Lovely, Dark, Deep

by Joyce Carol Oates

  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 pleasure 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.

  Through all this, Dad’s work had continued. It was a joke to suggest that the man was a womanizer when the deeper truth was, he was wed to work.

  Dad had recently finished a project—a lengthy novel set in New York City in the 1940s and 1950s, the era of World War II, post-War and Cold War America. Gleefully he’d been telling interviewers that he’d “named names and burnt bridges”—even as he insisted that Patricide was purely fiction. There was anticipation in publishing circles, for a novel by Roland Marks invariably managed to excite controversy. Feminists loved to hate him; haters of feminism loved to praise him; every Jewish literary figure had a strong, even vehement opinion about him; and there were the ex-wives, one of them the moderately famous Broadway actress of a certain age who’d said some very damning—and funny—things about Roland Marks in uncensored TV interviews. In any case he’d put the manuscript in a drawer, and would not look at it for another six months. He was anxious about his work, and superstitious. If he waited too long to revise, he might die before he finished! The novel would be published posthumously. He would be criticized posthumously, for not having polished it to Roland Marks’s characteristic high sheen.

  “Daddy, don’t fret! You always say the same things.”

  “Do I? The same things?”

  “You’ve been worrying about ‘dying too soon’ since you were in your fifties. That’s twenty years at least.”

  “Those were premature worries. But now . . .”

  I’d hoped that Dad would ask me to help him with the novel in some way—fact-checking, retyping. But he wasn’t quite ready to share Patricide with anyone else, just yet.

  Patricide. A strange title.

  It was not an attractive title, I thought. But I dared not ask Roland Marks what it meant.

  That day Dad had been going through a copyedited galley of an essay he’d written for the New York Review of Books with the intriguing title “Cervantes, Walter Benjamin, and the Fate of Linear Art in a Digital Age.” Roland Marks was as impassioned, and often as unreasonable, about his non-fiction work as he was about his fiction: he’d ended up revising most of the essay, and yet he was still dissatisfied. And his head ached, and his eyes hurt. (No one knew, but me, that Roland Marks had a still-mild case of macular degeneration for which he was being treated by injections to the eye, at an enormous expense only partly covered by his medical insurance.) He couldn’t bear any more reading today, he said—“Or thinking. I’m God-damned tired of thinking.”

  It was Thai food my father had ordered, from a Nyack restaurant. For our Thursday dinners we alternated among several restaurants—Chinese, Italian, Thai—which my father found not too terrible, though nothing like his favorite New York restaurants, to which he was usually taken as a guest.

  On our domestic Thursdays we often watched television in the remodeled sunporch while we ate take-out dinners from the Thai Kitchen, reheated in a microwave.

  “What would you like to watch, Dad?”

  “Anything. Nothing.”

  I knew that he was still thinking of Cameron whose last name he’d forgotten. I knew that he was anxious, embittered, and yet hopeful—that was Roland Marks.

  He’ d been unjustly angry with me earlier, but he’d forgotten why. Now he was unjustly angry with the gawky ponytailed blond without remembering why. He said, taking the TV wand from me, “Anything distracting. Entertaining. But something.”

  This wasn’t so. My father couldn’t tolerate TV advertisements. I would have to find a movie for us, on one of the few cable channels without interruptions.

  “What about A Stolen Life—Bette Davis and Glenn Ford. The Bridge on the River Kwai—William Holden. The Entertainer—Laurence Olivier.”

  “The Entertainer.”

  “You’ve seen this, I think?”

  “Yes, I’ve seen The Entertainer—‘I think.’ When you’re seventy-four you’ve seen everything. But not recently. And Olivier is brilliant.”

  I brought in our heated-up Thai food from the kitchen, on trays. I used attractive earthenware plates and paper napkins of a high quality that almost resembled cloth napkins. I would have opened a bottle of wine for us but Dad avoided alcohol in the evenings because it made him sleepy. I tried not to notice the anger in his face, and the sorrow beneath. I fussed over him as I always did, tried to chide and joke with him, for he expected it of Lou-Lou, no matter what mood he was in.

