The Bill from My Father

by Bernard Cooper

  “What’d he say?” asked my father.

  “He said, ‘It depends.’ ”

  “Betty, please! I’m telling you these things in confidence. You have no idea what my father and I have been through. Our relationship is complicated. I love him in my own way, and vice versa.”

  “He loves you, he says, and vice versa.”

  My father shouted, “What’s the vice versa?” He sounded hurt. Shocked on top of it. His hearing aid squealed.

  “Put him on the phone, Betty.”

  “What’s the vice versa?” he asked again.

  “It’s that I love you in my own way and you love me in your own way.”

  “Oh. I thought it was …” His voice trailed off.

  “You thought it was what?”

  “Hate.” He expelled the word like a cough.

  “Dad! I don’t hate you.”

  “You never know,” he said. “Worse things have happened.”

  “Worse things have, but I don’t.”

  “You get checkups?

  I was taken aback. “Yes.”

  “And you don’t have the AIDS?”

  I’d taken the test a year ago and waited an endless week for the results, frightened for myself and for Brian, for the friends I’d lost and might lose still. I was about to tell my father I’d tested negative when I heard a clatter on the other end of the line. Then Betty said, “I guess he went to take a nap. Ed?” she called after him. “Ed?” Then into the mouthpiece, “I should probably go. I don’t want him climbing those stairs by himself.”

  My father had sobbed for each of my brothers, sobbed raggedly, a cataract, his face clenched as tightly as a fist. Beyond shame or consolation, he wailed into the empty air, It should have been me, until weeping had siphoned the life from his eyes, the dazed figure sagging in a chair as close as a man had ever come to perishing in place of his son. And now, finding myself on the phone with Betty, beyond shame or consolation myself, I envied my brothers their unenviable deaths—a final sibling rivalry—for death would have been the only way to solicit an emotion from my father as abiding as his grief.

  Then again, with three sons dead, what was left within him to solicit? What reserves of emotion remained? That he’d had to hand the phone to Betty, that he’d had to walk away without a word, was a measure not of callousness but love—brusque and evasive, too difficult for him to bear for long, but love nonetheless. He’d rather his question go unanswered than be met with bad news.

  “Don’t hang up yet,” I said to Betty, trying to compose myself. “I wanted to ask you about some phone calls.”

  “Oh Lord,” she sighed. “You know about them. Why on earth would Anna call and ask for her things back after all this time?”

  “Anna?”

  “Your father told me to tell her that possession is nine-tenths of the law. She didn’t like that one bit! Another time I told her to let bygones be bygones. Did you know she threatened your father with a knife?”

  “I read it in the … yes. But it’s not Anna’s calls I’m talking about, Betty. I’m talking about calls to Texas. To the Benny Hinn Ministries.”

  Betty brightened. “Your father calls the prayer line every morning.”

  “No. Uh-uh. I don’t care if he’s saying Hail Marys …”

  “That’s Catholic.”

  “Betty, my father may not go to temple or wear a yarmulke, he may not even be religious, but he’s Jewish to the core, and no ministry is going to change that. Believe me, if he’s calling a prayer line, he’s only doing it to please you.”

  “How sweet!”

  “Yes,” I said. “He’s a sweet old Jew.”

  “Well, I think it’s wonderful that he’s so open-minded at his age. It can’t hurt him to learn about Jesus. Jesus the man, I mean. It’s an interesting part of history. An inspiring way to start the day.”

  “It’s costing, though, Betty, and he hasn’t been paying his phone bill. I had a long talk with a man named Delaney from Pacific Bell, and they’re not going to let it slide forever. They’re going to disconnect his phone.”

  She mulled this over. “I’m surprised to hear that because your father just gave me a generous raise.”

  I steeled myself, about to ask if she would have a talk with him about the bills. “Maybe you could …”

  “I will,” she said resolutely. “And you pray too.”

  Our Father of non sequiturs, of reductio ad absurdum and quid pro quo. Our Father for eternity, ipso facto.

