Bech (16 page)

Tuttle scribbled another page and looked up hopefully. “Maoism does seem to be the coming mood,” he said.

“The mood of t’mao,” Bech said, rising. “Believe it or not, my lad, I must take a shower and go to a party. Power corrupts.”

“When could we resume? I think we’ve made a fascinating beginning.”

“Be
gin
ning? You want
more
? For just a little puff in the
Observer
?”

When Tuttle stood, though he was skinny, with a round head like a newel knob, he was taller than Bech. He got tough. “I want it to be much more than that, Mr. Bech. Much more than a little puff. They’ve promised me as much space as we need. You have a chance here, if you
use
me hard enough, to make a d-definitive t-t-testament.”

If the boy hadn’t stammered, Bech might have escaped. But the stammer, those little spurts of helpless silence, hooked him. Stalling, he asked, “You never drink?”

“Not really.”

“Do you smoke?”

“No.”

“Matter of principle?”

“I just never acquired the taste.”

“Do you eat between meals?”

“I guess once in a while.”

“Call me sometime,” Bech conceded, and hated himself. Strange, how dirty the attempt to speak seriously made him feel. Comparable to his sensation when he saw someone press
an open book flat and complacently, irreparably crack the spine.

Bech’s tuxedo over the years had developed a waxen sheen and grown small; throughout Goldy’s party, his waist was being cruelly pinched. The taxicab, so capacious that Bech felt like ballast, turned down a succession of smaller and smaller streets and stopped on a dead-end loop, where, with the mystic menace of a Christmas tree, a portico blazed. The doorknocker was a goldsmith’s hammer inscribed with a florid double “J.” A servant in blue livery admitted Bech. Goldy bustled forward in a red velvet jacket and flopping ruffles. Another servant poured Bech a warm Scotch. Goldy, his eyes shuttling like a hockey player’s, steered Bech past a towering pier glass into a room where beautiful women in cream and saffron and magenta drifted and billowed in soft slow motion. Men in black dinner clothes stood like channel markers in this sea. “Here’s a lovely person you must meet,” Goldy told Bech. To her he said, “Henry Bech. He’s very shy. Don’t frighten him away, darling.”

She was an apparition—wide powdery shoulders, long untroubled chin ever so faintly cleft, lips ghostly in their cushioned perfection, gray eyes whose light flooded their cages of false lash and painted shadow. Bech asked her, “What do you do?”

She quivered; the corners of her lips trembled wryly, and he realized that the question had been consummately stupid, that merely to rise each morning and fill her skin to the brim with such loveliness was enough for any woman to do.

But she said, “Well, I have a husband, and five children, and I’ve just published a book.”

“A novel?” Bech could see it now: robin’s-egg-blue jacket, brisk adultery on country weekends, comic relief provided by precocious children.

“No, not really. It’s the history of labor movements in England before 1860.”

“Were there many?”

“Some. It was very uphill for them.”

“How lovely of you,” Bech said, “to care; that is, when you look so”—he rejected “posh”—“unlaborious.”

Again, her face underwent, not a change of expression, which was unvaryingly sweet and attentive, but a seismic tremor, as if her composure restrained volcanic heat. She asked, “What are your novels about?”

“Oh, ordinary people.”

“Then how lovely of
you;
when you’re so extraordinary.”

A man bored with being a channel marker came and touched her elbow, and she turned away, leaving Bech her emanations, as an astronomer is flooded by radio waves from a blank part of the sky. He tried to take a fix on her flattery by looking, as he went for another drink, into a mirror. His nose with age had grown larger and its flanges had turned distinctly red; his adoption of the hair style of the young had educed woolly bursts of gray above his ears and a tallowish mass of white curling outwards at the back of his collar: he looked like a mob-controlled congressman from Queens hoping to be taken for a Southern senator. His face was pasty with fatigue, though his eyes seemed frantically alive. He observed in the mirror, observing him, a slim young African woman in see-through pajamas. He turned and asked her, “What
can
we do about Biafra?”

“
Je le regrette, Monsieur
,” she said, “
mais maintenant je ne pense jamais. Je vis, simplement
.”

“
Parce que
,” Bech offered, “
le monde est trop effrayant?
”

She shrugged. “
Peut-être
.” When she shrugged, her silhouetted breasts shivered with their weight; it took Bech back to his avid youthful perusals of the
National Geographic
. He said, “
Je pense, comme vous, que le monde est difficile à comprendre, mais certainement, en tout cas, vous êtes très sage, très belle
.” But his French was not good enough to hold her, and she turned, and was wearing bikini underpants, with tiger stripes, beneath the saffron gauze of her pantaloons. Blue servants rang chimes for dinner. He gulped his drink, and avoided the sideways eye of the congressman from Queens.

On his right was seated a middle-aged Lady of evident importance, though her beauty could never have been much more than a concentrate of sharpness and sparkle. “You American Jews,” she said, “are so romantic. You think every little dolly bird is Delilah. I hate the ‘pity me’ in all your books. Women don’t want to be complained at. They want to be screwed.”

