by John Updike
“Well, actually, Mrs.—Miss?—Miz?—”
“Doreen will do fine.”
“It’s about a book I’m calling.”
“Yess?” That was it, a single spurt of steam, impatient. The pleasantries were over, the time clock was running.
“I’ve written a new one and wondered whom I should send it to.”
The silence this time was not cup-shaped, but more like that of a liqueur glass, narrow and transparent, with a brittle stem.
She said, “When you say you’ve written it, what do you mean exactly? This isn’t an outline, or a list of chapters, you want us to bid on?”
“No, it’s finished. I mean, there may be some revisions on the galleys—”
“The first-pass proofs, yess.”
“Whatever. And as to the bid, in the old days, when Big—when Mr. Vanderhaven was around, you’d just take it, and print it, and pay me a royalty we thought was fair.”
“Those were the old days,” Doreen Pease said, permitting herself a guffaw, and what sounded like a puff on her cigar. “Let’s get our pigeons all in line, Mr. Bech. You’ve finished a manuscript. Is this the Think Big you mention in interviews from time to time?”
“Well, the title’s been changed, tentatively. My wife, I’m married now—”
“I read that in People. About six months ago, wasn’t it?”
“Two and a half years, actually. My wife had this theory about how to write a book. You just sit down—”
“And do it. Well of course. Smart girl. And you’re calling me to ask who to send it to? Where’s your agent in all this?”
He blushed—a wasted signal over the phone. “He gave up on me years ago. That was fine. I hate people reading over my shoulder.”
“Henry, I’m cutting my own throat saying this, but if I were you I’d get me one. Starting now. A book by Henry Bech is a major development. But if you want to play it your way, send it straight here to me. Doreen Pease. Like the vegetable with an ‘e’ on the end.”
“Or I could bring it down on the train. I seem to live up here in Westchester.”
“Tell me where and we’ll send a messenger in a limo to pick it up.”
He told her where and asked, “Isn’t a limo expensive?”
“We find it cuts way down on postage and saves us a fortune in the time sector. Anyway, let’s face it, Henry: you’re top of the line. What’d you say the title was?”
“Easy Money.”
“Oh yesss.”
The hiss sounded prolonged. He wondered if he was tiring her. “Uh, one more thing, Miss Pease, Doreen. If it turns out you like it and want to print it—”
“Oh, Christ, I’m sure we’ll want to, it can’t be that terrible. You’re very sweetly modest, Henry, but you have a name, and names don’t grow on trees these days; television keeps coming up with so many new celebrities the public has lost track. The public is a conservative animal: that’s the conclusion I’ve come to after twenty years in this business. They like the tried and true. You’d know that better than I would.” She guffawed; she had decided that he was somehow joshing her, and that all her worldly wisdom was his also.
“What I wanted to ask,” Bech said, “was would I be assigned an editor? My old one, Ned Clavell, died a few years ago.”
“He was a bit before my era here, but I’ve heard a ton about him. He must have been a wonderful man.”
“He had his points. He cared a lot about not splitting infinitives or putting too much vermouth into a martini.”
“Yess. I think I know what you’re saying. I’m reading you, Henry.”
She was? He seemed to hear her humming; but perhaps it was another conversation fraying into this line.
“I think in that case,” Doreen decided, “we better give you over to our Mr. Flaggerty. He’s young, but very brilliant. Very. And sensitive. He knows when to stop, is I think the quality you’ll most appreciate. Jim’s a delicious person, I know you’ll be very happy with him.”
“I don’t have to be that happy,” Bech said, but in a burble of electronic exclamations their connection was broken off. Neither party felt it necessary to re-place the call.
