Bech Is Back (2 page)

This was the voice, but the man looked nothing like it—sallow and sour, yet younger than he should have been, with not an ounce of friendly fat on him, in dark trousers, white shirt, and suspenders. He was red-eyed from his nap, and his hair, barely flecked by gray, stood straight up. The lower half of his face had been tugged into deep creases by the drawstrings of some old concluded sorrow. “It’s nice of you to come around,” he said, as if Bech had just stepped around the corner—as if Cedar Meadow were not the bleak far rim of the world but approximately its center. “Come on in, why don’tcha now?”

Within, the house held an airless slice of the past. The furniture looked nailed-down and smelled pickled. Nothing had been thrown away; invisible hands, presumably those of the sister, kept everything in order—the glossy knickknacks and the doilies and the wedding photos of their dead parents and the landscapes a dead aunt had painted by number and the little crystal dishes of presumably petrified mints. Oppressive ranks of magazines—
Christian Age
,
Publishers Weekly
, the journal of the Snyder County Historical Society—lay immaculate on a lace-covered table, beneath an overdressed window whose sill was thick with plastic daffodils. In the corners of the room, exposed plumbing pipes had been papered in the same paper as the walls. The ceilings, though high, had been papered, too. Kafka was right, Bech saw: life is a matter of burrows. Federbusch beside him was giving off a strange withered scent—the delicate stink of affront. Bech guessed he had been too frankly looking around, and said, to cover himself, “I don’t see my books.”

Even this missed the right note. His host intoned, in the sonorous voice Bech was coming to hear as funereal, “They’re kept in a closet, so the sun won’t fade the chackets.”

A room beyond this stagnant front parlor had a wall of closet doors. Federbusch opened one, hastily closed it, and opened another. Here indeed was a trove of Bechiana—old Bech in
démodé
Fifties jackets, reprinted Bech in jazzy Seventies paperbacks with the silver lettering of witchcraft novels, Bech in French and German, Danish and Portuguese, Bech anthologized, analyzed, and deluxized, Bech laid to rest. The books were not erect in rows but stacked on their sides like lumber, like dubious ingots, in this lightless closet along with—oh, treachery!—similarly exhaustive, tightly packed, and beautifully unread collections of Roth, Mailer, Barth,
Capote.… The closet door was shut before Bech could catalogue every one of the bedfellows the promiscuous Federbusch had captivated.

“I don’t have any children myself,” the man was saying mournfully, “but for my brother’s boys it’ll make a wonderful inheritance some day.”

“I can hardly wait,” Bech said. But his thoughts were sad. His thoughts dwelt upon our insufficient tragedies, our dreadfully musty private lives. How wrong he had been to poke into this burrow, how right Federbusch was to smell hurt! The greedy author, not content with adoration in two dimensions, had offered himself in a fatal third, and maimed his recording angel. “My dealer just sent some new Penguins,” Federbusch said, mumbling in shame, “and it would save postage if …” Bech signed the paperbacks and wound his way through ravaged hills to the Mennonite normal school, where he mocked the students’ naïve faith and humiliated himself with drunkenness at the reception afterward at the Holiday Inn. But no atonement could erase his affront to Federbusch, who never troubled his telephone again.

In the days when Bech was still attempting to complete
Think Big
, there came to him a female character who might redeem the project, restore its lost momentum and focus. She was at first the meagerest wisp of a vision, a “moon face” shining with a certain lightly perspiring brightness over the lost horizon of his plot. The pallor of this face was a Gentile pallor, bearing the kiss of Nordic fogs and frosts, which ill consorted with the urban, and perforce Jewish, hurly-burly he was trying to organize. Great novels begin with tiny hints—the sliver of madeleine melting in Proust’s mouth,
the shade of louse-gray that Flaubert had in mind for
Madame Bovary
—and Bech had begun his messy accumulation of pages with little more than a hum, a hum that kept dying away, a hum perhaps spiritual twin to the rumble of the IRT under Broadway as it was felt two blocks to the west, on the sixth floor, by a bored bachelor. The hum, the background radiation to the universe he was trying to create, was, if not the meaning of life, the tenor of meaninglessness in our late-twentieth-century, post-numinous, industrial-consumeristic civilization, North American branch, Middle Atlantic subdivision. Now this hum was pierced by an eerie piping from this vague “moon face.”

