Bech (11 page)

Beatrice sat alone in the living room, beside the dead fireplace. Bech asked her, “Where is everybody?”

She said, unmoving, uncomplaining, “They went outside and about two minutes ago I heard his car motor start.”

Bech, shaken but sane, said, “Another medical fact exploded.”

Beatrice looked at him questioningly. Flirting her head, Bech thought, like Norma. Sisters. A stick refracted in water. Our biological mother.

He explained, “A, the little bastard tells me it won’t make me sick, and B, he solemnly swears it’s a sexual depressant.”

“You don’t think—they went back to his room?”

“Sure. Don’t you?”

Beatrice nodded. “That’s how she is. That’s how she’s always been.”

Bech looked around him, and saw that the familiar objects—the jar of dried bayberry; the loose shell collections, sandy and ill-smelling; the damp stack of books on the sofa—still wore one final, gossamer thickness of the mystery in
which marijuana had clothed them. He asked Bea, “How are you feeling? Do the windows still worry you?”

“I’ve been sitting here watching them,” she said. “I keep thinking they’re going to tip and fall into the room, but I guess they won’t really.”

“They might,” Bech advised her. “Don’t sell your intuitions short.”

“Please, could you sit down beside me and watch them with me? I know it’s silly, but it would be a help.”

He obeyed, moving Norma’s wicker chair close to Bea, and observed that indeed the window frames, painted white in unpainted plank walls, did have the potentiality of animation, and a disturbing pressingness. Their center of gravity seemed to shift from one corner to the other. He discovered he had taken Bea’s hand—limp, cool, less bony than Norma’s—into his. She gradually turned her head, and he turned his face away, embarrassed that the scent of vomit would be still on his breath. “Let’s go outside on the porch,” he suggested.

The stars overhead were close and ripe. What was that sentence in
Ulysses
? Bloom and Stephen emerging from the house to urinate, suddenly looking up—
The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit
. Bech felt a sadness, a terror, that he had not written it. And never would. A child whimpered and rustled in its sleep. Beatrice was wearing a loose pale dress luminous in the air of the dark porch. The night was moist, alive; lights along the horizon pulsed. The bell buoy clanged on a noiseless swell. She sat in a chair against the shingled wall and he took a chair facing her, his back to the sea. She asked, “Do you feel betrayed?”

He tried to think, scanned the scattered stars of his decaying brain for the answer. “Somewhat. But I’ve had it coming to me. I’ve been getting on her nerves deliberately.”

“Like me and Rodney.”

He didn’t answer, not comprehending and marveling instead how, when the woman crossed and recrossed her legs, it could have been Norma—a gentler, younger Norma.

She clarified, “I forced the divorce.”

The child who had whimpered now cried aloud; it was little Donald, pronouncing hollowly, “Owl!”

Beatrice, struggling for control against her body’s slowness, rose and went to the child, kneeled and woke him. “No owl,” she said. “Just Mommy.” With that ancient strange strength of mothers she pulled him from the sleeping bag and carried him back in her arms to her chair. “No owl,” she repeated, rocking gently, “just Mommy and Uncle Harry and the bell buoy.”

“You smell funny,” the child told her.

“Like what funny?”

“Like sort of candy.”

“Donald,” Bech said, “we’d never eat any candy without telling you. We’d never be so mean.”

There was no answer; he was asleep again.

“I admire you,” Beatrice said at last, the lulling rocking motion still in her voice, “for being yourself.”

“I’ve tried being other people,” Bech said, fending, “but nobody was convinced.”

“I love your book,” she went on. “I didn’t know how to tell you, but I always rather sneered at you, I thought of you as part of Norma’s phony crowd, but your writing, it’s terribly tender. There’s something in you that you keep safe from all of us.”

As always when his writing was discussed to his face, a precarious trembling entered Bech’s chest: a case of crystal when heavy footsteps pass. He had the usual wild itch to run, to
disclaim, to shut his eyes in ecstasy. More, more. He protested, “Why didn’t anybody at least knock on the door when I was dying in the bathroom? I haven’t whoopsed like that since the army.”

“I wanted to, but I couldn’t move. Norma said it was just your way of always being the center of attention.”

“That bitch. Did she really run off with that woolly little prep-school snot?”

Beatrice said, with an emphatic intonation dimly, thrillingly familiar, “You
are
jealous. You
do
love her.”

