Bech Is Back

by John Updike

  What did she know of art? She had been an honors student at Vassar, majoring in economics. Her father, old Judge Latchett, recently dead, had run the quickest docket in the East. Her sister, the difficult Norma, ill-disguised prototype of Thelma Stern, had had a testy and judgmental tongue. Bea’s softness, which had lured him, sheathed an instinctive efficiency; at heart she was still that good child who would check off Toothbrushing, Breakfast, and Toidy on the chart provided before going off each day to school. “Writing isn’t like that,” he protested.

  “Like what?”

  “Like toothbrushing and breakfast and doing toidy. The world doesn’t need it that way.”

  She thought, her face in repose round and unsmiling, like that of his character Lenore. “You do, though,” she said. “Need it. Because you’re a writer. At least that’s what you told me you were.”

  Bech ignored the suggestion that he had deceived her, for the many years of their courtship. He pursued his argument: “To justify its existence writing has to be extraordinary. If it’s ordinary it’s less than worthless; it’s clutter. Go into any bookstore and try to breathe. You can’t. Too many words produced by people working every morning.”

  “You know,” Bea told him, “Rodney wasn’t that crazy about being a bond analyst, either. He would have loved to play tennis all day, every day. But up he got, to catch that 7:31, rain or shine; it used to break my heart. I’d hide in bed until he was gone, it made me feel so guilty.”

  “See,” Bech said. “By marrying me, you’ve freed yourself from guilt.” But every time she brandished Rodney’s example at him, he knew that he had given the world of power a hook into his flesh.

  “Donald keeps asking me what you do,” Bea went on. “The girls were asked at school if it was true you were insane. I mean, thirteen years without a word.”

  “Now you’re hurting me.”

  “You’re hurting us,” she said, her face going pink in patches. “Rodney feels sorry for me, I can tell over the phone.”

  “Oh fuck Rodney. What do I care about the Rodneys of the world? Why’d you ever leave him if he was so great?”

  “He was a pill; but don’t make me say it. It’s you I love, obviously. Forget everything I said, I love it the way you keep yourself pure by never putting pen to paper. There’s just one little thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Never mind.”

  “No, tell me.” He loved secrets, had loved them ever since his father whispered to him that his mother was bad-tempered that day for a reason that had nothing to do with them, and that some day when Henry grew up he would understand. It was not until Bech was about thirty-eight, and lying in bed beside a lovely sleeping girl called Claire, that Bech realized his father had been referring to menstruation.

  “We need the dough,” Bea said.

  “Oho. Now you’re really talking.”

  “This is a big house to heat, and they say fuel oil’s going to go to a dollar a gallon. And some slates fell off the north side after that big wind last week.”

  “Let’s sell this barn and move back to the Apple, where the living is easy.”

  “You know I would, if it weren’t for the children.”

  He knew nothing of the kind, but enjoyed making her lie. He enjoyed, indeed, these contentious conversations, bringing out the Norma in Bea, and would have continued had not the front-door bell rung. It was Marcie Flint, another driven veteran of the suburban quotidian, come to compare second marriages over coffee. Bech fled upstairs, past all the tumbled toys and blankets of the children’s bedrooms, to his third-floor retreat. He scratched out Think Big on page one of his mauled manuscript and penned the words Easy Money. He changed his heroine’s name back to Olive. Ripe with reckless scorn, he began anew.

