by John Updike
Wendell arranged four chairs in a rectangle, and produced a pipe. It was an ordinary pipe, the kind that authors, in the corny days when Bech’s image of the literary life had been formed, used to grip in dust-jacket photographs. Norma took the best chair, the wicker armchair, and impatiently smoked a cigarette while Beatrice cleared away the dishes and checked on the children. They were asleep beneath the stars. Donald had moved his sleeping bag against the girls’ and lay with his thumb in his mouth and the other hand on Judy’s hair. Beatrice and Bech sat down, and Wendell spoke to them as if they were children, showing them the magic substance, which looked like a residue of pencil shavings in a dirty tobacco pouch, instructing them how to suck in air and smoke simultaneously, how to “swallow” the smoke and hold it down, so the precious narcotic permeated the lungs and stomach and veins and brain. The thoroughness of these instructions aroused in Bech the conviction that something was going to go wrong. He found Wendell as an instructor pompous. In a fury of puffing and expressive inhaling, the boy got the pipe going, and offered first drag to Norma. She had never smoked a pipe, and suffered a convulsion of coughing. Wendell leaned forward and greedily inhaled from midair the smoke she had wasted. He had become, seen sidewise, with his floppy blond hair, a baby lion above a bone; his hungry quick movements were padded with a sinister silence. “Hurry,” he hoarsely urged Norma, “don’t waste it. It’s all I have left from my last trip to Mexico. We may not have enough for four.”
She tried again—Bech felt her as tense, rebellious, all too aware that, with the pipe between her teeth, she became a sharp-nosed crone—and coughed again, and complained, “I’m not getting any.”
Wendell whirled, barefoot, and, stabbing with the pipestem, said, “Mr. Bech.”
The smoke was sweet and circular and soft, softer than Bech could have imagined, ballooning in his mouth and throat and chest like a benevolent thunderhead, like one of those valentines from his childhood that unfolded into a three-dimensional tissue-paper fan. “More,” Wendell commanded, thrusting the pipe at him again, ravenously sniffing into himself the shreds of smoke that escaped Bech’s sucking. This time there was a faint burning—a ghost of tobacco’s unkind rasp. Bech felt himself as a domed chamber, with vaults and upward recesses, welcoming the cloud; he shut his eyes. The color of the sensation was yellow mixed with blue yet in no way green. The base of his throat satisfyingly burned.
While his attention was turned inward, Beatrice was given the pipe. Smoke leaked from her compressed lips; it seemed intensely poignant to Bech that even in depravity she was wearing no lipstick. “Give it to me,” Norma insisted, greedily reaching. Wendell snatched the pipe against his chest and, with the ardor of a trapped man breathing through a tube, inhaled marijuana. The air began to smell sweetish, flowery, and gentle. Norma jumped from her chair and, kimono shimmering, roughly seized the pipe, so that precious sparks flew. Wendell pushed her back into her chair and, like a mother feeding a baby, insinuated the pipestem between her lips. “Gently, gently,” he crooned, “take it in, feel it press against the roof of your mouth, blossoming inside you, hold it fast, fast.” His “s” ’s were extremely sibilant.
“What’s all this hypnosis?” Bech asked. He disliked the deft way Wendell handled Norma. The boy swooped to him and eased the wet pipe into his mouth. “Deeper, deeper, that’s it, good … good …”
“It burns,” Bech protested.
“It’s supposed to,” Wendell said. “That’s beautiful. You’re really getting it.”
“Suppose I get sick.”
“People never get sick on it, it’s a medical fact.”
Bech turned to Beatrice and said, “We’ve raised a generation of amateur pharmacologists.”
She had the pipe; handing it back to Wendell, she smiled and pronounced, “Yummy.”
Norma kicked her legs and said savagely, “Nothing’s happening. It’s not doing anything to me.”
“It will, it will,” Wendell insisted. He sat down in the fourth chair and passed the pipe to Norma. Fine sweat beaded his plump round face.
“Did you ever notice,” Bech asked him, “what nifty legs Norma has? She’s old enough to be your biological mother, but condescend to take a gander at her gams. We were the Sinewy Generation.”
“What’s this generation bag you’re in?” Wendell asked him, still rather respectfully English 1020. “Everybody’s people.”
“Our biological mother,” Beatrice unexpectedly announced, “thought actually I had the better figure. She used to call Norma nobby.”
