Bech Is Back

by John Updike

  One night, reading at the New School, he became conscious of her in the corner of his eye. Over by the far wall, at the edge of the ocean of reading-attending faces—the terrible tide of the up-and-coming, in their thuggish denims and bristling beards, all their boyhood misdemeanors and girlhood grievances still to unpack into print, and the editors thirsty to drink their fresh blood, their contemporary slant—Bech noticed a round female face, luminous, raptly silent. He tried to focus on her, lost his place in the manuscript, and read the same sentence twice. It echoed in his ears, and the audience tittered; they were embarrassed for him, this old dead whale embalmed in the anthologies and still trying to spout. He kept his eyes on his pages, and when he lifted his gaze, at last, to relieved applause, Lenore had vanished, or else he had lost the place in the hall where she had been seated. Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!A week later, at his reading at the YMHA, she had moved closer, into the third or fourth row. Her wide, white, lightly perspiring face pressed upward in its intensity of attention, refusing to laugh even when those all around her did. As Bech on the high stage unrolled, in his amplified voice, some old scroll of foolery, he outdid himself with comic intonations to make his milk-pale admirer smile; instead, she solemnly lowered her gaze now and then to her lap, and made a note. Afterward, in the unscheduled moment of siege that follows a reading, she came backstage and waited her turn in the pushing crowd of autograph-seekers. When at last he dared turn to her, she had her notebook out. Was this truly Lenore? Though he had failed to imagine some details (the little gold hoop earrings, and the tidy yet full-bodied and somewhat sensually casual way in which she had bundled her hair at the back of her head), her physical presence flooded the translucent, changeable skin of his invention with a numbing concreteness. He grabbed reflexively at her notebook, thinking she wanted him to sign it, but she held on firmly, and said to him, “I thought you’d like to know. I noted three words you mispronounced. ‘Hectare’ is accented on the first syllable and the ‘e’ isn’t sounded. In ‘flaccid’ the first ‘c’ is hard. And ‘sponge’ is like ‘monkey’—the ‘o’ has the quality of a short ‘u.’ ”

  “Who are you?” Bech asked her.

  “A devotee.” She smiled, emphasizing the long double “e.” Another devotee pulled Bech’s elbow on his other side, and when he turned back, Lenore was gone. Darkness there and nothing more.

  He revised what he had written. The scene with Thelma was sacred filth, dream matter, not to be touched; but the professional capacities of the moon face had come clearer—she was a schoolteacher. A teacher of little children, children in the first-to-fourth-grade range, in some way unusual, whether unusually bright or with learning disabilities he couldn’t at first decide. But as he wrote, following Lenore into her clothes and the elevator and along the steam-damp, slightly tipping streets of West Side Manhattan, the name above the entrance of the building she entered became legible: she taught in a Steiner School. Her connection with the other characters of Think Big must be, therefore, through their children. Bech rummaged back through the manuscript to discover whether he had given Tad Greenbaum and his long-suffering wife, Ginger, boys or girls for children, and what ages. He should have made a chart. Faulkner and Sinclair Lewis used to. But Bech had always resisted those practical aids which might interfere with the essential literary process of daydreaming; Lenore belonged to a realm of subconscious cumulus. She would have wide hips: the revelation came to him as he slipped a week’s worth of wastepaper into a plastic garbage bag. But did the woman who had come up to him, in fact, have wide hips? It had been so quick, so magical, he had been conscious only of her torso in the crowd. He needed to see her again, as research.

  When she approached him once more, in the great hot white tent annually erected for the spring ceremonial of that marmoreal Heaven on Washington Heights, she was wearing a peasant skirt and braless purple bodice, as if to hasten in the summer. To be dressy she had added a pink straw hat; the uplifted gesture with which she kept the wide hat in place opened up a new dimension in the character of Lenore. She had been raised amid greenery, on, say, a Hardyesque farm in northeastern Connecticut. Though her waist was small, her hips were ample. The sultriness of the tent, the spillage of liquor from flexible plastic cups, the heavy breathing of Bech’s fellow immortals made a romantic broth in which her voice was scarcely audible; he had to stoop, to see under her hat and lip-read. Where was her fabled “bossiness” now? She said, “Mr. Bech, I’ve been working up my nerve to ask, would you ever consider coming and talking to my students? They’re so sweet and confused, I try to expose them to people with values, any values. I had a porno film director, a friend of a friend, in the other day, so it’s nothing to get uptight about. Just be yourself.” Her eyes were dyed indigo by the shadow of the hat, and her lips, questing, had a curvaceous pucker he had never dreamed of.

