Bech at Bay (11 page)

“You’d have to ask Pam about that. Until she got linked up with Izzy, she was on the couch five days a week.”

“But she’s the picture of health now.” Rosy cheeks, buoyant dappled breasts, seamless plastic surgery. Was Bech falling in love yet again?

“Izzy’s done wonders for her, I can tell you. My dad died happy, seeing his daughter in good hands at last.”

“He sounds like an easy man to make happy.”

Zeke Jr. was again puzzled, but had already built puzzlement into his expectations of Bech, and was determined to be polite. Why? Uneasily the unprolific author wondered what charm he held for this financial buccaneer, this boyish wielder of air rights and metropolitan acreage. “My dad had been lucky in life,” young Zeke said reverently, as if taking a frat pledge, “and nothing was too good for his family. He would have spoiled the hell out of us, if he hadn’t also exemplified the work ethic.”

Before such piety, Bech was almost silent. “
My
father,” he confessed, “thought nothing could be too bad for us. He was a spoiler. He managed to die in the subway at rush hour.”

“My dad came from Queens,” said Zeke Jr., taking the high road. “He began with just a couple of vacant lots, and then in the Depression he’d assume the mortgages of bankrupt commercial property, stuff nobody else’d touch. He never looked back. Even into his eighties he was working ten, twelve hours a day. ‘I love the hassle and the wrassle,’ he’d say.”

What was this kid—kid, he could be sixty, if you factor in the rejuvenating effects of gym workouts and winter visits to the Fountain of Youth—trying to sell him? Maybe an earnest, innocent selling manner had become his only style, just like Bech could only do prose haiku. He wasn’t used to such friendly attention from men in such expensive blazers, with a silk handkerchief tumbling from the breast
pocket like a paisley orchid. “Where do you get
your
ideas?” Bech asked him.

“Ideas?”

“For deals.”

Zeke Jr.’s candid eyes narrowed; the skin beneath his eyes took on a crěpey pallor, a tinge of corruption. “Oh—they just develop. It’s a team effort. Not like what you do—think up all this stuff out of nowhere. That to me is awesome.”

Thank God, Izzy came up to them, bringing the fresh air of familiar rudeness. “Henry
is
awesome,” he said. “Especially in the sack.”

“Who says?” Bech asked.

“Rumor hath it,” said Thornbush smugly. “Henry, you are talking here to one of your foremost fans. Though it galls me to admit it, my main distinction in this lad’s eyes is having a claim to your acquaintance.”

“Not just a claim. You’ve done the mining.”

“And pure gold it was. Is.” The tenacious Izzy grip had closed around Bech’s upper arm, which became a kind of tiller in these choppy currents. Bech found himself being steered toward a wall where an ice bucket and a militant array of bottles were being tended by a slender young mime sporting a nostril-ring.

“A privilege and pleasure to meet you, Mr. Bech,” his alleged admirer’s voice called after them.

Izzy turned in stately, politic fashion. “Zeke,” he said, “I’d invite you to join us for brandy and cigars but I know you never let yourself be contaminated. Your better half was making noises in the dining room about the long ride back to Greenwich.”

“You really feel at home with a shaygets like that?” Bech had to ask when he and the other writer were alone in a
corner—the only such corner—containing bookshelves. Bech vainly scanned them for one of his own books; he knew their spines better than his past mistress’s faces. Pamela must keep them in her bedroom.

“Don’t underrate the boy,” Izzy assured him. “He may not look it, but he’s a genius at what he does. New York real estate has been rocky lately, but young Zeke never gets caught holding the bag.
Very
impressive. He’s as ruthless as his old man, and smoother. You can be glad old Zeke isn’t here any more. A fucking monster—never got past eighth grade, and with every prejudice in the book. Came out of the South Jersey pine woods—Appalachia without the mountain air. He would have blocked the marriage if I hadn’t told him I would rescue his daughter from Jewish shrinks. Takes a Jew to chase a Jew, I knew he’d think.”

Izzy had lit up a cigar, a smuggled Havana, and Bech was holding the brandy. His third sip of the raw cognac put him in touch, via a knight’s move of the consciousness, with the volatile essence of truth. “How would he have blocked it?” he asked.

“Disinherit,” Izzy said.

“But surely,” Bech protested, “you didn’t marry Pamela for her money?”

“It was part of the picture. Just like her tits. Would you want to marry a woman if they sawed off her tits? Stick with her, sure—but take her on? Hey, what’s with you and La O’Reilly?”

“She’s souring on me. She ever talk to you about it?”

Under those prodigious eyebrows the old wizard’s eyes veiled meretriciously. “She and I don’t talk romance, just the word business. I was surprised you put such a move on her. You don’t generally go for bluestocking, methodical types; you like destructive.”

“Martina has her sweet destructive side,” Bech said. He must not finish this brandy, he vowed to himself.

“I think she’s jealous of Edna,” Thornbush volunteered.

“Edna? Dear little birdy, virginal Edna?” Yet the very name had conjured up the chaste inner spaces of the Forty’s mansion, and the distinguished dim visages over whom he now and then presided as if over a congress of the ghosts of the dignity, the integrity, the saintly devotion that had once attached to the concept of the arts in the American republic. Edna had as pure a profile as Miss Liberty on the old dime.

“She says you talk about her. You talk about the Forty all too tenderly, in Martina’s view. She thinks you’ve gone establishment. I tell her, ‘Not Bech. He’s the last of the desperadoes.
Dérèglement de tous les sens
, that’s his motto.’ ”

“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.”

“Oh, Pamela. Those wide-open little-girl eyes. Unlike her, I have more in life than to play. All my books at work are problem books. A lot of necessary revision, fighting prima-donna authors, and not much payoff on the bottom line likely.”