Patricide by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    â€œ ‘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.
    â€œLou-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.
    â€œI’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 was
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.
    â€œWe’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