The limo arrived at five. A young man with acne and a neo-Elvis wet look crawled out of the back and gave both Ann and Judy, who crowded into the front hall, a lecherous goggle eye. Bech began to fear that he was guarding treasure, in the form of these blossoming twins. Rodney, their biological father, after a period of angry mourning for his marriage, had descended into the mid-Manhattan dating game and exerted an ever feebler paternal presence. He showed up Sundays and took Donald to the Bronx Zoo or a disaster movie, and that was about it. The only masculine voices the children heard in the house belonged to Bech and the old man who came in a plastic helmet to read the water meter. But now that Bech’s book was submitted and, as of November, “in the works,” the homely mock-Tudor house tucked against the woods no longer felt like a hermitage. Calls from Vellum’s publicity and production departments shrilled at the telephone, and a dangerous change in the atmosphere, like some flavorless pernicious gas, trickled through the foundation chinks into the heated waste spaces of their home: Bech, again a working author, was no longer quite the man Bea had married, or the one his stepchildren had become accustomed to.
Vellum Press (the “The” had been dropped during a streamlining operation under one of its former corporate owners) had its offices on the top six floors of a new Lexington Avenue skyscraper the lacteal white of ersatz-ivory piano keys; the architect, a Rumanian defector famous in the gossip press for squiring the grandes dames of the less titled jet set, had used every square inch of the building lot but given the skyline a fillip at the top, with a round pillbox whose sweeping windows made the publisher’s offices feel like an airport control tower. When Bech had first published with Vellum in 1955, a single brownstone on East 67th Street had housed the operation. In those days Big Billy himself, ruddy from outdoor sport, sat enthroned in a leather wing chair in what had been two fourth-floor maid’s rooms, the partition broken through. He would toy with a Himalayan paper-knife and talk about his travels, his mountain-climbing and marlin-fishing, and about his losing battle with the greed and grossly decayed professional standards of printers. Bech enjoyed these lectures from on high, and felt exhilarated when they were over and he was released to the undogmatic, ever fresh street reality of the ginkgos, of the polished nameplates on the other brownstones, of the lean-legged women in mink jackets walking their ornamentally trimmed poodles. Ned Clavell’s office had been a made-over scullery in the basement; from its one narrow window Bech could see these same dogs lift a fluffy hind leg, exposing a mauve patch of raw poodle, and daintily urinate on the iron fencing a few yards away. Ned had been a great fusser, to whom every page of prose gave a certain pain, which he politely tried to conceal, or to voice with maximum politeness, his hands showing a tremor as they shuffled sheets of manuscript, his handsome face pale with the strain of a hangover or of language’s inexhaustible imperfection. His voice had had that hurried briskness of Thirties actors, of Ronald Colman and George Brent, and meticulously he had rotated his gray, brown, and blue suits, saving a double-breasted charcoal pinstripe for evening wear. A tiny gold rod had pressed the knot of his necktie out and the points of his shirt collar down; he wore rings on both hands, and had never married. Bech wondered now if he had been homosexual; somehow not marrying in those years could seem a simple inadvertence, the oversight of a dedicated man. “Piss off, you bitch!” he used to blurt out, from beneath his pencil-line mustache, when one of the poodles did its duty; and it took years for Bech to realize that Ned did not mean the dog but the woman with taut nylon ankles who was overseeing the little sparkling event. Yet Ned had been especially pained by Bech’s fondness for the earthier American idioms, and they spent more than one morning awkwardly bartering tits, as it were, for tats, the editor’s sharpened pencil silently pointing after a while at words he took no relish in pronouncing. Dear dead Ned: Bech sens
ed at the time he had his secret sorrows, his unpublished effusions and his unvented appetites, but the young author was set upon his own ambitions and used the other man as coolly as he used the mailman. Now the man was gone, taking his decent, double-breasted era with him.
Through the great bowed pane of Mr. Flaggerty’s office the vista of the East River and of Queen’s waterfront industrial sheds was being slowly squeezed away by rising new construction. Flaggerty also was tall, six three at least, and the hand he extended was all red-knuckled bones. He wore blue jeans and an open-necked shirt of the checkered sort that Bech associated with steelworkers out on their bowling night. He wondered, How does this man take his authors to restaurants? “It’s super Doreen is letting me handle you,” Flaggerty said.
“I’ve been told I’m hard to handle.”
“Not the way I hear it. The old-timers I talk to say you’re a pussycat.”