  As Bech typed, countering with his four-finger syncopation the nervous rustling of the Rodentia overhead, and as spring’s chartreuse buds and melting breezes yielded to the oppressive overgrowth of summer, in turn to be dried and tinted according to the latest fall fashions and returned to the frostbound earth, memories of Manhattan weather washed through him unpredictably, like pangs of bursitis. There, the seasons spoke less in the flora of the hard-working parks than in the costumes of the human fauna, the furs and wool and leather boots and belts and the summer cotton and clogs and in these recent condition-conscious years the shimmering tanktops and supershorts of the young women who rose up from the surfaces of stone as tirelessly as flowers out of mud. New York was so sexy, in memory: the indoorness of it all, amid circumambient peril, and the odd good health imposed upon everyone by the necessity of hiking great distances in the search for taxis, of struggling through revolving doors and lugging bags heavy with cheesecake and grapefruit up and down stairs, the elevator being broken. On this island of primitive living, copulation occurred as casually as among Polynesians, while Scarlatti pealed from the stereo and the garbage truck whined its early-morning song two blocks away. Bech remembered, from that cozy long decade of his life before the onset of Claire, how he had gone home from a publishing party with a Mademoiselle editor and how in her narrow kitchen her great creamy breasts had spilled from her loosened Shantung dress into his hands as simultaneously their mouths fused in the heat of first kiss and his eyes, furtively sneaking a look at his surroundings, filled with the orbs of the glossy scarlet onions hung on a jutting nail above this overflowing lady’s sink. He remembered how Claire, slender as a fish, would flit naked through the aquarium light of his own rooms as a short winter day ended outside in a flurry of wet snow collecting flake by flake on the ridges of the fire escape. She had been studying dance in those remote days, and as Ravel latticed the snow-darkened air with rhythm could have been practicing in a flesh-colored leotard but for the vertical smudge of her pubic hair; unlike the dark triangle that was standard, her pussy formed a gauzy little column as of smoke. Of the mistress succeeding Claire, Bech entertained fewer nostalgic memories, for she had been Norma Latchett, now his sister-in-law. Norma occasionally visited them, dirtying every ashtray in the house with a single lipsticky cigarette each and exuding a rapacious melancholy that penetrated to Bech even through the dungeon walls of the kinship taboo that now prevailed between them. Judge Latchett, having sent so many to their reward, had gone to his, and the sisters’ mother was legally incompetent; so Norma now faintly stank to Bech of family depressingness, as Wasps know it. It was the romantic period before Norma that with a sweetness bordering on pain welled up to flood the blank spaces in his ragged manuscript; it now seemed a marvel worth confiding that through those publicly convulsed years under two lugubrious presidents the nation had contained catacombs of private life. Bech at his green steel desk retrieved that vast subterrain detail by detail and interwove the overheard music of a buried time with the greedy confusion his characters bred. They were, but for Olive and some lesser shiksa mistresses, Jewish, and here, in this house built and repeatedly bought by Protestants, and presently occupied save for himself by blonds, and haunted by the tight-lipped ghost of Rodney Cook, Jewishness too became a kind of marvel—a threadbare fable still being spun, an energy and irony vengefully animating the ruins of Christendom, a flavor and guile and humor and inspired heedlessness truly superhuman, a spectacle elevated the promised Biblical notch above the rest of the human drama. His own childhood, his Brooklyn uncles and West Side upbringing, he now saw, through the precious wrong end of the telescope, to be as sharp and toylike as once the redneck motorcyclists of the Midwest had seemed, when the telescope was pointed in the other direction. Day by day his imagination caught slow fire and reduced a few pages to the ash-gray of typescript. He had determined not to rewrite, in his usual patient-spider style, or even to reread, except to check the color of a character’s hair or sports car. Where the events seemed implausible, he reasoned that a novel about Greenbaum Productions might legitimately have the texture of a soap opera; where a character seemed thin and unformed, he reassured himself that later episodes would flesh him out; where a gap
loomed, Bech enshrined yet another erotic memory from that past enchanted by the removes of time and his Ossining exile. He cast off as spiritual patrons finicky Flaubert and Kafka and adopted the pragmatic fatalism of those great native slapdashers Melville and Faulkner. Whatever faults he was bundling pell-mell into his opus he saw as deepening his revenge upon Bea. For his uncharacteristic gallop of activity was among other things spiteful—fulfillment of a vow to “show” her. “I’ll show you!” children would sometimes shout, near tears, beneath his window.

  Downstairs, when the day’s dizzying flight with the smirched angels of his imagining was over, a brave new domestic world awaited Bech. For lunch he might eat several drying peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich halves that Donald and a playmate had spurned an hour before. As summer ripened, vegetables from Bea’s garden—beans, broccoli, zucchini—might be lying on the butcher-block kitchen counter and could be nibbled raw. That there was great nutritional and moral benefit in raw, homegrown vegetables was one of the Christian notions he found piquant. If Bea was around, she might warm him soup from a can and sit at the round kitchen table and sip some with him. Luncheon meat might be in the refrigerator or not, depending upon the vagaries of her shopping and the predations of Ann’s and Judy’s boyfriends. It was a chaotic contrast to the provender of Bech’s bachelor days, when the stack of delicatessen salami occupying in lonely splendor the second shelf of his refrigerator went down at the inexorable rate of three slices a day, like a book being slowly read through. Dinner in those days he usually ate out; or else, in the emergency of a blizzard or an irresistible TV special, he heated up a frozen Chinese meal, a nugget of ice remaining at the heart of the egg roll. Here, wed, he confronted great formal meals planned by Bea as if to fatten him up for the kill, or else fought for scraps with barbaric adolescents.

