Bech (10 page)

Norma was not pleased by his arrangements. “How ridiculous of you,” she said, “not to trust me alone with that child. You’re so immature and proprietorial. You don’t own me. I’m a free agent, by your preference.”

“I wanted to save you embarrassment,” he told her. “I’ve read the kid’s stories; you don’t know what goes on in his mind.”

“No, after keeping you company for three years I’ve forgotten what goes on in any normal man’s mind.”

“Then you admit he
is
a normal man.
Not
a child. O.K. You stay out of that bastard’s atelier, or whatever he thinks it is. A pad.”

“My, aren’t
you
the fierce young lover? I wonder how I survived thirty-odd years out from under your wing.”

“You’re so self-destructive, I wonder too. And by the way it’s not been three years we’ve been keeping company, it’s two and a half.”

“You’ve been counting the minutes. Is my time about up?”

“Norma,
why
do you want to cop out with all these drugs? It’s so insulting to the world, to me.”

“I want to have an
experience
. I’ve never had a
baby
, the only wedding ring I’ve ever worn is the one you loan me when we go to St. Croix in the winter, I’ve never been to Pakistan, I’m
never
going to get to Antarctica.”

“I’ll buy you a freezer.”

“That
is
your solution, isn’t it?—buy another box. You go from box to box, each one snugger than the last. Well I for
one
don’t
think your marvelous life-style, your heady mixture of art for art’s sake and Depression funk, entirely covers the case. My life is closing in and I hate it and I thought this way I could open it up a little. Just a
little
. Just a teeny
crack
, a splinter of sunshine.”

“He’s coming back, he’s coming back. Your fix is on the way.”

“How can I possibly get high with you and Bea sitting there watching with long faces? It’s too grotesque. It’s too limiting. My kid sister. My kindly protector. I might as well call my mother—she can fly up from West Orange with the smelling salts.”

Bech was grateful to her, for letting her anger, her anguish, recede from the high point reached with the wail that she had never had a baby. He promised, “We’ll take it with you.”

“Who will? You and Bea?” Norma laughed scornfully. “You two nannies. You’re the two most careful people I’ve ever met.”

“We’d
love
to smoke pot. Wouldn’t we, Bea? Come on, take a holiday. Break yourself of Nembutal.”

Beatrice, who had been cooking lamb chops and setting the table for four while Bech and her sister were obstructively gesturing in the passageway between the kitchen and the dining area, stopped and considered. “Rodney would have a fit.”

“Rodney’s divorcing you,” Bech told her. “Think for yourself.”

“It makes it
too
ridiculous,” Norma protested. “It takes
all
the adventure out of it.”

Bech asked sharply, “Don’t you love us?”

“Well,” Bea was saying. “On one condition. The children must be asleep. I don’t want them to see me do anything wild.”

It was Wendell’s ingenious idea to have the children sleep
on the porch, away from what noise and fumes there might be. He had brought from his magical cache of supplies two sleeping bags, one a double, for the twins. He settled the three small Cooks by pointing out the constellations and the area of the sky where they might, according to this week’s newspapers, see shooting stars. “And when you grow tired of that,” Wendell said, “close your eyes and listen for an owl.”

“Are there owls?” one twin asked.

“Oh, sure.”

“On this island?” asked the other.

“One or two. Every island has to have an owl, otherwise the mice would multiply and multiply and there would be no grass, just mice.”

“Will it get us?” Donald was the youngest, five.

“You’re no mouse,” Wendell whispered. “You’re a man.”

Bech, eavesdropping, felt a pang, and envied the new Americans their easy intermingling with children. How terrible it seemed for him, a Jew, not to have children, to lack a father’s dignity. The four adults ate a sober and unconversational meal. Wendell asked Bech what he was writing now, and Bech said nothing, he was proofreading his old books, and finding lots of typos. No wonder the critics had misunderstood him. Norma had changed into a shimmering housecoat, a peacock-colored silk kimono Bech had bought her last Christmas—their second anniversary. He wondered if she had kept on her underclothes, and finally glimpsed, as she bent frowning over her overcooked lamb chop, the reassuring pale edge of a bra. During coffee, he cleared his throat. “Well, kids. Should the séance begin?”

