The Bill from My Father

by Bernard Cooper

  His smile died.

  Not until I was stuffed into the jumpsuit and facing its now distrustful owner did it occur to me that I would react exactly the same way had my father come over to my house, borrowed a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, squeezed into them while I stood there in my underwear, and then informed me that he was off to what he didn’t have the chutzpah to admit (but my sixth sense whispered) was a costume party. How far would he go in assuming my identity? Would he toss off my stock phrases and pet expressions? Would he give a mock lecture on John Cheever to a bunch of other parents, who, dressed like their offspring and guzzling rum punch, laughed their heads off and egged him on? If this sounds paranoid, let it be known that as a boy, I’d mimic my dad to the delight of those kids in our neighborhood who’d been fathered by oddballs, which is to say every kid on the block. And later, when my red-eyed fellow potheads mumbled about their uptight folks, I’d freak them out by asking, as Dad, if they planned to spend the rest of their lives dancing through the daisies.

  To this day I can conjure my father’s voice at will—the soprano notes of pleasure, the rumble of disgust, the singsong Yiddish equivocation, the elastic Oy and rasping Eh. It’s not uncommon for me to answer one of Brian’s questions as my father would (with another, more imploring question), or to blurt an opinion about a movie or current event by stepping deftly, if I do say so myself, into and out of Dad’s persona. This is not a talent on my part any more than being possessed by the spirit of Napoleon Bonaparte would be a talent; you’re either the mouthpiece for a dead emperor or you’re not. It’s a neurochemical condition like Tourette’s, all helpless tic and lurching verbiage. Anyway, watching my father dash off to make light of me at a costume party would be even worse if I’d just told him how wonderful he looked.

  My intent hadn’t been to disguise myself as my father so much as to disguise myself as the type of man who would wear a polyester jumpsuit. But the syllogism, had I stopped to give it thought, went roughly thus: A Stepford husband would wear a polyester jumpsuit; my father wears a polyester jumpsuit; therefore, my father is a Stepford husband. This logic insulted his sartorial taste, his very style of husbandry. By asking to borrow my father’s clothes, I’d asked the subject of my caricature to contribute to his exaggeration.

  I unzipped the zipper a couple of inches to make breathing easier, and there it was, the requisite accessory—chest hair only slightly darker than my father’s. He leaned against the dresser, its glass top reflecting fleur-de-lis like huge but motionless snowflakes. Despite or perhaps because of his boxers he looked absolutely nude. So nude that my being clothed might as well have been the result of my having stolen the jumpsuit right off his back, or of his having sacrificed it for the sake of my warmth. This could have been the last jumpsuit on earth, and it wasn’t big enough for both of us.

  Dad glared at me over the rims of his glasses. “What’s Brian going as?”

  I considered: Brian’s going as his father, too. But the truth provided a better evasion. “Brian can’t go. He sees clients that day.”

  “So what you’re telling me,” said my father, crossing his arms, “is that some people actually work for a living.”

  “Is your father still pissed?” asked Monica.

  We’d planted ourselves beside the buffet table. In the center there rose a three-tiered punch bowl Lynn had rented for the party. Rivulets of peach-colored punch trickled over its crystal rims, the constant watery burble almost as soothing as the booze itself. Muzak wafted from outdoor speakers, renditions of old standards so plodding and homogenized they were unidentifiable.

  “Things are okay for now,” I told Monica. My father had given up on his cross-examination, finally amused to see a younger version of himself standing in his bedroom and stammering excuses; how could he stay mad when his past was trying to appease his present? I left his house with the jumpsuit tucked under my arm.

  Lynn was chatting with a trio of lesbian separatists who wore matching gingham shifts with lace trim. All that cool, roomy cotton seemed to cause them as much discomfort as polyester caused me. They couldn’t stop tugging and plucking at the fabric.

