Bech at Bay (19 page)

A week later, he was in the subway. The Rockefeller Center station on Sixth Avenue, the old IND line. The downtown platform was jammed. All those McGraw-Hill, Exxon, and Time-Life execs were rushing back to their wives in the Heights. Or going down to West 4th to have some herbal tea and put on drag for the evening. Monogamous transvestite executives were clogging the system. Bech was in a savage mood. He had been to MoMA, checking out the Constructivist film-poster show and the Project 60 room. The room featured three “ultra-hip,” according to the new
New Yorker
, figurative painters: one who did “poisonous portraits of fashion victims,” another who specialized in “things so boring that they verge on non-being,” and a third who did “glossy, seductive portraits of pop stars and gay boys.” None of them had been Bech’s bag. Art had passed him by. Literature was passing him by. Music he had never gotten exactly with, not since USO record hops. Those cuddly little WACs from Ohio in their starched uniforms. That war had been over too soon, before he got to kill enough Germans.

Down in the subway, in the flickering jaundiced light, three competing groups of electronic buskers—one country, one progressive jazz, and one doing Christian hip-hop—were competing, while a huge overhead voice unintelligibly burbled about cancellations and delays. In the cacophony,
Bech spotted an English critic: Raymond Featherwaite, former Cambridge eminence lured to CUNY by American moolah. From his perch in the CUNY crenellations, using an antique matchlock arquebus, he had been snottily potting American writers for twenty years, courtesy of the ravingly Anglophile
New York Review of Books.
Prolix and
voulu
, Featherwaite had called Bech’s best-selling comeback book,
Think Big
, back in 1979. Inflation was peaking under Carter, the AIDS virus was sallying forth unidentified and unnamed, and here this limey carpetbagger was calling Bech’s chef-d’oeuvre prolix and
voulu.
When, in the deflationary epoch supervised by Reagan, Bech had ventured a harmless collection of highly polished sketches and stories called
Biding Time
, Featherwaite had written, “One’s spirits, however initially well-disposed toward one of America’s more carefully tended reputations, begin severely to sag under the repeated empathetic effort of watching Mr. Bech, page after page, strain to make something of very little. The pleasures of microscopy pall.”

The combined decibels of the buskers drowned out, for all but the most attuned city ears, the approach of the train whose delay had been so indistinctly bruited. Featherwaite, like all these Brits who were breeding like woodlice in the rotting log piles of the New York literary industry, was no slouch at pushing ahead. Though there was hardly room to place one’s shoes on the filthy concrete, he had shoved and wormed his way to the front of the crowd, right to the edge of the platform. His edgy profile, with its supercilious overbite and artfully projecting eyebrows, turned with arrogant expectancy toward the screamingly approaching D train, as though hailing a servile black London taxi or gilded Victorian brougham. Featherwaite affected a wispy-banged Nero haircut. There were rougelike touches of color on his cheekbones.
The tidy English head bit into Bech’s vision like a branding iron.

Prolix, he thought.
Voulu.
He had had to look up
voulu
in his French dictionary. It put a sneering curse on Bech’s entire oeuvre, for what, as Schopenhauer had asked, isn’t willed?

Bech was three bodies back in the crush, tightly immersed in the odors, clothes, accents, breaths, and balked wills of others. Two broad-backed bodies, padded with junk food and fermented malt, intervened between himself and Featherwaite, while others importunately pushed at his own back. As if suddenly shoved from behind, he lowered his shoulder and rammed into the body ahead of his; like dominoes, it and the next tipped the third, the stiff-backed Englishman, off the platform. In the next moment the train with the force of a flash flood poured into the station, drowning all other noise under a shrieking gush of tortured metal. Featherwaite’s hand in the last second of his life had shot up and his head jerked back as if in sudden recognition of an old acquaintance. Then he had vanished.

It was an instant’s event, without time for the D-train driver to brake or a bystander to scream. Just one head pleasantly less in the compressed, malodorous mob. The man ahead of Bech, a ponderous black with bloodshot eyes, wearing a knit cap in the depths of summer, regained his balance and turned indignantly, but Bech, feigning a furious glance behind him, slipped sideways as the crowd arranged itself into funnels beside each door of the now halted train. A woman’s raised voice—foreign, shrill—had begun to leak the horrible truth of what she had witnessed, and far away, beyond the turnstiles, a telepathic policeman’s whistle was tweeting. But the crowd within the train
was surging obliviously outward against the crowd trying to enter, and in the thick eddies of disgruntled and compressed humanity nimble, bookish, elderly Bech put more and more space between himself and his unwitting accomplices. He secreted himself a car’s length away, hanging from a hand-burnished bar next to an ad publicizing free condoms and clean needles, with a dainty Oxford edition of Donne’s poems pressed close to his face as the news of the unthinkable truth spread, and the whistles of distant authority drew nearer, and the train refused to move and was finally emptied of passengers, while the official voice overhead, louder and less intelligible than ever, shouted word of cancellation, of disaster, of evacuation without panic.

