Bech at Bay (20 page)

However, as he aged into the ranks of the elderly, adverse phrases from the far past surfaced in his memory, word for word—“says utterly nothing with surprising aplomb,” “too toothless or shrewd to tackle life’s raw meat,” “never doffs his velour exercise togs to break a sweat,” “the sentimental coarseness of a pornographic valentine,” “prose arabesques of phenomenal irrelevancy,” “refusal or failure to ironize his reactionary positions,” “starry-eyed sexism,” “minor, minorer, minormost”—and clamorously rattled around in his head, rendering him, some days, while his brain tried to be busy with something else, stupid with rage. It was as if these insults, these hurled mud balls, these stains on the robe of his vocation, were, now that he was nearing the end, bleeding wounds. That a negative review might be a fallible verdict, delivered in haste, against a deadline, for a few dollars, by a writer with problems and limitations of his own was a reasonable and weaseling supposition he could no longer, in the dignity of his years, entertain.
Any
adverse review, even a single mild phrase of qualification or reservation
within a favorable, indeed an adoring notice, stood revealed as the piece of pure enmity it was—an assault, a virtual murder, a purely malicious attempt to unman and destroy him. What was precious and potentially enduring about Bech was not his body, that fraternal pig with its little oink of an ego, but his oeuvre. Any slighting of his oeuvre attacked the self he chiefly valued. After fifty years of trying to rise above criticism, he liberated himself to take it personally. A furious lava—an acidic indignation begging for the Maalox of creamy, murderous satisfaction—had secretly become Bech’s essence, his angelic ichor.

The female reviewer, Deborah Frueh, who had in 1957 maligned
Brother Pig
as a flight of Jewish self-hatred lived far from New York, in the haven of Seattle, amid New Age mantras and medicinal powders, between Boeing and Mount Rainier. He could not get her ancient review out of his aging mind—the serene inarguable complacency of it, the certainty that she grasped the ineffable reality of being “covenanted” and he, poor pseudo-Jew, did not. He began to conceive of a way to reach her with the long arm of vengeance. She was still alive, he felt in his bones. She had been young when she dealt the young Bech her savage blow, but had emerged in 1979 to write, for the
Washington Post
, a stinging, almost pathologically sour review of
Think Big
beginning, “Somehow, I have never been persuaded to hop onto the Bech bandwagon. Even (or maybe especially) at its flashiest, his prose seems flimsy, the nowhere song of a nowhere man, devoid of any serious ethnic identification and stimulated by only the most trivial, consumeristic aspects of the United States.…” She, the spot bio accompanying this onslaught revealed, taught English poetry and the post-colonial novel at the University of Washington. From this remove her dismissive, pompous criticism
ever more rarely reached the book-review columns of the Northeast Corridor. Perhaps academia had seduced her into Derridean convolution, culminating in self-erasure. But she could not hide from him, now that he had been aroused and become, on the verge of dotage, a man of action.

Though she was grit too fine to be found in the coarse sieve of
Who’s Who
, he discovered her address in the
Poets & Writers’
directory, which listed a few critical articles and her fewer books, all children’s books with heart-tugging titles like
Jennifer’s Lonely Birthday
and
The Day Dad Didn’t Come Home
and
A Teddy Bear’s Bequest.
These books, Bech saw, were her Achilles’ heel.

