Bech at Bay (7 page)

But he had an agenda. Now it was Bech’s turn to feel the force of Izzy’s grip, on his upper arm, through a patched tweed sleeve. “Henry, listen. How’d you like to head up the Forty? Do us all a favor and be the next president. Von Klappenemner’s term’s up, and it’s time we got a younger guy in there, somebody from the literary end. These composers, they look good presiding, but they have no head for facts, and a few facts come up from time to time, even there.”

The Forty—its number of members a wistful imitation of the French Academy—was one of the innumerable honorary organizations that the years 1865–1914, awash in untaxed dollars, had scattered throughout Manhattan. It was housed in a neoclassical, double-lot brick-front in the East Fifties, near the corner of Third Avenue, where the glass boxes—Citicorp! the Lipstick Building!—were marching north. An
unwed heiress, Lucinda Baines, who, like Pamela Thornbush, fancied herself a patroness of the arts, had left her grand townhouse, with a suitable endowment, to serve as the gracious gathering-place of the hypothetical forty best artists—painters, writers, composers, sculptors—in the country. Her fortune had stemmed from a nineteenth-century nostrum called Baines’ Powders, a fraud taken off the market by the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, but not before its illusory powers of palliation had eased many a rough-hewn death; the powders were gone but the fortune rolled on, keeping the mansion in heat and repair, feeding the faithful at the Forty’s half-dozen ceremonial dinners a year, and funding a clutch of annual awards to the possibly deserving with which the organization preserved its tax-exempt status. A small paid staff fulfilled the daily duties, but by a romantic provision of Lucinda’s will the membership itself owned the building and controlled the endowment. “How come you’re involved?” Bech asked, perhaps rudely.

When Izzy blinked, massive lashless eyelids had to traverse nearly a full hemisphere of yellowing eyeball. “I’m on the board.”

“What about
you
for president? Isaiah the prez: that has a ring to it.”

“You schmo, I
was
president, from ’81 to ’84. Where were you? Try to pay attention—you never come to the dinners.”

“I’m watching my figure. Don’t you find, once you pass sixty-five—”

“Yeah, yeah. Listen, I got to circulate. The wife is giving me the evil eye. But think of Edna—she’d love it. She’s dying for you. I’m asking on behalf of Edna.” Edna was the directress, a wiry little white-haired spinster from Australia.
“Don’t make her beg, at her age. The whole board is crazy about the idea. They delegated me, since they thought we were friends.”

“Izzy, we
are
friends. Read your fucking Festschrift.”

“People can be friends. Writers, no. Writers are condemned to hate one another, doesn’t Goethe somewhere say?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter.…
Or was that Schiller? Forget it. I’m putting this forward as a person. Loosen up. Remember the good times we had in Albania? We were the first Western writers in over the top.”

“Slovenia,
not
Albania. Nobody got into Albania. Ljubljana World Writers for Peace, in the Carter years. How could you have forgotten, Izzy—that frisky little blond poet from the Ukraine we had to do everything with in fractured French? Remember how she showed us the trick with a little tomato, biting it after tossing down a shot of vodka?”

It had been Bech, though, and not Thornbush that she had taken back with her to her cell of a room in the people’s hotel. But much of the fervor of the encounter had been wasted in a breathless whispered discussion, in uncertain French, of birth control. She had kept rolling her eyes toward the corners of the room, indicating, as if he didn’t know, that the walls were bugged. He knew but as an American didn’t care. Perhaps she had been risking the gulag for him. How lovely in its childlike skinniness her naked body had been! Her pubic hair much darker than the hair on her head. The acid aftertaste of cherry tomato fighting with the sweetness of vodka in his mouth. She had halted him halfway in, with a stare of those wide scared eyes, eyes a many-petalled Ukrainian blue. For all the liquor she had consumed, she had been tight in the cunt, but he pushed on. She seemed relieved when he came, too
soon. He had tried to wait, staring at a painting above the headboard. Shabby as the furniture was, the walls held real paintings, rough to the touch: the Socialist state supporting its hordes of collaborationist daubers.

As if he had accompanied Bech in his swift dip into memory, Thornbush sighed heavily and said, “They gave us a good time, the Commies. We’re going to miss ’em.”

“They soured me on writers’ organizations. I don’t want to be president of the Forty.”

