Bech: A Book

by John Updike

  As the loosening of the boy’s vocabulary indicated a prolonged conversation, the woman beside Bech shifted restlessly. Wendell’s clear blue eyes observed the movement, and obligated Bech to perform introductions. “Norma, this is Wendell Morris. Miss Norma Latchett.”

  “Morrison,” the boy said, and reached in past Bech’s nose to shake Norma’s hand. “He’s beautiful, isn’t he, Ma’am?”

  She answered dryly, “He’ll do.” Her thin brown hand rested in Wendell’s white plump one as if stranded. It was a sticky day.

  “Let’s go,” a child exclaimed from the back seat, in that dreadful squeezed voice that precedes a tantrum. Helplessly Bech’s hands tightened on the steering wheel, and the hairs on the back of his neck stiffened. After two weeks, he was still unacclimated to the pressures of surrogate paternity. The child grunted, stuffed with fury; Bech’s stomach sympathetically clenched.

  “Hush,” the child’s mother said, slow-voiced, soothing. “Uncle Harry’s talking to an old student of his. They haven’t seen each other for years.”

  Wendell bent low to peer into the back seat, and Bech was obliged to continue introductions. “This is Norma’s sister, Mrs. Beatrice Cook, and her children—Ann, Judy, Donald.”

  Wendell nodded four times in greeting. His furry plump hand clung tenaciously to the sill of Bech’s window. “Quite a scene,” he said.

  Bech told him, “We’re trying to get to the beach before it clouds over.” Every instant, the sky grew less transparent. Often the island was foggy while the mainland, according to the radio, blissfully baked.

  “Where’s everybody staying?” The boy’s assumption that they were all living together irritated Bech, since it was correct.

  “We’ve rented a shoe,” Bech said, “from an old lady who’s moved up to a cigar box.”

  Wendell’s eyes lingered on the three fair children crammed, along with sand pails and an inflated air mattress, into the back seat beside their mother. He asked them, “Uncle Harry’s quite a card, huh, kids?”

  Bech imagined he had hurt Wendell’s feelings. In rapid atonement he explained, “We’re in a cottage rented from Andy Spofford, who used to be in war movies—before your time, he played sidekicks that got killed—and lives mostly in Corsica now. Blue mailbox, third dirt road past the Up-Island Boutique, take every left turning except the last, when you go right, not hard right. Mrs. Cook is up from Ossining visiting for the week.” Bech restrained himself from telling Wendell that she was going through a divorce and cried every evening and lived on pills. Bea was an unspectacular middle-sized woman two years younger than Norma; she wore dull clothes that seemed designed to set off her sister’s edgy beauty.

  Wendell understood Bech’s apologetic burst as an invitation, and removed his hand from the door. “Hey, I know this is an imposition, but I’d love to have you just glance at the stuff I’m doing now. I’m out of that lower-case bag. In fact I’m into something pretty classical. I’ve seen the movie of Ulysses twice.”

  “And you’ve let your hair grow. You’re out of the barbershop bag.”

  Wendell spoke past Bech’s ear to the children. “You kids like to Sunfish?”

  “Yes!” Ann and Judy chorused; they were twins.

  “What’s Sunfish?” Donald asked.

  Going to the beach had been the children’s only entertainment. Their mother was drugged and dazed, Norma detested physical activity before dark, and Bech was frightened of the water. Even the ferry ride over to the island felt precarious to him. He never sailed, and rarely swam in water higher than his hips. From his apartment on Riverside Drive, he looked across to New Jersey as if the Hudson were a wide flat black street.

  “Let’s do it tomorrow,” Wendell said. “I’ll come for them around one, if that’s O.K., ma’am.”

  Bea, flustered to find herself addressed—for Bech and Norma had almost enforced invisibility upon her, staging their fights and reconciliations as if she were not in the cottage—answered in her melodious grief-slowed voice, “That would be lovely of you, if you really want to bother. Is there any danger?”

  “Not a bit, ma’am. I have life jackets. I used to be a camp counselor.”

  “That must have been when you shot your polar bear,” Bech said, and pointedly restarted the motor.

