by John Updike
Bech protested, “I have no usual,” but the other man said deafly, “Bless you,” and left.
Too excited by the new city, and by having survived another airplane flight, Bech instead of sleeping walked miles looking at the daffodils, at the Georgian rows plastered with demolition notices and peace slogans, at the ruffled shirts and Unisex pants in the shop windows, at the bobbies resembling humorless male models, at the dingy band of hippies sharing Eros’s black island in Piccadilly Circus with pigeons the color of exhaust fumes. On Great Russell Street, down from the British Museum, past a Hindu luncheonette, a plaque marked the site of a Dickens novel as if the characters had occupied the same time-space in which Bech walked. Back in his hotel lobby, he was offended by the American voices, the pseudo-Edwardian decor, the illustrated chart of acceptable credit cards. A typical Goldschmidt snap decision, to stuff him into a tourist trap. A pale young man, plainly American from his round-headed haircut and his clever hangdog way of sidling forward, came up to Bech. “My name is Tuttle, Mr. Bech. I guess I’m going to interview you.”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Bech said.
The boy tipped his head slightly, like a radar dish, as if to decipher the something acerb in Bech’s tone, and said, “I don’t generally do this sort of thing, actually I have as low an opinion of interviews as you do—”
“How do you know I have a low opinion?” Jet-lag was getting to Bech; irritability was droning in his ears.
“You’ve said so”—the boy smiled shyly, cleverly—“in your other interviews.” He went on hastily, pursuing his advantage: “But this wouldn’t be like your others. It would be all you, I have no ax to grind, no ax at all. A friend of mine on the staff of the Sunday Observer begged me to do it; actually I’m in London researching a thesis on eighteenth-century printers. It would be a sort of full spread to go with The Best of Bech. Let me frankly confess, it seemed a unique opportunity. I’ve written you letters in the past, in the States, but I suppose you’ve forgotten.”
“Did I answer them?”
“You hit them with a rubber stamp and sent them back.” Tuttle waited, perhaps for an apology, then went on. “What I have in mind now is a chance for you to explain yourself, to say everything you want to say. You want to say. Your name is known over here, Mr. Bech, but they don’t really know you. ”
“Well, that’s their privilege.”
“I beg your pardon, sir, I think it’s their loss.”
Bech felt himself slippingly, helplessly relenting. “Let’s sit over here,” he said. To take the young man up to his room would, he thought groggily, simulate pederasty and risk the fate of Wilde.
They sat in facing lobby chairs; Tuttle perched on the edge of his as if he had been called into the principal’s office. “I’ve read every word you’ve written five or six times. Frankly, I think you’re it.” This sounded to Bech like the safest praise he had ever heard; one appetite that had not diminished with the years was for unambiguous, blood-raw superlatives.
He reached over and tagged the boy. “Now you’re it,” he said.
Tuttle blushed. “I mean to say, what other people say they’re doing, you really do.” An echo troubled Bech; he had heard this before, but not applied to himself. Still, the droning had ceased. The blush had testified to some inner conflict, and Bech could maintain his defenses only in the face of a perfectly simple, resolute attack. Any sign of embarrassment or self-doubt he confused with surrender.
“Let’s have a drink,” he said.
“Thank you, no.”
“You mean you’re on duty?”
“No, I just don’t ever drink.”
“Never?”
“No.”
Bech thought, They’ve sent me a Christer. That’s what Tuttle’s pallor, his sidling severity, his embarrassed insistence reminded Bech of: the Pentecostal fanatic who comes to the door. “Well, let me frankly confess, I sometimes do. Drink.”
“Oh, I know. Your drinking is famous.”
“Like Hitler’s vegetarianism.”
In his haste to put Bech at ease, Tuttle neglected to laugh. “Please go ahead,” the boy insisted. “If you become incoherent, I’ll just stop taking notes, and we can resume another day.”