“Is that what you want me to tell Edna? You think I can go to her and tell her that? She’s getting on, Henry. She’s going to retire one of these days. Why do you want to break her heart?”

“Out of thirty-eight members not you or me,” Bech patiently said, “there must be somebody else who can do it. How about a woman? Or a black?”

Once you start to argue with somebody like Thornbush, it becomes a negotiation. His painful grip on Bech’s arm resumed. “There aren’t forty of us, we’re four or five short of the full body. Those that can do it have all done it. We’re all old as bejesus. Any time a slot opens up in the membership, one old bastard puts up another, even older. As the Forty goes, you’re a
kid.
Come
on
; I’ve done it; there’s nothing to it. Two meetings a year, spring and fall; you can skip some of the dinners. All you’ve got to do is preside. Just
sit
there on your tochis.”

Martina O’Reilly had emerged from the smoky wall of cloth, wearing an olive-drab loden coat, looking inquisitively everywhere but toward him. She was going to leave, Bech saw, and was giving him a chance to leave with her. If he missed this boat, who knew when there would be another? The docks were crumbling, like those off the West Fifties
that had bustled with tugs and toughs when he was boy. “I’m not a presider,” he told Izzy, more sharply, “I’m a—”

A learner rather
, Stephen Dedalus had said, but Bech didn’t finish, stricken by the way that Martina, resolving now to leave alone, glancing about with the reckless quickness of a woman in tears, reached up with both hands and lightldy brushed back, in a symmetrical motion, some long strands straying from her severe hairdo.

“Cop-out,” Izzy finished for him. “Above-it-all. That’s the beauty of you for this post—you don’t dirty yourself, generally, with being a nice guy. That’s why we especially need you, after a string of these twelve-tone gladhanders.
Edna
needs you; she’s got a bunch of senile fogeys on her hands.”

“Izzy, let me think about it. I got to go.”

“The fuck you’ll think about it. Your check is in the mail, too. I know a brush-off.” He had grabbed both Bech’s forearms and the (slightly) younger author feared that he would have to wrestle the powerful older to escape. Martina was receding in the corner of Bech’s squeezed field of vision. She was hatless, hurrying.

“O.K.,” Bech said, “I’ll
do
it. I’ll do it, maybe. Have Edna call me and tell me the duties. Tell Pamela for me it was a great party, a great apotheosis.”

“What’s your rush? There’s real eats coming. I wanted you to meet Pam’s brother, he’s a hell of a good egg, a genius in his line—moves real estate around like a chess player. And Pam wanted to talk to you about one of her pets, some benefit up at the Guggenheim.”

“I bet she did. Another time. Izzy”—he found himself giving the man a hug, Communist-style, Brezhnev to Chou En-lai—“they don’t make bullshitters like you any more.”

He hustled through a scrum of late arrivals in the foyer, whose walls were hung with silk prayer rugs from Kazakhstan, and saw ahead of him a pink cloth rose about to disappear. “Hey,” he called. “Hold the elevator!”

Once they were sealed in together, softly plunging the fifteen stories down, he saw from the satisfied set of Martina’s unpainted lips that she was not surprised by his pursuit; she had hoped for it. “Thanks,” he said to her. “For holding the door.” She had thrust her slender bare hand into its rubber-edged jaws. “Getting hot in there,” he nervously added. “
Trop de
fest” He did feel warm, across his chest and under his arms: his exertions in coping with Izzy and escaping the party, but also a curious nagging satisfaction, a swollen sense of himself. President Bech. He had made, for wrong enough reasons, the right decision.

He rather liked presiding. Perhaps seven or eight of the Forty attended the biannual meetings. In what had been the solarium of the dainty Baines mansion, Bech sat at the massive president’s desk—mahogany, with satinwood inlay—and in a facing row of leather wing chairs some of the most distinguished minds of his generation feigned respectful attention. Edna slipped the agenda to him beforehand on a sheet of paper and sat at his side with a tape recorder, taking notes on the proceedings. There might be a matter of repairs to the exquisitely designed building; or of the salary of Gabriel, the Hispanic caretaker who lived in the basement with his wife and three children; or of the insurance on the paintings and drawings that Reginald Marsh, John Sloan, William Glackens, William Merritt Chase, and the like had casually bestowed, as gentlemanly pleasantries, upon the
place, and that by now had grown so in value that the insurance was prohibitive. And then there was the matter of new members—in the past two years death had opened up six new vacancies, and of thirty-four nomination requests mailed out this year only three had been returned. The array of sage and even saintly old faces confronting Bech politely, inscrutably listened. Edna adjusted the volume of her tape recorder and placed it closer to the edge of the desk, to catch any utterance from the quorum of the Forty. The quorum had once been ten but in response to poor attendance had been reduced to five. The meetings were held at dusk, before one of the dinners, so rush traffic was roaring north on Third Avenue, buses chuffing, trucks shifting down, taxis honking. It was hard to hear, even for those not hard of hearing. Across the street, trailer tractors moved in and out, laboriously backing, of a nameless bleak building that took up a third of the block.

