Bech at Bay by John Updike
“Well, thanks. I guess. You and Martina have these intimate consultations about me often?”
“No, just at lunch the other day. We had business. Aesop is bringing out a collection of my out-of-print essays, including a bunch I did for Displeasure. Remember Displeasure?”
“How could I forget?” For all his egregious faults, Izzy had what few people left in the world had: he remembered Displeasure. Its crammed second-floor offices in Chelsea, its ragged right margins, its titles in lower-case sans. The black-haired internes from the Village, girlfriends of associate editors, who helped out, their triangular brows furrowed by the search for typos, which tended to multiply when corrected.
“Old Fritzi Egle in his bedroom slippers,” Izzy was saying, “with that funny sweet smell around his head all the time. We were so frigging innocent we didn’t know he was sucking opium. We thought it was his hair tonic.”
“How big is the collection?” Bech was jealous. The Vellum Press had let his miscellany When the Saints go out of print, and his second novel, Brother Pig, existed only in quality paperback, available, maybe, at college bookstores. He used to see himself on drugstore racks and in airports, but no more. If he wasn’t assigned in a college seminar on post-war anti-realism, he wasn’t read.
“Too big,” Thornbush allowed with mock modesty. “Over a thousand pages, unless they cheat me on the leading. These young editors keep asking for this and that favorite they remember, and Aesop doesn’t want to leave any real gem out.”
“Heaven forbid,” Bech said, and decided to see the brandy through after all. He swirled the dark-amber residue in the bottom of the snifter and dizzily reflected that no doubt there were strict laws, known to mathematicians and specialists in the study of chaos, to describe exactly its elliptical gyrations. Then he tossed it down. It burned, lower and lower in his esophageal tract. “Listen, Izzy,” he said. “You got me into being president of the Forty, it’s not something I was dying to do. Now you’re acting like there’s something dirty about it. At the fall meeting, when MacDeane began to talk about what sounded like dissolution, you egged it on: you proposed that moratorium on new members that just about would have scotched the whole institution. Who of us is going to be around in the year 2000? Edna was horrified. So was I.”
“I was saving the situation,” Izzy suavely said. “Those goons from music were out for blood.”
“Yeah, why?”
“You heard them. They don’t like the electronic crowd that might get elected. Seidensticker doesn’t like representational revisionism. MacDeane hates the revisionist historians that make us the bad guys in the late Cold War. Also, he’s out of the Washington power loop and it hurts.”
“So, kill the whole thing. The whole idea of the Forty, never mind what Forty. Is that what the arts in America have come to? Is that what Lucinda Baines laid down her fortune for? A lot of people died, taking Baines’ Powders, so the Forty could exist.”
Izzy with his clownish side-wings of snowy hair was playing an imaginary violin, so convincingly that his jaw sprouted multiple chins. Bech could see the strings, hear the vibrato. “You’re breaking my heart,” Izzy said. “Anyway, my motion saved the situation. Glad I could help out. You can thank me later.”
“If that was help, I’ll take opposition. Hey,” Bech said, “I got to go. Martina’s making motions of her own.” She was, as over a year ago, moving about in her loden coat, preparing to leave without him.
Izzy was enjoying the conversation. “It’s like prizes and prize committees,” he said. “Do you want to be a literary judge? Reading all that crap, and then getting no thanks?”
“No,” Bech admitted. “I always duck it.”
“Me, too. So who accepts? Midgets. So who do they choose for the prize? Another midget.”
There was an analogy there, but Bech felt he was missing it. He knew that Thornbush hadn’t won a prize since a Critics Circle for the LB-Bull in 1971. Sour grapes, the champagne of the intelligentsia. Martina had put on that shapeless green coat over her gray wool dress and as she bent forward to give Pamela an unsmiling kiss, a peck on each cheek European-style, she seemed to brandified Bech a schoolgirl refugee from those pre-war public-school classrooms where he had sat learning the rudiments of history, biology, and mathematics. P.S. 87, a bleak brick building at 77th and Amsterdam, had been staffed in that laggard time mostly by unmarried Christian women who, hindsight told him, were very young. Girls, really. They had seemed enormously tall and mature and wise. They had taught him to read, and that had been the making and unmaking of him. “I feel like my feet are stuck in buckets of brandy,” he told Izzy, trying to break free of the other writer’s powerful gravitational field.
