Bech Is Back

by John Updike

  Having taken Donald swimming one day at the pool of Bea and Rodney’s old club, Bech saw a bronze and zaftig young woman on a plastic-strap chaise holding the book up against the sun, reading it through her rhinestone-studded sunglasses. “How’s it going?” he asked aloud, feeling guilty at the pain he must be giving her—the squint, the ache in her upholding arm. She lowered the book and stared at him, dazed and annoyed; it was as if he had awakened her. He saw from the tightening of her zinc-white lips that she made no connection between the world she had been immersed in and this stocky, woolly male intruder in outmoded plaid trunks, and that if he did not instantly move away she would call for the lifeguard. Yet she had an appealing figure, and must have an emptiness within, which his book was in some sense filling. He was his own rival. He came to flinch at the sight of his aqua jackets; they were as vivid to his sensitized sight as swimming pools seen from an airplane. He had filled the world with little distorting mirrors. Think Big was in its sixth printing by September, and Big Billy telegraphed in congratulation from Hawaii, GROW OLD ALONG WITH ME THE BEST IS YET TO COME.

  He couldn’t even take Arlene Schoenberg to lunch in an unprestigious Italian restaurant without some nitwit asking him to sign a scrap of paper—usually one of those invitations to a “health club” staffing topless masseuses that are handed out all over our sordid midtown. Every time an autograph-seeker approached, it put more stardust in Arlene’s eyes and set seduction at another remove. The world, by one of those economic balancings whereby it steers, had at the same time given him success and taken from him the writer’s chief asset, his privacy. Her little fascinating hands enticingly fiddled with her knife and fork, caressed her Campari-and-soda, and dropped to her lap. After a moment, like an actress taking a curtain call, one of them returned into sight to scratch with a fingernail at an invisible itch on the side of her high-arched nose. She asked him where he got his ideas, from real life or out of his imagination. She asked him if he thought a writer owed anything to society or just to himself. She asked him if he had always been such a neat typist and good speller; now, her little brother and sisters, none of them could spell, it was really shocking, you wonder if there will be any books at all in twenty years, the terrible way it’s going. Bech told her that credit for his typing and spelling should go to Mae, a genius his wife had found for him in Ossining. In an attempt to steer Miss Schoenberg’s fascination away from his professional self, he talked a good deal about his wife. He gave Bea credit for finally settling him down in front of a typewriter and getting him to finish his book. He further confessed, putting the intimacy level up a notch, that when he had married her he had not realized what a worrier she was: she had seemed, in contrast to her difficult sister, Norma, so calm and understanding, so, well, motherly. And indeed she had proved motherly: she thought about her kids all the time, and nearly went wild when one of her daughters began to—Bech hesitated, for this starstruck minx was also somebody’s daughter, and the word “fuck” or “screw,” running ahead as a kind of scout, might startle her into a defensive posture—“misbehave,” he said. As he spoke, the house in Ossining, with its dome-shaped lawn and coarse green exoskeleton and cool silver-lined retreat, became uncomfortably real. The storm windows were only half up. Some insulation in his study needed to be taped and restapled. Bech wondered if the magic appeal of those Xeroxed hands, haunting the edges of his duplicated galleys, might not have been a mirage peculiar to that silver-lined environment. Certainly Miss Schoenberg, as she sat perkily across from him in her sparrow-colored sweater, gave signs of being common.

  “It must be terribly exciting to be a writer’s wife,” she said. “I mean, she must never know what you’re thinking.”

  “Oh, I expect she knows as much as she wants to.”

  “I mean, when you look at her, she must feel she’s being X-rayed. You write about women so well, she must feel naked.”

  Campari-and-soda always gave Bech the same sensation as swallowing aspirin: that burny feeling at the top of the esophagus. Thinking of naked, he stared glumly at Arlene’s thready sweater and found it utterly opaque. Did she have breasts in there, or typewriter spools? She was wearing a thin gold chain which nobody had ripped off her neck yet. And she was going on, “Writers have such rich fantasy lives, I think that’s what makes them so fascinating to women.”

