Bech at Bay (27 page)

“I can’t do it,” he told Robin. “I can’t say anything important enough. The essence of what I do is that it isn’t important, or at least doesn’t
come on
as important. Importance is not important, that’s what I’ve been trying to say all my life.”

“Well,” she said, “try saying that.”

“But that’s
really
unimportant,” he protested. “And egotistical. I don’t want to be egotistical. I don’t want to seem to be trying to get
on top of
the Prize, if you know what I mean.”

“I think you’re outsmarting yourself,” Robin offered, primarily concerned with persuading Golda of the nutritional worth of the diced carrots the child kept picking up from her high-chair tray with curly slimy tiny fingers and dropping carefully on the floor. “All the Swedes want is a little relaxed gratitude—”

“You don’t understand. You give a little bow when the King hands it all to you—the medal, the certificate, the week’s pass on the Stockholm transit system. You say thanks at the banquet after the ceremony. The lecture comes earlier in the week. It’s the lecture that’s killing me.
My chance at last to make a statement, after seventy-six years of nobody listening. Well, I guess my mother listened, for the first five years or so.”

“—a little gratitude and a half-hour’s intellectual entertainment. Think of
them
,” Robin said. “They’ve been sweating over these prizes all year, neglecting their own work and their families. Swedes have feelings, too—look at those Ingmar Bergman movies.”

“The
women
in those movies have feelings; the men don’t. They’re
frozen.
Leontyne”—Leontyne was folding little dresses and playsuits, at the new washer and drier they had installed beside the refrigerator, there in the loft’s once-primitive kitchen—“what should I tell the people of the world?”

“You go tell them,” Leontyne readily advised, “that you been wanting to make people happy ever since you been a little boy. That the Lord be telling you what to say, and you just writing it down.”

“I don’t think God plays well in Sweden,” he said. “God sticks pretty close to the equator.”

That did make Leontyne laugh; he was never quite sure what would. Her shy pealing seemed to pull itself back on every note, into her supple throat, as if laughter were a sin to be retracted. Her eyes looked lacquered by merriment; her solemn brief bangs, a straightened fringe, came less than halfway down her brow. Her twelve-year-old daughter, Emerald, Bech knew from snapshots, had hair done in beaded corn-rows, the maternal work of hours.

He wondered if he could work God’s favoring the peoples of the equator into his Nobel lecture; perhaps he was wrong to ignore the world’s lurking ethnic sores.
Your Highnesses, Lord Mayor, and welcome guests: the Prize is a fine
bauble upon the pale chest of Western civilization, but as a few let me wonder aloud, What has this civilization, this Christendom, meant to my people? It has meant ghettos, pogroms, verbal and physical abuse, unappealable injustice, exclusionary laws, yellow stars, autos-da-fé, scapegoating whenever disaster threatened a Christian society, and a collective helplessness at the whim of every petty Christian ruler and government. One nation to whose glory and prosperity we had contributed, as artisans and merchants and moneylenders, for hundreds of years, Spain, rewarded us with unconditional expulsion in the very year in which America was discovered. Germany and Austria, where Jews had seen their talents ripen into genius, wealth, and an apparent bourgeois security—those very nations instituted a systematic plan for the extermination of the Jews, a plan whose all but completely successful execution remains the astonishment of this century, the final refutation of any European claims to virtue and wisdom. Even in my own country, thought by many to be too indulgent of its Jews, swastikas are frequently spray-painted upon synagogues. In Sweden, I have read, one out of three teenagers doubt that the Holocaust ever took place. And so, Your Highnesses, I find that as a Jew I cannot accept this sop, this pathetic attempt to paper over the smoking pit, the thousands of gas ovens in which thousands of greater gifts and purer hearts than my own
 … What was he doing? Turning the Prize down had made Sartre look like a fool, and Pasternak like a Soviet slave.

“Meri Jo, I’m panicked,” he told her, over a lunch at Four Seasons he had invited her to give him. “Find me a speech.”

“Henry, an old Spielmeister like you? Tell them what you told Oprah; that was charming.”

“I forget what I say on these damn talk shows. I try to suppress it as soon as I say it.”

“You told her you didn’t write pornography, you just tried to give the sexual component of our lives a fair shake. Or something like that.”

