BECH TAKES POT LUCK
THOUGH HENRY BECH’S few persistent admirers among the critics praised his “highly individual and refractory romanticism,” his “stubborn refusal to mount, in this era of artistic coup d’état and herd movement, any bandwagon but that of his own quixotic, excessively tender, strangely anti-Semitic Semitic sensibility,” the author nevertheless had a sneaking fondness for the fashionable. Each August, he deserted his shabby large apartment at 99th and Riverside and rented a cottage on a Massachusetts island whose coves and sandy lanes were crammed with other writers, television producers, museum directors, undersecretaries of State, movie stars whose Forties films were now enjoying a camp revival, old New Masses editors possessively squatting on seaside acreage bought for a song in the Depression, and hordes of those handsome, entertaining, professionless prosperous who fill the chinks between celebrities. It innocently delighted Bech, a child of the urban middle class, to see these luxurious people padding in bare feet along the dirty sidewalks of the island’s one town, or fighting for overpriced groceries in the tiny general store of an up-island hamlet. It gratified him to recognize some literary idol of his youth, shrunken and frail, being tumbled about by the surf; or to be himself recognized by some faunlike bikinied girl who had been assigned Travel Light at the Brearley School, or by a cozy Westchester matron, still plausible in her scoop-back one-piece, who amiably confused Bech’s controversial chef-d’œuvre The Chosen with a contemporary best-seller of the same title. Though often thus accosted, Bech had never before been intercepted by a car. The little scarlet Porsche, the long blond hair of its driver flapping, cut in front of Bech’s old Ford as he was driving to the beach, and forced him to brake within inches of two mailboxes painted with flowers and lettered, respectively, “Sea Shanty” and “Avec du Sel.” The boy—it was a boy’s long blond hair—hopped out and raced back to Bech’s window, extending a soft hand that, as Bech docilely shook it, trembled like a bird’s breast. The boy’s plump face seemed falsified by the uncut mane; it engulfed his ears and gave his mouth, perhaps because it was unmistakably male, an assertive quarrelsome look. His eyebrows were sun-bleached to invisibility; his pallid blue eyes were all wonder and love.
“Mr. Bech, hey. I couldn’t believe it was you.”
“Suppose it hadn’t been me. How would you explain forcing me into this ditch?”
“I bet you don’t remember who I am.”
“Let me guess. You’re not Sabu, and you’re not Freddie Bartholomew.”
“Wendell Morrison, Mr. Bech. English 1020 at Columbia, 1963.” For one spring term Bech, who belonged to the last writing generation that thought teaching a corruption, had been persuaded to oversee—it amounted to little more than that—the remarkably uninhibited conversations of fifteen undergraduates and to read their distressingly untidy manuscripts. Languid and clever, these young people had lacked not only patriotism and faith but even the coarse morality competitiveness imposes. Living off fathers they despised, systematically attracted to the outrageous, they seemed ripe for Fascism. Their politics burlesqued the liberal beliefs dear to Bech; their literary tastes ran to chaotic second-raters like Miller and Tolkien and away from those austere, prim saints—Eliot, Valéry, Joyce—whose humble suppliant Bech had been. Bech even found fault with them physically: though the girls were taller and better endowed than the girls of his youth, with neater teeth and clearer skins, there was something doughy about their beauty; the starved, conflicted girls of Bech’s generation had had distinctly better legs. He slowly remembered Wendell. The boy always sat on Bech’s left, a fair-haired young Wasp from Stamford, crewcut—a Connecticut Yankee, more grave and respectful than the others, indeed so courteous Bech wondered if some kind of irony were intended. He appeared to adore Bech; and Bech’s weakness for Wasps was well known. “You wrote in lower case,” Bech said. “An orgy with some girls in a house full of expensive furniture. Glints of pink flesh in a chandelier. Somebody defecated on a polar-bear rug.”
“That’s right. What a great memory.”
“Only for fantasies.”
“You gave it an A, you said it really shook you up. That meant a hell of a lot to me. I couldn’t tell you then, I was playing it cool, that was my hang-up, but I can tell you now, Mr. Bech, it was real encouragement, it’s really kept me going. You were great.”
As the loosening of the boy’s vocabulary indicated a prolonged conversation, the woman beside Bech shifted restlessly. Wendell’s clear blue eyes observed the movement, and obligated Bech to perform introductions. “Norma, this is Wendell Morris. Miss Norma Latchett.”
“Morrison,” the boy said, and reached in past Bech’s nose to shake Norma’s hand. “He’s beautiful, isn’t he, Ma’am?”
