The Bill from My Father

by Bernard Cooper

  I turned on my right side, my left. I began to wonder whether cumulative loss defies the laws of simple addition, its effect exponential. Could this be the one art of the poem’s title? One because loss is ongoing, art because one must make, and make again, a life despite who and what is missing? Faint gray light began to seep beneath the bedroom curtains and I remembered, with the unwelcome clarity that’s visited upon the sleep-deprived, those rare moments when my father’s features were freed from the grip of rage or suspicion or nervous mirth. His face didn’t relax so much as settle toward emotional bedrock. The expression that remained wasn’t simply one of sorrow, but that of a man stunned by sorrow, by its indifference and ubiquity, by its power over his waking moments, and though he didn’t know it, over mine.

  Winner Take Nothing

  When I received word informing me that my first book had been chosen for the PEN Ernest Hemingway Award, I held the letter in trembling hands while the following thoughts, in precisely this order, shot through my head:

  I won the Ernest Hemingway Award!

  I don’t deserve it.

  My father’s heard of Ernest Hemingway!

  I ran a couple of laps around the house, elated not just because of the letter, but because I remembered seeing a hardback volume of The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories on the shelves in my father’s upstairs hall. Perhaps the book had belonged to one of my brothers, or was left behind by Anna. In any case, a book by the award’s namesake was shelved right there in Dad’s very own home library, which would, as far as he was concerned, lend credence to the whole affair.

  I had to admit that my father had managed perfectly well without literature for the past eighty-six years, and I had no illusions that writing, especially mine, could enrich his life. He sometimes read Consumer Reports, but largely, I think, to sustain through retirement the image he had of himself as a citizen with buying power. His primary reading material was TV Guide, a map by which he and Betty navigated nights in front of the Sony console, watching Wheel of Fortune, followed by the healings of Reverend Benny Hinn. In the few instances I told him I’d had something published in a magazine or literary review, the first question he asked was, “How much they pay you?” I suppose he thought “they” were a faceless jury, twelve arbiters of taste. Imagine telling a man who keeps his cash in a gold money clip shaped like a dollar sign that, after working on a piece of writing for months, you’ve been compensated with a complimentary copy of the publication. “You’re kidding,” he’d say, shaking his head as if I’d been duped in a shell game.

  Over time, I’d cultivated a certain temperance when sharing literary news with my father. I’d come to consider it unfortunate, but not devastating, that he was unable to recognize the arc—or was it the bump?—of my career. Still, I ached to have him slap me on the back, wanted to hear his unstinting praise, and in it the honeyed pronouncement: son.

  Toward this end, I’d once given him something of mine to read. I chose a brief reminiscence about my mother, who had once dreamed of writing a book into which she’d pack every anecdote she could recall, starting with her immigration from Russia to the United States. Immigration isn’t quite the right word;what she told me was that she and her parents swam across the Atlantic Ocean to the shores of North America when she was two. I was young enough at the time to believe such a feat was possible, and my credulity inspired her to add that if the “authorities” ever discovered she’d entered the country illegally, they’d knock on our door and deport her, and that’s why she never applied for a driver’s license. Needless to say, my gratitude for having a mother grew instantly acute. I thought my father would find the tone of this reminiscence unmistakably fond. And so I handed him the pages one day, neatly stapled. Before I let go of the manuscript (feeling him tug it from the other side was the closest I’d come to his tangible enthusiasm), I told him I hoped he’d enjoy reading it and assured him he was under no obligation to offer comments.

  Days went by. Weeks. Months. In all the times we saw each other or spoke on the phone, he never mentioned reading it, and pride prevented me from coming right out and asking. If it hadn’t been for a chokingly potent vodka tonic I drank when we met for dinner one night at the Brass Pan, I may not have asked him to this day.

  “Hey, Dad. You’ve never mentioned the essay I wrote about Mom.” He peered at me over his bifocals. In the dim light of the restaurant, he looked anything but adversarial. “Well,” he sighed, “what can I tell you? You wrote down your opinion.”

