Tenderly she said, “I will take care of you, Lou-Lou. Anything you want from me, I will provide.”
Since my father’s death, I am often short of breath. I find it difficult to sleep on my back. Of course I’m frightened to see a doctor and have an EKG—(I’m a physical coward like Dad)—but Cameron insists that she will drive me to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, which would have been Dad’s choice, if I made an appointment.
I never had a daughter. I’d never had the experience of being pregnant.
Though Dad would have laughed at me in scornful pity, I’d never had the experience of sex with a man, or a woman. Never the experience about which Roland Marks wrote with such corrosive humor and such unabashed delight.
If Roland had married Cameron, she would be my step-mother.
How strange it would have been, perhaps how wonderful, to have a step-mother young enough to be a sister.
Strange, and wonderful. Though I would not have thought so at the time of our first meeting.
OUR NEWS IS, we will be attending the Los Angeles Book Fair together, to represent Roland Marks whose first several novels are being republished in classy trade paperbacks. Then, we are going to Book Expo America, in New York City; then, later in the summer, London and Stockholm for similar publications. We will be interviewed at literary festivals, and on TV.
Onstage, we wear black, side by side: we are not likely to be mistaken for sisters, but we may be mistaken as kin.
By slow degrees Cameron is becoming beautiful again, something of the luster in her eyes returning. Though she’s still pale, and wears her shimmering blond hair pulled back and tied at the nape of her neck, in a way I think too prim and widow-like. I am not so pale, rather more putty-colored, which Cameron tries to correct by “making up” my face—with startling results, I have to concede. (How Dad would laugh at me—“I can see through your fancy makeup, kid.”) For these occasions Cameron wears tasteful black dresses that fall to her ankles, often with a shawl or a scarf around her shoulders; I have urged her to stand up straighter, to resist the impulse to make herself shorter, now that there is no reason for her to make herself shorter. I wear dark trouser-suits, that fit my less hulking body flatteringly; my graying hair is trimmed short as a man’s, in fact shorter than my father’s hair had been. Audiences gaze at us with fascination. They know something of Cameron’s story, and something of mine. As if spontaneously we clasp hands onstage. We do not rehearse such scenes. Tears spring from our eyes like shining jewels. The audience draws in its collective breath.
Women who love each other. Women who will stand by each other.
How unexpected, this is Roland Marks’s legacy.
WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT, this posthumous life of Roland Marks is so—celebratory! For his admirers, his survivors, are many; and his literary reputation, buoyed by rumors that Patricide, scheduled for fall publication, will be the author’s strongest novel, a masterpiece to set beside the major works of Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Bellow, has never been higher. Requests for reprints of all kinds, republications of titles long out of print and seemingly forgotten, come to us continually. The Library of America will be issuing a large volume titled Roland Marks, and Cameron and I will be co-editors. Dad’s longtime publisher has commissioned a biography and Cameron and I will be interviewing prospective biographers including the distinguished Nelson A. Gregorson whose biography of Melville Dad had so admired.
Of course, we will be editing the Selected Letters. A volume of at least seven hundred pages, a treasure trove of brilliant prose, flippant prose, gossip, scandal, candid snapshots of the writer’s secret life, “visionary” insight.
There is even movie interest, from Miramax Films, in Intimacy: A Tragedy.
Though Roland Marks had haughtily refused to sign over any of his titles to be “mongrelized” by Hollywood, Cameron and I are willing to negotiate with the filmmakers. We joke about our “cameo” roles . . .
When we miss him terribly, we seek each other out. We clasp hands. Cameron says, swiping at her eyes, “Oh God, he was so funny. I loved his humor, his laughter.” I said, “I can hear him laughing, sometimes.” And we listened.
Trying not to hear instead the final desperate scream that might have been my name.
The other night after Cameron returned late, exhausted, from New York City, I was awakened hearing her walking in the house, as the floorboards creaked; I went to her, where she was lying on the settee in the sunroom, that was flooded with moonlight. I brought her an afghan, because the night was cold; and Cameron is very thin, and becomes chilled easily. And I held her hands, to warm them. And I thought We both loved him. And now we have each other.
