Lovely, Dark, Deep

by Joyce Carol Oates

  In Washington, D.C., a few years ago, where Dad had been honored by the president at the National Medals ceremony in the White House, he’d been accompanied by a chic skinny girl who might’ve been a model, very gorgeous, and so young that the president’s wife had said, utterly without irony: “It’s so nice of you to bring your granddaughter to our ceremony, Mr. Marks!”

  It’s well into the twenty-first century. The era of Women’s Liberation was the 1970s, or should have been. Yet, women are still bound to men. The majority of women, regardless of age. And a famous man attracts women as a flame attracts moths—irresistibly, fatally. Some of the most beautiful moths want nothing more than to fling themselves into the flame which destroys them.

  “Go away. Steer clear of him. Don’t you know who he is?”—often I wanted to cry at the foolish women.

  My own mother, in fact. Poor Mom had been clinically depressed, frankly suicidal, for years after their divorce, though she’d seen a succession of therapists and “healers” and had been prescribed a virtual buffet of tranquillizers, anti-depressants, organic and “whole” foods. (She’d been a rising young editor at Random House when Roland Marks had met her but she’d quit her job, at Dad’s insistence, shortly after they were married.) As a mother she’d often been distracted and hadn’t been able to focus, as she’d said, on her children, as she’d have liked; for Roland Marks was her most demanding child.

  Belatedly, Sarah has tried to be a “devoted” mother—too late for my sister and brothers, I think.

  In a divorce, a child invariably chooses one or the other parent to side with. It was never any secret, though he’d moved out of our house and out of our lives, I’d sided with my father.

  Though my mother was the one who’d loved me, and cared for me.

  My father never knew that I’d spared him the embarrassment of an ex-wife-suicide.

  I’d been twelve at the time. Mom had been still fairly young—not yet forty-five. Dad had been living elsewhere for several months as details of the “separation” were being worked out. (In fact, there was to be no “separation” everyone but my mother and I seemed to know.) She’d told me in a matter-of-fact voice, as if she were discussing the weather: “I don’t think that I can go on, Lou-Lou. I feel so tired. Life doesn’t seem worth the effort . . .”

  “Please don’t talk that way, Mom. You know you don’t mean it.”

  I was frightened because in fact I didn’t know that my mother didn’t mean it. In the slow, then rapid decline of her sixteen-year marriage with Roland Marks, she’d lapsed into a chronic melancholy. When I’d been a little girl it was said that she’d suffered from postpartum depression but in fact, as people close to our family knew, it was my father’s infidelities that wore her down.

  She might’ve divorced him—so one might think.

  My sister Karin, my brothers Harry and Saul were impatient with my mother. Her weakness was a terror to us all. She frightened them as she frightened me but, cannily self-absorbed adolescents as they were at this time, they reacted by ignoring, rebuffing, or fleeing her, as I did not.

  One afternoon when I returned home from school I couldn’t find Mom, though I knew she was home. And then I did find her, locked into an upstairs bathroom.

  I could hear her inside, beneath the noise of the fan. She was talking to herself, or sobbing; when I knocked on the door, she told me please go away.

  But I didn’t go away. I continued knocking on the door until at last she opened it.

  I don’t think that I will describe what I saw.

  I will spare my mother this indignation, out of numerous others.

  I called 911. I may have screamed, and I may have wept, but I only remember calling 911. For already at the age of twelve I was Lou-Lou the brave, the stout, and the reliable.

  It was for the best, Mom was saying. Her eyes were dilated, her voice was faint and cracked. He’d all but told her—told her what to do . . . He’d shown her how, in his new novel. How to clear the way for an impatient husband who has fallen in love (guiltily, ecstatically) with a younger woman . . .

  Mom was referring to Roland Marks’s newest novel Jealousy in which an unloved wife kills herself in these circumstances and is much mourned, much regretted, even admired by survivors for her sensitivity, generosity.

  I held my mother, waiting for the emergency medical workers.

  I thought If I weren’t here she would die now. He would have killed her.

