Read Online Patricide by Joyce Carol Oates - Free Book Online

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  . . .”
    â€œWell, where are you from?”
    â€œWhere 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.
    â€œOh 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.
    What a blunder I’d made, asking the girl about her
personal life! I’d taken for granted that it would be a conventional, proper,
dull suburban life which would provoke my father’s scorn; but quite the opposite
had developed.
    And it seemed to have been already arranged, to my
surprise, yes and dismay, that Cameron would be staying the night in
Nyack—“Since we have work tomorrow morning, it makes sense for Cameron not to
commute all the way back to New York City.”
    All the way back! It was no farther than my “commute” to
Skaatskill.
    Calmly