Well, the woman would have to be attractive; women in fiction always are. From the roundness of her face, its innocent pressing frontality, would flow a certain “bossiness,” a slightly impervious crispness that would set her at odds with the more subtle, ironical, conflicted, slippery intelligentsia who had already established power positions in the corporate structure of his virtually bankrupt fantasy. Since this moony young (for the crispness, this lettucy taste of hers, bespoke either youth or intense refrigeration) woman stood outside the strong family and business ties already established, she would have to be a mistress. But whose? Bech thought of assigning her to Tad Greenbaum, the six-foot-four, copiously freckled, deceptively boyish dynamo who had parlayed a gag-writer’s servitude into a daytime-television empire. But Tad already had a mistress—stormy, raven-haired, profoundly neurotic Thelma Stern. Also, by some delicate gleam of aversion, the moon face refused to adhere to Greenbaum. Bech offered her instead to Thelma’s brother Dolf, the crooked lawyer, with his silken mustaches, his betraying stammer, and his great clean glass desk. Bech even put the two of them into
bed together; he loved describing mussed sheets, and the sea-fern look of trees seen from the window of a sixth-floor apartment, and the way various vent constructions on the adjacent roofs resembled tin men in black pajamas engaged in slow-motion burglary. But though the metaphors prospered, the relationship didn’t take. No man was good enough for this woman, unless it were Bech himself. She must have a name. Moon face, Morna—no, he already had a Thelma, his new lady was cooler, aloof … doom, Poe, Lenore.
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word
, “
Lenore!
” Lenore would do. Her work? That kindly bossiness, that confident frontality—the best he could think of was to make her an assistant producer for his imaginary network. But that wasn’t right: it didn’t account for her supernatural serenity.

She became as real to him as the nightglow on his ceiling during insomnia. He wrote scenes of her dressing and undressing, in the space between the mussed bedsheets and the window overlooking treetops and chimney pots; he conjured up a scene where Lenore primly lost her temper and told Tad Greenbaum he was a tyrant. Tad fired her, then sent Thelma around to persuade her not to write an exposé for
TV Tidbits
. Experimenting with that curious androgynous cool Lenore possessed, Bech put her into bed with Thelma, to see what happened. Plenty happened, perhaps more gratifyingly to the author than to either character; if he as male
voyeur
had not been present, they might have exchanged verbal parries and left each other’s yielding flesh untouched. However, Thelma, Bech had previously arranged, had become pregnant by her ex-husband, Polonius Stern, and could not be allowed a Sapphic passion that would pull Lenore down into the plot. He cancelled the pregnancy but the moon face hung above the plot still detached, yet infusing its tangle with a glow, a calm,
a hope that this misbegotten world of Bech’s might gather momentum. She seemed, Lenore, to be drawing closer.

One night, reading at the New School, he became conscious of her in the corner of his eye. Over by the far wall, at the edge of the ocean of reading-attending faces—the terrible tide of the up-and-coming, in their thuggish denims and bristling beards, all their boyhood misdemeanors and girlhood grievances still to unpack into print, and the editors thirsty to drink their fresh blood, their contemporary slant—Bech noticed a round female face, luminous, raptly silent. He tried to focus on her, lost his place in the manuscript, and read the same sentence twice. It echoed in his ears, and the audience tittered; they were embarrassed for him, this old dead whale embalmed in the anthologies and still trying to spout. He kept his eyes on his pages, and when he lifted his gaze, at last, to relieved applause, Lenore had vanished, or else he had lost the place in the hall where she had been seated.
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!
A week later, at his reading at the YMHA, she had moved closer, into the third or fourth row. Her wide, white, lightly perspiring face pressed upward in its intensity of attention, refusing to laugh even when those all around her did. As Bech on the high stage unrolled, in his amplified voice, some old scroll of foolery, he outdid himself with comic intonations to make his milk-pale admirer smile; instead, she solemnly lowered her gaze now and then to her lap, and made a note. Afterward, in the unscheduled moment of siege that follows a reading, she came backstage and waited her turn in the pushing crowd of autograph-seekers. When at last he dared turn to her, she had her notebook out. Was this truly Lenore? Though he had failed to imagine some details (the little gold hoop earrings, and the tidy yet full-bodied and somewhat sensually casual
way in which she had bundled her hair at the back of her head), her physical presence flooded the translucent, changeable skin of his invention with a numbing concreteness. He grabbed reflexively at her notebook, thinking she wanted him to sign it, but she held on firmly, and said to him, “I thought you’d like to know. I noted three words you mispronounced. ‘Hectare’ is accented on the first syllable and the ‘e’ isn’t sounded. In ‘flaccid’ the first ‘c’ is hard. And ‘sponge’ is like ‘monkey’—the ‘o’ has the quality of a short ‘u.’ ”

“Who are you?” Bech asked her.

