by John Updike
Bech was led to a cathedral-sized dining room and seated at a table with eight young ladies. A colored girl sat on his right. She was one of two in the school. The student body, by its own petition, in the teeth of parental protests and financial curtailments from the state legislature, had integrated itself. The girl was rather light-skinned, with an Afro hair-do cut like an upright loaf of bread; she spoke to Bech in a voice from which all traces of Dixie had been clipped. “Mr. Bech,” she said, “we admire your gifts of language but wonder if you aren’t, now and then, somewhat racist?”
“Oh? When?” The presence of food—shrimp salad nested in lettuce, in tulip glasses—had not relieved his panic; he wondered if he dared eat. The shrimp seemed to have retained their legs and eyes.
“In Travel Light, for example, you keep calling Roxanne a Negress.”
“But she was one.” He added, “I loved Roxanne.”
“The fact is, the word has distinctly racist overtones.”
“Well, what should we call them?”
“I suppose you might say ‘black women.’ ” But her tone implied that she, like a spinster lecturing on male anatomy, would rather not call certain things anything at all. Bech was momentarily roused from his funk by this threat, that there were holes in language, things that could not be named. He told her, “Calling you a black woman is as inexact as calling me a pink man.”
She responded promptly. “Calling me a Negress is as insulting as calling you a kike.”
He liked the way she said it. Flat, firm, clear. Fuck you. Black is beautiful. Forced by the argument to see her color, he saw that her loaf of hair was cinnamon-tinted and a spatter of freckles saddled the bridge of her nose. Through this he saw, in a sliding succession of imagery that dumped him back into terror, an Irish overseer raping a slave, vomiting slaves packed beneath the deck of a bucking ship, Africans selling Africans, tribes of all colors torturing one another, Iroquois thrusting firebrands down the throats of Jesuits, Chinese skinning each other in careful strips, predation and cruelty reaching back past Man to the dawn of life, paramecia in a drop of water, aeons of evolution, each turn of beak or stretch of toe shaped by a geological patter of individual deaths. His words echoed weakly in the deep well of this vision. “A black woman could be a woman who’s painted herself black. ‘Negro’ designates a scientific racial grouping, like Caucasian or Mongolian. I use it without prejudice.”
“How do you feel then about ‘Jewess’?”
Bech lied; the word made him wince. “Just as I do about ‘duchess.’ ”
“As to your love,” the girl went on, still with deliberate dignity, holding her head erect as if balancing something upon it and addressing the entire table in full consciousness of dominating, “we’ve had enough of your love. You’ve been loving us down in Georgia and Mississippi for hundreds of years. We’ve been loved to death, we want now to be respected.”
“By which you mean,” Bech told her, “you want to be feared.”
A white girl at the table broke in with hasty politeness. “Pahdon me, Lana Jane, but Misteh Bech, do you realleh believe in races? The school I went to befoh, they made us read a Misteh Carleton Coon? He says, I don’t believe a word of it but he says, black folks have longer heels, thet’s whah the men run fastuh in sprints?”
“Black people, Cindy,” Lana Jane corrected. “Not black ‘folks.’ ” At her prim shudder the ring of pink faces broke into relieved, excessive laughter.
Cindy blushed but was not deflected; she continued, “Also he says, Misteh Bech, that they have thinneh skulls, thet’s whah so many dah in the prahz ring? We used to be told they had thickeh!”
Puzzled by the intensity of her blush, Bech saw that for this excited young convert to liberalism anthropology was as titillating as pornography. He saw that even in an age of science and unbelief our ideas are dreams, styles, superstitions, mere animal noises intended to repel or attract. He looked around the ring of munching females and saw their bodies as a Martian or a mollusc might see them, as pulpy stalks of bundled nerves oddly pinched to a bud of concentration in the head, a hairy bone knob holding some pounds of jelly in which a trillion circuits, mostly dead, kept records, coded motor operations, and generated an excess of electricity that pressed into the hairless side of the head and leaked through the orifices, in the form of pained, hopeful noises and a simian dance of wrinkles. Impossible mirage! A blot on nothingness. And to think that all the efforts of his life—his preening, his lovemaking, his typing—boiled down to the attempt to displace a few sparks, to bias a few circuits, within some random other scoops of jelly that would, in less time than it takes the Andreas Fault to shrug or the tail-tip star of Scorpio to crawl an inch across the map of Heaven, be utterly dissolved. The widest fame and most enduring excellence shrank to nothing in this perspective. As Bech ate, mechanically offering votive bits of dead lamb to the terror enthroned within him, he saw that the void should have been left unvexed, should have been spared this trouble of matter, of life, and, worst, of consciousness.