J. Edward Jamison, whose novels of city manners had been thought sparklingly impudent as late as 1962, quaveringly spoke up: “There’s this fellow Pynchon appears to be first-rate. At least, my grandsons adore his stuff. Computers is what they mostly care about, though.”

“He’d never accept,” croaked Amy Speer deLessups, one of the few female members and faithful in her attendance, perhaps because she lived in Turtle Bay, a modest hop to the south. Her rhyming confessions of her many amours had once created a sensation, thanks to her strict metrical defiance of the prevailing vers-libre mode. Now it was the amours themselves that seemed scandalous, in connection with this shrivelled, wispy body, lamed by arthritic joints. She walked with a cane, wore black velvet bell-bottoms, and carried her little wrinkled round face tipped up, a flirtatious habit left over from her days of comeliness. She
went on, creakily turning in her chair to address Jamison and almost shouting in her pain, “He turns down
eve
rything. These younger ones are like that. They think it’s
smart
, not to belong. I was the same at their age.”

Jamison perhaps had failed to hear her despite her effort, or had grasped only the most general import of her words, for he replied ambiguously, “Not a bad idea. Then there’s this Salinger my grandsons used to talk about. Not so much lately; now they’ve discovered the Internet, and girls.”

“He won’t accept either,” Amy shouted.

This exchange awoke Aaron Fisch, a small and gnomish painter whose peculiar enamelled, fine-focus style of surrealistic political allegory had peaked in the late Thirties, plateaued for four popular years as war propaganda (no one could do Mussolini as he could, with five-o’clock shadow and jutting lower lip, and Hirohito in all his military braid, and Hitler’s burning black eyes in a lean white poisoned-looking face), and then had, post-war, fallen swiftly into abysmal unfashionability, though Aaron himself lived on. A decade or more ago his work resurfaced in the art magazines as an anticipation of photorealism, but his recent paintings, as his eyes and fine motor control failed, were increasingly rough, more and more like Soutine. Blinking, pushing his thick black-framed spectacles back on his small nose, he looked toward Bech and asked, “Mr. President, have we ever given consideration to Arshile Gorky? Or did he never become an American citizen?”

“Aaron, he’s
dead
,” the other painter present, Limbaugh Seidensticker, gloomily erupted. “He committed suicide.”

“Who?” the little surrealist asked, looking about in alarm, and almost piteously returning his pink-lidded gaze to the president, for guidance.

“Arshile Gorky, Mr. Fisch,” Bech said.

“Oh, of course. I knew that. A wonderful sensibility. His onions and bulb-forms; very organic. He never understood why the Abstract Expressionists took him up.”

This may have been deliberately tactless, since Seidensticker was an adamantly abstract painter, who worked entirely with commercial paint rollers and latex colors straight from the hardware-store can. Not since his moment of revelation in 1947 had he deviated from his faith that painting’s subject was painting itself and even the rectangular shape of the canvas was an embarrassing tie with the picture/window fallacy. There were almost none like him left; the resurgence of figuration, among young artists who had no training in how to draw, had left him sputtering on his flat fields of chaste monochrome. “It’s a scandal,” he said now, “that Donald Judd isn’t a member.”

“Oh, Limby, don’t you think if you’ve gone and seen one aluminum box you’ve seen them all?” Amy intervened, tipping up her wrinkled face to him like a round dish to be drained of its light, as the last rays of the spring afternoon bounced off the blank side walls of the truck depot opposite and sidled into Lucinda Baines’ old solarium. As if still alive with plants, this skylit interior shimmered; the faces of the Forty seemed to Bech flowers, yellowish blooms of ancient flesh suspended against the Rembrandtesque gloom of the dark leather chairs.