This is not the ending that I had envisioned, just months ago. It is no kind of an ending anyone might have envisioned, especially my father, and yet—here it is.
This night, when I can’t sleep, I curve beside Cameron on the settee, and pull part of the afghan over myself. If Cameron is covered, including her bare feet, and I’m part-uncovered, that’s fine with me: of the two of us, I’m the stoic. I’ve brought a bottle of red wine, and we drink from the same cloudy glass, by moonlight. A rich red sensation begins in my throat and spreads through my chest, my belly and my loins. I feel the stirring of sexual desire, but it is not a desire for paroxysmal pleasure; I think it is a desire like the opening of a flower, petals spreading to the sun. It is the purity of desire, that requires another person to coax it into blooming.
“I love you, Cameron. I am so grateful that you’ve come into my life.”
“I love you, Lou-Lou. If Roland could see us, he’d be—well, he’d laugh, wouldn’t he? He’d be jealous, maybe.”
High overhead the moon is moving through the night sky. Venus, the brightest star. And Jupiter. We are planning an exhibit of Roland Marks’s photography, taken in the last three years of his remarkable life; some of the photographs are of the night sky shot with moonlight above the Hudson River. Dad would have been embarrassed, and abashed: he’d been an “amateur”—he hadn’t been competing with “professionals.” Already we’ve shown a portfolio of the Hudson River photographs to the gallery here in Nyack, and the proprietor is eager to mount the exhibit; yet we’re thinking perhaps this is premature, and we should show the portfolio to some galleries in Chelsea or TriBeCa as well. Tell me a story about your father, Cameron says in a voice husky with sleep, and so I tell her about the incident at the Rye Academy. “I was playing field hockey and Dad was in the bleachers—he came to a surprising number of my games that year—and a girl struck me in the mouth with her stick, and one of my teeth—this one, here—was knocked out. And Dad said, ‘What’s that in your hand, Lou-Lou?’ and I said, ‘What’s it look like, Dad?’ and he said, not missing a beat, ‘It looks like about five thousand dollars, Lou-Lou. But you’re worth it.’”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo by Star Black
JOYCE CAROL OATES is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Accursed. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.
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ALSO BY JOYCE CAROL OATES
Story Collections
By the North Gate (1963)
Upon Sweeping Flood and Other Stories (1966)
The Wheel of Love (1970)
Marriages and Infidelities (1972)
The Goddess and Other Women (1974)
The Hungry Ghosts (1974)
The Poisoned Kiss (1975)
The Seduction (1975)
Crossing the Border (1976)
Night-Side (1977)
A Sentimental Education (1980)
Last Days (1984)
Raven’s Wing (1986)
The Assignation (1988)
Heat and Other Stories (1991)
Where Is Here? (1992)
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: Selected Early Stories (1993)
Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (1994)
Will You Always Love Me? (1996)
The Collector of Hearts: New Tales of the Grotesque (1998)
Faithless: Tales of Transgression (2001)
High Lonesome: New and Selected Stories 1966–2006 (2006)
Wild Nights! (2008)
Dear Husband, (2009)
Sourland (2010)
The Corn Maiden (2011)
Black Dahlia & White Rose (2012)
CREDITS
Cover design by Allison Saltzman
Cover photograph © by Magdalena Lutek
Orchid photograph by Suet Yee Chong
COPYRIGHT
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
LOVELY, DARK, DEEP. Copyright © 2014 by The Ontario Review. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-235694-9
EPub Edition SEPTEMBER 2014 ISBN 9780062356963
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* This is a work of fiction, though based upon (selected) historical research. See Robert Frost: A Biography by Jeffrey Meyers (1996).
The Frost poetry quoted in this story is from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem (Henry Holt, 1969).
* From Robert Frost and Sydney Cox: Forty Years of Friendship by William R. Evans (University Press of New England, 1981).
Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories Page 41