Slide Two. His bedroom was the corner first-floor room of a large new neo-Georgian dorm. Locked glass doors discreetly separated his quarters from the corridors where virginity slept in rows. But frilly touches whispered and giggled in the room—the beribboned lampshade, the petticoat curtains of dotted swiss beneath the velvet drapes, the abundance of lace runners and china figurines on dainty tables. His bed, with its two plumped pillows one on top of the other like a Pop Art sandwich, its brocaded coverlet turned down along one corner like an Open Here tab on a cereal box, seemed artificially crisp and clean: a hospital bed. And indeed, like an infirm man, he discovered he could lie only in one position, on his back. To turn onto either side was to tip himself toward the edge of a chasm; to roll over onto his belly was to risk drowning in the oblivion that bubbled up from the darkness heated by his own body. The college noises beyond his windows drifted into silence. The last farewell was called, the last high heels tapped down a flagstone path. Chapel bells tolled the quarter hours. The land beyond the campus made itself heard in the sounds of a freight train, a whippoorwill, a horse faintly whinnying in some midnight meadow where manure and grass played yin and yang. Bech tried concentrating on these noises, pressing from them, by sheer force of attention, the balm of their undeniability, the innocence that somehow characterized their simple existence, considered apart from their attributes. All things have the same existence, share the same atoms, reshuffled: grass into manure, flesh into worms. But there was a blackness beneath this thought like that of a midnight pane from which frost is rubbed. He tried to relive pleasantly his evening triumph, his so warmly applauded reading: he had read a long section from Brother Pig, the part where the hero seduces his stepdaughter in the bowling alley, behind the pinsetting machine, and had been amazed, as he read, by the coherence of the words, by their fearless onward march. The blanket of applause, remembered, oppressed him. He tried word games. He went through the alphabet with world saviors: Attila, Buddha, Christ, Danton … Woodrow Wilson, Xerxes the Great, Brigham Young, Zoroaster. There was some slight comfort in the realization that the world had survived all its saviors, but Bech had not put himself to sleep. His panic, like a pain which intensifies when we dwell upon it, when we inflame it with undivided attention, felt worse away from the wash of applause; yet, like a wound tentatively defined by the body’s efforts of asepsis and rejection, it was revealing a certain shape. It felt pasty and stiff. Mixed with the fear, a kind of coagulant, was shame: shame at his having a “religious crisis” that, by all standard psychology, should have been digested in early adolescence, along with post-masturbatory guilt; shame at the degradation of a one-time disciple of those great secreters Flaubert and Joyce into a slick crowd-pleaser at whistle-stop colleges; shame at having argued with a Negress, at having made Bea cry, at having proved himself, in his relations with all women from his mother on, a thin-skinned, fastidious, skittish, slyly clowning, cold-blooded ingrate. His mother. He had taken her de
ath as a bump in his road, an inconvenience in his busy postwar reconstruction of himself. He had seen death in war, and had learned to sneer at its perennial melodrama. He had denied his mother’s death the reality it must have had to her, this chasm that numbed as it swallowed; and now it was swallowing him. He had scarcely mourned. No one sat shivah. No Kaddish had been said. Six thousand years of observance had been overturned in Bech. He was cold, as Flaubert and Joyce were cold. He denied his characters the final measure of love, that would enable them to break free of his favorite tropes, the ruts of his phrases, the chains that rattled whenever he sat down at the typewriter.
