The Bill from My Father (15 page)

Any name would have been too late. One day, blood began seeping from the corner of Bob's mouth. My parents called an ambulance and went with him to the hospital, thinking it best to leave me behind. When the double doors slammed shut, I could see my mother and father and the attending paramedic through the small rear window as the ambulance sped away.

Gary phoned me at home later that day—he'd joined my parents at the hospital—to tell me Bob was dead, explaining that our mother and father were too distraught to tell me themselves. His voice was steely to the point of dispassion. And yet, once we hung up, what reverberated wasn't only what he'd said, but the keening he'd swallowed in order to speak.

A decade later, the same steeliness braced Gary's voice when he told me he'd been diagnosed with colon cancer. He had just turned thirty-four, and the luck that lasted since the day he went by another name had started to change. Illness didn't fit the life that he and Sharleen had made for themselves. Didn't fit his new law firm, the glass house in Encino, the walk-in closet full of Nehru suits and op-art dresses, the heated swimming pool that steamed like a bowl of blue soup when the valley nights were cool.

By the time Gary received a second medical opinion, which confirmed the first, I felt myself giving in to numbness, which brought with it a perverse sort of conviction, a sustenance very close to hope. Bob's death had left me suspicious of remission—a promise that never materialized—and yet I somehow convinced myself that this steeliness of Gary's would be the very thing that spared him, that he would defy cancer not by recovering from it, but by continuing to outlive the disease until his diagnosis was false, a rumor time would disprove. I'd witnessed Bob's decline in close quarters, seeing
his body surrender and rally with dispiriting regularity, and the geographical distance between Gary and me—even one drivable by freeway—made his illness easier to disbelieve. Except when I went to visit.

One afternoon toward the end of summer, Gary and I were sitting together at the edge of his pool, dangling our legs in the water. He wore a loose T-shirt and shorts, and I saw that the once-robust muscles of his thighs had grown thin. Beneath the water, his skin turned blue-white, and as he lazily stirred his legs, bands of tendon shifted along the length of his calves. Each hair and pore, each clinging bubble of trapped air, was magnified by the water and articulated with a terrible clarity. Gary also seemed to be looking at his legs, but he bent forward, reached out, and, as I'd seen him do many times before, dipped his hand into the pool and scooped a flailing bee from the surface, water dripping through the sieve of his fingers. He pivoted to one side and tipped his hand so the insect would tumble off his palm and onto the flagstone, where it could dry off and, if it revived, fly away. He used to do this to keep the children to whom he gave swimming lessons from accidentally getting stung, and it had become an unthinking mercy as well as a sport whose challenge was to save the insect from drowning and himself from pain. Watching him do it always made my stomach drop because it was hard to tell if the bee was dead or merely stunned, whether it had spent its stinger in the struggle to escape from the heavy, clinging surface of the pool or was so agitated that it would sting at the least provocation. In a mock-mystical tone, Gary would always tell me, as he held the bee aloft and treaded through waist-high water toward the pool's edge, that he could think a bee into submission by aiming a ray of his psychic power. This time though, the usual remark about mind over matter wasn't forthcoming, and the bee in his palm began to stir. But that's not what caused me to catch my breath. When Gary had leaned to the side, his T-shirt rode a few inches above the waistband of his shorts, revealing a plastic pouch, a small pillowy reservoir the likes of which I'd never seen before and whose purpose I couldn't place. A tube entered a hole in my brother's body that surgical
tape and gauze hadn't entirely covered, a tear so raw and red and unexpected that, instead of having been implanted, the tube could have pierced his flesh just then. No sooner had I seen this than he let out a yelp as loud and helpless as any I'd ever heard from him—pain emanating, I thought, from this fresh wound. All at once blood banged in my ears and stars blazed and skidded through my field of vision until he lurched back, swearing and clutching his hand, and the laws of cause and effect resumed.