Poor Henry Bech, to whom innocence, in its galoshes of rudeness and wet raincoat of presumption, must always appear as possibly an angel to be sheltered and fed. He ordered a drink (“Do you know what a whiskey sour is?” he asked the waiter, who said “Absolutely, sir” and brought him a whiskey-and-soda) and tried for one more degrading time to dig into the rubbish of his “career” and come up with lost baubles of wisdom. Encouraged by the fanatic way the boy covered page after page of his notebook with wildly oscillating lines, Bech talked of fiction as an equivalent of reality, and described how the point of it, the justification, seemed to lie in those moments when a set of successive images locked and then one more image arrived and, as it were, superlocked, creating a tightness perhaps equivalent to the terribly tight knit of reality, e.g., the lightning ladder of chemical changes in the body cell that translates fear into action, or the implosion of subatomic mathematics consuming the heart of a star. And the down-grinding thing is the realization that no one, not critics or readers, ever notices these tight moments but instead prattles, in praise or blame, with an altogether insolent looseness. That it is necessary to begin by believing in an ideal reader and that slowly he is proved not to exist. He is not the daily reviewer skimming a plastic-bound set of raggedy advance proofs, nor the bulk-loving housewife who buys a shiny new novel between the grocer’s and the hairdresser’s, nor the diligent graduate student with his heap of index cards and grant applications, nor the plump-scripted young ballpointer who sends a mash note via Who’s Who, nor, in the weary end, even oneself. In short, one loses heart in the discovery that one is not being read. That the ability to read, and therefore to write, is being lost, along with the abilities to listen, to see, to smell, and to breathe. That all the windows of the spirit are being nailed shut. Here Bech gasped for air, to dramatize his point. He said, then, that he was sustained, insofar as he was sustained, by the memory of laughter, the specifically Jewish, sufficiently desperate, not quite belly laughter of his father and his father’s brothers, his beloved Brooklyn uncles; that the American Jews had kept the secret of this embattled laughter a generation longer than the Gentiles, hence their present domination of American lit; and that in the world today only the Russians still had it, the Peruvians possibly, and Mao Tse-tung but not any of the rest of the Chinese. In his, Bech’s, considered judgment.
Tuttle scribbled another page and looked up hopefully. “Maoism does seem to be the coming mood,” he said.
“The mood of t’mao,” Bech said, rising. “Believe it or not, my lad, I must take a shower and go to a party. Power corrupts.”
“When could we resume? I think we’ve made a fascinating beginning.”
“Beginning? You want more? For just a little puff in the Observer?”
When Tuttle stood, though he was skinny, with a round head like a newel knob, he was taller than Bech. He got tough. “I want it to be much more than that, Mr. Bech. Much more than a little puff. They’ve promised me as much space as we need. You have a chance here, if you use me hard enough, to make a d-definitive t-t-testament.”
If the boy hadn’t stammered, Bech might have escaped. But the stammer, those little spurts of helpless silence, hooked him. Stalling, he asked, “You never drink?”
“Not really.”
“Do you smoke?”
“No.”
“Matter of principle?”
“I just never acquired the taste.”
“Do you eat between meals?”
“I guess once in a while.”
“Call me sometime,” Bech conceded, and hated himself. Strange, how dirty the attempt to speak seriously made him feel. Comparable to his sensation when he saw someone press an open book flat and complacently, irreparably crack the spine.
Bech’s tuxedo over the years had developed a waxen sheen and grown small; throughout Goldy’s party, his waist was being cruelly pinched. The taxicab, so capacious that Bech felt like ballast, turned down a succession of smaller and smaller streets and stopped on a dead-end loop, where, with the mystic menace of a Christmas tree, a portico blazed. The doorknocker was a goldsmith’s hammer inscribed with a florid double “J.” A servant in blue livery admitted Bech. Goldy bustled forward in a red velvet jacket and flopping ruffles. Another servant poured Bech a warm Scotch. Goldy, his eyes shuttling like a hockey player’s, steered Bech past a towering pier glass into a room where beautiful women in cream and saffron and magenta drifted and billowed in soft slow motion. Men in black dinner clothes stood like channel markers in this sea. “Here’s a lovely person you must meet,” Goldy told Bech. To her he said, “Henry Bech. He’s very shy. Don’t frighten him away, darling.”
She was an apparition—wide powdery shoulders, long untroubled chin ever so faintly cleft, lips ghostly in their cushioned perfection, gray eyes whose light flooded their cages of false lash and painted shadow. Bech asked her, “What do you do?”
She quivered; the corners of her lips trembled wryly, and he realized that the question had been consummately stupid, that merely to rise each morning and fill her skin to the brim with such loveliness was enough for any woman to do.
But she said, “Well, I have a husband, and five children, and I’ve just published a book.”
