by John Updike
His attempts to separate her from her family were not successful. Once he stayed at a motel near the railroad station, and took her out, in her own car, on a “date” that was to proceed, after dinner, to his hired room, and was to end with Bea’s return home no later than midnight, since the babysitter was the fifteen-year-old daughter of the local Methodist minister. But the over-filling meal at a boorish roadside restaurant, and their furtive decelerated glide through the crackling gravel courtyard of the motel (where a Kiwanis banquet was in progress, and had hogged all the parking spaces), and his fumbly rush to open the tricky aluminoid lock-knob of his door and to stuff his illicit guest out of sight, and the macabre interior of oak-imitating wallboard and framed big-eyed pastels that embowered them proved in sum withering to Bech’s potency. Though his suburban mistress graciously, following less her own instincts than the exemplary drift of certain contemporary novels, tried to bring his weakling member to strength by wrapping it in the velvet bandages of her lips, Bech couldn’t achieve more than a two-thirds hard-on, which diminished to an even less usable fraction whenever the starchy fare within their stomachs rumbled, or his gaze met that of a pastel waif, or the Kiwanis broke into another salvo of applause, or Bea’s beginning yips frightened him up from the primordial level where he was, at last, beginning to thrive. Who, as a rabbi once said, by taking thought can add a cubit to his height? Not Bech, though he tried. The minister’s freckle-faced daughter was asleep on the sofa when he and Bea, as caked with dried sweat as a pair of squash players, finally returned.
In Manhattan, on Bech’s cozy turf, the problem was different: Bea underwent a disquieting change. At home in Bech’s drab large rooms at Riverside and 99th, she became slangy, bossy, twitchy, somewhat sluttish, too much at home—she became in short like her rejected sister Norma. The Latchett blood ran tart at the scent of marriage; old Judge Latchett, when alive, had been one of the hanginger magistrates in Jersey City. Bea, as her underwear and Bech’s socks dried together on the bathroom radiator, tended to pontificate. “You should get out of these dreary rooms, Henry. They’re half the reason you’re blocked.”
“Am I blocked? I’d just thought of myself as a slow typist.”
“What do you do, hit the space bar once a day?”
“Ouch.”
“I’m sorry, that did sound bitchy. But it makes me sad, to see someone of your beautiful gifts stagnating.”
“Maybe I have a beautiful gift for stagnation.”
“Come live with me.”
“What about the neighbors? What about the children?”
“The neighbors don’t care. The children love you. Come live with us and see in the spring. You’re dying of carbon monoxide down here.”
“I’d drown in flesh up there. You pin me down and the others play pile-on.”
“Only Donald. And aren’t you funny about that? Rodney and I absolutely agreed, a child shouldn’t be excluded from anything physical. We thought nothing of being nude in front of them.”
“Spare me the picture, it’s like a Grünewald. You and Rodney, as I understand it, agreed about everything.”
“Well at least neither of us were squeamish old maids.”
“Unlike a certain écrivain juif, n’est-ce pas?”
“You’re very good at making me sound like a bitch. But I honestly do believe, Henry, you need to do something different with yourself.”
“Such as integrating Suburbia. Henry Bech, Ossining’s one-man ghetto.”
“It’s not like that. It’s not like a Polish village. Nobody thinks in these categories any more.”
“Will I be asked to join the Kiwanis? Does a mama’s lover qualify to join the P.-T.A.?”
“They don’t call it the P.-T.A. any more.”
“Bea baby, here I stand, I can do no other. I’ve lived here twenty years.”
“That is precisely your problem.”
“Every shop on Broadway knows me. From the Chinese laundry to the Swedish bakery. From Fruit House to Japanese Foodland. There he goes, they say, Old Man Bech, a legend in his lifetime. Or, as the colored on the block call me, Cheesecake Charley, the last of the Joe Louis liberals.”
“You’re really terrified, aren’t you,” Bea said, “of having a serious conversation?”
