The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (20 page)

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.”

————————

“W
ILLIE, WHAT HE SAID?
N
O 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.