The Narcissist's Daughter (17 page)

I stood with my eyes closed and waited. The curtains separated again and she said, “Move over,” and got in with me. I reached out and my hand found her breast.

“Turn around,” she said, and began to knead my stitched and greasy head and rarely in my life I think have I felt anything so satisfying and competent. She washed even the sutured areas, and scraped the rest of it with her nails so that the scalp itself burned and came alive again. She said, “Nice?”

“Yeah. It hurts a little, but it’s nice.”

“Isn’t that always the way?”

She helped me rinse, then began to scrub the rest of me using her nails on the dry skin, washed my chest and back and belly and then soaped down over my ass and between my legs and reached around front as if it were just a normal part of washing a body and began to move her hand back and forth on the erection she found there. I came almost immediately. And then she started to get out.

When I fitted my good hand between her legs, so that it covered her, she shook her head, but lifted one foot to the edge of the tub and steadied herself against me. She came nearly as quickly as I had. By the time I’d rinsed and opened the curtains she’d pulled the dress over her head. She opened the door and went out.

I took down a towel and put my face into it when I heard Joyce say, “Oh!” as if Fear itself had been waiting for her. I stepped out of the tub and, thinking she’d slipped, maybe, or hurt herself some other way, opened the door. The outside doorway was open and Jessi stood in it, heavy gray daylight seeping in around her so that I could not really make out her expression. But I heard her say, “Oh. Oh—what is this? What is it? Syd?” She sounded as if she were shivering.

I hugged the towel. I shivered, too, cold with the fresh air. It was my name she said, only mine, and it must have been me she was looking at, not her mother, so it was for me to speak, for me to answer, but I did not. Joyce said, “Sweetie, Syd was having trouble. With his wounds. He asked me for some help.”

“Is that true?”

I nodded. I said, “The stitches didn’t feel right. I didn’t know if I could take a shower.”

“So you had to come here to do it?”

“She just looked, to see if there was a problem, then made me take a shower because I was gross.”

“Honey,” Joyce said, “I was just checking on him. I’m sorry if you think it looks funny. You startled me.”

“But you knew I was coming over.”

“I—I just wasn’t thinking about it. I mean, I didn’t think—I was just surprised to see someone standing there.”

I understood what we were then, Joyce and I, and that I would always look at her. Whatever else it was, if she wanted someone to look, I would look. Her husband was finished looking. Now her daughter was looking, though that would not happen again. But I would always look.

Jessi spoke again, to me. “That book,” she said.

“What?”

“That fucking Aristotle. She never wanted to see that. You never even talked to her about it, did you? It’s so stupid.”

“Jessi, come on.”

“No. I didn’t get it then. I mean, I got it—I knew you’d come to see her, she was why you were there. The book was just an excuse for my benefit. But I didn’t know why you wanted to see her. I thought you were just her friend. I’m so stupid.”

“Why are you talking about this? What difference does it make now?”

“Because I knew,” she said, “or I should have.”

“Jessi—”

But she had turned and gone.

“Baby,” Joyce said, and some remaining shred of maternal instinct overwhelmed her, at least for that moment. She said, “My god,” and she left, too, in her yellow dress and bare feet, plucked her keys from the hook on the wall by the door and ran down the staircase into the rain.

I
thought about going over, even yearned (a part of me at least) to go, but it came clear as I lay in my room that I had no place at that house anymore. I’d somehow suddenly become irrelevant to their lives. I stared out the window. Though we still had the sun of summer it was weakened on that late afternoon, aging and preparing its fade into the paler flatter briefer sunlight of autumn. Eventually, I fell asleep.

When I opened my eyes it took me a moment to realize in the inky dark that I was not alone, that there was a face hovering directly over mine, peering down at me. I flinched.

“It’ll be over now,” Brigman said. You could smell that he’d been drinking.

“What will?”

He looked at me.

“You mean Ron?”

He almost nodded.

“It doesn’t matter anymore. Jessi. I’ve got to—what are you talking about? What’re you going to do?”

“Did. You hungry? I brought some dinner.”

“What’d you do?”

“It don’t concern you no more.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Come on,” he said, “let’s eat.”

“How the fuck do you figure that?” I shouted after him.

It was some excuse for Mexican he’d picked up, soggy of tortilla and dry of bean and meat, but I was hungry and so was he apparently because we tucked in and made not a sound except the grinding salivating noises of hard male mastication. We’d just finished and sat back, him to smoke, me to sip one of the Cokes he’d bought, when the front door slammed open and heavy feet stomped in and back toward the kitchen—Chloe’s as it turned out. She stalked over to me, put her face down in mine and said, “What’d you do?”

“What?”

“She came to my work. She was standing in the middle of the stupid mall,
screaming
.”

“Where is she?”

“What’d you
do
?”

“Never mind that, Chloe. Where is she?”