The sliding glass door behind us rumbled open and Sharleen peered out to see what had happened, wary, I was sure, that one more intolerable surprise awaited her, one more degradation of the body she made no mystery of desiring, once confiding in me that Gary was the sexiest man she'd ever known, adding how good it felt to want someone that much, and how lucky I was to have that hunger in store for me. Now, standing behind the screen door, she appeared more fragile than the last time I'd seen her. Every failed treatment took its toll on her as well as Gary, as if she too had undergone invasive tests and experimental therapies, which in a sense she had.

Gary must have seen the shock on my face, because after that day we began having uncharacteristically long conversations, the topic of which was often our father. That's when he told me about walking in on Dad and his secretary, and how our father believed that Grace would ruin Bob's life unless he took drastic measures. “Ruin his life,” Gary repeated, too tired for irony. “You can forgive Dad all you want, but after a while, you realize he respects you more when you hold things against him. He wants a sparring partner.”

When Gary died, I prodded everyone for details, especially Sharleen, hoping not to appear morbid, but driven to risk rudeness just the same. The moment of Bob's death had never been discussed, and so it was a blur in my imagination, the missing passage of a text. I couldn't have articulated this at the time, but I was asking for a story whose particulars could continue to be lived through.

Gary and Sharleen had been watching the late-night news, and after remarking on the stupidity of a used car commercial, my brother gave the finger to their TV, downed a couple of pills, and
kissed his wife. He found, after a few labored adjustments, a position comfortable enough to carry him through the night. Sometime toward morning, Sharleen dreaming beside him, he stepped beyond the threshold of sleep and entered the boundless end of sensation.

However brief, however reconstructed or secondhand, I was glad to have a story in which Gary was present till the very end; the story withstood what happened next. Less than a month after Gary's funeral, my father showed up unexpectedly at the house in Encino, asking if he could visit. Sharleen offered him a chair in the living room and went into the kitchen to get them something to eat, but he wasn't sitting there when she returned. She assumed he was in the bathroom, and so she set down the tray and waited. My father wasn't the type to show up unannounced and Sharleen was certain that grief had brought him there on a sentimental impulse. He was a difficult man, she thought—all the lingering ill will about Gary leaving the practice—but that was a while back, and what was the point to grief unless patience or concern or some other human virtue could occupy the emptiness? She never thought she'd be a young widow sitting alone in her living room wondering such things, and she felt the unstoppable welling up that came upon her in those days at the drop of a hat. She wiped her eyes on a napkin, glad my father hadn't walked in when her eyes were wet, afraid the sight of her crying might have set him off, too. She remembered him afflicted by violent sobs at the funeral, the storm of it silencing those who, until they heard him wail, only mistook themselves for mourners. Sharleen began to worry when she realized he'd been gone for a long time. She got up and walked down the hall toward the bedroom. The closer she came, the more clearly she heard a dull tapping through the walls, as urgent and otherworldly as a table knocking at a seance. The sound grew louder as she entered the bedroom.

The door to their walk-in closet was open, and inside, with his back to Sharleen, stood my father. He briefly inspected one of Gary's shirts before sweeping it aside. The wooden hanger tapped against the wall in an almost code. One shirt, another. His brisk efficiency
suggested that he had a plan. He checked each tag for the shirt size, sometimes thrusting his arm into the garment as if to wrench it inside out. Unable to move, Sharleen watched him go for her coats and search inside the pockets.

She heard herself say, “Stop it.”

He neither turned around nor stopped.

She tried again. “What are you looking for?”

“You know what I'm looking for.”

“I wish I did,” she said. “You're scaring me.”

“I'm looking for the new man in your life.”

“What?”

“I know you've been seeing another man.”

“Ed. That's crazy.”

“I'm not crazy.”

“Stop this or I'm calling the police.”

“By the time they come, I'll have proof.”

“So what? What if I
was
seeing a man?”

My father turned. His hands were shaking. “It's too soon.”

“I'm lonely.” She said this not as an admission, but because the truth of it hit her just then, stark and remarkable.

She stepped back as my father barreled past her. “I'm lonely,” he echoed, and she couldn't be sure whether this was blurted in mockery or commiseration. He raced out of the house, left the front door open. She watched to make sure he'd driven away, then shut the door and locked it.