Wendell arranged four chairs in a rectangle, and produced a pipe. It was an ordinary pipe, the kind that authors, in the corny days when Bech’s image of the literary life had been
formed, used to grip in dust-jacket photographs. Norma took the best chair, the wicker armchair, and impatiently smoked a cigarette while Beatrice cleared away the dishes and checked on the children. They were asleep beneath the stars. Donald had moved his sleeping bag against the girls’ and lay with his thumb in his mouth and the other hand on Judy’s hair. Beatrice and Bech sat down, and Wendell spoke to them as if they were children, showing them the magic substance, which looked like a residue of pencil shavings in a dirty tobacco pouch, instructing them how to suck in air and smoke simultaneously, how to “swallow” the smoke and hold it down, so the precious narcotic permeated the lungs and stomach and veins and brain. The thoroughness of these instructions aroused in Bech the conviction that something was going to go wrong. He found Wendell as an instructor pompous. In a fury of puffing and expressive inhaling, the boy got the pipe going, and offered first drag to Norma. She had never smoked a pipe, and suffered a convulsion of coughing. Wendell leaned forward and greedily inhaled from midair the smoke she had wasted. He had become, seen sidewise, with his floppy blond hair, a baby lion above a bone; his hungry quick movements were padded with a sinister silence. “Hurry,” he hoarsely urged Norma, “don’t waste it. It’s all I have left from my last trip to Mexico. We may not have enough for four.”

She tried again—Bech felt her as tense, rebellious, all too aware that, with the pipe between her teeth, she became a sharp-nosed crone—and coughed again, and complained, “I’m not
get
ting any.”

Wendell whirled, barefoot, and, stabbing with the pipestem, said, “Mr. Bech.”

The smoke was sweet and circular and soft, softer than Bech could have imagined, ballooning in his mouth and
throat and chest like a benevolent thunderhead, like one of those valentines from his childhood that unfolded into a three-dimensional tissue-paper fan. “More,” Wendell commanded, thrusting the pipe at him again, ravenously sniffing into himself the shreds of smoke that escaped Bech’s sucking. This time there was a faint burning—a ghost of tobacco’s unkind rasp. Bech felt himself as a domed chamber, with vaults and upward recesses, welcoming the cloud; he shut his eyes. The color of the sensation was yellow mixed with blue yet in no way green. The base of his throat satisfyingly burned.

While his attention was turned inward, Beatrice was given the pipe. Smoke leaked from her compressed lips; it seemed intensely poignant to Bech that even in depravity she was wearing no lipstick. “Give it to
me
,” Norma insisted, greedily reaching. Wendell snatched the pipe against his chest and, with the ardor of a trapped man breathing through a tube, inhaled marijuana. The air began to smell sweetish, flowery, and gentle. Norma jumped from her chair and, kimono shimmering, roughly seized the pipe, so that precious sparks flew. Wendell pushed her back into her chair and, like a mother feeding a baby, insinuated the pipestem between her lips. “Gently, gently,” he crooned, “take it in, feel it press against the roof of your mouth, blossoming inside you, hold it fast, fast.” His “s” ’s were extremely sibilant.

“What’s all this hypnosis?” Bech asked. He disliked the deft way Wendell handled Norma. The boy swooped to him and eased the wet pipe into his mouth. “Deeper, deeper, that’s it, good … good …”

“It burns,” Bech protested.

“It’s supposed to,” Wendell said. “That’s beautiful. You’re really getting it.”

“Suppose I get sick.”

“People never get sick on it, it’s a medical fact.”

Bech turned to Beatrice and said, “We’ve raised a generation of amateur pharmacologists.”

She had the pipe; handing it back to Wendell, she smiled and pronounced, “Yummy.”

Norma kicked her legs and said savagely, “Nothing’s
hap
pening. It’s not
do
ing anything to me.”

“It will, it will,” Wendell insisted. He sat down in the fourth chair and passed the pipe to Norma. Fine sweat beaded his plump round face.

“Did you ever notice,” Bech asked him, “what nifty legs Norma has? She’s old enough to be your biological mother, but condescend to take a gander at her gams. We were the Sinewy Generation.”

“What’s this generation bag you’re in?” Wendell asked him, still rather respectfully English 1020. “Everybody’s people.”

“
Our
biological mother,” Beatrice unexpectedly announced, “thought actually
I
had the better figure. She used to call Norma nobby.”

“I
won’t
sit here being discussed like a piece of meat,” Norma said. Grudgingly she passed the pipe to Bech.

As Bech smoked, Wendell crooned, “Yes, deeper, let it fill you. He really has it. My master, my guru.”

