Bech at Bay

by John Updike

  Bech grasped the slim cool hand proffered, which mustered a manly squeeze while her eyes levelled into his own. She was his height, perhaps an inch less. Her eyes were a grave shade of hazel. “At my age,” he told her, “it’s either fresh or frozen.”

  How strangely, unironically there this Martina was, though not quite beautiful; she had no sheen of glamour. She was all business. “I hope you noticed,” she said, “that I defended your paragraph from the copyeditors. As you predicted, they wanted to break the flow.” She spoke with the easy quickness of a thoroughly naturalized American, yet the words had an edge of definiteness, as if she did not quite trust them to convey her full meaning—a remnant, Bech guessed, of her immigrant parents’ accents.

  “Copyeditors do hate flow,” he said. “I haven’t looked into the book yet, actually. I thought it might make me too jealous. I’m all of sixty-eight, and nobody fests my schrift.”

  “You’re too young, Mr. Bech. You must reach a round number.”

  “I’m not sure,” he said, seriously—this steady-eyed woman was an invitation, received however late in life, to be serious; he checked their vicinity to verify that Pamela, the freckled, fabulous, still-girlish heiress, had moved on, having made this little conversational match—“that I have Izzy’s gift for round numbers. Look at the bastard. The perfect host, lapping up homage. He should have been a Roman emperor.”

  Thornbush, with the sixth sense that the literary jungle breeds, intuited from far across the room that Bech was talking about him; his protuberant eyes, with their jaundiced whites, slid toward his old colleague, even as a ring of adorers exploded into laughter at his most recent witticism, hot from his fat and flexible tongue.

  In response to Bech’s uncharacteristic seriousness, Martina intensified her own. For emphasis she rested her cool fingers on the back of his hand, where it clasped a drink at his chest, a bourbon getting watery as he radiated heat. “People are afraid of you,” she said in a scallion-scented gust of sincerity that tingled the hairs in his avid nostrils. “You’re so pure. I think they think you’d laugh at the idea of a Festschrift. You’d scoff at the concept that people love you.”

  He considered the possible truth of this, as he contemplated the waxy white crimps of her ear. This ear was bared beneath a taut side of sensible brown hair, and was, as he had hazarded in their only previous communication, dainty. Fancy anticipates reality. He liked the old-fashioned severity of her hairdo, pulled back into a ponytail secured by a ringlet of silk, a pink cloth rose—an appealing cheap touch. He liked thrift in a woman, an ascetic self-careless streak; it showed the fitness needed to travel even briefly with him on his rocky road. “They’re right, I would,” Bech answered. “Praise that you squeeze out of people is worth about ten cents on the dollar. Enough about me. Tell me about you.”

  She let her level gaze drop while her sallow cheek, above her firm, excitingly antagonistic jaw, resisted a blush. “You had it only slightly wrong. My parents got out in ’68, when I was three years old. My husband wasn’t a gunrunner but in mergers and acquisitions, if you can see the difference.”

  “Was? Was in mergers and acquisitions, or was your husband?”

  “The latter. I’m sorry I wrote ‘unbuttoned.’ I was nervous. Pamela was frantic to have you in the Festschrift. I thought you’d spit on it. I was both grateful and disappointed when you didn’t.”

  This, again, took them to a level of seriousness where neither was quite prepared to breathe. “I succumbed,” he admitted. “To your blandishments. I’ve been to Czechoslovakia,” he added.

  “Of course. Everybody goes now. It’s cheap, and Prague is raunchy.”

  “I was there when it was still real. Still Communist. That huge statue of Stalin. Those aging hippieish dissidents. It seemed like a very lively, tender place. Vulnerable.”

  “Yes, we are. The Czechs were put too close to fiercer peoples. Even when we got free, we smiled our way out.”

  “Nothing wrong with that. Would that we all could.”

  Her hands were clutched in front of her, one cupping the other, which held a glass of red wine tipped at a dangerous angle. He dared reach out and touch her. Her hand had seemed cooler when she had touched him. “Watch your back,” he said. “Here comes the birthday boy.”

  Izzy Thornbush, the hairs of his bald head standing upright in the light, loomed. Standing beside Martina as if in military formation, he squeezed her shoulders hard enough to make her snicker in surprise. But she kept her wine from sloshing out. “She’s some tootsie, huh, Henry, like we used to say?”

  “The term hadn’t occurred to me,” said Bech gallantly.

  “She’s been my best buddy at Aesop,” the much-honored scrivener went on. “The rest of those young slobs over there now are computerniks who think the written word is obsolete junk. They don’t care about grammar, they don’t care about margins. This young lady is a real throwback, to the age of us dinosaurs.”

