The Narcissist's Daughter Read online

  I took a booth at Sobecki’s instead of my usual spot at the bar. I’d just lit a smoke when the door opened and the tocking of footsteps approached across the wooden floor. Joyce wore a white sweater, a denim skirt, navy stockings, and clogs with wooden soles. She slid in across from me and smiled and lit a cigarette.

  “Special occasion,” I said, and she smiled. She took the tin of Quaaludes out of her purse and swallowed one and offered them to me, but I shook my head. Later, after a couple of drinks, she said, “I don’t need to sit in a bar all morning. Can we go somewhere else?”

  We came out into the sunlight of the morning and crossed the small weed-cracked parking lot to the 280Z. She unlocked the door, then looked up at me. I stood close enough to smell the wintergreen breath mint she’d taken, and her perfume, which was sharp, not soft and floral at all but vivid and vexing. It reminded me of Halloween, all orange and black.

  “Do you feel like another drink?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s just I don’t want to have more and drive. My house isn’t far. We could go there.”

  I nodded.

  “Follow me.”

  A library lay on one side of the cool dark foyer complete with a sliding ladder to reach the higher shelves, and an emerald parlor with a tall silver Christmas tree still up on the other. I’d never been in a house that smelled so clean, not the antiseptic smell of the hospital but more the absence of any odors at all with just the hint of some underlying scent, not of cleansers or air fresheners but of a kind of flower maybe that I had never smelled before or some spice I couldn’t have named. The dark garland-laced walls of the central hallway were covered with rows of photographs in matching brass frames. One, taken onboard a large boat, was of a smiling Dr. Kessler, shirtless and tanned, with his arm around a ten-or-so-year-old Jessi, but almost all the rest of them seemed to be of Joyce. Joyce as a very young woman, maybe twenty, Joyce pregnant, Joyce graduating from nursing school, Joyce with Jessi as a baby, and so on.

  We passed through a huge dining room with a wooden table long enough to nearly span it, and into a wide bright kitchen of new stainless steel appliances and a glass table in a glass alcove.

  “Sit,” she said and crossed to the refrigerator and opened it and leaned in. She was built nothing like the women I’d been with. She was substantial in ways they had not been, in the breasts and the shoulders and neck, in the pelvis and thighs, in the belly, yet there was a kind of lightness in the way she carried herself. In the inebriating warmth of the light falling through the wide window, it occurred to me how simple about it they were, Ted and Joyce, how ignorant the walls and luxuries they lived behind had made them. What did they know really of the world? He had fought in a war and been injured, I’d give him that, and she got her hands dirty caring for the dying, but beyond that they lived terribly sheltered privileged lives, the dirt of the street, the rawness of the world, alien to them, at most a long distant memory. But not to me. I knew it and was certain I was smarter about this than they could ever be.

  She set two Heinekens on the table then turned a chair out and sat down so close to me that when I faced her our knees brushed. She put her hand on my thigh and said, “It’s okay.”

  “Is it?” I said.

  She got up and stood behind me and said, “You need to relax.” She began to knead the muscles along my shoulders and in my neck, squeezing, then driving a knuckle in until a great warmth flowed to my head and I did not feel light there anymore. I grunted and leaned back so that my hair brushed her. I let my head fall until it rested against the cushion of her breasts and as she continued to knead I reached around and rubbed her leg. She tilted my face back and when she leaned over and smiled and touched the end of her nose to mine it released something in me—I felt suddenly calm and voracious; I stopped trembling, my breathing deepened and slowed and the tension ran out of my shoulders and back. I slid my fingers into her hair and pulled her forward and placed my mouth over hers and we kissed in that upside down manner until she pulled away and said, “Wait here.”

  I listened to her clogs on the wooden staircase and drank and looked out the wide window at the yard. Soon she came back down, held her hand out and said, “Come.” She led me upstairs and back to what I thought was a small TV room until I realized it was only the antechamber to the master suite. It held a black leather sofa, two end tables, and a bookcase with a television on one shelf, a Betamax player on another, and a row of videotapes.

