Lovely, Dark, Deep

by Joyce Carol Oates

  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 naïvely. 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.

  For that was the paradox: like other writers of his generation, Roland Marks was both ego-centered and insecure; he believed that he was a literary genius—(otherwise, how could he have had the energy to write so many books?)—while at the same time he believed the worst things said of him by his critics and detractors. Even the Nobel Prize hadn’t shored him up for long.

  (When Norman Mailer died in 2007, at the age of eighty-four, Roland Marks had publicly lamented—“Now Norman will never win the damned Nobel! That’s their loss.”)

  There was no hope, I thought. He would fall in love with this Cameron Slatsky—(“Slutsky”?—I dared not joke about her name to him)—he had already fallen in love with her. Brain, (male) genitals. Irresistible.

  I said, a little sharply, “But what about you, Cameron? We haven’t heard a thing about you.”

  Sitting so close to the girl, it was difficult not to succumb to her warmly glowing personality; if I had not resolved to hate her, I would probably have liked her very much. She was beautiful—but awkward, unsure of herself. She was certainly very smart. As a professor I was inclined to like my students unless they gave me reason to feel otherwise, and Cameron Slatsky wasn’t much older than our Riverdale undergraduates.

  With a stricken look Cameron said, “Oh—me? There’s n-nothing to say about me . . .”

  “Well, where are you from?”

  “Where am I from . . .”

  Cameron shook her head mutely. Her face crinkled in an infantile way. At first I thought that she was laughing, fatuously; then I saw that she was fighting back tears.

  “Oh well—my life is too sad. I don’t want to talk about my life—please.”

  This ploy had an immediate effect upon my father: he moved to sit beside Cameron, taking both her hands in his and asking her what she meant. I hadn’t seen such an expression of tenderness in the man’s face since—well, the incident on the hockey field. Presumably Roland Marks had been deeply moved by other events in his life—(the births of his youngest children, for instance)—but I hadn’t witnessed them.

  What a blunder I’d made, asking the girl about her personal life! I’d taken for granted that it would be a conventional, proper, dull suburban life which would provoke my father’s scorn; but quite the opposite had developed.

  And it seemed to have been already arranged, to my surprise, yes and dismay, that Cameron would be staying the night in Nyack—“Since we have work tomorrow morning, it makes sense for Cameron not to commute all the way back to New York City.”

  All the way back! It was no farther than my “commute” to Skaatskill.

 
Calmly my father regarded me with bemused eyes. Asking if I would please check to see if the guest room was “in decent shape” for a guest?

  I would, of course. I did. Like a house servant—or a slightly superannuated wife—I brought in a supply of fresh towels for the adjoining bathroom. The guest room was drafty from ill-fitting windows but that wasn’t my concern.

  Cameron had the graciousness to express embarrassment. She saw me to the door, since Dad wasn’t inclined to rise to his feet after the intense two-hour dinner.

  I would have slipped away with a muttered farewell, but Cameron insisted upon shaking my hand, and thanking me—for what, I couldn’t imagine.

  “I’m so happy to have met you, Lou-Lou!—as well as your amazing father. So happy, you can’t imagine.”

  Yes. I could imagine.

  I left them, trembling with indignation. Driving to the George Washington Bridge where once again wet rain was whipping into sleet, and the pavement was slick and dangerous.

  “Accident. ‘Accident-prone.’ Who?”

  NEXT DAY WHEN I telephoned my father, it was Cameron’s bright voice that greeted me.

  “Oh Lou-Lou—guess what! Your father has asked me to be his assistant, and I’ve said ‘yes.’ I think that I can add my experience in some way to the dissertation material—like, a journal as an appendix?”

  A memoir, most likely. Which you will write after the man’s death.

  DREAMS OF MY father’s death.

  “It was an accident. He didn’t l-listen . . .”

  Quickly before the will is changed. Before the executrix is changed.