She answered dryly, “He’ll do.” Her thin brown hand rested in Wendell’s white plump one as if stranded. It was a sticky day.
“Let’s go,” a child exclaimed from the back seat, in that dreadful squeezed voice that precedes a tantrum. Helplessly Bech’s hands tightened on the steering wheel, and the hairs on the back of his neck stiffened. After two weeks, he was still unacclimated to the pressures of surrogate paternity. The child grunted, stuffed with fury; Bech’s stomach sympathetically clenched.
“Hush,” the child’s mother said, slow-voiced, soothing. “Uncle Harry’s talking to an old student of his. They haven’t seen each other for years.”
Wendell bent low to peer into the back seat, and Bech was obliged to continue introductions. “This is Norma’s sister, Mrs. Beatrice Cook, and her children—Ann, Judy, Donald.”
Wendell nodded four times in greeting. His furry plump hand clung tenaciously to the sill of Bech’s window. “Quite a scene,” he said.
Bech told him, “We’re trying to get to the beach before it clouds over.” Every instant, the sky grew less transparent. Often the island was foggy while the mainland, according to the radio, blissfully baked.
“Where’s everybody staying?” The boy’s assumption that they were all living together irritated Bech, since it was correct.
“We’ve rented a shoe,” Bech said, “from an old lady who’s moved up to a cigar box.”
Wendell’s eyes lingered on the three fair children crammed, along with sand pails and an inflated air mattress, into the back seat beside their mother. He asked them, “Uncle Harry’s quite a card, huh, kids?”
Bech imagined he had hurt Wendell’s feelings. In rapid atonement he explained, “We’re in a cottage rented from Andy Spofford, who used to be in war movies—before your time, he played sidekicks that got killed—and lives mostly in Corsica now. Blue mailbox, third dirt road past the Up-Island Boutique, take every left turning except the last, when you go right, not hard right. Mrs. Cook is up from Ossining visiting for the week.” Bech restrained himself from telling Wendell that she was going through a divorce and cried every evening and lived on pills. Bea was an unspectacular middle-sized woman two years younger than Norma; she wore dull clothes that seemed designed to set off her sister’s edgy beauty.
Wendell understood Bech’s apologetic burst as an invitation, and removed his hand from the door. “Hey, I know this is an imposition, but I’d love to have you just glance at the stuff I’m doing now. I’m out of that lower-case bag. In fact I’m into something pretty classical. I’ve seen the movie of Ulysses twice.”
“And you’ve let your hair grow. You’re out of the barbershop bag.”
Wendell spoke past Bech’s ear to the children. “You kids like to Sunfish?”
“Yes!” Ann and Judy chorused; they were twins.
“What’s Sunfish?” Donald asked.
Going to the beach had been the children’s only entertainment. Their mother was drugged and dazed, Norma detested physical activity before dark, and Bech was frightened of the water. Even the ferry ride over to the island felt precarious to him. He never sailed, and rarely swam in water higher than his hips. From his apartment on Riverside Drive, he looked across to New Jersey as if the Hudson were a wide flat black street.
“Let’s do it tomorrow,” Wendell said. “I’ll come for them around one, if that’s O.K., ma’am.”
Bea, flustered to find herself addressed—for Bech and Norma had almost enforced invisibility upon her, staging their fights and reconciliations as if she were not in the cottage—answered in her melodious grief-slowed voice, “That would be lovely of you, if you really want to bother. Is there any danger?”
“Not a bit, ma’am. I have life jackets. I used to be a camp counselor.”
“That must have been when you shot your polar bear,” Bech said, and pointedly restarted the motor.
They arrived at the beach just as the sun went behind one of those irregular expanding clouds whose edges hold blue sky at bay for hours. The children, jubilant at freedom and the prospect of Sunfishing, plunged into the surf. Norma, as if unwrapping a fragile gift in faintly poor taste, removed her beach robe, revealing a mauve bikini, and, inserting plastic eyecups in her sockets, arranged herself in the center of a purple towel the size of a double bed. Bea, disconsolate in a loose brown suit that did not do her figure justice, sat down on the sand with a book—one of Bech’s, curiously. Though her sister had been his mistress for two and a half years, she had just got around to doing her homework. Embarrassed, fearful that the book, so near his actual presence, would somehow detonate, Bech moved off a few strides and stood, bare-chested, gazing at his splendid enemy the sea, an oblivious hemisphere whose glitter of whitecaps sullenly persisted without the sun. Shortly, a timid adolescent voice, the voice he had been waiting for, rustled at his shoulder. “I beg your pardon, sir, but by any chance are you …?”