  Lynn excused herself from the group and sauntered toward me and Monica with a fake-dainty walk. The silver platter she held in her arms had been picked clean of everything but crumbs. She kissed Monica on the lips, a masterpiece of perfunctory suction. “Hello, darling,” she said in what was fast becoming the afternoon’s obligatory robot drone. She turned to me. “Why, Mr. Cooper, you cut quite a figure in that jumpsuit.” Lynn and I had lived together for three years before we both came out—drove each other out, as we liked to say—and in all that time she rarely wore makeup, so it was a shock to see her batting a pair of false eyelashes. She bent toward me and inhaled, closing her spidery eyes to better place the scent. In her own voice she said, “You even smell like your father. Is it Old Spice?”

  “Very old. And what do you mean, ‘even’?”

  “I mean you kind of look like him in that getup.”

  By now I was determined to replace every drop of lost perspiration with rum punch, and after a few more gulps I found myself woozily resigned to the family resemblance. My father, after all, was the only living member of the immediate family left for me to resemble.

  Lynn and Monica and I glanced around the yard at women arrayed in summery ensembles, several wearing wide-brimmed hats, their outfits accessorized with costume jewelry or tiny clutch purses that matched the sherbet colors of their shoes. The guests had gone to great lengths to dress as the kind of women their mothers had hoped to be, or to dress as the kind of daughters their mothers had hoped to have. Some milled about the flagstone patio, talking and laughing and nibbling hors d’oeuvres. Others congregated beneath the shade of an oak tree whose enormous gnarled branches seemed to take root in the sky. The gathering could have passed as a lesbian Stepford, or a chimerical cocktail party dreamed up by a restless husband in a John Cheever story, a man who knew his wife both too little and too well, and who longed to spend an idyllic day in the company of alluring ladies.

  I refilled my cup of punch and lurched away from the buffet table to mingle with the crowd. The lawn felt more topographically complicated than it had when the party started. One gregarious, white-gloved guest commented on the jumpsuit. When I told her it was my father’s, she asked if he was a skydiver or a gas station attendant. “He’s a retired attorney,” I said. I tried not to think about my tongue, which had become a little numb and stubborn. “He wears it every day because he can wake up and just jump right into it”—here I damply snapped my fingers—“ready to sit around the house and relax in front of the television without having to fuss with buttons or waste a moment deciding what to wear. And you don’t have to iron the thing. Ever. It holds its shape, which is more than you can say for most of us. Thanks to this one-piece, stain-resistant, wrinkle-free article of clothing, my father now has time in abundance, and he’ll have it in greater and greater abundance until he possesses eternity itself!”

  “Wow,” she said, fingering her pearls. “That’s some jumpsuit.”

  Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed?

  The jumpsuit was still at the dry cleaner’s when my father called to tell me he’d developed a mysterious medical condition overnight. “I couldn’t sleep a wink,” he said. “The sheet felt heavy as a goddamn anvil on my big toe!” By morning, the toe was swollen and shiny and so painful he could barely take a step without moaning out loud. I suspected that his ailment was gout, a disease I’d have known nothing about had I not just read an essay on Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy” in preparation for my class on American literature since 1950, and learned that the lines “Ghastly statue with one gray toe / Big as a Frisco seal” were a reference to her father’s chronic gout. So, while I had my father on the phone, I looked up gout in the dictionary, read him the definition to see if it rang a bell, and when I came to “an inflammation characterized by exquisite tenderness,” he shouted, “That’s it! It’s exq
uisite!”

  His physician, Dr. Graham, considered it a particularly debilitating attack and suggested that, until the pain and inflammation subsided, my father hire a live-in nurse to help around the house. Impressed that I’d arrived at the same diagnosis as his doctor, Dad asked if I could be there to advise him when he “tried the new nurse on for size,” or what the home-care service more prudently called “the patient/provider intake session.”

  The interviewee, a short, sturdy woman with a brassy stack of teased hair, arrived right on time. She wore a pantsuit whose pants were neatly creased, and this, along with a purse slung like a duffel bag over her shoulder, gave her an air of almost military preparedness. Dad and I greeted her at the front door and immediately started talking at the same time, flustered by the fact that this unfamiliar woman wasn’t simply here to visit, but possibly to live. When we found the presence of mind to invite her inside, she strode through the foyer in silent white shoes, assessing the house with the keen eyes of a person who’d worked at hundreds of different homes and had learned how to sum up, with a single glance, the lives led inside them.

