by John Updike
“Let’s go into the living room,” Bech said. “I’ll build a fire.”
“You don’t have to entertain me, I could push on to Vassar and have the art department chairman give me dinner. Except I hate to eat before I talk, the blood all rushes to your stomach and makes you very stupid.”
“I don’t think anything could make you very stupid,” he said gallantly, remembering as he followed her in past the pompous staircase how her body had concealed surprising amplitudes—her hips, for instance, were wide, as if the pelvic bones had been spread by a childbirth that had never occurred, so that her thighs scarcely touched, giving her a touching knock-kneed look, naked or in a bathing suit. He took three of the logs he had split last winter in hopes that the exercise would prolong his life, and laid a fire while she settled into one of the wing chairs, his favorite, the one covered in maroon brocade, that he usually read in. The match flared. The crumpled Times caught. The pine kindling began to crackle. He stood up, asking, “Tea?” His heart was thumping, as in last night’s dream. The house in all its rooms held silent around them like the eye of a storm. Max padded in, claws clicking, and dropped himself with a ponderous sigh on the rug before the quickening flames. One golden eye with a red lower lid questioned Bech before closing. “Or a real drink?” Bech pursued. “I’m not sure we have white crème de menthe. Bea and I don’t drink that much.” Norma had, he remembered, a fondness for vodka stingers, for Black Russians, for anything whose ingredients he was likely not to have.
“I never drink before I talk,” she said sharply. “I’m wondering, if I’m going to stay, if I should bring my slides in from the car. You leave them in a cold car too long, they sometimes crack in the heat of the projector.”
As Bech retrieved the gray metal box from the trunk of her car, Max trotted along with him, letting one of Norma’s tires have his autograph and running a quick check on the woodchuck trying to hibernate underneath the porch. In returning, Bech closed the front door on the dog’s rumpled, affronted face. Three’s a crowd.
The slides tucked safely beneath her chair, beside her swollen briefcase, Norma asked, “Well. How does it feel?”
“How does what feel?” This time her cigarette was violet in tint. They must come mixed in the box, like gumdrops.
“Having pulled it off.”
“What off?” The nylon sheen of her ankles picked up an orange glimmer from the fireplace flames; her eyes held wet and angry sparks.
“Don’t play dumb,” she said. “That book. She got you to make a million. Busy Bea, buzz, buzz.”
“She didn’t get me to do anything, it just happened. Is happening. They say there’s going to be a movie. Sure you don’t want any tea?”
“Stop being grotesque. Sit down. I have your chair.”
“How can you tell?”
“The look on your face when I sat here. It didn’t just happen, she’s bragging all the time about how she got you your little room, and told you to write a few pages every day, and keep going no matter how rotten it was, and how now the money’s rolling in. How does it feel, being a sow’s ear somebody’s turned into a silk purse?”
He had thought they might trade a few jabs with the big gloves on; but this was a real knife fight. Norma was furious. The very bones in her ankles seemed to gnash as she crossed and recrossed her legs. “Did you read the book?” Bech mildly asked her.
“As much as I could. It’s lousy, Henry. The old you would never have let it be published. It’s slapdash, it’s sentimental, it’s cozy. That’s what I couldn’t forgive, the coziness. Look how everybody loves it. You know that’s a terrible sign.”
“Mm,” he said, a syllable pressed from him like a whistle from the chimney, like a creak from the house.
“I don’t blame you; I blame Bea. It was she who forced it out of you, she and her cozy idea of marriage, to make a monument to herself. What if the monument was made of the bodies of all your old girlfriends, she’s the presiding spirit, she’s the one who reaps the profit. Top dog. Bea always had to be top dog. You should have seen her play tennis, before she got so fat.” Norma’s eyes blazed. The demons of vengeance and truth had entered this woman, a dazzling sight.
“Bodies of old girlfriends—?” Bech hesitantly prompted.
“Christ, Henry, it was a pyre. Smoke rising to heaven, to the glory of big fat Bea. Thanks by the way for calling me Thelma, so all my friends can be sure it’s me.”
