Bech Is Back (19 page)

“I was?”

“
I
thought so,” Bea said. “You used to frighten me. Not just sad. Other things, too. A lovely man, but, I don’t know, sterile. You’re so sweet with Donald.”

Her arm across his chest was wonderfully heavy. He felt pegged down, and the image of Donald was another luminous nail. “We get along,” he admitted. “But the kid’s growing up.”

Bea would not allow even so faint a discord to be the final note. “He loves you,” she uttered, and as she slept he could see by moonlight that a smile remained on her face, rounding the cheek not buried in the pillow.

In his dream he is free. The landscape seems European—low gray sky, intense green fields, mud underfoot, churned and marked by tire treads and military boots. He has escaped from somewhere; fear is mixed sourly with his guilt, guilt at having left all those others behind, still captive. Yet in the meantime there are the urgencies of escape to cope with: dogs pursuing him are barking, and a hedge offers a place to hide. He squeezes in, his heart enormous and thumping. Candy wrappers litter the ground underfoot. The hedge is too wintry and thin; he will be discovered. In that thick gray European wool overhead, a single unseen bomber drones. It is, he instinctively knows, his only hope, though it will bring destruction. He awakes, and recognizes the drone as the furnace floors below. The neighborhood dogs have been harrying something, a raccoon perhaps, and downstairs Max had sleepily joined in with a gruff bark or two. Yet terror and guilt were slow to drain from Bech’s system.

That afternoon, Bea had to pick up Donald after school
and take him to the orthodontist and then to buy some school clothes; he had outgrown last year’s. The child’s smile had sprouted touching silver bands, and the first few pimples, harbingers of messy manhood, marred the skin once as perfect as a girl’s. They would not be home until six at the earliest. Bech roamed the great house with a vague sense of having lost something, a Minotaur restless in his maze. Around four, the doorbell rang. He expected to open it upon a UPS delivery-man or one of Bea’s Ossining sipping companions; but the woman on the porch was Bea’s sister, Norma Latchett.

Where middle ages had brought out Bea’s plumpness, it had whittled Norma down, making her appear even more stringy, edgy, and exasperated than formerly. Her dark hair was turning gray and she was not dyeing it but pulling it back from her brow severely. Yet her black silk suit was smart, her lipstick and eye shadow were this fall’s correct shade and amount, and across her face, when it proved to be he who opened the door, flickered all the emotions of a woman first alarmed by and then standing up to a former lover. “Where’s Bea?” she asked.

Bech explained, and invited her in to wait until six or so.

Norma hesitated, holding a big calfskin briefcase and looking slightly too trim, like the Avon lady. “I’m heading north to give a talk in Poughkeepsie and thought I’d say hello. Also I have some papers for Bea to sign. You two never come to the city anymore.”

“Bea hates it,” Bech said. “What are you giving your talk about? Come in, for heaven’s sake. Just me and Max are here, and we aren’t biting today.”

“Oh, the usual thing,” Norma said, looking vexed but entering the great varnished foyer. Since the workmen had done the refinishing it gleamed like the cabin of a yacht. “Those
awful icons.” For years, Norma had held jobs off and on in museums, and in these last ten years, as hope of marriage faded, had put herself seriously to school, and become an expert on Byzantine and Russian Orthodox art. Icons becoming ever more “collectible,” she included bankers as well as students in the audience for her expertise. She lit a cigarette whose paper was tinted pale green, and looked switchily about for an ashtray.

“Let’s go into the living room,” Bech said. “I’ll build a fire.”

“You don’t have to entertain me, I could push on to Vassar and have the art department chairman give me dinner. Except I hate to eat before I talk, the blood all rushes to your stomach and makes you very stupid.”

