by John Updike
“I can picture it,” Bech lied politely. “Inside, does it give a feeling of grandeur?”
“No,” said Hannah.
“It’s all rather tedious bits and pieces,” Moira elaborated. “We fired the Dane who did the outside and finished the inside ourselves.”
The two girls’ life together, Bech guessed, contained a lot of Moira’s elaboration, around the other’s dark and somber core. Hannah had moved toward him, after the show, as though by some sullen gravitational attraction such as the outer planets feel for the sun. He was down under, Bech told himself; his volume still felt displaced by an eternity in airplanes. But Hannah’s black eyes had no visible backs to them. Down, in, down, they said.
She drove to a cliffy point from which the harbor, the rain lifting, gleamed like silver long left unpolished. Sydney, Moira explained, loved its harbor and embraced it like no other city in the world, not even San Francisco. She had been in San Francisco once, on her way to Afghanistan. Hannah had not been anywhere since leaving Europe at the age of three. She was Jewish, said her eyes, and her glossy, tapered fingers. She drove down to Bondi Beach, and the three removed their six shoes to walk on the soaked sand. The tops of Bech’s fifty-year-old feet looked white as paper to him, cheap paper, as if his feet amounted to no more than the innermost lining of his shoes. The young women ran ahead and challenged him to a broadjump contest. He won. Then, in the hop, step, and jump, his heart felt pleasantly as if it might burst, down here, where death was not real. Blond surfers, wet-suited, were tumbling in with the dusk; a chill wind began sweeping the cloud tatters away. Hannah at his side said, “That’s one reason for wearing a bra.”
“What is?” Moira asked, hearing no response from Bech.
“Look at my nipples. I’m cold.”
Bech looked down; indeed, the woman wore no bra and her erectile tissue had responded to the drop in temperature. The rare sensation of a blush caked his face, which still wore its television makeup. He lifted his eyes from Hannah’s T-shirt and saw that, like fancy underpants, the entire beach was frilled, with pink and lacy buildings. Sydney, the girls explained, as the tour continued from Bondi to Woollahra to Paddington to Surry Hills and Redfern, abounds in ornate ironwork shipped in as ballast from England. The oldest buildings were built by convicts: barracks and forts of a pale stone cut square and set solid, as if by the very hand of rectitude.
In Toronto, the sight Glenda was proudest to show him was the City Hall, two huge curved skyscrapers designed by a Finn. But what moved Bech, with their intimations of lost time and present innocence, were the great Victorian piles, within the university and along Bloor Street, that the Canadians, building across the lake from grimy, grubbing America, had lovingly erected—brick valentines posted to a distant, unamused queen. Glenda talked about the city’s community of American draft evaders and the older escapees, the families who were fleeing to Canada post-Vietnam, because life in the United States had become, what with race and corruption and pressure and trash, impossible.
Flicking back her pale hair as if to twitch it into life, Glenda assumed Bech agreed with her and the exiles, and so a side of him lackadaisically did; but another side, his ugly patriotism, bristled as she chattered on about his country’s sins and her own blameless land’s Balkanization by the money that, even in its death throes, American capitalism was flinging north. Hearing this, Bech felt the pride of vicarious power—he who lived cowering on drug-ridden West 99th Street, avoiding both the venture of marriage, though his suburban mistress was more than ready, and the venture of print, though his editor, dear old Ned Clavell, from his deathbed in the Harkness Pavilion had begged him to come up at least with a memoir. While Glenda talked, Bech felt like something immense and confusedly vigorous about to devour something dainty. He feigned assent and praised the new architecture booming along the rectitudinal streets, because he believed that this woman—her body a hand’s-breadth away on the front seat of a Canadian Ford—liked him, liked even the whiff of hairy savagery about him; his own body wore the chill, the numb expectancy all over his skin, that foretold a sexual conquest.
He interrupted her. “Power corrupts,” he said. “The powerless should be grateful.”
She looked over dartingly. “Do I sound smug to you?”
“No,” he lied. “But then, you don’t seem powerless to me, either. Quite masterful, the way you run your TV crew.”
