Bech at Bay (14 page)

“Haven’t you heard?” he asked Bech. “She’s left Aesop to help get out the bimonthly newsletter of a conservative Washington think tank. They offered her more money than she’d known existed and a crack at the editorship in two years, if she learns to sing their neocon tune. This with my mega-collection of criticism and opinion pieces still up in the air. I kidded her about becoming an apologist for capitalism but she got very solemn, the way she can, and said, ‘What else is there left to believe in?’ But you must have heard all this from her.”

“No. As
you
must have heard, we broke up when the Forty began to come apart. I know I shouldn’t have blamed her, but I did. I saw her as a temptress. It got worked around in my mind that Edna stood for everything noble and she’d been raped. That made Martina the rapist. And you, of course.”

“Me?
Me
? I was the least of it. It was the composers and artists, they can’t stand anybody’s shit but their own. I could have swung either way. The Forty was a fun place to go now and then, but, frankly, Edna always struck me as a bit out of her depth. How’s she doing, have you heard?”

“She dropped me a postcard. She says the sheep seem pretty sensible, after all those years with us.”

The ballot by mail in the summer past had totalled up five against, six not voting, and twenty for disbandment and dispersement of the realized assets. The Baines heirs—a flock of distant cousins resident in Indiana and Oklahoma—had filed motions contesting the interpretation of Lucinda’s will, demanding that all the proceeds not consumed by lawyers’ fees be distributed to living Baineses. It would be years, if ever, before the matter was legally settled. The fall meeting consisted of Bech announcing these developments and that a specially struck gold-alloy medal was being awarded to Edna for her decades of service. At dinner there were spontaneous toasts and even some singing; several members said it was the best dinner for ages and they certainly looked forward to next year’s. They didn’t understand that there would be no next year’s. Bech had served for only two of the three years of a president’s usual term. He was the end of a list of which Clarence Edmund Stedman, hand-picked by the dying Lucinda, was the first. The mansion had already found a buyer, for something in eight figures. The lawyers on all sides had agreed to let the sale go through, rather than have the upkeep whittle at the endowment.

Izzy asked him, “How do you like
Summa Saeculorum
for a title?”

“For what?”

“For my book, you
farmishter.
See, it’s my summing up, and
saeculum
means an age, our age, as well as world, worldly, you know, as opposed to
theologica.”

“You and Aquinas, together again. You don’t think it’s a little, how can I say, grandiose?”

“Thus speaketh the old haikumeister. But listen, seriously”—here was that grip on the tender part of the arm
again—“you did a great job with the Forty. A number of us saw the demise coming, and you gave it dignity; I figured you would. Edna agreed.”

“She saw it coming too?”

“Maybe not consciously, but in her gut. You know women. Hey, who’s this little mother’s joy?”

A girl in a very short silver dress, with platinum hair a nappy half-inch long covering her beautifully ovoid skull, had appeared at Bech’s side. “Izzy,” he said, “I’d like you meet Crystal Medford, Jim Flaggerty’s assistant over at Vellum and the editor and organizer of my Festchrift volume. It offended my modesty, but nothing I said could dissuade her from her salaried duty.”

“Crystal,” Izzy repeated. “Of course.
Adored
your letter; you got me to do something I swore I never would—heap more praise on this bastard’s swelled head. So your mother called you Crystal. I bet it came to her in a vision.”

“My parents told me it was my dad’s idea,” said the assistant editor politely, her little hand lost and evidently forgotten within the old maze-maker’s heavy grip. “He’s the one more into extra dimensions.”

“Yes, those extra ones. Still with us, is he, your dad? On our earthly plane?”

“Oh yeah, he’s doing real well. He makes these special birdhouses in Vermont. They’re like apartment buildings, for the purple martins, to put out in the marshes and on golf courses.”

“Enchanting,” Izzy said, and Bech could feel his old rival’s creative gears turn a worn cog or two—apartment building, birds, a city of such cages, a mock epic satirizing modern society, feather by feather. A muscle in Bech’s jaw ached from suppressing an anticipatory yawn.

“Crystal has both feet on the ground,” he said protectively.

“Not, I hope, every single hour of the day,” Izzy said with roguish gallantry, releasing her hand from his enveloping grip as if slowly disclosing a humid secret.

Crystal gazed at her creased palm and told Bech nervously, “Mr. Flaggerty says there are some German bookclub people here he’d like you to meet.” As they threaded their way toward these sacred guests, Bech tried to comfort her; her hand was bright pink from the prolonged pressure. “That’s America’s most portentous writer,” he said. “Didn’t they assign you some Thornbush in college?”