But Martina moved across his field of vision, green, a bit of Birnam wood removing to Dunsinane. I say, a moving grove, the messenger told Macbeth. The power of sexual attraction snapped Bech loose from Izzy’s spell; he sailed across the room and came up against Martina with a bump. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“Going.”
“Without me?”
“Why not? You’ve ignored me all night.”
“I didn’t want to cramp your style.”
“I have no style, Henry. I’m just a lowly copyeditor, correcting other people’s styles and getting small thanks.”
Small thanks seemed to be a theme of the evening. “That’s not true. You have tons of style. You’re Colette in a loden coat. Listen, you. We may not have come together, but we go together. That’s how we do it.” His stomach sagged and burned beneath the brandy-soaked possibility of losing this fragrant, solid, slightly un-American woman. He was bad at the business of life, which is letting go. In the elevator he pleaded, “Come back to the loft. We got to work on our relationship.”
“Ha,” Martina said. “Relating to you is like wallpapering an igloo.”
“That bad?” The phrase didn’t sound like her; it was too good, too intricate, too Thornbushian.
Martina went on, “I saw you with our hostess, trying to crawl down the front of her dress. She’s all show, Henry, I tell you this as a friend. All show and no performance. Like any rich bitch. She fucks badly.”
“How do you know that? Let me guess. The husband. Holy Isaiah, with his suction-cup mouth. At age seventy-one, he wants performance?”
The plunging elevator hiccuped to its stop, and they put on straight faces for the doorman, who warned them, in his jolly Russian-refugee accent, that it was cold outside—calder than vitch’s teet.
When Bech lived up on West 99th Street, he would feel, heading across West End Avenue toward Riverside Drive and the Hudson, safe at last; now he felt that way when the taxi crossed Houston’s rushing car-stream. The industrial streets reflected scattered wan lights on their old paving-stones; the incidence of habitation here reverted to prehistoric times, when man was outnumbered by lions and timber wolves, and his lonely fires flickered at the backs of caves halfway up iron-stained cliffs. Bech’s second-floor (third, counting the ground floor) loft lay in the rickety block between Prince and Spring. His neighbors were, below him, a struggling gallery of Sahel art and crafts, and, above him, a morose little sweatshop where a pack of Filipinos wove and bent baskets, rope sandals, floor mats, and rattan animals. At night his nearest active neighbor was a jazz club at the back of a building up the block; its weakly applauded riffs and cymbal-punctuated climaxes filtered through his walls. Bech, a bit sickened by the cognac and the sweet smell of Izzy Thornbush’s sell-out to the rich, poured himself a cleansing Pellegrino, but Martina decided to stick with white wine. She found some recorked Chardonnay in the back of his refrigerator. “Henry,” she said, settling into the exact center of the little sofa opposite his beanbag chair, so that there was no space for an amorous drunk on either side of her, “I don’t intend to quarrel or make love. We’ve done both for all they’re worth.”
“Done and done? Isn’t there a recurrent need? Pamela thought you seemed distracted and sour lately.”
He thought of sawing away at an imaginary violin, but instead asked, “What do you and Izzy talk about all the time? He said you’re bringing out a collection of all the essays he’s ever written. That’s some load.”
“Some of them are quite amazing,” she said, tucking her stocking feet up under her solid haunches on the old leather sofa that Bea in Ossining had covered in nubbly almond-colored wool before she sent both Bech and the sofa back to New York and desolation. Strange, but, thinking of fabrics, Bech perceived that Martina had managed to find in the United States pantyhose of the less-than-fine, gray-brown knit that Communist women used to wear. “Such intellectual curiosity!” she was going on, of the deplorable Thornbush’s written effusions. “There was nothing he wouldn’t tackle—chess, the international meaning of Ping-Pong, Adlai Stevenson as Hamlet versus Eisenhower’s Fortinbras, these Persian and Chinese and Ethiopian novelists nobody else has heard of or read—”
“Wonderful, wonderful. The walking brain, later to be known as Mr. Potato-Head. What did you mean when you told him at lunch that you thought I was going establishment?”