  “I have always loved books,” Martina said, with a little wriggle that loosened the wordmaster’s bearlike grip. “I like the way,” she said, “the reader can set his or her own pace, instead of some director on speed or Prozac, who sets it for you.” Did Bech imagine it, or did her lips threaten a stammer, as her almost-native English stiffened on her tongue? Bech was annoyed to think that she was impressed, or intimidated, by Izzy.

  The novelist’s massive eyebrows—thickets, wherein arcs as red as burning filaments struggled to stay alight amid hairs from which all color and curl had been extracted—lifted in appreciation of this bulletin from the pharmaceutical generation. “There’s never been enough organized thought,” he announced, “on how a reader’s input helps create the book. We have no equivalent to the art installation, where the viewer is also the orderer.”

  “Well, there was Hopscotch,” Bech said. “And Barthes somewhere writes about how he always skips around in Proust.”

  “A computer system,” Izzy was wool-gathering on, his eyes popping and bubbles of saliva exploding between his lips, “say, À la Recherche on CD-ROM, could generate a new path, an infinite series of new paths, through it, making a new novel every time—there could be one in which Jupien is the hero, or in which Albertine becomes Odette’s lover!”

  “A reader doesn’t want decision-making power,” Martina said, a bit testily, in the face of Thornbush’s eminence. Perhaps she was showing Bech she was less intimidated than he, onlooking, had thought. “You read because no decisions are asked of you, the author has made them all. That is the luxury.”

  “But isn’t this,” Izzy said, displaying that he was not too old to have developed a Derridean streak, “a mode of tyranny? Isn’t a traditional author the worst sort of maniacal Yahweh, telling us how everything must be?”

  Bech glanced upward, wondering if Yahweh, who used to consider it a dreadful uncleanness to have His name in a mortal mouth, would strike Thornbush dead. Or had Izzy through marriage and promiscuously roving the world of ideas become so little a Jew as to enjoy a goyish immunity? A cool hard pressure on his hand recalled Bech to earth; Martina, formal and mannish, was shaking his hand goodbye. “I’ll leave you two to settle these great matters,” she said. “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Bech. Thanks again for your wonderful contribution.”

  “Goodbye so soon? Perhaps,” he ventured, “when and if I get my own Festschrift …”

  Her serious deepset eyes met his; no smile crimped her unpainted lips. “Or sooner,” she said sternly.

  Sooner? Bech scented sex, that hint of eternal life. Her face, unadorned, held a naked promise that her figure did not deny. Izzy rotated his great neckless head to watch her gray-clad derrière, firm but a touch more ample than was locally fashionable, disappear into a smoky wall of animated cloth. “Cute,” he muttered. “Bright. Knock the Commies all you want, they put some backbone into their brats you don’t see in American kids that age—gone limp in front of the damn television.”

  “She came here when she was three, she told me,
” Bech said.

  “You learn more by three than all the rest of your life,” Thornbush rebutted. “Read Piaget. Read Erikson. Read anybody, for Chrissake—what the hell do you do all day in that empty loft downtown? Nobody can figure it out.”

  But he had an agenda. Now it was Bech’s turn to feel the force of Izzy’s grip, on his upper arm, through a patched tweed sleeve. “Henry, listen. How’d you like to head up the Forty? Do us all a favor and be the next president. Von Klappenemner’s term’s up, and it’s time we got a younger guy in there, somebody from the literary end. These composers, they look good presiding, but they have no head for facts, and a few facts come up from time to time, even there.”

  The Forty—its number of members a wistful imitation of the French Academy—was one of the innumerable honorary organizations that the years 1865–1914, awash in untaxed dollars, had scattered throughout Manhattan. It was housed in a neoclassical, double-lot brick-front in the East Fifties, near the corner of Third Avenue, where the glass boxes—Citicorp! the Lipstick Building!—were marching north. An unwed heiress, Lucinda Baines, who, like Pamela Thornbush, fancied herself a patroness of the arts, had left her grand townhouse, with a suitable endowment, to serve as the gracious gathering-place of the hypothetical forty best artists—painters, writers, composers, sculptors—in the country. Her fortune had stemmed from a nineteenth-century nostrum called Baines’ Powders, a fraud taken off the market by the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, but not before its illusory powers of palliation had eased many a rough-hewn death; the powders were gone but the fortune rolled on, keeping the mansion in heat and repair, feeding the faithful at the Forty’s half-dozen ceremonial dinners a year, and funding a clutch of annual awards to the possibly deserving with which the organization preserved its tax-exempt status. A small paid staff fulfilled the daily duties, but by a romantic provision of Lucinda’s will the membership itself owned the building and controlled the endowment. “How come you’re involved?” Bech asked, perhaps rudely.

  When Izzy blinked, massive lashless eyelids had to traverse nearly a full hemisphere of yellowing eyeball. “I’m on the board.”

  “What about you for president? Isaiah the prez: that has a ring to it.”

  “You schmo, I was president, from ’81 to ’84. Where were you? Try to pay attention—you never come to the dinners.”

