Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories

  This is the story of how a best-loved daughter repays her father.

  “YOU’RE LATE.”

  It wasn’t a statement but an accusation. In another’s voice the implication would be Why are you late? Where were you? The implication would be—Darling, I was worried about you.

  “I can’t depend upon you, Lou-Lou. I’ve had to make a decision without you.”

  “A decision? What do you mean?”

  He is moving away. He is getting remarried. He is writing me out of his will.

  “I’ve decided to hire an assistant. A professional, who’s trained in literary theory.”

  This wasn’t so remarkable, for my father had had numerous “assistants” and “interns” over the years. Each had disappointed him or failed him in some way, and had soon disappeared from our lives. Most had been young women, a particularly vulnerable category for assistant, intern.

  Except now, since the breakup of my father’s fifth marriage, and since my move to Riverdale, I’d been my father’s assistant, to a degree—and we’d been planning a massive project, sorting and labeling the thousands of letters Roland Marks had received over the course of five decades, as well as carbons and copies of letters he’d sent. The letters were to be a part of Roland Marks’s massive archive, which he and his agent were negotiating to sell to an appropriate institution: the New York Public Library, the Special Collections of the University of Texas at Austin, the Special Collections at Harvard, Yale, Columbia. (In fact the archive would be sold, Dad hoped for several million dollars, to the highest bidder—though Roland Marks wouldn’t have wanted to describe the negotiations in so crass a way.)

  It was unfair on Dad’s part to suggest that he’d actually been waiting for me. Not in normal usage, as one individual might be “waiting” for another. With one part of his mind he’d probably been aware that someone was expected, after 7:00 P.M. and no later than 7:30 P.M., for this was our usual Thursday evening schedule. He would have been working in his study overlooking the slate-gray choppy Hudson River, from the second floor of the sprawling old Victorian house on Cliff Street; he might be writing, or going through a copyedited manuscript, or proofreading galleys—(for a writer who claimed to find writing difficult and who spent most of his time revising, Roland Marks managed to publish a good deal); he would have been listening to music—for instance, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which was so familiar to him, like notes encoded in his brain, he could no longer be distracted by it. Certainly my father wouldn’t be waiting for me but his sensitive nerves were attuned to a waiting-for-someone, waiting-for-something, and until this unease was resolved he would feel incomplete, edgy, irritable and vaguely offended.

  Yet if I’d arrived early, Dad wouldn’t have liked that, either. “So soon, Lou-Lou? What time did you say you were coming? And what time is it now?”

  My impossible father! Yet I loved Dad so much, I could not love anyone else including my clumsy well-intentioned self.

  “And why exactly are you late?”

  “An accident on the George Washington Bridge . . .”

  “An accident! You should factor in slow-downs on that damned bridge, and leave early. I’d have thought you knew that by now.”

  “But this was a serious accident, Dad. The entire upper level was shut down for at least forty minutes . . .”

  “You’re always having accidents, Lou-Lou. Or, accidents are always occurring around you. Why is this?”

  Dad was being playful, funny. But Dad was being cruel, too.

  In fact it was rare that things went wrong in my life, and virtually never as a consequence of anything I’d done personally. A delayed plane, or a canceled flight—how was that my fault?—or an emergency at the college, which it would have been professionally irresponsible for me to ignore; or the plea of an old friend, calling at an inopportune time and badly needing me to speak to her, which had been the case several weeks before.

  I’d tried to explain to my father that a friend from graduate school at Harvard had called me sounding distraught, suicidal. I’d had to spend time with Denise on the phone and had sent a barrage of e-mails to follow—“I couldn’t just abandon her, Dad.”

  “How do you know that I’m not ‘suicidal,’ too? Waiting for you to arrive and wondering where the hell you are?”

  This was so preposterous a claim, I decided that my father had to be joking. Does an egomaniac kill himself?

  Dad persisted: “Do you think that, if you were in this person’s place, she might not ‘abandon’ you?”

  Though the subtext here was simply that Dad resented another person in my life, and felt threatened by the least disturbance of his schedule, it was like him to ask such questions, to make one squirm. His boldly serio-comic novels were laced with paradoxes of a moral nature, to make the reader squirm even as the reader was laughing.