“Thelma wasn’t exactly …” he began. And, thinking of Bea herself, her soft body in bed, the way her eyelids and nose looked rubbed and pink when she was sad or cold, he knew that the rebirth and growth of Think Big weren’t quite as Norma had described them, making something sudden and crass out of all those patient months spent tapping away amid the treetops and the flying squirrels. Still, she put the book in a fresh harsh light, and a fresh light is always liberating. “Bea is pleased about the money,” he admitted. “She wants to refurnish the entire house.”
“You bet she does,” Norma said. “You should have seen the way she took over the dollhouse my parents had meant for both of us. She’s greedy, Henry, and materialistic, and small-minded. Why does she keep you out here with these ridiculous commuters? The real question is, Why do you permit it? You’ve always been weak, but weak in your own way before, not in somebody else’s. I guess I better have tea after all. To shut me up.” She pinched her long lips tight to dramatize and turned her head so her profile looked pre-Raphaelite against the firelight. Some strands of her hair had strayed from severity, as if a light wind were blowing.
He perched forward on the lemon-colored wing chair and asked, “Didn’t you at least like the part where Mort Zenith finally gets Olive alone in the beach cabaña?”
“It was cranked out, Henry. Even where it was good, it felt cranked out. But don’t mind me. I’m just an old discarded mistress. You’ve got Prescott and Cavett with you and they’re the ones that count.”
In the barny old kitchen, its butcher-block countertops warping and its hanging copper pans needing Brillo, the tea water took forever to boil: Bech was burning to get back to his treasure of truth, arrived like an arrow in Ossining. He was trembling. Dusk was settling in outside. Max woofed monotonously at the back door, where he was usually at this hour let in and fed. When Bech returned with the two steaming cups and a saucer of Ritz crackers to the living room, Norma stood up. Her wool suit wore a fuzzy corona; her face in shadow loomed featureless. He set the tray down carefully on the inverted bushel basket and, giving the response that seemed expected, held and kissed her. Her mouth was wider and wetter than Bea’s and, by virtue of longer acquaintance, more adaptable. “I have a question for you,” he said. “Do you ever fuck before you talk?”
They were so careful. They let Max in and closed the kitchen door. Upstairs, they chose Donald’s bed because, never made, it would not show mussing. The boy’s shelves still held the stuffed toys and mechanical games of childhood. A tacked-up map of the world, in the projection that looks like a flattened orange peel, filled Bech’s vision with its muted pinks and blues when his eyelids furtively opened. So this is adultery, he thought: this homely, friendly socketing. An experience he would have missed, but for marriage. A sacred experience, like not honoring your father and mother. Good old Norma, she still had a faintly sandy texture to her buttocks and still liked to have her nipples endlessly, endlessly flicked by the attendant’s tongue. She came silently, even sullenly, without any of Bea’s angelic coos and yips. They kept careful track of the time by the clown-faced plastic clock on Donald’s maple dresser, and by five-thirty Bech was downstairs pouring Kibbles into Max’s bowl. The dog ate greedily, but would never forgive him. Bech cleared away the telltale untasted tea, washed and dried the cups, and put them back on their hooks. What else? Norma herself, whom he had last seen wandering in insouciant nudity toward the twins’ bathroom for a shower, was maddeningly slow to get dressed and come back downstairs; he wanted her desperately to go, to disappear, even forever
. But she had brought in her briefcase some documents connected with old Judge Latchett’s estate—the release of some unprofitable mutual-fund shares—that needed Bea’s signature. So they waited together in the two wing chairs. Bech took the maroon this time. Max went and curled up by the front door, pointedly. Norma cleared her throat and said, “I did, actually, like that bit with Zenith and your heroine. Really, it has a lot of lovely things in it. It’s just I hate to see you turn into one more scribbler. Your paralysis was so beautiful. It was … statuesque.”
Her conceding this, in softened tones, had the effect of making her seem pathetic. A mere woman, skinny and aging, hunched in a chair, his seed and sweat showered from her. In praising his book even weakly she had shed her dark magic. Bad news had been Norma’s beauty. She was getting nervous about the talk she had to give. “If they aren’t back by six-fifteen, I really will have to leave.”