“I’ll have to try it,” Bech said.

“Do. Do.” She pivoted toward a long-toothed gallant waiting grinning on her right; he exclaimed “Darling!” and their heads fell together like bagged oranges. On Bech’s left sat a magenta shape his first glance had told him to ignore. It glittered and was young. Bech didn’t trust anyone under thirty; the young now moved with the sacred and dangerous assurance of the old when he had been young. She was toying with her soup like a child. Her hand was small as a child’s, with close-cut fingernails and endearing shadows around the knuckles. He felt he had seen the hand before. In a novel.
Lolita
?
Magic Mountain
? Simple etiquette directed that he ask her how she was.

“Rotten, thanks.”

“Think of me,” Bech said. “By the time I woke up in, it’s four o’clock in the morning.”

“I hate sleep. I don’t sleep for days sometimes and feel wonderful. I think people sleep too much, that’s why their arteries harden.” In fact, he was to discover that she slept as the young do, in long easy swings that gather the extra hours into their arc and override all noise—though she had every woman’s tendency to stir at dawn. She went on, as if politely, “Do you have hard arteries?”

“Not to my knowledge. Just impotence and gout.”

“That sounds come-ony.”

“Forgive me. I was just told women don’t like being complained to.”

“I heard the old tart say that. Don’t believe her. They love it. Why are you impotent?”

“Old age?” A voice inside him said,
Old age? he tentatively said
.

“Come off it.” He liked her voice, one of those British voices produced halfway down the throat, rather than obliquely off the sinuses, with alarming octave jumps. She was wearing gold granny glasses on her little heart-shaped face. He didn’t know if her cheeks were flushed or rouged. He was pleased to observe that, though she was petite, her breasts pushed up plumply from her dress, which was ornamented with small mirrors. Her lips, chalky and cushioned, with intelligent tremulous corners, seemed taken from the first woman he had met, as if one had been a preliminary study for the other. He noticed she had a little mustache, faint as two erased pencil lines. She told him, “You write.”

“I used to.”

“What happened?”

A gap in the dialogue. Fill in later. “I don’t seem to know.”

“I used to be a wife. My husband was an American. Still is, come to think of it.”

“Where did you live?” The girl and Bech simultaneously glanced down and began to hurry to finish the food on their plates.

“New York.”

“Like it?”

“Loved it.”

“Didn’t it seem dirty to you?”

“Gloriously.” She chewed. He pictured sharp small even teeth lacerating and compressing bloody beef. He set down his fork. She swallowed and asked, “Love London?”

“Don’t know it.”

“You don’t?”

“Been here only long enough to look at daffodils.”

“I’ll show it to you.”

“How can you? How can I find you again?” Victorian novel? Rewrite.

“You’re in London alone?”

A crusty piece of Yorkshire pudding looked too good to leave. Bech picked up his fork again, agreeing, “Mm. I’m alone everywhere.”

“Would you like to come home with me?”

The lady on his right turned and said, “I must say, you’re a stinker to let this old fag monopolize me.”

“Don’t complain. Men hate it.”

She responded, “Your hair is smashing. Are the curls induced?”

“Tell me, love, who’s this, what do you say, bird on my left?”

“She’s Little Miss Poison. Her father bought himself a peerage from Macmillan.”

The girl at Bech’s back tickled the hairs of his neck with her breath and said, “I withdraw my invitation.”

“Let’s all,” Bech said loudly, “have some more wine,” pouring. The man with long teeth put his hand over the top of his glass. Bech expected a magician’s trick but was disappointed.

And at the door, as Bech tried to sneak past the voracious pier glass with the girl, Goldy seemed disappointed. “But did you meet
ev
erybody? These are the nicest people in London.”

Bech hugged his publisher. Waxy old tux, meet velvet and ruffles. Learn how the other half lives. “Goldy,” he said, “the party was nice, nicey, niciest. It couldn’t have been nicier. Like, wow, out of sight.” He saw drunken noise as the key to his exit. Otherwise this velvet gouger would milk him for another hour of lionization. Grr.

Goldy displayed the racial gracefulness in defeat. His limpid eyes, as busy as if he were playing blitz chess, flicked past Bech’s shoulder to the girl. “Merissa dear,
do
take decent care of our celebrity. My fortune rides on his genius.” Thus Bech learned her first name.

