Bech Is Back (14 page)

He felt easier in downtown Ossining, with its basking blacks and its rotting commercial streets tipped down sharply toward the Hudson and its chunky Gothic brick-and-cornice architecture whispering to Bech’s fancy of robber barons and fairy tales and Washington Irving. Washington Heights, he supposed, once looked much as Ossining did now. He had not expected such a strong dark-skinned presence on the streets so far up the Hudson, or the slightly sleepy Southern quality of it all—the vacant storefronts, the idle wharfs, the clapboarded shacks and rusting railroad spurs and Civil War memorials. Throughout the northeastern United States, he realized, there were towns like this, perfected long ago, topped with a band pavilion and a squat civic library, only to slide into sunstruck somnolence, like flecks of pyrite weeping rust stain from the face of a granite escarpment. Ossining, he learned, was a euphemism; in 1901, the village fathers had changed the name from Sing Sing, which had been pre-empted by the notorious prison and long ago had been stolen from the Indians, in whose Mohican language “Sin Sinck” meant “stone upon stone.” Stone upon stone the vast correctional facility had arisen; electrocutions here used to dim the lights for miles around, according to the tabloids Bech read as a boy. The
coarsely screened newspaper photos of the famed “hot seat” at Sing Sing, and the movie scene wherein Cagney is dragged, moaning and rubbery-legged, down a long corridor to his annihilation, had told the young Bech all he ever wanted to know about death. He wondered if denizens of the underworld still snarled at one another, “You’ll fry for this,” and supposed not. The lights of Ossining no longer flickered in sympathy with snuffed-out murderers. The folks downtown looked merry to Bech, and the whole burg like a play set; he had the true New Yorker’s secret belief that people living anywhere else had to be, in some sense, kidding. On that sloping stage between Peekskill and Tarrytown he enjoyed being enrolled in the minor-city minstrelsy; he often volunteered to run Bea’s errands for household oddments, killing time in the long dark unair-conditioned drugstore, coveting the shine on the paperbacks by Uris and Styron and marveling at the copious cosmetic aids of vain, anxious America. His light-headedness on these away-from-home afternoons strengthened him to burrow on, through that anfractuous fantasy he was tracing among the lost towers of New York.

He remembered the great city in the rain, those suddenly thrashing downpours flash-flooding the asphalt arroyos and overwhelming the grated sewer mains, causing citizens to huddle—millionaires and their mistresses companionable with bag ladies and messenger boys—under restaurant canopies and in the recessed marble portals of international banks, those smooth fortresses of hidden empery. In such a rain, Tad Greenbaum and Thelma Stern are caught without their limousine. For some time, remember, Thelma has been resolved to leave Tad but dreads and postpones the moment of announcement. The taxis splash past, their little cap lights doused, their back seats holding the shadowy heads of those
mysterious personages who find cabs in the worst of weathers: when the nuclear bombs begin to fall, those same shadows will be fleeing the city in perfect repose, meters ticking. Thelma’s dainty Delman’s—high gold heels each held to her feet by a single gilded ankle strap—become so soaked as she wades through the gutter’s black rivulet that she takes them off, and then scampers across the shining tar in her bare feet. No, cross that out, her feet are not bare, she would be wearing pantyhose; with a madcap impulse she halts, beneath the swimming
DONT WALK
sign, and reaches up into her Shantung skirt and peels herself free, disentangling first the left leg, then the right. Now her feet are truly bare. Tomboyishly she, who as the lithe Lessup girl had run wild in the hills of Kentucky, wads the drenched nylon and chucks it overhand into one of those UFO-like trash barrels the filth-beleaguered metropolis provides. Tad, catching up to her, his size thirteen iguana-skin penny loafers still soggily in place, laughs aloud at her reckless gesture. Her gold shoes follow into the bin; his immense freckled baritone rings out into the tumult of water and taxi tires and squealing hookers caught loitering in their scarlet stretch pants a few doors up Third Avenue with no more for shelter than a M
ASSAGE
P
ARLOR
sign. “I—want—
out
,” she suddenly shouts up at him. Her raven hair is pasted about her fine skeletal face like the snake-ringlets of Medusa.

“Out—of—
what
?” Tad thunders back.

