The Bill from My Father (6 page)

“It's your dime.”

“About what happened in the living room …”

“What happened in the living room?”

Either (a) he didn't remember our altercation or (b) he remembered but was acting as if he didn't because feigning ignorance would make this potentially unpleasant phone call easier on us both. I followed Dad's lead and opted for amnesia, starting the conversation from scratch.

“I was wondering if I could borrow your jumpsuit.”

“Sure. When did you want to come pick it up?”

“I just need it for a day, is all.”

“Okay.”

“I'll bring it back dry-cleaned.”

“I said okay, didn't I?”

“I know you wear it a lot and I don't want to deprive you of …”

“Of clothes? You think that's my only clothes? Don't be ridiculous. I got a closet full. You really like to make things difficult, don't you?”

“Things
are
difficult, don't you think? I'll never get used to it.”

He laughed a bitter, commiserating laugh. “If I had a nickel for every pain in the ass I've had to put up with,” he said, “I'd be a rich man with a sore ass.”

“The phone company's on your case these days?”

“Why should I pay for calls I didn't make?”

“Have you disputed the charges?”

“Every time they call. And believe me, they don't let up. I'd get an unlisted number if I didn't have to pay them to get it. You should hear the way they twist things around! They connect me to this person and that person until I don't know whether I'm coming or going. I'm keeping track of how long they've put me on hold and I'm going to take them to court and charge them for every minute of it, with interest. Don't think I won't.”

“Bureaucracy.”

“You can say that again.”

Back and forth we batted life's hassles. If we both insisted the world was unfair, then we both lived, for a while at least, in the same world.

“I'll be there in an hour,” I said.

I must have been even more eager for a reunion than I realized, for recollection entirely bypasses my hanging up the phone and getting dressed and driving to his house, setting me smack in his upstairs bedroom. Mother had carpeted the master bedroom in the same white shag as our living room, the wallpaper flocked with white fleur-de-lis. In keeping with the decor, Dad stood before me clad only in a pair of boxers, and though the sight of them reminded me of the lipstick incident, I refused to give the memory a crimson inch.

My father often remarked on the anatomical landslide of his aging body, but that afternoon he didn't appear at all modest about the excess flesh of his chest and belly or the creases in his skin. Throughout my boyhood, I'd reassured myself that by the time I
grew up, medical science would find a cure for aging just as it had for polio, and if the cure was delayed, I'd have myself cryogenically frozen until an antidote to death had been invented. Now, as an adult, I pitied the rationalizations of that boy, yet I looked at my father stripped to the waist and tried to tell myself that a strict regimen of exercise and diet might spare me from the effects of age—a deceit that had itself grown old, too feeble to soothe me.

Dad chatted about this and that just to hear the sound of his own voice, and after all these weeks of our not speaking, I listened just to hear the audio portion of fatherhood. “You don't need anything besides the jumpsuit, do you? Money or something?” When I told him no, he jokingly asked if I could loan
him
a twenty.

He swung open his closet door. The odor of mothballs wafted from its dim interior, where a small, high window admitted a single shaft of light. The closet seemed as separate from the outside world as a sanctuary, the air inside it a muffled, secret substance. Dad flicked a switch and the bare lightbulb revealed a museum of suits, an archive of ties in every width and color, the leathery husks of at least a dozen shoes. His khaki jumpsuit hung from a hook, looking limp and dejected without my father to give it life.

“Try it on,” he insisted.

In the spirit of locker room camaraderie, I stripped to my Fruit of the Looms, dipped my feet into the puddle of polyester, and tugged upward. Once I'd stuffed myself inside the jumpsuit, my father appraised me, or rather, gazed at me and appraised himself. “I'm getting a little thick around the middle,” he said. “But you're still pretty thin. I should lay off the potatoes.”

“Potatoes don't make you fat.”

“This,” he insisted, grabbing a handful of loose flesh from his stomach, “is a potato.”

“It's maybe the butter you put on it, not the potato per se.”

“Potato persay?” He adjusted his hearing aid. “Turn around and let me get a look at you!” He made a stirring motion with his index finger.

“It kind of binds,” I said, rigid as a stick figure.

“What are you talking, binds? It looks wonderful! How about we go out and I'll buy you one of your own? We'll get some lunch and then stop at the Big and Tall on Western. They got them in any kind of color. Leisure suits, too. You point and I'll pay; it's as simple as that. Whaddaya say?”

“That's really generous, Dad, but I'll probably only wear it once.”

“And to where will you wear it?” He couldn't stop smiling at the sight of me: Daddy's simulacrum. In our rush to reestablish contact, he hadn't bothered to ask why I wanted to borrow his jumpsuit, and I hadn't bothered to think he might.

“To a party at Lynn's.”

“Oh? What kind of party is Lynn giving?”

“Just a … party party.”

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.”

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 exquisite!”