“I enjoy it, is the frightening thing. You were lovely, did I say that? So giving. Vanessa can be awfully obvious in her questions.”
“I didn’t mind. You do it and it flies over all those wires and vanishes. Not like writing, that sits there and gives you that Gorgon stare.”
“What are you writing now?”
“As I said to Vanessa. A novel with the working title Think Big.”
“I thought you were joking. How big is it?”
“It’s bigger than I am.”
“I doubt that.”
I love you. It would have been easy to say, he was so grateful for her doubt, but his sensation of numbness, meaning love was at hand, had not yet deepened to total anesthesia. “I love,” he told her, turning his face to the window, “your sensible, pretty city.”
• • •
“Loved it,” Bech said of his tour of Sydney. “Want to drop me at the hotel?”
“No,” Hannah said.
“You must come home and let us give you a bite,” Moira elaborated. “Aren’t you a hungry lion? Peter said he’d drop around and that would make four.”
“Peter?”
“He has a degree in forestry,” Moira explained.
“Then what’s he doing here?”
“He’s left the forest for a while,” Hannah said.
“Which of you … knows him?” Bech asked, jealously, hesitantly.
But his hesitation was slight compared with theirs; both girls were silent, waiting for the other to speak. At last Hannah said, “We sort of share him.”
Moira added, “He was mine, but Hannah stole him and I’m in the process of stealing him back.”
“Sounds fraught,” Bech said; the clipped Australian lilt was already creeping into his enunciation.
“No, it’s not so bad,” Moira said into his ear. “The thing that saves the situation is, after he’s gone, we have each other. We’re amazingly compatible.”
“It’s true,” Hannah somberly pronounced, and Bech felt jealous again, of their friendship, or love if it were love. He had nobody. Flaubert without a mother. Bouvard without a Pécuchet. Even Bea, whose dreary life in Ossining had become a continuous unstated plea for him to marry her, had ceased to send signals, the curvature of the earth interceding.
They had driven in the darkness past palm-studded parks and golf courses, past shopping streets, past balconies of iron lace, into a region of dwarf row houses, spruced up and painted pastel shades: Bohemia salvaging another slum. Children were playing in the streets and called to their car, recognizing Hannah. Bech felt safe. Or would have but for Peter, the thought of him, the man from the forest, on whose turf the aged lion was daring to intrude.
The section of Toronto where Glenda drove him, proceeding raggedly uphill, contained large homes, British in their fussy neo-Gothic brickwork but New World in their untrammeled scale and large lawns—lawns dark as overinked etchings, shadowed by great trees strayed south from the infinite forests of the north. Within one of these miniature castles, a dinner party had been generated. The Anglican priest who had prepared the concordance asked him if he were aware of an unusual recurrence in his work of the adjectives lambent, untrammeled, porous, jubilant, and recurrent. Bech said no, he was not aware, and that if he could have thought of other adjectives, he would have used them instead—that a useful critical distinction should be made, perhaps, between recurrent imagery and authorial stupidity; that it must have taken him, the priest, an immense amount of labor to compile such a concordance, even of an oeuvre so slim. Ah, not really, was the answer: the texts had been
readied by the seminarians in his seminar in post-Christian kerygmatics, and the collation and printout had been achieved by a scanning computer in twelve minutes flat.
The writer who had cried “Touché!” to Cocteau was ancient and ebullient. His face was as red as a mountain-climber’s, his hair fine as thistledown. He chastened Bech with his air of the Twenties, when authors were happy in their trade and boisterous in plying it. As the whiskey and wine and cordials accumulated, the old saint’s arm (in a shimmering grape-colored shirt) frequently encircled Glenda’s waist and bestowed a paternal hug; later, when she and Bech were inspecting together (the glaze of alcohol intervening so that he felt he was bending above a glass museum case) a collector’s edition of the Canadian’s most famous lyric, Pines, Glenda, as if to “rub off” on the American the venerable poet’s blessing, caressed him somehow with her entire body, while two of their four hands held the booklet. Her thigh rustled against his, a breast gently tucked itself into the crook of his arm, his entire skin went blissfully porous, he felt as if he were toppling forward. “Time to go?” he asked her.