The telephone rang. Without the telephone, Bech wondered, how would we ever avoid proposing marriage? The instrument sat by a window, on a table with a chessboard inlaid into veneer warped by years of disuse and steam heat. A dust-drenched shaft of four o’clock sun dwelt tepidly upon a split seam in the sofa cover, a scoop-shaped dent in the lampshade, and a yellowing stack of unread presentation copies of once-new novels, arranged to lend stability to the chess table’s rickety, dried-out legs. The phone directory was years old and its cover was scrawled with numbers that Bech no longer called, including, in happy crimson greedily inked early one morning, Norma’s. The receiver, filmed by air pollution, held a history of fingerprints. “Hello?”
“Mistah Bech? Is that Hainry Bech the authuh?”
“Could be,” Bech said. The Southern voice, delightfully female, went on, with a lacy interweave of cajoling and hysterical intonations, to propose that he come and speak or read, whicheveh he prefuhhed, to a girls’ college in Virginia. Bech said, “I’m sorry, I don’t generally do that sort of thing.”
“Oh Mistah Bech, Ah knew you’d say that, ouah English instructah, a Miss Eisenbraun, ah don’t suppose you know heh, sayd you were immensely hard to gait, but you hev so many fayuns among the girls heah, we’re all just hopin’ against hope.”
“Well,” Bech said—a bad word choice, in the situation.
The voice must have sensed he found the accent seductive, for it deepened. “Oueh countrehsaad round heah is eveh so pretteh, the man who wrote Travel Laaht owes it to himself to see it, and though to be shooah we all know moneh is no temptation foh a man of yoh statchuh, we have a goood speakeh’s budget this ye-ah and kin offeh you—” And she named a round figure that did give Bech pause.
He asked, “When would this be?”
“Oh!”—her yip was almost coital—“oh, Misteh Bech, you mean you maaht?” Before she let him hang up he had agreed to appear in Virginia next month.
Bea was indignant. “You’ve lost all your principles. You let yourself be sweet-talked into that.”
Bech shrugged. “I’m trying to do something different with myself.”
Bea said, “Well I didn’t mean letting yourself be cooed at by an auditorium full of fluffy-headed racists.”
“I think of it more as being an apostle to the Gentiles.”
“You won’t speak at Columbia when it’s two subway stops away and full of people on your own wavelength, but you’ll fly a thousand miles to some third-rate finishing school on the remote chance you can sack out with Scarlett O’Hara. You are sick, Henry. You are weak, and sick.”
“Actually,” Bech told Bea, “I’ll be there two nights. So I can sack out with Melanie too.”
Bea began to cry. The inner slump he felt, seeing her fair face sag, was perhaps a premonition of his panic. He tried to joke through it: “Bea baby, I’m just following your orders, I’m going to see spring in in the Southland. They offered me an even grand. I’ll buy a triple bed for you, me, and Donald.”
Her blue eyes went milky; her lips and lids became the rubbed pink color of her nipples. She had washed her hair and was wearing only his silk bathrobe, one Norma had given him in response to the gift of a kimono, and when Bea bowed her head and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes, the lapels parted and her breasts hung lustrous in his sight. He tried to fetch up some words of comfort but knew that none would be comfort enough but the words, “Marry me.” So he looked away, past the dented lampshade, at the framed rectangle of city that he knew better than he knew his own soul—the fragile forest of television aerials, the stunted courtyards of leafless ailanthus, the jammed clockwork of fire escapes. His soul felt nervously suspended within him, like a snagged counterwei
ght.