  “Richer, you think, than, say, Mr. Flaggerty’s fantasy life?”

  It was an inspired stab. She said petulantly, “Oh him, all he fantasizes about is the Mets and then the Jets. Really. And where to get good Mexican brown like they used to groove on at college when he was picketing the ROTC and marching with Dylan and all that.”

  “You seem,” Bech ventured, “to know him pretty well.”

  For the first time, her eyes lost their starry celebrity shine and submitted to an amused and sexual narrowing. “Well enough. He’s a good boss. I’ve had worse.”

  Bech nostalgically wished he were back home raking the lawn. But Arlene Schoenberg was just getting relaxed, her shapely hands deftly twirling spaghetti onto a fork. The restaurant skills of New York women: like praying mantises roving the twigs of a creosote bush. He should have had more Gothamesque eating-out in his book. And the way the tables are inching out into the streets, into the soot. His silence brought a slow smile to Arlene’s face, showing a provocative rim of gum and a fleck of tomato sauce. “See,” she said. “I have no idea what you’re thinking.”

  “I was wondering,” he told her, “if there was a way we could get Vellum to pay for this lunch. Can you forge Flaggerty’s signature, or aren’t you that friendly yet?”

  Her eyes became solemn bright circles again. “Oh, no.”

  “O.K., then. On me. What else can I do for you?”

  “Well”—she absent-mindedly, tuggingly fiddled up a loop into her gold chain and squeezed her finger in it so that the tip turned bright red—“that brother I was telling you about, you know, did want me to ask you if you could possibly come talk to his seventh-grade class, it’s a special school for dyslexics out toward Glen Cove, they’d be so, you know—”

  Bech saw his opportunity and took it. He patted her bare hand as it lay distracted on the checked tablecloth. “I’d like to,” he told her, “but I can’t. The last time I spoke in a school I got involved in a disastrous affair with a woman who only cared about the literary me. She spurned the man. Wasn’t that rotten of her?”

  “I’d have to know the circumstances,” Arlene Schoenberg prudently said, as if there had never been a sexual revolution, and pulled back her hand to cope further with the spaghetti.

  On the walk from the restaurant back to the Vellum offices, they passed the Doubleday window, which held a pyramid of Think Bigs. Bech always pitied his books, seen in a bookstore; they looked so outnumbered. He had sent them forth to fight in inadequate armor, with guns that jammed. These unbought copies were beginning to fade and warp in the daily slant of sun. On the train home, he saw how many of the yellowing trees were already bare. Soon it would be a year since he had finished the book Bea had got him to sit down and write. Their household had changed: the girls were off at college, Ann at M.I.T. and Judy at Duke, and little Donald no longer wanted his stepdad to take him places. Each fall they used to go to one Ossining High School football game together, played by mostly black players on a field where you could smell the torn earth and hear each cheerleader’s piping voice fragile against the sky. This year the boy, newly thirteen, had looked disdainful and begged off. His father’s snobbery was welling up through his genes. Rodney had taken Donald instead to the Harvard-Princeton game, at Palmer Stadium.

  The house crackled in its timbers and joints, now that the furnace was on again and a heat differential applied torque. Workmen were busy inside the house and out; since Bech’s book had made a million dollars, the north face of the mansard roof was being given new slates and the grand front staircase was being fully refinished, after ten years of a half-scraped left-hand banister. The television crew
of Sixty Minutes had come and rearranged all the furniture, exposing how shabby it was. Within the many rooms Bech had been somewhat avoiding Bea; she wanted mostly to talk about their household expenditures, or to complain that Donald kept climbing on the roofers’ scaffolding after they had gone for the day. “He has these horrible new delinquent friends, Henry. With Ann and Judy off I thought we’d be so relaxed now.”

  “How did that ever work out, by the way, with the diaphragms?”

