Bech Is Back

by John Updike

  “I suppose so,” Bea said vaguely. “I know at school they took hygiene.… It’s hard, Henry. For a long time they’re so young it wouldn’t make any sense and then suddenly they’re so old you assume they must know it all and you’d feel foolish.”

  “Well, there’re worse things than feeling foolish.” It was hard for him, on his side, to believe that Bea needed his advice, his wisdom. Female mockery and its Southern cousin female adulation had played in his ears for five decades, so it was hard for him to hear this shy wifely tune, this halting request for guidance in a world little more transparent in its fundamental puzzles to female intution than to male. “You must talk to her,” Bech advised firmly.

  “But how can I let her know I know anything without betraying Judy?”

  The prototypical maze, Bech remembered reading somewhere, was the female insides. He tried to be patient. “You don’t have to let her know. Just tell her as an item of general interest.”

  “Then I should be talking to them both at the same time.”

  She had a point there, he admitted to himself. Aloud he said, “No. In this area being a twin doesn’t count anymore. You can imply to Ann you’ve had or will have the same conference with Judy, but for now you want to talk privately with her. Listen. The girl must know she’s gotten in deep, she wants to hear from her mother. She’s not going to grill you about what you know or how you know.”

  The more persuasively he talked, the more slack and dismayed her expression grew. “But what do I say exactly, to start it off?”

  “Say, ‘Ann, you’re reaching an age now when many girls in our society enter into sexual relations. I can’t tell you I approve, because I don’t; but there are certain medical options you should be aware of.’ ”

  “It doesn’t sound like me. She’ll laugh.”

  “Let her. She’s a little girl inside a woman’s body. She’s suddenly been given the power to make a new human life out of her own flesh. It’s more frightening than getting a driver’s license. She’s more frightened than you are.”

  “How do you know so much?”

  “I’m a man of the world. People are my profession.”

  A new thought struck Bea. “Don’t boys like that use things?”

  “Well, they used to, but in this day and age I expect they’re too spoiled and lazy. They don’t like that snappy feeling.”

  “But if I begin to talk contraception with her so calmly, it amounts to permission. I’m saying it’s fine.” Panic squeezed this last word out thin as a wire.

  “Well, maybe it is fine,” he said. “Think of Samoa. Of Zanzibar. Western bourgeois civilization, don’t forget, is a momentary episode in the history of Homo sapiens.”

  She heard the impatience of his tone, his boredom with wedded worry and wisdom. “Henry, I’m sorry. I’m being stupid. It’s just I’m so scared of doing the wrong thing. For some reason I can’t think.”

  “Well,” he began in a deep voice, for the third time. “It’s easy to give advice where it’s not your own life and death. On the matter of my book, you were very hard-headed.”

  “And you resent it,” she pointed out, dry-eyed at last.

  After this fraught discussion of sexuality, it seemed to Bech, Bea pulled back, she who had once been so giving and playful, so honestly charmed to find this new, hairier, older, more gnarled and experienced man in her bed. Now when at night, finished reading, he turned off his light and experimentally caressed her, she stiffened at his touch, for it interrupted her inner churning. Even under him and enclosing him, she felt absent. “What are you thinking about?” he would ask.

  It would be as if he had startled her awake, though the whites of her eyes gleamed sleeplessly in the Ossining moonlight. Sometimes she would confess, blaming herself for both the girl’s sin and this its frigid penance, “Ann.”

  “Can’t you give it a rest?”

  “God in Heaven I wish I could.”

  At Vellum, lanky, laconic Flaggerty had a young female assistant, a quick black-haired girl fresh from Sarah Lawrence, and Bech wondered if it was her hands that appeared in the Xeroxes the firm sent him of his galley sheets. Whoever it was had held each sheet flat on the face of the photocopier, and in the shadowy margins clear ghosts of female fingers showed, some so vivid a police department could have analyzed the fingerprints. Bech inspected these parts of disembodied hands with interest; they seemed smaller, slightly, than real hands, but then womanly smallness, capable of Belgian embroidery and Rumanian gymnastics, is one of the ways by which the grosser sex is captivated. He looked through the photocopied fingers for the hard little ghost of a wedding or engagement ring and found none; but then she might have been employing only her right hand.