  I stirred the booze with a swizzle stick and took another swig.

  My father wasn’t the first person I called about the award (I reached Brian during his break between clients, and then made short work of my address book), but when I dialed Dad’s number and told him him the news, his “Oh” was as round and buoyant as a bubble.

  In my excitement, however, I’d overlooked one crucial hitch: now that it had been deemed worthy by a panel of judges, my father might decide to read the book—specifically the passage where I mentioned his affairs while married to my mother. If only I’d used a pseudonym or the putty nose of fiction, but the man was unmistakable, the ink completely dry.

  Sure enough, once my father learned of the award, he phoned several local bookstores and, to my relief, was told that my book, which had been in print for several months, had sold out. Little did he know that the bookstores had ordered only a couple of copies in the first place, one or both of which had been bought by my friends. I wasn’t about to disabuse him of the idea that my fame was a wave that swept through the city, washing my work from the shelves. I told him the publisher was planning another print run that would be available after the PEN ceremony in New York. By lying, I’d bought myself more time to plan the least upsetting way to let him know he appeared in the book. Should he react badly, at least I wouldn’t arrive at the ceremony feeling defeated. No, defeat would have to wait until after I received the award.

  A few days later my father and I were talking on the phone about my plan to buy a suit for the big night, and though it usually made me bristle when he gave unsolicited advice, I listened with pleasure to his description of the dress code that prevailed in the courtroom, and to his suggestion that I try a men’s store downtown I was sure had long ago gone out of business. “Listen,” he said, “we’ll fly to New York together, share a room, and take in some Broadway shows. Betty will take care of things while I’m gone. To tell you the truth, I could use a break from her, and probably so could she from me.” I was stunned by his offer, and more than a little touched. Since he had no compunction about expressing bemusement at my small successes, it never occurred to me that he might need to take an active part in my large ones.

  I didn’t know what to say. Without Betty there to monitor his diet and medications, the responsibility for his well-being would fall to me, and I didn’t want to be encumbered. Not on this trip. Besides, Brian had booked our flights and hotel room weeks ago.

  “Nothing could make me happier than knowing you’re proud of me,” I told him, “but I’m only going to be in New York for three days.” I explained that I’d made plans to see a couple of old friends and had promised to read for a creative writing class. As terrific as a trip with him sounded, I wouldn’t have time to go to Broadway shows or give him the attention he deserved. Although his gout was finally under control, he still walked slowly and tired easily, and I suggested that Manhattan might not be the best city for him to visit until he had less trouble getting around. “Tell you what,” I said. “Let me take you and Betty to the Brass Pan just as soon as we get back. That way the four of us can relax and celebrate properly.”

  After I stopped talking, I gave my little speech high marks; it had been a good mixture of respect and autonomy. But the longer he remained silent, the more aware I became of the telephone’s static, a sound growing vast, oceanic. “Dad?”

  “Fine,” he said. “If that’s what you want.”

  Brian gave me his window seat as soon a
s we reached cruising altitude. I thought that looking out the window might make me less claustrophobic, but no matter where I sat, the plane seemed to stay aloft solely because of my death grip on the armrests. When panic finally gave way to the Valium I’d taken twenty minutes before takeoff, my hands and feet grew rubbery, the view of earth abstract.

  Once we were inside the terminal at JFK, it finally dawned on me that I’d survived the flight to receive an award. Luggage spilled onto a carousel. Sunlight burned through a bank of windows and warmed the glaring terrazzo floor. Outside, people swarmed toward a fleet of cabs and were whisked away to meetings and reunions. Possibility charged the air, dense, electric. In my happiness I turned to Brian and faced my father.

  At first I thought I might be drugged or dreaming, though by then, only the mildest trace of Valium remained in my system. I looked at him and couldn’t speak. The entire busy terminal contracted to a point the size of his face. Was he omnipresent like Santa Claus or God? Dad looked back and blithely smiled.