“Soon,” Glenda answered.
Peter was not inside the girls’ house, though the door was open and his dirty dishes were stacked in the sink. Bech asked, “Does he live here?”
“He eats here,” Hannah said.
“He lives right around the corner,” Moira elaborated. “Shall I go fetch him?”
“Not to please me,” Bech said; but she was gone, and the rain recommenced. The sound drew the little house snug into itself—the worn Oriental rugs, the rows of books about capital and underdevelopment, the New Guinean and Afghan artifacts on the wall, all the frail bric-a-brac of women living alone, in nests without eggs.
Hannah poured them two Scotches and tried to roll a joint. “Peter usually does this,” she said, fumbling, spilling. Bech as a child had watched Westerns in which cowpokes rolled cigarettes with one hand and a debonair lick. But his efforts at imitation were so clumsy that Hannah took the paper and the marijuana back from him and made of these elements a plump-tongued packet, a little white dribbling piece of pie, which they managed to smoke, amid many sparks. Bech’s throat burned, between sips of liquor. Hannah put on a record. The music went through its grooves, over and over. The rain continued steady, though his consciousness of it was intermittent. At some point in the rumpled stretches of time, she cooked an omelet. She talked about her career, her life, the man she had left to live with Moira, Moira, herself. Her parents were from Budapest; they had been refugees in Portugal during World War II, and when it was over, only Australia would let them in. An Australian Jewess, Bech thought, swallowing Scotch to ease his burned throat. The concept seemed unappraisably near and far, like that of Australia itself. He was here, but Australia was there, a world’s fatness away from his empty, sour, friendly apartment at Riverside and 99th. He embraced Hannah and they seemed to bump together like two clappers in the same bell. She was fat, solid. Her body felt in his arms hingeless; she was one of those wooden peasant dolls, containing congruent dolls, for sale in Slavic Europe, where he had once been, and where she had been born. He asked her among their kisses, which came and went in his consciousness like the sound of the rain, which traveled circularly in grooves like the music, if they should wait up for Peter and Moira.
“No,” Hannah said.
If Moira had been there, she would have elaborated, but she wasn’t and therefore didn’t.
“Shall I come up?” Bech asked. For Glenda lived on the top floor of a Toronto castle a few blocks’ walk—a swim, through shadows and leaves—from the house they had left.
“All I can give you,” she said, “is coffee.”
“Just what I need, fortuitously,” he said. “Or should I say lambently? Jubilantly?”
“You poor dear,” Glenda said. “Was it so awful for you? Do you have to go to parties like that every night?”
“Most nights,” he told her, “I’m scared to go out. I sit home reading Dickens and watching Nixon. And nibbling pickles. And picking quibbles. Recurrently.”
“You do need the coffee, don’t you?” she said, still dubious. Bech wondered why. Surely she was a sure thing: that shimmering full-body touch.
Her apartment snuggled under the roof, bookcases and lean lamps looking easy to tip between the slanting walls. In a far room he glimpsed a bed, with a feathery Indian bedspread and velour pillows. Glenda, as firmly as she directed cameramen, led him the other way, to a small front room claustrophobically lined with books. She put on a record, explaining it was Gordon Lightfoot, Canada’s own. A sad voice, gentle to no clear purpose, imitated American country blues. Glenda talked about her career, her life, the man she had been married to.
“What went wrong?” Bech asked. Marriage and death fascinated him: he was an old-fashioned novelist in this.
She wanly shrugged. “He got too dependent. I was being suffocated. He was terribly nice, a truly nice person. But all he would do was sit and read and ask me questions about my feelings. These books, they’re mostly his.”
“You seem tired,” Bech said, picturing the feathery bed.
She surprised him by abruptly volunteering, “I have something wrong with my corpuscles, they don’t know what it is, I’m having tests. But I’m out of whack. That’s why I said I could offer you only coffee.”
Bech was fascinated, flattered, relieved. Sex needed participation, illness needed only a witness. A loving witness. Glenda was dear and directorial in her movement as she rose and flicked back her hair and turned the record over. The movement seemed to generate a commotion on the stairs, and then a key in the lock and a brusque masculine shove on the door. She turned a notch paler, staring at Bech; her long pink nose stood out like an exclamation point. Too startled to whisper, she told Bech, “It must be Peter.”
