I could almost hear how my mother would mock him if—God forbid—she’d sat at the table and witnessed dinner. Mr. Sweep the Lady off Her Feet. Mr. Prince Among Men. Mr. Pitch the Woo. But no sooner had I imagined these sarcasms than they turned into haunting compliments, accurate observations of the smitten man before me. My father hadn’t lost so much that he’d also lost hope; for better or worse (as he soon would vow) there were vestiges left.
What should I have done, Mother? Begrudge him love?
Even fewer people attended the wedding than the four who’d been invited. Anna’s daughter, Pam, had been visiting friends on the East Coast and her plane was delayed in a snowstorm. Brian stayed at home with the flu. This made Anna’s stately, gray-haired uncle Reggie and me the only guests. We introduced ourselves and wondered aloud if we were now stepuncle and stepnephew or just abruptly related strangers. We each complimented the other on his suit, then opened our jackets and compared the linings, as close to personal disclosure as we were likely to get. At some point during our conversation, Reggie and I arrived at a tacit understanding that it was up to us to impersonate a crowd and make the occasion as festive as two people who barely knew each other could. Before the ceremony began, we claimed one pew apiece on either side of the aisle, sprawling nonchalantly in order to take up the maximum amount of space. My father and Anna were sequestered offstage, and although they’d known for hours that only two of the four people they’d invited would be able to attend, I couldn’t help but anticipate the sight of their crestfallen faces when they saw the dearth of guests firsthand. I swiveled around every few seconds, hoping to see the miraculous advent of a crowd: Sunday-school children streaming through the doors (it was Thursday) or last-minute parishioners taking their seats for the evening prayer service (it was two in the afternoon). No live or prerecorded music played—a good thing, considering that even a three-piece ensemble would have outnumbered the guests, the notes of Papas Hayden and Bach echoing through the empty chapel.
While fidgeting in the pew, I thought about the years of isolation my father must have experienced while living alone in that large house, and before I knew it, my sense of his particular loneliness had expanded into one of those universal emotions the Germans probably have a compound word for, something like collective-singularity or wish-to-escape-the-self-cage. I was beginning, in other words, to understand why people cry at weddings. Which was odd, considering that up until that day, my reaction to the weddings I’d attended had been one of anthropological detachment, as if I were watching a PBS program about aboriginal courtship rites. The grinning imp who strews rose petals for the wedding procession to mash underfoot; the bride and groom force-feeding each other wedges of frosted cake; the best man’s drunken tribute to the newlyweds, peppered with references to their former sexual escapades; the bride’s backward bouquet toss and the subsequent stampede of single females. It’s strange, ritualistic stuff, and watching people I loved get married had never made it less so. The financial and legal advantages of marriage are one thing, and I fully support them for homosexual as well as heterosexual couples, but Brian and I would no more have a big fancy marriage ceremony than we would throw a party where we sat on thrones and wore paper crowns and made people listen to royal proclamations about how much we enjoyed French-kissing and taking long walks on the beach, for which shared proclivities the guests would present us with expensive gifts. I knew exactly what my father meant when he’d told me that he and Anna didn’t want to “do the whole schmear.” Still, I secretly believed that they secretly believed that the more people who witnessed their wedding, the more irrevocable wedlock would be.
Prompted by a cue I must have missed, my father and Anna emerged from one end of the stage and walked toward a suntanned priest at the other. Dressed in black vestments, the priest solemnly watched them approach. He squared his shoulders, cleared his throat, and opened the Bible he held at his chest. Rays of sunlight slanted through the clerestory window. Reggie and I sat absolutely still. Not a cough or creaking pew. Standing side by side, my father and his new bride were almost the same height, and for lack of other signs to go on, I told myself this boded well. Once they’d turned to face the priest, their expressions had to be guessed at from behind. There was the coiffed blossom of Anna’s hair. Light rippled through her silk skirt as she shifted her weight (excitedly? impatiently?) from foot to foot. The plump flesh of my father’s neck bulged over the starched collar of a dress shirt he hadn’t worn in years. A blush colored his bald head when he (timidly? calmly?) spoke his vows. The voices were theirs, but because I wasn’t able to see their expressions, and given the empty, reverberating church, their “I do’s” could have come from anywhere. Out of thin air. After the priest nodded his permission, the newlyweds merged for a consummating kiss, their eyes wide open, as if in surprise.
