Patricide

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Now a sly expression came into my father’s face. I thought A woman. He has brought a woman here.

  Despite his age Roland Marks was a handsome man; he’d been exceptionally handsome in his youth, with dark dreamy brooding eyes, a fine-sculpted foxy face and a quick and ingratiating smile. He’d dazzled many women in his time—and many men. Some of this I knew firsthand but much of this I knew from reading about him.

  When you are related to a person of renown you can’t shake off the conviction that others, strangers, know him in ways you will never know him. Your vision of the man is myopic and naïve—the long-distance vision is the more correct one.

  “An academic. A ‘scholar.’ She’s come to interview me. You know—the usual.”

  Roland Marks’s genial contempt for academics and scholars did not preclude his being quite friendly with a number of them. Like most writers, he was flattered by attention; even the kind of attention that embarrassed him, annoyed or exasperated him. Each academic and scholar who’d met with Roland Marks, and had written about him, imagined that he or she was the exception. What a surprise Roland Marks is! Nothing at all like people say but really, really nice . . . and so funny.

  “Is this your new—assistant?”

  “We’ve been exploring the possibility.”

  This person, whoever she was, was unknown to me. I had the idea, since Dad hadn’t mentioned her until now, that she was relatively unknown to him, too.

  “Come upstairs, Lou-Lou, and meet ‘Cameron.’ We’ve been having a quite intense interview session.”

  It wasn’t uncommon for people to come to my father’s Nyack house to interview him. But it was somewhat uncommon for one of these interviewers to stay so late.

  Though there was the Paris Review interviewer, a literary journalist, who’d interviewed Roland Marks in 1978, in his apartment at the time on the Upper West Side, who’d virtually moved in with him and had had to be forcibly evicted after several weeks.

  Dad led me upstairs with unusual vigor.

  In his study, a tall skinny blond woman—a quite young, quite striking blond woman—was slipping papers into a tote-bag. On the table before her was a laptop, a small tape recorder, a cell phone, and a can of Diet Coke.

  “Cameron? I’d like you to meet my daughter Lou-Lou Marks. And Lou-Lou, this is Cameron—from . . . “

  “Cameron Slatsky. From Columbia University.”

  With a naïve stiffness the young woman spoke, as if one had to identify Columbia as a university.

  Awkwardly we shook hands. Cameron Slatsky from Columbia University smiled so glowingly at me, I felt my face shrink like a prune in too much sunshine.

  Of course, Dad had to tease a bit calling me his “Dean Daughter”—

  “Dean Marks, Daughter”—which drew a breathy laugh from Cameron Slatsky and a look of wary admiration as if she’d never seen a dean before, close up.

  In fact, Dad was proud of my academic credentials. Unlike my sister and my brothers, who’d tried to “compete” with Roland Marks by writing—(fiction, poetry, plays, journalism)—I was the daughter who’d impressed him with her diligence, intelligence, and modesty; if I published essays, they were of esoteric literary subjects—Sappho’s poetry, the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, for instance—which Dad read with the avidity of the intellectual whose knowledge of a subject is limited. The point was, Lou-Lou Marks knew her place.

  I gathered that Cameron had just been speaking on her cell phone and that she was, as a consequence perhaps, somewhat agitated; though she continued to smile at my father.

  “Mr. Marks? I wonder if we could confirm our date for—”

  “Please, I’ve asked you: call me Roland.”

  “ ‘R-Roland’. . . .”

  “Thank you, my dear! ‘Roland’ it is.”

  My dear. I felt a stab of embarrassment for my father.

  Roland Marks, who often didn’t try at all to be charming, was trying now. Hard.

  “—our date for Monday? As we’d planned?”

  “Sure. Just don’t come before four P.M., please.”

  It seemed that Cameron was writing a dissertation on the “post-Modernist-polemic” fiction of Roland Marks for a Ph.D. in English. Exactly the kind of theoretical bullshit my father usually scorned.

  Cameron wore metal-rimmed eyeglasses of the kind that, removed, reveal myopic but beautiful thick-lashed eyes, as in a romantic comedy. (And so it was in Cameron’s case, in fact.) She was thin, willowy. She shivered with the intensity of an Italian greyhound. Her shoulders were just perceptibly hunched. For she was a tall girl, taller than my father; and she would have sensed that Roland Marks was vain enough to resent any woman taller than himself.

  Cameron’s strangest and most annoying feature was her hair: a kind of ponytail shot out of the side of her head, above her left ear. The hair was straw-colored and stiff-looking like a paintbrush. Long straight uneven bangs fell to her eyebrows, nearly in her eyes. If she’d been a dog she would’ve been a cross between a greyhound and a Shih Tzu, face partly obscured by hair.

  Her sexy red mouth just kept smiling! I could imagine this arrogant young woman gloating to herself as soon as she was alone—Pretty good, I think! Not bad! The old man likes me for sure.

  The way Dad was looking at Cameron, frowning and bemused, blinking, smiling to himself—it was obvious, the old man liked her.

