Bech Is Back

by John Updike

  “Out—of—what?” Tad thunders back.

  Still the pedestrian sign says DONT WALK, though the traffic light on the avenue has turned red. The ghostly pallor of her face, upturned toward his in the streaming rain, takes on an abrupt greenish tinge. “Out—of—you,” she manages to shout at last, the leap of her life, her heart falling sickeningly within her at the utterance; Tad’s face looms above her like a blimp, bloated and unawares, his chestnut mop flattened on his wide freckled brow and releasing down one temple a thin tan trickle of the color-freshener his hair stylist favors. He is just a boy growing old, she thinks to herself, with a boy’s warrior brutality, and a boy’s essential ignorance. Without such ignorance, how could men act? How could they create empires, or for that matter cross the street?

  Their sign has changed from red to white, a blur spelling perilously WALK. Tad and Thelma run across Third Avenue to take refuge in the shallow arcade of a furrier. The street surface is a rippling film; wrappers are bunched at the clogged corner grate like bridesmaids’ handkerchiefs. Feeling tar on the soles of her feet and being pelted by rain all the length of her naked calves has released in Thelma an elemental self which scorns Tad and his charge cards and his tax breaks. He, on the other hand, his Savile Row suit collapsed against his flesh and an absurd succession of droplets falling from the tip of his nose, looks dismal and crazed. “You bitch,” he says to her in the altered acoustics of this dry spot. “You’re not going to pull this put-up-or-shut-up crap on me again; you know it’s just a matter of time.”

  Meaning, she supposes, until he leaves Ginger—Ginger Greenbaum, that stubborn little pug of a wife, always wearing caftans and muu-muus to hide her thirty pounds of overweight. Thelma marvels at herself, that she could ever sleep with a man who sleeps with that spoiled and pouting parody of a woman, whose money (made by her father in meatpacking) had fed Tad’s infant octopus. It seems comic. She laughs, and prods with a disrespectful forefinger the man’s drenched shirtfront of ribbed Egyptian cotton. His stomach is spongy; there comes by contrast into her mind the taut body of her slender Olive, their gentle mutual explorations in that exiguous, triangular West Side apartment where the light from New Jersey enters as horizontally as bars of music and thus provides accompaniment for the breathing silence of the two intertwined women.

  Tad slugs her. Or, rather, cuffs her shoulder, since she saw it coming and flinched; the blow bumps her into a wire burglar-guard behind which a clay-faced mannequin preens in an ankle-length burnoose lined with chinchilla. The rain has lessened, the golden taxis going by are all empty. “You were thinking of that other bitch,” Tad has shrewdly surmised.

  “I was not,” Thelma fervently lies, determined now to protect at all costs that slender other, that stranger to their city; she has remembered how the subtle crests of Olive’s ilia cast horizontal shadows across her flat, faintly undulant abdomen. “Let’s go back to your place and get dry,” she suggests.

  And Henry Bech in his mind’s eye saw the drying streets, raggedly dark as if after a storm of torn carbon paper, and each grate exuding a vapor indistinguishable from leaks of municipal steam. And the birds, with that unnoticed bliss of New York birds, have begun to sing, to sing from every pocket park and potted curbside shrub, while sunlight wanly resumes and Thelma—all but her sloe eyes and painted fingernails hidden within the rustling, iridescent cumulus of a bubble bath in Tad’s great sunken dove-colored tub—begins to cry. It is a good feeling, like champagne in the sinuses. His own sinuses prickling, Bech lifted his eyes and read the words Apply this side toward living space on the aluminum-foil backing of his room’s insulation. He turned his attention out the window toward the lawn, where little Donald and a grubby friend were gouging holes in the mowed grass to make a miniature golf course. Bech thought of yelling at them from his height but decided it wasn’t his lawn, his world; his world was here, with Tad and Thelma. She emerges from the bathroom drying herself with a russet towel the size of a Ping-Pong-table top. “You big pig,” she tells Tad with that self-contempt of women which is their dearest and darkest trait, “I love your shit.” He in his silk bathrobe is setting out on his low glass Mies table—no, it is a round coffee table with a leather center and a stout rim of oak, and carved oaken legs with griffin feet—champagne glasses and, in a little silver eighteenth-century salt dish bought at auction at Sotheby’s, the white, white cocaine. Taxi horns twinkle far below. Thelma sits—whether in bald mockery of the imminent fuck or to revisit that sensation of barefoot mountain-girl uncontrollability she experienced on the rainswept street—naked on an ottoman luxuriously covered in zebra hide. Each hair is a tiny needle. Bech shifted from buttock to buttock in his squeaking chair, empathizing.

  By such reckless daily fits, as seven seasons slowly wheeled by in the woods and gardens of Ossining, the manuscript accumulated: four emptied boxes of bond paper were needed to contain it, and still the world it set forth seemed imperfectly explored, a cave illumined by feeble flashlight, with ever more incidents and vistas waiting behind this or that stalagmite, or just on the shadowy far shore of the unstirring alkaline pool. At night sometimes he would read Bea a few pages of it, and she would nod beside him in bed, exhaling the last drag of her cigarette (she had taken up smoking, after years on the nicotine wagon, in what mood of renewed desperation or fresh anger he could not fathom), and utter crisply, “It’s good, Henry.”