  “Surprise,” he said.

  “How …?” I sputtered.

  “Your plane. I went first class.”

  Suddenly I understood that all the questions he’d asked about the details of my trip—time of departure, name of the airline—questions I’d interpreted as paternal concern, were part of a perfectly executed plan.

  Brian, who at first had been as stunned as I, rushed in to fill the conspicuous silence. He shook my father’s hand. “Are you staying at our hotel?” he asked.

  I recalled with a start that Brian had booked rooms at a gay bed-and-breakfast.

  “I’m at the Warwick,” said my father. “Quite a fancy place, according to the automobile club.” Two familiar carryalls were making aimless circles in the periphery of my vision, and before I knew what I was doing, I yanked them off the carousel and threw one over each shoulder. “We’re going,” I announced, a decision I’d regret within minutes. I marched toward the taxi stand.

  “Bernard!” shouted Brian, dashing after me.

  “Share a ride?” my father shouted.

  I didn’t look back.

  The cab rattled like an earthquake, the driver barely missing other vehicles as he swerved from lane to lane. If this Caddy had another coat of paint, my father liked to say after a close call, we would have been in an accident! He could be funny, my father, which made me a heel for leaving him at the airport. But he’d gone ahead and followed me to New York. If he and I weren’t going to sleep in adjacent beds and take in the town like sailors on shore leave, we were going to arrive on the same flight, split a cab, and share who knew what other adventures. It wasn’t that he was “eccentric,” as the jacket copy of my book (a book whose publication I was in no mood to celebrate) claimed; he was unpredictable, capable of acts that were unimaginable until they happened. I’d spent much of my life having to appease or second-guess him, and look where a stab at independence had gotten me: grinding my teeth in the back of a cab, vacillating between guilt and fury while Manhattan slipped past the windows, unseen.

  Once we settled into our hotel room, with the faux hominess of its antique furniture and antimacassars, I took a shower and tried to gather my thoughts. Pelted by hot water, I returned to what was left of my senses and began to worry that I’d acted rashly. Had I been a different person, I might have poked my father in the ribs and teased him for being a stubborn coot. But in order to be a different person I’d have to have been raised by a different dad. The one I had was an old Jewish genie who materialized wherever he willed and granted any wish—as long as it was his.

  After changing into fresh clothes, I called the Warwick. My father answered on the second ring. Allowing himself to sound upset would have presumed he’d done something wrong, and so it was to his advantage to act as if nothing unusual had happened. “Hey there,” he said.

  “We’d better have a talk, Dad.”

  “It’s your dime.”

  “I thought you understood that I wanted to do this on my own.”

  “Fine. I’ll pack up my goddamn bags and go home.”

  “No. I want you to stay now that you’re here. I’m just trying to explain why I reacted the way I did at the airport.”

  “So now you explained it. Is that what you wanted to talk about?”

  There had to be more. In the shower, I’d rehearsed ways to tell him that his surprise was an intrusion disguised as kindness, a success usurped. But now, I couldn’t recall what I’d wanted to say, or why each of us always found it so important to win the other’s capitulation. After all was said and done, my father had come here because he was proud of me.

  “We’ll have lunch tomorrow,” he said.

  The dining room at the Warwick, with its ambient chimes of silverware and ice, offered a quiet retreat from the city. My father looked small and harmless as he sat waiting for us at a table. He peered nearsightedly around the spacious room, hands folded before him in a boyish pose, almost contrite. As Brian and I walked toward the table, it struck me that he was not at all the giant of the nursery I was prone to imagine; when I didn’t have the actual man before me, he ballooned into myth. There arose a somewhat leery conviviality as we seated ourselves at the table. Brian had had experience with couples counseling, but of course, expecting him to mediate the situation between my father and me would have burdened him with a professional responsibility while he was on vacation. It would also mean that the couple to be counseled was you know who.

  “So, Mr. Cooper,” asked Brian, “what have you been doing?”