  And then Betty told me she’d pay for the calls to Texas with the money from her raise—“It’s almost like filling Reverend Benny’s coffers”—and have a talk with my father. My gratitude was lavish; I not only wanted to thank her in the present but recruit her for my future thanks.

  “Oh, now,” she said, happily abashed.

  Betty was keeping my father in check, not helping him plot a frivolous lawsuit. I was sorry for having doubted her. All this time I’d been blind to the auspicious possibility that Betty might love and nurse him both. Far be it from me to limit the definition of love. Or of round-the-clock care. How little faith I sometimes had in people, in their adaptable, inventive connections. Betty, I was coming to believe, had enough faith for all three of us. She was ready and willing to pick up our theological slack. What difference did it make if his prayers were vicarious, or directed toward the goyims’ God? They’d been answered with companionship and improving health. Come to think of it, my prayers had been answered, too; the matter of the bill had been resolved. I’d done a good deed, or at least instigated it, without having to spend (though I would have if I’d had to) one red cent.

  “Soon,” Betty assured me, “he’ll walk without crutches. Things are about to change,” she said. “Just wait and see.”

  I had to wait only ten minutes. “Listen,” hissed my father when I answered the phone. I’d been filling my briefcase with books and notes for an afternoon lecture on the poet Elizabeth Bishop. “My bills are my business. Not Betty’s. Not yours. I’ll pay when I’m good and ready. You can’t seem to grasp the fact that I have reasons for doing things the way I do them. It’s not your place to understand or not understand. It’s not your place to question me.” His voice rushed like wind through a cavern. “No one can make me do what I refuse to do. No one can twist my arm. That’s the point I’ve been trying to make to you your whole life, but you don’t hear so good, I guess.

  “Who should an old man like me depend on? You? With the money you make? You live in a dream world. You may be a teacher, but you’re still in school, is the way I see it. Betty? Everything to her is God’s will, good or bad. I’m not ready to give my will away; I might need it someday, and I don’t think God’s going to care if I keep it. All’s I do is sit there and listen to the prayer line while she makes me breakfast. What else do I have to occupy my mornings? I’m getting saved all right—saved from having to think of things to talk to her about. We don’t have much in common, in case you haven’t guessed. But that’s fine by me ’cause I don’t need to have things in common with people. Not like I used to. What I need is a little peace. A little peace is all I’m after. If I wasn’t listening to ‘the Lord sayeth this and the Lord sayeth that,’I’d be walking around the house wondering, What if? What if now’s when I fall down the stairs? What if the numbness in my arm isn’t nothing? What if these pills are killing me? I’m supposed to rely on a doctor who makes me his lab rat, pumps me so full of drugs I don’t know whether I’m coming or going? Graham’s sixty if he’s a day, and putting my life in the hands of another old man doesn’t exactly—how do you call it?—inspire confidence. Me, myself, and I, that’s who a person can depend on in the end. Someday you’ll understand what I’m saying. You’ll look around and shout, ‘Hello?’ and your own voice will echo back. The sooner you get that through your head, the better.”

  “How crazy is my father?” I asked Brian. I’d wanted to ask if he thought my father was crazy, period, but that phrasing begged an eithe
r/or answer, and after all those phone calls and a long day at school, I could only cope with gradations of crazy. Brian looked surprised by my question because the two of us had an ongoing disagreement about diagnostic evaluations. As a psychotherapist, he thought terms like manic-depressive and narcissistic helped define human nature. As a writer, I thought they simplified human nature by forcing it into preexisting categories. He thought that categories were illuminating; I was inspired by the uncategorizable. He was washing the dishes; I was drying them.

  “Did something happen?” he asked.

  I told him about Mr. Delaney.

  “The telephone company is trying to triangulate.”

  “Triangulating bastards,” I grumbled, only half joking.

