Patricide

by Joyce Carol Oates

  I had never read a page of my father’s allegedly brilliant fiction for its aesthetic properties. I’d read only to pursue an ever-elusive glimpse of my own self through Roland Marks’s eyes though I’d read—and reread—obsessively.

  Smiling Cameron Slatsky said, “Miss Marks, may I bring you something to drink? There’s more coffee, and wine. And I brought Diet Coke . . .”

  Dad said, “For God’s sake call her ‘Lou-Lou,’ Cameron. ‘Miss Marks’ sounds like one of those cryptically unfunny New Yorker cartoons.”

  Stiffly I told Cameron Slatsky no thank you, I didn’t want any of her Diet Coke. Or coffee or wine either, for that matter.

  In fact I’d have loved a Diet Coke. But not in my father’s presence.

  “We’re not quite finished for today, Lou-Lou. Cameron has been asking some very provocative, tough-minded questions about the ‘internal logic’ of my novels—I’m being made to feel flayed. But it’s a good feeling, for once.”

  A good feeling—flayed? This had to be ridiculous.

  Shining-blond Cameron cast her eyes downward in a semblance of modesty. Indeed they were beautiful gray-green eyes, once she’d removed her glasses.

  She was looming above my father dazzling and willowy in the mauve wool suit, that had to be of very high quality, though possibly purchased at a consignment shop; the brass buttons were just slightly tarnished. She was slouch-shouldered as a too-tall teenaged girl might be, which made her appear touching, vulnerable. In the instant in which my father turned to Cameron I sensed how the exemplary daughter disappeared from his consciousness, as if a portion of his brain had been severed.

  Of course, I was upset. I hadn’t expected this—again. In the intervening week I’d tried to erase the arrogant young woman from my memory.

  However, in my role as a college administrator I’d long ago learned to disguise upset. Emotions were not permitted in one in authority. In an unperturbed voice I asked my father—smilingly—what sort of food he wanted for dinner; and my father gallantly asked Cameron what sort of food did she want?—“There’s Chinese, Italian, Thai—but we had Thai last week . . .”

  The way—gently crumpling, a catch in his throat— in which my father enunciated “Cameron” was not reassuring.

  Bright-vivacious Cameron said, like any high school girl aiming to be liked, “Please choose anything you want, Mr. Marks—I mean, Roland. I’m not a fussy eater. I like all kinds of things.” It was the sweetly subservient manner of one who understands that to manipulate others in serious matters you should always acquiesce in small matters; you should give an impression of pliancy.

  “Except sushi—the thought of raw fish makes me feel queasy.”

  Cameron shuddered, and laughed. Roland Marks shuddered and laughed, too.

  Cynically I had to wonder if Cameron knew that, many years ago, Roland Marks had gotten deathly sick after eating sushi at a publisher’s banquet in Tokyo; since then, the mere thought of raw fish made him feel queasy, too.

  I said, “I’ll order Chinese. I’ll specify—nothing raw.”

  I left them and went into the kitchen. I must have been upset, I collided with doorways, chairs, countertops. In the other room I could hear their laughter, that was chilling to me.

  I’d interrupted a domestic scene—was that it? Unbelievable.

  It must have been my father’s age. Everything had to be accelerated, even as it was being repeated. And ever-younger women, to be confused with not daughters but granddaughters.

  I bit my lower lip. This was unfair! Unjust.

  The deluded old man can’t fall in love so quickly—so soon again.

  It was a measure of my upset, I’d thought of my father as an old man. In a normal state of mind I would never have thought of Roland Marks in such a way.

  Several times during the past week I’d called my father, spoken with him or left phone messages. I had not mentioned the young Ph.D. candidate who’d been interviewing him nor had my father mentioned her to me and so I’d felt justified in thinking that she might already be out of our lives.

  As always I’d been a dutiful and devoted daughter. Dad had very little idea of how hard I worked at Riverdale College and of how much the college expected of me. For him, I’d made several telephone calls which he hadn’t had time to make himself and I’d arranged for a furnace repairman to drop by the house, since Dad was having trouble with the furnace. (Roland Marks was helpless as a child living in an adult’s house: he had no idea how to keep up with repairs, whom to call, how much to expect to pay; he just suspected all the locals to be taking advantage of him.) The wooden steps at the rear of the house, leading down to the beach, badly needed repair; at the end of the summer I’d tied yellow tape across the top of the steps, to discourage people, primarily my father, from using them; but Dad had ripped the tape off, of course—“Lou-Lou is always exaggerating ‘safety measures.’ ” (Walking along the riverbank with his Nikon camera was one of Dad’s few relaxing hobbies.) I was trying to find a reliable carpenter to repair the steps but, like plumbers and building contractors in Rockland County, reliable carpenters were in short supply.

  When Dad had tried to deal with local handymen and tradesmen, and they’d failed to call him back, he’d given up in disgust. Nothing was so insulting in Roland Marks’s elevated world than someone failing to call you back—Roland Marks was the one who failed to call others back. But an administrator knows that such disgust is but the first rung of the ladder you must climb routinely, if not daily.