Ron and I must have talked about our father's surprise visit to Encino a dozen times since Sharleen told us about it. Each time, Dad became less culpable because we considered his grief—now as incendiary as his temper—a mitigating circumstance. We weren't necessarily dutiful sons, at least not by our father's standards, but we were saddened by what was happening to our family and hesitant to add more reasons for mistrust than we absolutely had to. If we knew anything, Ron and I, we knew that our father's losses had started to deform him; we felt its deforming pressure in ourselves. Dad began to settle ever more deeply into silence, a silence breached
infrequently, and only by explosion. Over the next several years, Ron and I were allied first and foremost by the puzzle of how to love such a man.

Sometimes, when contemplating the possibility of my father's death, I'd ask Brian if he thought, when the time came, I'd be inundated by all the unresolved emotions my father and I had accumulated over the years. He'd think for a moment and say, “No. Not necessarily. It might be a relief.” Then, when I asked him if he thought my father's death might be a relief from all the unresolved emotions we'd accumulated over the years, he'd say, “No. Not necessarily. It might dredge them up.” And so, the night Brian and I returned home to a message from Nancy on our answering machine, asking me, in a small anguished voice, to call her the moment I got back, I told Brian I was sure my father had died, and whatever was coming was going to be hard.

It fell to me to tell my father, but not before contacting my father's doctor, who warned me that high blood pressure made Dad's health precarious enough that he should be told of Ron's death while under sedation. And so, on the implausible pretext (I was too distraught to think of anything better) that the doctor, unable to reach my father by phone, had contacted me and insisted I bring him in for a checkup, I drove by the old house in Hollywood and picked him up. During our drive to the medical center, I couldn't stop wondering what it must have been like for Nancy to find Ron wide-eyed and lifeless at the top of the stairs, or whether my brother felt the last bright fragment of consciousness dislodge as his heart seized and he plunged toward the floor. It was all I could do to keep my mind on the road and my grief hidden behind a scrim of small talk. That my father failed to notice my distress or question our mission was a testament either to my acting ability or to what had become for him, at the age of eighty-three, an obliviousness both self-protective and involuntary.

The doctor met us in the waiting room before we'd had a chance to sit down. If initially gladdened by the special attention, Dad was a little surprised when we breezed right past the receptionist and the
people looking up from their magazines. We were ushered into an examination room, where, without so much as having to be asked, he clambered onto the padded table, an unwrinkled length of fresh paper crackling beneath him. He blithely offered his arm for the stethoscope and the blood pressure cuff—“Whaddaya hear, Doc? Is there an echo?”—and then for a hypodermic, which the doctor sank, with practiced alacrity, deep into the waiting vein. Not until the plunger had been fully depressed did my father ask what drug he'd been given or what all the fuss was about. Instead of answering, the doctor dabbed at the ruby bead of blood and instructed his patient to hold the cotton ball firmly in place. Then he spun on his heel, giving me a solemn nod as he left the room. My father finally registered a fateful irregularity in the normal course of things. Fear seized his expression for a few seconds before it let go. His shoulders slowly lowered, the gauze of Valium softening his eyes, his pupils opening their black apertures to the point where I thought I could see myself inside them, speaking in the dark. “What!” he yelped, when I told him the news. “What the hell are you saying?” He drew back his arm tried to strike me. The punch missed by inches. He overshot his center of gravity, his fist continuing to sail past my cheek, my ear, the momentum almost causing him to topple over. I had to steady him atop the table, but he bristled meekly, wouldn't let himself be righted without a fight. He wanted, I think, to look at me, to look
into
me, and gauge the truth of what I'd said, but the sedative made it hard for him to focus, and so his rage was strangely familiar: feral, diffuse, alarming, useless.

I took down Mr. Delaney's number and told him I'd see what I could do about my father's overdue phone bill. After we hung up, I got to thinking how, late in the course of family life, the child is often called upon to assume the role of parent, and the parent, due to age or illness, often reverts to the role of child. So common is this reversal, I figured, that even a man as stubborn as my father, as proudly self-sufficient, would open his hands when hardship befell
him and accept what his son was able to offer. He didn't have to accept it happily or with gratitude. What mattered was that he'd stay out of debt.