Wendell found Bech’s diffident directions no obstacle and came for the children promptly at one the next day. The expedition was so successful Beatrice prolonged her visit another week. Wendell took the children clamming and miniature-golfing; he took them to an Indian burial ground, to an abandoned windmill, to grand beaches fenced with No Trespassing signs. The boy had that Wasp knowingness, that facility with things: he knew how to insert a clam knife, how to snorkle (just to put on the mask made Bech gasp for breath), how to bluff and charm his way onto private beaches (Bech believed everything he read), how to excite children with a few broken shell bits that remotely might be remnants of ceremonially heaped conch shells. He was connected to the land in a way Bech could only envy. Though so young, he had been everywhere—Italy, Scandinavia, Mexico, Alaska—whereas Bech, except for Caribbean holidays and a State Department-sponsored excursion to some Communist countries, had hardly been anywhere. He lived twenty blocks north of where he had been born, and couldn’t sleep for nervousness the night before he and Norma and his rickety Ford risked the journey up the seaboard to the ferry slip. The continent-spanning motorcyclists of Travel Light had been daydreams based upon his Cincinnati sister’s complaints about her older son, a college dropout. Wendell, a mere twenty-three, shamed Bech with his Yankee ingenuity, his native woodcraft—the dozen and one tricks of a beach picnic, for instance: the oven of scooped sand, the corn salted in seawater, the fire of scavenged driftwood. It all seemed adventurous to Bech, as did the boy’s removal, in the amber summer twilight, of his bathing suit to body-surf. Wendell was a pudgy yet complete Adonis stiff-armed in the waves, his buttocks pearly, his genitals distinctly visible when he stood in the wave troughs. The new generation was immersed in the world that Bech’s, like a foolish old bridegroom full of whiskey and dogma, had tried to mount and master. Bech was shy of things, and possessed few, not even a wife; Wendell’s room, above a garage on the summer property of some friends of his parents, held everything from canned anchovies and a Bible to pornographic photographs and a gram of LSD.
Ever since Bech had met her, Norma had wanted to take LSD. It was one of her complaints against him that he had never got her any. He, who knew that all her complaints were in truth that he would not marry her, told her she was too old. She was thirty-six; he was forty-three, and, though flirting with the senility that comes early to American authors, still absurdly wary of anything that might damage his brain. When, on their cottage porch, Wendell let slip the fact that he possessed some LSD, Bech recognized Norma’s sudden new mood. Her nose sharpened, her wide mouth rapidly fluctuated between a heart-melting grin and a severe down-drawn look almost of anger. It was the mood in which, two Christmases ago, she had come up to him at a party, ostensibly to argue about The Chosen, in fact to conjure him into taking her to dinner. She began to converse exclusively with Wendell.
“Where did you get it?” she asked. “Why haven’t you used it?”
“Oh,” he said, “I knew a turned-on chemistry major. I’ve had it for a year now. You just don’t take it, you know, before bedtime like Ovaltine. There has to be somebody to take the trip with. It can be very bad business”—he had his solemn whispering voice, stashed behind his boyish naïve one—“to go on a trip alone.”
“You’ve been,” Bech said politely.
“I’ve been.” His shadowy tone matched the moment of day. The westward sky was plunging toward rose; the sailboats were taking the final tack toward harbor. Inside the cottage, the children, happy and loud after an expedition with Wendell to the lobster hatchery, were eating supper. Beatrice went in to give them dessert, and to get herself a sweater.
Norma’s fine lean legs twitched, recrossing, as she turned to Wendell with her rapacious grin. Before she could speak, Bech asked a question that would restore to himself the center of attention. “And is this what you write about now? In the classic manner of Ulysses movies?”
Under the embarrassment of having to instruct his instructor, Wendell’s voice dropped another notch. “It’s not really writable. Writing makes distinctions, and this breaks them down. For example, I remember once looking out my window at Columbia. Someone had left a green towel on the gravel roof. From sunbathing, I suppose. I thought, Mmm, pretty green towel, nice shade of green, beautiful shade of green—and the color attacked me!”
Norma asked, “How attacked you? It grew teeth? Grew bigger? What?” She was having difficulty, Bech felt, keeping herself out of Wendell’s lap. The boy’s innocent eyes, browless as a Teddy bear’s, flicked a question toward Bech.
“Tell her,” Bech told him. “She’s curious.”
