The Narcissist's Daughter Read online

  The door opened again and Donny stood there holding up a six of Blatz like it was a trophy and he was the champion of something. I tensed but all Brigman said was, “Piss water.”

  But when Donny came in and held it out to him, Brigman, after hesitating a moment, pretending to consider it, pretending that he might refuse it and kick Donny out, of course accepted it and tore off a can for himself and one for Donny. What a scheme! I knew Donny could sometimes be perceptive for a stupid shit, and of course he knew how things worked (that with six down Brigman could get damn mean, but a few beyond that would put him out cold until morning), but this guile, this blatant manipulation, was nothing I’d have thought him capable of.

  “You ain’t hangin out here,” Brigman said.

  “Just come over to say hey.”

  He looked at Chloe and I saw something pass between them, then she went upstairs. After he finished the beer, Donny said, “Well, take it easy,” and left as well. Mary Hartman was over. By the time the early news came on, and I had to leave, Brigman was snoring in his chair. Chloe stepped around the wall from the staircase. She’d changed into fresh jeans and a nice blouse, and I smelled Charlie, the perfume she wore. She opened one of the remaining cans of Blatz and squeezed into the big easy chair alongside me, our hips mashed together, and said, “He wants it so bad for you.”

  “Who?”

  “Brigman, stupid.” She sipped and handed the can to me. “You don’t know how much. Doctor Syd.”

  A sudden tide of regret flooded through me. We were both, my sister and I, fuck-ups in a literal sense—we were fucking our lives away. And at that moment I cared less about mine than I did about hers. I wanted so terribly for her to have something decent and normal, a real job, a healthy family. Nothing spectacular. Just to learn how to live in the world without destroying herself out of some kind of self-loathing. I wanted her to sell goddamn pretzels at the mall, to wear the little jacket and hairnet and get a paycheck every week, and to come home and not go out and ride around in cars and drink and give blowjobs to pimply little shits who cared not a whit about anything beyond her body and what she could do with it. And maybe to go to college but even if not to make enough to live in a good place and not always be scraping for everything she needed. Though perhaps I had gone a long way toward ruining that possibility, too. Because if I got into medical school, found entrée to that life, surely I could pull her up with me. I was fucking it up as surely as she was. Beyond that, I had thought about what other consequences my sinning might lead to—this was a long-standing marriage I’d tampered with. Maybe what was really frightening was the danger I saw in me, not of action but its opposite, of just letting things carry on until it was too late to save anything.

  Chloe took another slug from the can, then pried herself up and went to the front door and looked at me, waiting it almost seemed for me to say something. When I didn’t, she said, “Night, Little Syd,” and was gone.

  The other thing I heard at work. Ray and I were pounding coffee in the lounge and playing two-handed euchre, waiting for something to happen. Oween stood at the sink washing the pot. Ray said, “Shelley says we should go out. Us and you and you bring someone.” They had no kids with both of them past thirty, a nearly paid-off house, new twin Fords every couple years, and another thirty or forty years of it looking Ray in the face. When we drank in the mornings, I often had to pour him into the car to get him home.

  “Who’m I supposed to bring?” I said.

  “I don’t care. Find somebody. Bring Oween.”

  “Uh-oh,” she said, “don’t you be draggin me in on this.”

  “She’s married,” I said.

  “You wouldn’t let that stop you, would you?” Ray asked her.

  “Ain’t sayin nothin about nothin. Just go on about my own business. Mm.” She shook her head and left.

  I put a card down and said, “Do you let it?”

  “What?”

  “Being married, stop you from screwing around?”

  “I did all that. That’s why you gotta wait.”

  “Who would it take for you to do it? Like say you’re home alone and Farrah Fawcett-Majors knocks on the door.”

  “Fuck Farrah Fawcett-Majors.”

  “Would you?”

  “Too skinny.”

  “There’s got to be someone. Jane Fonda.”

  “Fuck Jane Fonda.”

  “Linda Ronstadt. Carrie Fisher.”

  “Cybill Shepherd.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’d let her blow me.”

  “Who else?”

  “I’d let Kessler’s wife blow me, too.”

  “What?”

  “The nurse. What’s her name. Joyce? She’d do it, too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean she’d blow me.”

  “In your dreams, maybe.”

  “Listen—Shelley and me were at Krystal’s. She goes to the head. I’m walking around, I see Joyce at the bar. Alone. I say hi and she starts coming on—hard. She was pretty tanked and she had that fuck-me look, you know. I mean, she was ready.”

  “When was this?”

  “Two, three weeks ago. She’s touching me and talking about shit, what a big guy I am and we should get together sometime. I mean, goddamn, if Shelley wasn’t there…Later, I seen her with some other guy. He was gettin’ some of that.”

  “It wasn’t Ted?”

  “Fuck no. She doesn’t sleep with that asshole. I heard she fucks like half the new residents every year.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “She got to get it somewhere.”

  “And how do you know all this?”