  Bech noticed, also, a dark-haired young woman standing near Lenore, wearing no makeup and a man’s tweed jacket. A friend, or the friend of a friend? The young woman, seeing the conversation about to deepen, drifted away. Bech asked, “How old are your students?”

  “Well, they’re in the third grade now, but it’s a Steiner School—”

  “I know.”

  “—and I move up with them. You might be a little wasted on them now; maybe we should wait a few years, until they’re in fifth.”

  “And I’ve had time to work on my pronunciation.”

  “I do apologize if that seemed rude. It’s just a shock, to realize that a master of words doesn’t hear them in his head the way you do.” As she said this, her own pronunciation seemed a bit slurred. An empty plastic glass sat in her hand like an egg collected at dusk.

  Perhaps it was the late-afternoon gin, perhaps the exhilaration of having just received a medal (the Melville Medal, awarded every five years to that American author who has maintained the most meaningful silence), but this encounter enchanted Bech. The questing fair face perspiring in the violet shade of the pink hat, the happy clatter around him of writers not writing, the thrusting smell of May penetrating the tent walls, the little electric push of a fresh personality—all felt too good to be true. He felt, deliciously, overpowered, as reality always overpowers fiction.

  He asked her, “But will we still be in touch, when your sweet confused students are in the fifth grade?”

  “Mr. Bech, that’s up to you.” In the shade of her hat, she lowered her eyes.

  “To me?”

  Her blue eyes lifted boldly. “Who else?”

  “How do you feel about dinner then, if we can find the flap to get out of this tent?”

  “The two of us?”

  “Who else?” Of course, he was thinking, with the voice of reason that dismally mutters accompaniment to every euphoria, there is a rational explanation. God forbid there wouldn’t be a rational explanation. I have conjured this creature, by eye-glance and inflection, from the blank crowds just as I conjured her, less persuasively, from blank paper. “What did you say your name was?”

  “Ellen,” she said.

  So he had got that slightly wrong. He had been slightly wrong in a hundred details, the months revealed. Their affair did not last until her students were in the fifth grade. It was his literary side, it turned out, his textbook presence, that she loved. Also, she really did—his instincts had been right in this—see the male sex as, sexually, second-rate. Still, she gave him enough of herself to eclipse, to crush, “the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore,” and once again Think Big ground to a grateful halt.

  An irresistible invitation came to Bech. A subsidiary of the Superoil Corporation called Superbooks had launched a series of signed classics; for an edition of Brother Pig bound in genuine pigskin Bech was invited to sign twenty-eight thousand five hundred tip-in sheets of high-rag-content paper, at the rate of one dollar fifty a sheet. He was to do this, furthermore, during a delightful two-week holiday on a Caribbean island, where Superoil owned a resort. He s
hould take with him a person to pull the sheets as he signed them. This “puller” could be a friend, or someone hired in the locality. All this was explained to Bech as to a fairly stupid child by a hollow-voiced man calling from corporation headquarters—a thousand-acre variant of Disneyland somewhere in Delaware.

  As always in the face of good fortune, Bech tended to cringe. “Do I have to have a puller?” he asked. “I’ve never had an agent.”

  “The answer to your question,” the man from Superbooks said, “is one-hundred-percent affirmative. From our experience, without a puller efficiency tapers very observably. As I say, we can hire one on the spot and train her.”

  Bech imagined her, a svelte little Carib who had been flown to emergency secretarial school, but doubted he could satisfy her after the first proud rush. So he asked Norma Latchett to be his puller.

  Her reply was inevitable. “Super,” she said.