  She stopped here and turned and threw her arms around my neck and kissed me again. For a moment she was like a young girl giddy with excitement, then she stepped away and held out her hands. She pulled her sweater over her head, undid the skirt and let it drop, and slid the stockings down and took them off so that she wore nothing but a white bra and white panties cut high up on her hips. She walked backward, facing me, into the bedroom proper.

  It was mammoth, this room, running the entire breadth of the house. The rear of the ceiling angled downward with the roofline and beneath that lowered part sat the bed, king-sized with a heavy gold spread. The walls were the yellow-green color of avocado flesh. Ted’s bureau was nearest the door. Her dresser, wider and lower and with a huge mirror mounted over it, lay beyond it, the two of them separated by the entrance to a walk-in closet. Across from the foot of the bed, along the inside wall, stood a huge oak-colored armoire, with its doors slightly opened. At the far end was a separate grouping of furniture—a suite of ornate matching armchairs and love seats.

  Joyce stepped onto the bed as if it were a stage. She reached back and unsnapped the bra and then came forward to let me lift it away. When her breasts fell into my hands I felt something click deep inside myself—they were not only large, these breasts, but denser than any I had ever held, with stretch marks along the bottoms and tight puckered nipples, and I thought that I had never felt anything so soft and heavy at the same time. And it wasn’t just her breasts I found as I touched her. It was her belly, soft like an old woman’s and slightly protuberant and flaccid but substantial beneath, renitent. It was the heavy flesh that had just begun to loosen behind her arms or at the insides of her thighs, the skin at the small of her back, or her wide dimpled bottom. It all had the same velvety texture, the same gravity.

  She got on her knees and I sucked a nipple into my mouth. As she held my head against her the sounds of her cooing and sighing came to me directly through the wall of her chest. I slid a hand up between her legs to the panties and rubbed her there as she moved against it, and ran a finger inside the elastic and felt her thick matted hair all damp and hot and beneath that the swollen nub of her clitoris and then the slick wide opening. Then she got off the bed and rubbed her hands across me and as she began to undo my belt she said, “I’ve been thinking about this.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Have you? About me?” She held me and spoke very softly near my ear as if it were some secret between us.

  “All the time. I can’t sleep.”

  “About doing what to me?”

  “Kissing you. Touching you.”

  “Is that all?” she said. “Don’t you want to fuck me?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you could have any girl you wanted.”

  “I want you, Joyce. I want to fuck you.”

  “How do you like to fuck a girl?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Hard?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “How else?”

  “Slow.”

  “Mm, another excellent choice.” She let the trousers fall and lowered my shorts and pushed me back onto the bed. She slipped off my shoes and socks and my pants, then crawled over me and kissed me and unbuttoned my shirt. Her hand was warm and she slid it inside and touched me in the center of my chest and then on my nipples, rubbed each one (moving her thumb in quick circles) until it stiffened, then pushed the shirt back and slid it off so that I was exposed to her.

  “There you are,” she said. “Such a pretty pi
cture.”

  SEVEN

  Weeks passed in which Chloe heard nothing about the job, but she refused to call. It was early February when I came home from class one afternoon and saw her in Donny’s Road Runner, him holding her, hugging her, actually. I stood on the porch and watched until I heard Brigman behind me. He was smoking and watching from the door again. When I asked what was up he just glared. It wasn’t until dinner (Church’s Chicken on paper plates in front of the TV), at which Donny ate Chloe’s share because she was upstairs in her room sobbing, that Brigman, several beers looser, his mouth full, said, “Hope you’re happy.”

  “About what?”

  “Didn’t get the job,” said Donny. “’Cause of her face.”

  I looked at him.

  He nodded.

  “You see?” said Brigman.

  I went up and sat on her bed but she wouldn’t look at me.

  “What’d she say?”

  She turned just enough for me to hear her and said, “Go away.”