“I’m horribly curious,” Norma exclaimed. “I’m so tired of being myself. Liquor doesn’t do anything for me anymore, sex, anything.”
Wendell glanced again toward Bech, worried. “It—attacked me. It tried to become me.”
“Was it wonderful? Or terrible?”
“It was borderline. You must understand, Norma, it’s not a playful experience. It takes everything you have.” His tone of voice had become the unnaturally, perhaps ironically, respectful one he had used in English 1020.
“It’ll even take,” Bech told her, “your Saks charge-a-plate.”
Bea appeared in the doorway, dim behind the screen. “As long as I’m on my feet, does anybody want another drink?”
“Oh, Bea,” Norma said, leaping up, “stop being a martyr. It’s my turn to cook, let me help you.” To Bech, before going in, she said, “Please arrange my trip with Wendell. He thinks I’m a nuisance, but he adores you. Tell him how good I’ll be.”
Her departure left the men silent. Sheets of mackerel shards were sliding down the sky toward a magenta sunset; Bech felt himself being sucked into a situation where nothing, neither tact nor reason nor the morality he had learned from his father and Flaubert, afforded leverage. Wendell at last asked, “How stable is she?”
“Very un-.”
“Any history of psychological disturbance?”
“Nothing but the usual psychiatry. Quit analysis after four months. Does her work apparently quite well—layout and design for an advertising agency. Likes to show her temper off but underneath has a good hard eye on the main chance.”
“I’d really need to spend some time alone with her. It’s very important that people on a trip together be congenial. They last at least twelve hours. Without rapport, it’s a nightmare.” The boy was so solemn, so blind to the outrageousness of what he was proposing, that Bech laughed. As if rebuking Bech with his greater seriousness, Wendell whispered in the dusk, “The people you’ve taken a trip with become the most important people in your life.”
“Well,” Bech said, “I want to wish you and Norma all the luck in the world. When should we send out announcements?”
Wendell intoned, “I feel you disapprove. I feel your fright.”
Bech was speechless. Didn’t he know what a mistress was? No sense of private property in this generation. The early Christians; Brook Farm.
Wendell went on carefully, considerately, “Let me propose this. Has she ever smoked pot?”
“Not with me around. I’m an old-fashioned father figure. Two parts Abraham to one part Fagin.”
“Why don’t she and I, Mr. Bech, smoke some marijuana together as a dry run? That way she can satisfy her female curiosity and I can see if we could stand a trip together. As I size her up, she’s much too practical-minded to be a head. She just wants to make the Sixties scene, and maybe to bug you.”
The boy was so hopeful, so reasonable, that Bech could not help treating him as a student, with all of a student’s purchased prerogatives, a student’s ruthless power to intrude and demand. Young American minds. The space race with Russia. Bech heard himself yield. “O.K. But you’re not taking her over into that sorcerer’s-apprentice cubbyhole of yours.”
Wendell puzzled; he seemed in the half light a blameless furry creature delicately nosing his way through the inscrutable maze of the older man’s prejudices. At last he said, “I think I see your worry. You’re wrong. There is absolutely no chance of sex. All these things of course are sexual depressants. It’s a medical fact.”
Bech laughed again. “Don’t you dare sexually depress Norma. It’s all she and I have any more.” But in making this combination of joke and confession, he had waved the maze away and admitted the boy more deeply into his life than he had intended—all because, Bech suspected, at bottom he was afraid of being out-of-date. They agreed that Wendell would bring back some marijuana and they would give him supper. “You’ll have to take pot luck,” Bech told him.
Norma was not pleased by his arrangements. “How ridiculous of you,” she said, “not to trust me alone with that child. You’re so immature and proprietorial. You don’t own me. I’m a free agent, by your preference.”
“I wanted to save you embarrassment,” he told her. “I’ve read the kid’s stories; you don’t know what goes on in his mind.”
“No, after keeping you company for three years I’ve forgotten what goes on in any normal man’s mind.”
“Then you admit he is a normal man. Not a child. O.K. You stay out of that bastard’s atelier, or whatever he thinks it is. A pad.”
“My, aren’t you the fierce young lover? I wonder how I survived thirty-odd years out from under your wing.”
“You’re so self-destructive, I wonder too. And by the way it’s not been three years we’ve been keeping company, it’s two and a half.”
“You’ve been counting the minutes. Is my time about up?”
“Norma, why do you want to cop out with all these drugs? It’s so insulting to the world, to me.”
