by Paul Pipkin
What in God’s name was I doing in a motel room in Gulfport, with a girl half my age, whom I’d found myself called upon to torture with my reminiscences? Soon, I’d likely be hitting my bank account for a ticket back to San Antonio, having blown everything.
Outside, the sky was slate gray, welcome relief from the Texas inferno. I walked to a gazebo in a beachfront park across the street. Down the beach, the skeletons of new casinos were stark against the gray sky. I squinted at tiny figures out on a long fishing pier. Flaming red hair whipped about one beneath the sheltering eaves of the roof at the far end.
As I trudged out along the pier, the rain was approaching like a gray wall across the water. The fishermen were packing up and heading in. Even if we started back at once, we’d never make it before the squall hit. Rather, I wouldn’t, I thought morosely. With her body, so different from mine, still able to run and play like a child, she would have no trouble at all.
I could see her clearly in profile, shoulders hunched with elbows on the railing, pensively watching the approaching storm. Barefoot in her jeans, spray from sea and sky soaking the halter top against her breasts, she looked so damned young!
Approaching her, I registered the tension in the taut muscles of her back, my eyes following where they ran down enticingly below the beltless top of her jeans. I wanted to touch her once more, one last time before hearing what I had to hear. What could I have been thinking, fantasizing possession of a creature like her? I could hear it already, “This was a big-assed mistake; how can we get you home?” then running downstream from there. Might as well just throw myself into the Gulf.
I placed my hand on the small of her back, appalled at my skin, which looked to me like crepe paper against the smoothness of hers. She turned her head, creases in her tawny, resilient flesh disappearing without a trace, but her tendons were like steel cables. She looked up with a haunted expression, her eyes changed to some nameless color by the gray light. “The scary thing is that I almost wish you had been my father,” she began without preamble.
All right, at least this was original. But her wistful tone seemed to confirm my fears and bore me down, as if the lowering sky was falling on us. “I suppose you know how that resonates?”
“Believe me when I say aw-hunh!” She almost spat the words as her tension snapped, her voice filled with pain and anger. “As if, walking home from school, I would daydream of somehow finding my real daddy there. Of being so extreme happy that I would’ve done anything to please him?”
She wiped at her eyes. “This is so hard. Way sure I’m still that little girl and being an adult is just for pretend. I have a psych degree, but I’m still afraid of the dark.” I started to respond, but checked myself. Of course I knew that I’d been flying on father-issues, and those are double-edged swords. Pop-psych is like arguments of faith; both are no-win games, which is why people are fond of throwing them at you. I waited to see where this was going, and she pushed ahead.
“What was wiggin’ me was knowing how it felt, even before I knew it was you looking for Seabrook and all. Dead on that I had met something I couldn’t walk away from. I already knew you were all that. Believe that I never would’ve said a thing, till you had already had me and it was too late to go back! I do go way too far teasing and provoking, I really do, but I don’t want you to believe I drop my pants for every random hookup.”
This sounded as though it had an internal logic, but there were pieces missing. Clearly, I’d walked into the midst of a lot of things she’d been mulling over. I remained silent, but kept my body language open and accepting. Maybe what had risen between us the night before had been simply the first predictable emotional crisis and, just possibly, I might run the gauntlet once again. She relaxed a bit with a little rueful grin.
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“FUCKIN’ MY DADDY, the concept did work on my head. I’ll own that. Totally Gothic!”
O-kay, I thought, now I really don’t have a clue. “Drop back, there?”
She shrugged impatiently, as though I should have already put her outpouring all together. “Yesterday morning, JJ’s picture on your desk,” she scolded me. “As if I’m to believe you never knew her middle name?”
I frowned in confusion at the unexpected twist. “Why, her name is Jeanette…” I may be slow sometimes, but then the roaring surf was beginning to be drowned out by a roaring in my head. “Justine, what am I about to hear?”