  “I hear shit. Look, she wants to work, fine, but why nights? She needs the shift differential? It’s cover so when she wants a night out there’s no questions.”

  I didn’t know what to make of Ray’s story, whether I believed anything about what he thought he saw. But just the image of it, her with other men, although I’d only ever been with her twice in that way myself, gave me pains. The larger issue, of course, was school—Ted helping me, me helping Chloe, our helping Brigman, and all of us getting pulled up in the world—not throwing that possibility away for the chance to sleep with a doctor’s wife, however attractive she was to me, however much I found myself dreaming of being with her again. So it happened that I came to decide that it was time to stop.

  EIGHT

  I was sitting on the counter in Chemistry watching Ray spin down the last batches of the night when Ted walked in. It was early, barely past six, and he looked beat-up, puffy and red-eyed and saggy, but it was his first day back after the conference-ski trip. He glared at me and said, “Get down from there. Don’t you have work to do?”

  I shook my head. I could feel my heart.

  “That lounge is a dump,” he said to Ray. “Newspapers. Dirty plates. What do you think it is here?”

  Ray shut off the centrifuge. “It’s just been a long night.”

  “You were in charge, Ray. You’re responsible. How do you think it looks, a mess like that? In a laboratory?”

  “I’ll take care of it,” I said.

  Barb Lancioni was in the lounge making fresh coffee. When I came in her mouth fell open, its motors kicking in, but I had already set in to picking up and she seemed to sense that it would be better not to speak just then. She restricted herself to clicking and humphing and sighing as I stacked plates and cups in the sink and put in soap and filled it. I wiped down the table and cupboards and put the food away, and had begun to gather up newspapers when Ted came in. Barb glanced at him and hurried out.

  He said, “I warned you about him. He’s careless. He’ll get you in trouble. I don’t like when he’s in charge.”

  “The work gets done.”

  “Did you and Kathy have a chance to study?”

  “No. It really was crazy.”

  He sat on the love seat and leaned forward and pressed his palm against his forehead as if he were sick or i
n heavy thought.

  Joyce had worked that night. It was the first time I’d seen her since they left. I wanted to talk and so, apparently, did she, because when I first came up to the floor she told me I was meeting her in the morning at Piasecki’s. It was not a request.

  “Dr. Kessler—”

  “Be quiet, Syd.”

  “Can I—”

  “Ah!” he said and waved his hook toward me as one might wave a hand to cut someone off, but if you’d been watching with the sound off I think it would have looked for all the world as if he were slashing at me.

  I leaned against the counter to wait until he was over his crisis or whatever it was but he finally just said, “Go,” and so I did. Barb had lingered in the hallway to listen and I surprised her. Though I said nothing, made no gesture, she blanched and stepped away from me.

  On our way out to the parking garage, Ray said, “Ted the Head. What a dick. Married to a piece of ass like that and lets her work the night shift. Grab a brewski?”

  “Nah,” I said. “Not today.”

  We only got through one drink before she said, “Are you coming over, Daniel?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. You’re acting strangely. Like you don’t want to be with me.”

  “No,” I said. “I do—”

  “But?”

  “I don’t know. It’s…not right. It’s crazy.”

  “Doesn’t it feel right when we’re together?”

  I nodded.

  “I like being with you very much. I want us to be more.”

  “But, Joyce—”

  “I told you before not to worry. You don’t understand everything about my life. It’s not all what you think.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means stop worrying about it. Please can we go home?” She got teary and picked up her purse and walked out. When I caught up to her in the parking lot, she said, “You drive,” and got in my car. Before we were out of the lot, she had my trousers open. She lay across the seat with her head in my lap and took me hurriedly, deeply, greedily, as if it were a kind of nourishment she needed. A truck driver going the other way pulled his air horn. When I came the road wavered before me and I held it steady only by focusing on the yellow speedometer numbers and the solid white line at the edge of the asphalt, and that essential concentration made it somehow even more intense.

  She went into the bathroom when we got there, so I walked upstairs alone. When Joyce came up, she carried a tray that held two glasses of ice water, a bottle of massage oil, and several clean white towels, and she was naked.

  “What are you waiting for?” she said. As I undressed, she put the tray down and folded back the spread and the sheets and lay upon the bed.

  “Come,” she said and opened her arms. I tucked my face against her breasts and she held me and for a long time we lay without moving. When I looked up at her at last, she said, “I was afraid you didn’t like me anymore.”

  “I could love you. That’s the problem.”

  “Oh, Daniel.” She looked away. It was the first time I remembered anything I said having flustered her.

  I said, “Do you see anyone else, Joyce?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Other men.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I have a husband.”

  “Besides him.”

  “Sleep with them you mean? Have sex?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.” She shook her head and smiled so sadly and sweetly that I felt it go clear through me. She touched my cheek and I turned my face into her hand and breathed in the smell. “Do you think about me with other men?”

  “Sometimes,” I said.