  She looked blank. If there was one thing Bech resented about women, it was the way they so rapidly forgave themselves for the hysteria they inflicted on others. He prompted, “You remember, Judy wanted one too, but she was still a virgin.…”

  “Oh. Yes. Didn’t I tell you? It was very simple, I don’t know why we didn’t think of it. Doctor Landis fitted Ann for one, and then gave me a prescription for two the same size. After all, they are twins.”

  “Brilliant,” Bech sighed.

  “Sweetie, could you spare a minute and look at these Sloane’s catalogues with me? What I’d like to do around the fireplace is get sort of a conversation-pit feeling without having it look like a ski lodge. Do you think boxy modern looks silly on a big Oriental?”

  The hinges of his jaw ached with a suppressed yawn. “I think,” he said, “the room looks nice enough now.”

  “You’re not focusing. The staircase being all new and shiny shows everything else up. If it’s the cost you’re worried about, Sheila Warburton says with things so unsettled in the Middle East any Oriental you buy is a better investment than stocks, than gold—”

  “I love those old wing chairs,” Bech said. In the evenings he would sit in one, his feet up on an inverted bushel basket that was meant to hold wood, and read; he was reading Thomas Mann on Goethe, Wagner, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Freud these nights. What chums they all turned out to have been!

  “Those chairs were Rodney’s mother’s, and he really should have them back now that he has a bigger apartment.”

  “Bea, you know we don’t have the million dollars yet, it’s just a bunch of bits in Vellum’s computer. I won’t get my first royalties till next August.”

  “That was another thing Sheila Warburton said: you were crazy not to ask for a whopping advance, with inflation the way it is.”

  “Damn Sheila Warburton, and that pompous Paul as well. Nobody knew the book would take off like this. In the old days a respectable author never asked for an advance; that was strictly for the no-talents starving down in the Village.”

  Standing contemplative in her room of imagined furniture, Bea was hard to rattle. She slowly woke to his tone of indignation and came and embraced him. She had been raking leaves in an unraveling ski sweater that smelled muskily of leaf mold and lank autumn grass. “But these aren’t the old days, Henry,” she said, tickling his ear with her breath. “It costs a fortune to live down in the Village now. And you aren’t the old Henry, either.” She shuddered in happiness, and in her spasm gave him a squeeze. “We’re all so proud of you!”

  If there was another thing Bech resented about women it was the way they enveloped—the way they yearned, at moments of their convenience, to dissolve the sanitary partition between I and Thou. Assimilation, the most insidious form of conquest. He was becoming a shred of leaf mold. “I don’t know about that book,” he began.

  “The book is wonderful,” she interrupted, with breathy impatience. “When do we do another?”

  “Another?” The thought sickened him. A whole new set of names to invent, a theme to nurture within like a tumor, a texture to maintain page after page … His suburban softy, his plot of earth, was insatiable.

  “Sure,” Bea said briskly, backing off. “The storm windows are up, you’ve done all the publicity the media can stand, you’ve said the same things to twenty different interviewers, what are you going to do with your days?”

  “Well, there’ve been some invitations to read at colleges. Some little agricultural college in West Virginia sounded interesting, and an Indian school in South Dakota—”

  “Oh you’ve done all that,” Bea said. “You don’t need to go expose yourself for peanuts anymore, or fuck those little coeds in the Ramada Inn. Don’t think I don’t know really why you did all that speaking.” Her sideways glance was both hostile and flirtatious, a common marital combination.

  And he resented female knowingness, its coy invasion, its installation of an Oberführer in every province of his person. His mind, body, mouth, genitals—Bea had possessed them all and set up checkpoints along every escape route. His “triumph” (to quote Vogue again) was more deeply hers than his; that night in bed, when she insisted on copulating, it was, he felt, with the body of her own triumphant wifeliness that she came to climax, cooing above him and then breaking into that ascending series of little yips that had the effect, on this occasion at least, of reducing his own climax to something relatively trivial. More and more Bea favored the female-superior position. As the air in the bedroom seasonally cooled, she kept on her nightie, becoming in the dark a tent of chiffon and lace and loose blond hair, an operatic apparition whose damp grip upon him was swaddled and unseen as she pulled him up forcefully into manhood, into achievement, into riches and renewed fame, into viscid fireworks and neural release. She collapsed onto his chest panting.

