to them?”

  “I don’t know. That I was psychotic and if they weren’t nice to me I might do something really crazy.”

  “That was it,” she said. “You must have a spy here.”

  “Dog and I talk.”

  “Come over?”

  “All right.”

  Ted opened the door. He held a folded-over newspaper pinched in his hook and continued to read without ever looking at me. I offered no greeting, either, nor did I ask about the letter. Anything civil I said at that point would’ve been as much an affront as something nasty. And how would the conversation have gone?

  Hey, Ted, that was pretty good, hiring a thug to squeeze my nuts. I mean, you really got me there.

  Thanks, Syd. He does nice work. Tell him I said hey, won’t you, next time when he beats the shit out of you?

  I found my way through the dining room and kitchen and sun porch to the back where they—I counted four heads in the pool—floated or splashed and shouted.

  “Hey, you,” Jessi said, and then another of the bobbers, who turned out to be Chloe, lifted an arm and waved, and then the third. “Heya, Syd,” said Donny. Joyce did not wave but watched me walk toward them.

  “Get on your suit,” said Jessi. I nodded but sat in one of the row of rubber-slatted aluminum-tube-framed deck chairs. As I sat watching them play I grew…well, I wanted to get mad. It felt justified. You can see what’d happened—that the week or so of my and Jessi’s separation had been filled for her by a surrogate, my sister. And in turn, she, Chloe, had been granted a haven, a little love-nest sanctuary in which she could see as much of her banished boyfriend as she wanted. But I didn’t feel mad. Tired, maybe. Sad. A little dumbfounded at how prodigiously I had mismanaged things, let them slip away from whatever modicum of control I once had over them. But it all seemed such a smooth continuum—this led to that and now here I sat watching these four inhabitors of my life cavort together.

  “’Bout your car?” Donny said.

  “I’m still thinking.”

  “You all right?” It was Jessi.

  I nodded.

  “Come on in.”

  I shook my head.

  “You’re not all right. What’s wrong?”

  “Just tired.”

  “You want to lie down?”

  “I don’t know.” I stood up.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Talk to your dad.”

  “Oh,” she said. She looked as surprised as I felt at having said it. The notion came to me that I might still turn it back, call the whole thing off, return to Ted his daughter and his wife, and then grovel to try to resurrect my future. I went to the library and from the window glimpsed his car backing down the driveway hard enough that you could tell he was all mad again. Probably going to meet the ex-cop, have a couple of drinks and figure out what to do to me next.

  “Did he leave?” Joyce had come up behind me wrapped in a towel. “Jessi said you don’t feel well.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Are you still having pain?”

  “No. A little.”

  “Are you angry?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come.”

  I followed her back to the kitchen. She stood at the sink, facing the window, which looked out through the sun room to the backyard where we could see the three others.

  “I should go be sociable,” I said. “I mean, I came over to see her.”

  �
�You didn’t come over to see her. That’s why you’re angry.”

  “It is?”

  “Get rid of it, Syd.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Touch me.”

  I put my hand on her shoulder.

  She said, “Ted uses a belt.”

  “What?”

  She pushed the straps of her suit down over her shoulders, then pulled the suit down over her hips and peeled it off. She put her hands on the edge of the counter and leaned forward, legs slightly spread.

  She said, “Do you like that?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Do it.”

  “Joyce—”

  “Hurry up. They’re coming.”

  Donny and Jessi were climbing out as Chloe toweled off.

  “I don’t—”

  “Do it! Get rid of it!”

  In the motion you would use to pitch a fast softball, I reached back and swung my hand forward. Her ass felt cold and dense, and the sound was stiff and muffled.

  “Oh, god!” she said. “Take off your belt. Hurry.”

  It was an old worn canvas thing with a sliding brass buckle. I slid it off, doubled it over and cracked it against her.

  “Harder!”

  They were walking toward the house.

  I swung again and again, whipping her especially robustly with the last few strokes, which left pink welts that I guessed would rise and darken. Only as they stepped onto the sun porch did she gather her suit and towel and look at me and say, “You’re not so different, you know, the two of you,” and hurry out.

  I stuffed the belt in my pocket and was sitting at the table when they entered. “You okay?” Jessi asked.

  I nodded.

  “Hungry?”

  “Starved,” I said.

  Later the four of us were in the kitchen, Jessi and Chloe drinking Cokes, Donny and me having a beer, when Joyce came in and started banging around. She kept looking at me (though I don’t think the others noticed). At one point she even motioned with her head toward the door—she wanted to see me outside. I pretended not to get it, and when I held Jessi’s hand on the table, Joyce glared at me (oh, it was hateful) and stalked out and slammed the door.

  “Jesus,” Chloe said. “What’s with her?”

  Jessi just rolled her eyes, as if to say, Who knows this time? We could hear the 280Z tearing down the drive.

  A little later Jessi said, “Swim?” I nodded, but Chloe said no and went with Donny into a little television den off the dining room. It was dark out. I’d have to leave for work in an hour. I got my suit from the car but when I started into the cabana, Jessi, who was already in the water, said, “Don’t put your suit on. I didn’t.” She hadn’t turned on the lamps around the concrete apron or the powerful underwater spot.

  “What if they come out?”

  “They won’t.” From the way she said it I knew there was an arrangement.

  I met her in mid-pool where I could just reach the bottom, and held her, and we began a kind of dance, a twirling under the warm summer night supported by the water so that even if we tipped and went under I had only to kick to right us, and she did not let me go. I felt all the parts of her against me, her breath and her breasts, her thighs and her belly, her mouth against my mouth, breathing my air, our tongues playing, teeth clicking, and ever so faintly, against the upreaching tip of my erection, the wetted wooliness between her legs, and the different slicker wetness beneath it. Sometimes she lowered herself just enough that she nipped the tip of my cock with that mouth, pulled it in a bit and let it go, and I was so hard then, so teased, that I could feel the aching remnants of the bruising.