“I won’t sit here being discussed like a piece of meat,” Norma said. Grudgingly she passed the pipe to Bech.
As Bech smoked, Wendell crooned, “Yes, deeper, let it fill you. He really has it. My master, my guru.”
“Guru you,” Bech said, passing the pipe to Beatrice. He spoke with a rolling slowness, sonorous as an idol’s voice. “All you flower types are incipient Fascists.” The “a” ’s and “s” ’s had taken on a private richness in his mouth. “Fascists manqués,” he said.
Wendell rejected the pipe Beatrice offered him. “Give it back to our teacher. We need his wisdom. We need the fruit of his suffering.”
“Manqué see, manqué do,” Bech went on, puffing and inhaling. What a woman must feel like in coitus. More, more.
“Mon maître,” Wendell sighed, leaning forward, breathless, awed, loving.
“Suffering,” Norma sneered. “The day Henry Bech lets himself suffer is a day I’m dying to see. He’s the safest man in America, since they retired Tom Dewey. Oh, this is horrible. You’re all being so silly and here I sit perfectly sober. I hate it. I hate all of you, absolutely.”
“Do you hear music?” Bech asked, passing the pipe directly across to Wendell.
“Look at the windows, everybody people,” Beatrice said. “They’re coming into the room!”
“Stop pretending,” Norma told her. “You always played up to Mother. I’d rather be nobby Norma than bland Bea.”
“She’s beautiful,” Wendell said, to Norma, of Beatrice. “But so are you. The Lord Krishna bestows blessings with a lavish hand.”
Norma turned to him and grinned. Her tropism to the phony like a flower’s to the sun, Bech thought. Wide warm mouth wherein memories of pleasure have become poisonous words.
Carefully Bech asked the other man, “Why does your face resemble the underside of a colander in which wet lettuce is heaped?” The image seemed both elegant and precise, cruel yet just. But the thought of lettuce troubled his digestion. Grass. All men. Things grow in circles. Stop the circles.
“I sweat easily,” Wendell confessed freely. The easy shamelessness purchased for an ingrate generation by decades of poverty and war.
“And write badly,” Bech said.
Wendell was unabashed. He said, “You haven’t seen my new stuff. It’s really terrifically controlled. I’m letting the things dominate the emotions instead of vice versa. Don’t you think, since the Wake, emotions have about had it in prose?”
“Talk to me,” Norma said. “He’s absolutely self-obsessed.”
Wendell told her simply, “He’s my god.”
Beatrice was asking, “Whose turn is it? Isn’t anybody else worried about the windows?” Wendell gave her the pipe. She smoked and said, “It tastes like dregs.”
When she offered the pipe to Bech, he gingerly waved it away. He felt that the summit of his apotheosis had slipped by, replaced by a widespread sliding. His perceptions were clear, he felt them all trying to get through to him, Norma seeking love, Wendell praise, Beatrice a few more days of free vacation; but these arrows of demand were directed at an object in metamorphosis. Bech’s chest was sloping upward, trying to lift his head into steadiness, as when, thirty years ago, carsick on the long subway ride to his Brooklyn uncles, he would fix his eyes in a death grip on his own reflection in the shuddering black glass. The funny wool Buster Brown cap his mother made him wear, his pale small face, old for his age. The ultimate deliverance
of the final stomach-wrenching stop. In the lower edge of his vision Norma leaped up and grabbed the pipe from Beatrice. Something fell. Sparks. Both women scrambled on the floor. Norma arose in her shimmering kimono and majestically complained, “It’s out. It’s all gone. Damn you, greedy Bea!”
“Back to Mexico,” Bech called. His own voice came from afar, through blankets of a gathering expectancy, the expanding motionlessness of nausea. But he did not know for a certainty that he was going to be sick until Norma’s voice, a few feet away in the sliding obfuscation, as sharp and small as something seen in reversed binoculars, announced, “Henry, you’re absolutely yellow!”
In the bathroom mirror he saw that she was right. The blood had drained from his face, leaving like a scum the tallow of his summer tan, and a mauve blotch of sunburn on his melancholy nose. Face he had glimpsed at a thousand junctures, in barbershops and barrooms, in subways and airplane windows above the Black Sea, before shaving and after lovemaking, it witlessly smiled, the eyes very tired. Bech kneeled and submitted to the dark ecstasy of being eclipsed, his brain shouldered into nothingness by the violence of the inversion whereby his stomach emptied itself, repeatedly, until a satisfying pain scraped tears from his eyes, and he was clean.