“What you said,” she laughed at the irony, “her name is Jeanette Justine. Dearest, you loved my mother!”
I feverishly reviewed JJ’s descriptions of the children she’d never let me meet. There were two daughters, the older a stewardess with children of her own who was thirty-three; the other… No! Jesus, Justine couldn’t possibly be that seventeen-year-old, could she?
There, laughing so kiddish in front of me—for a moment I was having visions of a Mann Act prosecution. And on this other issue, “Justine, I swear, I did not even know where JJ was for thirty years. God, I don’t believe this is happening. We’re having a conversation out of a goddamned soap opera!”
She laid her hand on my chest, “No surprise she didn’t prompt you about me. Mother has trouble copping to a lot of things; she calls it ‘keeping things in their little boxes,’ and it looks like each of us has our own cache.” She then embraced me, plastering her wet front against me and gripping the back of my neck. I needed that, for the little homily of JJ’s was one with which I had become all too contemptuously familiar, during our brief adult affair.
“Seeing her picture on your desk, reading what you’d written, I had to know, much. I went and got all confrontational. I’m way sure that, if it hadn’t been something so totally weird, she would’ve denied even knowing you. But I was all, y’know, had I fucked my birth-father, and she was like, you not in her life for years, and I was like, cool, but then she put on an attitude, about like I had been doing incest.”
“The scariest part was knowing I would’ve been all—about being with you some way—dump it off, get you to run away with me to Mexico, or wherever, and live in serious sin…” She finally paused for breath and held me even tighter, were it possible. I felt as if she were looking for a marsupial pouch into which to crawl.
“Dread this, wondering if it will make things better. Or not. She like, slipped, that if you’d been my father, she thought…” she choked the rest through sudden tears, “you would’ve always been there.” We both just stood there, holding each other through the most curious blend of emotions that I believe either had yet known.
The storm had struck, and the rain poured in torrents, so we sat on the benches of the deserted pier, trying to sort it all out. Memory of JJ’s middle name must have been buried for years, and I was sure I’d never had knowledge of the restored Leiris surname at all. With the details of Justine’s confrontation with her mother, I could have no lingering doubts as to whether this was for real. I recalled her fixation on JJ the previous night.
Justine was the product of what JJ called her “promiscuous period,” during a separation from her husband. When she had found me again later, I’d beaten myself up a lot for not having kept track of her, thus missing that opportunity when I could, conceivably, still have made JJ mine. Justine having been born a good nine years before JJ’s youngest… A sudden insight perplexed me. In a world of choices not made, paths not taken, I might well have been Justine’s father!
I got hung up in that for a few minutes, thinking of that prospect correlated with my obsessions, which had placed my feet on the branching path leading me to this moment. Thunder rolled and lightning crashed out in the Gulf as another storm cell approached. For the first, but not the last time in this adventure, I became frightened. What in God’s name was happening?
I felt a poignant sense of loss that, more than once in lives that might have been, I had missed her. In this one as well, for that matter. I anguished that I could have known Justine for up to ten years in San Antonio, had paths
ever crossed. Two at least, had her mother not hidden her family from me as though I were a monster who might harm them. Again, I don’t “move on” very well. “What-Ifs” had been, for a long time, my breakfast cereal.
I was drawn back to her continuing story of a misbegotten reconciliation between JJ and her husband. Justine had grown up feeling singled out from her half siblings and despised by her stepfather. She’d returned the favor, and it seemed as though our mutual hatred of that man constituted another common bond between us. The isolation from family and friends that he had demanded, even as a youth, had graduated into the predictable pattern of the abuser. It’s a cultural paradigm that good old gawd-fearin’ redneck Texas condones even today.
In her psych-major fashion, she saw her extreme independence as derivative of being left to her own devices. She suggested that she’d forced her own amputation from a dysfunctional family unit as promptly as possible. When her bequest came due, she had been more than happy to move to Atlanta.