This young man had an uncanny dreamy smile and seemed content to sit forever at his glass desk smiling, tipped back into his chair so that his knees were thrust up to the height of his heaped In and Out baskets. His lengthy pale face was assembled all of knobs, melted together; his high brow especially had a bumpy shine. His desk top looked empty and there was no telling what he was thinking as he gazed so cherishingly at Bech.
Bech asked him, “Have you read the book?”
“Every fucking word,” Flaggerty said, as if this was unusual practice.
“And—?”
“It knocked me out. A real page-turner. Funny and gory.”
“You have any suggestions?”
Flaggerty’s wispy eyebrows pushed high into his forehead, multiplying the bumps. “No. Why would I?”
“The language didn’t strike you as—a bit rough in spots?” One of Ned Clavell’s favorite phrases.
This idea seemed doubly startling. “No, of course not. For me, it all worked. It went with the action.”
“The scene with Olive and the video crew—”
“Gorgeous. Raunchy as hell, of course, but with, you know, a lot of crazy tenderness underneath. That’s the kind of thing you do so well, Mr. Bech. Mind if I call you Henry?”
“Not at all. Sock it to me, Jim.” Bech still had not got what he wanted—an unambiguous indication that his manuscript had been pondered. He had the strange sensation, talking to Flaggerty, that his editor had not so much read the book as inhaled it: that Bech’s book had been melted down and evaporated in these slice-of-pie-shaped offices and sent into the ozone to join the former contents of aerosol cans. Here, in Vellum’s curved and pastel halls, languidly drifting young women in Vampira makeup outnumbered any signs of literary industry; the bulletin boards were monopolized by tampon and lingerie ads torn out of magazines, with all their chauvinistic implications underlined and annotated in indignant slashing felt-tip. Flaggerty’s walls were white and mostly blank, but for a grainy blowup of Thomas Wolfe about to board a trolley car. Otherwise they might be sitting in a computer lab. Bech asked him, “How do you like the title?”
“Easy Money?” So he had got that far. “Not bad. Might confuse people a little, with all these how-to-get-rich-in-the-coming-crash books on the market.”
“The original title was Think Big, but I found it hard to work under. It weighed on me. I couldn’t get going really until my wife told me to scrap the title.”
“Think Big, huh?” Flaggerty’s eyes, deep in their sockets of bone, widened. “I like it.” They were beryl: an acute pale cat color. “Don’t you?”
“I do,” Bech admitted.
“It comes at you a little harder somehow. More zap. More subliminal leverage.”
Bech nodded. This tall fellow for all his languor and rural costume talked Bech’s language. They were in business.
BECH IS BACK! was to be the key of the advertising campaign. Newspaper ads, thirty-second radio spots, cardboard cutouts in the bookstores, posters showing Bech as of over a decade ago and Bech now. Fifteen Years in the Making was a subsidiary slogan. But first, nine months of gestation had to be endured, while proofs languished in the detention cells of book production and jacket designs wormed toward a minimum of bad taste. Back in Ossining, Bea was frantic over the loss of Ann’s virginity. Judy had squealed on her younger sister. If only it had been Judy, Bea explained, she wouldn’t be so shocked; but Ann had always been the good one, the A student, the heir to Rodney’s seriousness.
“Maybe that’s why,” Bech offered. “It takes some seriousness to lose your virginity. Always flirting and hanging out with the cheerleaders like Judy, you get too savvy and the guys never lay a glove on you.”
“Oh, what do you know? You’ve never had daughters.”
“I had a sister,” he said, hurt. “I had a twenty-one-year-old mistress once.”
“I bet you did,” Bea said. “Typical. You’re just the kind of thing Rodney and I hoped would never happen to our girls.”
The twins were seventeen. They would be eighteen on Valentine’s Day. The deflowerer, if Judy could be believed, was one of the preppy crowd crunching around in the driveway with their fathers’ cars. “I don’t see that it’s any big deal,” Bech said. “I mean, it’s a peer, it’s puppy love, it’s not rape or Charles Manson or anybody. Didn’t I just read in a survey somewhere that the average American girl has had intercourse by around sixteen and a half?”
