The Bill from My Father

by Bernard Cooper

  My father sauntered toward the Fiat as I got out, peeking though the open window despite my attempt to block his view. A rare tenderness lit him from within and stirred my allegiance like daybreak stirs a bird.

  “Hey,” he said. “Looks like you could use a new set of wheels.” The phrase “new set of wheels” was an affectionate flourish meant to make him sound, in the parlance of his own youth, palsy-walsy.

  “I can’t afford a new car,” I told him. I distinctly recall facing my father and shaping my tone so that I sounded neither pitiful (I’m too poor) or petulant (I’ll never be able to buy a new car).

  Before I knew it, my father and I were cradled in the plush bucket seats of his white Eldorado, gliding toward a Toyota dealership in West Covina whose ads he’d seen on TV. He pointed a stubby finger at his chest. “Let me handle this,” he said. “I’ve bought plenty of cars in my life and I know how to deal with these bastards. You watch; I’ll beat them at their own game. They won’t know what hit them.”

  On one hand, Dad’s braggadocio made me feel invincible, as though I were in the company of a seasoned pro. On the other hand, it relegated me to the role of admiring onlooker and suggested that I was too incompetent and naive to buy my own car. Which was entirely true. I floundered when it came to the treacherous etiquette of negotiating a major sale, a feat that required, it seemed to me, a keen mistrust of one’s fellow men coupled with a barely sublimated bloodlust. As far as I was concerned, getting gypped out of a few bucks was simply a built-in fee for avoiding confrontations with strangers. I’d watched my father often enough to know that such transactions excited him into what can only be described as a rapture of antagonism; he didn’t mind yelling threats and pounding desks and generally hurling himself bodily into the arena of commerce. Still, if a new car required me to be embarrassed by his aggression, bring on the blushing; and if it required a few hours of my infantalization, I was more than willing to comply. Besides, his intent was generous. The Caddy whizzed past slower traffic, as regal as a motorized mansion.

  As we walked across the asphalt lot of the Toyota dealership, colorful plastic pennants rippled and snapped in the breeze. I thanked Dad in advance and told him that I didn’t need whitewalls, an air conditioner, or a radio. Basic transportation would be fine. He nodded and forged ahead. Secretly, I hoped my modest expectations might endear me to him even more; maybe he’d close the deal that very day. Before his mood changed. Before I said something that would inadvertently set him off. Before he said crap or bastard to the dealer. My excitement was indistinguishable from panic. I wanted a beautiful new Toyota more desperately with every step. I wanted an end to the self-consciousness I felt on the road, an end to the shameful sense that the thunderous rumbling and rank exhaust were coming from my person rather than my car.

  The showroom felt bracingly cool after the heat of West Covina, the air thick with the deliciously medicinal perfume of new upholstery. In the center of the room, a sleek new convertible turned around and around on an enormous platform, as if swooning to the Muzak. The second we entered, salespeople, sensing prey, rose from their desks and converged. It occurred to me that we would be the prize for the fastest walker, the one whose handshake greeted us first. The victor was a skinny man whose snug black suit lent him an eel-like iridescence, or perhaps I was just seeing him as my father might: slippery, unctuous, not to be trusted. Dad shifted his weight to meet the man’s gaze, his posture erect. He walked up to a minivan on display and kicked a tire as if to gauge, through his knowing toes, the vehicle’s overall quality. He squinted at the sticker price.

  “John,” said my father, reading the salesman’s name tag. “Firstly, I’m an attorney. Secondly, when it comes to cars, I’m not some idiot off the street. A cousin of mine is fleet manager of a Cadillac dealership in San Bernardino.” A complete fabrication as far as I knew. “If we cut through the crap, you just might make yourself a sale. My son here—I’m buying the boy a car—doesn’t need any bells or whistles.”

  “I’m Bernard,” I said to the salesman. He shook my hand without taking his eyes off my father.

  “Well, Mr …?”

  “Cooper. Edward. Attorney at law.”

  “I gotta hand it to you, Mr. Cooper. It’s nice to meet a customer who knows what he wants and comes prepared to do business.”

  My father shot me a sidelong glance as if to say, Watch and learn.

  “I’m going to make this painless,” said the salesman. He spun on his heel and walked toward the glass door that led to the lot. We followed him outside to a veritable poppy field of new Tercels until we reached a red two-door that John claimed was the least expensive automobile on the lot. “This is the cheapest?” asked my father. His synonym for least expensive was meant, I suspected, to cast aspersions on the merchandise—That’s nothing more than a metal shell with some baked-on paint—and therefore place him at a strategic advantage. Though it pains me to do so, I must add that my father’s gold Star of David had loosed itself from the humid interior of his shirt to glint conspicuously in the afternoon light, the sight of which, given my father’s unabashed haggling, caused a chord of shame to vibrate inside me. I felt compelled to explain to the salesman how my father had worked hard for everything he owned; he was a hoarder, a scrimper, a seeker of bargains who could never take his solvency for granted, and in this respect he was like thousands of people who’d grown up poor and endured the Depression, Jewish or not.