“I don’t think anything could make you
very
stupid,” he said gallantly, remembering as he followed her in past the pompous staircase how her body had concealed surprising amplitudes—her hips, for instance, were wide, as if the pelvic bones had been spread by a childbirth that had never occurred, so that her thighs scarcely touched, giving her a touching knock-kneed look, naked or in a bathing suit. He took three of the logs he had split last winter in hopes that the exercise would prolong his life, and laid a fire while she settled into one of the wing chairs, his favorite, the one covered in maroon brocade, that he usually read in. The match flared. The crumpled
Times
caught. The pine kindling began to crackle. He stood up, asking, “Tea?” His heart was thumping, as in last night’s dream. The house in all its rooms held silent around them like the eye of a storm. Max padded in, claws clicking, and dropped himself with a ponderous sigh on the rug before the quickening flames. One golden eye with a red lower lid questioned Bech before closing. “Or a real drink?” Bech pursued. “I’m not sure we have white crème de menthe.
Bea and I don’t drink that much.” Norma had, he remembered, a fondness for vodka stingers, for Black Russians, for anything whose ingredients he was likely not to have.

“I never drink before I talk,” she said sharply. “I’m wondering, if I’m going to stay, if I should bring my slides in from the car. You leave them in a cold car too long, they sometimes crack in the heat of the projector.”

As Bech retrieved the gray metal box from the trunk of her car, Max trotted along with him, letting one of Norma’s tires have his autograph and running a quick check on the woodchuck trying to hibernate underneath the porch. In returning, Bech closed the front door on the dog’s rumpled, affronted face. Three’s a crowd.

The slides tucked safely beneath her chair, beside her swollen briefcase, Norma asked, “Well. How does it feel?”

“How does what feel?” This time her cigarette was violet in tint. They must come mixed in the box, like gumdrops.

“Having pulled it off.”

“What off?” The nylon sheen of her ankles picked up an orange glimmer from the fireplace flames; her eyes held wet and angry sparks.

“Don’t play dumb,” she said. “That book. She got you to make a million. Busy Bea, buzz, buzz.”

“She didn’t get me to do anything, it just happened. Is happening. They say there’s going to be a movie. Sure you don’t want any tea?”

“Stop being grotesque. Sit down. I have your chair.”

“How can you tell?”

“The look on your face when I sat here. It
didn’t
just happen, she’s bragging all the time about how she got you your little
room
, and told you to write a few pages every
day
, and keep going no matter how
rot
ten it was, and how now the
money’s rolling in. How does it feel, being a sow’s ear somebody’s turned into a silk purse?”

He had thought they might trade a few jabs with the big gloves on; but this was a real knife fight. Norma was furious. The very bones in her ankles seemed to gnash as she crossed and recrossed her legs. “Did you read the book?” Bech mildly asked her.

“As much as I could. It’s lousy, Henry. The old you would never have let it be published. It’s slapdash, it’s sentimental, it’s
cozy
. That’s what I couldn’t forgive, the coziness. Look how everybody loves it. You know that’s a terrible sign.”

“Mm,” he said, a syllable pressed from him like a whistle from the chimney, like a creak from the house.

“I don’t blame you; I blame Bea. It was she who forced it out of you, she and her cozy idea of marriage, to make a monument to herself. What if the monument
was
made of the bodies of all your old girlfriends,
she’s
the presiding spirit, she’s the one who reaps the profit. Top dog. Bea always had to be top dog. You should have seen her play tennis, before she got so fat.” Norma’s eyes blazed. The demons of vengeance and truth had entered this woman, a dazzling sight.

“Bodies of old girlfriends—?” Bech hesitantly prompted.

“Christ, Henry, it was a pyre. Smoke rising to heaven, to the glory of big fat Bea. Thanks by the way for calling me Thelma, so all my friends can be sure it’s me.”

“Thelma wasn’t exactly …” he began. And, thinking of Bea herself, her soft body in bed, the way her eyelids and nose looked rubbed and pink when she was sad or cold, he knew that the rebirth and growth of
Think Big
weren’t quite as Norma had described them, making something sudden and crass out of all those patient months spent tapping away amid the treetops and the flying squirrels. Still, she put the book in
a fresh harsh light, and a fresh light is always liberating. “Bea
is
pleased about the money,” he admitted. “She wants to refurnish the entire house.”

“You bet she does,” Norma said. “You should have seen the way she took over the dollhouse my parents had meant for both of us. She’s greedy, Henry, and materialistic, and small-minded. Why does she keep you out here with these ridiculous commuters? The real question is, Why do you permit it? You’ve always been weak, but weak in your own way before, not in somebody else’s. I guess I better have tea after all. To shut me up.” She pinched her long lips tight to dramatize and turned her head so her profile looked pre-Raphaelite against the firelight. Some strands of her hair had strayed from severity, as if a light wind were blowing.