Bech said, “I just don’t like creative-writing students pushing me out of my bed. I make a good Tiresias but I’m a poor Fisher King.”

There was no answer; he sensed she was crying. Desperately changing the subject, he waved toward a distant light, whirling, swollen by the mist. “That whole headland,” he said, “is owned by an ex-member of the Communist Party, and he spends all his time putting up No Trespassing signs.”

“You’re nice,” Beatrice sobbed, the child at rest in her arms.

A motor approached down the muffling sandy road. Headlights raked the porch rail, and doubled footsteps crashed through the cottage. Norma and Wendell emerged onto the porch, Wendell carrying a messy thickness of typewriter paper. “Well,” Bech said, “that didn’t take long. We thought you’d be gone for the night. Or is it dawn?”

“Oh, Henry,” Norma said, “you think everything is sex. We went back to Wendell’s place to flush his LSD down the toilet, he felt so guilty when you got sick.”

“Never again for me, Mr. Bech. I’m out of that subconscious bag. Hey, I brought along a section of my thing, it’s not exactly a novel, you don’t have to read it now if you don’t want to.”

“I couldn’t,” Bech said. “Not if it makes distinctions.”

Norma felt the changed atmosphere and accused her sister, “Have you been boring Henry with what an awful person I am? How could the two of you i
ma
gine I’d misbe
have
with this
boy
under your noses? Surely I’m subtler than
that
.”

Bech said, “We thought you might be high on pot.”

Norma triumphantly complained, “I never got
any
thing. And I’m positive the rest of you faked it.” But, when Wendell had been sent home and the children had been tucked into their bunks, she fell asleep with such a tranced soundness that Bech, insomniac, sneaked from her side and safely slept with Beatrice. He found her lying awake waiting for him. By fall the word went out on the literary circuit that Bech had shifted mistresses again.

BECH PANICS

T
HIS MOMENT
in Bech’s pilgrimage must be approached reverently, hesitantly, as befits a mystery. We have these few slides: Bech posing before a roomful of well-groomed girls spread seraglio-style on the floor, Bech lying awake in the frilly guest room of a dormitory, Bech conversing beside a granite chapel with a woman in a purple catsuit, Bech throwing himself like a seed upon the leafy sweet earth of Virginia, within a grove of oaks on the edge of the campus, and mutely begging Someone, Something, for mercy. Otherwise, there is semi-darkness, and the oppressive roar of the fan that cools the projector, and the fumbling, snapping noises as the projectionist irritably hunts for slides that are not there. What made Bech panic? That particular March, amid the ripening aromas of rural Virginia, in that lake of worshipful girls?

All winter he had felt uneasy, idle, irritable, displaced. He had broken with Norma and was seeing Bea. The train ride up to Ossining was dreary, and the children seemed, to this bachelor, surprisingly omnipresent; the twin girls sat up
watching television until “Uncle Harry” himself was nodding, and then in the heart of the night little Donald would sleepwalk, sobbing, into the bed where Bech lay with his pale, gentle, plump beloved. The first time the child, in blind search of his mother, had touched Bech’s hairy body, he had screamed, and in turn Bech had screamed. Though Donald, who had few preconceptions, soon grew adept at sorting out the muddle of flesh he sometimes found in his mother’s bed, Bech on his side never quite adjusted to the smooth transition between Bea’s lovemaking and her mothering. Her tone of voice, the curve of her gestures, seemed the same. He, Bech, forty-four and internationally famous, and this towheaded male toddler depended parallel from the same broad body, the same silken breasts and belly, the same drowsy croons and intuitive caresses. Of course, abstractly, he knew it to be so—Freud tells us, all love is one, indivisible, like electricity—but concretely this celibate man of letters, who had been an only son and who saw his sister’s family in Cincinnati less than once a year, felt offended at his immersion in the ooze of familial promiscuity. It robbed sex of grandeur if, with Bech’s spunk still dribbling from her vagina and her startled yips of pleasure still ringing in his dreams, Bea could rouse and turn and almost identically minister to a tot’s fit of night-fright. It made her faintly comical and unappetizing, like the giant milk dispenser in a luncheonette. Sometimes, when she had not bothered to put on her nightie, or had been unable to find where their amorous violence had tossed it, she nestled the boy to sleep against her naked breasts and Bech would find himself curled against her cool backside, puzzled by priorities and discomfited by the untoward development of jealousy’s adamant erection.

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
any
thing physical. We thought
noth
ing 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.”