Two petite, groomed, curried girls met him at the airport and drove him in a pink convertible, at great speed, through the rolling, burgeoning landscape. Spring had arrived here. New York had been windy and raw. The marzipan monuments of Washington, seen from the airport, had glittered above cherry blossoms. Piedmont Air Lines had lifted him and rocked him above hills dull evergreen on the ridges and fresh deciduous green in the valleys, where streams twinkled. The shadow of the plane crossed racetrack ovals and belts of plowed land. Dot-sized horses slowly traced lines of gallop within fenced diagrams. Looking down, Bech was dizzy; twice they bounced down into small airports cut into hillsides. On the third stop, he alighted. The sun stood midway down the sky, as it had the day the phone had rung and Bea had mocked his acceptance, but now the time stood an hour later in the day; it was after five. The two girls, giggling, gushing, met him and drove him, in a deafening rush of speed (if the convertible flipped, his head would be scraped from his shoulders; he foresaw the fireman hosing his remains from the highway) to a campus, once a great plantation. Here many girls in high heels and sheer stockings and, Bech felt, girdles strolled across acres of hilly lawn overswept by the powerful smell of horse manure. In his citified nostrils, the stench rampaged, but nothing in the genteel appearance of the place acknowledged it—not the scrubbed and powdered faces of the girls, nor the brick-and-trim façades of the buildings, nor the magnolia trees thick and lumpy with mauve-and-cream, turnip-shaped buds. It was as if one of his senses had short-circuited to another channel, or as if a school of deaf-mutes were performing a minuet to the mistaken accompaniment of a Wagnerian storm. He felt suddenly, queasily hollow. The declining sun nubbled the lawn’s texture with shadowed tufts, and as Bech was led along a flagstone path to his first obligation (an “informal” hour with the Lanier Club, a branch of budding poetesses) profound duplicity seemed to underlie the landscape. Along with the sun’s reddening rays and the fecal stench a devastating sadness swept in. He knew that he was going to die. That his best work was behind him. That he had no business here, and was frighteningly far from home.
Bech was uncomfortable in colleges. War had come when he was eighteen, and a precocious acceptance from Liberty two years later. He stayed in Germany a year after V-E Day, editing a news-sheet for the U.S. occupation forces in Berlin, and returned home to find his mother dying. She was not quite fifty. When, having surrendered both breasts to the surgeon’s knife, she had beat her way back from the underworld of anaesthesia for the final time, Bech felt he knew too much to submit to a college curriculum. He used the GI Bill to take courses at NYU but evaded graduation. He joined the army of vets who believed they had earned the right to invent their lives. He entered a tranced decade of abstract passions, of the exhilarations of type and gossip and nights spent sitting up waiting for the literary renaissance that would surely surpass that of the Twenties by just as much as this war had surpassed, in nobility and breadth and conclusiveness, its predecessor. But it was with the gaunt Titans of modernism, with Joyce and Eliot and Valéry and Rilke, that one must begin. Make it new. The intolerable wrestle with words and meanings. Bech weaned himself from the slicks and wormed his way into the quarterlies. Commentary let him use a desk. As he confessed to Vera Glavanakova, he wrote poems: thin poems scattered on the page like soot on snow. He reviewed books, any books, history, mysteries, almanacs, memoirs—anything printed had magic. For some months he was the cinema critic for an ephemeral journal titled Displeasure. Bech was unprepossessing then, a scuttler, a petty seducer, a bright-eyed bug of a man in those days before whiskey and fame fleshed him out, his head little more than a nose and a cloud of uncombable hair. He was busy and idle, melancholy and happy. Though he rarely crossed the water necessary to leave Manhattan, he was conscious of freedom—his freedom to sleep late, to eat ham, to read the Arabian Nights in the 42nd Street library, to sit an hour in the Rembrandt room at the Metropolitan, to chisel those strange early paragraphs, not quite stories, which look opaque when held in the lap but held up to the window reveal a symmetrical pattern of intended veins. In the years before Travel Light, he paced his gray city with a hope in his heart, the expectation that, if not this day the next, he would perfectly fuse these stone rectangles around him with the gray rectangles of printed prose. Self-educated, street-educated, then, he was especially vulnerable to the sadness of schools. They stank of country cruelty to him—this herding, this cooping up of people in their animal prime, stunning them with blunt classics, subjecting them to instructors deadened and demented by the torrents of young blood that pass through their terms; just the lip-licking reverence with which professors pronounce the word “students” made Bech recoil.