  I’d said that I liked Denise very much. I hadn’t wanted to avoid her. (Though it was true, we’d grown apart in recent years; Denise had been the one to cease writing and calling.) “I’ve invited her to come visit me, if she wants to. If I can help her, somehow . . .”

  “Lou-Lou, for Christ’s sake! That’s what I mean: you draw accidents to yourself. You’re accident-prone.” There was a pause, and Dad couldn’t resist adding, “And losers.”

  This was particularly cruel. Since I knew that Dad considered me a “loser”—at any rate, not a success.

  But now Dad was being funny, and not angry—at least, he’d been smiling. (For “losers” were the very material of Roland Marks’s fiction, some of them loveable and others not so.)

  His humor was the lightest stroke of a whip against my bare skin and not intended to hurt: if Roland Marks intended to inflict hurt, you would know it.

  Only at my father’s summons did I come, Thursday nights, to have dinner with him. This had been our schedule for some months since Dad had returned to the house in Upper Nyack—(he’d been writer-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome, and then a visiting fellow at the American Academy in Berlin)—but I couldn’t take our evenings for granted, because my father disliked being “constrained.”

  That is, I had to leave Thursday evenings open for my father; but my father might make other, more interesting plans for Thursday without notifying me.

  On weekends, Dad dined with other people in their homes or in restaurants. (I was rarely included.) Often, Dad was being “honored”—these events would often take place in New York City, forty minutes away by (hired) car. It wasn’t unusual for my father to be invited to give talks, readings, onstage interviews every week in one or another city: in recent months Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Boston, Seattle, Toronto and Vancouver. If such events didn’t conflict with my work-schedule, and if Dad wanted me, I would accompany him to these gigs, as he called them; his sponsors would pay for two business-class air tickets as well as two hotel rooms in luxury hotels. Since Dad’s last divorce, he had not acquired a new female companion, and so I was grateful to be his companion when he wanted me.

  Sometimes, I would be interviewed, too. Tell us what it was like growing up with Roland Marks as your father!

  I’d rehearsed answers that were plausible but interesting—at least, I hoped they were interesting. What I said of Roland Marks was unfailingly upbeat and optimistic; my daughterly praise was warm and sincere; never would I hint at anything less “positive”—that remained for my sister Karin and my brothers Harry and Saul, who imagined that their opinions of Roland Marks really mattered to anyone.

  Domestic routines, like our Thursday dinners, were sacrosanct with Roland Marks, as with most writers and artists. It’s the “nervous” sensibility, as Dad said, that craves routine and stability. Of course, if Dad himself altered these routines, that was different.

  Twelve years ago Roland Marks had been awarded a Nobel Prize for literature and in the wake of that cataclysmic award much in his domestic life had been overturned. His fifth marriage had ended in divorce, and a tremendous financial settleme
nt to his embittered wife had depleted much of his award money. (Though even friends persisted in thinking that Roland Marks was wealthy.) Vulnerable to women, particularly young women, Dad was always “seeing” someone and always being “disappointed”—yet I dreaded the day when my octogenarian father might announce that he was “remarrying”—again!—and that our Thursday evening routine, the very core of my emotional life, was coming to an end.

  Something was different about tonight. I realized—Don Giovanni wasn’t playing. And a vehicle was parked at the curb in front of the house, which I was sure I’d never seen before.

  My father had come to meet me in the front corridor of the sprawling old Victorian house, where a single wall-light feebly glowed. Roland Marks’s habits of frugality contrasted sharply with his habits of overspending and overindulgence. Since my most recent stepmother’s departure from his life, the Victorian house on Cliff Street was but partly furnished; the living room, with a beautiful dark-marble fireplace, was missing a leather sofa, a set of chairs, a Chinese carpet, and had the look of a minimalist art gallery in which the so-called art is a coiled rope, a bucket, a stepladder leaning against a bare wall. In my father’s words the departing wife had “ransacked” the house while he was in Europe; I’d offered to help him refurnish but he’d dismissed my offer with an airy wave of his hand—“I’m a bachelor from now on. I don’t use these damned rooms anyway.”

