Patricide (3 page)

“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.

T
HE 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.

A
FTER
C
AMERON
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
.”