“That’s with everybody figured in,” Bea snapped. “The ghettos and Appalachia and all that. If I’d wanted my girls to be ghetto statistics I would have moved to a ghetto.”
“Listen,” Bech said, hurt again. “Some of my best ancestors grew up in a ghetto.”
“Don’t you understand?” Bea asked, her face white, her lips thinned. “It’s a defilement. A woman can never get it back.”
“What would she do with it if she could get it back? Come on, sweetie. You’re making too fucking much of this.”
“Easy for you to say. Easy for you to say anything, evidently. Do you think this would have happened if that book of yours hadn’t been in the house, all that crazy penthouse sex you cooked up out of your own sordid little flings?”
“I didn’t know Ann had read it.”
“She didn’t have to. She heard us talking about it. It was in the air.”
“Oh, please. It doesn’t take a book of mine to put sex in the air.”
“No of course not. Don’t blame books for anything. They just sit there behind their authors’ grins. You act as though the world is one thing and art is another and God forbid they should ever meet. Well, my daughter’s virginity has been sacrificed, as I see it, to that damn dirty book of yours.”
Bech had never seen Bea like this before, raging. What frightened him most were her eyes, unseeing, and the mouth that went on, a machine of medium-soft flesh that could not be shut off. This face that had nested in every fork of his body floated like some careening gull in the wind of her fury, staring red-rimmed at him as if to swoop at the exposed meat of his own face. “Jesus,” he offered with mild exasperation. “The kid is seventeen. Let her experiment if that’s what she wants.”
“It’s not what she wants, how could she want one of those awful boys? She doesn’t want it, that’s the point; what she wants is to show me. Her mother. For leaving her father and screwing you.”
“I thought it was Rodney who left.”
“Oh, don’t be so literal, you know how these things are. It takes two. But then my taking up with you, so quickly really, in that house on the Vineyard that time, and the way we’ve been here, so h-happy with each other”—her face was going from white to pink, and drifting closer to his—“I never thought of how it must look to them. The children. Especially the girls. Don’t you see, I’ve made them confront what they shouldn’t have had to so early, their own mother’s”—now her face was on his shoulder, her breath hot on his neck—“s-sexuality! And of course they’re appalled, of course they want to do self-destructive things out of spite!” He was in her grip, no less tight for her being grief-strick
en. As her storm of remorse worked its way through Bea’s fragile, Christian nervous system, tough, Semitic Bech, dreamer and doer both, author of the upcoming long-awaited Think Big, pondered open-eyed the knobbed and varnished and lightly charred mantel of their fieldstone fireplace. Above it there was an oil painting, with a china-blue, single-clouded sky, of a clipper ship that Bea’s maternal great-grandfather had once captained, depicted under full sail and cleaving a bottle-green sea as neatly crimped by waves as an old lady’s perm. Upon the mantel stood two phallic clay candlesticks, one by Ann and one by Judy, executed by the twins in some vanished summer’s art camp at Briarcliff and now by consecrated usage set on either end of the mantelpiece; beside it leaned a fishing rod with broken reel that Donald had chosen to abandon in the corner where the fieldstones met the floral-wallpapered wall. Bourgeois life: its hooks came in all sizes.
He patted Bea’s back and said, “And for all this you blame me?”
“Not you, us.”
Like Adam and Eve. The first great romantic image, the Expulsion. The aboriginal trinity of producer, advertiser, and consumer. This woman’s fair head was full of warping myths. Her sobbing had become its own delicious end, a debauchery of sorts, committed not with him but with Rodney’s ghost, to the accompaniment of spiritual stride piano played by that honorary member of many a Jew-excluding organization, Judge R. Austin Latchett.
Tad slugs her. Bech looked around for cold water, and threw some. “What about birth control?” he asked.
Bea looked up out of her tear-mottled face. “What about it?”
“If the kid’s humping, she better have it or you’ll really have something to cry about.”
Bea blinked. “Maybe it was only one time.”
Bech flattened a tear at the side of her nose, tenderness returning. “I’m afraid it’s not something you do only once. You get hooked. Have you ever talked to the girls about all this?”