  “I feel so satisfied with you,” she confided.

  “And I with you,” he responded, trusting the formal grammar to shade his inevitable and as it were pre-shaped rejoinder.

  She heard the shadow. “Aren’t you pleased?” she asked. “Not only about the book but about us? Tell me.”

  “Yes, I’m pleased. Of course.”

  “You were such a sad person then, Henry.” Then. Before their marriage had infiltrated every cell and extracted daily wordage and nightly semen.

  “I was?”

  “I thought so,” Bea said. “You used to frighten me. Not just sad. Other things, too. A lovely man, but, I don’t know, sterile. You’re so sweet with Donald.”

  Her arm across his chest was wonderfully heavy. He felt pegged down, and the image of Donald was another luminous nail. “We get along,” he admitted. “But the kid’s growing up.”

  Bea would not allow even so faint a discord to be the final note. “He loves you,” she uttered, and as she slept he could see by moonlight that a smile remained on her face, rounding the cheek not buried in the pillow.

  In his dream he is free. The landscape seems European—low gray sky, intense green fields, mud underfoot, churned and marked by tire treads and military boots. He has escaped from somewhere; fear is mixed sourly with his guilt, guilt at having left all those others behind, still captive. Yet in the meantime there are the urgencies of escape to cope with: dogs pursuing him are barking, and a hedge offers a place to hide. He squeezes in, his heart enormous and thumping. Candy wrappers litter the ground underfoot. The hedge is too wintry and thin; he will be discovered. In that thick gray European wool overhead, a single unseen bomber drones. It is, he instinctively knows, his only hope, though it will bring destruction. He awakes, and recognizes the drone as the furnace floors below. The neighborhood dogs have been harrying something, a raccoon perhaps, and downstairs Max had sleepily joined in with a gruff bark or two. Yet terror and guilt were slow to drain from Bech’s system.

  That afternoon, Bea had to pick up Donald after school and take him to the orthodontist and then to buy some school clothes; he had outgrown last year’s. The child’s smile had sprouted touching silver bands, and the first few pimples, harbingers of messy manhood, marred the skin once as perfect as a girl’s. They would not be home until six at the earliest. Bech roamed the great house with a vague sense of having lost something, a Minotaur restless in his maze. Around four, the doorbell rang. He expected to open it upon a UPS delivery-man or one of Bea’s Ossining sipping companions; but the woman on the porch was Bea’s sister, Norma Latchett.

  Where middle ages had brought out Bea’s plumpness, it had whittled Norma down,
making her appear even more stringy, edgy, and exasperated than formerly. Her dark hair was turning gray and she was not dyeing it but pulling it back from her brow severely. Yet her black silk suit was smart, her lipstick and eye shadow were this fall’s correct shade and amount, and across her face, when it proved to be he who opened the door, flickered all the emotions of a woman first alarmed by and then standing up to a former lover. “Where’s Bea?” she asked.

  Bech explained, and invited her in to wait until six or so.

  Norma hesitated, holding a big calfskin briefcase and looking slightly too trim, like the Avon lady. “I’m heading north to give a talk in Poughkeepsie and thought I’d say hello. Also I have some papers for Bea to sign. You two never come to the city anymore.”

  “Bea hates it,” Bech said. “What are you giving your talk about? Come in, for heaven’s sake. Just me and Max are here, and we aren’t biting today.”

  “Oh, the usual thing,” Norma said, looking vexed but entering the great varnished foyer. Since the workmen had done the refinishing it gleamed like the cabin of a yacht. “Those awful icons.” For years, Norma had held jobs off and on in museums, and in these last ten years, as hope of marriage faded, had put herself seriously to school, and become an expert on Byzantine and Russian Orthodox art. Icons becoming ever more “collectible,” she included bankers as well as students in the audience for her expertise. She lit a cigarette whose paper was tinted pale green, and looked switchily about for an ashtray.