Paying the price

WHEN Bernard Cooper was 28 years old, his father sent him a bill for his paternal services. “Typed on his law firm’s onionskin stationery, the bill itemized the money he’d spent on me over my lifetime.” The final figure was approximately $2 million. Cooper ignored the bill, knowing that he risked the vengeance of a man who was a loose cannon. “[T]hough I seriously doubted that he’d have the audacity to take me to court, the letter proved him capable of who knew what.”

Cooper’s newest memoir, “The Bill From My Father,” (he is also the author of “Maps to Anywhere” and “Truth Serum”) is one long, albeit mesmerizing, account of meetings between a father and a son locked into a ritually antagonistic exchange that knows neither nuance nor surcease. Quite often, it explodes into periods of estrangement lasting weeks or months, even years; then it spins its wheels until it can take up where it left off in real time. One thing it never does is release either protagonist from its primitive hold. The relationship is, in fact, so stubbornly fixated that the reader is impressed when it does not culminate in actual mayhem.

This, then, is a tale of domesticated obsession, rendered with all the sweet-sounding reason that good writing can bestow on a narrator who very nearly convinces us that he is reliable. What, after all, could sound calmer or more balanced than these sentences:

“I couldn’t ask my father a question without his taking it as a challenge. He’d rightly have said the same of me. For as long as I could remember, our communication had been a series of defensive reflexes.... I didn’t mean you look tired in a bad way. I heard you the first time. What’s with the face? Such was the idiom in which we spoke. Not surprising, we didn’t speak often, and when we did, it wasn’t for long.”

Bernard Cooper, now 54, was raised in Los Angeles (where he still lives), one of four sons born to Lillian and Edward Cooper. All of Bernard’s brothers died in their 30s of either cancer or heart attack. When the memoir opens, Bernard’s mother has also died. What remains of the Cooper family is Bernard and his father. Just as well. The father is so omnipresent in the drama of the son’s inner life that it’s hard to imagine anyone else with a speaking part; even Bernard’s lover, Brian, is only a walk-on.

This father is, indeed, presented as larger than life: a piece of emotional arrest characterized exclusively by a crudity of speech and an intrusiveness of behavior that is, quite simply, stunning. A divorce lawyer of the kind who might advertise his services on a placard above the seats of a city bus, Ed Cooper is a man whose unfiltered passions appear to serve a lifelong conviction that no amount of experience can dislodge: that no one -- and I mean no one -- is to be trusted. Given half a chance, the wife, the children, the man on the corner, all would do him in.

Thus we have a Jewish Scrooge so frightened of letting down his guard that he is mean and cunning to intimates and strangers alike: a bully and a philanderer whose loneliness gradually unhinges him. In one remarkable scene, the father is entirely unembarrassed to be discovered, by one of his sons, in his office with a secretary performing oral sex on him. (“He flashed his women like stolen jewels. He wanted his sons to be dazzled. He wanted to leave them speechless.”)

In another, he storms the house of his freshly widowed daughter-in-law, looking for evidence of a new man in her life. (“If we knew anything ... we knew that our father’s losses had started to deform him.”) In a third, he refuses to pay a gigantic phone bill that he has incurred and sues the phone company for harassment: the beginning of his litigious end. Ed Cooper loses one lawsuit after another (with heavy costs to pay in each case) but goes on suing everyone in sight until he is broke and must live out his last years in a trailer park an hour from Los Angeles. Brazen to the bitter finale, he instructs those in charge of his burial to engrave on his tombstone: “They finally got me.” When Bernard and Brian arrive at the ceremonial unveiling a year after Ed’s death, they are shaken to discover that the phrase on the stone is actually, “You finally got me.” Either way, though, the words indicate that for Ed Cooper, life itself was the enemy; he’d been locked inexorably in combat with the very fact of human existence.

To grow up in compelled proximity to such nearly deranged negativity is to experience it as toxic. The trick, then, in adult life, is to purge oneself of the poisoned childhood within: the one still clamoring for justice. A thing far easier to describe than to expel.

Going back to the bill his father had sent him in his 20s, Bernard Cooper speculates that the catalyst for this bizarre act might have been Ed’s thwarted effort to buy him a new car shortly before. When Ed could not bully the salesman into giving him the price he wanted, he flew into a rage and refused to buy any car at all. The humiliation of this failure, Bernard is convinced, rankled his father and, perversely, became converted in his mind into a grievance against the very person upon whom he had meant to bestow his once-in-a-lifetime impulse toward generosity.

Bernard, in turn, has licked his own wounds over the lost car all these years, and when at last his father is dying, he wants to apologize for his part in all the misunderstandings they’d had. But, he tells us, he bent over the old man, who could no longer hear him, and could not help mentioning “the car and the bill in one breath, as if this, at last, confirmed their connection.” Clearly, the bill is being leveled -- to the very last minute -- by the party of the second part, as well as the party of the first part.

Thus we have an unamended bill of grievance being sent back and forth across a couple of Los Angeles neighborhoods over a period of some 25 years, and that would be all there is to this memoir, except for the depth with which we feel the narrator’s inability to free himself, not of the garish cartoon figure who inhabits the pages of this book but of the father within: the one he can’t stop opposing -- or aping.

Bernard Cooper might have written a memoir of distinction if he had created a father of dimension -- a man whom we might see, even if only once, as he saw himself; feel his fear and confusion as he felt them; experience as he did the isolation into which he could not help driving himself. Then, the dialogue between them might have become a developing drama. This Cooper could not do. Yet, in a way that is hard to explain, his grief over his lousy father-son relationship is penetrating. The writing is so good that the cumulative strength of Bernard’s very incapacity becomes quietly unsettling, even haunting. It leaves the reader struck anew by how hard it is to avoid becoming what is done to us.