Still the pedestrian sign says
DONT WALK,
though the traffic light on the avenue has turned red. The ghostly pallor of her face, upturned toward his in the streaming rain, takes on an abrupt greenish tinge. “Out—of—
you
,” she manages to shout at last, the leap of her life, her heart falling sickeningly within her at the utterance; Tad’s face looms above her like a blimp, bloated and unawares, his chestnut mop flattened on his wide
freckled brow and releasing down one temple a thin tan trickle of the color-freshener his hair stylist favors. He is just a boy growing old, she thinks to herself, with a boy’s warrior brutality, and a boy’s essential ignorance. Without such ignorance, how could men act? How could they create empires, or for that matter cross the street?

Their sign has changed from red to white, a blur spelling perilously
WALK.
Tad and Thelma run across Third Avenue to take refuge in the shallow arcade of a furrier. The street surface is a rippling film; wrappers are bunched at the clogged corner grate like bridesmaids’ handkerchiefs. Feeling tar on the soles of her feet and being pelted by rain all the length of her naked calves has released in Thelma an elemental self which scorns Tad and his charge cards and his tax breaks. He, on the other hand, his Savile Row suit collapsed against his flesh and an absurd succession of droplets falling from the tip of his nose, looks dismal and crazed. “You bitch,” he says to her in the altered acoustics of this dry spot. “You’re not going to pull this put-up-or-shut-up crap on me again; you know it’s just a matter of time.”

Meaning, she supposes, until he leaves Ginger—Ginger Greenbaum, that stubborn little pug of a wife, always wearing caftans and muu-muus to hide her thirty pounds of overweight. Thelma marvels at herself, that she could ever sleep with a man who sleeps with that spoiled and pouting parody of a woman, whose money (made by her father in meatpacking) had fed Tad’s infant octopus. It seems comic. She laughs, and prods with a disrespectful forefinger the man’s drenched shirtfront of ribbed Egyptian cotton. His stomach is spongy; there comes by contrast into her mind the taut body of her slender Olive, their gentle mutual explorations in that exiguous, triangular West Side apartment where the light from
New Jersey enters as horizontally as bars of music and thus provides accompaniment for the breathing silence of the two intertwined women.

Tad slugs her. Or, rather, cuffs her shoulder, since she saw it coming and flinched; the blow bumps her into a wire burglar-guard behind which a clay-faced mannequin preens in an ankle-length burnoose lined with chinchilla. The rain has lessened, the golden taxis going by are all empty. “You were thinking of that other bitch,” Tad has shrewdly surmised.

“I was not,” Thelma fervently lies, determined now to protect at all costs that slender other, that stranger to their city; she has remembered how the subtle crests of Olive’s ilia cast horizontal shadows across her flat, faintly undulant abdomen. “Let’s go back to your place and get dry,” she suggests.

And Henry Bech in his mind’s eye saw the drying streets, raggedly dark as if after a storm of torn carbon paper, and each grate exuding a vapor indistinguishable from leaks of municipal steam. And the birds, with that unnoticed bliss of New York birds, have begun to sing, to sing from every pocket park and potted curbside shrub, while sunlight wanly resumes and Thelma—all but her sloe eyes and painted fingernails hidden within the rustling, iridescent cumulus of a bubble bath in Tad’s great sunken dove-colored tub—begins to cry. It is a good feeling, like champagne in the sinuses. His own sinuses prickling, Bech lifted his eyes and read the words
Apply this side toward living space
on the aluminum-foil backing of his room’s insulation. He turned his attention out the window toward the lawn, where little Donald and a grubby friend were gouging holes in the mowed grass to make a miniature golf course. Bech thought of yelling at them from his height but decided it wasn’t his lawn, his world; his world was here,
with Tad and Thelma. She emerges from the bathroom drying herself with a russet towel the size of a Ping-Pong-table top. “You big pig,” she tells Tad with that self-contempt of women which is their dearest and darkest trait, “I love your shit.” He in his silk bathrobe is setting out on his low glass Mies table—no, it is a round coffee table with a leather center and a stout rim of oak, and carved oaken legs with griffin feet—champagne glasses and, in a little silver eighteenth-century salt dish bought at auction at Sotheby’s, the white, white cocaine. Taxi horns twinkle far below. Thelma sits—whether in bald mockery of the imminent fuck or to revisit that sensation of barefoot mountain-girl uncontrollability she experienced on the rainswept street—naked on an ottoman luxuriously covered in zebra hide. Each hair is a tiny needle. Bech shifted from buttock to buttock in his squeaking chair, empathizing.