The renovated old factory where he lived assigned each of its tenants a storage room in the basement. But these partitioned, padlocked chambers by no means included all the basement space: exploration discovered far, dim-lit, brick-walled caverns that held rusted stitching machines and junked parts whose intricate shape defied speculation as to their mechanical purpose at the other, clanking end of the century. In a slightly less neglected recess, the building’s management—a realty corporation headquartered in New Jersey—kept some shelved cans of paint and, hung on pegboard, plumbing supplies and carpentry tools and other infrequently wielded implements of upkeep. The super had about a dozen SoHo buildings in his care and was seldom in the basement, though a split, scuffed Naugahyde armchair, a stack of musty
Hustlers
, and an antique, gray-encrusted standing ashtray, long ago lifted from a hotel lobby, testified to a potential presence capable of, in the era before downsizing, some low-down leisure. In one of his furtive forays into these lower levels of Manhattan’s lost
Industrial Age, Bech found around a grimy corner a narrow wooden closet fitted between waste pipes and an abandoned set of water meters. The locked door was a simple hinged frame holding, where glass might have been, chicken wire rusted to a friable thinness. Peering inside, he saw a cobwebbed cache of dried dark jars, nibbled cardboard boxes, and a time-hardened contraption of rubber tubing with a tin hand-pump, coiled and cracked and speckled with oxidation. His attention fastened on a thick jar of brown glass whose label, in the stiff and innocent typographic style of the 1940s, warned
POISON
and displayed along its border an array of dead vermin, roaches and rats and centipedes in dictionary-style engraving. Snapping the frail brown wire enough to admit his hand, Bech lifted the bottle out. The size of a coffee can, it sloshed, half-full. In the dusty light he read on the label that among the ingredients was hydrocyanic acid. Fearful that the palms of his hands might become contaminated, Bech carried the antique vermicide up to his loft wrapped in a
News
the super had tossed aside (headline:
KOCH BLASTS ALBANY
) and did not unscrew the rusty lid until he had donned Robin’s mint-green rubber kitchen gloves. He exerted his grip. His teeth ground together; his crowns gnashed on their stumps of dentine. The lid’s seal snapped a second before his carotid artery would have popped. Out of fifty intervening years of subterranean stillness arose the penetrating whiff, cited in many a mystery novel, of bitter almonds. The liquid, which was colorless, seemed to be vaporizing eagerly, its ghostly essence rushing upward from the gaping mouth of the jar.

He replaced the lid. He hid the jar in the drawer of his filing cabinet where he kept his old reviews. He did some
research. Hydrocyanic, or prussic, acid was miscible with water, and a minute amount—a few drops of even a mild solution—would slow the heart, inhibit breathing, dilate the pupils, promote violent convulsive movements, cause loss of consciousness, and asphyxiate the victim with a complete loss of muscular power. Cyanides act within seconds, halting tissue oxidation and suspending vital functions. The victim’s countenance turns a bluish color, not to be confused with Prussian blue, an inert precipitant of the poison.

Bech wrote Deborah Frueh a fan letter, in a slow and childish hand, in black ballpoint, on blue-lined paper. “Dear Debora Freuh,” he wrote, deliberately misspelling, “You are my very favrite writer. I have red your books over ‘n’ over. I would be greatful if you could find time to sign the two enclosed cards for me and my best frend Betsey and return them in the inclosed envelop. That would be really grate of you and many
many
thanx in advance.” He signed it, “Your real fan, Mary Jane Mason.”

He wrote it once and then rewrote it, holding the pen in what felt like a little girl’s fist. Then he set the letter aside and worked carefully on the envelope. He had bought a cheap box of one hundred at an office-supply store on lower Broadway and destroyed a number before he got the alchemy right. He put on the rubber gloves. They made his hands sweat. With a paper towel he delicately moistened the dried gum on the envelope flap—not too much, or it curled. Then, gingerly using a glass martini-stirring rod, he placed three or four drops of the colorless poison on the moist adhesive. Lest it be betrayingly bitter when licked, and Deborah Frueh rush to ingest an antidote, he sweetened
the doctored spots with some sugar water mixed in an orange-juice glass and applied with an eye-dropper. Several times he stopped himself from absent-mindedly licking the flap to test the taste. He recoiled, it was as if he had been walking the edge of a cliff and nearly slipped and fell off, down toward the Prussian-blue sea of asphyxia and oblivion. In the midst of life, death is a misstep away.

The afternoon waned; the roar of tunnel-bound traffic up on Houston reached its crescendo unnoticed; the windows of the cast-iron façade across Crosby Street entertained unseen the blazing amber of the lowering sun. Bech was wheezily panting in the intensity of his concentration. His nose was running; he kept wiping it with a trembling handkerchief. His littered desk—an old army-surplus behemoth, with green metal sides and a black plastic top—reminded him of art-class projects at P.S. 87, before his father heedlessly moved him to Brooklyn. He and his peers had built tiny metropolises out of cereal boxes, butterflies out of colored papers and white paste, scissored into being red valentines and black profiles of George Washington, even made paper Easter eggs and Christmas trees, under their young and starchy Irish and German instructresses, who without fear of protest swept their little Jewish-American pupils into the Christian calendar. Back then, the magazine covers on the newsstand rack, the carols on the radio, the decorations on the school windowpanes all bespoke one culture, stuck in the Depression and the tired legend of that goyish young Jew who had made his way from Bethlehem to Golgotha, a life-journey children still celebrated with paper, cardboard, and paste.

