Bech (18 page)

The cool practicality of this advice, its smug recourse to millennia of peasant saws and aristocratic maxims, to all that civilized wisdom America had sought to flee and render obsolete, angered him. “Art
is
ardor,” he told her.

“Bad artists hope that’s true.”

“Read your Wordsworth.”

“In tran
quil
lity, darling.”

Her willingness to debate was beginning to excite him. He saw that wit and logic might survive into the lawless world coming to birth. “Merissa, you’re so clever.”

“The weak must be. That’s what England is learning.”

“Do you think I’m necessarily impotent? As an artist?”

“Unnecessarily.”

“Merissa, tell me: what do you
do
?”

“You’ll see,” she said, pressing her head back into the pillow and smiling in assured satisfaction, as his giant prick worked back and forth. The tail wagging the dog.

Tuttle caught him at his hotel the day before he left and asked him if he felt any affinity with Ronald Firbank. “Only the affinity,” Bech said, “I feel with all Roman Catholic homosexuals.”

“I was hoping you’d say something like that. How are you feeling, Mr. Bech? The last time I saw you, you looked awful. Frankly.”

“I feel better now that you’ve stopped seeing me.”

“Great. It was a real privilege and delight for me, I tell you. I hope you like the way the piece shaped up; I do. I hope you don’t mind my few reservations.”

“No, you can’t go anywhere these days without reservations.”

“Ha ha.” It was the only time Bech ever heard Tuttle laugh.

Merissa didn’t answer her telephone. Bech hoped she’d be at the farewell party Goldy threw for him—a modest affair, without blue livery, and Bech in his altered tuxedo the sole man present in formal dress—but she wasn’t. When Bech asked where she was, Goldy said with a twinkle, “Working. She sends her love and regrets.” Bech called her at midnight, at one in the morning, at two, at five when the birds began singing, at seven when the earliest church bells rang, at nine and at ten, while packing to catch his plane. Not even Isabella answered. She must be off on a country weekend. Or visiting the boy at school. Or vanished like a good paragraph in a book too bulky to reread.

Goldschmidt drove him to the airport in his maroon Bentley, and with an urgent prideful air pressed a number of Sunday newspapers upon him. “The
Observer
gave us more space,” he said, “but the
Times
seemed to like it more. All in all, a very fine reception for a—let’s be frank—a rather trumped-up mishmash of a book. Now you must do us a blockbuster.” He said this, here at Heathrow, in the second-class passenger lounge, but his eyes were darting over Bech’s shoulder toward the stream of fresh arrivals.

“I have just the title,” Bech told him. He saw that he must
put Goldy into it, as a Jewish uncle. A leatherworker, his right palm hard as a turtle shell from handling an awl. That heavy pampered Florentine head bent full of greedy dreams beneath a naked light bulb, as pocketbooks, belts, and sandals tumbled from the slaughter of screaming calves. The baroque beauty of the scraps piled neglected at his feet. A fire escape out the window. Some of the panes were transparent wire-glass and others, unaccountably, were painted opaque.

Goldschmidt added a folded tabloid to Bech’s supply of airplane reading.

the headline said. Goldschmidt said, “Page seventeen might amuse you. As you know, this is the paper Merissa’s father bought last year. Millions read it.”

“No, I didn’t know. She told me nothing about her father.”

“He’s a dear old rascal. Almost the last of the true Tories.”

“I could have sworn she was a Lib-Lab.”

“Merissa is a very clever lamb,” Goldschmidt stated, and pinched his lips shut. In our long Diaspora we have learned not to tattle on our hosts. Goldy’s right hand, shaken farewell, was unreally soft.

Bech saved page seventeen for the last. The
Times
review was headlined “More Ethnic Fiction from the New World” and lumped
The Best of Bech
with a novel about Canadian Indians by Leonard Cohen and a collection of protest essays and scatalogical poems by LeRoi Jones. The long
Observer
piece was titled “Bech’s Best Not Good Enough” and was signed L. Clark Tuttle. Bech skimmed, as a fakir walks on hot coals, pausing nowhere long enough to burn the moisture
from the soles of his feet. Almost none of the quotes he had poured into the boy’s notebook and tape recorder were used. Instead, an aggrieved survey of Bech’s
œuvre
unfolded, smudged by feeble rebuttals.

Bech let the paper go limp. The airplane had taxied out and he braced himself for the perilous plunge into flight. Only when aloft, with Hampton Court securely beneath him, a
delicate sepia diagram of itself, and London’s great stone mass dissolved into a cloud on the surface of the receding earth, did Bech turn to page seventeen. A column there was headed M
ERISSA’S
W
EEK
. The line drawing of the girl recalled to Bech the spaces in her face—the catlike span between her eyes, the oval granny glasses, the V-shaped little chin, the sudden moist gap of her mouth, which in the caricature existed as a wry tilde, a ~.