By such reckless daily fits, as seven seasons slowly wheeled by in the woods and gardens of Ossining, the manuscript accumulated: four emptied boxes of bond paper were needed to contain it, and still the world it set forth seemed imperfectly explored, a cave illumined by feeble flashlight, with ever more incidents and vistas waiting behind this or that stalagmite, or just on the shadowy far shore of the unstirring alkaline pool. At night sometimes he would read Bea a few pages of it, and she would nod beside him in bed, exhaling the last drag of her cigarette (she had taken up smoking, after years on the nicotine wagon, in what mood of renewed desperation or fresh anger he could not fathom), and utter crisply, “It’s good, Henry.”

“That’s all you can say?”

“It’s loose. You’re really rolling. You’ve gotten those people just where you want them.”

“Something about the way you say that—”

“What am I supposed to do, whoop for joy?” She doused her butt with a vehement hiss in the paper bathroom cup half-full of water she kept by her bedside in lieu of an ashtray, a trick learned at Vassar. “All those old sugarplums you fucked in New York, do you really think I enjoy reading about how great they were?”

“Honey, it’s
fan
tasy. I never knew anybody like these people. These people have money. The people I knew all subscribed to
Commentary
, before it went fascist.”

“Do you realize there isn’t a Gentile character in here who isn’t slavishly in love with some Jew?”

“Well, that’s—”

“Well, that’s life, you’re going to say.”

“Well, that’s the kind of book it is.
Travel Light
was
all
about Gentiles.”

“Seen as hooligans. As barbaric people. How can you think that, living two years now with Ann and Judy and Donald? He just adores you, you know that, don’t you?”

“He can beat me at Battleship, that’s what he likes. Hey, are you crying?”

She had turned her head away. She rattled at her night table, lighting another cigarette with her back still turned. The very space of the room had changed, as if their marriage had passed through a black hole and come out as anti-matter. Bea prolonged the operation, knowing she had roused guilt in him, and when she at last turned back gave him a profile as cool as the head on a coin. She had a toughness, Bea, that the toughness of her sister, Norma, had long eclipsed but that connubial privacy revealed. “I’ve another idea for your title,”
she said, biting off the words softly and precisely. “Call it
Jews and Those Awful Others
. Or how about
Jews versus Jerks
?”

Bech declined to make the expected protest. What he minded most about her in these moods was his sense of being programmed, of being fitted tightly into a pattern of reaction; she wanted, his loving suburban softly, to
nail him down
.

Frustrated by his silence, she conceded him her full face, her eyes rubbed pink in the effort of suppressing tears and her mouth a blurred cloud of flesh-color sexier than any lipstick. She put an arm about him. He reciprocated, careful of the cigarette close to his ear. “I just thought,” she confessed, her voice coming in little heated spurts of breath, “your living here so long now with me, with
us
, something nice would get into your book. But those people are so vicious, Henry. There’s no love that makes them tick, just ego and greed. Is that how you see us? I mean us, people?”

“No, no,” he said, patting, thinking that indeed he did, indeed he did.

“I recognize these gestures and bits of furniture you’ve taken from your life here, but it doesn’t seem at all like me. This idiotic Ginger character, I hate her, yet sometimes whole sentences I know I’ve said come out of her mouth.”

He stroked the roundness of the shoulder that her askew nightie strap bared, while her solvent tears, running freely, released to his nostrils the scent of discomposed skin moisturizer. “The only thing you and Ginger Greenbaum have in common,” he assured her, “is you’re both married to beasts.”

“You’re not a beast, you’re a dear kind man—”

“Away from my desk,” he interjected.

“—but I get the feeling when you read your book to me it’s a way of paying me
back
. For loving you. For marrying you.”

“Who was it,” he asked her, “who told me to do a few pages
a day and not worry about
le mot juste
and the capacity for taking infinite pains and all that crap? Who?”

“Please don’t be so angry,” Bea begged. The hand of the arm not around his shoulders and holding a cigarette, the hand of the arm squeezed between and under their facing tangent bodies, found his dormant prick and fumblingly enclosed it. “I love your book,” she said. “Those people are so silly and wild. Not like us at all. Poor little Olive. She had to end it herself.”