Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Partly I’d dreaded being taken to the ER for this reason. I worried that my father would become impatient and annoyed with me—his instinct was to blame the victim. He wasn’t one to “coddle” weakness in others, though weakness in himself was an occasion for lyric self-pity of a Rilkean quality.

  “. . . we could sue, possibly. You girls should be wearing mouth-guards—masks—like ice-hockey goalees . . . Jesus, the puck could have gone in your eye.”

  “It wasn’t the puck, Dad. It was a stick.”

  “Puck, stick—fucking monosyllable. Comes to the same thing, in a ‘negligence’ suit.”

  “Please tell me you’re not serious about suing my school, Dad.” Everyone would hate me, then. Now, they mostly just pitied me, or felt sorry for me, or half-admired me, or tolerated me. I had more than a year and a half to endure at the Rye Academy, before I graduated, if I graduated. Just let me get through, Dad. Then—I’m on my own.

  So I wanted to think. My sister and two brothers had fled Roland Marks’s gravitational pull. He liked to say, dryly—The older kids are on their own. If that’s how they want it—fine.

  “We’ll get the tooth replaced, Lou-Lou—I promise. We’ll fix you up fine. Better than new.”

  For years I’d had to suffer orthodontic braces. Now that my teeth were reasonably straight, I’d lost a crucial front tooth. Dad didn’t appreciate the irony. Or, Dad had other, more pressing things to think about.

  I couldn’t know, or wouldn’t have wished to know, how what was preoccupying my father was nowhere near: not even in Manhattan.

  An individual whose name I didn’t (yet) know, who would become Roland Marks’s next wife; at the present time living in Berkeley; the object of his current concern, or obsession. Yet it had seemed slightly odd to me, a quizzical matter, how Dad chattered about West Coast residents: “They seem younger somehow, more naïve and innocent, on the West Coast. Here it’s six P.M.—they’re still at three P.M. We’re the future they’re headed for.”

  In my codeine daze I tried to object: “Dad, if the world ended, it would end for them at exactly the same time it ends for us. Don’t be silly.”

  “‘Silly’! I guess I am, sweetie.”

  And Dad gazed at me, or rather toward me, not-seeing me, with a fond, faint smile of such heartbreak, I knew that I would love him, and forgive him, forever.

  WEEKS LATER—(you will not believe this!)—over Christmas break in Manhattan, at Dad’s apartment on West Seventy-eighth Street, I would overhear a call between my father and—could it be Tina Rodriguez?

  For it seemed, they’d already met at least once in the “city”—that is, New York City. Evidently they’d had drinks together. They’d talked over an “issue”—exactly what, wasn’t clear.

  T.R.! And Roland Marks!

  I don’t think that anything much came of it. I’m sure that nothing came of it. Roland Marks was always “having drinks” with women—friends, editors, agents, journalists, admirers. To his credit, not all were glamorous young women; some were his age at least. You might hear that he was seeing X, but you might not ever hear of X again. Instead you’d be hearing of Y, and of Z.

  I was shocked, and felt betrayed. Not by my father but by Tina Rodriguez.

  Why would she want to see my much-older father in the city? What had she thought that a meeting with Roland Marks might lead to?

  I hoped T.R. wasn’t disappointed. As I was disappointed in her.

  We’d wanted to think that our wiry-limbed phys. ed. instructor with the snapping-dark eyes was a lesbian, at least. Not susceptible to men.

  I would never tell my teammates. I would never play field hockey again.

  “HELLO, MISS MARKS! SO GOOD TO SEE YOU AGAIN.”

  “Hello . . .”

  In my discomfort I couldn’t recall her name—the skinny blond ponytail girl of the previous week with the insipid ingratiating smile.

  Except today she wasn’t wearing her hair in a ponytail jutting out of the side of her head but brushed straight, to her shoulders. Shimmering and lustrous as a model’s hair, not at all straw-colored or paintbrush-like but dazzling-pale-blond like Catherine Deneuve.

  And she was wearing a trim little designer-looking mauve wool jacket, with a matching pleated skirt. And stockings, and high-heeled shoes.

  The eyebrow piercing had vanished. Quite proper gold studs in her creamy ears.

  “‘Cameron’—remember me? Your father is out in the sunroom, Miss Marks. We’re almost finished for the day, come right in.”

  I’d been unlocking the front door of my father’s house on Cliff Street, the following Thursday, when the door was flung open for me by the smiling blond stranger—the Ph.D. student/interviewer from Columbia. Vaguely I’d assumed that, since my father hadn’t mentioned her, she’d been expelled from his life.

  And what an insult, an arrogant blond stranger daring to invite me inside my father’s house that was practically my own house as well.

  Like a pasha Dad was sprawled on a bamboo settee in the sunroom sipping a muddy-looking cup of coffee which I had to suppose smiling Cameron had prepared for him. To be Roland Marks’s assistant was to be his personal servant, as well.

  Just barely, my father managed a smile for me.

  “Lou-Lou. You’re a little early, are you? No ‘accident’ on the bridge today?”

  I’d wanted to lean over my father and brush his cheek with my lips in a tender-daughter greeting, to impress Cameron Slatsky; but I knew that my father would recoil, maybe laughingly—we rarely indulged in such sentimental female gestures.

  “I’m not early. I’m exactly ‘on time.’ But I can go away again if you’d like, and come back later.”

  I spoke in a voice heavy with adolescent sarcasm. A few seconds in a parent’s presence can provoke such regression.

  I didn’t like the bemused and condescending tone of my father to me, his favorite child, as it might be interpreted by the shining blond stranger.

  On a glass-topped table in front of my father were many sheets of paper, some of them photocopies of pages from Roland Marks’s books, as well as a laptop and a small tape recorder. And a can of Diet Coke which the intrepid interviewer must have brought for herself since it represented the sort of “toxic chemical cocktail” my father had always banned from his households.

  I could see that the interviewer was systematically questioning my father about his career, making her way through his book titles chronologically. Her questions, numbered for each title, appeared to be elaborate.

  For the first time, I wondered, is the girl serious? about Roland Marks’s oeuvre? Her interest had to be a calculated campaign—didn’t it?

  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 c
onsignment 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 Sylvia’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 t
he 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 . . .”