Bech Is Back (20 page)

N
O SOONER
had the great success of
Think Big
sunk into the Upper East Side’s social consciousness than engraved invitations had begun to arrive at the Bechs’ Ossining house. After Bech moved out, Bea in her scrupulous blue handwriting would forward these creamy stiff envelopes, including those addressed to “Mr. and Mrs.,” to Bech’s two drab sublet rooms on West 72nd Street. Many of the invitations he dropped into the plastic wastebasket, after lovingly thumbing them as examples of the engraver’s art and the stationer’s trade; but he tended to accept those that carried with them a shred of old personal connection. His marriage having dissolved around him like the airy walls of a completed novel, anyone who knew Bech “when” interested him, as a clue to his past and hence to his future.

Bech remembered being photographed by the young and eager Angus Desmouches for
Flair
, long defunct, in the mid-Fifties, when
Travel Light
was coming out, to a trifling stir. The youthful photographer had himself looked at first sight as if seen through a wide-angle lens, his broad, tan, somehow Aztec face and wide head of wiry black hair dwindling to a pinched waist and tiny, tireless feet; clicking and clucking, he had pursued Bech up and down the vales and bike paths of Prospect Park, and then for contrast had taken him by subway to lower Manhattan and posed him stony-faced among granite skyscrapers. Bech had scarcely been back to the financial district in the decades since, though now he had a lawyer there, who, with much well-reimbursed head-wagging, was trying to disentangle him and his recent financial gains from Bea and her own tough crew of head-waggers. In a little bookshop huddled low in the gloom of Wall Street Bech had flipped through a smudged display copy of
White on White
($128.50 before Christmas, $150 thereafter): finely focused
platinum prints of a cigarette butt on a plain white saucer, a white kitten on a polar-bear rug, an egg amid feathers, a naked female foot on a tumbled bedsheet, a lump of sugar held in bared teeth, a gob of what might be semen on the margin of a book, a white-hot iron plunged into snow.

Bech went to the party. The butler at the door of the apartment looked like a dancer in one of the old M-G-M musical extravaganzas, in his white tie, creamy tails, and wing collar. The walls beyond him had been draped in bleached muslin; the apartment’s regular furniture had been replaced with white wicker and with great sailcloth pillows; boughs and dried flowers spray-painted white had been substituted for green plants; most remarkably, in the area of the duplex where the ceiling formed a dome twenty feet high, a chalky piano and harp shared a platform with a tall vertical tank full of fluttering, ogling albino tropical fish. Angus Desmouches bustled forward, seemingly little changed—the same brown pug face and gladsome homosexual energy—except that his crown of black hair, sticking out stiff as if impregnated with drying paste, had gone stark white. So stark Bech guessed it had been dyed rather than aged that color; his eyebrows matched, it was too perfect. The years had piled celebrity and wealth upon the little photographer but not added an inch to his waist. He looked resplendent in a satin plantation suit. Bech felt dowdy in an off-white linen jacket, white Levi’s, and tennis shoes he had made a separate trip out to Ossining to retrieve.

“Gad, it’s good to press your flesh,” Desmouches exclaimed, seeming in every cubic centimeter of his own flesh to mean it. “How long ago was that, anyway?”

“Nineteen fifty-five,” Bech said. “Not even twenty-five years ago. Just yesterday.”

“You were such a sweet subject, I remember that. So patient and funny and wise. I got some delicious angles on especially the downtown take, but the foolish,
fool
ish magazine didn’t use any of it, they just ran a boring head-and-shoulders under some weeping
wil
low. I’ve always been afraid you blamed
me
.”

“No blame,” Bech said. “Absolutely no blame in this business. Speaking of which, that’s some book of yours.”

The other man’s miniature but muscular hands fluttered skyward in simultaneous supplication and disavowal. “The idea came to me when I dropped an aspirin in the bathtub and couldn’t find it for the longest time. The idea, you know, of exploring how little contrast you could have and still have a photograph.” His hands pressed as if at a pane of glass beside him. “Of taking something to the limit.”