  At last Bea did take Ann aside, on an evening when Judy was working late on the senior yearbook, and they had their conversation. “It was just as you predicted,” Bea told Bech in their bed. “She wasn’t angry that I seemed to know, she seemed relieved. She cried in my arms, but she wouldn’t promise to stop doing it. She isn’t sure she loves the boy, but he’s awfully sweet. We agreed I’d make an appointment with Doctor Landis to get her fitted for a diaphragm.”

  “Well then,” he said. “After all that fuss.”

  “I’m sorry,” Bea apologized. “I know I’ve been distracted lately. You want to make love now?”

  “In principle,” Bech said. “But in practice, I’m beat. Donald made me bowl six strings with him over at Pin Paradise and my whole shoulder aches. Also I thought I’d take the train into town tomorrow.”

  “Oh?”

  “There’re some things I want to go over on the galleys with Flaggerty. It’s better if we can hash it out right there, and I want to be sharp. He’s deceptive—all lazy and purring and next thing he’s at your throat.”

  “I thought you said he never had any suggestions. Unlike that other editor you had years ago.”

  “Well, he didn’t, but now he’s developing some. I think he was babying me before, since I’m a living legend.”

  “O.K., dear. If you say so. Love you.”

  “Love you,” Bech echoed, preparing to fold his mind into a dark shape, a paper airplane to be launched with a flick from the crumbling cliff of consciousness.

  But Bea broke into his dissolution with the thought, spoken aloud toward the ceiling, “I worry now about what Judy will say. Somehow I don’t think she’ll approve. She’ll think I’ve been too soft.”

  His sweet suburban softy, Bech thought sibilantly, and slept.

  At his suggestion next day Flaggerty introduced him to his assistant. “Arlene Schoenberg,” Flaggerty said, stooping in his shirt of mattress ticking like some giant referee overseeing a jump-off between two opposing players at a midget basketball game. The girl was small, slender, and sleek, with hair in a Lady Dracula fall and sable eyes fairly dancing, in their web of sticky lashes, with delight at meeting Henry Bech.

  “Mr. Bech, I’ve admired you for so long—”

  “I feel like old hat,” Bech finished for her.

  “Oh, no,” the girl said, aghast.

  “So you tote bales for Massah Jim here,” Bech said.

  “Arlene has all the moves,” Flaggerty said, shuffling, about to blow the whistle.

  Bech had held on a half-second longer than necessary to her hand. Her dear small busy clever hand. It was much whiter than in the Xeroxes, and decidely pulsing in his.

  He glided back to Ossining as the early-winter dusk was bringing to a glow the signal lights, the grudged wattage of the station platform, the vulnerable gold of the windows of homes burning in the distance, all softened by the tentative wet beginnings of a snowfall. His head and loins were light with possibility merely, for Flaggerty had taken him to lunch at a health-food restaurant where no liquor was served and, when they had returned, Arlene Schoenberg was absent on a crosstown errand. Bech drove his old Ford—only thirty-three thousand miles in eighteen years of ownership—home through the cosmic flutter. He was met by a wild wife.
Bea pulled him into the downstairs bathroom so she could impart her terrible new news. “Now Judy wants one too!”

  “One what?” Bea’s eyes, after his brooding upon Arlene’s dark, heavily lashed ones all through the lulling train ride, looked so bald and blue, Bech had to force himself to feel there was a soul behind this doll’s stare.

  “One diaphragm!” Bea answered, putting the lid hard on her desire to scream. “I asked her if she was making love to anybody and she said No and I told her they couldn’t fit one in with her hymen intact and she said she broke hers horseback-riding years ago, and I just have no idea if she’s lying or not. She was awfully cocky, Henry; I know now I did the wrong thing with Ann, I know it.” Bea uttered all this in a choked tearful rush; he had to hug her, there in the downstairs bathroom, the smallest room in the big house.

  “You did the right thing,” he had to say, for she had followed his advice.

  “But why did Ann have to run right away and tell her?” Bea asked.

  “Bragging,” Bech offered, already bored. He felt this woman’s mind narrowing in like the vortex in a draining bathtub toward an obsession with her daughters’ vaginas. There must be more to life than this. He asked Bea, “What would Rodney have done in this situation?”

  It was the wrong name to invoke. “This situation wouldn’t have happened if Rodney were still here,” Bea said, making little fists and resting them on Bech’s chest in lieu of thumping him.

  “Really?” he asked, wondering whether this could be so. Rodney had gone from being a pill and a heel to become in absentia the very principle of order—the clockwork God of the Deists, hastily banished by the Romantic rebellion. “Could he really have stopped the girls from growing up?”

