Bech Is Back

by John Updike

  “That’s sad,” Bea said absently, pulling into a patch of dirt on the left and accepting a grateful wave from the driver of a rattling old lorry.

  “Well, there’s a kind of a beauty to it,” Bech told her. “The Duke of Sutherland himself came up from London to see what was the matter, and one old guy stood up in the meeting and told him, It is the opinion of this county that should the Czar of Russia take possession of Dunrobin Castle and of Stafford House next term we couldn’t expect worse treatment at his hands than we have experienced in the hands of your family for the last fifty years.” Bech chuckled; he thought of his own ancestors, evading enlistment on the opposite side of that same war. His mother’s people had come from Minsk. History, like geography, excited and frightened him with the superabundance of life beyond his dwindling own.

  Bea blinked and asked, “Why are you so enthusiastic about all this?”

  “You mean you aren’t?”

  “It’s sad, Henry. You’re not looking at the scenery.”

  “I am. It’s magnificent. But misery must be seen as part of the picture.”

  “Part of our picture, you mean. That’s what you’re rubbing my nose in. You bring me here as a birthday present but then keep reminding me of all these battles and evictions and starvation and greed, as if it applies to us. All right. We’re mortal. We’re fallible. But that doesn’t mean we’re necessarily cruel, too.” One of the leaning, hurrying clouds was darker than the others and suddenly it began to rain, to hail, with such ferocity that Bea whimpered and pulled the car to a halt in a wide spot. The white pellets danced upward from the red hood as if sprung from there and not the sky; the frown within the air was like what the blind must confront before the light winks out entirely. Then the air brightened. The hail ceased, and through the luminous mist of its ceasing a rainbow appeared above the shadows of a valley where a cultivated field formed a shelf of smooth verdure. They had come down from the remotest Highlands into an area where cultivation began, and telephone wires underlined the majesty of the sub-arctic sky. They both climbed out of the little car, to be nearer the rainbow, which, longer in one leg than the other, receded from them, becoming a kind of smile upon the purple-green brow of a ben. Bech luxuriated in the wild beauty all around and said, “Let’s buy a castle and murder King Duncan and settle down. This is where we belong.”

  “We do not,” Bea cried. “It’s where I belong!” He was startled; fear must have shown on his face, for an anxious wifely guilt blurred hers as, close to tears, she still pressed her point: “That’s so typical of you writers—you appropriate. My own poor little Scottishness has been taken from me; you’re more of a Scot now than I am. I’ll have nothing left eventually, and you’ll move on to appropriate somebody else’s something. Henry, this marriage was a horrible mistake.”

  But the sheer horror of what she was saying drove her, her blurred round face pink and white like that of a rabbit, into his arms. He held her, patting her back while her sobs moistened his tweed shoulder and the rainbow quite faded in the gorse-golden sun. She was still trying to explain herself, her outburst. “Ever since we got married—”

  “Yes?” he encouraged, noting above her sunny head that the lower slopes of the mountain, for aeons stark moor, had been planted in regiments of fir trees to feed the paper mills of the south.

  “—I’ve felt myself in your mind, being digested, becoming a character.”

  “You’re a very real person,” Bech reassured Bea, patting mechanically. “You’re my Christian maiden.” In deference to the spine of feminist feeling that had stiffened beneath his hands, he quickly amended this to: “God’s Christian maiden.”