  In the kitchen I called Szechuan Village. I ordered several dishes which we might share. Cameron seemed the type who’d want brown rice, so I ordered brown rice as well as white. I was very much in control but my hand shook gripping the phone and the Chinese woman at the other end of the line seemed to have trouble understanding me. “Speak English?” she said uncertainly, and I said, vehemently, “I am speaking English!”

  In the next room I could hear them. The girl’s uplifted soprano voice, and the man’s deeper voice. It was a duet in which I was not welcome—I had no musical voice.

  Also, I was feeling intense jealousy. For the one thing that Roland Marks had never been able to abide from anyone in his family, adult children as well as wives, was talk of his “career”: his “writing.” All that was Roland Marks’s professional life was out of bounds to his family, as it would have been out of bounds for his children to have asked him how much money he made a year, or which of his women he’d loved best.

  She has a way into his soul that you just don’t. You can’t.

  This past week I’d been particularly diligent about asking my father how he was feeling, and if he needed me to drive him to any medical appointments; for some time, he’d been having water therapy at a local clinic to ease arthritic pain in his neck, lower back and hips, and as often as I could I drove him to the clinic; but my workdays at the college were long, and frequently my father had to drive himself, or take a taxi. Now I would feel anxious that the vigilant interviewer would take my place without my even knowing.

  There was a (new) crisis imminent in Roland Marks’s life at this time. Very soon, a Manhattan judge would be ruling in a civil suit brought against my father by his fifth wife Sylvia, the flamboyantly “wounded” and “sexually abased” actress who was charging, with the panache of the obsessively litigious Avril
Gatti, the third wife, that she’d been virtually a collaborator with my father on at least two of his bestselling books, and deserved more money than he’d paid to her at the time of their divorce settlement.

  This was ridiculous of course. This was outrageous. And—wasn’t it illegal? Sylvia and her attorney had accepted the generous settlement at the time, which preceded her post-marital campaign of revealing comically vile slanderous “facts” about my father to a repelled but fascinated public—(interviews on E!, profile in New York. “The woman has made me her hobby,” Dad said ruefully). Yet, in a courtroom anything can happen. Even judges who’d read and enjoyed Roland Marks’s fiction were perversely likely to side against him. We had noted this phenomenon over the years—the decades. The more outrageous a former wife’s demands, the more somberly the demands were considered in court.

  My mother Sarah had been an exception. She’d been so emotionally fragile during the last several years of her marriage to my father, and at the time of their divorce, she’d hardly cared to contest him; despite her (female, feminist) lawyer’s urging she hadn’t asked for much money, and for a minimum amount of child support. (To my father’s credit, like his friend Norman Mailer he’d never stinted in child support and had often contributed more than legally required.) Poor Mom! She’d been a pushover, in Dad’s slangy term. He’d insisted that he had loved her, he said—“But it burnt out. Like a flame that just gets smaller and smaller and finally it’s gone.”

  He’d assured us kids at the time of the divorce that his love for us would never change—which turned out not to be true, so far as my sister and brothers were concerned.

  To deal with Silvia’s collaboration charges my father had hired a very good—and very expensive—lawyer to defend him, in New York City where the lawsuit had been initiated. As usual he seemed to think that the self-evident outrage of the litigant’s demands, not to mention the injustice, on which expert (literary) witnesses would testify in court, would influence the judge to side with the beleaguered author, and not with the vindictive ex-wife. But I wasn’t so convinced, and hoped to shield my father from the shock of another massive judgment going against him.

  After a judge had awarded Avril Gatti two and a half million dollars as well as ordering Roland Marks to pay her crushing legal fees, my father had managed to pick himself up and limp along, as he described it, like a horse with three broken legs; with gleeful commiseration his (male) writer-friends who’d gone through more or less the same experiences called him, to welcome him to the club. It had been considered that Roland Marks might be “finished”—“close to finished.” But out of an equal mixture of stubbornness and desperation he’d immersed himself in work, in “exile”—(that is, here in Nyack)—in a novel unique among Roland Marks’s oeuvre in that it is mostly dialogue, though dealing with his usual subject of erotic obsession, in a mordantly comic style that made the book a number one bestseller.

  Out of its own ashes, the Phoenix rises triumphant. Poor Phoenix!—(my father joked, in interviews)—has he any choice but to survive?

  Living with a genius you come to realize: the “genius” is hidden from you, somewhere inside the deeply flawed if loveable and mortal person.

  Waiting for the Chinese food to be delivered, I joined my father and his young blond companion in the sunroom, as they were stepping out onto the terrace, to look at the river.

  Often my father stood on the terrace, taking photographs. In the relative tranquility of Nyack he’d learned to take quite beautiful photographs of shifting lights and weather on the Hudson River but disparaged them as “amateur”—he who had so pointed a respect for “professionals” in any field.

  Of course, Dad couldn’t resist inviting Cameron to climb down the wooden steps with him to the riverbank. Though the light was rapidly fading, and the steps were unsafe.