  Bea’s face was contorted and clouded by a rich pink veil of mourning for Rodney. Beyond a certain age, women are not enhanced by tears. Bech shrugged off her absent-minded grip upon him and snapped, “Here’s a simple solution. Tell Judy she has to go out and get fucked first before you’ll buy her a diaphragm.”

  Get a diaphragm the old-fashioned way, ran through his mind. Earn it. He left Bea weeping in the tiny room, with its honorable, solid turn-of-the-century plumbing, and surveyed the weather from the bay windows. It was snowing hard now, thick as a ticker-tape parade. The mass of woods behind the house was toned down almost out of sight; in the near foreground the spherical aluminum bird-feeder suspended from the old grape arbor swung softly back and forth like a bell buoy in a whispering white sea. Donald was outside trying to toboggan already on the fresh-fallen inch, and the twin girls were huddled giggling on the long orange sofa in the TV den, which had been intended a hundred years ago as a library. On its shelves Bech’s books still waited to be integrated with the books already there. Rodney had been a history buff, and collected books on sailing. The girls’ faces looked feverish with secrets. Their giggles stopped when Bech loomed in the doorway. “Why don’t you two little angels,” he asked them, “stop giving your mother a hard time with your nasty little cunts?”

  “Screw you, Uncle Henry,” Judy managed to get out, though their four gray eyes stared in fright.

  Rather than wax more ogreish, he climbed the stairs to his silver room and read proof for the hour before dinner. Mortimer Zenith, a minor character who took on an unexpected menace and dynamism in the third chapter, was outlining to poor fat, battered, snuffly, alcoholic Ginger Greenbaum the potential financial wonders of a divorce. Mortimer, too, has his designs on the lovely Olive, once he gets his own game show, which he is hoping Ginger will back, once she gets her chunk of Tad’s money. Ginger, muddled and despairing though she is, cannot quite imagine life without Tad, whose scorn and long absences are somewhat mitigated by the afternoon consolations of Emilio, the young Filipino horsetrainer on their newly acquired Connecticut estate. What caught Bech’s eye as he wrote, and now as he rewrote on proof, was the light at the great windows of the Greenbaum penthouse, while Mort and Ginger murmur and car horns—he crossed out “twinkle”—bleat ever more urgently ten stories below. The sky has sifted out of its harsh noon cobalt a kind of rosy brown banded behind the blackening profiles of the skyscrapers, here and there a cornice or gargoyle flaming in the dying light from the west. Rush hour, once again. Bech in his mind’s eye sees a pigeon scrabblingly alight on the sill outside, causing both scheming, curried heads to turn around simultaneously. At his own window, the outdoors was an opaque gray blanket. Individual pellets of snow ticked at the icy panes, like a tiny cry for help. Downstairs, a trio of female voices was lifted in pained chorus, chanting the scandal of Bech’s brief exchange with the twins. The front door slammed as Donald came in frozen, his voice loud with complaint at the toboggan’s performance. Happiness was up here, as the tendrils of emendation thickened along the margins and the electric heaters glazed Bech’s shins with warmth. He glanced again at his window and was surprised not to see a pigeon there, with its cocked head and Chaplin-tramp style of walking, its beady eye alert for a handout. Tick. Tick. Blizzards are ideal for doing proof, he thought. Socked in. Byrd at the South Pole. Raleigh in the Tower.

  The storm felt sexy, but beneath the goosedown puff Bea whimpered to him, “I’m sorry, sweetie. This thing with the girls has exhausted me. Judy and Ann and I had a big cry about everything but it still all feels so up in the air.” Wind softly whirred in the chimney of their bedroom fireplace, with its broken damper. Gently his hand sought to tug up the flannel of her nightie. “Oh, Henry, I just can’t,” Bea pleaded. “After all this upset I just feel numb down there.” When her breathing slowed to a sleeper’s regularity, and the house sighed in all its walls as the storm cuffed its frame with rhythmic airy blows, Bech in his meteorological rapture masturbated, picturing instead of his own thick hand that small, dark, dirty Xeroxed one.