He perched forward on the lemon-colored wing chair and asked, “Didn’t you at least like the part where Mort Zenith finally gets Olive alone in the beach cabaña?”

“It was cranked out, Henry. Even where it was good, it felt cranked out. But don’t mind me. I’m just an old discarded mistress. You’ve got Prescott and Cavett with you and they’re the ones that count.”

In the barny old kitchen, its butcher-block countertops warping and its hanging copper pans needing Brillo, the tea water took forever to boil: Bech was burning to get back to his treasure of truth, arrived like an arrow in Ossining. He was trembling. Dusk was settling in outside. Max woofed monotonously at the back door, where he was usually at this hour let in and fed. When Bech returned with the two steaming cups and a saucer of Ritz crackers to the living room, Norma stood up. Her wool suit wore a fuzzy corona; her face in shadow loomed featureless. He set the tray down carefully on the inverted bushel basket and, giving the response that
seemed expected, held and kissed her. Her mouth was wider and wetter than Bea’s and, by virtue of longer acquaintance, more adaptable. “I have a question for you,” he said. “Do you ever fuck before you talk?”

They were so careful. They let Max in and closed the kitchen door. Upstairs, they chose Donald’s bed because, never made, it would not show mussing. The boy’s shelves still held the stuffed toys and mechanical games of childhood. A tacked-up map of the world, in the projection that looks like a flattened orange peel, filled Bech’s vision with its muted pinks and blues when his eyelids furtively opened.
So this is adultery
, he thought: this homely, friendly socketing. An experience he would have missed, but for marriage. A sacred experience, like not honoring your father and mother. Good old Norma, she still had a faintly sandy texture to her buttocks and still liked to have her nipples endlessly, endlessly flicked by the attendant’s tongue. She came silently, even sullenly, without any of Bea’s angelic coos and yips. They kept careful track of the time by the clown-faced plastic clock on Donald’s maple dresser, and by five-thirty Bech was downstairs pouring Kibbles into Max’s bowl. The dog ate greedily, but would never forgive him. Bech cleared away the telltale untasted tea, washed and dried the cups, and put them back on their hooks. What else? Norma herself, whom he had last seen wandering in insouciant nudity toward the twins’ bathroom for a shower, was maddeningly slow to get dressed and come back downstairs; he wanted her desperately to go, to disappear, even forever. But she had brought in her briefcase some documents connected with old Judge Latchett’s estate—the release of some unprofitable mutual-fund shares—that needed Bea’s signature. So they waited together in the two wing chairs. Bech took the maroon this time. Max went and
curled up by the front door, pointedly. Norma cleared her throat and said, “I
did
, actually, like that bit with Zenith and your heroine. Really, it has a lot of lovely things in it. It’s just I hate to see you turn into one more scribbler. Your paralysis was so beautiful. It was … statuesque.”

Her conceding this, in softened tones, had the effect of making her seem pathetic. A mere woman, skinny and aging, hunched in a chair, his seed and sweat showered from her. In praising his book even weakly she had shed her dark magic. Bad news had been Norma’s beauty. She was getting nervous about the talk she had to give. “If they aren’t back by six-fifteen, I really
will
have to leave.”

But Donald and Bea returned at six-ten, bustling in the door with crackling packages while the dog leaped to lick their faces. Donald’s face had that stretched look of being brave; he had been told he must keep wearing retainers for two more years. Bea was of course surprised to find her sister and her husband sitting so primly on either side of a dying fire. “Didn’t Henry at least offer you a drink?”

“I didn’t want any. It might make me need to pee in the middle of my lecture.”

“You poor thing,” Bea said. “I’d be impossibly nervous.” She knew. Somehow, whether by the stagy purity of their waiting or the expression of Max’s ears or simple Latchett telepathy, she knew. Bea’s blue eyes flicked past Bech’s face like a piece of fair sky glimpsed between tunnels high in the mountains. And little Donald, he knew too, looking from one to the other of them with a wary brightness, feeling this entire solid house suspended above him on threads no more substantial than the invisible currents between these tall adults.