“The Swedes don’t care if I write pornography. It’s all legal there. It’s part of their healthy pagan outlook.”

“I’ll never forget you on ‘Donahue’ when
Think Big
was fresh out. I was a sophomore at Barnard, and my roommate and her boyfriend were channel-surfing—you had to twist the dial in those days—and I said, ‘No, wait, that man is saying something.’ You were younger then, and your hair filled the whole top half of the screen. You were so calm and understated, not letting him bully you, and only lightly but sweetly letting the audience know you thought he
was
a bully.…”

“That was his job. Highly paid bully. Bully of the people, for the people. What did I
say
, though?”

Meri Jo’s circular face—in which a pertly pointed chin still tried to assert itself above a set of others, like ghosts in New York television before cable came in—was flushed, either from empathy with his plight or from the two pint-sized glasses of white wine that had come with the meal, or else from the compressing effects of her leather jacket, its zipper as wide as a yardstick and its brass studs the size of gumdrops. “It wasn’t what you
said
, it was the way you said it. You were sincere without being
heavy.
You were funny without being the least bit, you know, Catskills. Six months later, when I read in
People
that you and your wife had broken up, I remember—I shouldn’t be telling you this, I shouldn’t have had that second glass of Chardonnay—I was delighted; I thought, Maybe he’ll meet
me.
So I went into publishing, but you weren’t there. Or there very rarely. You were one of our invisible authors. Never mind, Henry; it’s
been a good life, P.R. I guess I was naïve, but I was only a sophomore, remember, and my guy of the time, I’ve forgotten everything about him except the way his fingernails were never clean, was having some potency issues. Pardon me for blushing.”

“Meri Jo, you’ll have me blushing myself. Tell me, would it help for me to see a tape of that Donahue show? Did Publicity keep one?”

“To be honest, Henry, we might have, but a ton of that stuff got tossed when we moved to the new building. Can’t you just talk about the future of the written word or something?”

“Look, this Prize comes but once a lifetime, and everybody says it was a miracle I got it. I hate to pollute the occasion with idle prattle.”

“Oh, hon, don’t badmouth prattle,” she said. Her chin, the top one, firmed up and pointed at him. “I have a raft of requests for you to consider. They keep coming in. We said yes, you remember, to a print interview with the Washington
Post
, and if you say yes to the
Post
you can’t say no to the Atlanta
Constitution
, it’s a booming market down there. Ever since air-conditioning, Southerners
read.
Then there’s the Minneapolis
Star Tribune
, the books editor has been terribly good to Vellum over the years, and we’re trying to do more with the Northwest, so there’s this smart new arts editor at the Tacoma
News Tribune
 …”

“I
hate
print interviews,” Bech said. “They take forever, they get you all relaxed and gabby, and then they crucify you, writing down whatever they please. There’s no evidence of what you really said except their tape, and they keep the tape. No. No more print. Print is dead.”

“Each one will come to your apartment—”

“It will ruin Golda’s nap.”

“And take no more than an hour and a half, with some time before or after for the photographer. Only Annie Leibovitz is apt to ask you to put on makeup. Maybe with her you can get away with just a funny hat.”

“Meri Jo, why are you doing this to me? Is it my fault you liked me on ‘Donahue’? I didn’t like
myself
on ‘Donahue.’ ”

She put her hand, still remarkably dainty, on his gnarled, hairy-backed one, as he struggled with his green fettuccine. The oiled strips eluded the tines of his fork like eels wriggling out of a trap. “People want you, dear, and it’s my job to facilitate access.”

“It’s not my fault they want me. I don’t want them. I want peace. I vunt to be alone, and to watch Golda grow. She can almost say words. She says ‘Hi.’ ”

“I’m not asking for myself, or for yourself, even. I’m asking for the
in
dustry. There’s such a thing—you’ve never learned this, darling, your mother obviously spoiled you rotten—as responsibility to others. With prizes come responsibilities, didn’t Delmore Schwartz say that? You’re making me seriously think about a third glass of wine.”

“Think about it all you want. I’m saying no to any more interviews.”

“But you don’t mean no.” Her sea-green eyes must once have been lovely and big; now they were small in her face, little sinister bits of buried beach glass.

He didn’t have the heart not to be seduced by her. He grumbled by way of caving in, “They won’t want me once I botch this lecture.”