  As offensive as the grade-school ponytail was the young woman’s attire, which had to be totally inappropriate for an interview with a Nobel laureate: she was wearing jeans foolishly frayed at the knee and so tight they fitted her anorexic body like a sausage casing. I swear you could see the crack of her buttocks. You could see—(though I didn’t want to look)—the cleft of her pelvis. And her small Dixie-cup breasts strained against a tight black turtleneck sweater adorned with a white satin star like a bib.

  Her ears glittered with gold studs and there was a tiny, near-invisible gold comma through her left eyebrow. Her skin was pale, pearly. Beneath the silly bangs, probably her forehead was pimply.

  And the insipid mouth just kept smiling.

  I could barely bring myself to look at this Cameron, I disliked her so intensely. I felt an impulse to grab hold of the ridiculous ponytail and give her head a good hard shake.

  In dismay I thought She will be the next! She is the enemy.

  In one of my father’s bestselling novels of erotic obsession—(well, to be frank, virtually all of my father’s novels were about erotic obsession however cloaked in intellectual and paradoxical political terms)—not a tragic novel but a comically convoluted melodrama titled Intimacy: A Tragedy, he describes the male response to the most obvious sorts of sex-stimuli, in terms of newly fledged ducks who react to the first thing they see when they leave the egg: a cardboard duck-silhouette, a paper hanger in the shape of a cartoon duck, a wooden block. All that’s essential is that the thing, the stimulus, is in motion; the ducklings will follow it blindly as if it were the mother duck. So too, Roland Marks said, the male reacts blindly to a purely sexual mechanism, stimulated by certain sights and smells. Instead of a brain, there’s the male genitalia.

  Such knowledge hadn’t spared Roland Marks from several disastrous marriages and, I didn�
��t doubt, numberless liaisons.

  Cameron was saying, apologetically, in a voice that scratched at your ears, “Mr. Marks, I mean—Roland—this is disappointing, I’m really sorry, but I can’t stay for dinner—I have to leave now. . . .”

  “But I’ve ordered dinner. I’ve ordered for three.”

  “Oh I know—I’m so sorry! It’s just something that came up, I’ve been on the phone. . . .”

  “When? Just now?”

  “Yes. A—someone—just called, I had to t-take the call . . .”

  Dad was aggrieved, angry. It disturbed me how quickly he was flaring up at this stranger, as if she’d betrayed an intimacy between them.

  He’d never seen her before today. His reaction was totally irrational.

  “I really can’t stay, it’s a personal matter . . .”

  My father’s face was livid with emotion—surprise, hurt, jealousy. For the past fifty years or more, Roland Marks had become accustomed to being at the center of most scenes involving women. He’d had the whip hand.

  “Well, Cameron. Whatever you like.”

  Dryly Dad spoke. I wondered—had he asked this young woman to be his new assistant? How impulsive he was becoming!

  “May I return, Mr. Marks? On Monday afternoon as we’d planned?”

  “Better call me first, to see if I’m here. Good night!”

  It was like a grating yanked down over a store window—Dad’s conviviality toward the striking young blond girl had ceased.

  It fell to me to see the abashed Cameron downstairs and out the door as she clumsily repeated that she was sorry, she hoped my father would understand, maybe another time they could have dinner . . .

  No. You will not. Not ever.

  I shut the door behind her. I did not watch her drive away from the curb. I told myself But I must not be jealous of her, if he lets her return. I must be happy for my father. If that is what he wishes.

  Brave Lou-Lou Marks staring at her blurred reflection in a mirror in the front hall while a floor above, in his study, door pointedly shut, my father Roland Marks was already talking and laughing too loudly, in a phone conversation with someone I could not imagine.

  THE FACT is, my name isn’t Lou-Lou but Lou. Yet Lou is so bluntly unlovely, inevitably the name became vapid Lou-Lou.

  My father had wanted to name me after Lou Andreas-Salomé, a hot-blooded female intellectual of the nineteenth century whose most heralded achievement in the popular imagination is to have lived in a ménage à trois with her lover Paul Rée and Friedrich Nietzsche and to be photographed with the two men in a dominatrix pose.

  You’ve seen the famous photograph—Lou Andreas-Salomé in a little cart pulled by Rée and Nietzsche in the role of donkeys. Andreas-Salomé looks oddly twisted, in a dress with a long skirt; she’s wielding a little whip. The men, who should look doting, or as if they’re enjoying a joke for posterity, look like zombies. Andreas-Salomé was said to be a beautiful woman but, as is often the case with alleged beauties of the past, photographs of her don’t bear out this claim but show a snoutish-faced woman with intense eyes and a heavy chin. (Yes, I do somewhat resemble Andreas-Salomé except that no one would have described me as beautiful.)

  My namesake, admirably “liberated” for a woman of her time, also had affairs and intimate friendships with Maria Rilke, Viktor Tausk, and Sigmund Freud. She’d become a psychoanalyst and published psychoanalytic studies admired by Freud; she’d written novels, and a study of Nietzsche. I’d tried to read some of her writing years ago but had soon given up, it had seemed so dated, so sad and so—female.