  Once she’d settled into the living room couch, Betty Schaefer fished a notepad from her purse and began asking my father questions about his blood pressure medications and their side effects. She proposed a diet low in animal fat and dairy products, telling us how high levels of uric acid in his bloodstream had caused crystal deposits to form around the joint in his big toe. “Gout used to be called ‘rich man’s disease,’” she explained, “because only people like kings could afford the foods that cause it.” My father smiled. Crystals, kings—gout was now a badge of honor as well as a goddamn anvil. Betty laid out a plan for his convalescence that made a strict regimen of Indomethacin, bland food, bed rest, and diuretics sound as rejuvenating as a tropical cruise. Dad shot me a glance that meant: As long as there are nurses like her in the world, people walking around in bodies are better off. And as we both realized but would never admit, having Betty there to offer assistance and enforce the doctor’s orders would keep us from becoming more touchy with each other than we already were.

  The second my father told her she was hired, Betty dashed out the door and rummaged through the back of a yellow station wagon parked in our driveway. She returned with a pair of aluminum crutches that enabled my father to hobble around the house without putting pressure on his swollen toe. Even when it came to simple tasks, however, the crutches hindered as much as they helped, making him as awkward as a man with six limbs. It quickly became apparent that the less my father could do on his own, the more stubborn he’d become. Instead of telling one of us he was thirsty, he’d thump through the kitchen on his crutches, teeter at the sink, and draw himself a glass of splattering tap water. If Betty and I made a move to help, he’d shoo us away with such an emphatic wave of his hand, he’d nearly lose his balance. He must have worried, I realize in retrospect, that unless he kept a stranglehold on health, he’d begin a quick, precipitous slide toward a life of dependence. But back then, as I watched him fill a glass to the brim, his forehead bunched in concentration, all I saw was misplaced pride. Why had he hired a nurse, I wondered, if he was so determined to fend for himself?

  This question became all the more pressing when I visited him a few days later. Betty had taken a break to watch This Is Your Day, a weekly show in which Benny Hinn, a placidly evangelical man in heavy stage makeup, laid hands on a steady stream of sick and injured audience members, each more telegenically abject than the next. One would think that, for a nurse-practitioner such as Betty, the sight of all those eye patches, slings, plaster casts, neck braces, portable oxygen tanks, electric wheelchairs, and rolling IV stands, all those frail people weeping and falling to the ground, would make viewing the show a sort of busman’s holiday, and yet she’d surrendered to the salmon-colored couch, setting a box of Kleenex on her lap in case a miracle moved her to tears. When I told her I was going to take my father upstairs for an afternoon nap, she told me to yell down if I needed help. Try as she might to turn her head, she couldn’t wrench her eyes from the set, where Hinn was frantically snapping his fingers near the ear of a blinking deaf-mute who may or may not have heard the audience break into applause.

  At first my father refused assistance, poking the tip of his crutch at the lowest step as if testing its strength. Then he glanced toward the top of the stairs—Kilimanjaro capped in white shag—and handed me the crutches.

  With his arm slung over my shoulder and mine around his waist, my father and I made halting progress. He had to pause every few steps and wait for the pain in his foot to pass, sucking air through gritted teeth. This gave him ample opportunity to assess aloud each nuanced throb: What a doozy. Coulda been worse. Like a toothache in my toe. Meanwhile, the sound of the TV—the chords of an electric organ punctuated by yelps of praise—grew fainter and more terrestrial the higher we climbed.

  No sooner had we entered the bedroom than I noticed that not only was his side of the bed unmade, but also the side that had been my mother’s. The bed had been my parents’ refuge in sickness and in health, and as far as I was concerned, they hadn’t merely slept on, but possessed, their respective sides. They’d purchased the bed, with its high mahogany headboard and king-size mattress, before I was born. This was the bed in which I’d been conceived (to the extent that any parents can conceive of the child they actually end up with). What upset me wasn’t the idea of my father sleeping with another woman—it had been a decade since my mother’s death—or the idea of him sleeping with another woman in that particular bed. What upset me was the sight of my mother’s side abandoned;the bedspread had been thrown back to reveal a swath of linen as pale as a shroud, the impression of a head indenting the pillow. It was as if my mother’s resting place in life had suddenly merged with her resting place in death, and I felt, as strongly as ever, the intractable fact of her absence.