  My father toyed with the silverware. “Nothing much. I watched a little TV.”

  “What did you watch, Dad?”

  My father cocked his head and thought. “They got this channel where they show you all about the hotel, where the lobby is, and the fire exits, et cetera.”

  Brian and I looked at each other.

  “Have you gone anywhere, Mr. Cooper? I hear there are some wonderful restaurants in the area.”

  “I had breakfast at a deli across the street. Haven’t had corned beef hash in so long, I’m telling you I got tears in my eyes! Don’t tell Betty, though. If it was up to her, I’d be eating air.”

  “Is there anybody you know in New York who you could go to dinner with tonight?” Please, I prayed.

  “We’ll find the name of a great place,” offered Brian. “And make your reservations.”

  “I got relatives in Jersey. Or used to twenty years ago. I should look them up next time I’m here.” His hearing aid squealed with feedback and he fiddled with its tiny dial.

  “The thing is, Dad, we can’t go to dinner with you tonight.”

  “I know,” he said curtly. “You’re very busy.”

  The maître d’ brought us huge glossy menus, the covers printed to look like marble. I opened mine, expecting an engraving of the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt honor thy father, who gazeth at the entrées. Without lifting his eyes from the menu, he waved his hand in a gesture of largesse. “Get whatever you want,” he said. “Sky’s the limit.”

  The morning of the ceremony, I added an additional paragraph to my acceptance speech. In it, I thanked my father for reading me stories as a child. His rapt voice had transported me, I wrote, and his enthusiasm for telling tales had introduced me to the power of language. I wasn’t certain whether my father had, in fact, read me stories as a child, but he wouldn’t contradict the sentimental notion, and our collusion would be a kind of bond.

  That evening, when the elevator doors opened on the tenth floor of the Time-Life Building, my nerves lit up like a chandelier. The representative of PEN introduced himself and pointed to a table where the books by the various winners and nominees were on display. My father had stationed himself beside it, staring down at a small stack of my books. I waited to see if he’d pick one up to peek at a page or turn it over to scan the jacket copy, but his hands stayed clasped behind his back.

  Half a dozen awards were handed out during the ceremony. Almost every author w
ho received one had written a speech identical to mine, a sort of apologia in which they expressed surprise at having won and either implied, or insisted, they were undeserving. The motif of modesty had been exhausted by the time I walked up to the podium, but I’d already revised my speech that morning and was far too nervous to change it again. When I came to the part about my father, I looked up from the wrinkled sheet of paper, eager to find him among the crowd and make eye contact, but I had to look back quickly for fear of losing my place. The paragraph I’d added struck me as a little schmaltzy, and I worried that my apparent sentimentality would discourage people in the audience from buying my book. In the end, it didn’t really matter; my homage was meant for Dad’s ears alone, and reading it aloud righted the night.

  Or so I thought. Immediately after the ceremony I found my father milling in the crowd and raced up to ask him how he’d liked my speech. “Couldn’t hear a damn thing,” he said, chuckling at his rotten luck. His hearing aid, unable to distinguish between foreground and background noises, had amplified both. From the rear of the auditorium, my father saw me reading in the distance, but he heard ubiquitous coughs and whispers, a battle of creaking leather coats, the rubbery acoustics of someone chewing gum.

  That trip to New York completely changed my life. In three days I’d charged so much money to my credit card that I had to teach two additional classes when I returned. Along with teaching, I began to publish in a few well-paying magazines. My combined income was still meager by any standard except my own, but at last I could speak my father’s language, a lexicon of hard cold cash.

  By that time, however, my father reacted to news of my solvency with a foggy acknowledgment. At the mention of money he’d look at me wistfully, nod his head, then look away. My father was going broke from lawsuits. Although Betty, true to her word, had paid the phone bill, Dad filed a harassment suit against Mr. Delaney. A judge dismissed the case before he heard it, admonishing my father to pay his phone bill on time and scolding him for clogging an overtaxed judicial system with a frivolous complaint.