Only months before, the implications of JJ’s remark, on me always being there for Justine, would have saddened me, though perhaps raised my hopes. But then I was more bemused than ever by the woman’s refusal to leave a man she didn’t love for me. At what price had she maintained the notion of a life lived in Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds”? Still, any resentments I’d ever directed at her were being redressed royally, were they not? And didn’t I kind of have my hands full here, anyway?
Unless I grossly misunderstood, this youngster had been blatantly announcing that I was the object of her twisted father issues, but behaving for all the world as if she loved me woman-on-man nonetheless. On my part, I found myself agonizing as with the discovery of a lost daughter I had never known. Should I stay away from those thoughts?
My long-held contempt for psychology to the contrary, I wondered if I needed a shrink, though I doubted that Doktors Freud and Jung in collaboration could have fully unraveled this one! I recalled Richard saying that the trick was learning to laugh with the gods. Certainly it must be them now, I thought, roaring in the swirling storm at this cosmic joke.
Justine was describing with unabashedly fiendish glee her confrontation with JJ. Her mother had gone into a snit and threatened to take the issue up with me. I was grateful Justine had persuaded me not to answer that phone call as we’d been leaving, because I could understand and sympathize with both women. JJ’s shock and confusion probably had equaled what I was going through, and Justine had yielded to an irresistible temptation to exact payback on a cosmic scale.
“Give it a rest, babe,” I admonished. “You have no idea. Your generation looks on sex and any consequent choices as your right—which is as it should be. Your mother…”
“The prevailing mores blew her shit away? Her childhood again? That is such a crock!” Maybe I’m a wuss, but I don’t think you would have challenged the cold steel in those eyes and voice either.
“Over halfway to Atlanta, and when you’re finally willing to talk about yourself, out comes something incredible.” I sighed heavily. “Please tell me that there isn’t some other little item that you haven’t mentioned yet.”
The long pause suggested to me that there might well be something else to be known, but she spoke before I could question further. “I hope you’ll be down for all there is to know about me. I did want us far away from her, because I didn’t know if you would be all right with this. Believe that this was a mind-fuck for me, too, and when things went way weird in the car last night…” Her voice trailed off.
“My history puts you off?” I misread her.
“Not like you mean.” She glanced at me with the haunted expression. “Guess I gotta go there.”
Again in psych-major mode, she sought the roots of her personal masochism in her childhood. Flogging herself as a wrong person, she craved expiation from guilt, real or imaginary. A daughter named Justine was to be the recipient of a bequest from JJ’s grandmother, and JJ had doubtlessly seen this as an advantageous position for the girl. But her apparent strategy to level the playing field for her love child had backfired.
The stepfather had been all too willing to punish her, but she had only responded to him with the same resentment he felt for her. He had no right, you see. Only the emotional equivalent of the father she had never known would she endow with the authority to punish her and thus let her be free.
While his behavior had to be deemed irrational, considering the pending bequest, it was easy enough to imagine the man’s sodden brain marrying a lust for control with his resentment of her origins. From early on, his cruelty toward Justine went far beyond anything exacted on his own children.
Probably in sync with the deterioration of the man himself, the mistreatment had degenerated into sexual abuse. He was not a pedophile, but by the time she was becoming nubile, it was clear that he had some use for her in spite of his contempt. It’s an old and common story, one that seldom if ever encompasses the complexities of any given situation.
“What did he do to you?” I reluctantly asked, as she shivered against me on the bench. The paternal issue was one thing; her quest for the father was likely what had made her liaison with me possible, But this? God, how I’d always hated spending my life cleaning up other men’s messes!
“All that.” She shrugged. “He had this whole droit de seigneur thing going on.” She met my eyes, but misread the focus of my curiosity. “Hey, I’d wanted to clue you on this later. No, wait. As if you wanna hear it described? First time he went ’twixt my legs, the attitude was all, y’know, an alternative to being whipped, a special punishment he had prepared for me.