Downstairs, more footsteps than two entered the little house, and from the grumble of a male voice, Bech deduced that Moira had at last returned with Peter. Hannah slept, her body filling the bed with a protective turnipy warmth he remembered from Brooklyn kitchens. The couple below them bumbled, clattered, tittered, put on a record. It was a Chilean-flute record Hannah had played for him earlier—music shrill, incessant, searching, psychedelic. This little orphan continent, abandoned at the foot of Asia, looked to the New World’s west coasts for culture, for company. California clothes, Andean flutes. “My pale land,” he had heard an Australian poet recite; and from airplanes it was, indeed, a pale land, speckled and colorless, a Wyoming with a seashore. A continent as lonely as the planet. Peter and Moira played the record again and again; otherwise, they were silent downstairs, deep in drugs or fucking. Bech got up and groped lightly across the surface of Hannah’s furniture for Kleenex or lens tissue or anything tearable to stuff into his ears. His fingers came to a paperback book and he thought the paper might be cheap enough to wad. Tearing off two corners of the title page, he recognized by the dawning light the book as one of his own, the Penguin Brother Pig, with that absurdly literal cover, of a grinning pig, as if the novel were Animal Farm or Charlotte’s Web. The paper crackling and cutting in his ears, he returned to the bed. Beside him, stately Hannah, half-covered and unconscious, felt like a ship, her breathing an engine, her lubricated body steaming toward the morning, her smokestack nipples relaxed in passage. The flute music stopped. The world stopped turning. Bech counted to ten, twenty, thirty in silence, and his consciousness had begun to disintegrate when a man harshly laughed and the Chilean flute, and the pressure in Bech’s temples, resumed.
“This is Peter Syburg,” Glenda said. “Henry Bech.”
“Je sais, je sais bien,” Peter said, shaking Bech’s hand with the painful vehemence of the celebrity-conscious. “I saw your gig on the tube. Great. You talked a blue streak and didn’t tip your hand once. What a con job. Cool. I mean it. The medium is you, man. Hey, that’s a compliment. Don’t look that way.”
“I was just going to give him coffee,” Glenda interposed.
“H
ow about brandy?” Bech asked. “Suddenly I need my spirits fortified.”
“Hey, don’t go into your act,” Peter said. “I like you.”
Peter was a short man, past thirty, with thinning ginger hair and a pumpkin’s gap-toothed grin. He might have even been forty; but a determined retention of youth’s rubberiness fended off the possibility. He flopped into a canvas sling chair and kept crossing and recrossing his legs, which were so short he seemed to Bech to be twiddling his thumbs. Peter was a colleague of sorts, based at the CBC office in Montreal, and used Glenda’s apartment here when she was in Montreal, as she often was, and vice versa. Whether he used Glenda when she was in Toronto was not clear to Bech; less and less was. Less and less the author understood how people lived. Such cloudy episodes as these had become his only windows into other lives. He wanted to go, but his going would be a retreat—Montcalm wilting before Wolfe’s stealthy ascent. He had a bit more brandy instead. He found himself embarked on one of those infrequent experiments in which, as dispassionate as a scientist bending metal, he tested his own capacity. He felt himself inflating, as before television exposure, while the brandy flowed on and Peter asked him all the questions not even Vanessa had been pushy enough to pose (“What’s happened to you and Capote?” “What’s the timer makes you Yanks burn out so fast?” “Ever thought of trying television scripts?”) and expatiating on the wonders of the McLuhanite world in which he, Peter, with his thumb-like legs and berry-bright eyes, moved as a successful creature, while he, Bech, was picturesquely extinct. Glenda flicked her pale hair and studied her hands and insulted her out-of-whack corpuscles with cigarettes. Bech was happy. One more brandy, he calculated, would render him utterly immobile, and Peter would be displaced. His happiness was not even punctured when the two others began to talk to each other in Canadian French, about calling a taxi to take him away.