  Distracted by resentment and anxiety I made an effort to be all the more friendly, helpful, and alert in my dean’s position. I was sympathetic with everyone who complained to me, I even shook hands with particular warmth. I stayed up until 2:00 A.M. answering e-mails including even e-mails from “concerned” parents. It was reasonable—(well, it was wholly unreasonable)—to think that, if I was a good person, I would be rewarded and not punished by Fate.

  ONCE, I’D SAVED ROLAND MARKS’S LIFE.

  I’d been twenty years old. I was to be a junior at Harvard, within a month.

  My father was staying with wealthy friends on Martha’s Vineyard in late August. With his third wife, gorgeous/unstable Avril Gatti. I was in a smaller guest house, that overlooked the water, when a girl in a bikini drove into the driveway in a little red Ferrari convertible.

  She was sharp-beaked, like a hungry bird. Crimped dyed-red hair as if she’d stuck her finger in an electric socket.

  “Is Roland Marks here? I have to see him.”

  “He isn’t here. Is he expecting you?”

  “Where is he? He’s here.”

  “I’m sorry. This is not Roland Marks’s house, and he is not here.”

  “I know whose house this is. And I know he is here.”

  Since the publication of Jealousy, and Roland Marks’s figure, in tennis whites, on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, many people had tried to contact him. The usual sorts of people, but now others as well. A more American-suburban spread, not primarily Jewish-background as before. Dad laughed at the commotion but was beginning to become concerned.

  “Philip is absolutely correct”—(Dad was referring to his friend Philip Roth)—“people naïvely think they want to become ‘famous’—but it’s nothing like what you expect. Instead of having the luxury of failure, which is being left alone, you’re fair game for every idiot.”

  Rudely the bikini-girl was staring at me, in my shapeless Save-the-Whales T-shirt and drawstring sweatpants. Even my bare feet looked pudgy and graceless.

  “Are you one of his daughters? Karin?”

  “No.”

  “The other, then—‘Lou-Lou.’”

  “Louise.”

  “‘Lou-Lou.’”

  “Well, my father isn’t here. He’s in London.”

  In fact, Dad was sailing with our hosts. He’d be back within a few hours.

  “No. He’s on the island. I asked in town. There are no secrets here.”

  The bikini-girl was edging toward me in a way that made me nervous. Her body was fleshy and full yet her face looked drawn and there were distinct shadows beneath her eyes. She was glancing about, suspiciously. “He’s—where? Down by the water? Upstairs in the house? And his wife—‘Avril.’ Where’s she?”

  I thought She has something in that bag.

  It was a large Bloomingdale’s sort of bag made of elegantly woven straw. The handles were tortoiseshell. The way the girl was gripping it, I understood that she had a weapon inside.

  Calmly I said, with a forced smile, “I can leave a message with my father. He can call you.”

  She laughed. “Call me! Are you joking? He will never call me, he has said so.”

  “Then . . .”

  “There was a time when that hypocritical son of a bitch called me, but now, I can’t even call him; he never calls back. Your father is a terrible man. You know this, I’m sure. You don’t look stupid—only just moon-faced and fat. I don’t think that your father should be allowed to live.”

  Barefoot, with garishly painted toenails, the bikini-girl was edging toward the veranda of the main house, which was shingle board purposely stained to appear weatherworn, with a steep-pitched roof. Inside the house there were voices—I didn’t know whose. I’d begun to sweat. My fatty upper arms stuck to my armpits. I was calculating that I would have to wrench the bag away from the bikini-girl with no hesitation, within seconds; if she stepped back from me, she could take out her weapon . . .

  With my strained mouth I continued to smile. I saw that the girl had tiny rosebud or pursed-lips tattoos on her back. I saw that her bikini was striped iridescent-purple and that her flushed-looking hips and breasts were tightly constrained; she was breathing audibly.

  “Wait, please.”

  “I’m just going to knock at the screen door.”

  “No, please—wait.”