  Ann’s and Judy’s boyfriends struck him as a clamorous and odorous swarm of dermatological disasters, a pack of howling wolves clad in the latest style of ragbag prep, their clothes stretching and ripping under the pressure of their growing bodies, their modes of courtship uniformly impossible to ignore, from the demonstrations of football prowess arranged on the September lawn to the post-midnight spinouts of their parents’ Mercedeses on the gravel drive after some vernal dance. The twin girls themselves—Ann a touch more pensive and severe than Judy, Judy the merest shade more womanly than Ann, as if the fifteen minutes by which she had preceded her into the world insured an everlasting edge of maturity—were much at school. Bech was irritably conscious of their presence most during those evenings when, bored by homework, they would collapse together into whispering and giggles, making in the house an everywhere audible, bottomless vortex of female hilarity that fed endlessly upon itself and found fresh cause wherever it glanced. Bech could only imagine that he was somehow the joke, and feared that the entire house and his life with it would be sucked down into their insatiable mirth, so sinisterly amplified by twinnishness. Whereas little Donald, his companion in the error of being male, stirred in him only tender feelings. In the child’s clumsy warrior energy he saw himself at heart; standing above the sleeping boy’s bed at night, he took the measure of his own grotesque age and, by the light of this dream-flushed, perfect cheek, his own majestic corruption. Donald returned on the pumpkin-colored school bus around four, and sometimes he and Bech would play catch with a baseball or football, the forgotten motions returning strangely to Bech’s shoulders, the rub and whack of leather to his hands. Or, before the fall chill caused the backyard pools to be drained and the tarpaulins tugged into place, the two of them and Bea might go swimming at a neighbor’s place to which Bea’s old friendship gave them access, and where the hostess would emerge to keep them company and offer them a drink. These old friends of Bea’s, named Wryson or Weed or Hake or Crutchman—sharp English names that might have come off the roster of a Puritan caravel—had their charms and no doubt their passions and disappointments and histories, but seemed so exotic to Bech, so brittle and pale and complacently situated amid their pools and dogwoods and old Dutch masonry, that he felt like a spy among them and, when not a silent spy, a too-vigorous, curly-haired showoff. Exquisite and languid as a literary practitioner, he was made to feel among Bea’s people vulgar and muscular, a Marx brother about to pull up a skirt or grind out a cigar in a finger bowl. An evening amid such expectations wearied him. “I don’t know,” he sighed to Bea. “They’re just not my crowd.”

  “You don’t give them a chance,” she said, driving him home along the winding lanes. “You think just because they don’t live in apartment houses and have metal bookcases crammed to the ceilings and grandparents that came from a shtetl they’re not people. But Louise Bentley, that you met tonight, had something really terrible happen to her years ago, and Johnny Hake, though I know he can get carried away, really did pull himself back from the abyss.”

  “I don’t doubt,” Bech said. “But it isn’t my abyss.” Money, for example, as these Wasps possessed it, seemed something rigid and invisible, like glass. Though it could be broken and distributed, acquired and passed on, it quite lacked organic festiveness. Whereas money under Jewish hands was yeasty; it grew and spread and frolicked on the counting table. And their bizarre, Christmassy religion: many of Bea’s crowd went to church, much as they faithfully played tennis and golf and attended rallies to keep out developers. Yet their God, for all of His colorful history and spangled attributes, lay above Earth like a whisper of icy cirrus, a tenuous and diffident Other Whose tendrils failed to entwine with fibrous blood and muscle; whereas the irrepressible Jewish God, the riddle of joking rabbis, playing His practical jokes upon Job and Abraham and leading His chosen into millennia of mire without so much as the promise of an afterlife, this hairy-nostrilled God beside Whom even the many-armed deities of the Hindus appeared sleek and plausible, nevertheless entered into the daily grind and kibitzed at all transactions. Being among the goyim frightened Bech, in truth; their collective chill was the chill of devils.