“Something about Nixon,” she said. “Or was that Philip Roth? I didn’t get very far in it. Is Nixon the President who kept hitting people with golf balls?”

“Try Izzy when you’re older. He’s what is called professionally
un monstre sacré. Guten Abend, meine Herren,”
he smoothly continued, they having arrived at the smiling Germans, who spoke English so beautifully that it seemed to Bech that a polished metal language-machine hung in front of their faces.

With the help of two old-fashioneds and a frequently refilled wineglass, he felt the party as an enormous success, a spontaneous outpouring of love for his person and of respect for his slim but agile oeuvre. Even those who were not here were here: his mother, dead a generation ago but her faith in him still a live goad, and Norma Latchett, his mistress and fruitful irritant for many years, and Bea Latchett, his wife and mollescent muse for, alas, too brief a period, and all the women he had burningly coveted and (a much smaller number) fleetingly possessed, and, having joined the piano and the bass, Woody Allen himself, hitting one high note after another on the old licorice stick, as
we used to call it. In his imagination Bech presided over this gathering—
Dies ist mein Endfest
, he had told the Germans, to their puzzled, civil guffaws—with superhuman energy and charm, gliding from one conversational knot to another, intruding the deft words which let each guest know that his or her presence was especially meaningful. Each brought to him, as the worms brought Badroulbadour up from her tomb in the Wallace Stevens poem, a piece of himself, from his scampish boyhood on the Upper West Side to his heady days as a negotiable item of American cultural exchange abroad. Skip Reynolds was there, now retired from the State Department and the president of a bankrupt Long Island college, and Angus Desmouches, the ubiquitous fashion photographer, whose wide head of wiry black hair had turned as white as coal in a negative, and Lucy Ebright, who had put Bech into one of her innumerable novels but unrecognizably to himself, and Tad Greenbaum, the six-foot-four, highly personable hero of
Think Big
, Bech’s lone best-seller. Even Pamela Thornbush showed up, as she had promised but Bech had not dared hope, on the arm of her boyish brother, Zeke Towers, Jr.

Bech hugged Pamela but her breasts did not squeak. Her cheek under his kiss was like an upstate apple, cool and smooth from the refrigerator truck. “Has Izzy been misbehaving?” she murmured breathlessly, flirtatiously into his ear.

“Sugar, when isn’t he?” He loved that in himself, how smoothly corrupt he could sound.

“Who’s the girl in the silver dress he’s got cornered?”

“Her name is Crystal, but relax. He’s cruising not for nooky but for some gullible slave to edit the biggest book since the dictionary.
Summa Summorum.
Why don’t you
tell him to think small for a change? It would be good for his cardiovascular system.”

“Henry, please—you’re manicky. My brother has something serious he wants to say to you.”

Young Zeke looked Bech straight in the eyes, lovingly, and said, “Mr. Bech, I really want to thank you for all you did to help make the Baines property available.”

“The Baines property? Oh. I didn’t do a thing, did I?”

“Don’t you go denying it, sir. My brother-in-law says you’re the only one who could have swung it, with the requisite sensitivity and tact. We’ve been needing that piece for five years, to complete our parcel. Now we have the whole half-block and if the city goes along we’ll be putting up a building ten feet taller than Citicorp.”

“Ten feet?” Bech felt as if his two feet had been dragged down from twinkling like Tinker Bell’s through his party and abruptly planted on the soggy soil where real things rest.

“That’s not counting the flagpole and airplane-warning lights. The Towers Building—the dream of my dad’s lifetime. We’ll have our own tunnel into both the 53rd Street station on the Queens line and the 51st Street on the Lex. Some day, when they renovate, we might even get the name of a station. As you pull in you’ll see
TOWERS
spelled out in tiles on the wall.”

Pamela broke in, adding, “We’re all so thrilled and grateful, Henry.” Her blue eyes were bright as amethysts; the freckles exposed on her bosom danced; her round cheeks flamed. Money does that, he thought—promotes health and strong family feeling.

“We’re going to express our appreciation some way, you can count on that,” Zeke assured the septuagenarian author. Bech winced under the glare of that frat-boy
sincerity, that dazzling Wasp blankness which comes of never having been persecuted and scorned.

“I don’t deserve a thing, honest Injun,” Bech protested, at the same time wondering, with a tingle that numbed him from head to toe, what this expression of plutocratic appreciation might consist of. A Mercedes? A cottage in the Hamptons?
After a lifetime / of dwelling among fine shades / a payoff at last.