“I want to have an experience. I’ve never had a baby, the only wedding ring I’ve ever worn is the one you loan me when we go to St. Croix in the winter, I’ve never been to Pakistan, I’m never going to get to Antarctica.”
“I’ll buy you a freezer.”
“That is your solution, isn’t it?—buy another box. You go from box to box, each one snugger than the last. Well I for one don’t think your marvelous life-style, your heady mixture of art for art’s sake and Depression funk, entirely covers the case. My life is closing in and I hate it and I thought this way I could open it up a little. Just a little. Just a teeny crack, a splinter of sunshine.”
“He’s coming back, he’s coming back. Your fix is on the way.”
“How can I possibly get high with you and Bea sitting there watching with long faces? It’s too grotesque. It’s too limiting. My kid sister. My kindly protector. I might as well call my mother—she can fly up from West Orange with the smelling salts.”
Bech was grateful to her, for letting her anger, her anguish, recede from the high point reached with the wail that she had never had a baby. He promised, “We’ll take it with you.”
“Who will? You and Bea?” Norma laughed scornfully. “You two nannies. You’re the two most careful people I’ve ever met.”
“We’d love to smoke pot. Wouldn’t we, Bea? Come on, take a holiday. Break yourself of Nembutal.”
Beatrice, who had been cooking lamb chops and setting the table for four while Bech and her sister were obstructively gesturing in the passageway between the kitchen and the dining area, stopped and considered. “Rodney would have a fit.”
“Rodney’s divorcing you,” Bech told her. “Think for yourself.”
“It makes it too ridiculous,” Norma protested. “It takes all the adventure out of it.”
Bech asked sharply, “Don’t you love us?”
“Well,” Bea was saying. “On one condition. The children must be asleep. I don’t want them to see me do anything wild.”
It was Wendell’s ingenious idea to have the children sleep on the porch, away from what noise and fumes there might be. He had brought from his magical cache of supplies two sleeping bags, one a double, for the twins. He settled the three small Cooks by pointing out the constellations and the area of the sky where they might, according to this week’s newspapers, see shooting stars. “And when you grow tired of that,” Wendell said, “close your eyes and listen for an owl.”
“Are there owls?” one twin asked.
“Oh, sure.”
“On this island?” asked the other.
“One or two. Every island has to have an owl, otherwise the mice would multiply and multiply and there would be no grass, just mice.”
“Will it get us?” Donald was the youngest, five.
“You’re no mouse,” Wendell whispered. “You’re a man.”
Bech, eavesdropping, felt a pang, and envied the new Americans their easy intermingling with children. How terrible it seemed for him, a Jew, not to have children, to lack a father’s dignity. The four adults ate a sober and unconversational meal. Wendell asked Bech what he was writing now, and Bech said nothing, he was proofreading his old books, and finding lots of typos. No wonder the critics had misunderstood him. Norma had changed into a shimmering housecoat, a peacock-colored silk kimono Bech had bought her last Christmas—their second anniversary. He wondered if she had kept on her underclothes, and finally glimpsed, as she bent frowning over her overcooked lamb chop, the reassuring pale edge of a bra. During coffee, he cleared his throat. “Well, kids. Should the séance begin?”
Wendell arranged four chairs in a rectangle, and produced a pipe. It was an ordinary pipe, the kind that authors, in the corny days when Bech’s image of the literary life had been formed, used to grip in dust-jacket photographs. Norma took the best chair, the wicker armchair, and impatiently smoked a cigarette while Beatrice cleared away the dishes and checked on the children. They were asleep beneath the stars. Donald had moved his sleeping bag against the girls’ and lay with his thumb in his mouth and the other hand on Judy’s hair. Beatrice and Bech sat down, and Wendell spoke to them as if they were children, showing them the magic substance, which looked like a residue of pencil shavings in a dirty tobacco pouch, instructing them how to suck in air and smoke simultaneously, how to “swallow” the smoke and hold it down, so the precious narcotic permeated the lungs and stomach and veins and brain. The thoroughness of these instructions aroused in Bech the conviction that something was going to go wrong. He found Wendell as an instructor pompous. In a fury of puffing and expressive inhaling, the boy got the pipe going, and offered first drag to Norma. She had never smoked a pipe, and suffered a convulsion of coughing. Wendell leaned forward and greedily inhaled from midair the smoke she had wasted. He had become, seen sidewise, with his floppy blond hair, a baby lion above a bone; his hungry quick movements were padded with a sinister silence. “Hurry,” he hoarsely urged Norma, “don’t waste it. It’s all I have left from my last trip to Mexico. We may not have enough for four.”