  Dad came to see my mother in the hospital, repentant, remorseful, very quiet. He brought her flowers. He brought her new books in bright paper covers, conspicuously women’s fiction of the kind Roland Marks scorned. He took certain of her relatives, visiting the hospital, out to dinner at a good restaurant. He spent time with my sister, my brothers and me. And after Mom was discharged from the hospital, he filed for divorce.

  Except at court dates and incidental meetings at family events, Roland Marks would never speak to my mother again.

  AND YET, I loved him best. Can’t help it.

  “MY GOD, WHAT’S THAT? A TOOTH?”

  He was astonished. He was aghast. Yet you could see that already he was formulating the terms in which he would relate the story to his friends: how his teenaged athlete-daughter Lou-Lou was struck in the mouth with an opponent’s hockey stick, tripped and fell on the field entangled in opponents’ feet, yet nonetheless managed to scramble erect and grip her stick hoping to continue in the frantic game until—at last—though it could not have been more than a few seconds—the referee pulled her out of the game.

  “Hell, Dad. I’m OK.”

  The athlete-daughter was me. Panting, dribbling blood down her chin, staining her lime-green hockey-team uniform. Cursing but laughing. The referee hadn’t seen how badly I’d been hit.

  “Jesus, Lou-Lou! Is that a tooth?”

  It was. A front, lower tooth, with a bloody root, in the palm of my shaky hand.

  “I’ve got plenty more, Dad. It doesn’t hurt one bit.”

  This was true. In the adrenaline-charge of the moment, my bloodied mouth didn’t hurt. Spitting blood to keep from choking didn’t hurt.

  Worth it, to see the aghast-admiring look in my father’s eyes.

  Before the sheer physicality of life, Roland Marks seemed at times mesmerized, paralyzed. His large intelligent eyes blinked and shimmered like an infant’s eyes yearning to understand, yet overwhelmed by understanding.

  “Dad, hey—don’t look at me like that. It’s not like, you know—I’m some kind of fashion model, and now my career is ruined.” And I laughed again, and spat out blood.

  I was scared, but high. No sensation like being high on adrenaline!

  I was Roland Marks’s exemplary daughter, his favorite daughter, but I was no beauty. Gamely my father liked to compare me to certain classic paintings—female portraits—by Ingres, Renoir, even Whistler—but my broad Eskimo-face, my small eyes given to irony, my fleshy sardonic mouth resisted mythologizing. Hulking and needy, but disguising my need in robust good spirits and a laugh that, as Dad noted, sounded like fingernails scraped upward on a blackboard, I resisted idealization.

  I’d weighed nine pounds, twelve ounces at birth. So I’d been told many times.

  I wanted to scare my fastidious father, a little. He’d almost missed this game. He’d wanted to miss this game, but I’d begged him on the phone the night before—my mother had arranged not to come to Rye so that my father could come—and so he’d given in. But I knew he’d resented it. He’d had other plans, in Manhattan. I wanted to suggest now in my swaggering manner that, even as I assured him I felt fine, really I’d been stunned, shaken. Violence had been done to me by a meanly-wielded hockey stick which despite my big-girl body I hadn’t been able to absorb. And I wanted to punish Roland Marks for staring so avidly at certain of my teammates—my friend Ardis and the sloe-eyed Estella with thick dark hair like an explosion of tiny wires. He’d even gaped after some of the St. Ann’s girls.

  “Maybe the to
oth could be put back in? Some kind of fancy orthodontic surgery . . .”

  Roland Marks was looking faint. Nearly wringing his hands. The sight of blood was confounding to him. Infamously he’d written about female blood—a notorious passage in an early novel, frequently quoted by hostile feminist critics as an example of Marks’s unconscionable misogyny.

  But Dad was no misogynist. Dad loved me.

  I laughed. I was feeling excited, exalted. This was a key moment in my young life—I was fifteen years old. I had not always been so very happy and I had not always been so very proud of myself despite my exemplary status in my father’s eyes. I believed now that my teammates were concerned about me—and that they knew who my father was—who Roland Marks was. I’d seen the curiosity and admiration in their eyes, a hint of envy. The Rye Academy was an academically prestigious school (it was ranked with Lawrenceville, Exeter, Andover) but it was not Miss Porter’s, St. Mark’s, or Groton—there were not nearly enough celebrity-daughters enrolled. So Roland Marks—a much-awarded, much-acclaimed and frequently bestselling literary author whose picture had once been on a Time cover—a name particularly known to English instructors and headmasters—carried some weight. As Dad complained to his friends It’s a come-down to discover you’re the celebrity yourself. You know what Groucho Marx said.