  They arrived at the beach just as the sun went behind one of those irregular expanding clouds whose edges hold blue sky at bay for hours. The children, jubilant at freedom and the prospect of Sunfishing, plunged into the surf. Norma, as if unwrapping a fragile gift in faintly poor taste, removed her beach robe, revealing a mauve bikini, and, inserting plastic eyecups in her sockets, arranged herself in the center of a purple towel the size of a double bed. Bea, disconsolate in a loose brown suit that did not do her figure justice, sat down on the sand with a book—one of Bech’s, curiously. Though her sister had been his mistress for two and a half years, she had just got around to doing her homework. Embarrassed, fearful that the book, so near his actual presence, would somehow detonate, Bech moved off a few strides and stood, bare-chested, gazing at his splendid enemy the sea, an oblivious hemisphere whose glitter of whitecaps sullenly persisted without the sun. Shortly, a timid adolescent voice, the voice he had been waiting for, rustled at his shoulder. “I beg your pardon, sir, but by any chance are you …?”

  Wendell found Bech’s diffident directions no obstacle and came for the children promptly at one the next day. The expedition was so successful Beatrice prolonged her visit another week. Wendell took the children clamming and miniature-golfing; he took them to an Indian burial ground, to an abandoned windmill, to grand beaches fenced with No Trespassing signs. The boy had that Wasp knowingness, that facility with things: he knew how to insert a clam knife, how to snorkle (just to put on the mask made Bech gasp for breath), how to bluff and charm his way onto private beaches (Bech believed everything he read), how to excite children with a few broken shell bits that remotely might be remnants of ceremonially heaped conch shells. He was connected to the land in a way Bech could only envy. Though so young, he had been everywhere—Italy, Scandinavia, Mexico, Alaska—whereas Bech, except for Caribbean holidays and a State Department-sponsored excursion to some Communist countries, had hardly been anywhere. He lived twenty blocks north of where he had been born, and couldn’t sleep for nervousness the night before he and Norma and his rickety Ford risked the journey up the seaboard to the ferry slip. The continent-spanning motorcyclists of Travel Light had been daydreams based upon his Cincinnati sister’s complaints about her older son, a college dropout. Wendell, a mere twenty-three, shamed Bech with his Yankee ingenuity, his native woodcraft—the dozen and one tricks of a beach picnic, for instance: the oven of scooped sand, the corn salted in seawater, the fire of scavenged driftwood. It all seemed adventurous to Bech, as did the boy’s removal, in the amber summer twilight, of his bathing suit to body-surf. Wendell was a pudgy yet complete Adonis stiff-armed in the waves, his buttocks pearly, his genitals distinctly visible when he stood in the wave troughs. The new generation was immersed in the world that Bech’s, like a foolish old bridegroom full of whiskey and dogma, had tried to mount and master. Bech was shy of things, and possessed few, not even a wife; Wendell’s room, above a garage on the summer property of some friends of his parents, held everything from canned anchovies and a Bible to pornographic photographs and a gram of LSD.

  Ever since Bech had met her, Norma had wanted to take LSD. It was one of her complaints against him that he had never got her any. He, who knew that all her complaints were in truth that he would not marry her, told her she was too old. She was thirty-six; he was forty-three, and, though flirting with the senility that comes early to American authors, still absurdly wary of anything that might damage his brain. When, on their cottage porch, Wendell let slip the fact that he possessed some LSD, Bech recognized Norma’s sudden new mood. Her nose sharpened, her wide mouth rapidly fluctuated between a heart-melting grin and a severe down-drawn look almost of anger. It was the mood in whic
h, two Christmases ago, she had come up to him at a party, ostensibly to argue about The Chosen, in fact to conjure him into taking her to dinner. She began to converse exclusively with Wendell.

  “Where did you get it?” she asked. “Why haven’t you used it?”

  “Oh,” he said, “I knew a turned-on chemistry major. I’ve had it for a year now. You just don’t take it, you know, before bedtime like Ovaltine. There has to be somebody to take the trip with. It can be very bad business”—he had his solemn whispering voice, stashed behind his boyish naïve one—“to go on a trip alone.”

  “You’ve been,” Bech said politely.

  “I’ve been.” His shadowy tone matched the moment of day. The westward sky was plunging toward rose; the sailboats were taking the final tack toward harbor. Inside the cottage, the children, happy and loud after an expedition with Wendell to the lobster hatchery, were eating supper. Beatrice went in to give them dessert, and to get herself a sweater.