I found out about their divorce as abruptly as I’d found out about their marriage. I was sitting in a molded plastic chair at Launderland, watching my clothes swoop around with Brian’s in an industrial-sized dryer and thinking about the first line of a poem by James Merrill:
Again last night I dreamed the dream called Laundry.
I loved the rolling-overness of that line, its rhythm an exact match for tumbling clothes. It took a while before I noticed a copy of the Herald Examiner lying on the empty chair beside me. One headline read: Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed? I may not have given the article a second look had my father’s name not leaped from the text.
Attorney Edward S. Cooper’s wife didn’t take kindly to his decision to retire for the night in her bedroom, according to a $25,000 lawsuit Cooper filed yesterday. In fact, Cooper said his wife, Anna Hill Cooper, brandished a twelve-inch knife, punched him repeatedly, and smashed his eyeglasses while demanding that he get out. As a result, Cooper’s suit contends, the attorney suffered “severe shock … severe pain in his right ear … is in fear of becoming totally deaf, thereby losing his right to earn his livelihood from his profession.” He also suffered a groin injury and a cut under his left eye. According to the Superior Court action, the assault took place on July 9, when Mrs. Cooper found her husband sleeping in the master bedroom of their Hollywood home. The Coopers had occupied separate bedrooms since May 30, the suit said.
The newspaper, limp from moisture in the air, felt as soft as cloth when I picked it up. My father had been married to Anna for only a few months. Toward the end of their honeymoon in Greece, I’d received a postcard of the Parthenon. On the back he’d written, “This is where it all began.” He meant Western civilization, though in light of their divorce, the message struck a Sibylline note, as if the seed of their marital undoing had been planted in that parched and foreign soil.
He’d been hard to get hold of ever since their return, and unusually slow to return my calls. On the few occasions we spoke, he didn’t report anything out of the ordinary. They were busy doing “this and that.” Pressed to elaborate, he’d say, “Eating. Sleeping. What people do.” His reticence wasn’t unusual and, considering that he and Anna hadn’t known each other for long, I figured their marriage would begin with a phase of daily, hourly adaptations. My father and his bride had a private life to relish and protect, and so I didn’t pry.
It was difficult to reconcile the couple I remembered from the Brass Pan with the article’s pugilistic wife and her slumbering husband. My father had been exceptionally deferential toward Anna that night at dinner, but no campaign of adoration or self-sacrifice would have compelled him, ever, to give up the comforts of his own bed. Lynn and her feminist friends would have said that terms like king-size mattress and master bedroom were coined to flatter the sovereignty of men, and my father was no exception. It may well have taken a sneak attack to boot him from that room. If that’s what really happened.
Despite his age, my father could rally a bullish strength whenever he felt threatened, his poor hearing and eyesight making him even quicker to react than he had been in the days when his senses were dependable. I’
m certain he would have thrashed back with enough force to injure an assailant, especially if startled from sleep. And yet, judging from his story, or its omissions, Anna came through the row unscathed. I balked at the “twelve-inch” knife, the kind of meticulously specific detail one often finds in exaggerations. The “groin injury,” whether true or trumped up to win him sympathy, may have been a bruise or a strained muscle, but because it was followed by the mention of “a cut under his left eye,” the wound became a jewel of allusion, implying that my father, peaceful and prone and defenselessly dreaming, had barely escaped a castrator’s knife with his manhood intact.