  (Did I know what Groucho Marx had said? I wasn’t sure. As a young child, I’d assumed the name my father meant was Groucho Marks.)

  Dad had given me one of his handkerchiefs to press against my bleeding mouth. Not a tissue—a handkerchief. White, fine-spun cotton, neatly ironed and folded. My mother would have grabbed me tight not minding if I got blood on her clothing.

  “Lou-Lou darling, we’ll—sue! Someone is liable here! This is worse than Roman gladiatorial combat, you don’t even get a decent crowd.”

  Dad’s lame attempt at humor. The more nervous he was, the more he tried to be “funny.”

  As soon as he’d arrived at school, as soon as he’d seen the number of spectators in the bleachers before our game with St. Ann’s, he’d been vehement, disapproving. Where was “school spirit”? Why weren’t the field hockey team’s friends and classmates supporting them in greater numbers? And where were their teachers, for Christ’s sake? (This was unfair: there were teachers amid the spectators. No choice for them, our fancy private school decreed that instructors attend as many sports events as they could, as well as concerts, plays, poetry slams. Our teachers were substitute-parents, of a kind. You could see the strain in their faces, before their cheery-instructor smiles broke out.) Dad’s quick alert eye had moved about my teammates’ faces—and figures—seeking out those images of female beauty, utterly irresistible female beauty, that made life worth living—or so you’d think, from Roland Marks’s novels; and during the game, even as I ran my heart out to impress him, stomping up and down the field like a deranged buffalo and wielding my hockey stick with bruised hands, even then I saw how he was distracted by certain of my teammates, and one or two of the St. Ann’s girls, whose field-hockey ferocity didn’t detract from their young sexy bodies.

  My father didn’t know what to make of me, beyond marveling at my “pluck”—“physical courage”—“recklessness.” He should have held me, hugged me—but of course, he’d have risked soiling his J. Press sport coat and tattersall shirt if he had. Easy intimacy wasn’t one of Dad’s notable traits.

  At five foot ten I loomed over Dad who habitually described himself as “just-under six-feet”—I didn’t want to think that I intimidated him, as sometimes I intimidated my smaller classmates. Roland Marks was an elegant figure—slender, narrow in the torso, straight-backed and always impeccably dressed. In literary circles he could be depended upon to wear what is called, with jaw-dropping pretension, bespoken suits. The tattersall was his “country gentleman” shirt—he had others, dressier and more expensive. His neckties were always Italian silk, very expensive. Though this afternoon at the girls’ school in Rye, Connecticut, he was wearing a beige-checked shirt with no tie beneath a camel’s hair coat; neatly pressed brown trousers and dark brown “country” shoes with a high luster. If you hadn’t known that my father was a famous man, something of his prominence, his specialness, exuded from his manner: he expected attention, and he expected a certain degree of excitement, even melodrama, to stave off the essential boredom of his life. (This, too, is taken from Roland Marks’s memoirist fiction.) In his youth he’d been strikingly handsome—as handsome as a film star of the era—(Robert Taylor, Glenn Ford, Joseph Cotten?)—and now in late middle age he exuded an air still of such entitlement, women turned their heads in his wake, yes and young women as well, even adolescent girls—(I’d seen certain of my classmates stare openly at my father before dismissing him as old).

  In my mother’s absence, Dad had driven to Rye, Connecticut. Mom was now his ex-ex-wife and his feelings for her, once a toxic commingling of pity, impatience, and repugnance, were now mellowing, as his feelings for his more recent ex-wife, the notorious litigant Avril Gatti, were sharp as porcupine quills. In the accumulation of former wives, my mother Sarah Detticott was not the most vivid; her predecessor, and her glamorous successors, had figured in my father’s fiction more prominently, pitiless portraits of harshly stereotyped bitch-goddesses that were nonetheless entertaining, rendered in Roland Marks’s beguiling prose. Even feminists conceded In spite of yourself you have to laugh—Marks is so over-the-top sexist.