  Once I’d asked my mother why she’d agreed with my father to name me after Lou Andreas-Salomé and not rather someone within the family—(which is a Jewish custom)—and my mother had said she had no idea—“He talked me into it, I suppose. Why else?”

  He was uttered in a way so subtle, you’d have to listen closely to hear reproach, accusation, woundedness, resignation in that single syllable.

  At last count I have four stepmothers, in addition to my own mother. They are Monique, Avril, Phyllis, Sylvia. There are step-brothers and –sisters in my life but they are younger than I am, of another generation, and resentful of me as their father’s favorite.

  I think of my stepmothers as fairy-tale figures, sisters united by their marital ties to Roland Marks, but of course these ex-wives of Roland Marks detest one another.

  Sylvia Sachs was the New York actress, and the youngest. Just fifty-six, and looking, with the aid of cosmetic surgery and the very best hair salons in Manhattan, twenty years younger.

  Monique Glickman was old by now—that is, Dad’s age. For a woman, old.

  She was living in Tampa, Florida. She’d disappeared from our lives—good riddance!

  Avril Gatti was the litigious one—a former journalist, Italian-born, now residing in New York City with an (allegedly) female lover.

  Of Phyllis Brady what’s to say? The daughter of a distinguished Upper East Side architect might have expected to be better treated by her Jewish-novelist-husband whose father had owned a (small, not-prosperous) bakery in Queens, but she’d been mistaken.

  My mother, Sarah, had been Roland’s second wife. He’d been still young at the time of their marriage—just thirty-two. Mom must have thought that, impassioned as the handsome young Roland Marks had been, eager to leave his “difficult” wife Monique for her, that his love for her would be stable, constant, reliable—of course, it was not. And after four children, certainly it was not.

  “You must have wanted to kill him, when he left you for—whoever it was at the time”—so I’d said to my mother impulsively, one day when we were reminiscing about those years when we’d been a family in Park Slope, and the name “Lou-Lou” wasn’t so inappropriate for me; and my mother said, with a wounded little cry, “Oh, no, Lou-Lou—not him.”

  A neutral observer would have interpreted this remark as—She’d wanted to kill the woman he left her for.

  But I knew my mother better than that.

  AFTER CAMERON left, the very air in the house was a-quiver.

  “Not an auspicious beginning. If she wants to be my assistant.”

  Dad was muttering in Dad’s way: an indignant thinking-aloud you were (possibly) meant to hear, and to respond to; though sometimes, not.

  Casually I said, as often I did in such circumstances: “She may have wanted to exploit you, Dad.”

  “Oh well—‘exploit.’ That’s what everyone pins onto me.”

  “You can’t trust interviewers. They can edit the tape as they wish, and make you out to seem—”

  “She certainly knew my work. My oeuvre as she called it.”

  With a wounded air Dad spoke. He might have been lamenting My penis.

  Of course, Dad was disgruntled. Not just the beautiful blond girl had left, trailing a sweet-smelling sort of mist in her wake, but he had to content himself for the evening with me.

  His favorite daughter. Poor plain hulking Lou-Lou.

  Not that Dad didn’t like me. Even love me. (So far as he was capable of love.) But it was clear that he didn’t regard me as attractive, or particularly feminine; he didn’t admire me. This had always been evident, even as a young girl I’d seen it in his eyes, as I’d seen his ple
asure in female beauty, female grace, femaleness, in the presence of one or another of his wives, or my older sisters who were both quite attractive as girls. “Beauty is skin deep: we perceive it immediately. What’s beneath, if it’s ugly, will require more time”—so Roland Marks had observed more than once, with an air of vengeful melancholy.

  All that day, Dad said, until the interviewer had come at 3:00 P.M. to “interrupt and distract him,” he’d been working in his study. It is expected of Nobel Prize winners that they begin to slacken their pace after receiving the award but this wasn’t the way of Roland Marks who was as committed to, or as obsessed with, his work as he’d been as an aggressive young man out of the Midwest fifty years before. It had been his aim to combine the “many voices of our time”—the elevated, the intellectual and the poetic, and the debased, vernacular, and the crudely prosaic. It was an ambitious aim—it was a Whitmanesque aim—which struck a nerve in the literary community as well as in the vast unchartable American community that responds to some—a very few—works of “art” with genuine enthusiasm and pleasure. Yet, Roland Marks had detractors. After reviewers celebrate a “brilliantly promising” young writer, they are not so easily placated with his more mature work. The many awards bestowed upon my father didn’t soften the hurt of the barbs and stabs he’d received as well, some from old friends whose admiration had turned to resentment as Roland Marks’s reputation grew.

  The cruelest blow had been a lengthy, quasi-sympathetic but finally condescending review of a novel by an old writer-friend of his, a literary rival, who ought never to have written such a veiled attack on another writer of Roland Marks’s stature and age—in The New Yorker.

  Roland Marks never wrote reviews. But if he had, he would not have retaliated—such “low-down, down-dirty” behavior was beneath him, he said.

  Never again would he speak to that writer, whom he felt had betrayed him. If the man’s name came up, Dad was likely to walk away, wounded.