by John Updike
“Not really. A little grass to be companionable. I don’t believe in it.”
Her American counterpart would, of course. Bech saw this counterpart in his mind: a pale Puritan, self-destructive, her blue eyes faded like cotton work clothes too often scrubbed. Merissa’s green eyes sparkled; her hectic cheeks burned. “What do you believe in?” he asked.
“Different things at different times,” she said. “You don’t seem all that pro-marriagey yourself.”
“I am, for other people.”
“I know why sleeping with you is so exciting. It’s like sleeping with a dirty monk.”
“Dear Merissa,” Bech said. He tried to crush her into himself. To suck the harlot’s roses from her cheeks. He slobbered on her wrists, pressed his forehead against the small of her spine. He did all this in ten-point type, upon the warm white paper of her sliding skin. Poor child, under this old ogre, who had chewed his life so badly his stomach hurt, whose every experience was harassed by a fictional version of itself, whose waking life was a weary dream of echoes and erased pencil lines; he begged her forgiveness, while she moaned with anticipated pleasure. It was no use; he could not rise, he could not love her, could not perpetuate a romance or roman without seeing through it to the sour parting and the mixed reviews. He began, in lieu of performance, to explain this.
She interrupted: “Well, Henry, you must learn to replace ardor with art.”
The cool practicality of this advice, its smug recourse to millennia of peasant saws and aristocratic maxims, to all that civilized wisdom America had sought to flee and render obsolete, angered him. “Art is ardor,” he told her.
“Bad artists hope that’s true.”
“Read your Wordsworth.”
“In tranquillity, darling.”
Her willingness to debate was beginning to excite him. He saw that wit and logic might survive into the lawless world coming to birth. “Merissa, you’re so clever.”
“The weak must be. That’s what England is learning.”
“Do you think I’m necessarily impotent? As an artist?”
“Unnecessarily.”
“Merissa, tell me: what do you do?”
“You’ll see,” she said, pressing her head back into the pillow and smiling in assured satisfaction, as his giant prick worked back and forth. The tail wagging the dog.
Tuttle caught him at his hotel the day before he left and asked him if he felt any affinity with Ronald Firbank. “Only the affinity,” Bech said, “I feel with all Roman Catholic homosexuals.”
“I was hoping you’d say something like that. How are you feeling, Mr. Bech? The last time I saw you, you looked awful. Frankly.”
“I feel better now that you’ve stopped seeing me.”
“Great. It was a real privilege and delight for me, I tell you. I hope you like the way the piece shaped up; I do. I hope you don’t mind my few reservations.”
“No, you can’t go anywhere these days without reservations.”
“Ha ha.” It was the only time Bech ever heard Tuttle laugh.
Merissa didn’t answer her telephone. Bech hoped she’d be at the farewell party Goldy threw for him—a modest affair, without blue livery, and Bech in his altered tuxedo the sole man present in formal dress—but she wasn’t. When Bech asked where she was, Goldy said with a twinkle, “Working. She sends her love and regrets.” Bech called her at midnight, at one in the morning, at two, at five when the birds began singing, at seven when the earliest church bells rang, at nine and at ten, while packing to catch his plane. Not even Isabella answered. She must be off on a country weekend. Or visiting the boy at school. Or vanished like a good paragraph in a book too bulky to reread.
Goldschmidt drove him to the airport in his maroon Bentley, and with an urgent prideful air pressed a number of Sunday newspapers upon him. “The Observer gave us more space,” he said, “but the Times seemed to like it more. All in all, a very fine reception for a—let’s be frank—a rather trumped-up mishmash of a book. Now you must do us a blockbuster.” He said this, here at Heathrow, in the second-class passenger lounge, but his eyes were darting over Bech’s shoulder toward the stream of fresh arrivals.
“I have just the title,” Bech told him. He saw that he must put Goldy into it, as a Jewish uncle. A leatherworker, his right palm hard as a turtle shell from handling an awl. That heavy pampered Florentine head bent full of greedy dreams beneath a naked light bulb, as pocketbooks, belts, and sandals tumbled from the slaughter of screaming calves. The baroque beauty of the scraps piled neglected at his feet. A fire escape out the window. Some of the panes were transparent wire-glass and others, unaccountably, were painted opaque.
Goldschmidt added a folded tabloid to Bech’s supply of airplane reading.