  I slipped my arms beneath her legs so that my elbows rode in the crooks of her knees and lowered her so that I penetrated her gradually and in a way over which she had no control, until I was planted and she made a sound deep in her throat. We held like that for a long time, turning still, dancing, then I raised her up again and set her down. It went on in that slow aqueous way, and even at our climax I tried not to speed up too much, and she did not move against me, so that it happened in the same slow motion as our dance, the breaking waves of it making us shudder so that we must have sent out ripples. Like fishes we spilled ourselves into the water and each other.

  Then we heard a sound in the blackness at the back of the estate.

  “Dog?” she said.

  No answer came, and then a sound again.

  “Who is it?” she said.

  “Shh,” I whispered, and let her go and slipped to the side and out into the cool darkness, and ran, naked and wet, and heard it again, though farther away now, because it, whatever it was, had run away.

  He caught me on top of the parking garage, just about where Ted had confronted me, only he didn’t want to talk. I was careless to even go up there, to follow my habits, and made it easy for him and easier still by not paying attention. I had barely stepped from my car when he came out of the shadows and swung his fist up into my gut. That suddenly I was down, airless and incapacitated.

  He knelt beside me. I was on my knees, folded over. “Every time,” he said. He was panting a little, though probably more from adrenaline than exertion. It’s strange the things you think of when your world is wiped clean by the act of dying. “Every time you see her, I’m gonna pound your fucking ass.”

  I fell over onto the stained and grease-scented concrete.

  “You’re not too bright, so I guess this is what it’s gonna take till you get it. Leave. Jessi. Kessler. The. Fuck. Alone.”

  My grunt must have sounded something like a response, because he stepped back and turned toward his car (the one I’d stupidly failed to notice though it was right there under a light). I managed to pull in enough air to speak, and said, or grunted, “Hey.”

  He turned and stood backlighted by the street lamp, so I could only make out his bulk and the shape of his ape arms bowing away from his sides.

  “Don’t know…your name.”

  “What?”

  “If we’re…gonna…meet like this—”

  He laughed. He said, “You are one smart-mouthed shit, you know that? You might not be too bright, but you got balls. It’s Ron.”

  “Ron,” I said. “Seeya.”

  He laughed again, and left.

  So began a new phase.

  Under the guise of adventure—trying a restaurant in a strange part of the city; catching an afternoon movie; a day trip to anywhere—I steered Jessi into surreptitiousness. She seemed not to suspect anything. I just didn’t come to the house anymore. She in fact began coming to mine afternoons when Brigman and Chloe were at work (I learned not to be self-conscious about the mess, and anyway she never commented on it, as if everyone’s house looked like this), and in my room in my bed we made slow love in the way we had discovered in the pool. Her face grew pink and moist, and her lips dry. So much persisted in this way and so much was delivered that it was almost as if we had discovered some new activity altogether, our own form of physical communion that was derived from and related to sexual intercourse but had become something other than that, something new. Eventually we could last on the very edge for a full hour (I timed it on my alarm clock), and the release then was symphonic, epiphanic (it’s silliness really to even suggest a word for it).

  In the meantime, in Holiday Inns and Motel 6s and a by-the-hour cottage on a highway west of town, I was spanking her mother. Oh, I beat that woman’s bounteous ass until it reddened and rocked, the reverberations riding down even into her dimply thighs, but not only that, no. I’d turn her over and push apart her legs and straddle her and with a limp leather strap that’d once been the belt to a 60s Chanel suit of hers whipped her there, too (that furry mons, those swollen swollen lips), until the juices flew, and I could see in her face that, whether she deserved it or not, she was in her bliss. You should know that she began then also, from that first living room moment of our reunion, to teach me about pain. I was open to it as I was open to everything she suggested
if for no other reason than that I wanted still (perhaps even more desperately than before) to please her.

  Even the first time she bound my wrists and ankles and blindfolded me and lit a candle and stung me with globules of hot wax, and I writhed against the restraints and swore magnificently at her, she said she knew that I was finally beginning to understand the secret: that this made it even better.

  I did not plan this, did not conspire to double-time them with each other. My sin was weakness, not having the will to say no to any of it. My god, though, I have to say they both seemed happy in those middlemost weeks of summer—Jessi just lay sometimes looking at me and smiling and running her fingers over my face; Joyce took to licking me in surprising places, on the cheek or elbow or the back of my calf—and their happiness made me happy, too, at least for the hours we were together and there was no room to think of anything else but us.

  In this way we passed into August.

  FIFTEEN

  I came home one morning to find Chloe’s car idling in the street, and her in her work uniform dragging two suitcases and an overnight makeup kit down the front steps. When she huffed and set them down at the curb, I said, “Going somewhere?”

  “Work.”

  “Long shift, huh?”

  “Shut up, Syd. I’m moving out, all right? Now you can run over and tell my dad.”

  “You think he might not notice?”

  “You’re so funny.”

  “Maybe you should talk to him.”

  “I’ll call him.”

  “Oh. Well, good.”

  She lifted one case into the trunk, then the other.

  “Where you going to stay?” I asked then, as mildly as I could, though it was the question we’d both been waiting for.

  “Jessi’s.”

  I think I actually staggered. I said, “What do you mean?”

  “Jessi? Remember her? Big house. Small dog.”

  “Chloe—you can’t.”

  “She invited me.” She threw in the makeup case and slammed the lid. “It’s not like they don’t have the room. And they don’t treat me like I’m twelve or something.”