“A devotee.” She smiled, emphasizing the long double “e.” Another devotee pulled Bech’s elbow on his other side, and when he turned back, Lenore was gone.
Darkness there and nothing more
.

He revised what he had written. The scene with Thelma was sacred filth, dream matter, not to be touched; but the professional capacities of the moon face had come clearer—she was a schoolteacher. A teacher of little children, children in the first-to-fourth-grade range, in some way unusual, whether unusually bright or with learning disabilities he couldn’t at first decide. But as he wrote, following Lenore into her clothes and the elevator and along the steam-damp, slightly tipping streets of West Side Manhattan, the name above the entrance of the building she entered became legible: she taught in a Steiner School. Her connection with the other characters of
Think Big
must be, therefore, through their children. Bech rummaged back through the manuscript to discover whether he had given Tad Greenbaum and his long-suffering wife, Ginger, boys or girls for children, and what ages. He should have made a chart. Faulkner and Sinclair Lewis used to. But Bech had always resisted those practical aids which might interfere with the essential literary process of daydreaming; Lenore
belonged to a realm of subconscious cumulus. She would have wide hips: the revelation came to him as he slipped a week’s worth of wastepaper into a plastic garbage bag. But did the woman who had come up to him, in fact, have wide hips? It had been so quick, so magical, he had been conscious only of her torso in the crowd. He needed to see her again, as research.

When she approached him once more, in the great hot white tent annually erected for the spring ceremonial of that marmoreal Heaven on Washington Heights, she was wearing a peasant skirt and braless purple bodice, as if to hasten in the summer. To be dressy she had added a pink straw hat; the uplifted gesture with which she kept the wide hat in place opened up a new dimension in the character of Lenore. She had been raised amid greenery, on, say, a Hardyesque farm in northeastern Connecticut. Though her waist was small, her hips were ample. The sultriness of the tent, the spillage of liquor from flexible plastic cups, the heavy breathing of Bech’s fellow immortals made a romantic broth in which her voice was scarcely audible; he had to stoop, to see under her hat and lip-read. Where was her fabled “bossiness” now? She said, “Mr. Bech, I’ve been working up my nerve to ask, would you ever consider coming and talking to my students? They’re so sweet and confused, I try to expose them to people with values, any values. I had a porno film director, a friend of a friend, in the other day, so it’s nothing to get uptight about. Just be yourself.” Her eyes were dyed indigo by the shadow of the hat, and her lips, questing, had a curvaceous pucker he had never dreamed of.

Bech noticed, also, a dark-haired young woman standing near Lenore, wearing no makeup and a man’s tweed jacket. A friend, or the friend of a friend? The young woman, seeing
the conversation about to deepen, drifted away. Bech asked, “How old are your students?”

“Well, they’re in the third grade now, but it’s a Steiner School—”

“I know.”

“—and I move up with them. You might be a little wasted on them now; maybe we should wait a few years, until they’re in fifth.”

“And I’ve had time to work on my pronunciation.”

“I do apologize if that seemed rude. It’s just a shock, to realize that a master of words doesn’t hear them in his head the way you do.” As she said this, her own pronunciation seemed a bit slurred. An empty plastic glass sat in her hand like an egg collected at dusk.

Perhaps it was the late-afternoon gin, perhaps the exhilaration of having just received a medal (the Melville Medal, awarded every five years to that American author who has maintained the most meaningful silence), but this encounter enchanted Bech. The questing fair face perspiring in the violet shade of the pink hat, the happy clatter around him of writers not writing, the thrusting smell of May penetrating the tent walls, the little electric push of a fresh personality—all felt too good to be true. He felt, deliciously, overpowered, as reality always overpowers fiction.