  BECH WED

  THE HOUSE in Ossining was a tall mock-Tudor with an incongruous mansard roof, set on a domed lawn against a fringe of woods on an acre and a half tucked somewhere between the Taconic State and the Briarcliff-Peekskill parkways. Its exterior timbers were painted the shiny harsh green of park benches and its stucco had been aged to a friable tan; the interior abounded in drafty wasteful spaces—echoing entrance halls and imperious wide staircases and narrow windowless corridors for vanished servants to scuttle along. Bea and Rodney while their marriage thrived had fixed it up, scraping the white paint and then, next layer down, the dusty-rose off the newel posts and banisters until natural oak was reached; they had replaced all the broken glass and fragmented putty in the little greenhouse that leaned against the library, retiled the upstairs bathrooms, replastered the back-stair walls, and laid down a lilac hedge and a composition tennis court. As their marriage ran into difficulties, the scraping stopped halfway up the left-hand banister and the tennis court was taken over by the neighborhood children and their honey-limbed baby-sitters. Now Bech was installed in the mansion like a hermit crab tossed into a birdhouse. The place was much too big; he couldn’t get used to the staircases and the volumes of air they arrogantly commandeered, or the way the heat didn’t pour knocking out of steam radiators from an infernal source concealed many stories below but instead seeped from thin pipes sneaking low around the baseboards, pipes kept warm by personalized monthly bills and portentous, wheezing visits from the local oil truck. In the cellar, you could see the oil tanks—two huge rust-brown things greasy to the touch. And here was the furnace, an old converted coal-burner in a crumbling overcoat of plastered asbestos, rumbling and muttering all through the night like a madman’s brain. Bech had hardly ever visited a basement before; he had lived in the air, like mistletoe, like the hairy sloth, Manhattan subgenus. Though he had visited his sister in Cincinnati, and written his freshest fantasy, Travel Light, upon impressions gathered during avuncular visits there, he had never in his bones known before what America was made of: lonely outposts, log cabins chinked with mud and moss.

  Insulation was a constant topic of conversation with the neighbors, and that first winter Bech dragged his uprooted crab tail back and forth to the building-supply center along Route 9 and hauled home in Bea’s sticky-geared Volare station wagon great rolls of pink insulation backed by silver paper; with a hardening right hand he stapled this cumbersome, airy material between the studs of an unused and unplastered third-floor room, intended for storage, and made himself, all lined in silver imprinted with the manufacturer’s slogans, a kind of dream-image, a surreal distillation, of his cloistered, forsaken apartment high above the windswept corner of 99th and Riverside. Here, his shins baking in the intersecting rays of two electric heaters, he was supposed to write.

  “Write?” he said to Bea, who had proposed this space allocation. “How do you do that?”

  “You know,” she said, not to be joshed. “It’ll all come back to you, now that you’re settled and loved.”

  His heart, which had winced at “settled,” fled from the word “loved” so swiftly that he went momentarily deaf. These happy conditions had nothing to do with writing. Happiness was not the ally but the enemy of truth. Dear Bea, standing there in her slightly shapeless housedress, her fair hair straggled out in the dishevelment of utter sincerity, seemed a solid obstacle to the translucent on-running of the unease that was Bech’s spiritual element, his punctilious modernist diet. Too complacent in her seventh-hand certainty, descended from Freud, that she held between her soft thighs the answer to all his questions, Bea assumed that the long sterile stretch of his unwed life before her had been, simply, a mistake, a wandering in a stony wilderness cluttered with women and trips. He doubted it was that simple. Being an artist was a matter of delicate and prolonged maneuver; who could tell where a false move lay? Think of Proust’s, think of Rilke’s, decades of procrastination. The derangement of the senses, Rimbaud had prescribed. Didn’t all of Hart Crane’s debauchery find its reason in a few incandescent lines that burned on long after the sullen waves had closed upon his suicide?

  “What you must do,” Bea told him, even as her blue Scots eyes slid sideways toward some other detail of housekeeping, “is go up there first thing every day and write a certain number of pages—not too
many, or you’ll scare yourself away. But do that number, Henry, good or bad, summer or winter, and see what happens.”

  “Good or bad?” he asked, incredulous.

  “Sure, why not? Who can tell anyway, in the end? Look at Kafka, whom you admire so much. Who cares now, if Amerika isn’t as good as Das Schloss? It’s all Kafka, and that’s all we care about. Whatever you produce, it’ll be Bech, and that’s what people want out of you. Mehr Licht; mehr Bech!”

  He hadn’t known she knew all this German. “I don’t admire Kafka,” he grumbled, feeling a child’s pleasurable restiveness. “I feel him as an oppressive older brother. He affects me the way his father affected him.”

  “What you’re doing,” Bea told him, “is punishing us. Ever since The Chosen got panned, you’ve been holding your breath like an angry baby. Enough now. Finish Think Big.”

  “I was thinking of calling it Easy Money.”

  “Good. A much better title. I think the old one intimidated you.”

  “But it’s about New York. How can I write about New York when you’ve taken me away from it?”

  “All the better,” Bea briskly said, patting her hair in closer to the luminous orb of her face. “New York was a terrible place for you, you were always letting yourself get sidetracked.”

  “Who’s to say,” he asked, giving his old aesthetic one more try, “what a sidetrack is?”