“A novel?” Bech could see it now: robin’s-egg-blue jacket, brisk adultery on country weekends, comic relief provided by precocious children.
“No, not really. It’s the history of labor movements in England before 1860.”
“Were there many?”
“Some. It was very uphill for them.”
“How lovely of you,” Bech said, “to care; that is, when you look so”—he rejected “posh”—“unlaborious.”
Again, her face underwent, not a change of expression, which was unvaryingly sweet and attentive, but a seismic tremor, as if her composure restrained volcanic heat. She asked, “What are your novels about?”
“Oh, ordinary people.”
“Then how lovely of you; when you’re so extraordinary.”
A man bored with being a channel marker came and touched her elbow, and she turned away, leaving Bech her emanations, as an astronomer is flooded by radio waves from a blank part of the sky. He tried to take a fix on her flattery by looking, as he went for another drink, into a mirror. His nose with age had grown larger and its flanges had turned distinctly red; his adoption of the hair style of the young had educed woolly bursts of gray above his ears and a tallowish mass of white curling outwards at the back of his collar: he looked like a mob-controlled congressman from Queens hoping to be taken for a Southern senator. His face was pasty with fatigue, though his eyes seemed frantically alive. He observed in the mirror, observing him, a slim young African woman in see-through pajamas. He turned and asked her, “What can we do about Biafra?”
“Je le regrette, Monsieur,” she said, “mais maintenant je ne pense jamais. Je vis, simplement.”
“Parce que,” Bech offered, “le monde est trop effrayant?”
She shrugged. “Peut-être.” When she shrugged, her silhouetted breasts shivered with their weight; it took Bech back to his avid youthful perusals of the National Geographic. He said, “Je pense, comme vous, que le monde est difficile à comprendre, mais certainement, en tout cas, vous êtes très sage, très belle.” But his French was not good enough to hold her, and she turned, and was wearing bikini underpants, with tiger stripes, beneath the saffron gauze of her pantaloons. Blue servants rang chimes for dinner. He gulped his drink, and avoided the sideways eye of the congressman from Queens.
On his right was seated a middle-aged Lady of evident importance, though her beauty could never have been much more than a concentrate of sharpness and sparkle. “You American Jews,” she said, “are so romantic. You think every little dolly bird is Delilah. I hate the ‘pity me’ in all your books. Women don’t want to be complained at. They want to be screwed.”
“I’ll have to try it,” Bech said.
“Do. Do.” She pivoted toward a long-toothed gallant waiting grinning on her right; he exclaimed “Darling!” and their heads fell together like bagged oranges. On Bech’s left sat a magenta shape his first glance had told him to ignore. It glittered and was young. Bech didn’t trust anyone under thirty; the young now moved with the sacred and dangerous assurance of the old when he had been young. She was toying with her soup like a child. Her hand was small as a child’s, with close-cut fingernails and endearing shadows around the knuckles. He felt he had seen the hand before. In a novel. Lolita? Magic Mountain? Simple etiquette directed that he ask her how she was.
“Rotten, thanks.”
“Think of me,” Bech said. “By the time I woke up in, it’s four o’clock in the morning.”
“I hate sleep. I don’t sleep for days sometimes and feel wonderful. I think people sleep too much, that’s why their arteries harden.” In fact, he was to discover that she slept as the young do, in long easy swings that gather the extra hours into their arc and override all noise—though she had every woman’s tendency to stir at dawn. She went on, as if politely, “Do you have hard arteries?”
“Not to my knowledge. Just impotence and gout.”
“That sounds come-ony.”
“Forgive me. I was just told women don’t like being complained to.”
“I heard the old tart say that. Don’t believe her. They love it. Why are you impotent?”
“Old age?” A voice inside him said, Old age? he tentatively said.
“Come off it.” He liked her voice, one of those British voices produced halfway down the throat, rather than obliquely off the sinuses, with alarming octave jumps. She was wearing gold granny glasses on her little heart-shaped face. He didn’t know if her cheeks were flushed or rouged. He was pleased to observe that, though she was petite, her breasts pushed up plumply from her dress, which was ornamented with small mirrors. Her lips, chalky and cushioned, with intelligent tremulous corners, seemed taken from the first woman he had met, as if one had been a preliminary study for the other. He noticed she had a little mustache, faint as two erased pencil lines. She told him, “You write.”