She tried again—Bech felt her as tense, rebellious, all too aware that, with the pipe between her teeth, she became a sharp-nosed crone—and coughed again, and complained, “I’m not getting any.”
Wendell whirled, barefoot, and, stabbing with the pipestem, said, “Mr. Bech.”
The smoke was sweet and circular and soft, softer than Bech could have imagined, ballooning in his mouth and throat and chest like a benevolent thunderhead, like one of those valentines from his childhood that unfolded into a three-dimensional tissue-paper fan. “More,” Wendell commanded, thrusting the pipe at him again, ravenously sniffing into himself the shreds of smoke that escaped Bech’s sucking. This time there was a faint burning—a ghost of tobacco’s unkind rasp. Bech felt himself as a domed chamber, with vaults and upward recesses, welcoming the cloud; he shut his eyes. The color of the sensation was yellow mixed with blue yet in no way green. The base of his throat satisfyingly burned.
While his attention was turned inward, Beatrice was given the pipe. Smoke leaked from her compressed lips; it seemed intensely poignant to Bech that even in depravity she was wearing no lipstick. “Give it to me,” Norma insisted, greedily reaching. Wendell snatched the pipe against his chest and, with the ardor of a trapped man breathing through a tube, inhaled marijuana. The air began to smell sweetish, flowery, and gentle. Norma jumped from her chair and, kimono shimmering, roughly seized the pipe, so that precious sparks flew. Wendell pushed her back into her chair and, like a mother feeding a baby, insinuated the pipestem between her lips. “Gently, gently,” he crooned, “take it in, feel it press against the roof of your mouth, blossoming inside you, hold it fast, fast.” His “s” ’s were extremely sibilant.
“What’s all this hypnosis?” Bech asked. He disliked the deft way Wendell handled Norma. The boy swooped to him and eased the wet pipe into his mouth. “Deeper, deeper, that’s it, good … good …”
“It burns,” Bech protested.
“It’s supposed to,” Wendell said. “That’s beautiful. You’re really getting it.”
“Suppose I get sick.”
“People never get sick on it, it’s a medical fact.”
Bech turned to Beatrice and said, “We’ve raised a generation of amateur pharmacologists.”
She had the pipe; handing it back to Wendell, she smiled and pronounced, “Yummy.”
Norma kicked her legs and said savagely, “Nothing’s happening. It’s not doing anything to me.”
“It will, it will,” Wendell insisted. He sat down in the fourth chair and passed the pipe to Norma. Fine sweat beaded his plump round face.
“Did you ever notice,” Bech asked him, “what nifty legs Norma has? She’s old enough to be your biological mother, but condescend to take a gander at her gams. We were the Sinewy Generation.”
“What’s this generation bag you’re in?” Wendell asked him, still rather respectfully English 1020. “Everybody’s people.”
“Our biological mother,” Beatrice unexpectedly announced, “thought actually I had the better figure. She used to call Norma nobby.”
“I won’t sit here being discussed like a piece of meat,” Norma said. Grudgingly she passed the pipe to Bech.
As Bech smoked, Wendell crooned, “Yes, deeper, let it fill you. He really has it. My master, my guru.”
“Guru you,” Bech said, passing the pipe to Beatrice. He spoke with a rolling slowness, sonorous as an idol’s voice. “All you flower types are incipient Fascists.” The “a” ’s and “s” ’s had taken on a private richness in his mouth. “Fascists manqués,” he said.
Wendell rejected the pipe Beatrice offered him. “Give it back to our teacher. We need his wisdom. We need the fruit of his suffering.”
“Manqué see, manqué do,” Bech went on, puffing and inhaling. What a woman must feel like in coitus. More, more.
“Mon maître,” Wendell sighed, leaning forward, breathless, awed, loving.
“Suffering,” Norma sneered. “The day Henry Bech lets himself suffer is a day I’m dying to see. He’s the safest man in America, since they retired Tom Dewey. Oh, this is horrible. You’re all being so silly and here I sit perfectly sober. I hate it. I hate all of you, absolutely.”
“Do you hear music?” Bech asked, passing the pipe directly across to Wendell.
“Look at the windows, everybody people,” Beatrice said. “They’re coming into the room!”
“Stop pretending,” Norma told her. “You always played up to Mother. I’d rather be nobby Norma than bland Bea.”
“She’s beautiful,” Wendell said, to Norma, of Beatrice. “But so are you. The Lord Krishna bestows blessings with a lavish hand.”