Beatrice sat alone in the living room, beside the dead fireplace. Bech asked her, “Where is everybody?”
She said, unmoving, uncomplaining, “They went outside and about two minutes ago I heard his car motor start.”
Bech, shaken but sane, said, “Another medical fact exploded.”
Beatrice looked at him questioningly. Flirting her head, Bech thought, like Norma. Sisters. A stick refracted in water. Our biological mother.
He explained, “A, the little bastard tells me it won’t make me sick, and B, he solemnly swears it’s a sexual depressant.”
“You don’t think—they went back to his room?”
“Sure. Don’t you?”
Beatrice nodded. “That’s how she is. That’s how she’s always been.”
Bech looked around him, and saw that the familiar objects—the jar of dried bayberry; the loose shell collections, sandy and ill-smelling; the damp stack of books on the sofa—still wore one final, gossamer thickness of the mystery in which marijuana had clothed them. He asked Bea, “How are you feeling? Do the windows still worry you?”
“I’ve been sitting here watching them,” she said. “I keep thinking they’re going to tip and fall into the room, but I guess they won’t really.”
“They might,” Bech advised her. “Don’t sell your intuitions short.”
“Please, could you sit down beside me and watch them with me? I know it’s silly, but it would be a help.”
He obeyed, moving Norma’s wicker chair close to Bea, and observed that indeed the window frames, painted white in unpainted plank walls, did have the potentiality of animation, and a disturbing pressingness. Their center of gravity seemed to shift from one corner to the other. He discovered he had taken Bea’s hand—limp, cool, less bony than Norma’s—into his. She gradually turned her head, and he turned his face away, embarrassed that the scent of vomit would be still on his breath. “Let’s go outside on the porch,” he suggested.
The stars overhead were close and ripe. What was that sentence in Ulysses? Bloom and Stephen emerging from the house to urinate, suddenly looking up—The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit. Bech felt a sadness, a terror, that he had not written it. And never would. A child whimpered and rustled in its sleep. Beatrice was wearing a loose pale dress luminous in the air of the dark porch. The night was moist, alive; lights along the horizon pulsed. The bell buoy clanged on a noiseless swell. She sat in a chair against the shingled wall and he took a chair facing her, his back to the sea. She asked, “Do you feel betrayed?”
He tried to think, scanned the scattered stars of his decaying brain for the answer. “Somewhat. But I’ve had it coming to me. I’ve been getting on her nerves deliberately.”
“Like me and Rodney.”
He didn’t answer, not comprehending and marveling instead how, when the woman crossed and recrossed her legs, it could have been Norma—a gentler, younger Norma.
She clarified, “I forced the divorce.”
The child who had whimpered now cried aloud; it was little Donald, pronouncing hollowly, “Owl!”
Beatrice, struggling for control against her body’s slowness, rose and went to the child, kneeled and woke him. “No owl,” she said. “Just Mommy.” With that ancient strange strength of mothers she pulled him from the sleeping bag and carried him back in her arms to her chair. “No owl,” she repeated, rocking gently, “just Mommy and Uncle Harry and the bell buoy.”
“You smell funny,” the child told her.
“Like what funny?”
“Like sort of candy.”
“Donald,” Bech said, “we’d never eat any candy without telling you. We’d never be so mean.”
There was no answer; he was asleep again.
“I admire you,” Beatrice said at last, the lulling rocking motion still in her voice, “for being yourself.”
“I’ve tried being other people,” Bech said, fending, “but nobody was convinced.”
“I love your book,” she went on. “I didn’t know how to tell you, but I always rather sneered at you, I thought of you as part of Norma’s phony crowd, but your writing, it’s terribly tender. There’s something in you that you keep safe from all of us.”
As always when his writing was discussed to his face, a precarious trembling entered Bech’s chest: a case of crystal when heavy footsteps pass. He had the usual wild itch to run, to disclaim, to shut his eyes in ecstasy. More, more. He protested, “Why didn’t anybody at least knock on the door when I was dying in the bathroom? I haven’t whoopsed like that since the army.”
“I wanted to, but I couldn’t move. Norma said it was just your way of always being the center of attention.”
“That bitch. Did she really run off with that woolly little prep-school snot?”
Beatrice said, with an emphatic intonation dimly, thrillingly familiar, “You are jealous. You do love her.”