  In weary truth, Bech and Norma had passed beyond the end of their long romance into a limbo of heterosexual pal-ship haunted by silently howling abandoned hopes. They would never marry, never be fruitful. The little island of San Poco was a fit stage for their end drama—the palm trees bedraggled and battered from careless storage in the prop room, the tin-and-tarpaper houses tacked together for a short run, the boards underfoot barely covered by a sandy thin soil resembling coffee grounds, the sea a piece of rippling silk, the sunshine as harsh, white, and constant as overhead spotlights. The island was littered with old inspirations—a shoal collecting the wrecks of hotels, night spots, cabañas, and eateries swamped by the blazing lethargy. The beach resort where Bech and Norma and the twenty-eight thousand five hundred pieces of paper were housed had been built by pouring cement over inflated balloons that were then collapsed and dragged out the door; the resulting structures were windowless. All along the curve of one dark wall were banked brown cardboard boxes containing five hundred sheets each. Super-oil’s invisible minions had placed in the center of the hemisphere a long Masonite table, bland as a torturer’s rack, with a carton of felt-tip pens. Bech never used felt-tip pens, preferring the manly gouge and sudden dry death of ballpoints. Nevertheless, he sat right down in his winter suit and ripped through a box, to see how it went.

  It went like a breeze. Arrows, to be trimmed away by the binder, pointed to the area he must inscribe. Norma, as if still auditioning for the role of helpmate, pulled the sheets with a sweet deftness from underneath his wrists. Then they undressed—since he had last seen her naked, her body had softened, touchingly, and his body, too, had a certain new slump to it—and went out to swim in the lukewarm, late-afternoon sea. From its gentle surface the lowering sun struck coins of corporate happiness; Bech blessed Superoil as he floated, hairy belly up. The title of his next novel, after Think Big was in the bag, came to him: Easy Money. Or had Daniel Fuchs used it during the Depression? When he and Norma left their vast bath, the soft coral sand took deep prints from Bech’s bare feet, as from those of a giant.

  Wake, eat, swim, sun, sign, eat, sun, sign, drink, eat, dance, sleep. Thus their days passed. Their skins darkened. Bech became as swarthy as his Brazilian jacket photos. The stack of boxes of signed sheets slowly grew on the other side of the cement dome. They had to maintain an average of two thousand signatures a day. As Norma’s tolerance for sun increased, she begrudged the time indoors, and seemed to Bech to be accelerating her pulling, so that more than once the concluding “h” got botched. “You’re slowing down,” she told him in self-defense, the third time this happened in one session.

  “I’m just trying to give the poor bastards their buck-fifty’s worth,” he said. “Maybe you should pay attention to me, instead of trying to pull and read at the same time.” She had taken to reading a novel at their signing table—a novel by, as it happened, a young writer who had, in the words of one critic, “made all previous American-Jewish writing look like so much tasteless matzo dough.”

  “I don’t need to pay attention,” she said. “I can hear it now; there’s a rhythm. Mm-diddle-um-um, boomity-boom. You lift your pen in the middle of ‘Henry’ and then hurry the ‘Bech.’ You love your first name and hate your last—why is that?”

  “The ‘B’ is becoming harder and harder,” he admitted. “Also, the ‘e’ and the ‘c’ are converging. Miss O’Dwyer at P.S. 87 tried to teach me the Palmer penmanship method once. She said you should write with your whole arm, not just your fingers.”

  “You’re too old to change now; just keep doing it your way.”

  “I’ve decided she was right. These are ugly signatures. Ugly.”

  “For God’s sake, Henry, don’t try to make them works of art; all Superbooks wants is for you to keep touching pen to paper.”

  “Superbooks wants super signatures,” he said. “At least they want signatures that show an author at peace with himself. Look at my big ‘H’s. They’ve turned into backward ‘N’s. And then the little ‘h’ at the end keeps tailing down. That’s a sign of discouragement. Napoleon, you know, after Waterloo, every treaty he signed, his signature dragged down right off the page. The parchment.”

  “Well, you’re not Napoleon, you’re just an unemployed self-employed who’s keeping me out of the sun.”

  “You’ll get skin cancer. Relax. Eleven hundred more and we’ll go have a piña colada.”

  “You’re fussing over them, I can’t stand it! You just romped through those early boxes.”

  “I was younger then. I didn’t understand my signature so well. For being so short, it has a lot of ups and downs. Suppose I was Robert Penn Warren. Suppose I was Solzhenitsyn.”