He tried to analyze himself. He reasoned that since the id cannot entertain the concept of death, which by being not-being is nothing to be afraid of, his fear must be of something narrower, more pointed and printed. He was afraid that his critics were right. That his works were indeed flimsy, unfelt, flashy, and centrifugal. That the proper penance for his artistic sins was silence and reduction; that his id, in collaboration with the superego figures of Alfred Kazin and Dwight Macdonald, had successfully reduced him to artistic impotence and was now seeking, in its rambling, large-hearted way, his personal extinction: hence his pipsqueak ego’s present flutter of protest. As soon sleep in a cement mixer as amid these revelations. Sleep, the foreshadow of death, the dab of poison we daily take to forestall convulsion, became impossible. The only position in which Bech could even half-relax was on his back, his head propped on both pillows to hold him above smothering, his limbs held steady in the fantasy that he was a china figurine, fragile, cool, and miniature, cupped in a massive hand. Thus Bech tricked himself, a moment after the chapel bells had struck three, into sleep—itself a devastating testimony to the body’s power to drag us down with it. His dreams, strange to report, were light as feathers, and blew this way and that. In one of them, he talked fluid French with Paul Valéry, who looked like the late Mischa Auer.
He awoke stiff. He moved from bed to suitcase to bathroom with an old man’s self-dramatizing crouch. By the light of this new day, through the murky lens of his panic, objects—objects, those atomic mirages with edges that hurt—appeared mock-heroic in their persistence, their quixotic loyalty to the shapes in which chance has cast them. They seemed to be watching him, to be animated by their witness of his plight. Thus, like primitive Man, he began to personify the universe. He shat plenteously, hot gaseous stuff acidified into diarrhoea, he supposed, by his fear. He reflected how, these last unproductive years, his output of excrement had grown so that instead of an efficient five minutes he seemed to spend most of his work morning trapped on the toilet, leafing sadly through Commentary and Encounter. Elimination had become Bech’s forte: he answered letters with the promptness of a backboard, he mailed his loose-paper files to the Library of Congress twice a year. He had become a compulsive wastebasket-emptier. Toilets, mailboxes, cunts were all the receptacles of a fanatic and incessant attempt to lighten himself, as if to fly. Standing at the basin of lavender porcelain (which, newly installed, boasted one of those single faucet controls that blends hot and cold like a joy stick on the old biplanes) Bech, far from his figurine fantasy of last night, felt precariously tall: a sky-high prodigy about to topple, or crumple. His ministrations to himself—brushing his teeth, wiping his anus, shaving his jaw—seemed laid upon his body from a cosmic distance, amid the held breath of inert artifacts, frozen presences he believed were wishing him well. He was especially encouraged, and touched, by the elfin bar of motel-size mauve soap his fingers unwrapped across an interstellar gap.
But stepping, dressed, into the sunshine, Bech was crushed by the heedless scale of outdoors. He was overwhelmed by the multiple transparent signs—the buds, the twittering, the springtide glisten—of growth and natural process, the inhuman mutual consumption that is Nature. A zephyr stained by manure recalled his first flash of terror. He ate breakfast stunned, with a tickling in his nose that might have been the wish to cry. Yet the eight girls seated with him—eight new ones, all Caucasian—pretended to find his responses adequate, even amusing. As he was being led to his first display case of the day, a seminar in the postwar American novel, a zaftig woman in a purple catsuit accosted him by the chapel. She was lithe, rather short, in her thirties, with brushed-back black hair of which some strands kept drifting onto her temple and cheeks and needed to be brushed back with her fingers, which she did deftly, cleverly, continuously. Her lips were long; the upper bore a faint mustache. Her nose too was long, with something hearteningly developed and intelligent about the modulations from tip to nostril wing. When she spoke, it was not with a Southern accent but with Bech’s own, the graceless but rapid and obligingly enunciatory accent of New York Jews.
She said, “Henry—may I?—I know you’re being rushed to some important destination, but my girls, the girls you spoke to last night, the Lanier Club, were so, I guess the word is ‘impressed,’ that they cooked up a rather impertinent, not to say importunate, request that none of them had the nerve to deliver. So they asked me to. I’m their adviser. I was impressed, too, by the way. The name is Ruth Eisenbraun.” She offered her hand.
Bech accepted the offer. Her hand was warmer than porcelain, yet exact, and firm. He asked, “What are you doing amid all this alien corn, Ruth?”