  “Simple. It’s the track that doesn’t lead anywhere. Do what you want with your talent. Hide it under a bushel. I can’t stand here arguing forever. From the sounds out back, Donald and his friends are doing something terrible to the dog.”

  It was true, Donald and two pals from a house across the lane were trying to play rodeo with Max, a sluggish old golden retriever that Rodney and Bea had bought as a puppy. He had yelped when lassoed and then, as the boys were being scolded, hung his tail, ashamed of having tattled. Bech had never lived in close conjunction with a dog before. He marveled at the range of emotion the animal could convey with its tail, its ears, and the flexible loose skin of its muzzle. When he and Bea returned from the supermarket or an expedition to the city, old Max in his simple-minded joy would flog the Volare fenders with his tail and, when his new master bent down to pat his head, would slip Bech’s hand into his mouth and try to pull him toward the house—retrieving him, as it were. The grip of the dog’s teeth, though kindly meant, was firm enough to give pain and to leave livid marks. Bech had to laugh, trying to pull his hand free without injury. Max’s muzzle rumpled with fond determination as he kept tugging the stooping, wincing man toward the back door; his ears were rapturously flattened, and cats slid off the porch to rub at Bech’s ankles jealously. Cats came with this house, and rodent pets of Donald’s that died of escaping from their cages. The three children all had noisy friends, and Bea herself would spend many a morning and afternoon entertaining housewives from the neighborhood or from Briarcliff Manor or Pleasantville—old friends from the Rodney days, curious perhaps to glimpse the notorious author (in the suburbs, at least since Peyton Place, all authors are sui generis notorious) whom Bea—Bea, of all people—had somehow landed. If these visitors were there for morning coffee, they gave Bech little more than bright-eyed, wide-awake smiles above the crisp dickies stuck in their cashmere sweaters; but if he came upon them amid the lengthening shadows of the cocktail hour, slouched around second drinks in a murky corner of the timbered living room, these Gentile housewives would dart toward him blurred, expectant glances and, merriment waxing reckless, challenge him to “put” them “in” a book. Alas, what struck him about these women, in contrast to the women of his travels and of Manhattan, was just their undetachability from these, to him, illegible Westchester surroundings.

  Without so many inducements to flee upstairs, Bech might never have settled into his silver room. But it was the one spot in the vast house where he did not seem to be in the middle of a tussle, or a party, or a concert. The twin girls especially could not bear to be out of range of amplified music. They were fifteen when Bech became their stepfather—rather bony, sallow girls with Rodney’s broad forehead and solemn, slightly bulging gray eyes. They lolled on the sofa or upstairs in their room reading fat novels of witchcraft and horror in Maine while bathed in the clicking thud and apocalyptic lyrics of reggae. Donald, who had inherited more of Bea’s curves and shades of humid pink, was ten, and for a time carried everywhere with him a battery-powered CB unit on which he attempted to chat with truckers rolling north beyond the woods. The sound of traffic, though kept at a distance, nevertheless permeated Westchester County, its pitch more sinister, because concealed by greenery, than the frank uproar of Manhattan. Marrying Bea, who had drifted into his life in the wake of her stormy sister, Bech had ignorantly climbed aboard an ark of suburban living whose engines now throbbed around him like those of a sinking merchant ship in Conrad. There was no ignoring noise in these environs. In New York, there were walls, precincts, zones and codes of avoidance; here in Ossining every disturbance had a personal application: the ringing phone was never in someone else’s apartment, and the child crying downstairs was always one’s own. A kind of siege crackled around the gawky half-green house, so conspicuous on its hillock of lawn—a siege of potentially disastrous groans in the plumbing and creaks in the woodwork, while the encircling animal world gnawed, fluttered, and scrabbled at the weakened structure. Invisible beetles and ants powdered the basement floor with their leavings, and Bech was astonished at how much infiltrating wildlife lurked in even a thoroughly tamed and mortgaged stretch of woods. Squirrels—or was it bats?—danced over his head in the silver room, above the ceiling with its fantasy map of stains, within those dusty constructional gaps that merged with the teeming treetops via holes he could never spot from the ground or a ladder. Even in the summer he kept his room’s one window closed against the distracting variety of birdcalls. That second spring, a colorless small bird had built a nest in a chink of the eaves of the mansard roof and bewitched Bech with the incessancy of its trips to the nest. A fluffy beating of wings, an arousal of tiny cheeping, a momentary silencing of the cheeping with wriggling food, and then a beating of the wings away again. So much fanatic labor, to add a few mousy birds to the world’s jungle. One morning, suddenly, there was silence from the nest; the fledglings had flown. A loneliness enveloped the writer’s aerie, with its old army-green desk from Ninety-ninth Street, its tinny electric heaters, its bookshelves of raw pine attached to the studs with screwed-in L-brackets, its cardboard boxes of dishevelled but accumulating manuscript. For Bech had, even before their Scots trip, taken root in his birdhouse; he had accepted Bea’s advice and was pecking his way steadily through the ghostly tangle of Think Big.