Bech said, “I just don’t like creative-writing students pushing me out of my bed. I make a good Tiresias but I’m a poor Fisher King.”
There was no answer; he sensed she was crying. Desperately changing the subject, he waved toward a distant light, whirling, swollen by the mist. “That whole headland,” he said, “is owned by an ex-member of the Communist Party, and he spends all his time putting up No Trespassing signs.”
“You’re nice,” Beatrice sobbed, the child at rest in her arms.
A motor approached down the muffling sandy road. Headlights raked the porch rail, and doubled footsteps crashed through the cottage. Norma and Wendell emerged onto the porch, Wendell carrying a messy thickness of typewriter paper. “Well,” Bech said, “that didn’t take long. We thought you’d be gone for the night. Or is it dawn?”
“Oh, Henry,” Norma said, “you think everything is sex. We went back to Wendell’s place to flush his LSD down the toilet, he felt so guilty when you got sick.”
“Never again for me, Mr. Bech. I’m out of that subconscious bag. Hey, I brought along a section of my thing, it’s not exactly a novel, you don’t have to read it now if you don’t want to.”
“I couldn’t,” Bech said. “Not if it makes distinctions.”
Norma felt the changed atmosphere and accused her sister, “Have you been boring Henry with what an awful person I am? How could the two of you imagine I’d misbehave with this boy under your noses? Surely I’m subtler than that.”
Bech said, “We thought you might be high on pot.”
Norma triumphantly complained, “I never got anything. And I’m positive the rest of you faked it.” But, when Wendell had been sent home and the children had been tucked into their bunks, she fell asleep with such a tranced soundness that Bech, insomniac, sneaked from her side and safely slept with Beatrice. He found he
r lying awake waiting for him. By fall the word went out on the literary circuit that Bech had shifted mistresses again.
BECH PANICS
THIS MOMENT in Bech’s pilgrimage must be approached reverently, hesitantly, as befits a mystery. We have these few slides: Bech posing before a roomful of well-groomed girls spread seraglio-style on the floor, Bech lying awake in the frilly guest room of a dormitory, Bech conversing beside a granite chapel with a woman in a purple catsuit, Bech throwing himself like a seed upon the leafy sweet earth of Virginia, within a grove of oaks on the edge of the campus, and mutely begging Someone, Something, for mercy. Otherwise, there is semi-darkness, and the oppressive roar of the fan that cools the projector, and the fumbling, snapping noises as the projectionist irritably hunts for slides that are not there. What made Bech panic? That particular March, amid the ripening aromas of rural Virginia, in that lake of worshipful girls?
All winter he had felt uneasy, idle, irritable, displaced. He had broken with Norma and was seeing Bea. The train ride up to Ossining was dreary, and the children seemed, to this bachelor, surprisingly omnipresent; the twin girls sat up watching television until “Uncle Harry” himself was nodding, and then in the heart of the night little Donald would sleepwalk, sobbing, into the bed where Bech lay with his pale, gentle, plump beloved. The first time the child, in blind search of his mother, had touched Bech’s hairy body, he had screamed, and in turn Bech had screamed. Though Donald, who had few preconceptions, soon grew adept at sorting out the muddle of flesh he sometimes found in his mother’s bed, Bech on his side never quite adjusted to the smooth transition between Bea’s lovemaking and her mothering. Her tone of voice, the curve of her gestures, seemed the same. He, Bech, forty-four and internationally famous, and this towheaded male toddler depended parallel from the same broad body, the same silken breasts and belly, the same drowsy croons and intuitive caresses. Of course, abstractly, he knew it to be so—Freud tells us, all love is one, indivisible, like electricity—but concretely this celibate man of letters, who had been an only son and who saw his sister’s family in Cincinnati less than once a year, felt offended at his immersion in the ooze of familial promiscuity. It robbed sex of grandeur if, with Bech’s spunk still dribbling from her vagina and her startled yips of pleasure still ringing in his dreams, Bea could rouse and turn and almost identically minister to a tot’s fit of night-fright. It made her faintly comical and unappetizing, like the giant milk dispenser in a luncheonette. Sometimes, when she had not bothered to put on her nightie, or had been unable to find where their amorous violence had tossed it, she nestled the boy to sleep against her naked breasts and Bech would find himself curled against her cool backside, puzzled by priorities and discomfited by the untoward development of jealousy’s adamant erection.