PEER, BRIDE NABBED
IN DORSET DOPE RAID
the headline said. Goldschmidt said, “Page seventeen might amuse you. As you know, this is the paper Merissa’s father bought last year. Millions read it.”
“No, I didn’t know. She told me nothing about her father.”
“He’s a dear old rascal. Almost the last of the true Tories.”
“I could have sworn she was a Lib-Lab.”
“Merissa is a very clever lamb,” Goldschmidt stated, and pinched his lips shut. In our long Diaspora we have learned not to tattle on our hosts. Goldy’s right hand, shaken farewell, was unreally soft.
Bech saved page seventeen for the last. The Times review was headlined “More Ethnic Fiction from the New World” and lumped The Best of Bech with a novel about Canadian Indians by Leonard Cohen and a collection of protest essays and scatalogical poems by LeRoi Jones. The long Observer piece was titled “Bech’s Best Not Good Enough” and was signed L. Clark Tuttle. Bech skimmed, as a fakir walks on hot coals, pausing nowhere long enough to burn the moisture from the soles of his feet. Almost none of the quotes he had poured into the boy’s notebook and tape recorder were used. Instead, an aggrieved survey of Bech’s œuvre unfolded, smudged by feeble rebuttals.
… Queried concerning the flowery, not to say fruity, style of The Chosen, Bech shrugged off the entire problem of style, claiming (facetiously?) that he never thinks about it.… Of the book’s profound failure, the crippling irreconcilability of its grandiose intentions and the triviality of its characters’ moral concerns, Bech appears blissfully unaware, taking refuge in the charming, if rather automatically gnomic, disclaimer that “as you grow older, life becomes complicated” … This interviewer was struck, indeed, by the defensive nature of Bech’s breezy garrulousness; his charm operates as a screen against others—their menacing opinions, the raw stuff of their life—just as, perhaps, drink operates within him as a screen against his own deepest self-suspicions … counter-revolutionary nostalgia … possibly ironical faith in “entrepreneurism” … nevertheless, undoubted verbal gifts … traumatized by the economic collapse of the 1930s … a minor master for the space of scattered pages … not to be classed, Bech’s faithful New York Review claque to the contrary, with the early Bellow or the late Mailer … reminded, in the end, after the butterfly similes and overextended, substanceless themes of this self-anointed “Best,” of (and the comparison may serve English readers as an index of present relevance) Ronald Firbank!
Bech let the paper go limp. The airplane had taxied out and he braced himself for the perilous plunge into flight. Only when aloft, with Hampton Court securely beneath him, a delicate sepia diagram of itself, and London’s great stone mass dissolved into a cloud on the surface of the receding earth, did Bech turn to page seventeen. A column there was headed MERISSA’S WEEK. The line drawing of the girl recalled to Bech the spaces in her face—the catlike span between her eyes, the oval granny glasses, the V-shaped little chin, the sudden moist gap of her mouth, which in the caricature existed as a wry tilde, a ~.
Merissa had a tamey week * * * The daffodils were just like olde tymes, eh, W. W.? * * * Beware: the blackjack dealer at L’Ambassadeur draws to sixteen and always makes it * * * A ve
rger down at Canterbury C. is such an ignoramus I took him for a Drugs Squad agent * * * The new acoustics in the Albert Hall are still worse than those on Salisbury Plain * * * John & Yoko will cut their next record standing on their heads, their bottoms painted to resemble each other’s faces * * * Swinging L. was a shade more swingy this week when the darling American author Henry (Travel Light, Brother Pig and don’t look blank they’re in Penguins) Bech dropped in at Revolution and other In spots. The heart of many a jaded bird beat brighter to see Bech’s rabbinical curls bouncing in time to “Poke Salad Annie” and other Yank-y hits. Merissa says: Hurry Back, H. B., transatlantic men are the most existential * * * He was visiting Londinium to help push la crème of his crème, Bech’s Best, a J. J. Goldschmidt release, with a dull, dull jacket—the author’s pic is missing. Confidentially, his heart belongs to dirty old New York * * *
Bech closed his eyes, feeling his love for her expand as the distance between them increased. Entrepreneurism rides again. Rabbinical curls: somehow he had sold her that. Automatically gnomic: he had sold that too. As a screen against others. Firbank dead at forty. Still gaining altitude, he realized he was not dead; his fate was not so substantial. He had become a character by Henry Bech.