  “Chloe. Tell me.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Well, I do. I need to know.”

  “Why do you need to?”

  “I just do.”

  She sniffed and turned her face a little more. “She said people wouldn’t want to buy food from someone who looked like me.”

  “Look.” When she did I saw blood-crusted welts where she’d gouged the stain. “Someone like that is an asshole,” I said, “a fool. You can’t listen to that shit.” But of course she did listen, and had been listening all her life.

  It was only then that it struck me how much I had wanted her to get it, to begin to do something constructive in the world.

  Weeks passed, too, after my morning with Joyce in which I awoke every day with my stomach knotted by concurrent emotions—self-loathing and disbelief at the carelessness with which I might have thrown away my nascent career, and fear that it would not happen with her again.

  It was hard to tell. When I saw her at work she always smiled, and we talked and sometimes ate together as we had before. But she made no mention of our moment, not even a passing reference to there being anything like a relationship, an affair, going on between us. Until one night I ran into her in the cafeteria, and she leaned into me and said, “Can you come over this morning?”

  The first time had been furious and fast, a voracious alcohol-fueled muscle-fuck of the simplest sort. This time (though I would have been happy enough with what we’d had before) she seemed to want to linger over each moment, to manage it almost, to savor it, suckle it. She insisted on undressing me one slow peeled-off piece at a time, then positioned me crosswise on the bed and began kissing me, on the mouth at first, lifting up and lowering herself again and again as if I were a fountain she was drinking from, and then my chin and throat and down over my chest and belly. When she got there she lifted my cock and regarded it (eyebrows furrowed, mouth pursed), blew on it, then crouched between my legs and rubbed it over her forehead and her eyes and her cheeks before taking it in.

  The few times I’d had it before were tentative and faltering and begrudging and incomplete and marred by teeth and thin lips, but this, the fullness and heat of it, the incongruity of the pressure of her tongue and lips and the roof of her mouth juxtaposed against the pull of the vacuum she created with her slight sucking, the unending wetness, was like nothing I’d felt. What was more she seemed to relish it. As if I were somehow working on her at the same time, as if my imminent orgasm was magically causing her own, she made more noise than I did. It did not last long before I called out and thrust into her, the pumping and emptying seeming to go on longer than I had anything to give.

  She kissed up along my hip then and came to lie with her head against me, breathing as hard as I was and in the same rhythm, as if she were taking air from the rising and falling of my belly. After a moment, though, she got up and as she had the first time went to the armoire (which stood slightly open), slipped her arm in and brought out the short silk robe, shut the door tightly and went into the bathroom. When she came back she lay with her head on my arm and we were still.

  After a little while, she said, “Do you think I hate him?”

  “I don’t know. Do you?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Us,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “I mean me. Why am I doing this?”

  “Don’t worry, Daniel.” She’d taken to calling me that in private.

  “You don’t think he could blackball me?”

  “I suppose he could find ways.”

  “Shit.”

  “Daniel. Listen to me—it’s okay.”

  “You always say that.”

  “Do I? Well, I must think you worry too much.” I remembered that he’d said that, or something very like it, once, too.

  Outside a flurry of new blown snow batted against the window. The sky was low and heavy, and so it was dark there in the doctor’s house and we dozed. When we awoke she smiled at me, and I kissed her. At first she seemed distant, tight and preoccupied as if she were going to get up, as if it were time for me to leave, but I kept on until she relaxed into it. We made love carefully this time, with her on top and my arms wrapped around her, and when she came she simply put her face into my neck and gave a single quiet cry. I held her against me for a long time, and we were still again, listening to the wind and the house and each to the breathing of the other.