Her face—the deepset eyes, the unplucked brows, the lipstickless lips—was startled by the betrayal. A clarinet swooped up an octave in the jazz club many walls away, then slippingly descended the scale via flats and sharps. “I didn’t say it exactly like that. I’m surprised he told you.”
“That’s how Izzy is. A communicator. If you thought you and he had any secrets, forget it.”
The restless, slightly guilty way she adjusted her stocking feet under her haunch’s warm weight was driving him tenderly wild. “What I may have said was that ever since you became president of the Forty you’ve been acting a little different. Not self-important, exactly, but … more declarative. Dictatorial, even. When you come back from meeting all afternoon privately with Edna you’re quite impossible—I don’t think you’re aware of it.”
“Well, yes, I dictate. I’ve never had the use, before, of a secretary, to take down my words and type them all up on cream-colored stationery. For the first time I see what all these men with power are clinging to.”
“And you’ve never had a professional harem before, possibly,” she said, working on it with him therapeutically. “They all grovel, Edna and her help. You’re the catch, the living immortal.”
“Author of prose haiku,” he said. It still rankled.
“What do you care what a flutterbrain like Pamela Thornbush says? How greedy you are, Henry, to have every woman in the world on her knees in front of you.”
The image was pure blue movie. Now the drummer, his brushes and high-hat cymbals tingling, had launched a solo, coaxing a spatter of applause from the desultory little crowd. “Flutterbrain,” he said. “Is that a word you made up, or what the smart young people now are all saying?”
“You know what I meant. Birdbrain. Don’t deflect. I think it’s sad, that an absolutely meaningless organization like the Forty, just because it has some endowment to play with and the staff flatters you, would take up any of your time and energy. In the days when you had integrity, you would have sneered at it. It is decadent capitalism at its most insidious.”
“Don’t you mean triumphant, not decadent? Read the papers.”
“It’s just not real,” Martina said. “A bunch of mostly New York City has-beens electing each other. It’s worse than the Writers’ Unions—at least they had a kind of policing function. They could reward and punish.”
“What do you want me to do, get it to dissolve?”
“Yes.” The simple syllable was paired with a distant collapse of multiple instruments into the climactic, finalizing set of chords. “It’s pointless,” she said, “and an insult to young artists. The only positive thing it does is make work for Edna and her sleek little lackeys.”
How did she know the assistants were sleek? Their brushed hair, their respectful smiles, their little golden granny glasses. As in some ceiling vision by Tiepolo they ministered, bare legs dangling, to the arc of befuddled old faces, shiningly clean from their lifelong bath in the higher verities. “Imagine the Forty,” he told Martina, “as a Festschrift all year long.”
“That was my job. I thought you were stupid, contributing to it, by the way. I thought it was beneath you. And your irony didn’t save it.”
“Then why was your letter so seductive?”
She took her feet out from under her haunch and sat up as if to go somewhere. “Was it?”
“I thought so.”
“My pantyhose feel hot.”
“They look heavy. You should break down and buy the finer-gauge.”
“Those run,” she told him, pushing her pelvis toward the loft ceiling to hook her thumbs around the pantyhose’s waistband.
“You’ve said,” he pointed out, “unforgivable things to me.”
Her voice was milder, though she still didn’t smile. “Just that you’re silly to be seduced by something like the Forty. You scorn Izzy and his rich wife, but you’re knocked silly by this dead woman’s money, what was her name, Lucinda Baines?” In stripping off her pantyhose she had flashed old-fashioned plain white non-bikini underpants; the old-fashionedness hit Bech hard, hurtling him back to boyhood glimpses of underpants at P.S. 87. Did his memory betray him, or did wisps of pubic fuzz peek out of the loose leg-holes, the elastic limp in the Depression?