  Brian’s eyebrows lifted when I told him about my father putting Betty on the phone. After years in private practice, he’d perfected a nonjudgmental expression with which to greet even the most shocking revelations, so this slight change in his face was the equivalent to someone else’s jaw dropping. He sponged a plate and handed it over. “On what grounds is he refusing to pay?”

  “Grounds?”

  “Of course.” He smiled. “What was I thinking?”

  “Betty offered to pay for the long-distance calls and have a talk with him.”

  “Good.”

  “The way you say ‘good’ makes it sound bad.”

  “Well,” he said, “whether she takes care of it or not remains to be seen.”

  “I can’t afford to mistrust her at the moment.”

  “Then don’t.”

  “Don’t? Okay. Poof! Everything’s fine.”

  “Let’s not continue this conversation if you’re going to act like that.”

  “Don’t isn’t just some button I can punch.”

  “Too bad,” he said. “I’d like to punch it right now.”

  I laughed. “Good one.”

  “Insults come easily when I’m with you.”

  I leaned over and kissed him.

  “Well,” said Brian, “want to hear my diagnosis?”

  “Yes, Doctor.” I couldn’t resist calling him Doctor in situations that gave his credentials an illicit charge; I was doing the dishes with my doctor, for which procedure my doctor had stripped off his shirt, his sinewy forarms glistening with water, pectorals flexing as he rinsed a plate.

  “The diagnosis will have to pertain to you, not your father, if you want it to be useful.”

  “Go ahead. I’m ready.” I must not have been, though, since I handed him back the plate I’d just dried.

  “Drainer,” he said.

  “What?”

  He looked at the plate in my outstretched hand.

  “Oh. I thought that was the diagnosis.” I set the plate in the drainer and leaned against the sink.

  Only one other time had I asked Brian to diagnose me—goaded him into it, really. It happened about a month after our first date (which wasn’t a first date so much as a bout of energetic sex not twenty minutes after we met). We were sharing mounds of Thai food at a local restaurant when I pointed to the tablecloth and mentioned that a stain made by the black bean sauce resembled a Rorschach blot. This naturally led to a discussion of diagnostics. Brian described the Thematic Apperception Test, for which the subject is asked to supply the story behind an emotionally loaded image of, say, a boy holding a broken violin, the shadowy figure of a woman peering in at him from a doorway. But there was another test, called the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Index, that he considered an even more revealing diagnostic tool. He shook his head sternly when I asked if he would administer it after dinner. He warned me, gallantly I thought, that taking the MMPI might not be an appropriate way to spend time together at this early stage of our dating, since dating was a personality test in itself. I argued that the test would determine how well our relationship withstood tests in general. If we passed—that is, if we were still speaking to each other by the end of the evening—then this whole dating process, which ever-so-slowly doled out clues regarding our compatibility, would be expedited by leaps and bounds.

  And so we found ourselves back in Brian’s tiny apartment above a two-car garage in the Silver Lake foothills. His living room overlooked a stand of towering trees. Where the foliage thinned, distant city lights shone through the branches like luminous fruit. I’d been cavalier about the test in the restaurant, but it became clear that my psyche was being prepped for dissection when I saw Brian thumbing through the instructions on how to accurately interpret the test, then sorting dozens of clear plastic overlays printed with cryptic, zigzagging graphs for measuring the results. The spiral-bound test booklet looked formidable. Still, it would have been cowardly to back out now. Brian sharpened a pencil, set the booklet on his dinette table, and fine-tuned the dimmer switch till the overhead light was bright enough to read by but not so bright as to suggest interrogation or dentistry.

  “Remember,” he said, “this was your idea.”

  The MMPI is a true-or-false test, but the testee is advised to think of his responses to the statements—here Brian read from the manual—“As either TRUE or MOSTLY TRUE, or as FALSE or NOT USUALLY TRUE,” a distinction for which I needed several refresher explanations.

  I vacillated for a long time on the first statement: “I have met problems so full of possibilities that I have been unable to make up my mind about them.” Some statements appeared more than once but in a slightly rephrased form, giving the testee several opportunities to reveal either his consistency or hypocrisy. Taken as a whole, the unrelated statements gave my deepest concerns a narrative clarity they lacked in the rush and befuddlement of daily life:

  My father is a good man.