  “That’s all you can say?”

  “It’s loose. You’re really rolling. You’ve gotten those people just where you want them.”

  “Something about the way you say that—”

  “What am I supposed to do, whoop for joy?” She doused her butt with a vehement hiss in the paper bathroom cup half-full of water she kept by her bedside in lieu of an ashtray, a trick learned at Vassar. “All those old sugarplums you fucked in New York, do you really think I enjoy reading about how great they were?”

  “Honey, it’s fantasy. I never knew anybody like these people. These people have money. The people I knew all subscribed to Commentary, before it went fascist.”

  “Do you realize there isn’t a Gentile character in here who isn’t slavishly in love with some Jew?”

  “Well, that’s—”

  “Well, that’s life, you’re going to say.”

  “Well, that’s the kind of book it is. Travel Light was all about Gentiles.”

  “Seen as hooligans. As barbaric people. How can you think that, living two years now with Ann and Judy and Donald? He just adores you, you know that, don’t you?”

  “He can beat me at Battleship, that’s what he likes. Hey, are you crying?”

  She had turned her head away. She rattled at her night table, lighting another cigarette with her back still turned. The very space of the room had changed, as if their marriage had passed through a black hole and come out as anti-matter. Bea prolonged the operation, knowing she had roused guilt in him, and when she at last turned back gave him a profile as cool as the head on a coin. She had a toughness, Bea, that the toughness of her sister, Norma, had long eclipsed but that connubial privacy revealed. “I’ve another idea for your title,” she said, biting off the words softly and precisely. “Call it Jews and Those Awful Others. Or how about Jews versus Jerks?”

  Bech declined to make the expected protest. What he minded most about her in these moods was his sense of being programmed, of being fitted tightly into a pattern of reaction; she wanted, his loving suburban softly, to nail him down.

  Frustrated by his silence, she conceded him her full face, her eyes rubbed pink in the effort of suppressing tears and her mouth a blurred cloud of flesh-color sexier than any lipstick. She put an arm about him. He reciprocated, careful of the cigarette close to his ear. “I just thought,” she confessed, her voice coming in little heated spurts of breath, “your living here so long now with me, with us, something nice would get into your book. But those people are so vicious, Henry. There’s no love that makes them tick, just ego and greed. Is that how you see u
s? I mean us, people?”

  “No, no,” he said, patting, thinking that indeed he did, indeed he did.

  “I recognize these gestures and bits of furniture you’ve taken from your life here, but it doesn’t seem at all like me. This idiotic Ginger character, I hate her, yet sometimes whole sentences I know I’ve said come out of her mouth.”

  He stroked the roundness of the shoulder that her askew nightie strap bared, while her solvent tears, running freely, released to his nostrils the scent of discomposed skin moisturizer. “The only thing you and Ginger Greenbaum have in common,” he assured her, “is you’re both married to beasts.”

  “You’re not a beast, you’re a dear kind man—”

  “Away from my desk,” he interjected.

  “—but I get the feeling when you read your book to me it’s a way of paying me back. For loving you. For marrying you.”

  “Who was it,” he asked her, “who told me to do a few pages a day and not worry about le mot juste and the capacity for taking infinite pains and all that crap? Who?”

  “Please don’t be so angry,” Bea begged. The hand of the arm not around his shoulders and holding a cigarette, the hand of the arm squeezed between and under their facing tangent bodies, found his dormant prick and fumblingly enclosed it. “I love your book,” she said. “Those people are so silly and wild. Not like us at all. Poor little Olive. She had to end it herself.”

  His voice softened as his prick hardened. “You talk as though this was the first time I’ve ever written about Jews. That’s not so. Brother Pig had that union organizer in it, and there were even rabbis in The Chosen. I just didn’t want to do what all the others were doing, and what Singer had done in Yiddish anyway.”

  She snuffled, quite his Christian maiden now, and burrowed her pink nose deeper into the grizzly froth of his chest while her touch lower down took on a quicksilver purity and slidingness. “I have a terrible confession to make,” she said. “I never got through The Chosen. It was assigned years ago in a reading group I belonged to up here, and I tried to read it, and kept getting interrupted, and then the group discussed it and it was as if I had read it.”

  Any guilt Bech might have been feeling toward her eased. Claire had read The Chosen; it had been dedicated to her. Norma had read it twice, taking notes. He rolled across Bea’s body and switched off the light. “Nobody who did read it liked it,” he said in the dark, and kneeled above her, near her face.

  “Wait,” she said, and dunked her cigarette with a sizzle. Something like a wet smoke ring encircled him; tightened, loosened. What beasts we all are. What pigs, Thelma would say. I love your shit.

