The Narcissist's Daughter Read online

  He stared up at me. Blankly, you might say. He was as vacuous a human being as I had ever met.

  “Syd—” he started.

  “No,” I said, “I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to hear any denials or excuses or justifications. I’m telling you, I find out you so much as touched her after this, I’ll tie you down and take Brigman’s ax and chop your hand off at the wrist.”

  “Jesus Christ—”

  “—will not help you in this, Donny.”

  I crossed back over to our place, one in a line of tall and narrow clapboard deals on a tarred and graveled dead end street in the old south end. It had been not so long before that a prosperous enough looking place, both the house and the neighborhood, I mean, but it had all changed somehow along with our circumstances. When I was seventeen—recipient of dozens of come-hither co-eds-lounging-on-the-grassy-green brochures from colleges around the country; on the very verge of beginning to realize my one true ambition, my goal-since-childhood, which was not actually then to be a doctor but just to be somebody—my stepfather, Brigman Reed (my younger sister Chloe’s actual father), was in a bad car wreck. It was largely a result of his own carelessness, for which he would spend six months in the can after his release from the hospital, and he would never really quite recover from it, but it affected me directly because I put off college for a year to stick around and help out at home. By the time Brigman got out, our mother, Sandy, had been diagnosed with metastasized lung cancer, of which she died not long after I turned nineteen. Things had kind of been falling apart ever since. Now, in Sandy’s absence (as if she had somehow personally held all of it together) each of the nearly identical houses seemed to lean to one side or the other, and you noticed peeling paint and curling shingles and rotting-leaf- carpeted lawns where there had once been only neatness and care. As for my ambitions—which had by then, with Masterson’s encouragement and as a reaction I think now to the serial crises of Brigman’s accident and my mother’s illness, lit on medicine—they stayed hot as ever in the heart of my heart. But time, of course, hurried on, so it was only now, after the break of getting the lab job, after I had finally been able to go back to school full time, that I felt on the verge again of my life.

  As I came up the front concrete steps I did the dance—knees urgently flexed, hand grasping for the nonexistent railing, swearing under the breath (they’d cracked down the middle so they shifted when you stepped on them and for an instant made you think you were falling)—and came into our shit-stuffed living room. A television alcove jutted out beside the porch, so there should have been plenty of space for furniture, but after Sandy died Brigman (which is all I’d ever called him from the time he and my mom started dating when I was eight) began filling it with stuff he refused for whatever reason to throw out (cardboard boxes of her clothing, stacks of newspapers and magazines, cases of empty beer bottles, the broken remains of Chloe’s childhood toys) so now the television sat in the square middle of the room, on boxes, and the two easy chairs were shoved back against the wall and you had to make your way through it all on pathways that had been hewn out between the piles.

  Chloe stood inside the door, arms folded over the breast-shelf of her chest, glaring at me. She’d obviously seen or anyway heard my little tirade of threats to her special friend, our forever neighbor-across-the-street, he who was twenty-four to her sixteen.

  She said, “You prick.”

  “Great,” I said. “Nice to see you, too. How’s your day been, Chlo?”

  She was born, my baby sister, with a facial disfigurement called a nevus flammeus, what you might hear called a port-wine stain, just a birthmark really but in her case a huge one—it covered half her face (the right half, as it happened) from the midline of her mouth and chin up across her cheek to just above her eye and nearly over to her ear—that darkened as she grew from infancy until by the time she was toddling it was the color I would call magenta, that is, the shade of a just ripening plum when its dark redness has begun to be shot through with a deeper richer violet. It was the crisis of her life, of course, that mask, a horrid torment for a girl who had always been pretty otherwise.

  Now, on top of it, she was newly built in a way that made your heart hurt—well, it made my heart hurt but pretty much every other man’s neck twist. Chloe had a bosom, you might say, the sort that even other women appraised. It only compounded the view she had of herself as freakish, as a creature the world had license to regard shamelessly and openly.

  She said, “Why can’t you just mind your own business?”

  What does a girl from a collapsed and hopeless place do when she has a bicolored face and a body that stops traffic? Where does she turn when she has no mother and the shadow of a father and a brother who’s utterly preoccupied with his own perceived miseries and injustices, and she wants so terribly just to have friends, to be let in? How does she accomplish that? It’s not a hard question to answer. Chloe had not wanted, since the time she was in junior high, for boyfriends, at least.

  “Night,” I said, and headed up the stairs. I was exhausted. I’d worked the night before, gone straight to class, run a reconnaisance mission that turned into a face-to-face with the enemy and led, quite unexpectedly, to a penetration of their peripheral defenses, so that now apparently I had ahead of me another long night, though of a wholly different sort.

  I barely even heard it when Chloe shouted after me, “Why do you have to go around making everyone miserable?”