  At the rear of the house, not visible from the front hall, was a remodeled sunroom, where Dad spent much of his time when he wasn’t working upstairs in his study. Beyond the sunroom, through a rear door, was a flagstone terrace in what one might describe as a comfortably worn state of repair, and descending from the terrace a flight of wooden steps that led to the riverbank thirty feet below, through a scrubby jungle of overgrown shrubs and trees. There had once been a small dock there, swept away by a ravaging river during the first winter of my father’s occupancy.

  Dad had joked that his marriage to Sylvia Sachs had been very like the dock—“Gone with the river!”

  Gradually it had happened that, though I lived in a (modest) condominium of my own in the village of Skaatskill, just north of Riverdale, my father expected me to keep his house in reasonably good repair; it had fallen to me to pay my father’s household bills with his checkbook, and help him prepare his financial records for his accountant’s yearly visit; if my father had trouble opening a bottle or a jar, for instance, he would keep it for me to open—“Your fingers are strong and canny. Lou-Lou. You have peasant genes, you’ll live a long time.” It fell to me to hire cleaning women, handymen, a lawn crew, though my father invariably found fault with them.

  Tonight my father was wearing not his usual at-home jeans and shapeless cardigan but neatly pressed trousers, one of his English “country-gentleman” shirts, and a green Argyll vest; his cheeks were smooth-shaven, and his silvery-brown hair, thinning at the crown but abundant elsewhere, falling to his shoulders, looked as if it had been recently brushed. Clearly, Roland Marks had not so groomed himself for me.

  There was a sound upstairs. A murmurous voice, as on a cell phone.

  “Is—someone here? Upstairs?”

  My father’s study was upstairs, as well as several bedrooms. My father’s study was his particular place of refuge, his sanctuary, with a wall of windows overlooking the river, a large antique desk, built-in mahogany bookshelves. It was not often that anyone was invited into my father’s study, even me.

  Now a sly expression came into my father’s face. I thought A woman. He has brought a woman here.

  Despite his age Roland Marks was a handsome man; he’d been exceptionally handsome in his youth, with dark dreamy brooding eyes, a fine-sculpted foxy face and a quick and ingratiating smile. He’d dazzled many women in his time—and many men. Some of this I knew firsthand but much of this I knew from reading about him.

  When you are related to a person of renown you can’t shake off the conviction that others, strangers, know him in ways you will never know him. Your vision of the man is myopic and naïve—the long-distance vision is the more correct one.

  “An academic. A ‘scholar.’ She’s come to interview me. You know—the usual.”

  Roland Marks’s genial contempt for academics and scholars did not preclude his being quite friendly with a number of them. Like most writers, he was flattered by attention; even the kind of attention that embarrassed him, annoyed or exasperated him. Each academic and scholar who’d met with Roland Marks, and had written about him, imagined that he or she was the exception. What a surprise Roland Marks is! Nothing at all like people say but really, really nice . . . and so funny.

  “Is this your new—assistant?”

  “We’ve been exploring the possibility.”

  This person, whoever she was, was unknown to me. I had the idea, since Dad hadn’t mentioned her until now, that she was relatively unknown to him, too.

  “Come upstairs, Lou-Lou, and meet ‘Cameron.’ We’ve been having a quite intense interview session.”

  It wasn’t uncommon for people to come to my father’s Nyack house to interview him. But it was somewhat uncommon for one of these interviewers to stay so late.

  Though there was the Paris Review interviewer, a literary journalist, who’d interviewed Roland Marks in 1978, in his apartment at the time on the Upper West Side, who’d virtually moved in with him and had had to be forcibly evicted after several weeks.

  Dad led me upstairs with unusual vigor.

  In his study, a tall skinny blond woman—a quite young, quite striking blond woman—was slipping papers into a tote-bag. On the table before her was a laptop, a small tape recorder, a cell phone, and a can of Diet Coke.

  “Cameron? I’d like you to meet my daughter Lou-Lou Marks. And Lou-Lou, this is Cameron—from . . .”

  “Cameron Slatsky. From Columbia University.”

  With a naïve stiffness the young woman spoke, as if one had to identify Columbia as a university.

  Awkwardly we shook hands. Cameron Slatsky from Columbia University smiled so glowingly at me, I felt my face shrink like a prune in too much sunshine.