  But that was a lot to explain to a salesman, especially on the cusp of a deal that would better my life. Certainly my father would have chastised me, and rightly, for making an excuse on his behalf, especially one coming from a young man who’d had it comparatively easy and for whom both money and automobiles were mysteries on par with astrophysics. To put it bluntly, if my father was conforming to the cliché of the cheap Jew, I was that cliché’s beneficiary. I peered at the car, feigning disinterest. Quite a performance considering how I coveted that little red Tercel.

  “Mr. Cooper,” said the salesman, “I know a shrewd man when I see one, and I’m going to do something that could put my job on the line. But before I tell you what it is, Mr. Cooper, I want you to promise that you won’t say a word to my boss.”

  I’d once heard that repeating a person’s name is a way to make them feel important, to win them over, and John, it seemed, had heard the same. Each time he invoked my father’s name, I felt myself lean closer, progressively mesmerized because I was a Cooper, too. My father, however, was immune to customer seduction. It wouldn’t have mattered if the salesman were Rasputin, Dad wouldn’t budge. “Let’s hear it,” he grumbled, folding his arms.

  “Mr. Cooper, I’m going to let you drive out of here for a mere two hundred dollars over the factory price. I’m going to scratch my commission on this. Frankly, I need the sales points more than I need the money, and if we can lock up this deal pronto, it’ll be worth my while. And of course, worth yours.”

  “You’ve got to be shitting me, John. I know you can give it to me under factory. I’m not paying a penny more than factory. Period.”

  My heart misfired, mouth went dry.

  “As I said, Mr. Cooper, I don’t mind giving up my commission but I can’t lose money on the deal. I’m giving you the best price you’re going to find in L.A. County.”

  Other customers were milling uncomfortably close to my Tercel and succumbing to the persuasion of salespeople. I wanted to turn to my father and blurt, Why would he lie? But it would have been disastrous to say anything, especially if I seemed to be siding with my father’s black-suited adversary.

  “I’m not buying it,” my father said. It took me a second to realize he meant the dealer’s story, not the car itself. “I know how this game is played. And I’ll play along up to a point. But we’ve reached that point, so let’s see what kind of a deal you can give me.”

  “Shop around if you don’t believe me, Mr. Cooper. Then come on back. The offer still stands. Better act quickly, though, ’cause
this baby isn’t going to stay on the lot much longer.”

  My father gave John the once-over, then turned to me. “Let’s go,” he said. “We’re taking our business elsewhere.”

  The salesman curtly thanked my father and walked away.

  “I think he’s basically an honest man,” I mumbled.

  “Honest my ass.” My father looked at me with something like pity; I’d never catch on, would forever remain a sucker, a rube. We trudged across the lot toward his Caddy.

  The drive back to Los Angeles took a good forty minutes. My father still fumed from the encounter with the salesman, his ears and neck flushed with blood. He’d been unmanned by having his deal rebuffed in front of his son. I tried to bolster him by praising his efforts on my behalf, telling him he was a gutsy negotiator. My joviality, however, couldn’t have been convincing; the Fiat kept careening through my head, leaking oil and molting upholstery. Sensing my disappointment, Dad insisted that the deal was far from over. “The guy’s playing hardball, but you watch. The phone will be ringing when we get back to the house. It’ll be him and he’ll say …”

  My father launched into an imitation of John cooing Mr. Cooper this and Mr. Cooper that, his interpretation making the salesman appear more obsequious than he’d actually been. I’m positive Dad used the phrase tail between his legs, because it colored their struggle with a certain zoological ferocity. My father promised that when the call finally came, John would apologize for being too hasty and lower the price. I’d have my car before I knew it.

  One day passed. Two. Three. Each day I called my father on a transparent pretext and attempted to find out whether he’d heard anything from the salesman. On the fourth day, I steeled myself and asked him outright.

  “Keep your pants on,” grumbled my father. “I said he’d call, didn’t I?”

  In the meantime, I’d researched the prices at other Toyota dealerships around town and discovered that John’s offer was the best of the bunch. And so I called my father in a last-ditch effort to own the car.

  “Dad,” I said. “I’ve done some comparative pricing.”

  “So?”

  “I think we should go for the Tercel before it’s sold. And if it’s a matter of not wanting to pay more than the factory price—and who can blame you?—I’d be happy to contribute the extra two hundred dollars myself.” The proposal had about it the pleasing hue of teamwork, and I wished I’d thought of it days ago.

  “It’s not about the two hundred bucks,” shouted my father. “It’s a waiting game. He’s holding out so I’ll come running back and throw my money at him. If you can’t sit tight for a while, if you have to have everything you want right when you want it, you might as well forget the whole damn thing.” Before he hung up, he said, “And don’t pester me anymore. I’ll call you when the car is ready.”

  The bill arrived after a month of silence. By then I’d given up on the car, resigned to drive the Fiat until it broke down completely or until I could afford to make payments on a new car, whichever came first. Losing that Tercel was a substantial disappointment, but one swiftly eroded by the grind of daily life: grading papers for my freshman comp classes while trying to figure out how to earn more money and still have time to write. If I had any energy left over to fret about a car, I’d fret about the one I owned. Our visit to the Toyota dealership might have ended up being one of many aggravating but forgettable misunderstandings I’d had with my father—stepping on the other’s toes: that’s how the two of us knew where we stood—if not for the letter.