Now, and only now, can it be told. Until recently, possible legal ramifications have laid a seal of silence on the three weeks that Bech once spent in Los Angeles, being sued for libel. The year was 1972. Vietnam was winding down, and the seeds of Watergate were nestled warm within Nixon’s paranoia. Bech was a mere forty-nine, wallowing in the long trough between the publication, in 1963, of his rather disappointingly received chef d’oeuvre,
The Chosen
, and, sixteen years later, the triumphantly sleazy best-seller
Think Big.
He lived in dowdy bachelor solitude in his apartment at West 99th Street and Riverside, and, though continuing royalties from his 1955 semi-Beat near-classic
Travel Light
dribbled in, along with other odd sums, his need for money was acute enough to drive him out into the sunlit agora of a wider America: he went around impersonating himself at colleges and occasionally accepted a magazine assignment, if it seemed eccentric enough to be turned, by a little extra willful spin, into art. Art—as understood in the era of his boyhood, which
extended through the Depression and World War II, in which he boyishly fought—was his god, his guiding star.

When a new New York biweekly called
Flying Fur
, in hopeful echo of
Rolling Stone
, asked him to write an “impressionistic sort of piece” on the new, post-studio Hollywood, he consented, imagining that he would be visiting the site of the black-and-white melodramas that had entranced his adolescence. Alas, he found instead a world in full and awful color, like reels of fermenting, bleached Kodachrome stock—cans and cans of worms, of agents and manipulators voraciously trying, in the absence of the autocratic old studios, to assemble blockbuster-potential “packages” within the chaotic primal soup of underemployed actors, directors, stuntmen, and all such other loose hands once kept busy within the film industry when its assembly lines moved and television hadn’t yet kidnapped its mass audience. Bech had described what he saw and felt, and got sued for his trouble. Admirer of Hollywood melodrama though he had been, he couldn’t believe it. “You mean I actually have to go out there again, to sit in a courtroom and be sued for just writing the truth?”

“What is truth?” his New York lawyer asked over the phone, each syllable ticking into the meter running at, in those days, $110 an hour.

Bech had been paid $1,250 for the article, plus the expenses of his week on the West Coast doing research. In the two years since it had appeared,
Flying Fur
had gone belly-up. Its editors and layout artists had dispersed to other frontiers, and its old offices on East 17th Street—canary-yellow walls hung with Pop Art prints—were given over to a team of young tooth-implant specialists. This lawsuit, however, survived, an unkillable zombie stalking its prey through the mists.

“You’ll love our West Coast team,” the lawyer said, mollifyingly. “Tom Rantoul may not look it, Henry, but he is a legal wizard. I don’t know when he last lost a case; my memory doesn’t go back that far.”

Rantoul proved to be a huge and hearty former athlete of Southern background, with an inward slope to the back of his head and meaty though manicured hands. At a lawyer-client luncheon on Bech’s fourth day in Los Angeles, Rantoul announced, “Well, lady and gents, it looks like we done finally got ourselves a judge.” He gestured with one of those manicured hands toward the browned filet of sole on the defendant’s plate. “He’s about the color of that there fish.”

Bech hesitated with his fork, then stabbed and parted the white meat. Racial issues did not seem, offhand, to be at stake. He was being sued because he called the plaintiff, a venerable Hollywood agent named Morris Ohrbach, an “arch-gouger” who for “greedy reasons of his own rake-off” had “widened the prevailing tragic rift between the literary and cinematic arts.” He knew the phrases by heart, since they had been the subject of fitful and increasingly dire communications ever since his article had appeared, under the title (supplied by a vanished sub-editor) “The Only Winners Left in Tinseltown.” Ohrbach was claiming that he had suffered five million dollars in personal distress and humiliation, and another five million in loss of professional credibility. In the course of Bech’s week, two years ago, of bilious-making lunches and pay-phone calls and hot waits in the nightmarishly constant California sun, Ohrbach’s name had repeatedly surfaced, with a spume of that mingled outrage and admiration with which the
carnivores of the film world hail an especially spectacular predator. It was Ohrbach who had invented the 15-percent agent’s fee, with a non-returnable down payment by the client; it was Ohrbach who had devised a discretionary clause whereby, above the 15 percent, up to half of the client’s earnings was to be invested at the agent’s discretion, with a 3-percent investment commission withdrawn semiannually from the capital. It was related to Bech how, having bled the great pop singer Lanna Jerome and her gullible husband at the time (a former pet hairdresser, famous for his poodle cuts) of millions of her earnings, Ohrbach demanded a half-million more to prop up the teetering edifice of porkbelly options and dry oil wells he had constructed, and promptly sued her when she and her new husband (a former disco bouncer) at last moved to stop the bleeding. Ohrbach was lightning-quick to sue. He would even, as a scorpion when aroused will supposedly sting itself, sue his own lawyers, if he felt a suit had been inadequately prosecuted.