“You did it,” Bech told the air, for Desmouches like a scarf up a magician’s sleeve had been whisked away, to greet other guests in this white-on-white shuffle. Bech was sorry he had come. The house in Ossining had been empty, Donald off at school and Bea off at her new job, being a part-time church secretary under some steeple up toward Brewster. Max had been there, curled up on the cold front porch, and had wrapped his mouth around Bech’s hand and tried to drag him in the front door. The door was locked, and Bech no longer had a key. He knew how to get in through the cellar bulkhead, past the smelly oil tanks. The house, empty, seemed an immense, vulnerable shell, a
Titanic
throttled down to delay its rendezvous with the iceberg. Its emptiness did not, oddly, much welcome him. In the brainlessly short memories of these chairs and askew rugs he was already forgotten; minute changes on all sides testified to his absence. Bea’s clothes hung in her closet like cool cloth knives seen on edge, and in the way his remaining shoes and his tennis racket had been left
tumbled on the floor of his own closet he read a touch of disdain. He turned up the thermostat a degree, lest the pipes freeze, before sneaking back out through the cellar and walking the two miles to the train station, through the slanting downtown, where he had always felt like a strolling minstrel. His West 72nd Street rooms had been rented in haste from a disreputable friend of Flaggerty’s, and though Bech deplored the tattered old acid-trip decor—straw mats, fringed hassocks—he was surprised by how much better he slept there than in bucolic splendor, surrounded by cubic yards of creaking space for whose repair and upkeep he had been, those Ossining years, at least half responsible.

The drinks served at this party were not white, nor was the bartender. An ebony hand passed him the golden bourbon. The host and hostess came and briefly cooed their pleasure at Bech’s company. Henderson Hyde may have been a third but he came from some gritty town in the Midwest and had the ebullient urbanity of those who have wrapped themselves in Manhattan as in a sumptuous cloak. His wife, too, was the third—a former model whose prized slenderness was with age becoming gaunt. Her great lip-glossed smile stretched too many tendons in her neck; designer dresses hung on her a trifle awkwardly, now that they were truly hers; her tenure as wife had reached the expensive stage. Tonight’s gown, composed of innumerable crescent slices as of quartz, suggested the robe of an ice-maiden helper that Santa had taken on while rosy-cheeked Mrs. Claus looked the other way. Until he had married Bea, Bech had imagined that Whitsuntide had something to do with Christmas. Not at all, it turned out. And there was an entire week called Holy Week, corresponding to the seven days of Pesach. They were in it, actually.

“Smash of a book,” said Hyde, giving the flesh above Bech’s
elbow a comradely squeeze as expertly as a doctor taps the nerves below your kneecap.

“You got through it?” Bech asked, startled. His funny bone tingled.

Mrs. Hyde intervened. “I told him all about it,” she said. “He couldn’t get to sleep for all my chuckling beside him as I read it. That scene with the cameramen!”

“It’s top of the list I’m going to get to on the Island this summer. Christ, the books keep piling up,” Hyde snarled. He was wearing, Bech only now noticed in the sea of white, a brilliant bulky turban and a caftan embroidered with the logo of his network.

“It’s hard to read anything,” Bech admitted, “if you’re gainfully employed.”

Somebody had begun to tinkle the piano: “The White Cliffs of Dover.”
There’ll be bluebirds over …

“So sorry your wife couldn’t be with us,” Hyde’s wife said in parting.

“Yeah, well,” Bech said, not wanting to explain, and expecting they knew enough anyway. “Easy come, easy go.” He had meant this to be soothing, but an alarmed look flitted across Mrs. Hyde III’s gracious but overelastic features.

The harp joined in, and the melody became “White Christmas.”
Just like the ones we used to know …
A man of his acquaintance, a fellow writer, the liberal thinker Maurie Leonard, came up to him. Maurie, though tall, and thick through the shoulders and chest, had such terrible, deskbound posture that all effect of force was limited to his voice, which emerged as an urgent rasp. Metal on metal. Mind on matter. “Some digs, huh?” he said. “You know how Hyde made his money, don’tcha?” More than a liberal, a radical whose twice-weekly columns were deplored by elected officials and whose bound
essays were removed from the shelves of public-school libraries, Maurie yet took an innocent prideful glee in the awful workings of capitalism.

