Patricide Read Online Free Page B

long to revise, he might die before he finished!
The novel would be published posthumously . He would
be criticized posthumously , for not having polished
it to Roland Marks’s characteristic high sheen.
    â€œDaddy, don’t fret! You always say the same
things.”
    â€œDo I? The same things?”
    â€œYou’ve been worrying about ‘dying too soon’ since
you were in your fifties. That’s twenty years at least.”
    â€œThose were premature worries. But
now . . .”
    I’d hoped that Dad would ask me to help him with
the novel in some way—fact-checking, retyping. But he wasn’t quite ready to
share Patricide with anyone else, just yet.
    Patricide . A strange
title.
    It was not an attractive title, I thought. But I
dared not ask Roland Marks what it meant.
    That day Dad had been going through a copyedited
galley of an essay he’d written for the New York Review of Books with the intriguing title “Cervantes, Walter
Benjamin, and the Fate of Linear Art in a Digital Age.” Roland Marks was as
impassioned, and often as unreasonable, about his non-fiction work as he was
about his fiction: he’d ended up revising most of the essay, and yet he was
still dissatisfied. And his head ached, and his eyes hurt. (No one knew, but me,
that Roland Marks had a still-mild case of macular degeneration for which he was
being treated by injections to the eye, at an enormous expense only partly
covered by his medical insurance.) He couldn’t bear any more reading today, he
said—“Or thinking. I’m God-damned tired of thinking .”
    It was Thai food my father had ordered, from a
Nyack restaurant. For our Thursday dinners we alternated among several
restaurants—Chinese, Italian, Thai—which my father found not too terrible,
though nothing like his favorite New York restaurants, to which he was usually
taken as a guest.
    On our domestic Thursdays we often watched
television in the remodeled sunporch while we ate take-out dinners from the Thai
Kitchen, reheated in a microwave.
    â€œWhat would you like to watch, Dad? ”
    â€œAnything. Nothing.”
    I knew that he was still thinking of Cameron whose
last name he’d forgotten. I knew that he was anxious, embittered, and yet
hopeful—that was Roland Marks.
    He’d been unjustly angry with me earlier, but he’d
forgotten why. Now he was unjustly angry with the gawky ponytailed blond without
remembering why. He said, taking the TV wand from me, “Anything distracting.
Entertaining. But something .”
    This wasn’t so. My father couldn’t tolerate TV
advertisements. I would have to find a movie for us, on one of the few cable
channels without interruptions.
    â€œWhat about A Stolen Life —Bette Davis and Glenn Ford. The Bridge on the River Kwai —William Holden. The Entertainer —Laurence Olivier.”
    â€œThe Entertainer.”
    â€œYou’ve seen this, I think?”
    â€œYes, I’ve seen The Entertainer —‘I think.’ When you’re seventy-four
you’ve seen everything. But not recently. And Olivier is brilliant.”
    I brought in our heated-up Thai food from the
kitchen, on trays. I used attractive earthenware plates and paper napkins of a
high quality that almost resembled cloth napkins. I would have opened a bottle
of wine for us but Dad avoided alcohol in the evenings because it made him
sleepy. I tried not to notice the anger in his face, and the sorrow beneath. I
fussed over him as I always did, tried to chide and joke with him, for he
expected it of Lou-Lou, no matter what mood he was in.
    The love-affair of a daughter with her father
encompasses her entire life. There has never been a time when she has not been
her father’s daughter.
    I thought None of them can take my place. None of them can know him as I do.
    It was so, Laurence Olivier was brilliant in a role
in which he, one of the great actors of the