  Of course, Dad had to tease a bit calling me his “Dean Daughter”—

  “Dean Marks, Daughter”—which drew a breathy laugh from Cameron Slatsky and a look of wary admiration as if she’d never seen a dean before, close up.

  In fact, Dad was proud of my academic credentials. Unlike my sister and my brothers, who’d tried to “compete” with Roland Marks by writing—(fiction, poetry, plays, journalism)—I was the daughter who’d impressed him with her diligence, intelligence, and modesty; if I published essays, they were of esoteric literary subjects—Sappho’s poetry, the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, for instance—which Dad read with the avidity of the intellectual whose knowledge of a subject is limited. The point was, Lou-Lou Marks knew her place.

  I gathered that Cameron had just been speaking on her cell phone and that she was, as a consequence perhaps, somewhat agitated; though she continued to smile at my father.

  “Mr. Marks? I wonder if we could confirm our date for—”

  “Please, I’ve asked you: call me Roland.”

  “‘R-Roland’ . . .”

  “Thank you, my dear! ‘Roland’ it is.”

  My dear. I felt a stab of embarrassment for my father.

  Roland Marks, who often didn’t try at all to be charming, was trying now. Hard.

  “—our date for Monday? As we’d planned?”

  “Sure. Just don’t come before four P.M., please.”

  It seemed that Cameron was writing a dissertation on the “post-Modernist-polemic” fiction of Roland Marks for a Ph.D. in English. Exactly the kind of theoretical bullshit my father usually scorned.

  Cameron wore metal-rimmed eyeglasses of the kind that, removed, reveal myopic but beautiful thick-lashed eyes, as in a romantic comedy. (And so it was in Cameron’s case, in fact.) She was thin, willowy. She shivered with the intensity of an Italian greyhoun
d. Her shoulders were just perceptibly hunched. For she was a tall girl, taller than my father; and she would have sensed that Roland Marks was vain enough to resent any woman taller than himself.

  Cameron’s strangest and most annoying feature was her hair: a kind of ponytail shot out of the side of her head, above her left ear. The hair was straw-colored and stiff-looking like a paintbrush. Long straight uneven bangs fell to her eyebrows, nearly in her eyes. If she’d been a dog she would’ve been a cross between a greyhound and a Shih Tzu, face partly obscured by hair.

  Her sexy red mouth just kept smiling! I could imagine this arrogant young woman gloating to herself as soon as she was alone—Pretty good, I think! Not bad! The old man likes me for sure.

  The way Dad was looking at Cameron, frowning and bemused, blinking, smiling to himself—it was obvious, the old man liked her.

  As offensive as the grade-school ponytail was the young woman’s attire, which had to be totally inappropriate for an interview with a Nobel laureate: she was wearing jeans foolishly frayed at the knee and so tight they fitted her anorexic body like a sausage casing. I swear you could see the crack of her buttocks. You could see—(though I didn’t want to look)—the cleft of her pelvis. And her small perfect breasts strained against a tight black turtleneck sweater adorned with a white satin star like a bib.

  Her ears glittered with gold studs and there was a tiny, near-invisible gold comma through her left eyebrow. Her skin was pale, pearly. Beneath the silly bangs, probably her forehead was pimply.

  And the insipid mouth just kept smiling.

  I could barely bring myself to look at this Cameron, I disliked her so intensely. I felt an impulse to grab hold of the ridiculous ponytail and give her head a good hard shake.

  In dismay I thought She will be the next! She is the enemy.

  In one of my father’s bestselling novels of erotic obsession—(well, to be frank, virtually all of my father’s novels were about erotic obsession however cloaked in intellectual and paradoxical political terms)—not a tragic novel but a comically convoluted melodrama titled Intimacy: A Tragedy, he describes the male response to the most obvious sorts of sex-stimuli, in terms of newly fledged ducks who react to the first thing they see when they leave the egg: a cardboard duck-silhouette, a paper hanger in the shape of a cartoon duck, a wooden block. All that’s essential is that the thing, the stimulus, is in motion; the ducklings will follow it blindly as if it were the mother duck. So too, Roland Marks said, the male reacts blindly to a purely sexual mechanism, stimulated by certain sights and smells. Instead of a brain, there’s the male genitalia.