Our slide shows him posturing in a sumptuous common room whose walls are padded with leatherbound editions of Scott and Carlyle and whose floor is carpeted with decorously arranged specimens of nubility. He was, possibly, as charming and witty as usual—the florid letter of thanks he received in New York from the Lanier Club’s secretary suggested so. But to himself his tongue seemed to be moving strangely, as slowly as one of those galloping horses he had seen from a mile in the air, while his real attention was turned inward toward the swelling of his dread, his unprecedented (not even in the freezing, murderous hell of the Battle of the Bulge, endured when he was twenty-one) recognition of horror. The presences at his feet—those seriously sparkling eyes, those earnestly flushed cheeks, those demurely displayed calves and knees—appalled him with the abyss of their innocence. He felt dizzy, stunned. The essence of matter, he saw, is dread. Death hangs behind everything, a real skeleton about to leap through a door in these false walls of books. He saw himself, in this nest of delicate limbs, limbs still ripening toward the wicked seductiveness Nature intended, as a seed among too many eggs, as a gross thrilling intruder, a genuine male intellectual Jew, with hairy armpits and capped molars, a man from the savage North, the North that had once fucked the South so hard it was still trembling—Bech saw himself thus, but as if in a trompe-l’œil box whose painted walls counterfeit, from the single perspective of the peephole, three-dimensional furnishings and a succession of archways. He felt what was expected of him, and felt himself performing it, and felt the fakery of the performance, and knew these levels of perception as the shifting sands of absurdity, nullity, death. His death gnawed inside him like a foul parasite while he talked to these charming daughters of fertile Virginia.
One asked him, “Suh, do you feel there is any place left in modern poetry for rhaam?”
“For what?” Bech asked, and educed a gale of giggles.
The girl blushed violently, showing blood suddenly as a wound. “For rhy-em,” she said. She was a delicate creature, with a small head on a long neck. Her blue eyes behind glasses seemed to be on stalks. The sickness in Bech bit deeper as he apologized, “I’m sorry, I simply didn’t hear what you said. You ask about rhyme. I write only prose—”
A sweet chorus of mutters protested that No, his prose was a poet’s, was poetry.
He went on, stooping with the pain inside him, amazed to hear himself making a kind of sense, “—but it seems to me rhyme is one of the ways we make things hard for ourselves, make a game out of nothing, so we can win or lose and lighten the, what?, the indeterminacy of life. Paul Valéry, somewhere, discusses this, the first line that comes as a gift from the gods and costs nothing, and then the second line that we make ourselves, word by word, straining all our resources, so that it harmonizes with the supernatural first, so that it rhymes. He thought, as I remember, that our lives and thoughts and language are all a ‘familiar chaos’ and that the arbitrary tyranny of a strict prosody goads us to feats of, as it were, rebellion that we couldn’t otherwise perform. To this I would only add, and somewhat in contradiction, that rhyme is very ancient, that it marks rhythm, and that much in our natural lives is characterized by rhythm.”
“Could you give us an example?” the girl asked.
“For example, lovemaking,” Bech said, and to h
is horror beheld her blush surging up again, and beheld beyond her blush an entire seething universe of brainless breeding, of moist interpenetration, of slippery clinging copulation, of courtship dances and come-on signals, of which her hapless blush, unknown to her, was one. He doubted that he could stand here another minute without fainting. Their massed fertility was overwhelming; each body was being broadened and readied to generate from its own cells a new body to be pushed from the old, and in time to push bodies from itself, and so on into eternity, an ocean of doubling and redoubling cells within which his own conscious moment was soon to wink out. He had had no child. He had spilled his seed upon the ground. Yet we are all seed spilled upon the ground. These thoughts, as Valéry had predicated, did not come neatly, in chiming packets of language, but as slithering, overlapping sensations, microörganisms of thought setting up in sum a panicked sweat on Bech’s palms and a palpable nausea behind his belt. He attempted to grin, and the pond of young ladies shuddered, as if a pebble had been dropped among them. In rescue an unseen clock chimed the half-hour, and a matronly voice, in the accents of Manhattan, called, “Girls, we must let our guest eat!”