Bech at Bay (12 page)

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 scent of musk pressing through the wool lap of the skirt, along the horizontal seam where, if Martina were a mermaid, her fishy half would begin?

“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.

When the rudimentary business of announcements and minutes was over with, the shapely brown hand of Jason Marr was lifted for recognition. Bech imagined he would be commenting on the unprecedented number of African-American candidates brought forth into nomination. But no, it was on a graver, more general matter that Marr spoke. “Mr. President,” he said, in his rich slow voice reminiscent of the pulpit, “as we discovered at our last meeting, there is an element within this institution that for unfathomable reasons of their own wishes to see it dissolved. I would like to give expression to my righteous horror at this development. Since I was a boy on the mean streets well north of here, I had heard of the Forty; the streets were not so mean, nor was our ignorance so complete, that word was denied to the least of us that somewhere on this rocky island the pinnacle of artistic accomplishment could be located—as it turned out, in the very building where I am now privileged, unto my everlasting wonder and gratitude, to sit. I have often heard the other members complain that this institution serves no distinct purpose, save that of
self-glorification. But of how many institutions can it be said that, even if their distinct good deeds do not make a legion of headlines, they do symbolize in their very being something eternal and unquestionably to be valued? Are love and respect for the arts so dead—are we so far gone in electronic degradation and the lust for monetary profit—that we can seriously contemplate writing ‘finis’ to a dream born at the outset of this cruellest of centuries, in the heart of a refined lady of means, one Lucinda Baines, who dared hope to redeem her drug-peddling family’s unsavory fortune by devoting a fraction of it to the establishment of a golden hill, a hill to be set before the eyes of the nation’s young as a Mount Sinai, a Mount Olympus, a Mount Everest of the spirit existing to be climbed by them? Mr. President, I would welcome a comment from the chair, and an endorsement or a refutation of these sentiments.” He sat down.

Bech’s head spun a little; there was more going on here than he knew. What did “the lust of monetary profit” have to do with it? He said cautiously, “Mr. Marr, your sentiments endorse themselves, by virtue of the eloquence of their expression. But someone playing the devil’s advocate could ask, Might we not embody an idea whose time has come and gone, with its distinct savor of elitism and of outmoded establishment values? Values, I need not tell you, established by a white male hierarchy whose comfortable idealism rested on the unconfessed exploitation of women, workers, and people of color.” Martina, he felt, would have especially liked the insertion of “workers” in the litany of abused minorities.

Marr was on his feet indignantly. “Mr. President, I did not speak as a person of color. I spoke as a person of sensibility
one elected to this body on the strength of my work. If the content of my work is rage, black rage, its form is timeless, of the ages. As a poet I claim fellowship with Sappho, with Whitman, with Shakespeare—yea, with Kipling and Tennyson and the singers of the white empire of their day. If the Forty is disbanded, I will be denied one of the few venues in which I can express that everlasting fellowship—I, and all my brothers and sisters of color. We are set to climb the golden hill; now some would take the golden hill away!”

“But,” Bech pointed out, “there is no motion to disband the Forty.”

“I so move, Mr. President,” a voice boomed from within the several rows of heads, shadowy beneath the thrumming rain. Bech recognized the voice of Isaiah Thornbush, its topping of English accent on a base of local gravel. There was a host of eager seconds.

“Would Mr. Thornbush,” Bech asked, striving to keep a level head, “like to speak to the motion?”

“You’ve already nailed it, Henry,” Izzy said with impudent coziness. “Elitist. Edwardian. Establishment. Extinct. You’re either in the march of progress or you’re obstructing it. This luxurious, idle,
honorary
”—scornfully emphasized and prolonged—“organization is an obstruction. It’s cultural clutter, if I may coin a virtual anagram.”

At Bech’s elbow Edna’s pencil was stabbing frantically on her yellow pad.
Charter by-laws don’t provide for dissolution
, he made out. The spinning in his head had increased; he was feeling helicoptered high above the fray. The members’ heads looked like eggs in a carton. His desk looked the size of a shoebox. “The directress,” he stated to the meeting from on high, “informs me that the by-laws have no provision for dissolution.”