Bech thought hard about the return address on the envelope, which could become, once its fatal bait was taken, a
dangerous clue. The poison, before hitting home, might give Deborah Frueh time to seal the thing, which in the confusion after her death might be mailed. That would be perfect—the clue consigned to a continental mailbag and arrived with the junk mail at an indifferent American household. In the Westchester directory he found a Mason in New Rochelle and fistily inscribed the address beneath the name of his phantom Frueh fan. Folding the envelope, he imagined he heard a faint crackling—microscopic sugar and cyanide crystals? His conscience, dried up by this century of atrocity and atheism, trying to come to life? He slipped the folded envelope with the letter and four (why not be generous?) three-by-five index cards into the envelope painstakingly addressed in the immature, girlish handwriting. As he licked the stamp he thought of the Simpson trial and the insidious intricacy of DNA evidence. Semen, blood, saliva—all contain the entire person, coiled in ribbons of microscopic code. Everywhere we dabble or dribble or spit, we can be traced. Bech stuck the tongue-licked stamp thriftily on a blank envelope and moistened the one for Frueh on a corner of paper towel held under a running faucet, then squeezed.

The tall old wobbly windows across Crosby Street cast a sketchy orange web of reflected light into his loft. Before Robin could return from work and express curiosity about the mess on his desk, he cleaned it up. The paper towels and spoiled stationery went into the kitchen trash, and the lethal jar into the back of the cabinet drawer with the old reviews, which only he cared about—only he and a tiny band of Bech scholars, who were dying off and not being replaced by younger recruits. Even the caretaker of his archives at NYU had expressed a lack of interest in his yellowing
lowing clippings—which included such lovingly snipped tidbits as Bech sentences cited in the
Reader’s Digest
feature “Picturesque Speech and Patter”—claiming that old newsprint posed “a terrible conservancy problem.”

Bech took off the rubber gloves and hurried downstairs, his worn heart pounding, to throw Mary Jane Mason’s fan letter into the mailbox at Broadway and Prince. A lurid salmon-striped sunset hung in the direction of New Jersey. The streets were crammed with the living and the guiltless, heading home in the day’s horizontal rays, blinking from the subway’s flicker and a long day spent at computer terminals. The narrow streets and low commercial buildings imparted the busy intimacy of a stage set, half lit as the curtain goes up. Bech hesitated a second before relinquishing his letter to the blue, graffiti-sprayed box, there in front of Victoria’s Secret. A delicate middle-aged Japanese couple in bulbous sightseer’s sneakers glanced at him timidly, a piece of local color with his springy white hair, his aggressively large nose, his deskworker’s humped back. A snappy black woman, her beaded cornrows bristling and rattling, arrived at his back with an armful of metered nine-by-twelve envelopes, impatient to make her more massive, less lethal drop. Bech stifled his qualm. The governmental box hollowly sounded as its lid like a flat broad tongue closed upon the fathomless innards of sorting and delivery to which he consigned his missive. His life had been spent as a votary of the mails. This was but one more submission.

Morning after morning, the
Times
carried no word on the demise of Deborah Frueh. Perhaps, just as she wasn’t in
Who’s Who
, she was too small a fish to be caught in the
Times
obituary net. But no, they observed at respectful length the deaths of hundreds of people of whom Bech had never heard. Former aldermen, upstate prioresses, New Jersey judges, straight men on defunct TV comedies, founders of Manhattan dog-walking services—all got their space, their chiselled paragraphs, their farewell salute. Noticing the avidity with which he always turned to the back of the Metro section, Robin asked him, “What are you looking for?”

He couldn’t tell her. His necessary reticence was poisoning their relationship. We are each of us sealed containers of gaseous fantasies and hostilities, but a factual secret, with its liquid weight, leaks out, if only in the care with which one speaks, as if around a pebble held in the mouth. “Familiar names,” he said. “People I once knew.”

“Henry, it seems morbid. Here, I’m done with Arts and Sports.”

“I’ve read enough about arts and sports,” he told this bossy twat, “to last me to the grave.” Mortality was his meat now.