  Norma’s fine lean legs twitched, recrossing, as she turned to Wendell with her rapacious grin. Before she could speak, Bech asked a question that would restore to himself the center of attention. “And is this what you write about now? In the classic manner of Ulysses movies?”

  Under the embarrassment of having to instruct his instructor, Wendell’s voice dropped another notch. “It’s not really writable. Writing makes distinctions, and this breaks them down. For example, I remember once looking out my window at Columbia. Someone had left a green towel on the gravel roof. From sunbathing, I suppose. I thought, Mmm, pretty green towel, nice shade of green, beautiful shade of green—and the color attacked me!”

  Norma asked, “How attacked you? It grew teeth? Grew bigger? What?” She was having difficulty, Bech felt, keeping herself out of Wendell’s lap. The boy’s innocent eyes, browless as a Teddy bear’s, flicked a question toward Bech.

  “Tell her,” Bech told him. “She’s curious.”

  “I’m horribly curious,” Norma exclaimed. “I’m so tired of being myself. Liquor doesn’t do anything for me anymore, sex, anything.”

  Wendell glanced again toward Bech, worried. “It—attacked me. It tried to become me.”

  “Was it wonderful? Or terrible?”

  “It was borderline. You must understand, Norma, it’s not a playful experience. It takes everything you have.” His tone of voice had become the unnaturally, perhaps ironically, respectful one he had used in English 1020.

  “It’ll even take,” Bech told her, “your Saks charge-a-plate.”

  Bea appeared in the doorway, dim behind the screen. “As long as I’m on my feet, does anybody want another drink?”

  “Oh, Bea,” Norma said, leaping up, “stop being a martyr. It’s my turn to cook, let me help you.” To Bech, before going in, she said, “Please arrange my trip with Wendell. He thinks I’m a nuisance, but he adores you. Tell him how good I’ll be.”

  Her departure left the men silent. Sheets of mackerel shards were sliding down the sky toward a magenta sunset; Bech felt himself being sucked into a situation where nothing, neither tact nor reason nor the morality he had learned from his father and Flaubert, afforded leverage. Wendell at last asked, “How stable is she?”

  “Very un-.”

  “Any history of psychological disturbance?”

  “Nothing but the usual psychiatry. Quit analysis after four months. Does her work apparently quite well—layout and design for an advertising agency. Likes to show her temper off but underneath has a good hard eye on the main chance.”

  “I’d really need to spend some time alone with her. It’s very important that people on a trip together be congenial. They last at least twelve hours. Without rapport, it’s a nightmare.” The boy was so solemn, so blind to the outrageousness of what he was proposing, that Bech laughed. As if rebuking Bech with his greater seriousness, Wendell whispered in the dusk, “The people you’ve taken a trip with become the most important people in your life.”

  “Well,” Bech said, “I want to wish you and Norma all the luck in the world. When should we send out announcements?”

  Wendell intoned, “I feel you disapprove. I feel your fright.”

  Bech was speechless. Didn’t he know what a mistress was? No sense of private property in this generation. The early Christians; Brook Farm.

  Wendell went on carefully, considerately, “Let me propose this. Has she ever smoked pot?”

  “Not with me around. I’m an old-fashioned father figure. Two parts Abraham to one part Fagin.”

  “Why don’t she and I, Mr. Bech, smoke some marijuana together as a dry run? That way she can satisfy her female curiosity and I can see if we could stand a trip together. As I size her up, she’s much too practical-minded to be a head. She just wants to make the Sixties scene, and maybe to bug you.”

  The boy was so hopeful, so reasonable, that Bech could not help treating him as a student, with all of a student’s purchased prerogatives, a student’s ruthless power to intrude and demand. Young American minds. The space race with Russia. Bech heard himself yield. “O.K. But you’re not taking her over into that sorcerer’s-apprentice cubbyhole of yours.”

  Wendell puzzled; he seemed in the half light a blameless furry creature delicately nosing his way through the inscrutable maze of the older man’s prejudices. At last he said, “I think I see your worry. You’re wrong. There is absolutely no chance of sex. All these things of course are sexual depressants. It’s a medical fact.”

  Bech laughed again. “Don’t you dare sexually depress Norma. It’s all she and I have any more.” But in making this combination of joke and confession, he had waved the maze away and admitted the boy more deeply into his life than he had intended—all because, Bech suspected, at bottom he was afraid of being out-of-date. They agreed that Wendell would bring back some marijuana and they would give him supper. “You’ll have to take pot luck,” Bech told him.