  “I’m watching my figure. Don’t you find, once you pass sixty-five—”

  “Yeah, yeah. Listen, I got to circulate. The wife is giving me the evil eye. But think of Edna—she’d love it. She’s dying for you. I’m asking on behalf of Edna.” Edna was the directress, a wiry little white-haired spinster from Australia. “Don’t make her beg, at her age. The whole board is crazy about the idea. They delegated me, since they thought we were friends.”

  “Izzy, we are friends. Read your fucking Festschrift.”

  “People can be friends. Writers, no. Writers are condemned to hate one another, doesn’t Goethe somewhere say? Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter.… Or was that Schiller? Forget it. I’m putting this forward as a person. Loosen up. Remember the good times we had in Albania? We were the first Western writers in over the top.”

  “Slovenia, not Albania. Nobody got into Albania. Ljubljana World Writers for Peace, in the Carter years. How could you have forgotten, Izzy—that frisky little blond poet from the Ukraine we had to do everything with in fractured French? Remember how she showed us the trick with a little tomato, biting it after tossing down a shot of vodka?”

  It had been Bech, though, and not Thornbush that she had taken back with her to her cell of a room in the people’s hotel. But much of the fervor of the encounter had been wasted in a breathless whispered discussion, in uncertain French, of birth control. She had kept rolling her eyes toward the corners of the room, indicating, as if he didn’t know, that the walls were bugged. He knew but as an American didn’t care. Perhaps she had been risking the gulag for him. How lovely in its childlike skinniness her naked body had been! Her pubic hair much darker than the hair on her head. The acid aftertaste of cherry tomato fighting with the sweetness of vodka in his mouth. She had halted him halfway in, with a stare of those wide scared eyes, eyes a many-petalled Ukrainian blue. For all the liquor she had consumed, she had been tight in the cunt, but he pushed on. She seemed relieved when he came, too soon. He had tried to wait, staring at a painting above the headboard. Shabby as the furniture was, the walls held real paintings, rough to the touch: the Socialist state supporting its hordes of collaborationist daubers.

  As if he had accompanied Bech in his swift dip into memory, Thornbush sighed heavily and said, “They gave us a good time, the Commies. We’re going to miss ’em.”

  “They soured me on writers’ organizations. I don’t want to be president of the Forty.”

  “Is that what you want me to tell Edna? You think I can go to her and tell her that? She’s getting on, Henry. She’s going to retire one of these days. Why do you want to break her heart?”

  “Out of thirty-eight members not you or me,” Bech patiently said, “there must be somebody else who can do it. How about a woman? Or a black?”

  Once you start to argue with somebody like Thornbush, it becomes a negotiation. His painful grip on Bech’s arm resumed. “There aren’t forty of us, we’re four or five short of the full body. Those that can do it have all done it. We’re all old as bejesus. Any time a slot opens up in the membership, one old bastard puts up another, even older. As the Forty goes, you’re a kid. Come on; I’ve done it; there’s nothing to it. Two meetings a year, spring and fall; you can skip some of the dinners. All you’ve got to do is preside. Just sit there on your tochis.”

  Martina O’Reilly had emerged from the smoky wall of cloth, wearing an olive-drab loden coat, looking inquisitively everywhere but toward him. She was going to leave, Bech saw, and was giving him a chance to leave with her. If he missed this boat, who knew when there would be another? The docks were crumbling, like those off the West Fifties that had bustled with tugs and toughs when he was boy. “I’m not a presider,” he told Izzy, more sharply, “I’m a—”

  A learner rather, Stephen Dedalus had said, but Bech didn’t finish, stricken by the way that Martina, resolving now to leave alone, glancing about with the reckless quickness of a woman in tears, reached up with both hands and lightldy brushed back, in a symmetrical motion, some long strands straying from her severe hairdo.

  “Cop-out,” Izzy finished for him. “Above-it-all. That’s the beauty of you for this post—you don’t dirty yourself, generally, with being a nice guy. That’s why we especially need you, after a string of these twelve-tone gladhanders. Edna needs you; she’s got a bunch of senile fogeys on her hands.”

  “Izzy, let me think about it. I got to go.”

  “The fuck you’ll think about it. Your check is in the mail, too. I know a brush-off.” He had grabbed both Bech’s forearms and the (slightly) younger author feared that he would have to wrestle the powerful older to escape. Martina was receding in the corner of Bech’s squeezed field of vision. She was hatless, hurrying.

  “O.K.,” Bech said, “I’ll do it. I’ll do it, maybe. Have Edna call me and tell me the duties. Tell Pamela for me it was a great party, a great apotheosis.”

  “What’s your rush? There’s real eats coming. I wanted you to meet Pam’s brother, he’s a hell of a good egg, a genius in his line—moves real estate around like a chess player. And Pam wanted to talk to you about one of her pets, some benefit up at the Guggenheim.”