BECH ENTERS HEAVEN
WHEN HENRY BECH was an impressionable pre-adolescent of twelve, more bored than he would admit with the question of whether or not the 1935 Yankees could wrest the pennant back from a Detroit led by the heroic Hank Greenberg, his mother one May afternoon took him out of school, after consultation with the principal; she was a hardened consulter with the principal. She had consulted when Henry entered the first grade, when he came back from the second with a bloody nose, when he skipped the third, and when he was given a 65 in Penmanship in the fifth. The school was P.S. 87, at 77th and Amsterdam—a bleak brick building whose interior complexity of smells and excitement, especially during a snowstorm or around Hallowe’en, was tremendous. None but very young hearts could have withstood the daily strain of so much intrigue, humor, desire, personality, mental effort, emotional current, of so many achingly important nuances of prestige and impersonation. Bech, rather short for his age, yet with a big nose and big feet that promised future growth, was recognized from the first by his classmates as an only son, a mother’s son more than a father’s, pampered and bright though not a prodigy (his voice had no pitch, his mathematical aptitude was no Einstein’s); naturally he was teased. Not all the teasing took the form of bloody noses; sometimes the girl in the adjacent desk-seat tickled the hair on his forearms with her pencil, or his name was flaunted through the wire fence that separated the sexes at recess. The brownstone neighborhoods that supplied students to the school were in those years still middle-class, if by middle-class is understood not a level of poverty (unlike today’s poor, they had no cars, no credit cards, and no delivery arrangements with the liquor store) but of self-esteem. Immersed in the Great Depression, they had kept their families together, kept their feet from touching bottom, and kept their faith in the future—their children’s future more than their own. These children brought a giddy relief into the sanctum of the school building, relief that the world, or at least this brick cube carved from it, had survived another day. How fragile the world felt to them!—as fragile as it seems sturdy to today’s children, who wish to destroy it. Predominately Jewish, Bech’s grammar school classes had a bold bright dash of German Gentiles, whose fathers also kept a small shop or plied a manual craft, and some Eastern Europeans, whose fey manners and lisped English made them the centers of romantic frenzy and wild joking attacks. All studied, by the light of yellowish overhead globes and of the 48-star flag nailed above the blackboard, penmanship, the spice routes, the imports and exports of the three Guianas, the three cases of percentage, and other matters of rote given significance by the existence of breadlines and penthouses, just as the various drudgeries of their fathers were given dignity, even holiness, by their direct connection with food and survival. Although he would have been slow to admit this also, little Bech loved the school; he cherished his citizenship in its ragged population, was enraptured by the freckled chin and cerulean eyes of Eva Hassel across the aisle, and detested his mother’s frequent interference in his American education. Whenever she appeared outside the office of the principal (Mr. Linnehan, a sore-lidded spoiled priest with an easily mimicked blink and stammer), he was teased in the cloakroom or down on the asphalt at recess; when she had him skip a grade, he had become the baby of the class. By the age of twelve, he was going to school with girls that were women. That day in May, he showed his anger with his mother by not talking to her as they walked from the scarred school steps, down 78th past a mock-Tudor apartment house like some evilly enlarged and begrimed fairy-tale chalet, to Broadway and 79th and the IRT kiosk with its compounded aroma of hot brakes, warm bagels, and vomit.
Extraordinarily, they took a train north. The whole drift of their lives was south—south to Times Square and to the Public Library, south to Gimbels, south to Brooklyn where his father’s two brothers lived. North, there was nothing but Grant’s Tomb, and Harlem, and Yankee Stadium, and Riverdale where a rich cousin, a theatre manager, inhabited an apartment full of glass furniture and an array of leering and scribbled photographs. North of that yawned the foreign vastness, first named New York State but melting westward into other names, other states, where the goyim farmed their farms and drove their roadsters and swung on their porch swings and engaged in the countless struggles of moral heroism depicted continuously in the Hollywood movies at the Broadway RKO. Upon the huge body of the United States, swept by dust storms and storms of Christian conscience, young Henry knew that his island of Manhattan existed as an excrescence; relatively, his little family world was an immigrant enclave, the religion his grandfathers had practiced was a tolerated affront, and the language of this religion’s celebration was a backwards-running archaism. He and his kin and their kindred were huddled in shawls within an overheated back room while outdoors a huge and beautiful wilderness rattled their sashes with wind and painted the panes with frost; and all the furniture they had brought with them from Europe, the footstools and phylacteries, the copies of Tolstoy and Heine, the ambitiousness and defensiveness and love, belonged to this stuffy back room.