  The fact was, Dad had missed several visits with me that fall. He’d had to cancel—“unavoidably, if unforgivably.” He’d insisted that I attend the Rye Academy since it wouldn’t be “too arduous” a drive for him from New York City—(compared to the smaller Camden School in Maine which I’d preferred)—and so it was a particular disappointment when he called, sometimes just the night before a scheduled visit, to cancel. Especially if we’d arranged it so that Mom wouldn’t be coming that weekend.

  Like the Swiss weather cuckoo-clock, in which the appearance of one quaintly carved little figure meant the absence of the other, my two so very different parents could not be in my company at the same time.

  He was looking at me now with dazed wounded eyes. I thought He really does love me. But he doesn’t know what that means.

  By this time Tina Rodriguez, our phys. ed. teacher and our hockey coach, who’d been refereeing the game, was headed in my direction. “Lou-Lou! What’s this about a tooth?”—she would have pried open my hand if I hadn’t opened it for her.

  “It doesn’t really hurt, T.R. It’s just bleeding a lot, but—it isn’t any kind of actual injury.”

  “A knocked-out tooth is an injury, Lou-Lou. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  In his anxiety Dad began to berate the referee for allowing “all hell to break loose” on the hockey field, and his daughter’s tooth knocked out in a “brutal scuffle.”

  T.R. was startled by my father’s vehemence. Possibly, she knew who he was. (I’d intended to introduce them after the game.) Yet she didn’t apologize profusely, she didn’t defer to an angry parent so much as try to placate him, and assure him that his daughter would get the very best medical treatment available in Rye.

  So, despite my protests, an ambulance was called. An emergency medical crew took me to a local ER for a dozen stitches in my gums and lower lip, a tetanus shot, painkillers. I was furious and crying—the last thing I’d wanted was to be expelled from the hockey game. I’d hoped only to be praised by my father, and a few others; my teammates, for sure; and our coach T.R. Naïvely I’d seemed to think that I might have been allowed to continue, for what was a silly lost tooth compared to the exhilaration of the game? (Win or lose didn’t matter to me, it was the game, the girl-team, that mattered.)

  In my ER bed surrounded by tacky curtains I shut my eyes to suppress tears seeing my teammates rushing down the field oblivious of Lou-Lou Marks’s absence, having forgotten their valiant teammate already, wielding hockey sticks with fierce pleasure and rushing away into the gathering dusk.

>   Wait, wait for me! Come back! I am one of you.

  But they ignore me. They are gone.

  Long I would recall—more than thirty years later I am still recalling—how quickly my fortunes had changed on that November afternoon in Rye, Connecticut. A single misstep! Not ducking to avoid a wildly swung hockey stick! And a knocked-out tooth! Dad would pay for fancy orthodontic surgery as he’d promised, and the new, synthetic tooth was—is—indistinguishable from my other lower front teeth: that isn’t the point. What I was struck by was the swift and unanticipated change of fortune: one minute you’re in the game rushing down the field wielding your hockey stick—(a light rain beginning to fall, threaded with snowflakes that melted on my fevered cheeks)—exhilarated, thrilled—yes, frankly showing off to Roland Marks in a way that was desperate and reckless if not adroit and skilled like the better field-hockey players that afternoon whom I so badly wanted to emulate, but could not: for they were agile on their feet even if their feet were large as mine—one minute in the game and the next, out.

  It was a revelation worthy of Roland Marks’s fiction. One minute in the game and the next, out.

  For intense periods of time—years, months, weeks—he loved his women. Then, by degrees or with stunning swiftness, he did not.

  In the hospital my father paced about my bedside excited and distracted.

  “Oh, Lou-Lou. Poor Lou-Lou! This is so, so . . .”

  So unexpected, probably Dad meant. When you considered that he’d done his daughter a favor by driving to Rye, Connecticut, from New York City—when (as the daughter had to know, even in her adolescent myopia) there were so many more far more interesting people craving Roland Marks’s attention in New York City than she. But this generous gesture had turned out badly, and who was to blame?

  Also, being stuck in the ER with me, groggy with codeine and awaiting the results of X-ray tests, and the game continuing without us, or, by this time, having ended—so boring.