  Norma was not pleased by his arrangements. “How ridiculous of you,” she said, “not to trust me alone with that child. You’re so immature and proprietorial. You don’t own me. I’m a free agent, by your preference.”

  “I wanted to save you embarrassment,” he told her. “I’ve read the kid’s stories; you don’t know what goes on in his mind.”

  “No, after keeping you company for three years I’ve forgotten what goes on in any normal man’s mind.”

  “Then you admit he is a normal man. Not a child. O.K. You stay out of that bastard’s atelier, or whatever he thinks it is. A pad.”

  “My, aren’t you the fierce young lover? I wonder how I survived thirty-odd years out from under your wing.”

  “You’re so self-destructive, I wonder too. And by the way it’s not been three years we’ve been keeping company, it’s two and a half.”

  “You’ve been counting the minutes. Is my time about up?”

  “Norma, why do you want to cop out with all these drugs? It’s so insulting to the world, to me.”

  “I want to have an experience. I’ve never had a baby, the only wedding ring I’ve ever worn is the one you loan me when we go to St. Croix in the winter, I’ve never been to Pakistan, I’m never going to get to Antarctica.”

  “I’ll buy you a freezer.”

  “That is your solution, isn’t it?—buy another box. You go from box to box, each one snugger than the last. Well I for one don’t think your marvelous life-style, your heady mixture of art for art’s sake and Depression funk, entirely covers the case. My life is closing in and I hate it and I thought this way I could open it up a little. Just a little. Just a teeny crack, a splinter of sunshine.”

  “He’s coming back, he’s coming back. Your fix is on the way.”

  “How can I possibly get high with you and Bea sitting there watching with long faces? It’s too grotesque. It’s too limiting. My kid sister. My kindly protector. I might as well call my mother—she can fly up from West Orange with the smelling salts.”

  Bech was grateful to her, for letting her anger, her
anguish, recede from the high point reached with the wail that she had never had a baby. He promised, “We’ll take it with you.”

  “Who will? You and Bea?” Norma laughed scornfully. “You two nannies. You’re the two most careful people I’ve ever met.”

  “We’d love to smoke pot. Wouldn’t we, Bea? Come on, take a holiday. Break yourself of Nembutal.”

  Beatrice, who had been cooking lamb chops and setting the table for four while Bech and her sister were obstructively gesturing in the passageway between the kitchen and the dining area, stopped and considered. “Rodney would have a fit.”

  “Rodney’s divorcing you,” Bech told her. “Think for yourself.”

  “It makes it too ridiculous,” Norma protested. “It takes all the adventure out of it.”

  Bech asked sharply, “Don’t you love us?”

  “Well,” Bea was saying. “On one condition. The children must be asleep. I don’t want them to see me do anything wild.”

  It was Wendell’s ingenious idea to have the children sleep on the porch, away from what noise and fumes there might be. He had brought from his magical cache of supplies two sleeping bags, one a double, for the twins. He settled the three small Cooks by pointing out the constellations and the area of the sky where they might, according to this week’s newspapers, see shooting stars. “And when you grow tired of that,” Wendell said, “close your eyes and listen for an owl.”

  “Are there owls?” one twin asked.

  “Oh, sure.”

  “On this island?” asked the other.

  “One or two. Every island has to have an owl, otherwise the mice would multiply and multiply and there would be no grass, just mice.”

  “Will it get us?” Donald was the youngest, five.

  “You’re no mouse,” Wendell whispered. “You’re a man.”

  Bech, eavesdropping, felt a pang, and envied the new Americans their easy intermingling with children. How terrible it seemed for him, a Jew, not to have children, to lack a father’s dignity. The four adults ate a sober and unconversational meal. Wendell asked Bech what he was writing now, and Bech said nothing, he was proofreading his old books, and finding lots of typos. No wonder the critics had misunderstood him. Norma had changed into a shimmering housecoat, a peacock-colored silk kimono Bech had bought her last Christmas—their second anniversary. He wondered if she had kept on her underclothes, and finally glimpsed, as she bent frowning over her overcooked lamb chop, the reassuring pale edge of a bra. During coffee, he cleared his throat. “Well, kids. Should the séance begin?”