“I used to.”
“What happened?”
A gap in the dialogue. Fill in later. “I don’t seem to know.”
“I used to be a wife. My husband was an American. Still is, come to think of it.”
“Where did you live?” The girl and Bech simultaneously glanced down and began to hurry to finish the food on their plates.
“New York.”
“Like it?”
“Loved it.”
“Didn’t it seem dirty to you?”
“Gloriously.” She chewed. He pictured sharp small even teeth lacerating and compressing bloody beef. He set down his fork. She swallowed and asked, “Love London?”
“Don’t know it.”
“You don’t?”
“Been here only long enough to look at daffodils.”
“I’ll show it to you.”
“How can you? How can I find you again?” Victorian novel? Rewrite.
“You’re in London alone?”
A crusty piece of Yorkshire pudding looked too good to leave. Bech picked up his fork again, agreeing, “Mm. I’m alone everywhere.”
“Would you like to come home with me?”
The lady on his right turned and said, “I must say, you’re a stinker to let this old fag monopolize me.”
“Don’t complain. Men hate it.”
She responded, “Your hair is smashing. Are the curls induced?”
“Tell me, love, who’s this, what do you say, bird on my left?”
“She’s Little Miss Poison. Her father bought himself a peerage from Macmillan.”
The girl at Bech’s back tickled the hairs of his neck with her breath and s
aid, “I withdraw my invitation.”
“Let’s all,” Bech said loudly, “have some more wine,” pouring. The man with long teeth put his hand over the top of his glass. Bech expected a magician’s trick but was disappointed.
And at the door, as Bech tried to sneak past the voracious pier glass with the girl, Goldy seemed disappointed. “But did you meet everybody? These are the nicest people in London.”
Bech hugged his publisher. Waxy old tux, meet velvet and ruffles. Learn how the other half lives. “Goldy,” he said, “the party was nice, nicey, niciest. It couldn’t have been nicier. Like, wow, out of sight.” He saw drunken noise as the key to his exit. Otherwise this velvet gouger would milk him for another hour of lionization. Grr.
Goldy displayed the racial gracefulness in defeat. His limpid eyes, as busy as if he were playing blitz chess, flicked past Bech’s shoulder to the girl. “Merissa dear, do take decent care of our celebrity. My fortune rides on his genius.” Thus Bech learned her first name.
The taxi, with two in it, felt less like a hollow hull and more like a small drawing room, where voices needn’t be raised. They did not, perhaps oddly, touch. Perhaps oddly? He had lost all ability to phrase. He was in a decadent Old World metropolis in a cab with a creature whose dress held dozens of small mirrors. Her legs were white like knives, crossed and recrossed. He proofread the triangular bit of punctuation where her thighs ended. The cab moved through empty streets, past wrought-iron gates inked onto the sky and granite museums frowning beneath the weight of their entablatures; it moved across the bright loud gulch of Hyde Park Corner and Park Lane, into darker quieter streets. It passed a shuttered building that Merissa identified as the Chinese Communist Embassy. They entered a region where the shaggy heads of trees seemed to be dreaming of fantastically long colonnades and of high white wedding-cake façades receding to infinity. The cab stopped. Merissa paid. She let him in by a door whose knob, knocker, and mail slot were silken with polishings. Marble stairs. Another door. Another key. The odors of floor wax, of stale cigarette smoke, of narcissi in a pebbled bowl. Brandy with its scorched, expensive smell was placed beneath his nose. Obediently he drank. He was led into a bedroom. Perfume and powder, leather and an oil-clothy scent that took him back into English children’s books that his mother, bent on his “improvement,” used to buy at the Fifth Avenue Scribner’s. A window opened. Chill April smells. Winter kept us warm. She brushed back curtains. A slice of slate night yellowish above the trees. The lights of an airplane winking in descent. A rustling all around him. The candy taste of lipstick. Clean air, warm skin. Feeding a little life with dried tubers. Her bare back a lunar surface beneath his hands. The forgotten impression of intrusion, of subtle monstrous assault, that the particularities of a new woman’s body make upon us. Summer surprised us. Must find out her last name. There are rings of release beyond rings, Bech discovered in the bliss—the pang of relief around his waist—of taking off his tuxedo. Must see a tailor.