The taxi, with two in it, felt less like a hollow hull and more like a small drawing room, where voices needn’t be raised. They did not, perhaps oddly, touch.
Perhaps oddly?
He had lost all ability to phrase. He was in a decadent Old World metropolis in a cab with a creature whose dress held dozens of small mirrors. Her legs were white like knives, crossed and recrossed. He proofread the triangular bit of punctuation where her thighs ended. The cab moved through empty streets, past wrought-iron gates inked onto the sky and granite museums frowning beneath the weight of their entablatures; it moved across the bright loud gulch of Hyde Park Corner and Park Lane, into darker quieter streets. It passed a shuttered building that Merissa identified as the Chinese
Communist Embassy. They entered a region where the shaggy heads of trees seemed to be dreaming of fantastically long colonnades and of high white wedding-cake façades receding to infinity. The cab stopped. Merissa paid. She let him in by a door whose knob, knocker, and mail slot were silken with polishings. Marble stairs. Another door. Another key. The odors of floor wax, of stale cigarette smoke, of narcissi in a pebbled bowl. Brandy with its scorched, expensive smell was placed beneath his nose. Obediently he drank. He was led into a bedroom. Perfume and powder, leather and an oil-clothy scent that took him back into English children’s books that his mother, bent on his “improvement,” used to buy at the Fifth Avenue Scribner’s. A window opened. Chill April smells.
Winter kept us warm
. She brushed back curtains. A slice of slate night yellowish above the trees. The lights of an airplane winking in descent. A rustling all around him. The candy taste of lipstick. Clean air, warm skin.
Feeding a little life with dried tubers
. Her bare back a lunar surface beneath his hands. The forgotten impression of intrusion, of subtle monstrous assault, that the particularities of a new woman’s body make upon us.
Summer surprised us
. Must find out her last name. There are rings of release beyond rings, Bech discovered in the bliss—the pang of relief around his waist—of taking off his tuxedo. Must see a tailor.

“When you were writing
The Chosen
,” Tuttle asked, “did you deliberately set out to create a more flowery style?” This time he had brought a tape recorder. They were in Bech’s hotel rooms, an extensive corner suite with a fake fireplace and a bed that hadn’t been slept in. The fireplace was not entirely fake; it held a kind of crinkly plastic sculpture of a
coal fire that glowed when plugged in and even gave off an imitation of heat.

“I never think about style, about creating one,” Bech dictated into the baby microphone of the tape recorder. “My style is always as simple as the subject matter permits. As you grow older, though, you find that few things are simple.”

“For example?”

“For example, changing a tire. I’m sorry, your question seems inane to me. This interview seems inane.”

“Let me try another approach,” Tuttle said, as maddeningly patient as a child psychiatrist. “In
Brother Pig
, were you conscious of inserting the political resonances?”

Bech blinked. “I’m sorry, when you say ‘resonances’ all I see is dried grapes.
Brother Pig
was about what its words said it was about. It was not a mask for something else. I do not write in code. I depend upon my reader for a knowledge of the English language and some acquired vocabulary of human experience. My books, I hope, would be unintelligible to baboons or squid. My books are human transactions—flirtations, quarrels.”

“You’re tired,” Tuttle told him.

He was right. Last night, Merissa had taken him to a restaurant along Fulham Road and then to Revolution, where big posters of Ho and Mao and Engels and Lenin watched from the walls as young people dressed in sequins and bell-bottoms jogged up and down within a dense, throbbing, coruscating fudge of noise. Bech knew something was happening here, a spiritual upthrusting like Christianity among the slaves of Rome or cabalism among the peasant Jews of stagnant Slavic Europe, but his old-fashioned particularizing vision kept dissolving the mob into its components: working girls resigned to a groggy tomorrow at their typewriters; neutered
young men in fashion or photography to whom coming here was work; the truly idle, the rich and the black, escaping from the empty-eye-socket stare of spooked hours; the would-be young like himself, ancient lecherous curly-haired Yanks whose willy-nilly charm and backwards success had prevented their learning ever to come in out of the rain; enigmatic tarty birds like Merissa, whose flat, he had discovered, held a room full of electric toys and teddy bears, with a bed where a child slept, her child, she confessed, a son, eight years old, born in America, when Merissa was nineteen, a child sent off to boarding school and even on vacations, Bech suspected, mostly taken to the park and the zoo by Isabella, Merissa’s Spanish maid, an old round woman who peeked at Bech through doorways and then quickly, quietly shut the door. It was confusing. Revolution was the cave of a new religion but everyone had come, Bech saw, for reasons disappointingly reasonable and opportunistic. To make out. To be seen. To secure advancement. To be improved. That girl in the chain-link tunic and nothing else was working off her Yorkshire accent. That man flicking his arm like a dervish under the blue battering of the strobe lights was swinging a real-estate deal in his head. Bech doubted that the men on the wall approved what they saw. They were simple failed librarians like himself, schooled in the pre-Freudian verities. Hunger and pain are bad. Work is good. Men were made for the daylight. Orgasms are private affairs.
Down in Loo-siana/Where the alligators swim so mean …
Opposite him Merissa, who had a way of suddenly looking tall, though her smallness was what enchanted him, twinkled through the holes of her dress and moved her limbs and turned to him a shuddering profile, eyes shut as if better to feel the beat between her legs, that fluttering elusive beat:
What we are witnessing
, Bech announced inside his own head,
in his role of college circuit-rider,
is the triumph of the clitoral, after three thousand years of phallic hegemony
. She called over to him, through the flashing din, “It gets to be rather same-y, doesn’t it?” And he felt then his heart make the motion he had been waiting for, of love for her; like the jaws of a clam when the muscle is sliced, his heart opened. He tasted it, the sugary nip of impossibility. For he was best at loving what he could never have.