“Guru you,” Bech said, passing the pipe to Beatrice. He spoke with a rolling slowness, sonorous as an idol’s voice. “All you flower types are incipient Fascists.” The “a” ’s and “s” ’s had taken on a private richness in his mouth. “Fascists
manqués
,” he said.

Wendell rejected the pipe Beatrice offered him. “Give it back to our teacher. We need his wisdom. We need the fruit of his suffering.”

“
Manqué
see,
manqué
do,” Bech went on, puffing and inhaling. What a woman must feel like in coitus. More, more.

“
Mon maître
,” Wendell sighed, leaning forward, breathless, awed, loving.

“Suffering,” Norma sneered. “The day Henry Bech lets himself suffer is a day I’m dying to see. He’s the safest man in America, since they retired Tom Dewey. Oh, this is horrible. You’re all being so silly and here I sit perfectly sober. I hate it. I hate
all
of you, absolutely.”

“Do you hear music?” Bech asked, passing the pipe directly across to Wendell.

“Look at the windows, everybody people,” Beatrice said. “They’re coming into the room!”

“
Stop
pretending,” Norma told her. “You
always
played up to Mother. I’d rather be nobby Norma than bland Bea.”

“She’s beautiful,” Wendell said, to Norma, of Beatrice. “But so are you. The Lord Krishna bestows blessings with a lavish hand.”

Norma turned to him and grinned. Her tropism to the phony like a flower’s to the sun, Bech thought. Wide warm mouth wherein memories of pleasure have become poisonous words.

Carefully Bech asked the other man, “Why does your face resemble the underside of a colander in which wet lettuce is heaped?” The image seemed both elegant and precise, cruel yet just. But the thought of lettuce troubled his digestion. Grass. All men. Things grow in circles. Stop the circles.

“I sweat easily,” Wendell confessed freely. The easy shamelessness purchased for an ingrate generation by decades of poverty and war.

“And write badly,” Bech said.

Wendell was unabashed. He said, “You haven’t seen my
new stuff. It’s really terrifically controlled. I’m letting the things dominate the emotions instead of vice versa. Don’t you think, since the
Wake
, emotions have about had it in prose?”

“Talk to me,” Norma said. “
He’s
absolutely self-obsessed.”

Wendell told her simply, “He’s my god.”

Beatrice was asking, “Whose turn is it? Isn’t anybody else worried about the windows?” Wendell gave her the pipe. She smoked and said, “It tastes like dregs.”

When she offered the pipe to Bech, he gingerly waved it away. He felt that the summit of his apotheosis had slipped by, replaced by a widespread sliding. His perceptions were clear, he felt them all trying to get through to him, Norma seeking love, Wendell praise, Beatrice a few more days of free vacation; but these arrows of demand were directed at an object in metamorphosis. Bech’s chest was sloping upward, trying to lift his head into steadiness, as when, thirty years ago, carsick on the long subway ride to his Brooklyn uncles, he would fix his eyes in a death grip on his own reflection in the shuddering black glass. The funny wool Buster Brown cap his mother made him wear, his pale small face, old for his age. The ultimate deliverance of the final stomach-wrenching stop. In the lower edge of his vision Norma leaped up and grabbed the pipe from Beatrice. Something fell. Sparks. Both women scrambled on the floor. Norma arose in her shimmering kimono and majestically complained, “It’s out. It’s all gone. Damn you, greedy Bea!”

“Back to Mexico,” Bech called. His own voice came from afar, through blankets of a gathering expectancy, the expanding motionlessness of nausea. But he did not know for a certainty that he was going to be sick until Norma’s voice, a few feet away in the sliding obfuscation, as sharp and small as something seen in reversed binoculars, announced, “Henry, you’re absolutely yellow!”

In the bathroom mirror he saw that she was right. The blood had drained from his face, leaving like a scum the tallow of his summer tan, and a mauve blotch of sunburn on his melancholy nose. Face he had glimpsed at a thousand junctures, in barbershops and barrooms, in subways and airplane windows above the Black Sea, before shaving and after lovemaking, it witlessly smiled, the eyes very tired. Bech kneeled and submitted to the dark ecstasy of being eclipsed, his brain shouldered into nothingness by the violence of the inversion whereby his stomach emptied itself, repeatedly, until a satisfying pain scraped tears from his eyes, and he was clean.