“I don’t
know
. I took her in the back—which I am really not allowed to do, I would get fired if they found out—and she sat there sobbing, and then I had customers, and when I came back she’d gone out through the loading dock door. What the hell?”

I shook my head.

“Syd!”

“I don’t know.”

She looked at Brigman and said, “What do you know?”

He drew on his smoke and looked at her. The Buddha of Beer. When he finally shrugged, she exhaled in exasperation.

“Listen,” I said, “can I talk to her?”

“I don’t know where she is! Why would you think she wants to talk to you, anyway?”

“She doesn’t, I’m sure. But someone needs to find her.”

“Well, you should have thought about that,” she said, as I got up to leave. “Before you did whatever stupid thing you did.”

Ted was alone at the house. He stood aside and let me in and did not to my surprise criticize me or even give so much as a slight shake of the head or tightening of the lips in regret or chastisement. He simply said, “Hello, Syd.”

“I’d like to talk to her,” I said. “I think I can make it better. I think I can explain.”

“You can’t,” he said, “but she’s not here, anyway. I don’t know where she is. I’m frightened. If you can find her…”

“Joyce—”

“She’s not here, either.”

“Today—Joyce went after her.”

“I know. I saw her this afternoon. Joyce. She was here.”

I stepped back to leave, there being nothing else really to say, when he said, “She left you something.” He took an envelope from his dressing gown pocket.

“Why?”

“Read it,” he said.

“My dear Syd,” it said. “I think that we must not see each other after this, not even for a moment, at least not for some time. I am leaving. I must, I feel. I’ve discussed this with my husband and he feels strongly that it’s the right thing to do, to begin to let things heal to whatever extent they can, and more important, not to make them worse. So I’m going away, tonight. I will not talk to you for some time. Maybe, one day, we can see each other again. Yours, Joyce.”

“How can she just leave?” I said.

“She just can. It’s best, don’t you think?”

“No. This—” I waved the note. I was furious. She’d signed it “yours,” for god’s sake. Not even love. What did that mean? It was as stupid and insipid as it could be.

He nodded. “You see now why it’s necessary? You’re upset, in spite of everything. You can’t let her go.”

“I can—”

“No,” he said, “you can’t. And you wouldn’t. You didn’t. You haven’t, at a great cost to us all. So she has finally seen what was necessary, and to her credit she’s done it.”

“She
left
?”

“She hasn’t abandoned anyone. She’ll come back. But by then things will have cooled.”

I shook my head.

“The thing now,” he said, “is to find Jessi. It’s urgent, Syd.”

“Is he out looking?”

“Who?”

“Ron.”

He looked at me. He said, “Who?”

“The guy—”

“Who did that to you?”

“Yeah. You hired him.”

“I had someone follow you when I wasn’t sure what was going on. In June. But not since then. I don’t know this guy.”

I understood then who’d been paying him to have me beaten until I quit with Jessi.

I burned through most of a tank and filled up sometime around midnight but she was nowhere I knew to look, none of the places we’d gone together. I went by Joyce’s apartment as well, a couple of times, actually, and sat in my car in the street watching it for any sign of life. I even went up once but the door was locked.

Our house was dark, too, when I got home. I turned on the tube and had a beer, thinking it would help me sleep, but I’d slept all evening and my body was ready to go to work. I was going to be tortured I could tell by a night of sitting with nothing to do but fret. I waited through
The Tomorrow Show
with Tom Snyder, then crept upstairs wanting at least to rest my eyes and I did slip into a shallow doze. When I awoke my clock said four
A
.
M
. I lay listening, wondering, and then heard again what it was that had roused me—Brigman’s alarm.

A joke—that’s what I thought at first, or rather told myself. But when I heard him drag himself up, throw some water in his face, and more than that when I heard him open the door downstairs to let someone in, and listened until I heard that the other voice was Donny’s, I knew it was no joke. And when from Brigman’s bedroom window I watched the two of them toss shovels into the back of the blue electrician’s truck they’d borrowed somewhere and climb into the cab, such a surge of urgency flooded through me that I felt crazed, crazy. I was already dressed. I raced downstairs, grabbed a jacket, got in my car and tore off after them. It was an old slow truck and it was nothing to find them and follow. The trick was in not coming up too tight behind so they could see me. I turned in fact and went around entire blocks so as to seem like another random car—and when they got to the Trail and headed downtown it was easy then to fit in with the thin traffic.

We followed exactly the route I drove when I took Brigman over on that early spring morning to look at the ’Cuda, exactly until we came down the far side of the High Level Bridge, where they turned off onto Miami Street, which ran south along the river. I went past it, cut down a side street, raced along and even blew some stop signs until I could turn and park and kill my lights just as they crawled past me. In that way I watched them and could just make it out as they, too, turned into the parking lot of a boarded-up carryout with a Budweiser sign still on the front, and stopped. They were waiting for there to be no traffic, I figured, and sure enough as soon as the road appeared deserted they crept out and across to where there were no other roads or houses or anything but trees and then the embankment leading down to the river itself, and they seemed to poke along there for a moment until they found what they were looking for and turned into the trees. I watched their headlights work back along some dirt turnoff that’d been carved out in the foliage until Donny killed the engine.