  TWO

  The lab, which occupied two entire wings of the basement of the main hospital building, was actually a private corporation owned by four pathologists, three of whom we rarely saw and who looked and acted as you might guess (as I guessed) people who work with the dead and disembodied would—they were gnomish men who locked themselves into their laboratory offices and spent the days staring at tissue samples and blood cells and writing reports about what they saw, or over in the small autopsy room in a distant part of the basement. The fourth, though, was Dr. Kessler, who ran it all, and this job of administrator, politician, enforcer, facilitator, even cheerleader seemed to suit him in ways I imagined the more typical and pedestrian chores of a clinical pathologist did not (though he was widely acknowledged to be brilliant at such things). He also owned a piece of an outside lab that served nursing homes and clinics and offices, lectured at the medical school and around the region, researched and wrote and published, and sat on several hospital boards.

  Though he had Ph.D.s under him to manage the departments, and technologists under them to run all the sections, and though the phlebotomists were in general the undegreed serfs and riffraff of the lab, Ted seemed from the beginning to take a strangely ardent interest in those of us who came in from the university. After we’d finished our training, he made a point every week that fall on a Thursday or Friday of taking a couple of us upstairs to breakfast. Most of the other students were a bare step beyond adolescence and spoiled on top of that (middle-white-collar-class kids looking to get into the upper middle or rich kids looking to stay that way) and I ignored them to the extent I could. I was aware, though, of the hissing speculation among the as yet unfed about what it must mean if you got asked to one of these breakfasts—that it was a kind of interview that could lead to Kessler writing a letter of recommendation (which was given to be virtually tantamount to an admission somewhere). The thought of such a letter made my arm hairs stand up. These spoiled young were unabashed about clawing like cats for advantage: refusing to divulge anything they’d learned about Kessler; spreading trash behind each other’s backs; stealing draw-lists to get a more challenging set in order to show off or an easier one to finish quickly and be available for an invitation. I didn’t play these games, though not because I had any less ambition or desire. On the contrary it made me almost blind to think they might get over on me. Still, with the additional curing I had on them I thought I understood something about the value of subtlety, of just not appearing to be an asshole. So I waited
.

  And one morning a month or so later—it was the fall now of 1978—I got down from the floors early along with a couple of the other students and two of the regular day-shift full-timers. I was at the supply rack replenishing my tray with all the variously stoppered test tubes—brick red, sky blue, turtle green, gray, lavender, and even the rarely used navy (for lead levels)—when the room behind me went suddenly quiet. “Morning, girls,” Dr. Kessler said. I turned around as his glance swept across the others to me and he winked.

  “Let’s grab some grub,” he barked, not a question or an offer, but a command. The black lady regulars who knew the order didn’t include them clicked and tssked and mmmed as we students followed him into the hallway.

  He was a compact man, slender, not tall, darkly complected, and always perfectly groomed. Though he wore a trimmed mustache in a nod perhaps to the relaxed fashions of the time, he still had his hair cut crew as he had since the days of his military service in Korea. He wore expensive suits and vests and ties under his lab coat; his teeth were large and white and his skin unnaturally clean and scrubbed. He was beyond forty-five then but had done well at keeping himself from looking it. The other salient thing about him was that his right hand was a hook, a split hook, actually, operated by cables attached somehow farther up his arm, which he used as dexterously as if it had grown there—I’d seen him manipulate test tubes with it and once watched him accept a glass slide from someone and hold it by its edges up to the light.

  After taking our scrambled eggs and toast we followed him across the open cafeteria to a plain blond wooden door that said, in small important letters, Physicians’ Dining Room. The doctors in their suits or lab coats and scrubs glanced up at us, then away again and I, noticing some frowns, felt like the trespasser I was (even escorted we were no way allowed in there) but I had the sense that Ted would have loved for one of them to challenge him and for us to witness that exchange. Of course he knew no one would, though I didn’t know it at the time.

  We took a corner table and after the predictable how-are-classes and when-do-you-graduate b.s. it segued into Ted going on about his own college and military experiences and what hospitals were like in those old-seeming days of the Eisenhower 50s, the two girls nodding and beaming and barely touching their food they were so busy making sure he could see that they were sucking it up. I was starved; I ate and looked around the room (which was nicely carpeted and wallpapered and lamp-lighted like a living room) at the Rolex watches and silk ties and Florsheim shoes. One older doc sucked prissily on a pipe with an ornate meerschaum bowl carved into the shape of a man’s head; another wore a sport coat of some kind of coarse woven material that was meant to be hip and was undoubtedly absurdly expensive but looked absurd on his paunchy shortish middle-aged carcass. I was tuned in to all of it and, hungry as I was for the food, I was hungrier still for that stuff—no, not the stuff itself really, but the ability to have it, to be able to simply point and say, “That.”

  Perhaps because I was so full of it, such an expert on Want, or because I had been working around the privileged enough by then to have come to know the look of their longing, it came to me clearly that Dr. Kessler, who from my vantage could have anything he chose, who was probably among the richest dozen doctors in the entire city, was as consumed by it as I was, that we were kindred spirits in desire. For one thing he was too earnest—the girls and I were only undergraduates, we had no standing in anything, we were too far down the ladder to even be considered as protégés. And he was no mere pathologist, being himself practically an institution. You might assume as I did initially that it was just generosity, his way of giving something back, but the more I watched him the more I knew I was right. He wanted something from us.