  “With all this hopping around,” said my father, winded from the stairs, “my good foot hurts as bad as the bad foot.” I propped the crutches against the wall, and before I could turn around, he’d plummeted into a sitting position atop the bedspread. He paid no attention to the disarray on the other side, perhaps thinking that if he ignored it, I would, too.

  I debated whether to say anything. Two years earlier, when I’d told my father that Brian (who he referred to as “your mental-doctor friend”) was more than just my friend, Dad knitted his brows and stared into the distance. With his other sons dead and his youngest gay, his lineage would end with me, the genealogical roadblock. At least that’s what I worried he was thinking, and I scrutinized his face for signs of disappointment. Finally he took a breath and blurted, “Love is no one’s business,” which sounded like a depressing generalization without the addition of “but your own,” though I knew what he meant and gave him a hug, hoping my disclosure might help make our future relationship more frank and even-keeled and agreeable.

  But now, taken aback by the state of his bed, I found myself unable to offer him the same quick, unstinting acceptance he’d offered me. Surely the people who ran the home-care service would object to these sleeping arrangements. Such intimate proximity might not only jeopardize Betty’s job, but compromise the way she cared for my father, in both the medical and personal sense. If the two of them are just going to throw the rules of decorum out the window, I thought unironically, at least they could have waited a decent amount of time. Coincidentally, Brian and I had just talked to a friend whose affair with her boss had come to an unpleasant end, and the three of us agreed that, with its potential entanglements, romance at the workplace was usually a bad idea. Imagine how much more complicated it would be if the workplace was someone’s bedroom and the only thing keeping employer from employee was the figurative partition of self-restraint. It’s one thing to be bedridden in the presence of a nurse, and it’s quite another to be bedridden with her.

  “I take it Betty sleeps with you?”

  “What do you mean, sleeps?”
>
  “Oh, Dad.”

  “Don’t Oh, Dad me. There’s sleeps and then there’s sleeps.”

  “I mean sleeps.”

  “Okay. She sleeps with me.”

  “As in falls asleep?”

  “Eventually, yes.”

  We were like two men racing each other on stationary bicycles.

  “You know,” I told him, “I’d never object to your having companionship …”

  “That’s very big of you.”

  “… but I wonder if these are the best circumstances.”

  “For what?”

  “A girlfriend.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend for God’s sake!”

  “Does she usually share a bed with the people she’s taking care of?”

  “Where else is she supposed to sleep?” he asked. “On the floor?”

  Saying, No, Betty shouldn’t sleep on the floor, would have been the same as saying, Yes, Betty should sleep in your bed. As often happened when my father and I reached a rhetorical impasse, I began, against my better judgment, to consider things from his point of view: if half a perfectly good mattress is just sitting there empty, why waste the space? The bed is so big he probably can’t even see her without putting on his glasses, and how enticing is a blurry nurse? It’s as if they’re sleeping in twin beds, really, except the beds touch.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “You should elevate your leg.”

  My father lay back and, without protest, allowed me to lift his foot by the heel and set it on a stack of pillows. A long Oy escaped him like steam. The swollen toe, even covered by a sock, was painful to see.

  Betty could have stayed in my old room down the hall, or she could have slept in a foldout bed provided by the home-care service, but by the time these suggestions occurred to me, silence seemed like the best advice. Besides, I had to admit that my father’s irrepressible interest in sex was the genetic trait I most hoped to inherit, a legacy I could share with Brian for the rest of our lives, or at least until one of us was no longer ambulatory. Still, the business with the bed worried me. Asking me whether Betty should sleep on the floor wasn’t so far-fetched. Someone had once slept on the floor of his bedroom, and that someone, as it happened, was Dad.