  “I’ll just call ‘hello’ inside. I won’t go fucking in.”

  As the girl edged past me I stumbled to my feet and threw myself at her, and wrenched away the bag—it was heavy, as I’d suspected.

  She began screaming. Cursing me. She clawed at me but I didn’t surrender the bag. Our hosts’ adult daughter came out of the house, astonished. A Portuguese water spaniel, that had been sleeping on the veranda nearby, began barking hysterically. The girl ran stumbling to the little Ferrari, where she’d left the key in the ignition; haphazardly she backed out of the driveway, all the while cursing us.

  In the elegantly woven bag was a snub-nosed revolver. In fact it was a Smith & Wesson .25-caliber “snubbie”—a semi-automatic with a mother-of-pearl handle that carried six rounds. It would turn out to be a stolen gun, sold to the bikini-girl in New York City; a female sort of gun, though close up it could be fatal.

  Our hosts’ daughter called the Vineyard police and the girl was arrested within a half hour as she tried to buy a ticket for the ferry.

  It would be said that she was one of Roland Marks’s girls. One who hadn’t worked out.

  My father refused to discuss her. My father professed not to know her—never to have heard of her. His wife Avril did not believe him. The bikini girl was older than she’d seemed: thirty-two. She’d been arrested for carrying an unlicensed and concealed gun. She lived in TriBeCa and described herself as an actress associated with La MaMa. Later, we would learn that, the previous summer, she’d stalked Philip Roth in Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut, though, like my father, Philip had declined to press charges against her.

  Dad had not wanted to talk about the bikini-girl. No one could make Dad talk about the bikini-girl. Not even Avril Gatti. To me he said, with his utterly charming abashed-Dad smile: “Thanks, kid. You did good.”

  ANOTHER TIME WHEN I CALLED MY FATHER, IT WAS CAMERON who answered the telephone.

  “Hi! Lou-Lou? We have news here—we’re flying to Miami tomorrow.”

  And so there
was no Thursday evening dinner that week. Nor the next week. Rudely, I wasn’t notified until I made a call, and Cameron called back to explain apologetically that she and my father were flying to Key West from Miami—“You know, the Key West Literary Seminar? Roland is giving the keynote speech.”

  I had known that the revered Key West seminar was imminent. But I’d been led to believe that I was to accompany my father.

  At last I managed to speak with him. My voice must have been quavering with hurt for Dad chided me kindly.

  “Lou-Lou, things have changed. Cameron’s coming with me—of course.”

  “You told me—‘mark on my calendar. Key West.’ You told me ‘don’t make other plans.’”

  In red ink several days in early January had been marked on my calendar. There was no mistaking this.

  In fact, I’d been invited to a party, or—to something . . . I hadn’t accepted of course since I’d planned to be in Key West with Roland Marks.

  I came close to blurting out Take me with you, please! I will pay for my own way.

  I didn’t, though. A dean is dignity.

  Shamelessly and unapologetically they went together, and without me. And my father had the temerity to ask me to “check in” on the house in his absence.

  THE FURNACE WAS REPAIRED, finally. Faulty smoke detectors were repaired. I called a carpenter to inspect the shaky wooden steps leading to the riverbank that needed to be strengthened and the man promised to call me back with an estimate. He couldn’t begin work, he said, until at least late March when the weather was warmer and ice had melted from the steps.

  Daringly—cautiously—I climbed down a half-dozen of the steps, to see how rickety they actually were. The January air was cold, and windy, rising from the steel-colored river. Obviously each winter had weakened the steps; the structure had to be at least twenty years old. (The house itself was 106 years old—an Upper Nyack landmark. I wanted to think that one day there would be a brass plaque on the front: Residence of Roland R. Marks, Nobel Prize in Literature.)

  Tightly I clutched the railings imagining the rickety structure suddenly buckling beneath my weight, collapsing, and my body falling heavily to the rocky ground below . . . My father would find me when he returned, a broken body, frozen . . .