It was hard for me not to admire his use of writerly devices, however debatable their literary merit or vengeful their intent. The repetition of the word “severe” to emphasize his shock and pain, the phrase “right to earn his livelihood,” as if he’d been denied a constitutional guarantee—Dad had crafted a malediction. What troubled me, though, was that he claimed to earn a livelihood from his profession when he had, in fact, been retired for years. Preposterous allegations may have been his stock in trade, but it seemed unwise to put in writing, and file in court, an assertion so easily disproved. This worried me not just because it was an outright lie, but because it was the kind of lie my father had once been sharp enough to catch before it damaged a client’s credibility and called their other claims into question.
I glanced up from the Herald. The air was humid, dense with the lemon scent of detergent. How did the rest of the poem go?
… the sheets and towels of a life we were going to share
The milk-stiff bibs, the shroud, each rag to be ever
Trampled or soiled, bled on or groped for blindly….
Customers absently fed dollar bills into the change machine or folded garments still warm from the dryer. Sleeves and pants legs clung to each other, crackling with static when peeled apart.
I showed the article to Brian the moment he got home. He shook his head as he read it and said he wasn’t surprised.
“Not surprised! I think it’s incredible.”
“Oh, it’s incredible,” he said. “I’m just not surprised.”
“Why not?”
“Because past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.”
“If he’s never been divorced before, how is this predictable?”
“He’s no stranger to divorce. Or to marital conflict.”
“Don’t you think people can change?”
“Not very quickly and not very much.”
“That’s sort of pessimistic for a shrink.”
“No. It’s optimistic. That way, I’m not disappointed by the rate at which people change.” His tie softly rasped as he tugged it through his collar. “Psychology is based on the idea that human behavior is made up of repeating patterns.”
“What about aberrations in human behavior?”
“They’re part of the pattern.”
I followed Brian into the bedroom and dove onto the bed, sighing the sigh I had learned from my father—a melancholy too immense to vent in one breath. “Do you think I should I ask him about it?”
“If your father wanted to talk to you about it, wouldn’t he have brought it up already?”
“What’s he going to say, ‘Oh, by the way, Anna came at me with a twelve-inch knife’?”
“Allegedly came at him.” He unbuttoned his shirt. “Would you want your father to know if I attacked you with a knife?”
“You’d never.”
“Supposing.”
I pictured Brian lunging toward me, a blade glinting in his upraised hand, his pretty blue eyes as homicidal as I had the imagination to make them. “No,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to worry him. Besides, I’d be ashamed I’d had the poor judgment to trust you.”
“There’s your answer,” he said. He stepped out of a pair of polished but innocuous brown shoes, then walked into the closet to hang up his pants.
I shucked off my clothes, tossed them onto the floor, and pulled the covers up to my chin. The sheets smelled like Launderland.
My father may have balked at inviting Brian to the wedding because he thought it would be harder to go though the ceremony in front of someone who’d been trained to detect trace amounts of doubt and self-deception. Little did he know how willingly my “mental-doctor friend” left his occupation at the office. Once Brian changed out of the tabula rasa of his work clothes, he allowed himself to be as mystified by human behavior as everyone else. Which meant, at the rate he was undressing, I had only a few more seconds to ask for his professional advice.
“If the headline says, ‘Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed?’ is my father Goldilocks, or one of the three bears?”
Hangers clanged. “He’s Goldilocks.”
“Because?”
Brian reappeared in the nude. “Because the bear finds him in her bed.”
“But it’s his bed, technically, so wouldn’t he be the bear?”
Brian switched off the light and pounced onto the mattress. Before my eyes had adjusted to the dark, I felt his hands gripping my shoulders, his breath against my neck. “Everyone,” he whispered, “wants to be the bear.”
The next morning I phoned my father, having resolved not to mention his divorce unless he mentioned it first. Keeping mum allowed me to conduct an experiment of sorts. Now that I knew the truth, but he didn’t know I knew, I could observe his methods of dissembling, could see how far he was willing to go to hide what had happened and spare himself disgrace. A purely imaginary disgrace, since the person to whom he’d make his admission (me) wouldn’t think of him as disgraced so much as entangled, as all of us are, in a boundless net of human failings, which is history itself. But my father harbored a superstitious belief that truth floated in a misty limbo, dormant until it was spoken aloud. To say a thing was to make it true.
