Patricide (2 page)

I'd rehearsed answers that were plausible but
interesting—at least, I hoped they were interesting. What I said of Roland Marks
was unfailingly upbeat and optimistic; my daughterly praise was warm and
sincere; never would I hint at anything less “positive”—that remained for my
sister Karin and my brothers Harry and Saul, who imagined that their opinions of
Roland Marks really mattered to anyone.

Domestic routines, like our Thursday dinners, were
sacrosanct with Roland Marks, as with most writers and artists. It's the
“nervous” sensibility, as Dad said, that craves routine and stability. Of
course, if Dad himself altered these routines, that was different.

Twelve years ago Roland Marks had been awarded a
Nobel Prize for literature and in the wake of that cataclysmic award much in his
domestic life had been overturned. His fifth marriage had ended in divorce, and
a tremendous financial settlement to his embittered wife had depleted much of
his award money. (Though even friends persisted in thinking that Roland Marks
was wealthy.) Vulnerable to women, particularly young women, Dad was always
“seeing” someone and always being “disappointed”—yet I dreaded the day when my
seventy-four-year-old father might announce that he was “remarrying”—again!—and
that our Thursday evening routine, the very core of my emotional life, was
coming to an end.

Something was different about tonight. I
realized—
Don
Giovanni
wasn't playing. And a vehicle was parked at
the curb in front of the house, which I was sure I'd never seen before.

My father had come to meet me in the front corridor
of the sprawling old Victorian house, where a single wall-light feebly glowed.
Roland Marks's habits of frugality contrasted sharply with his habits of
overspending and overindulgence. Since my most recent stepmother's departure
from his life, the Victorian house on Cliff Street was but partly furnished; the
living room, with a beautiful dark-marble fireplace, was missing a leather sofa,
a set of chairs, a Chinese carpet, and had the look of a minimalist art gallery
in which the so-called art is a coiled rope, a bucket, a stepladder leaning
against a bare wall. In my father's words the departing wife had “ransacked” the
house while he was in Europe; I'd offered to help him refurnish but he'd
dismissed my offer with an airy wave of his hand—“I'm a bachelor from now on. I
don't use these damned rooms anyway.”

At the rear of the house, not visible from the
front hall, was a remodeled sunroom, where Dad spent much of his time when he
wasn't working upstairs in his study. Beyond the sunroom, through a rear door,
was a flagstone terrace in what one might describe as a comfortably worn state
of repair, and descending from the terrace a flight of wooden steps that led to
the riverbank thirty feet below, through a scrubby jungle of overgrown shrubs
and trees. There had once been a small dock there, swept away by a ravaging
river during the first winter of my father's occupancy.

Dad had joked that his marriage to Sylvia Sachs had
been very like the dock—“Gone with the river!”

Gradually it had happened that, though I lived in a
(modest) condominium of my own in the village of Skaatskill, just north of
Riverdale, my father expected me to keep his house in reasonably good repair; it
had fallen to me to pay my father's household bills with his checkbook, and help
him prepare his financial records for his accountant's yearly visit; if my
father had trouble opening a bottle or a jar, for instance, he would keep it for
me to open—“Your fingers are strong and canny. Lou-Lou. You have peasant genes,
you'll live a long time.” It fell to me to hire cleaning women, handymen, a lawn
crew, though my father invariably found fault with them.

Tonight my father was wearing not his usual at-home
jeans and shapeless cardigan but neatly pressed trousers, one of his English
“country-gentleman” shirts, and a green Argyll vest; his cheeks were
smooth-shaven, and his silvery-brown hair, thinning at the crown but abundant
elsewhere, falling to his shoulders, looked as if it had been recently brushed.
Clearly, Roland Marks had not so groomed himself for
me.

There was a sound upstairs. A murmurous voice, as
on a cell phone.

“Is—someone here? Upstairs?”

My father's study was upstairs, as well as several
bedrooms. My father's study was his particular place of refuge, his sanctuary,
with a wall of windows overlooking the river, a large antique desk, built-in
mahogany bookshelves. It was not often that anyone was invited into my father's
study, even me.

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?”