“He was a real piece of work. Something would be my bad, yea? Always when we were alone. He’d make me go lie full-on across the bed, like when I was little, waiting to get a spanking.” She described all this utterly without expression. “I’m way sure that was to torture me, too—lying there and feeling all gnarly and exposed.”
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“WILLIE, WHAT HE SAID? NO HIDING PLACE? That was me, back in the day. Believe me when I say I even learned how to enjoy it. Sometimes I’d get naked and lie there, but not spread, like I was s’pose to? If I couldn’t handle him fucking me, I could make him go soft; he was usually drunk. But he wouldn’t be too stoked. I knew I was gonna get a whipping when I did that.” She looked at me coldly, and I wondered if I were being instructed on what not to do. “He used one of those old, thin yardsticks.”
I was astonished by her brutally matter-of-fact account. Due to causes buried deep within her, Justine had arrived at a method of coping that the compulsively socially correct will deny even exists. While she had hated the offender all the more, she had learned to embrace the things that happened to her, taking a strange and complex satisfaction. I am sexually sadistic, true, but not such a bastard as to inflict myself on a helpless kid. I hated even more the whim of fate that had left her to endure it alone, had kept me from being there for her.
“Conventional explanation would be low selfesteem, and so forth,” I offered uneasily, unsure as to how to tread carefully.
“Yadda, yadda, yadda.”
“You reversed the roles, taking him out of the picture by making him as faceless an object as possible, experiencing it as being all about yourself?”
“What-ev-er.” She shrugged again. “So now I don’t really like sex and, some way or other, don’t know it? Changes I’m getting put through are, like, fragmentation? Check it out, as if ‘dissociative identity disorder’? I’ve been through every drill psych has to offer, till I could hurl. Got diagnostic stats manual criteria coming out my ass!”
“I’d as rather think of you ‘owning it,’ like you would say. Justine, I need to know if I put us at risk the other night?” Her revelations, delivered so deadpan, made the format of our wonderful sexual encounter become alarming.
She was silent for long minutes. “Let’s not overidentify, shall we?” I started to speak, but she shushed me. “He couldn�
�t get it done for me; I wouldn’t let him. He would usually buttfuck me. No knocked-up baby, yea? Wet his fingers in my pussy and put them to my lips; said that proved what a slut I was. Dead right, there! Later, when I’d be horny, I’d think about that while I got it done for myself. Like denying him my orgasm was cheating him?”
With time, she had become aware of changes in the world around her. An increasingly intrusive society had lost tolerance for offenses within the family. An older Justine, sophisticated beyond her years, found that she could inspire fear in her cowardly oppressor. By sixteen, she’d begun to carry a knife.
“Not exactly Daddy’s little princess?”
“Hardly. No, wait. Princess did start getting whatever she wanted. As if, extortion?” Of course, my lame oxymoron had to founder against so decidedly “incorrect” an ear. Would there be a test afterward?
The man was not so demented as to fail to grasp the situation into which he’d placed himself. Namely, that he could end up getting cut and going to the joint as well. In forcing him to back off, Justine had empowered herself. Finding that she was not inclined to disrupt what her mother pathetically regarded as a life, she just wanted to get away. Her stepfather agreed.
“Am I twisted? I’ve been a big ho’. I really have, but I’ve been careful about disease and not getting hooked up with flakes. Believe that I’ve gotten the education and made the payments to own who I am. When I say I’m livin’ large, no one can tell me I’m too far out there.” She dismissed society’s “protective” functions with remarkable insight.
“I spent years being his victim. As if I should spend more years being their victim? I don’t think so.” Genuine emotion had been returning to her speech. “But you can be so sure that, for ten years, I never let anyone hit me in the butt. Not once, till you.” She heaved a shuddering sigh, but it was visibly expressing an unspeakable relief. Then she made a confession the like of which you seldom hear from woman or man.