Bech closed his eyes, feeling his love for her expand as the distance between them increased. Entrepreneurism rides
again.
Rabbinical curls:
somehow he had sold her that.
Automatically gnomic:
he had sold that too.
As a screen against others
. Firbank dead at forty. Still gaining altitude, he realized he was not dead; his fate was not so substantial. He had become a character by Henry Bech.

BECH ENTERS HEAVEN

W
HEN
H
ENRY
B
ECH
was an impressionable pre-adolescent of twelve, more bored than he would admit with the question of whether or not the 1935 Yankees could wrest the pennant back from a Detroit led by the heroic Hank Greenberg, his mother one May afternoon took him out of school, after consultation with the principal; she was a hardened consulter with the principal. She had consulted when Henry entered the first grade, when he came back from the second with a bloody nose, when he skipped the third, and when he was given a 65 in Penmanship in the fifth. The school was P.S. 87, at 77th and Amsterdam—a bleak brick building whose interior complexity of smells and excitement, especially during a snowstorm or around Hallowe’en, was tremendous. None but very young hearts could have withstood the daily strain of so much intrigue, humor, desire, personality, mental effort, emotional current, of so many achingly important nuances of prestige and impersonation. Bech, rather short for his age, yet with a big nose and big feet that
promised future growth, was recognized from the first by his classmates as an only son, a mother’s son more than a father’s, pampered and bright though not a prodigy (his voice had no pitch, his mathematical aptitude was no Einstein’s); naturally he was teased. Not all the teasing took the form of bloody noses; sometimes the girl in the adjacent desk-seat tickled the hair on his forearms with her pencil, or his name was flaunted through the wire fence that separated the sexes at recess. The brownstone neighborhoods that supplied students to the school were in those years still middle-class, if by middle-class is understood not a level of poverty (unlike today’s poor, they had no cars, no credit cards, and no delivery arrangements with the liquor store) but of self-esteem. Immersed in the Great Depression, they had kept their families together, kept their feet from touching bottom, and kept their faith in the future—their children’s future more than their own. These children brought a giddy relief into the sanctum of the school building, relief that the world, or at least this brick cube carved from it, had survived another day. How fragile the world felt to them!—as fragile as it seems sturdy to today’s children, who wish to destroy it. Predominately Jewish, Bech’s grammar school classes had a bold bright dash of German Gentiles, whose fathers also kept a small shop or plied a manual craft, and some Eastern Europeans, whose fey manners and lisped English made them the centers of romantic frenzy and wild joking attacks. All studied, by the light of yellowish overhead globes and of the 48-star flag nailed above the blackboard, penmanship, the spice routes, the imports and exports of the three Guianas, the three cases of percentage, and other matters of rote given significance by the existence of breadlines and penthouses, just as the various drudgeries of their fathers were given dignity, even holiness, by their direct
connection with food and survival. Although he would have been slow to admit this also, little Bech loved the school; he cherished his citizenship in its ragged population, was enraptured by the freckled chin and cerulean eyes of Eva Hassel across the aisle, and detested his mother’s frequent interference in his American education. Whenever she appeared outside the office of the principal (Mr. Linnehan, a sore-lidded spoiled priest with an easily mimicked blink and stammer), he was teased in the cloakroom or down on the asphalt at recess; when she had him skip a grade, he had become the baby of the class. By the age of twelve, he was going to school with girls that were women. That day in May, he showed his anger with his mother by not talking to her as they walked from the scarred school steps, down 78th past a mock-Tudor apartment house like some evilly enlarged and begrimed fairy-tale chalet, to Broadway and 79th and the IRT kiosk with its compounded aroma of hot brakes, warm bagels, and vomit.

Extraordinarily, they took a train
north
. The whole drift of their lives was
south
—south to Times Square and to the Public Library, south to Gimbels, south to Brooklyn where his father’s two brothers lived. North, there was nothing but Grant’s Tomb, and Harlem, and Yankee Stadium, and Riverdale where a rich cousin, a theatre manager, inhabited an apartment full of glass furniture and an array of leering and scribbled photographs. North of that yawned the foreign vastness, first named New York State but melting westward into other names, other states, where the
goyim
farmed their farms and drove their roadsters and swung on their porch swings and engaged in the countless struggles of moral heroism depicted continuously in the Hollywood movies at the Broadway RKO. Upon the huge body of the United States, swept by dust storms and storms of Christian conscience,
young Henry knew that his island of Manhattan existed as an excrescence; relatively, his little family world was an immigrant enclave, the religion his grandfathers had practiced was a tolerated affront, and the language of this religion’s celebration was a backwards-running archaism. He and his kin and their kindred were huddled in shawls within an overheated back room while outdoors a huge and beautiful wilderness rattled their sashes with wind and painted the panes with frost; and all the furniture they had brought with them from Europe, the footstools and phylacteries, the copies of Tolstoy and Heine, the ambitiousness and defensiveness and love, belonged to this stuffy back room.