Norma turned to him and grinned. Her tropism to the phony like a flower’s to the sun, Bech thought. Wide warm mouth wherein memories of pleasure have become poisonous words.
Carefully Bech asked the other man, “Why does your face resemble the underside of a colander in which wet lettuce is heaped?” The image seemed both elegant and precise, cruel yet just. But the thought of lettuce troubled his digestion. Grass. All men. Things grow in circles. Stop the circles.
“I sweat easily,” Wendell confessed freely. The easy shamelessness purchased for an ingrate generation by decades of poverty and war.
“And write badly,” Bech said.
Wendell was unabashed. He said, “You haven’t seen my new stuff. It’s really terrifically controlled. I’m letting the things dominate the emotions instead of vice versa. Don’t you think, since the Wake, emotions have about had it in prose?”
“Talk to me,” Norma said. “He’s absolutely self-obsessed.”
Wendell told her simply, “He’s my god.”
Beatrice was asking, “Whose turn is it? Isn’t anybody else worried about the windows?” Wendell gave her the pipe. She smoked and said, “It tastes like dregs.”
When she offered the pipe to Bech, he gingerly waved it away. He felt that the summit of his apotheosis had slipped by, replaced by a widespread sliding. His perceptions were clear, he felt them all trying to get through to him, Norma seeking love, Wendell praise, Beatrice a few more days of free vacation; but these arrows of demand were directed at an object in metamorphosis. Bech’s chest was sloping upward, trying to lift his head into steadiness, as when, thirty years ago, carsick on the long subway ride to his Brooklyn uncles, he would fix his eyes in a death grip on his own reflection in the shuddering black glass. The funny wool Buster Brown cap his mother made him wear, his pale small face, old for his age. The ultimate deliverance of the final stomach-wrenching stop. In the lower edge of his vision Norma leaped up and grabbed the pipe from Beatrice. Something fell. Sparks. Both women scrambled on the floor. Norma arose in her shimmering kimono and majestically complained, “It’s out. It’s all gone. Damn you, greedy Bea!”
“Back to Mexico,” Bech called. His own voice came from afar, through blankets of a gathering expectancy, the expanding motionlessness of nausea. But he did not know for a certainty that he was going to be sick until Norma’s voice, a few feet away in the sliding obfuscation, as sharp and small as something seen in reversed binoculars, announced, “Henry, you’re absolutely yellow!”
In the bathroom mirror he saw that she was right. The blood had drained from his face, leaving like a scum the tallow of his summer tan, and a mauve blotch of sunburn on his melancholy nose. Face he had glimpsed at a thousand junctures, in barbershops and barrooms, in subways and airplane windows above the Black Sea, before shaving and after lovemaking, it witlessly smiled, the eyes very tired. Bech kneeled and submitted to the dark ecstasy of being eclipsed, his brain shouldered into nothingness by the violence of the inversion whereby his stomach emptied itself, repeatedly, until a satisfying pain scraped tears from his eyes, and he was clean.
Beatrice sat alone in the living room, beside the dead fireplace. Bech asked her, “Where is everybody?”
She said, unmoving, uncomplaining, “They went outside and about two minutes ago I heard his car motor start.”
Bech, shaken but sane, said, “Another medical fact exploded.”
Beatrice looked at him questioningly. Flirting her head, Bech thought, like Norma. Sisters. A stick refracted in water. Our biological mother.
He explained, “A, the little bastard tells me it won’t make me sick, and B, he solemnly swears it’s a sexual depressant.”
“You don’t think—they went back to his room?”
“Sure. Don’t you?”
Beatrice nodded. “That’s how she is. That’s how she’s always been.”
Bech looked around him, and saw that the familiar objects—the jar of dried bayberry; the loose shell collections, sandy and ill-smelling; the damp stack of books on the sofa—still wore one final, gossamer thickness of the mystery in which marijuana had clothed them. He asked Bea, “How are you feeling? Do the windows still worry you?”
“I’ve been sitting here watching them,” she said. “I keep thinking they’re going to tip and fall into the room, but I guess they won’t really.”
“They might,” Bech advised her. “Don’t sell your intuitions short.”
“Please, could you sit down beside me and watch them with me? I know it’s silly, but it would be a help.”
He obeyed, moving Norma’s wicker chair close to Bea, and observed that indeed the window frames, painted white in unpainted plank walls, did have the potentiality of animation, and a disturbing pressingness. Their center of gravity seemed to shift from one corner to the other. He discovered he had taken Bea’s hand—limp, cool, less bony than Norma’s—into his. She gradually turned her head, and he turned his face away, embarrassed that the scent of vomit would be still on his breath. “Let’s go outside on the porch,” he suggested.
