Free The Narcissist's Daughter by Craig Holden Page B

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