It was three blocks from where I’d parked. I ran up the road, crossed over, and crept into the trees until I was close enough to hear them pulling things out of the truck, the shovels, yes, I heard scraping, but other things, too, heavier sounding things, though I dared not move closer to see. They made a couple trips. After the last one I waited a good fifteen minutes before creeping through to the truck. It was parked at the head of a faint footpath which, quietly as I could, moving a step (pausing), then another, I followed down.

Picture an omnipresent grayness. I imagine it now as a fine ash coating everything with a simultaneous fog permeating the non-corporeal (spirits, thoughts, ambitions, moods). The great gray river, frigid and foamy and dirty and deep, formed the backdrop. We were perched at its edge, in the very gut of the city but in one of those lost spots that exist between the meaningful places of commerce and transport and education and life.

When I came down the pathway of course it was still dark, and darker still in that empty barren place. I could hear them, though—they were digging. I crawled up the face of a slaggy heap of limestone, to the top so I could see over when it lightened. The stone itself lay at the base of the higher slope and as it did finally begin to lighten, after what felt like an hour of listening to them work, I could see that it was covered in gray brown grass that ought, I thought, to have been ashamed of itself. From where I sat hidden I could hear the hum and swoosh of the early morning traffic but it couldn’t see me, or any of us. If I’d put my arm out to ten o’clock, it would’ve pointed at a railroad trestle over the river. At eleven the trestle ended at the huge (gray) concrete tubes of a storage elevator. Next to these towers, directly across, was a warehouse with the faded word “Warehouse” painted on its side. Upriver lay the High Level Bridge and then the downtown. But no one over there could see us. The slope continued in both directions and was covered in careless brush, saplings and bushes and vines and weeds, all gray, all accidental, that closed us in, hid us from the world.

At the base of the heap of stone—I began to see with the sunrise—lay an open area marked only by more pathetic grass and cracked up slabs of faded asphalt and two huge cleats where the cargo ships tied on when they were backed up in line from the various elevators and cranes and warehouses lining the river from the lake clear through the city and on to the southern industrial townlets that existed, like the rest of it, for a single two-headed purpose—to absorb raw material from the river that fed it, and then to excrete back what it had made.

Digging they were, indeed. And drinking already at this earliest hour. I could just make it out as Donny paused, panting, wiped his brow, then drained the beer Brigman handed him and threw the empty in the dark hole. He squatted then and blew for a minute until Brigman said something and they started in to dig again.

At first, I could only sit shivering in the damp dark, huddled into the rock and curled into myself. I found that if I stayed like that a kind of warmth came. I’d heard you felt warm as you froze to death and remember thinking how wonderful it was of the world to make such a rule. I thought about what Jessi’d said once about drowning, how it was wonderful, too, a thing that maybe made you feel dimly, at the bare edges of your dying consciousness, regret that you could only experience this spectacle once.

Then, as I became aware of the first real light, I sat up a little and peered over and a shock ran through me as I saw it for the first time—Brigman and Donny were standing up to their shoulders in a hole that was maybe six feet long and a couple wide. Though they were some distance back from the river, and well higher than its surface, gray water had risen to their knees. If I was cold they must have been numb except for the exertion that kept them going, them reaching down in and throwing out mud.

It was misting out, getting ready to rain, so we would all soon be wet one way or the other. My legs ached. Walking sounded wonderful. But they kept on lifting sopping bladefuls of mud and water from the hole.

It was really only then—as if I had been in some kind of trance before that, some dream I refused to wake from—that I finally understood (though I had known it already in the heart of my heart) how far it had gone, how far I had taken it, what calamity I had wrought. And to what length this beaten and worn man would go, had gone already, for me and for the dream that had come to belong to him. I should have wept at that insight. I should have run crying down that hill and hugged him, and Donny, too, for his simple blind loyalty. But they would have just pushed me off and swore and spit, and dug some more.

They didn’t go much farther before Brigman threw his shovel onto the ground and climbed out. It was coming on real daylight now and they would soon risk being seen. Donny stopped, too, but did not climb out yet. He stood looking at what he had wrought.

And as he did, Brigman, in a strange and furtive movement, slid around behind him. I tried to sit up straighter but slipped in the loose stone. Brigman raised his shovel, aimed its pointed blade at that spot where Donny’s neck joined his skull. He pulled back, as if he were cocking a gun. God, I saw it all then. All my notions of revenge and rectification were insipid little boy tantrums next to this, this genius of evil, this end of all ends. I’d been wrong. This was not about me and my iniquities after all. And a part of me hoped wildly that that was so, that I might let go of the dread I’d been carrying around, though I knew it would only be replaced with a different dread. The hole was dug now. It would be filled one way or the other.