But Donald and Bea returned at six-ten, bustling in the door with crackling packages while the dog leaped to lick their faces. Donald’s face had that stretched look of being brave; he had been told he must keep wearing retainers for two more years. Bea was of course surprised to find her sister and her husband sitting so primly on either side of a dying fire. “Didn’t Henry at least offer you a drink?”
“I didn’t want any. It might make me need to pee in the middle of my lecture.”
“You poor thing,” Bea said. “I’d be impossibly nervous.” She knew. Somehow, whether by the stagy purity of their waiting or the expression of Max’s ears or simple Latchett telepathy, she knew. Bea’s blue eyes flicked past Bech’s face like a piece of fair sky glimpsed between tunnels high in the mountains. And little Donald, he knew too, looking from one to the other of them with a wary brightness, feeling this entire solid house suspended above him on threads no more substantial than the invisible currents between these tall adults.
WHITE ON WHITE
NO SOONER had the great success of Think Big sunk into the Upper East Side’s social consciousness than engraved invitations had begun to arrive at the Bechs’ Ossining house. After Bech moved out, Bea in her scrupulous blue handwriting would forward these creamy stiff envelopes, including those addressed to “Mr. and Mrs.,” to Bech’s two drab sublet rooms on West 72nd Street. Many of the invitations he dropped into the plastic wastebasket, after lovingly thumbing them as examples of the engraver’s art and the stationer’s trade; but he tended to accept those that carried with them a shred of old personal connection. His marriage having dissolved around him like the airy walls of a completed novel, anyone who knew Bech “when” interested him, as a clue to his past and hence to his future.
Bech remembered being photographed by the young and eager Angus Desmouches for Flair, long defunct, in the mid-Fifties, when Travel Light was coming out, to a trifling stir. The youthful photographer had himself looked at first sight as if seen through a wide-angle lens, his broad, tan, somehow Aztec face and wide head of wiry black hair dwindling to a pinched waist and tiny, tireless feet; clicking and clucking, he had pursued Bech up and down the vales and bike paths of Prospect Park, and then for contrast had taken him by subway to lower Manhattan and posed him stony-faced among granite skyscrapers. Bech had scarcely been back to the financial district in the decades since, though now he had a lawyer there, who, with much well-reimbursed head-wagging, was trying to disentangle him and his recent financial gains from Bea and her own tough crew of head-waggers. In a little bookshop huddled low in the gloom of Wall Street Bech had flipped through a smudged display copy of White on White ($128.50 before Christmas, $150 thereafter): finely focused platinum prints of a cigarette butt on a plain white saucer, a white kitten on a polar-bear rug, an egg amid feathers, a naked female foot on a tumbled bedsheet, a lump of sugar held in bared teeth, a gob of what might be semen on the margin of a book, a white-hot iron plunged into snow.
Bech went to the party. The butler at the door of the apartment looked like a dancer in one of the old M-G-M musical extravaganzas, in his white tie, creamy tails, and wing collar. The walls beyond him had been draped in bleached muslin; the apartment’s regular furniture had been replaced with white wicker and with great sailcloth pillows; boughs and dried flowers spray-painted white had been substituted for green plants; most remarkably, in the area of the duplex where the ceiling formed a dome twenty feet high, a chalky piano and harp shared a platform with a tall vertical tank full of fluttering, ogling albino tropical fish. Angus Desmouches bustled forward, seemingly little changed—the same brown pug face and gladsome homosexual energy—except that his crown of black hair, sticking out stiff as if impregnated with drying paste, had gone stark white. So stark Bech guessed it had been dyed rather than aged that color; his eyebrows matched, it was too perfect. The years had piled celebrity and wealth upon the little photographer but not added an inch to his waist. He looked resplendent in a satin plantation suit. Bech felt dowdy in an off-white linen jacket, white Levi’s, and tennis shoes he had made a separate trip out to Ossining to retrieve.
“Gad, it’s good to press your flesh,” Desmouches exclaimed, seeming in every cubic centimeter of his own flesh to mean it. “How long ago was that, anyway?”
“Nineteen fifty-five,” Bech said. “Not even twenty-five years ago. Just yesterday.”
“You were such a sweet subject, I remember that. So patient and funny and wise. I got some delicious angles on especially the downtown take, but the foolish, foolish magazine didn’t use any of it, they just ran a boring head-and-shoulders under some weeping willow. I’ve always been afraid you blamed me.”