  Bea found him a typist—Mae, a thirty-year-old black woman with an IBM Selectric in a little ranch house the color of faded raspberries on Shady Lane; there was a green parakeet in a cage and a small brown child hiding behind every piece of furniture. Bech was afraid Mae wouldn’t be able to spell, but as it turned out she was all precision and copyediting punctilio; she was in rebellion against her racial stereotype, like a Chinese rowdy or an Arab who hates to haggle. It was frightening, seeing his sloppily battered-out, confusingly revised manuscript go off and come back the next weekend as stacks of crisp prim typescript, with a carbon on onionskin and a separate pink sheet of queried corrigenda. He was being edged closer to the dread plunge of publication, as when, younger, he would mount in a line of shivering wet children to the top of the great water slide at Coney Island—a shaky little platform a mile above turquoise depths that still churned after swallowing their last victim—and the child behind him would nudge the backs of his legs, when all Bech wanted was to stand there a while and think about it.

  “Maybe,” he said to Bea, “since Mae is such a whiz, and must need the money—you never see a husband around the place, just that parakeet—I should go over it once more and have her retype.”

  “Don’t you dare,” Bea said.

  “But you’ve said yourself, you loathe the book. Maybe I can soften it. Take out that place where the video crew masturbates all over Olive’s drugged body, put in a scene where they all come up to Ossining and admire the fall foliage.” Autumn had invaded their little woods with its usual glorious depredations. Bech had begun to work in his insulated room two springs ago. Spring, summer, fall, winter, spring, summer, fall: those were the seven seasons he had labored, while little Donald turned twelve and Ann, so Judy had tattled, lost her virginity.

  “I loathe it, but it’s you,” Bea said. “Show it to your publisher.”

  This was most frightening. Fifteen years had passed since he had submitted a manuscript to The Vellum Press. In this interval the company had been sold to a supermarket chain who had peddled it to an oil company who had in turn, not liking the patrician red of Vellum’s bottom line, managed to foist the firm off on a West Coast lumber-and-shale-based conglomerate underwritten, it was rumored, by a sinister liaison of Japanese and Saudi money. It was like being a fallen woman in the old days: once you sold yourself, you were never your own again. But at each change of ownership, Bech’s books, outré enough to reassure the public that artistic concerns had not been wholly abandoned, were reissued in a new paperback format. His longtime editor at Vellum, dapper, sensitive Ned Clavell, had succumbed to well-earned cirrhosis of the liver and gone to that three-martini luncheon in the sky. Big Billy Vanderhaven, who had founded the firm as a rich man’s plaything in the days of the trifling tax bite and who had concocted its name loosely out of his own, had long since retired to Hawaii, where he lived with his fifth wife on a diet of seaweed and macadamia nuts. A great fadster, who had raced at Le Mans and mountain-climbed in Nepal and scuba-dived off Acapulco, “Big” Billy—so called sixty years ago to distinguish him from his effete and once socially prominent cousin, “Little” Billy Vanderhaven—had apparently cracked the secret of eternal life, which is Do Whatever You Damn Well Please. Yet, had the octogenarian returned under the sponsorship of that Japanese and Saudi money to take the helm of Vellum again, the effect could have been scarcely less sensational than Henry Bech turning up with a new manuscript. Bech no longer knew the name of anyone at the firm except the woman who handled permissions and sent him his little checks and courtesy copies of relevant anthologies, with their waxen covers and atrocious typos. When at last, gulping and sitting down and shutting his eyes and preparing to slide, he dialed Vellum’s number, it was the editor-in-chief he asked for. He was connected to the snotty voice of a boy.

  “You’re the editor-in-chief?” he asked incredulously.

  “No I am not,” the voice said, through its nose. “This is her secretary.”

  “Oh. Well could I talk to her?”

  “May I ask who is calling, please?”

  Bech told him.

  “Could you spell that, please?”

  “Like the beer but with an ‘h’ on the end, ‘h’ as in ‘Heineken.’ ”

  “Truly? Well aren’t we boozy this morning!”

  There was a cascade of electronic peeping, a cup-shaped silence, and then a deep female voice saying, “Mr. Schlitzeh?”

  “No, no. Bech. B-E-C-H. Henry. I’m one of your authors.”

  “You sure are. Absolutely. It’s an honor and a pleasure to hear your voice. I first read you in Irvington High School; they assigned Travel Light to the accelerated track. It knocked me for a loop. And it’s stayed with me. Not to mention those others. What can I do for you, sir? I’m Doreen Pease, by the way. Sorry we’ve never met.”

  From all this Bech gathered that he was something of a musty legend in the halls of Vellum, and that nevertheless here was a busy woman with her own gravity and attested velocity and displacement value. He should come to the point. “I’m sorry, too,” he began.

  “I wish we could get you in here for lunch some time. I’d love to get your slant on the new format we’ve given your reprints. We’re just crazy about what this new designer has done, she’s just out of the Rhode Island School of Design, but those stick figures against those electric col
ors, with the sateen finish, and the counterstamped embossing—”

  “Stunning,” Bech agreed.

  “You know, it gives a unity; for me it gives the shopper a handle on what you are all about, you as opposed to each individual title. The salesmen report that the chains have been really enthusiastic: some of them have given us a week in the window. And that ain’t just hay, for quality softcover.”