Bech Is Back (7 page)

The section of Toronto where Glenda drove him, proceeding raggedly uphill, contained large homes, British in their fussy neo-Gothic brickwork but New World in their untrammeled scale and large lawns—lawns dark as overinked etchings, shadowed by great trees strayed south from the infinite forests of the north. Within one of these miniature castles, a dinner party had been generated. The Anglican priest who had prepared the concordance asked him if he were aware of an unusual recurrence in his work of the adjectives
lambent, untrammeled, porous, jubilant
, and
recurrent
. Bech said no, he was not aware, and that if he could have thought of other adjectives, he would have used them instead—that a useful critical distinction should be made, perhaps, between recurrent imagery and authorial stupidity; that it must have taken him, the priest, an immense amount of labor to compile such a concordance, even of an
oeuvre
so slim. Ah, not really, was the answer: the texts had been readied by the seminarians in his seminar in post-Christian kerygmatics, and the collation and printout had been achieved by a scanning computer in twelve minutes flat.

The writer who had cried “
Touché!
” to Cocteau was ancient and ebullient. His face was as red as a mountain-climber’s, his hair fine as thistledown. He chastened Bech with his air of the Twenties, when authors were happy in their trade and boisterous in plying it. As the whiskey and wine and cordials accumulated, the old saint’s arm (in a shimmering grape-colored shirt) frequently encircled Glenda’s waist and bestowed a paternal hug; later, when she and Bech were inspecting together
(the glaze of alcohol intervening so that he felt he was bending above a glass museum case) a collector’s edition of the Canadian’s most famous lyric,
Pines
, Glenda, as if to “rub off” on the American the venerable poet’s blessing, caressed him somehow with her entire body, while two of their four hands held the booklet. Her thigh rustled against his, a breast gently tucked itself into the crook of his arm, his entire skin went blissfully porous, he felt as if he were toppling forward. “Time to go?” he asked her.

“Soon,” Glenda answered.

Peter was not inside the girls’ house, though the door was open and his dirty dishes were stacked in the sink. Bech asked, “Does he
live
here?”

“He eats here,” Hannah said.

“He lives right around the corner,” Moira elaborated. “Shall I go fetch him?”

“Not to please me,” Bech said; but she was gone, and the rain recommenced. The sound drew the little house snug into itself—the worn Oriental rugs, the rows of books about capital and underdevelopment, the New Guinean and Afghan artifacts on the wall, all the frail bric-a-brac of women living alone, in nests without eggs.

Hannah poured them two Scotches and tried to roll a joint. “Peter usually does this,” she said, fumbling, spilling. Bech as a child had watched Westerns in which cowpokes rolled cigarettes with one hand and a debonair lick. But his efforts at imitation were so clumsy that Hannah took the paper and the marijuana back from him and made of these elements a plump-tongued packet, a little white dribbling piece of pie, which they managed to smoke, amid many sparks. Bech’s throat burned, between sips of liquor. Hannah put on a record. The music went through its grooves, over and over. The rain continued
steady, though his consciousness of it was intermittent. At some point in the rumpled stretches of time, she cooked an omelet. She talked about her career, her life, the man she had left to live with Moira, Moira, herself. Her parents were from Budapest; they had been refugees in Portugal during World War II, and when it was over, only Australia would let them in.
An Australian Jewess
, Bech thought, swallowing Scotch to ease his burned throat. The concept seemed unappraisably near and far, like that of Australia itself. He was here, but Australia was there, a world’s fatness away from his empty, sour, friendly apartment at Riverside and 99th. He embraced Hannah and they seemed to bump together like two clappers in the same bell. She was fat, solid. Her body felt in his arms hingeless; she was one of those wooden peasant dolls, containing congruent dolls, for sale in Slavic Europe, where he had once been, and where she had been born. He asked her among their kisses, which came and went in his consciousness like the sound of the rain, which traveled circularly in grooves like the music, if they should wait up for Peter and Moira.

“No,” Hannah said.

If Moira had been there, she would have elaborated, but she wasn’t and therefore didn’t.

“Shall I come up?” Bech asked. For Glenda lived on the top floor of a Toronto castle a few blocks’ walk—a swim, through shadows and leaves—from the house they had left.

“All I can give you,” she said, “is coffee.”

“Just what I need, fortuitously,” he said. “Or should I say lambently? Jubilantly?”