“No blame,” Bech said. “Absolutely no blame in this business. Speaking of which, that’s some book of yours.”
The other man’s miniature but muscular hands fluttered skyward in simultaneous supplication and disavowal. “The idea came to me when I dropped an aspirin in the bathtub and couldn’t find it for the longest time. The idea, you know, of exploring how little contrast you could have and still have a photograph.” His hands pressed as if at a pane of glass beside him. “Of taking something to the limit.”
“You did it,” Bech told the air, for Desmouches like a scarf up a magician’s sleeve had been whisked away, to greet other guests in this white-on-white shuffle. Bech was sorry he had come. The house in Ossining had been empty, Donald off at school and Bea off at her new job, being a part-time church secretary under some steeple up toward Brewster. Max had been there, curled up on the cold front porch, and had wrapped his mouth around Bech’s hand and tried to drag him in the front door. The door was locked, and Bech no longer had a key. He knew how to get in through the cellar bulkhead, past the smelly oil tanks. The house, empty, seemed an immense, vulnerable shell, a Titanic throttled down to delay its rendezvous with the iceberg. Its emptiness did not, oddly, much welcome him. In the brainlessly short memories of these chairs and askew rugs he was already forgotten; minute changes on all sides testified to his absence. Bea’s clothes hung in her closet like cool cloth knives seen on edge, and in the way his remaining shoes and his tennis racket had been left tumbled on the floor of his own closet he read a touch of disdain. He turned up the thermostat a degree, lest the pipes freeze, before sneaking back out through the cellar and walking the two miles to the train station, through the slanting downtown, where he had always felt like a strolling minstrel. His West 72nd Street rooms had been rented in haste from a disreputable friend of Flaggerty’s, and though Bech deplored the tattered old acid-trip decor—straw mats, fringed hassocks—he was surprised by how much better he slept there than in bucolic splendor, surrounded by cubic yards of creaking space for whose repair and upkeep he had been, those Ossining years, at least half responsible.
The drinks served at this party were not white, nor was the bartender. An ebony hand passed him the golden bourbon. The host and hostess came and briefly cooed their pleasure at Bech’s company. Henderson Hyde may have been a third but he came from some gritty town in the Midwest and had the ebullient urbanity of those who have wrapp
ed themselves in Manhattan as in a sumptuous cloak. His wife, too, was the third—a former model whose prized slenderness was with age becoming gaunt. Her great lip-glossed smile stretched too many tendons in her neck; designer dresses hung on her a trifle awkwardly, now that they were truly hers; her tenure as wife had reached the expensive stage. Tonight’s gown, composed of innumerable crescent slices as of quartz, suggested the robe of an ice-maiden helper that Santa had taken on while rosy-cheeked Mrs. Claus looked the other way. Until he had married Bea, Bech had imagined that Whitsuntide had something to do with Christmas. Not at all, it turned out. And there was an entire week called Holy Week, corresponding to the seven days of Pesach. They were in it, actually.
“Smash of a book,” said Hyde, giving the flesh above Bech’s elbow a comradely squeeze as expertly as a doctor taps the nerves below your kneecap.
“You got through it?” Bech asked, startled. His funny bone tingled.
Mrs. Hyde intervened. “I told him all about it,” she said. “He couldn’t get to sleep for all my chuckling beside him as I read it. That scene with the cameramen!”
“It’s top of the list I’m going to get to on the Island this summer. Christ, the books keep piling up,” Hyde snarled. He was wearing, Bech only now noticed in the sea of white, a brilliant bulky turban and a caftan embroidered with the logo of his network.
“It’s hard to read anything,” Bech admitted, “if you’re gainfully employed.”
Somebody had begun to tinkle the piano: “The White Cliffs of Dover.” There’ll be bluebirds over …
“So sorry your wife couldn’t be with us,” Hyde’s wife said in parting.
“Yeah, well,” Bech said, not wanting to explain, and expecting they knew enough anyway. “Easy come, easy go.” He had meant this to be soothing, but an alarmed look flitted across Mrs. Hyde III’s gracious but overelastic features.