Now his mother was pointing him north, into the cold. Their reflections shuddered in the black glass as the express train slammed through local stops, wan islands of light where fat colored women waited with string shopping bags. Bech was always surprised that these frozen vistas did not shatter as they pierced them; perhaps it was the multi-leveled sliding, the hurtling metal precariously switched aside from collision, more than the odors and subterranean claustrophobia, that made the boy sick on subways. He figured that he was good for eight stops before nausea began. It had just begun when she touched his arm. High, high on the West Side they emerged, into a region where cliffs and windy hilltops seemed insecurely suppressed by the asphalt grid. A boisterous shout of spring rolled upward from the river, and trolley cars clanged along Broadway. Together they walked, the boy and his mother, he in a wool knicker suit that scratched and sang between his legs, she in a tremulous hat of shining black straw, up a broad pavement bordered with cobblestones and trees whose bark was scabbed brown and white like a giraffe’s neck. His sideways glance reaped a child’s cowing impression of, beneath the unsteady flesh of his mother’s jaw, the rose splotches that signaled excitement or anger. He had better talk. “Where are we going?”
“So,” she said, “the cat found his tongue.”
“You know I don’t like your coming into the school.”
“Mister Touch-Me-Not,” she said, “so ashamed of his mother he wants all his blue-eyed shiksas as to think he came out from under a rock, I suppose. Or better yet lives in a tree like Siegfried.”
Somewhere in the past she had wormed out of him his admiration of the German girls at school. He blushed. “Thanks to you,” he told her, “they’re all a year older than me.”
> “Not in their empty golden heads, they’re not so old. Maybe in their pants, but that’ll come to you soon enough. Don’t hurry the years, soon enough they’ll hurry you.”
Homily, flattery, and humiliation: these were what his mother applied to him, day after day, like a sculptor’s pats. It deepened his blush to hear her mention Eva Hassel’s pants. Were they what would come to him soon enough? This was his mother’s style, to mock his reality and stretch his expectations.
She went on, “There’s nothing one of those fräuleins would like better than fasten herself to some smart little Jewish boy. Better that than some sausage-grinding Fritz who’ll go to beer and beating her before he’s twenty-five. You keep your nose in your books.”
“That’s where it was, before you busted into school. Where are you taking me?”
“To see something more important than where to put your you-know-what.”
“Mother, don’t be vulgar.”
“Vulgar is what I call a boy who wants to put his mother under a rock. His mother and his people and his brain, all under a rock.”
“Now I understand. You’re taking me to look at Plymouth Rock.”
“Something like it. If you have to grow up American, at least let’s not look only at the underside. Arnie”—the Riverdale cousin—“got me two tickets from Josh Glazer, to I don’t know quite what it is. We shall see.”
The hill beneath their feet flattened; they arrived at a massive building of somehow unsullied granite, with a paradoxical look of having been here forever yet having been rarely used. Around its top ran a ribbon of carved names: PLATO · NEWTON · AESCHYLUS · LEONARDO · AQUINAS · SHAKESPEARE · VOLTAIRE · COPERNICUS · ARISTOTLE · HOBBES · VICO · PUSHKIN · LINNAEUS · RACINE and infinitely on, around cornices and down the receding length of the building’s two tall wings. Courtyard followed courtyard, each at a slightly higher level than the last. Conical evergreens stood silent guard; an unseen fountain played. For entrance, there was a bewildering choice of bronze doors. Bech’s mother pushed one and encountered a green-uniformed guard; she told him, “My name is Abigail Bech and this is my son Henry. These are our tickets, it says right here this is the day, they were obtained for us by a close associate of Josh Glazer’s, the playwright. I’m sure you’ve heard of him. Nobody forewarned me it would be such a climb from the subway, that’s why I’m out of breath like this.” The guard, and then another guard, for they several times got lost, directed them (his mother receiving and repeating a full set of directions each time) up a ramifying series of marble stairways into the balcony of an auditorium whose ceiling, the child’s impression was, was decorated with plaster toys—scrolls, masks, seashells, tops, and stars.