Patricide (7 page)

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 Silvia'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 the 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 . . .”

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 naively. 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 had 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.