  The snow descended for forty-eight hours, and they were snowbound for another two days. The pack of pimply wolves attracted to this house by Ann and Judy’s pheromones assembled now not in their fathers’ cars but on cross-country skis and, in one specially well equipped case, on a Kawasaki snowmobile; the boys, puffed up by parkas to the size of that cheerful monster made out of Michelin tires, clumped in and out of the front hall, tracking snow and exhaling steam. Bea’s immediate neighbors, too, tracked in and out, swapping canned goods and tales of frozen pipes and defrosted food lockers. The oral tradition in America was not quite dead, it seemed, as sagas of marooned cars, collapsed gazebos, and instant Alps beside the plowed parking lots downtown tumbled in. The worst privation in Ossining appeared to be the three days’ non-delivery of The New York Times; withdrawal symptoms raged at breakfast tables and beset stolid bankers as they heaved at the snow in their driveways, recklessly aware of bubbles of ignorance in their bloodstreams that might reach their hearts. All day long, while feathers whipped from the spines of drifts and children dug tunnels and golden retrievers bounded up and down in the fluff like dolphins, people discussed in hushed tones the scandal of it, of being without the Times. Television stations flashed pictures of the front page, to reassure outlying districts that it was still being published, and the Citizen Register (serving Ossining, Briarcliff, Croton, Buchanan, Cortlandt) expanded its World/Nation section, but these measures only underlined the sense of dire emergency, of being cut off from all that was real. Bech retreated from the Timesless hubbub to his silver-lined room, adding tendrils to his proofs like a toothpicked avocado pit sending down roots into a water glass. For the first time, he began to think he might really have something here. Maybe he really was back.

  The gestation period of nine months dictated that Think Big be a summer book, and that helped it; it didn’t have to slug it out with that musclebound autumnal crowd of definitive biographies or multi-generational novels with stark titles like Lust or Delaware and acknowledgments pages full of research assistants, nor with their hefty spring sisters, the female romancers and the feminist decriers of the private life. Think Big in its shiny aqua jacket joined the Popsicles and roller coasters, baseball g
ames and beach picnics as one of that summer’s larky things; “it melts in your mouth and leaves sand between your toes,” wrote the reviewer for The East Hampton Star. “The squalid book we all deserve,” said Alfred Kazin in The New York Times Book Review. “A beguilingly festive disaster,” decreed John Leonard in the daily Times. “Not quite as vieux chapeau as I had every reason to fear,” allowed Gore Vidal in The New York Review of Books. “Yet another occasion for rejoicing that one was born a woman,” proclaimed Ellen Willis in The Village Voice. “An occasion for guarded celebration,” boomed Benjamin De Mott in Partisan Review, “that puts us in grateful mind of Emerson’s admonition, ‘Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst.’ ” “An occasion,” proposed George Steiner in The New Yorker, “to marvel once again that not since the Periclean Greeks has there been a configuration of intellectual aptitude, spiritual breadth, and radical intuitional venturesomeness to rival that effulgence of middle-class, Mittel-European Jewry between, say, Sigmund Freud’s first tentative experiments with hypnosis and Isaac Babel’s tragic vanishing within Stalin’s Siberian charnel houses.”

  People simply opined, “A blast, if you skip the scenery,” and featured Bech and Bea repairing their grape arbor in his-and-hers carpenter coveralls. Even before the foam-topped notices came rolling in, the fair-weather flags had been up. Bech was photographed by Jill Krementz, caricatured by David Levine, and interviewed by Michiko Kakutani. The Book-of-the-Month Club made Think Big its Alternate Alternate choice for July, with a Special Warning to Squeamish Subscribers. Bantam and Pocket Books engaged in a furious bidding of which the outcome was a well-publicized figure with more zeroes than a hand has fingers. “Bech Is In!” Vogue splashed in a diagonal banner across a picture of him modeling a corduroy coat and a ribbed wool turtleneck. “Bech Surprises” was Time’s laconic admission in a belated follow-up piece, they having ignored Think Big during publication week in favor of a round-up of diet cook books. What surprised Bech, that remarkably fair summer, was seeing his book being read, at beaches and swimming pools, by lightly toasted teenagers and deep-fried matrons and even by a few of his male fellow commuters during his increasingly frequent trips to New York. To think that those shuttling eyes were consuming the delicate, febrile interplay of Tad and Thelma, or of Olive and Mort, or of Ginger and her Filipino while lilacs droopy with bloom leaned in at the open upper half of the stable door and the smell of oats mingled with human musk—the thought of it embarrassed Bech; he wanted to pluck the book from its readers’ hands and explain that these were only his idle dreams, hatched while captive in Sing Sing, unworthy of their time let alone their money.