The woman said, “Don’t knock it, it’s a living. This is my fourth year, actually. I like it here. The girls are immensely sweet, and not all of them are dumb. It’s a place where you can see things happening, you can actually see these kids loosening up. Your consenting to come down here is a tremendous boost to the cause.” She took her hand back from his to make the gestures needed to dramatize “loosening up” and “tremendous.” In the sunshine glare reflected from the granite chapel Bech could admire the nimble and even flow of her expressiveness; he enjoyed the sensation, as of a tailor’s measurements, of her coolly sizing him up even as she maintained a screen of patter, every dry and rapid turn of phrase a calibrated, unembarrassed offer of herself. “In fact,” she was saying, “the society as a whole is loosening up. If I were a black, the South is where I’d prefer to be. Nobody in the North believes now in integration because they’ve never had it, but here, in an economic and social way, they’ve had integration all along, though of course entirely on the Man’s terms. My girls, at least until they marry the local sheriff or Coke distributor, are really very naïvely”—again, arabesques with her hands—“sincerely excited about the idea that black people are people. I find them sweet. After five years at CCNY, this has been a gigantic breath of fresh air. You can honestly tell yourself you’re teaching these girls.” And by repeating “girls” so often, she was burning into Bech’s fogged brain awareness that she, something of a girl herself, was also something more.
“What did they want to ask me?”
“Oh, yes. And that seminar is waiting. You know what their nickname for it is?—‘Bellow’s Belles.’ Now that’s been turned into ‘Bellow’s Balls.’ Isn’t that a good sign, that they can be obscene? My girls delegated me to ask you”—and Bech inwardly questioned the source of that delegation—“if you’d please, please, pretty please be willing to judge a poetry contest of theirs. I got your schedule from Dean Coates and see you have a big empty slot late this afternoon; if you could possibly make it over to Ruffin Hall at five, they will recite for you in their best Sunday School manner some awful doggerel you can take back to your room, and give us the verdict before you go tomorrow. It is an imposition, I know. I know, I know. But they’ll be so thrilled they’ll melt.”
The zipper of her catsuit was open three inches below the base of her throat. If he pulled the zipper down six inches more, Bech estimated, he would discover that she was wearing no bra. Not to mention no girdle. “I’d be pleased to,” he said. “Honored, you can tell them.”
“God, that’s swell of you,” Miss Eisenbraun responded briskly. “I hope you weren’t hoping to have a nap this afternoon.”
“In fact,” he told her, “I didn’t get m
uch sleep. I feel very strange.”
“In what way strange?” She looked up into his face like a dentist who had asked him to open his mouth. She was interested. If he had said hemorrhoids, she would still be interested. A Jewish mother’s clinical curiosity. Abigail Bech had always been prying, poking.
“I can’t describe it. Angst. I’m afraid of dying. Everything is so implacable. Maybe it’s all these earth-smells so suddenly.”
She smiled and deeply inhaled. When she sniffed, her upper lip broadened, furry. The forgotten downiness of Jewish women. Their hairy thighs. “It’s worst in spring,” she said. “You get acclimated. May I ask, have you ever been in analysis?”
His escort of virgins, which had discreetly withdrawn several yards when Miss Eisenbraun had pulled her ambush, rustled nervously. Bech bowed. “I am awaited.” Trying to rise to jauntiness from in under her implication that he was mad, he added, “See you later, alligator.”
“In a while, crocodile”: streetcorner yids yukking it up in the land of milk and honey, giving the gentle indigenes something to giggle about. But with her he had been able to ignore, for an absent-minded moment, the gnawing of the worm inside.
How strange, really, his condition was! As absorbing as pain, yet painless. As world-transforming as drunkenness, yet with no horizon of sobriety. As debilitating, inwardly, as a severed spine yet permitting him, outwardly, a convincing version of his usual performance. Which proved, if proof were needed, how much of a performance it was. Who was he? A Jew, a modern man, a writer, a bachelor, a loner, a loss. A con artist in the days of academic modernism undergoing a Victorian shudder. A white monkey hung far out on a spindly heaven tree of stars. A fleck of dust condemned to know it is a fleck of dust. A mouse in a furnace. A smothered scream.