“No. How?” Bech asked.

“Game shows!” Maurie ground the words out through a mirth that pressed his cheeks up tight against his eyes, whose sockets were as wrinkled as walnuts. “
Hyde-Jinks, Hyde-’n’-seek
. Haven’t you heard of ’em? Christ, you just wrote a whole book about the TV industry!”

“That was fiction,” Bech said.

Maurie, too, exerted pressure on the flesh above Bech’s elbow, muttering confidentially, “You wouldn’t know it to look at the uptight little prick, but Hyde’s a genius. He’s like Hitler—the worst thing you can think of, he’s there ahead of you already. Know what his latest gimmick is?”

“No,” Bech said, beginning to wish that this passage were not in dialogue but in simple expository form.

“Mud wrestling!” Maurie rasped, and a dozen wrinkles fanned upward from each outer corner of his Tartarish, streetwise eyes. “In bikinis, right there on the boob tube. Not your usual hookers, either, but the girl next door; they come on the show with their husbands and mothers and goddamn gym teachers and talk about how they want to win for the hometown and Jesus and the American Legion and the next thing you see there they are, slugging another bimbo with a fistful of mud and taking a bite out of her ass. Christ, it’s wonderful. One or two falls and they could be fucking stark naked. Wednesdays at five-thirty, just before the news, and then reruns Saturday midnight, for couples in bed. Bech, I defy you to watch without getting a hard-on.”

This man loves America
, Bech thought to himself,
and he writes as if he hates it
. “Easy money,” he said aloud.

“You can’t imagine how much. If you think this place is O.K., you should see Hyde’s Amagansett cottage. And the horse farm in Connecticut.”

“So what I wrote was true,” Bech said to himself.

“If anything, you understated,” Leonard assured him, his very ears now involved in the spreading folds of happiness, so that his large furry lobes dimpled.

“How sad,” said Bech. “What’s the point of fiction?”

“It hastens the Revolution,” Leonard proclaimed, and in farewell, with hoisted palm: “Next year in Jerusalem!”

Bech needed another drink. The piano and harp were doing “Frosty the Snowman,” and then the harp alone took on “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” The room was filling up with whiteness like a steam bath. At the edge of the mob around the bar, a six-foot girl in a frilly Dior nightie gave Bech her empty glass and asked him to bring her back a Chablis spritzer. He did as he was told and when he returned to stand beside her saw that she had on a chocolate-brown leotard beneath the nightie. Her hair was an unreal red, and heavy, falling to her shoulders in a waxen Ginger Rogers roll; her bangs came down to her straight black eyebrows. She was heavy all over, Bech noticed, but comely, with a greasy-lidded humorless gaze. “Whose wife are you?” Bech asked her.

“That’s a chauvinistic approach.”

“Just trying to be polite.”

“Nobody’s. Whose husband are you?”

“Nobody’s. In a way.”

“Yeah? Tell me the way.”

“I’m still married, but we’re split up.”

“What split you up?”

“I don’t know. I think I was bad for her ego. Women now I guess need to do something on their own. As you implied before.”

“Yeah.” Her pronunciation was dead level, hovering between agreement and a grunt.

“What do
you
do, then?”

“Aah. I been in a couple a Hendy’s shows.”

Ah. She was a mud wrestler. Maurie Leonard in his enthusiasm for the Revolution sometimes got a few specifics wrong. The mud wrestlers
were
hookers. The give-away-nothing eyes, the calm heft held erect as a soldier’s body beneath the frills. “You win or lose?” Bech asked her. He had the idea that wrestlers always proceeded by script.

“We don’t look at it that way, win or lose. It’s more like a dance. We have a big laugh at the end, and usually dunk the referee.”

“I’ve always wondered, what happens if you get mud in your eyes?”

“You blink. You the writer?”