  When we’d ridden back downstairs and the girls walked off ahead of us, I felt a tug on my right bicep and looked down to see that the point of Ted’s hook had snagged me. He said, “You didn’t say much up there, Syd.”

  I shrugged. “Thanks for breakfast.”

  “That, you already said. Don’t be too grateful for things. So how’s it all going? Did I hear you’re working another job besides this one?”

  “I wait tables at the Armour Country Club.”

  “Ah,” he said and regarded me as if something had slipped into place. “What about your classes? Masterson tells me you started Organic this semester as well.”

  I nodded.

  “Can you handle everything?”

  “It’s a lot of work.”

  “Well, I know how that goes.”

  “Are you a member?” At the club, I meant. I’d never seen him there.

  “I write them a check every year, though I don’t know why. Who’s got time to golf?”

  “I know,” I said. “I have the same problem.”

  He smiled, then said, “You from around here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do your folks do?”

  “My step-dad used to be a tool-and-die maker at Hydramatic and my mom was the first woman line supervisor they ever had.”

  “Is that right? My old man was a pipe fitter up at the Rouge.” Ford. I couldn’t have guessed that, of course, but it thrilled me, this sort of connection between us, however faint. The sons of autoworkers. “We lost him just last year.”

  “Yeah. My mom’s gone.”

  He’d had to work for it, too—that’s what it was, I figured. He’d had to fight his way up and it mattered, even now, even from the pinnacle where he lived, to have that understood.

  Then, apropos of nothing, he said, “You ever think about nights?”

  “To work?” The thought of hauling into class on no sleep didn’t sound like much of a good idea.

  “There’s going to be an opening soon. Your probation’ll be up here in another few weeks. Consider it. Better hourly than you’re making now, and more hours. Some benefits. Your days free. You could quit the club.”

  I nodded.

  “Okay,” he said, as if he’d taken my nod as an assent.

  I said, “No. I mean…I’ll think about it.”

  His eyes held hard on mine, not blinking. They were pale, almost amber. He stepped in closer. “Can you get through Organic?” he said. “I don’t mean As. Just survive it.”

  “I’ll get an A.”

  “Will you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why do you always look so worried to me?”

  I could smell his Hi Karate. He looked up and down the hallway as if he were going to tell me some secret that mustn’t be overheard and said, “It wasn’t random, you know, your getting hired here. We didn’t just pull names out of a hat. You were recommended and vetted. It’s not only about grades. I mean, you’ve got a long way to go, some big hurdles. But you’re in the system now.” He lifted his eyebrows as if to say, Dig?

  I nodded.

  “It’s really a question,” he said, “from here on out, of just not fucking up.” He smiled. “Listen, you have anything on your mind, want a word, drop by my office.”

  “Sure. Thanks.”

  He touched the front of my lab coat with his hook, then said, “Gotta go,” and hurried away down the hallway.

  Past the blur of that initial month I began to discern the hierarchy of the lab, that is, which technologists would remain on the bench for their careers and which would become management—it had everything to do with Dr. Kessler. He was the sun, and the techs the astral bodies that revolved around him (some of them among the most egregious ass-kissers I’d ever met).

  Barb Lancioni, who was only maybe two years older than me, was the day-shift phlebotomy supervisor. She’d been a bench chemist for a few years out of college before the bump up to management and still had a lot to prove. Often at the end of my short shift when things had settled from the morning rush into the steadier pace of the rest of the day, I’d pass Ted’s office and see Barb in there laughing wildly at something he’d said, or leaning in to enlighten him about some sin another tech had committed. Barb was
one of the detachment of snitches (the chief one, I gathered) whose fierce loyalty Ted had inspired. He had that ability to rouse people to service, stir them to great heights of commitment. He was a motivator. His snitch brigade was scattered throughout the various departments and their extra unspoken duty was to keep him apprised of everything that was going on. You could tell when they had something to feed him—they got all nervous. With Barb it was always a high flush in her gauntish cheeks as if her very temperature had risen in anticipation of basking in his glow.

  One morning I passed his opened door as he sat at his desk, reading, and glanced in at him at the precise moment he happened to look up.

  “Syd,” he said.

  I paused, or froze, and nodded and said, “Dr. Kessler.”

  “Come on in. Sit.”

  The hallway was empty and I was glad of that. I wanted very much not to seem like one of them, the snitches, and had the strong urge to shut the door behind me, though I resisted it.

  “So how’s Organic?”

  “B on the first exam.”

  “That’ll work.”

  I shook my head and he smiled. Behind him was a built-in alcove with a work shelf that held a heavy binocular microscope. “You know there’re some pretty smart people down here who could help you out, if you want.”

  “Tutoring?”

  “You don’t have to call it that. Just someone to run compounds with you. Someone who’s smart about it. I could ask around.”

  His asking, of course, would render it so. I nodded vaguely in acknowledgment of the possibility, and again he seized on that as my agreement, and said, “All right, then. I’ll find someone.” He looked at me for a moment, then leaned across his desk and said, “Are you seeing anyone?”

  “What?”

  “A girlfriend.”