  “Suppose you were H. D., I’d still be sitting here in this damn dark igloo. You know, it’s getting to my shoulders. The pauses between are the worst—the tension.”

  “Go out in the sun. Read your pimply genius. I’ll be my own puller.”

  “Now you’re trying to hurt my feelings.”

  “I’ll be fine. I know my own rhythm.”

  “The Henry Bech backward crawl. I’ll see this through if it kills us both.”

  He attempted a signature, hated the “nry,” and slashed a big “X” across the sheet. “Your vibes are destroying me,” he said.

  “That was a dollar fifty,” Norma said, standing in protest.

  “Yeah, and here’s the sales tax,” Bech said, and X-ed out the preceding signature, whose jerky “ch” linkage had disturbed him as he did it, though he had decided to let it pass. He crumpled the sheet into a ball and hit her with it squarely between the two pieces of her bathing suit.

  After this, when they sat down on opposite sides of the long table, fear of this quarrel’s being repeated clotted their rapport. Fear of impotence seized his hand. The small digital muscles, asked to perform the same task thousands upon thousands of times, were rebelling. Sabotage appeared on the assembly line. Extra squiggles produced “Hennry,” and the “B” of “Bech” would come out horribly cramped, like a symptom of mental disease. While the sun poured down, and the other resort guests could be heard tinkling and babbling at the thatched beach bar not far away, Bech would write “Henry” and forget what word came next. The space between his first and last name widened as some uncappable pressure welled up between them. The whole signature kept drifting outside the arrows, though he shoved with his brain while Norma tugged the stacks of sheets into repeated readjustments. Their daily quota fell below two thousand, to seventeen hundred, then to three boxes, and then they stopped counting boxes.

  “We must sign them all here,” Norma pleaded. “They’re too heavy to take away with us.” Their two weeks were drawing to a close, and the wall of unopened boxes seemed to grow, rustling, in the night. They sliced them open with a blade from Bech’s razor; he cut his forefinger and had to pinch the pen through a Band-Aid. The pens themselves, so apparently identical at first, revealed large differences to his hypersensitive grasp, and as many as six had to be discarded before he found one that was not too light or heavy, whose flow and his were halfway cong
enial. Even so, one signature in five came out defective, while Norma groaned and tried to massage her own shoulders. “I think it’s writer’s cramp,” she said.

  “But you’re not writing,” he said. “You know, toward the end of his career Hogan would absolutely freeze over a one-foot putt.”

  “Don’t make conversation,” Norma begged. “Just inscribe.”

  The loudspeaking system strung through the palm trees interrupted its millionth rendition of “Yellow Bird” to announce his name. Over the phone in the manager’s office, the man from Superoil said, “We figured you’d be a hundred-percent done by tomorrow, so we’ve arranged for a courier to jet in and ship the sheets to our bindery in Oregon.”

  “We’ve run into some snags,” Bech told him. “Also, the pullers are restive.”

  The voice went a shade more hollow. “What percent would you say is still to be executed?”

  “Hard to say. The boxes have grown big as freight cars. At first they were the size of matchboxes. Maybe there’s ten left.”

  A silence. “Can you stonewall it?”

  “I’m not sure that’s the phrase. How about ‘hot-dog it’?”

  “The jet’s been commissioned; it can’t be cancelled. Do the best you can, and bring the rest back in your luggage.”

  “Luggage!” Norma scoffed, back at the igloo. “I’d just as soon try to pack a coral reef. And I refuse to ruin my last full day here.”

  Bech worked all afternoon by himself, while she sauntered on the beach and fell in with a pair of scuba divers. “Jeff wanted me to go underwater with him, but I was scared our hoses would get tangled,” she reported. “How many did you do?”

  “Maybe a box. I kept getting dizzy.” It was true; his signature had become a cataclysmic terrain of crags and abysses. His fingers traced the seismograph of a constant earthquake. Deep in the strata of time, a hot magma heaved. Who was this Henry Bech? What had led him up, up from his seat in his row in Miss O’Dwyer’s class, to this impudent presumptive scrawl of fame? Her severe ghost mocked him every time an “e” collapsed or a “B” shrivelled at his touch.