  He felt easier in downtown Ossining, with its basking blacks and its rotting commercial streets tipped down sharply toward the Hudson and its chunky Gothic brick-and-cornice architecture whispering to Bech’s fancy of robber barons and fairy tales and Washington Irving. Washington Heights, he supposed, once looked much as Ossining did now. He had not expected such a strong dark-skinned presence on the streets so far up the Hudson, or the slightly sleepy Southern quality of it all—the vacant storefronts, the idle wharfs, the clapboarded shacks and rusting railroad spurs and Civil War memorials. Throughout the northeastern United States, he realized, there were towns like this, perfected long ago, topped with a band pavilion and a squat civic library, only to slide into sunstruck somnolence, like flecks of pyrite weeping rust stain from the face of a granite escarpment. Ossining, he learned, was a euphemism; in 1901, the village fathers had changed the name from Sing Sing, which had been pre-empted by the notorious prison and long ago had been stolen from the Indians, in whose Mohican language “Sin Sinck” meant “stone upon stone.” Stone upon stone the vast correctional facility had arisen; electrocutions here used to dim the lights for miles around, according to the tabloids Bech read as a boy. The coarsely screened newspaper photos of the famed “hot seat” at Sing Sing, and the movie scene wherein Cagney is dragged, moaning and rubbery-legged, down a long corridor to his annihilation, had told the young Bech all he ever wanted to know about death. He wondered if denizens of the underworld still snarled at one another, “You’ll fry for this,” and supposed not. The lights of Ossining no longer flickered in sympathy with snuffed-out murderers. The folks downtown looked merry to Bech, and the whole burg like a play set; he had the true New Yorker’s secret belief that people living anywhere else had to be, in some sense, kidding. On that sloping stage between Peekskill and Tarrytown he enjoyed being enrolled in the minor-city minstrelsy; he often volunteered to run Bea’s errands for household oddments, killing time in the long dark unair-conditioned drugstore, coveting the shine on the paperbacks
by Uris and Styron and marveling at the copious cosmetic aids of vain, anxious America. His light-headedness on these away-from-home afternoons strengthened him to burrow on, through that anfractuous fantasy he was tracing among the lost towers of New York.

  He remembered the great city in the rain, those suddenly thrashing downpours flash-flooding the asphalt arroyos and overwhelming the grated sewer mains, causing citizens to huddle—millionaires and their mistresses companionable with bag ladies and messenger boys—under restaurant canopies and in the recessed marble portals of international banks, those smooth fortresses of hidden empery. In such a rain, Tad Greenbaum and Thelma Stern are caught without their limousine. For some time, remember, Thelma has been resolved to leave Tad but dreads and postpones the moment of announcement. The taxis splash past, their little cap lights doused, their back seats holding the shadowy heads of those mysterious personages who find cabs in the worst of weathers: when the nuclear bombs begin to fall, those same shadows will be fleeing the city in perfect repose, meters ticking. Thelma’s dainty Delman’s—high gold heels each held to her feet by a single gilded ankle strap—become so soaked as she wades through the gutter’s black rivulet that she takes them off, and then scampers across the shining tar in her bare feet. No, cross that out, her feet are not bare, she would be wearing pantyhose; with a madcap impulse she halts, beneath the swimming DONT WALK sign, and reaches up into her Shantung skirt and peels herself free, disentangling first the left leg, then the right. Now her feet are truly bare. Tomboyishly she, who as the lithe Lessup girl had run wild in the hills of Kentucky, wads the drenched nylon and chucks it overhand into one of those UFO-like trash barrels the filth-beleaguered metropolis provides. Tad, catching up to her, his size thirteen iguana-skin penny loafers still soggily in place, laughs aloud at her reckless gesture. Her gold shoes follow into the bin; his immense freckled baritone rings out into the tumult of water and taxi tires and squealing hookers caught loitering in their scarlet stretch pants a few doors up Third Avenue with no more for shelter than a MASSAGE PARLOR sign. “I—want—out,” she suddenly shouts up at him. Her raven hair is pasted about her fine skeletal face like the snake-ringlets of Medusa.