  I have had very peculiar and strange experiences.

  I sometimes have trouble sleeping.

  A minister can cure disease by praying and putting his hand on your head.

  I like poetry.

  Most of the time I would rather daydream than do anything else.

  I used to like hopscotch.

  Once in a while I laugh at a dirty joke.

  There seems to be a fullness in my head most of the time.

  I like dramatics.

  My family does not like the work I have chosen.

  I certainly feel useless at times.

  I love my father.

  My hardest battles are with myself.

  At times my thoughts race ahead faster than I can think them.

  Taking the test, it turned out, did hasten the knowledge we’d hoped to gain by dating; I knew I loved Brian when he stood beside my chair, speaking softly but not condescendingly, unsure about the wisdom of administering the test, but not so responsible that he wouldn’t use the tools of his profession to probe his date’s personality and, once it had been indexed, get him into bed. Unaware that I’d considered backing out of the test, he thought I either had nothing to hide or trusted him with whatever I might be hiding. I was the kind of guy who’d argue with the results as ardently as I’d begged to take the test, a guy too neurotic, paradoxically, to play the role of client to his shrink, which was fine by him.

  Brian tossed the sponge into the sinkful of dirty dishes and turned to face me. I considered asking him to put on a shirt so I could concentrate on what he was about to say.

  “You’re on a variable ratio, variable interval reinforcement schedule.”

  “I am? At least I’m on a schedule. What is it?”

  “You don’t get love from your father every time you try to get it, and every time you do get love from your father, you don’t get a lot. So you keep coming back again and again.”

  “You’re saying its the kind of situation where a person is stuck wanting something he almost, but won’t really, get?”

  “Close enough,” said Brian. He swiped the dishrag from my hand. “Let me dry for a while.”

  * * *

  Reading Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art” to my class that afternoon, I’d tried to inflect the refrain—“The art of losing is
n’t hard to master”—with the poet’s diminishing conviction. I wanted the students to hear how, each time Bishop repeats that phrase, she grows less and less certain about her ability to master loss until she must finally exhort herself to “Write it!” By the poem’s end, she suspects her claim is little more than false solace, a solace she must nevertheless force herself to believe in, and commit to paper, if she is to go on, unbowed by grief. This is the opposite of mastery, which isn’t defeat so much as the admission that one is whistling in the dark, saying to oneself whatever must be said to ward off the apprehension that losses will come “harder and faster” no matter what we do to protect ourselves against them, and that even the small, bearable losses—lost keys, forgotten names—are a harbinger of larger losses: homes and cities left behind, loved ones gone forever.

  Generally speaking, the inevitability of loss is not a topic a roomful of restless freshman, some of whom haven’t even lost their virginity, want to contemplate. And who can blame them? When I was twenty I would have squirmed in my seat and thought that the teacher was grasping at the straw of this sad lady’s poem as a way to justify his pessimistic view of the future. Oh, I would have felt sorry for the guy, but I would have considered him an exception to the rule that no matter how much loss a person endures, they’ll grow ever more contented and wise until they’re old and, hopefully, famous. I would have glanced at the classroom clock and wished I’d signed up for a different elective.

  That night in bed I replayed my lecture, deleting its infelicities and adding passages designed to make even the most disinterested student see how Bishop captures, in six short stanzas, the friction of ambivalence. All the while, Brian lay sound asleep beside me. He’d once joked that the reason he could fall asleep at the drop of a hat and I couldn’t was that he had a clear conscience. He may have been teasing, but one look at his placid face, the easy rise and fall of his chest, and my conscience seemed murky and clogged by contrast. Sure, there were nights when Brian twitched and whimpered, but far more often he laughed in his sleep. If you haven’t been awake at dawn, feeling every tremor of regret while your slumbering lover lies there and laughs, then you haven’t had insomnia.