  The love-affair of a daughter with her father encompasses her entire life. There has never been a time when she has not been her father’s daughter.

  I thought None of them can take my place. None of them can know him as I do.

  It was so, Laurence Olivier was brilliant in a role in which he, one of the great actors of the twentieth century, plays a second-rate vaudeville entertainer in a dreary English resort town—Brighton?—who, from time to time, onstage, in the spotlight, amid burlesque routines of stultifying banality and vulgarity, reveals flashes of genius.

  Olivier was so compelling in the role of Archie Rice, so utterly convincing, both my father and I sat in silence, enthralled. Roland Marks could not think of any clever remark to underscore what we were seeing—the saga of an aging, hypocritical, hollow-hearted vaudeville comedian who connives to make a comeback by exploiting his elderly father, and finally killing him. Yet Olivier’s character is so very human, my eyes filled with tears of sympathy. He’s a fraud, but “charming”—women continue to adore him! He’s a heel, and a cad, and a drinker, yet it was love I felt for the man, impersonal as sunshine.

  There is a particularly poignant scene midway in the film in which the young Joan Plowright, in the role of Archie Rice’s daughter, tells the “entertainer” that he can’t possibly be serious about marrying a naïve young woman who has been seduced by his charisma—“She’s my age! The age of your daughter!”

  Archie Rice is chastened, embarrassed. But his daughter’s scandalized plea makes no difference: he’s determined to marry the second-place beauty-contest winner just the same, in order to borrow money from her father.

  Dad began to laugh. Dad had been picking at his Thai food, that was too spicy for him though he’d insisted on ordering hot. And now something pleased him mightily.

  “Here’s a fact, Lou-Lou: Olivier married that very actress, Joan Plowright, within a year. He divorced Vivien Leigh and married Plowright who was young enough to be his daughter.” It was a curiosity, how Roland Marks seemed to know so much of popular culture, which in his books and lectures he disdained as drek. Now Dad laughed his loud Rabelaisian laugh, that made me shudder.

  Though he hadn’t had any wine, Dad was very sleepy by the time the movie ended. (The final sce
ne of The Entertainer, when Archie Rice is disintegrating onstage before a sadly diminished audience, had made him laugh, initially; then cast him into a bleak mood I thought it most prudent not to notice.) I helped him up the stairs, said good night to him and cleaned up downstairs; it gave me pleasure to darken the rooms of the house, preparatory to leaving, and returning to my condominium in Skaatskill.

  Except: before I left, in Dad’s study I looked for a note-sized piece of paper. I knew it was there somewhere, and finally I found it in plain sight beside Dad’s shut-up computer: Cameron S., 212 448 1439, cslatsky@columbia.edu.

  Crumpled it and took it away in my pocket.

  Thinking This will do no good, probably. But I will have tried.

  IT WAS MY VOCATION: TO SPARE MY FATHER FROM RAPACIOUS females.

  I hadn’t done a very good job of it, you might say. And you’d be correct.

  I tried to protect Dad from harm. At least when he wasn’t traveling abroad and far off my radar. I was the constant in his life, I wished to think.

  Swarms of women, of all ages, tried to attach themselves to Roland Marks in one guise or another. Some were wealthy socialites eager for celebrity-writers to perform—“For zero bucks,” as Dad said dryly—for their charity fund-raisers; some were young like Cameron Slatsky, relatively poor, unattached and, who knows?—desperate, if not deranged. No one is so alert to the dangers that beset a famous man than a daughter.

  It’s true, Dad might have been seeing quite reasonable women, divorcées or widows just slightly younger than himself, yet not embarrassingly young—except that Dad wouldn’t have been seen in public with any woman within two decades of his age.