  “Do you like it?”

  “No. I don’t know.”

  “It hurts, but it’s exciting.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d do that for you.”

  “What?”

  “Be with another man.”

  “Do what with him?”

  “Anything you want. As much or as little.”

  “God,” I said. “Joyce.”

  “Is that something you’re interested in?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “Are you ashamed of it? Of thinking about it?”

  “I don’t know. Yes. Maybe.”

  “Please don’t be. We can talk about it. I can even whisper it to you. Do you know what I mean?”

  I nodded.

  “Anything is possible, Daniel. Everything is. Do you understand that?”

  I did not. I did not.

  She said, “Turn over,” and sat on my bottom and with the oil wrote a slow S on my back. “I’ve been thinking so much about you,” she said.

  “Have you?”

  “Yes.”

  “While you were skiing?”

  “All the time.”

  The oil absorbed the heat of her hands and the friction of her rubbing and transferred it to my muscles. When she twisted her knuckles and drove them in, it went in more deeply still.

  “I thought about you, too.”

  “What about?”

  “How we should stop.”

  “Shh. Just relax. Just be, Daniel. Can you do that? Can you let the moment hold you? If you could learn that—”

  She rubbed my neck and shoulders, my ass and my legs and feet and toes and each bit of webbing between the toes, and my arms and hands and fingers, and then she had me turn over and massaged my face and my chest, then my genitals, focusing not on my cock so much as my scrotum. She oiled it and warmed it in her hands, taking each testicle in turn and rolling it gently between her fingers, squeezing it slightly so that I felt the faintest aching.

  When finally it was too much I had her lie face down and slipped a pillow beneath her hips and knelt behind her and in a single unbroken movement slid in. She exhaled and pressed her forehead against the mattress and said, “Oh, my Daniel.” I moved slowly and watched the entering and the reemerging. Then I came out and lifted slightly and placed the tip against that puckered annular button.

  She stopped moving and seemed to hold her breath, then she breathed and lowered her pelvis slightly and said, “Go.” The greater resistance yielded only slowly at first with a delicious gradual sliding and parting, and then abruptly so that I found myself suddenly plunged in to mid-shaft. She cried out, in pain yes, but not only in pain, not only, and she talked to me, telling me to wait, wait, then to go slowly, slowly, but not to stop. I pressed further into that hot cloud; that’s all I could think of, I was fucking her cloud, fucking her, fucked her, hurt her, I hated her, I loved her, I understood nothing about her, not what she wanted, not what she loved, not what she dreamed about, not what she hoped and waited for, not what mattered to her, nothing except that she’d told me anything was possible, everything was, and I did not see how that could be but I wanted it to be, I wanted it so much. That’s all I wanted: everything.

  Later, as we lay together, I heard the distant sound of the doorbell chimes. She got up, and went into the dressing room to a side window that overlooked the driveway.

  She said, “Shit.”

  “What is it?”

  “UPS. Ted’s been waiting for this package.” She opened the window and called out, “Hold on!” and then went to her dresser and took something from it and came back across to the armoire. Her body blocked my view, but it took a moment for her to open it, as it would if she were unlocking it. She opened the door slightly and reached in and took out the red robe and closed it again and smiled at me and hurried downstairs.

  I lay looking after her, then around the room. When my gaze fell across the armoire again it caught on something, a shadow where the two doors met, a certain gap—she had not closed it completely.

  I stood and went over and pulled on the door and it opened, the catch that should have locked it snapping down. It took a moment to know what I was looking at—it did not fall into place at once but rather
in a series of realizations, some minute, some astonishing, each linked to the subsequent one, a domino chain that fell rapidly, surely, inexorably backward from the moment in which I stood to the moment we’d met. I looked numbly dumbly at the machinery, the heavy Betamax recording deck mounted on a lower shelf, the thick cables running from it along the inner wall to the higher shelf, where the camera (a Sony, it declared in burnt orange letters) was mounted, its single bulbous eye staring, if blindly just then, out at me. At the room. At the bed.

  I turned as she came in. She, too, was staring at me, my stricken expression reflected in her own.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Daniel—”

  “What is it?”

  She looked as if she could not bear to see my face, that registering, the dawning of my knowledge of the betrayal, of the horrible breach she’d committed, continued to commit, against me.

  I said, “What have you done?”

  “Nothing, baby. Nothing now.”

  “Now?”

  “It was over. Do you see? It’s all different. Oh, my god, I’m so sorry.”

  “Who was it for?”

  “Daniel—”

  “Who was it for?”

  “At first it was just for us. Him. And me.” I waited. Tears fell from her chin onto her breasts but she did not seem aware of them. “And then—then it’s what you were for, in the beginning. It’s what made you possible. Made us possible. Can you understand that?”

  I looked out the window. I felt vacant and curious. I said, “Who watched it?”

  “Daniel, please—”

  “Ted?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Together?” I looked at her.

  She nodded.

  “Tell me one more thing.”