“You poor dear,” Glenda said. “Was it so awful for you? Do you have to go to parties like that every night?”

“Most nights,” he told her, “I’m scared to go out. I sit home reading Dickens and watching Nixon. And nibbling pickles. And picking quibbles. Recurrently.”

“You do need the coffee, don’t you?” she said, still dubious. Bech wondered why. Surely she was a sure thing: that shimmering full-body touch.

Her apartment snuggled under the roof, bookcases and lean lamps looking easy to tip between the slanting walls. In a far room he glimpsed a bed, with a feathery Indian bedspread and velour pillows. Glenda, as firmly as she directed cameramen, led him the other way, to a small front room claustrophobically lined with books. She put on a record, explaining it was Gordon Lightfoot, Canada’s own. A sad voice, gentle to no clear purpose, imitated American country blues. Glenda talked about her career, her life, the man she had been married to.

“What went wrong?” Bech asked. Marriage and death fascinated him: he was an old-fashioned novelist in this.

She wanly shrugged. “He got too dependent. I was being suffocated. He was terribly nice, a truly nice person. But all he would do was sit and read and ask me questions about my feelings. These books, they’re mostly his.”

“You seem tired,” Bech said, picturing the feathery bed.

She surprised him by abruptly volunteering, “I have something wrong with my corpuscles, they don’t know what it is, I’m having tests. But I’m out of whack. That’s why I said I could offer you only coffee.”

Bech was fascinated, flattered, relieved. Sex needed participation, illness needed only a witness. A loving witness. Glenda was dear and directorial in her movement as she rose and flicked back her hair and turned the record over. The movement seemed to generate a commotion on the stairs, and then
a key in the lock and a brusque masculine shove on the door. She turned a notch paler, staring at Bech; her long pink nose stood out like an exclamation point. Too startled to whisper, she told Bech, “It must be
Peter
.”

Downstairs, more footsteps than two entered the little house, and from the grumble of a male voice, Bech deduced that Moira had at last returned with Peter. Hannah slept, her body filling the bed with a protective turnipy warmth he remembered from Brooklyn kitchens. The couple below them bumbled, clattered, tittered, put on a record. It was a Chilean-flute record Hannah had played for him earlier—music shrill, incessant, searching, psychedelic. This little orphan continent, abandoned at the foot of Asia, looked to the New World’s west coasts for culture, for company. California clothes, Andean flutes. “My pale land,” he had heard an Australian poet recite; and from airplanes it was, indeed, a pale land, speckled and colorless, a Wyoming with a seashore. A continent as lonely as the planet. Peter and Moira played the record again and again; otherwise, they were silent downstairs, deep in drugs or fucking. Bech got up and groped lightly across the surface of Hannah’s furniture for Kleenex or lens tissue or anything tearable to stuff into his ears. His fingers came to a paperback book and he thought the paper might be cheap enough to wad. Tearing off two corners of the title page, he recognized by the dawning light the book as one of his own, the Penguin
Brother Pig
, with that absurdly literal cover, of a grinning pig, as if the novel were
Animal Farm
or
Charlotte’s Web
. The paper crackling and cutting in his ears, he returned to the bed. Beside him, stately Hannah, half-covered and unconscious, felt like a ship, her breathing an engine, her lubricated body steaming toward the morning, her smokestack nipples relaxed in passage. The flute music
stopped. The world stopped turning. Bech counted to ten, twenty, thirty in silence, and his consciousness had begun to disintegrate when a man harshly laughed and the Chilean flute, and the pressure in Bech’s temples, resumed.

“This is Peter Syburg,” Glenda said. “Henry Bech.”

“
Je
sais, je sais bien
,” Peter said, shaking Bech’s hand with the painful vehemence of the celebrity-conscious. “I saw your gig on the tube. Great. You talked a blue streak and didn’t tip your hand once. What a con job. Cool. I mean it. The medium is
you
, man. Hey, that’s a compliment. Don’t look that way.”

“I was just going to give him coffee,” Glenda interposed.

“How about brandy?” Bech asked. “Suddenly I need my spirits fortified.”

“Hey, don’t go into your act,” Peter said. “I
like
you.”

