Patricide Read Free Page B

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.
    Such knowledge hadn’t spared Roland Marks from
several disastrous marriages and, I didn’t doubt, numberless liaisons.
    Cameron was saying, apologetically, in a voice that
scratched at your ears, “Mr. Marks, I mean—Roland—this is disappointing, I’m
really sorry, but I can’t stay for dinner—I have to leave
now. . . .”
    â€œBut I’ve ordered dinner. I’ve ordered for
three.”
    â€œOh I know—I’m so sorry! It’s just something that
came up, I’ve been on the phone. . . .”
    â€œWhen? Just now?”
    â€œYes. 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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œWell, 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!
    â€œMay I return, Mr. Marks? On Monday afternoon as
we’d planned?”
    â€œBetter 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.