“You should see the house Lucinda gave us,” he boasted. “So lovely—no two mantelpieces alike, and a solarium that’s like a high oval birdcage. We meet in there. The president’s desk has bowed-out sides like a Spanish galleon, and upstairs, there is this terrific library with carved animal heads, lions alternating with lambs, full of everybody’s books, which nobody reads.”
She was stuffing her pantyhose into her purse and perching forward on the sofa to leave. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I just cannot sleep with a man who takes a birdcage or doll-house or whatever like that so seriously. Who would care about becoming a member except midgets?”
“Midgets,” he said. “There’s a word I’ve heard already tonight. According to Izzy, we’re all midgets, except him.”
“Not you, Henry.” She seemed sincere, her serious eyes, darkened by the lateness of the hour, boring into his. “You can do magical things Izzy can’t. You can make characters breathe and walk on their own. His, he has to move them around himself; all their energy is his.”
“Really?” he said. Was it he or the brandy blushing? He was deeply gratified. Farther along in the drab recesses of Crosby Street, the jazz group took up another set, with a tenor sax laying out the tune—“April in Paris”—in halting, introspective phrases. “You believe that?”
She stood loomingly above him, the little fuzzy pills of wear on her gray skirt a more appealing texture to him than the most shimmering watered silk: the drab texture of virtue. “Everybody knows it,” she said, and he could hear her voice resonate in her belly. He leaned his face, his ear against that flat belly. It was warm through the worn wool. Skin and hair were within kissing distance.
“You’re right,” he said. “The Forty is a farce. It just seems to me a harmless farce.”
“Nothing is harmless,” said Martina sternly, “if it takes up space. Mental and spiritual space. You must get it out of your mind.”
“I will. It is. Out.” He struggled up from the clammy grip of the beanbag chair to wrap his arms around her thickest part, the haunch and rump whose muscle and fat were braced by the flaring pelvis. He thought of all her layers, bones out to clothes, and foresaw a profound satisfaction in removing just the outermost ones. They hadn’t made love for weeks, because of this edgy political tension always between them. “Do stay tonight,” Bech begged, hoarsely. “I’ll swear off presiding forever.” Did he imagine it, or was the s
“You can preside,” Martina said. She made an impatient motion within his arms, of wanting to be free. “Just don’t be so proud of it. It makes you absurd, like some poltroon.”
“Now there’s a word you must have got from one of your prima-donna authors,” he said, sinking back into the bean-bag. He was tired, but he just had to relax and it would all happen, as water flows downhill; already she was out of her jacket and undoing the little pearly buttons of her blouse. Chestnuts in blossom, the saxophone was repeating. “Do you really think I’m a better writer than Izzy?”
“Better writer,” Martina said, shedding her clothes and slowly filling the loft with her scents, as apples rotting in the long wet grass perfume an entire orchard. “He’s the better thinker. Most of the time, Henry dearest”—she was drawing closer—“you don’t seem to be thinking at all.”
The spring meeting of the Forty, though the day turned out to be a rainy one, attained an all-time high: twenty-three members were in attendance. The buzz was up; the white-haired old heads bobbed one toward another as the rain drummed on the panes of the solarium, arching above their heads in a high half-shell. Over the winter, the stately MacDeane had died and also, her avidly flirtatious heart unexpectedly giving out after one last poetry reading at the 92nd Street “Y,” Amy Speer deLessups. Bech would miss them both. He had read them when young; they took with them some of the glamour of the post-war years, when the New York School was eclipsing Paris, and at any minute the new Farewell to Arms would appear, and it seemed everything would pick up and go on as it had before the war, only better, without the poverty and racial cruelty. You ate lunch in drugstores, and books cost two dollars, and college students wore neckties, and typewriters were the most advanced word processors there were. Amy had been smart and slender and wore big straw hats and slept with Delmore Schwartz and Philip Rahv in rumored conjunctions as exalted and cloudily chaste as the copulations of the Olympian gods. She was gone now, with Schwartz and Rahv and Wilson and Trilling and all those other guardians of Bech’s youthful aspirations.