  Quickly I said: “Dad? Remember, those steps are getting wobbly? I tied some tape there, that you ripped off . . .”

  But my father scarcely listened to me. Nor did Cameron, laughing as the gallant elder gentleman slipped an arm through hers, seem to hear.

  You would think that an intelligent and sharply observant young woman would be cautious about stepping onto rotted wood, even on the arm of a Nobel Prize winner. But in the gaiety of the moment nothing could have seemed more pleasurable than accompanying Roland Marks down the thirty-odd steps to the riverbank below—“All my property, Cameron. It’s two point five acres.”

  I was relieved to see that the steps held beneath them. I must have exaggerated the danger. If there were individual steps that sagged, and one or two that had broken, at least the overall structure held firm.

  I heard their laughter from below. Dad might have called me to come join them—but he didn’t.

  He’s forgotten me. Wishes I weren’t here.

  They were down there for quite a while, walking on the riverbank with some difficulty since the bank was overgrown. I could hear my father chuckling about the swept-away dock—“Gone with the river!”

  I wondered if my father continued to hold Cameron’s arm, through his. Or whether he might be holding her hand, to prevent her stumbling.

  Then, returning to the terrace, naturally my father had a little more difficulty ascending the steps, since the angle was steep, almost like a ladder. Cleverly Dad husbanded his strength pausing several times to point out to Cameron something of interest in the distance; he didn’t want the girl to hear him breathing heavily. Nor did he want her to notice how he slightly favored his (arthritic) right knee.

  Safely back up on the terrace he said to me, with an indulgent smile, “You worry too much, Dean Marks. ‘Live dangerously’—as your old friend Nietzsche said.”

  Your old friend Nietzsche was an allusion to Lou Andreas-Salomé, I supposed. It was an allusion probably lost to Cameron Slatsky.

  When the Chinese food was delivered, I prepared it as attractively as possible, and brought it to my father and Cameron in the sunroom, that now overlooked a murky river; when Cameron saw me carrying the tray, she made a pretense of leaping up to help me.

  At dinner most of the talk was between my father and Cameron. At a certain point she even switched on the tape recorder—“I hope you don’t mind, Mr.—Roland. The things you so casually say deserve to be kept for posterity.”

  Well, this was true. But Dad wouldn’t have liked me to say so, and would have been furious and incredulous if I’d suggested “recording” his off-the-cuff conversation.

  Wide-eyed and somber Cameron said to me, “Miss Marks, your father has been like this all day. Since I arrived. They say that Swinburne was a brilliant conversationalist. And Oscar Wilde, of course. And—Delmore Schwartz.”

  My father had known Delmore Schwartz. This was a (fairly crude) ploy to stir him into speaking of Schwartz, I supposed—but Dad, involved with chopsticks, merely grunted an assent.

  “Miss Marks—I mean, ‘Lou-Lou’ ” (this girly-frothy name Cameron spoke with the expression with which you might pick up a clumsy insect with a tweezers)—“as you must know, your father is —remarkable.”

  Benignly I smiled. It was pleasing to me, that I could handle chopsticks much better than Cameron Slatsky.

  “Of course. Otherwise people wouldn’t be begging to interview him and cluttering up his calendar.”

  “The most remarkable man I’ve ever met.”
/>
  “But not the most remarkable person you’ve ever met?”

  Cameron blinked at me naively. Dad intervened with a grunt of a laugh.

  “Lou-Lou, you might not want to stay too long tonight. We won’t be watching a DVD, obviously. Cameron and I have more serious things with which to occupy ourselves, OK?”

  What could I say? That my Thursday evenings were reserved exclusively for my father; that this was what remained of “family night” in my life? That the prospect of returning home to the chilly, sparely furnished condominium in Skaatskill, and to my computer and administrative work until midnight, was heart-numbing?

  “Of course.”

  They continued to talk of my father’s books almost exclusively. It was astonishing to me that Cameron Slatsky had certainly read these books with care and with (evident) enjoyment. The early, “promising” novels; the massive “breakthrough” novel that had won major literary awards for its twenty-nine-year-old author; subsequent titles, some of them “controversial”—“provoking.” My father’s face was flushed with pleasure. Particularly my father enjoyed Cameron leafing through her photocopied pages to read aloud passages of his “mordant humor”—he laughed heartily, with her.

  This conversation he would never have allowed within the family clearly gave him enormous happiness. There was no comparable happiness I could offer.

  I had little appetite for dinner, though no one noticed. Dad and his avid young visitor drank wine. They were festive. They were fun together as if linked by an old, easy intimacy.

  Plainly I saw: my father was mesmerized by Cameron Slatsky: that is, by the mirror she held up to him, of a “brilliant” man, a “remarkable” talent, one of the “major American writers of the twentieth century.” It would have required a will of steel to resist such flattery, and my father had rather a will of gossamer; cotton candy. I thought And yet, she’s probably right. The words she utters. He is a great writer, if only he could believe it.