  I suspected my father might brood about our day at the dealership, but I wasn’t prepared for the extremity of his reaction—if in fact the bill was a reaction. Whenever I tried to make a connection, the machinery of cause and effect began to break down. Perhaps my father had been offended by my offer to supplement the cost of the car, thinking I’d implied he couldn’t afford it, couldn’t pull off the deal on his own. Yet, even taking into account the full force of my father’s volatility, it seemed unlikely that my offer of $200 would result in him suing me for two million.

  As the month wore on, my longing for the car grew dimmer while my father’s no doubt deepened, thrusting him back to the deprivation he knew as a boy. The salesman’s refusal to call must have undermined his notion of how the world worked, how bargains were struck by men like himself, men possessed of wile and nerve. What had happened, or failed to happen, defied his every paternal assurance, his promise that the phone would ring, the salesman buckle, the car become mine. How humiliated he must have been to know that I awaited his call. That he’d asked me to wait must have made it worse. My father’s refusal to be in the wrong meant that I’d have to wait forever.

  Twenty years have passed since I opened that bill, and for most of those years I’d taken it for granted that at some point during our afternoon in West Covina, my father had given the dealer his telephone number. But I’ve sifted through that trip a dozen times, squinting against the glare of new cars, breathing the icy air of the showroom, and I can’t recall my father handing over one of his business cards, or filling out a form of any sort. Even if my father had been right, the salesman wouldn’t have known where to reach him.

  Before she officially admitted my father to the psychiatric ward at Saint Joseph’s, Dr. Montrose drove him to his trailer and then to a nearby Bank of America, where she helped him acquire a safe deposit box. He carried the $5,000 in cash and his important possessions in a grocery bag, which he kept in his lap. Dr. Montrose sat beside him, and as he paused at each blank in the application, she whispered his Social Security and Medicare numbers, the statistics before her in his open file.

  That night, she phoned at 11 P.M. to tell me he’d complained of stomach pains that had worsened in a matter of hours. She’d finally sent him to the Intensive Care Unit, where the staff suspected internal hemorrhaging. Tests were being run, she said, and an internist would consult me in the morning. “Your father’s been unusually agitated, but it’s probably the pain.” She told me he’d hurled a pitcher against the wall, swearing a blue streak at Lucinda, who up until then had been able to keep him relatively calm—as long as he understood what she was saying. But whenever fatigue or exasperation thickened her accent, he demanded to speak to Betty, who he’d kicked out of his room just hours earlier for “talking his ears off.”

  The following morning in the lobby, the buttons for the elevators wouldn’t light up no matter how firmly or often they were pressed. People milled around, holding bouquets and sipping Styrofoam cups of coffee. I checked and rechecked the piece of paper on which I’d jotted my father’s room number, unable, in my dread, to commit it to memory, which committed it to forgetfulness. The broken button, I warned myself, was only a hint of malfunctions to come. I took a deep breath and tried to both acknowledge the future and hold it at bay.

  When an elevator finally appeared, it opened up to reveal Betty. The only passenger, she stood against the dim rear wall, her metallic blond hair like those gold-leaf halos encircling the heads of saints in Renaissance paintings. With her shoulders thrown back and chin uplifted, she stepped into the morning light, her eyes fixed on mine. She looked every inch a heavenly messenger come to deliver momentous news. Tears slid down her cheeks, skin glistening where a layer of face powder had been washed away. She opened her arms, cinched me inside them. I couldn’t, and didn’t want to, resist. Her bulky lavender sweater smelled pungently of floral sachet, and remotely of Old Spice, the faint, valedictory trace of my father lost to the antiseptic odor of the hospital as soon as I took my next breath.

  “It’s a miracle!” she exclaimed, pulling away. She dug into her shoulder bag and handed me Kleenex.

  I dabbed at my eyes. “What are you saying? Are you saying he’s okay? When I saw you crying, I thought …”

  “He’s regained consciousness! He’s talking!”

  “Are you sure? Last night Dr. Montrose told me …”

  “Go and see for yourself!”

  When
she stuffed the package of Kleenex back into her bag, a gilt-edged Bible caught the light. Deathbed conversions couldn’t be all that uncommon at Saint Joseph’s (Brian, who’d been raised in the pragmatic United Church of Canada, referred to these eleventh-hour transformations as “cramming for the final”), and I hated to think that my father might have accepted Christ’s salvation while insensible with pain and fear, like a prisoner who finally relents and signs a false confession. Had Betty come here on a mission? Had my father felt it necessary to change who he was, and worse, to disavow who he’d been, that a higher power might spare him from death, or let him die in peace? Better he should dial the prayer line in Texas just to kill time. Better he should defend a headless chicken, proclaiming it a sign from God for the benefit of all mankind.

  And so the sight of Betty’s Bible stirred me to a revelation: the father I had was the one I wanted, even if I was destined to spend my life perplexed. Of course, I still had qualms about him and always would, but relatively speaking, and for the time being, I’d come as close to qualmlessness as I ever got.