Peter was a short man, past thirty, with thinning ginger hair and a pumpkin’s gap-toothed grin. He might have even been forty; but a determined retention of youth’s rubberiness fended off the possibility. He flopped into a canvas sling chair and kept crossing and recrossing his legs, which were so short he seemed to Bech to be twiddling his thumbs. Peter was a colleague of sorts, based at the CBC office in Montreal, and used Glenda’s apartment here when she was in Montreal, as she often was, and vice versa. Whether he used Glenda when she was in Toronto was not clear to Bech; less and less was. Less and less the author understood how people lived. Such cloudy episodes as these had become his only windows into other lives. He wanted to go, but his going would be a retreat—Montcalm wilting before Wolfe’s stealthy ascent. He had a bit more brandy instead. He found himself embarked on one of
those infrequent experiments in which, as dispassionate as a scientist bending metal, he tested his own capacity. He felt himself inflating, as before television exposure, while the brandy flowed on and Peter asked him all the questions not even Vanessa had been pushy enough to pose (“What’s happened to you and Capote?” “What’s the timer makes you Yanks burn out so fast?” “Ever thought of trying television scripts?”) and expatiating on the wonders of the McLuhanite world in which he, Peter, with his thumb-like legs and berry-bright eyes, moved as a successful creature, while he, Bech, was picturesquely extinct. Glenda flicked her pale hair and studied her hands and insulted her out-of-whack corpuscles with cigarettes. Bech was happy. One more brandy, he calculated, would render him utterly immobile, and Peter would be displaced. His happiness was not even punctured when the two others began to talk to each other in Canadian French, about calling a taxi to take him away.

“
Taxi, non
,” Bech exclaimed, struggling to rise. “
Marcher, oui. Je pars, maintenant. Vous le regretterez, quand je suis disparu. Au revoir, cher Pierre
.”

“You can’t walk it, man. It’s miles.”

“Try me, you post-print punk,” Bech said, putting up his hairy fists.

Glenda escorted him to the stairs and down them, one by one; at the foot, she embraced him, clinging to him as if to be rendered fertile by osmosis. “I thought he was in Winnipeg,” she said. “I want to have your baby.”

“Easy does it,” Bech wanted to say. The best he could do was, “
Facile le fait
.”

Glenda asked, “Will you ever come back to Toronto?”

“
Jamais
,” Bech said, “
jamais, jamais
,” and the magical word, so true of every moment, of every stab at love, of every step
on ground you will not walk again, rang in his mind all the way back to the hotel. The walk was generally downhill. The curved lights of the great city hall guided him. There was a forested ravine off to his left, and a muffled river. And stars. And block after block of substantial untroubled emptiness. He expected to be mugged, or at least approached. In his anesthetized state, he would have welcomed violence. But in those miles he met only blinking stop lights and impassive architecture.
And they call this a city
, Bech thought scornfully.
In New York, I would have been killed six times over and my carcass stripped of its hubcaps
.

The cries of children playing woke him. The sound of the flute at last had ceased. Last night’s pleasure had become straw in his mouth; the woman beside him seemed a larger sort of dreg. Her eyelids fluttered, as if in response to the motions of his mind. It seemed only polite to reach for her. The children beneath the window cheered.

Next morning, in Toronto, Bech shuffled, footsore, to the Royal Ontario Museum and admired the Chinese urns and the totem poles and sent a postcard of a carved walrus tusk to Bea and her three children.

Downstairs, in Sydney, Moira was up, fiddling with last night’s dishes and whistling to herself. Bech recognized the tune. “Where’s Peter?” he asked.

“He’s gone,” she said. “He doesn’t believe you exist. We waited up hours for you last night and you never came home.”

“We
were
home,” Hannah said.

“Oh, it dawned on us finally.” She elaborated: “Peter was so moody I told him to leave. I think he still loves
you
and has been leading this poor lass astray.”

“What do you like for breakfast?” Hannah asked Bech, as wearily as if she and not he had been awake all night. Himself,
he felt oddly fit, for being fifty and on the underside of the world. “Tell me about Afghanistan—should I go there?” he said to Moira, and he settled beside her on the carpeted divan while Hannah, in her lumpy blue robe, shuffled in the kitchen, making his breakfast. “Grapefruit if you have it,” he shouted to her, interrupting the start of Moira’s word tour of Kabul. “Otherwise, orange juice.”
My God
, he thought to himself,
she has become my wife. Already I’m flirting with another woman
.