  Bech’s fourth and, as critical diction has it, “long-awaited” novel existed in several spurts, or shoals, of inspiration. The first had come upon him in London, during a brief fling with a petite heiress and gossip columnist named Merissa, and took the envisioned form of an ambitious and elegiac novel directed, like Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, toward the heroine’s suicide. The heroine was to have Merissa’s exquisite small bones and feline adaptability but to be squarely, winsomely, self-ruinously American. Her name came to him, with an oddness bespeaking a profoundly subconscious imperative, as Olive. Bech managed about sixty handwritten pages, dealing mostly with Olive’s education at a Southern girls’ college where the stench of horse manure incongruously swept through the curried green campus and the idyllic vista of young women of good family striding to class in smart skirts and high heels. But when it came time in the novel to bring her to that capital of ruined innocence, New York City, he was at a loss for what professional field he should mire her in. The only one he knew first-hand, that of publishing, inspired great distaste in our author when encountered in published fiction; he did not much like involution, whether met in Escher prints, iris petals, or the romantic theme of incest. Yet all those glass boxes weighing on the heart of the city—what was done inside them, what empires rose a
nd fell? He could not imagine. Stalled, Bech let a year slide by as he responded to invitations and filled out questionnaires from doctoral candidates. Then, one iron-cold winter afternoon, with steam pouring lavishly from the radiator valves, Bech to counter his claustrophobia turned on television, and met there a young actress’s face uplifted beseechingly toward that of an aseptic-capped doctor, whose soothing baritone yet had a menacing rumble to it. Turning the channel, Bech eavesdropped upon the staccato conversation of two vexed women as they swiftly circulated among the furniture of a Texas-scale living room. Clicking past a channel of electronic ticker tape and another of Spanish sitcom, he found on the third major network a teen-aged girl screaming and snuffling about an abortion while California cliffs soared past the windows of her convertible. Here, Bech realized, was an empire, a kingdom as extensive and mystically ramified as a Chinese dynasty; the giant freckled figure of boyish, ruthless Tad Greenbaum swam into his cerebrum, trailing those of pliant, pill-popping Thelma Stern, Tad’s mistress; her diabolical ex-husband, the enigmatic Polonius Stern; and her unscrupulous though insouciant lawyer-brother, Dolf Lessup. A world of searingly lighted soundstages and intimately dark cutting rooms, of men frantically reaching out from within a closed expensive world of wide desks and deep carpets and dim French restaurants toward the unseen millions sitting lonely in shabby rooms, offered itself to Bech as a wilderness sufficiently harsh to memorialize, and one wherein all his ignorances could be filled in with bits from those old Hollywood movies about making Hollywood movies. For some pages, his path lit alternately by klieg lights and crêpes flambées, the author moved through this luminous maze, until all lights failed and he went dry again. For the fact was that power, and the battle for it, utterly bored Bech. Then he met Ellen, a Steiner School teacher, and by the glow of her intelligent, unsmiling moon face he revised some of the yellowing old shoals. Olive, his heroine, became Lenore, and less vulnerable and innocent than when she had been conceived, toward the end of the still-sexist Sixties. Today’s young woman would as soon commit murder as suicide. And television soap opera had become, disconcertingly, the rage, a cliché. More trips mercifully intervened. Bech had passed fifty, and his hair had become a startling blob of white in the publicity photographs, and his work in progress, Think Big, had been so often mentioned in print that collectors wrote him in some exasperation over their inability to procure a copy. It was this mess of hopeful beginnings, it was this blasted dream, that Bea now ordered him to make come true.