  Only a night or two later I heard Phyllis and Oween sniping about the pathology conference in Vail Dr. Kessler had jetted off to that afternoon, just in time for some late-season skiing. At first a delirious wave of hope washed over me, carrying images of the two of us, Joyce and Syd, together alone for a week. But the more I thought, the more I knew better, and when in the ICU I overheard one nurse say to another, “Must be nice, no notice. Just fly off skiing whenever you want,” I knew Joyce had gone, too. It seemed odd that she wouldn’t have mentioned it, but I didn’t think about it much. It was during this time that I was to learn, or to hear at least, a couple of things that shocked me and began, I can see now, or at least marked, all the changes that were to come in our lives.

  The first came at home. I was watching TV with Brigman, waiting for it to be time to leave for work. He was pretty hammered, having just finished a sixer. Chloe was upstairs—she’d taken to spending more and more of her time in the weeks since the pretzel debacle either cloistered in her room or across the street at Donny’s house, her long-time refuge from the strains of her life. It was dark but for the luminescent screen that lit Brigman’s face and the smoke that filled his opened mouth because he’d forgotten to exhale again. His eyes shined as he stared at Mary Hartman’s rerun pigtails and bangs (she turned him on, I think). When Mary said something stupid but smart Brigman cackled and phlegm cracked down in his throat and set him off into a round of cigarette coughing. Then the front door opened and Donny came in with a rush of cold air and said, “Heya.”

  Under his breath but loudly enough for us both to hear, Brigman said, “Fuck.”

  I didn’t know what was up, but Donny just turned and slipped back outside without a word. Brigman mumbled something that sounded like “Asshole,” but I didn’t ask him to elaborate. A second later Chloe came down.

  She said, “Thought I heard the door.”

  “It was Donny. Brigman swore at him and he left.”

  “Shit.”

  “Watch your mouth,” said Brigman.

  Now, after a six-pack, was the time to keep quiet, to let it lie. She knew that, but she had been changing for a long time, since junior high really, toughening up, growing flip and nasty and careless, and it made me sad. I did not like to think about what she did with the boys she hung out with, though I knew. I had overheard her once on the telephone, a couple years earlier, talking to another girl with the sort of candid frankness, the carnal familiarity, that I knew older women had with each ot
her but which shocked me to hear from a girl. And it was not speculative talk but a kind of comparing of notes, of how far, of where, of what hurt after. Brigman got regular calls from school about her attitude or something she had been caught doing—smoking in a john or making out in an empty classroom or being dressed inappropriately. But there in the dimness in the face of Brigman’s silly admonition, when I watched her cross her eyes and look down across her nose and push her lips way out so she could see them and say, “Shh-hit,” I laughed.

  “He ain’t comin in here,” Brigman said. I gathered this was still about Donny.

  “Fine,” she spat back.

  “What the hell—” I said.

  “Stay out of it,” Brigman told me, and Chloe said, “Syd,” and shook her head and came over and sat on the arm of my chair. It was a commercial now for Alka Seltzer (he couldn’t believe he ate the whole thing).

  “I mean it,” Brigman said to her.

  “All right,” she said. “Jesus. Drop it.”

  “No, you drop it, Little Miss Jailbait.”

  “God—”

  “What is this?” I said.

  “Ask her,” he said, “what she does with him over there.”

  “Just stop it,” she said.

  “What she’s been doing with him, I’d like to know for how long. Good ol’ Mr. Baby-sitter.”

  Chloe stood and pointed at him and said, “Don’t you say that. Don’t you ever.”

  “It’s true, ain’t it? What were you, twelve when it started? Thirteen?”

  “Brigman, come on—” I said.

  “Ask her.”

  But it scared me in that moment that he was telling the truth or some version of it—that Chloe and Donny had begun something together and that maybe it went back between them to when she was a little girl. It would never have occurred to me, Chloe and Donny in that way. They’d always had this weird bond (he was the one she went to as if even as a young child she sensed who it was would stick around—these parents might fall away but Donny would always live across the street). And it suddenly made a certain sick sense that something more than that had grown between them. Maybe that’s even where it had started with her, in those unprotected years with Sandy dead and Brigman lost in his grief and his beer. I felt dizzy and nauseous.