I let the phone ring at least a dozen times in case he was puttering around the house without his hearing aid, though once he’d taken it out, all the clanging bells in the world couldn’t get his attention. I was just about to hang up when he answered, or rather, when someone picked up the telephone without saying a word. The silence was willful as silences go, a silence with heft and dimension. Whoever lifted the receiver meant to challenge the caller, to throw them off guard. And so I was certain I’d dialed the right number. He must have been expecting Anna. I was about to say hello when something stopped me. I’d always been at odds with my father’s silence, and now, grasping the undeclared rules of the game, I found myself compelled to play along, even though he thought his opponent was someone other than me. We held our breath, kept absolutely still. I hadn’t shaved that morning and I had to make sure the mouthpiece didn’t grate against the bristles of my beard and make a sound like amplified sandpaper. Gripping the receiver too tightly might make it creak, but easing my grip might make it creak, too. There were strategies to master, advantages to gain. Not speaking demanded stamina. The silence from his end said, I dare you not to talk. The silence from mine said, Try me. No unretractable slips of the tongue. No oscillations of temper and regret. All that my father would never tell me about himself, and all that I would never tell him, fit snuggly into our speechlessness like a ring into a velvet box. Only a few seconds had passed, but who knows how long we could have gone on if his hearing aid hadn’t squealed and broken my concentration.
“Hello?” I said.
“Oh. It’s you.”
“What was that all about?”
“What was what all about?”
“You didn’t say hello.”
“You did. It doesn’t matter who says it first.”
“Well, actually, the person who picks up the—”
“You called to tell me how to talk on the phone?”
“No, I called to see how you are.”
He may not have heard me.
“How are you, Dad?”
“How should I be?”
“You should be—I don’t know—telling me how you are.”
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“My back is sore, for starters.”
“Did you pull a muscle?”
“I’ve been sleeping on the floor.”
“Oh, come on.”
“You come on. You asked why my back hurts and I’m telling you.”
“Why on earth would you sleep on the floor?”
“I toss and turn and it bothers Anna.”
I noted his use of the present tense. “What if you slept in another bed?” I’d almost used the Herald’s phrase: What if you “occupied separate bedrooms”?
“I can’t fall asleep if I’m not in my room. You get used to things and then, if they get taken away, you can’t get used to them.”
“Couldn’t Anna sleep in another bed?”
“You try telling her.”
“I just can’t picture you sleeping on the floor.”
“Why would I make something like that up? I don’t write books.”
I let that one pass. “Is there something you can do to make your back better?”
“Yes,” he said. “Sleep in my own goddamn bed. But Anna won’t have it.”
Why hadn’t he mentioned this in his deposition? It was at least as damning a charge as attempted castration. Of course, he’d fought off that indignity while he’d submitted to this one like a dog who’d been banished from its mistress’s bed, a humiliation my father would never make public, however dramatically it vilified Anna or illustrated the untenable conditions of their marriage. There was no way to tell this story without revealing its pitiful gist: the night may be cold and the mistress hardhearted, but the poor mongrel has no choice but to slink off the bed and curl around itself for comfort; the floor is its place in the scheme of things.
Had he actually camped out on the shag, or was this a fabrication meant to turn me against Anna so that when he finally told me she was gone, I’d be glad to see her go? Other sons may have been better at sorting fiction from fact, but in defense of what may sound like extreme credulity on my part, let me say that my father tended to nod off in circumstances that could keep a narcoleptic awake. While he watched wrestling matches on TV, for example, with the volume full-blast, his lids drooped and his head tilted back, his nap undisturbed by the bellowing crowd or thunderclaps of colliding flesh. The sight of two wrestlers in a headlock was as soporific to my father as the sight of my father napping on the couch would have been to them. No matter how awake he seemed, how pointedly impatient, at any moment the chasm of a yawn might open and expose his gold molars.
The Bill from My Father Page 7