“You won’t botch it. You can’t botch it. Faulkner wrote his on the airplane with a hangover and read it in a mumble
and now it’s a document like the Gettysburg Address. Think Gettysburg Address. Henry: Do you want to have some chocolate cheesecake with me, or do you want me to feel depraved all by myself?”

Stockholm, scattered on its Baltic archipelago, shone with the cold. The Swedish women sported blood-bright cheeks above their collars of wolf and fox as they carried their golden heads along the trendy streets, lined with restaurants and antique stores, of Gamla Stan, the Old Town. Bech was taken to lunch at the venerable gathering-spot for writers, the Källaren Den Gyldene Freden, with a few impish members of the Swedish Academy. “It looked like a deadlock,” confided one of them, a small bald twinkling man known for his Värmland tales in the tradition of Selma Lagerlöf, “between Günter Grass and Bei Dao, with Kundera the dark horse. You were in the final selection because some were afraid a stronger American might actually win. And then, you rascal, you won! The votes for you, in my view, constituted an anti-Socialist protest. As you can see, we live well here, but the taxes strike some as very burdensome.”

“Do not let Sigfrid fill you with his amiable nonsense,” intervened a female member of the Academy, a gracile poet and the biographer of such Nordic classics as the shortlived, tormented Erik Johan Stagnelius and the eventually mad Gustaf Fröding. “You are much esteemed in Scandinavia, for your ruthless clarity. You rape your women as you describe them. I myself prefer to read you in French, where I think your style is even more clean and—how do you say?—starkers?”

“When your names from the basket were counted,” volunteered a lyric feuilletonist of prodigious bulk and height, “I was surprised but not astounded. It is as if, recently, there are others voting, ghostly presences, around the table. The results are mysterious!”

“As you may know,” his first informant, his spectacles and mobile lower lip glinting, “the Academy is not at our full strength of eighteen. There have been resignations, and yet the members cannot be replaced. Once a member, the only way out is death.”

“Like being a member of the human race,” Bech ventured, diplomatically. He was nervous. Robin and Golda were back alone in the hotel suite. They had not brought Leontyne, for this week of festivity and formality. Bech was afraid the cold might blast her, like a jasmine blossom. He wanted her to spend more time with her husband, a security guard who left for the night shift as she arrived home. Bech felt that he and Leontyne were drawing too close in the loft, yoked together to a baby’s body. He was getting to lean on her otherworldly wisdom and to think in her voice. He wanted to shut down, at this terminal point of his life, his rusted but still-operative falling-in-love apparatus.

As for Robin, she was not used to being with Golda all day. She missed her computers, and the authority they gave her, her site in the Web. She found Sweden not for her. “Oh, it’s great for
you
,” she complained, “all you do is go out being wined and dined and interviewed, and go to receptions for the fun-loving biology winners, while I’m cooped up in this so-called Grand Hotel with a crying kid and a lot of pompous furniture. It’s too cold to go out and too hot to stay in. When I try to order room service, the people in the kitchen only speak Turkish.”

“Inger has said they’d get us all the babysitters we want.” Inger Wetterqvist was their Nobel attendant; every winner got one. She was lovely, efficient, and in constant attendance. Her statuesque neck, with wispy flaxen tendrils in the hollows of the nape, fascinated Bech.

But Golda had problems with the Swedes. Whenever she saw a big blond woman, she stuck the central two fingers of her left hand into her mouth and hid her face against her mother’s thigh. When she realized, on the first full day of their stay, that her parents were about to leave her alone with a golden-haired babysitter, she screamed in a panicked fury Bech had never heard before. The child feared these tall, shining Aryans.

The girl was, in her splendor, frightening. The world seemed to hold, Bech had noticed, more and more young women over six feet in height—whole clusters of them, whole basketball teams, striding through airports or down Fifth Avenue together—as if Nature, no longer designing women close to the ground for purposes of childbearing and domestic labor, were launching them toward some function as yet unknown.

Robin, embarrassed, told the helpless girl who, it had been arranged, would care for Golda during the official lunch at the American Embassy, “Our au pair back home is black—you know, Negro? I guess she’s used to her.” In the end, Robin and Bech took Golda to the Ambassador’s lunch; it included little carrots, which the infant carefully dropped one by one on the floor.