The stars overhead were close and ripe. What was that sentence in Ulysses? Bloom and Stephen emerging from the house to urinate, suddenly looking up—The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit. Bech felt a sadness, a terror, that he had not written it. And never would. A child whimpered and rustled in its sleep. Beatrice was wearing a loose pale dress luminous in the air of the dark porch. The night was moist, alive; lights along the horizon pulsed. The bell buoy clanged on a noiseless swell. She sat in a chair against the shingled wall and he took a chair facing her, his back to the sea. She asked, “Do you feel betrayed?”
He tried to think, scanned the scattered stars of his decaying brain for the answer. “Somewhat. But I’ve had it coming to me. I’ve been getting on her nerves deliberately.”
He didn’t answer, not comprehending and marveling instead how, when the woman crossed and recrossed her legs, it could have been Norma—a gentler, younger Norma.
She clarified, “I forced the divorce.”
The child who had whimpered now cried aloud; it was little Donald, pronouncing hollowly, “Owl!”
Beatrice, struggling for control against her body’s slowness, rose and went to the child, kneeled and woke him. “No owl,” she said. “Just Mommy.” With that ancient strange strength of mothers she pulled him from the sleeping bag and carried him back in her arms to her chair. “No owl,” she repeated, rocking gently, “just Mommy and Uncle Harry and the bell buoy.”
“You smell funny,” the child told her.
“Like what funny?”
“Like sort of candy.”
“Donald,” Bech said, “we’d never eat any candy without telling you. We’d never be so mean.”
There was no answer; he was asleep again.
“I admire you,” Beatrice said at last, the lulling rocking motion still in her voice, “for being yourself.”
“I’ve tried being other people,” Bech said, fending, “but nobody was convinced.”
“I love your book,” she went on. “I didn’t know how to tell you, but I always rather sneered at you, I thought of you as part of Norma’s phony crowd, but your writing, it’s terribly tender. There’s something in you that you keep safe from all of us.”
As always when his writing was discussed to his face, a precarious trembling entered Bech’s chest: a case of crystal when heavy footsteps pass. He had the usual wild itch to run, to disclaim, to shut his eyes in ecstasy. More, more. He protested, “Why didn’t anybody at least knock on the door when I was dying in the bathroom? I haven’t whoopsed like that since the army.”
“I wanted to, but I couldn’t move. Norma said it was just your way of always being the center of attention.”
“That bitch. Did she really run off with that woolly little prep-school snot?”
Beatrice said, with an emphatic intonation dimly, thrillingly familiar, “You are jealous. You do love her.”
Bech said, “I just don’t like creative-writing students pushing me out of my bed. I make a good Tiresias but I’m a poor Fisher King.”
There was no answer; he sensed she was crying. Desperately changing the subject, he waved toward a distant light, whirling, swollen by the mist. “That whole headland,” he said, “is owned by an ex-member of the Communist Party, and he spends all his time putting up No Trespassing signs.”
“You’re nice,” Beatrice sobbed, the child at rest in her arms.
A motor approached down the muffling sandy road. Headlights raked the porch rail, and doubled footsteps crashed through the cottage. Norma and Wendell emerged onto the porch, Wendell carrying a messy thickness of typewriter paper. “Well,” Bech said, “that didn’t take long. We thought you’d be gone for the night. Or is it dawn?”
“Oh, Henry,” Norma said, “you think everything is sex. We went back to Wendell’s place to flush his LSD down the toilet, he felt so guilty when you got sick.”
“Never again for me, Mr. Bech. I’m out of that subconscious bag. Hey, I brought along a section of my thing, it’s not exactly a novel, you don’t have to read it now if you don’t want to.”
“I couldn’t,” Bech said. “Not if it makes distinctions.”
Norma felt the changed atmosphere and accused her sister, “Have you been boring Henry with what an awful person I am? How could the two of you imagine I’d misbehave with this boy under your noses? Surely I’m subtler than that.”
Bech said, “We thought you might be high on pot.”
Norma triumphantly complained, “I never got anything. And I’m positive the rest of you faked it.” But, when Wendell had been sent home and the children had been tucked into their bunks, she fell asleep with such a tranced soundness that Bech, insomniac, sneaked from her side and safely slept with Beatrice. He found her lying awake waiting for him. By fall the word went out on the literary circuit that Bech had shifted mistresses again.