Obediently Bech left the stalled train, blood on its wheels, and climbed the metallic stairs sparkling with pulverized glass. His insides shuddered in tune with the shoving, near-panicked mob about him. He inhaled the outdoor air and Manhattan anonymity gratefully. Avenue of the Americas, a sign said, in stubborn upholding of an obsolete gesture of hemispheric good will. Bech walked south, then over to Seventh Avenue. Scrupulously he halted at each red light and deposited each handed-out leaflet (
GIRLS! COLLEGE SEX KITTENS TOPLESS! BOTTOMLESS AFTER
6:30
P.M.
!) in the next city trash receptacle. He descended into the Times Square station, where the old IRT system’s innumerable tunnels mingled their misery in a vast subterranean maze of passageways, stairs, signs, and candy stands. He bought a Snickers bar and leaned against a white-tiled pillar to read where his little book had fallen open,

He caught an N train that took him to Broadway and Prince. Afternoon had sweetly turned to evening while he had been underground. The galleries were closing, the restaurants were opening. Robin was in the loft, keeping lasagna warm. “I thought MoMA closed at six,” she said.

“There was a tie-up in the Sixth Avenue subway. Nothing was running. I had to walk down to Times Square. I
hated
the stuff the museum had up. Violent, attention-getting.”

“Maybe there comes a time,” she said, “when new art isn’t for you, it’s for somebody else. I wonder what caused the tie-up.”

“Nobody knew. Power failure. A shootout uptown. Some maniac,” he added, wondering at his own words. His insides felt agitated, purged, scrubbed, yet not yet creamy. Perhaps the creaminess needed to wait until the morning
Times.
He feared he could not sleep, out of nervous anticipation, yet he toppled into dreams while Robin still read beneath a burning light, as if he had done a long day’s worth of physical labor.

ENGLISH CRITIC, TEACHER DEAD / IN WEST SIDE SUBWAY MISHAP
, the headline read. The story was low on the front page and jumped to the obituaries. The obit photo, taken decades ago, glamorized Featherwaite—head facing one way, shoulders another—so he resembled a younger, less impish brother of George Sanders. High brow, thin lips, cocky glass chin.…
according to witnesses appeared to fling himself under the subway train as it approached the platform … colleagues at CUNY puzzled but agreed he had been under significant stress compiling permissions for his textbook of postmodern narrative strategies … former wife, reached in
London, allowed the deceased had been subject to mood swings and fits of creative despair … the author of several youthful satirical novels and a single book of poems likened to those of Philip Larkin … Robert Silvers of The New York Review expressed shock and termed Featherwaite “a valued and versatile contributor of unflinching critical integrity” … born in Scunthorpe, Yorkshire, the third child and only son of a greengrocer and a part-time piano teacher
 … and so on. A pesky little existence. “Ray Featherwaite is dead,” Bech announced to Robin, trying to keep a tremble of triumph out of his voice.

“Who was he?”

“A critic. More minor than Mishner. English. Came from Yorkshire, in fact—I had never known that. Went to Cambridge on a scholarship. I had figured him for inherited wealth; he wanted you to think so.”

“That makes two critics this week,” said Robin, preoccupied by the dense gray pages of stock prices.

“Every third person in Manhattan is some kind of critic,” Bech pointed out. He hoped the conversation would move on.

“How did he die?”

There was no way to hide it; she would be reading this section eventually. “Jumped under a subway train, oddly. Seems he’d been feeling low, trying to secure too many copyright permissions or something. These academics have a lot of stress. It’s a tough world they’re in—the faculty politics is brutal.”

“Oh?” Robin’s eyes—bright, glossy, the living volatile brown of a slick moist pelt—had left the stock prices. “What subway line?”

“Sixth Avenue, actually.”

“Maybe that was the tie-up you mentioned.”

“Could be. Very likely, in fact. Did I ever tell you that my
father died in the subway, under the East River in his case? Made a terrible mess of rush hour.”

“Yes, Henry,” Robin said, in the pointedly patient voice that let him know she was younger and clearer-headed. “You’ve told me more than once.”

“Sorry.”

“So why are your hands trembling? You can hardly hold your bagel.” And his other hand, he noticed, was making the poppy seeds vibrate on the obituary page, as if a subway train were passing underneath.

“Who knows?” he asked her. “I may be coming down with something. I went out like a light last night.”

“I’ll say,” said Robin, returning her eyes to the page. That summer the stock prices climbed up and up, breaking new records every day. It was unreal.

“Sorry,” he repeated. Ease was beginning to flow again within him. The past was sinking, every second, under fresher, obscuring layers of the recent past. “Did it make you feel neglected? A young woman needs her sex.”

“No,” she said. “It made me feel tender. You seemed so innocent, with your mouth sagging open.”

Robin, like Spider-man’s wife, Mary Jane, worked in a computer emporium. She not so much sold them as shared her insights with customers as they struggled in the crashing waves of innovation and the lightning-swift undertow of obsolescence. The exorbitant memory demands of Microsoft’s Windows 95 had overflowed two-year-old 4-RAM and 8-RAM IBMs and Compaqs. Once-mighty Macintosh had become a mere tidal pool, crawling with slowly suffocating Apple addicts. Simply holding one’s place in cyberspace required more and more megabytes and megahertzes.
Such pell-mell dispensability uncomfortably reminded Bech of his possible own, within the cultural turnover. Giants of his youth—A. J. Cronin, Louis Bromfield, John Erskine, Pearl Buck—had slipped over the horizon of living readership into the limbo of small-town book sales. Like a traveller in one of Einstein’s thought experiments, he could be rapidly shrinking in such a recession and be the last to know it. Bech found himself described in scholarly offprints as “Early Postmodern” or “Post-Realist” or “Pre-Minimalist” as if, a narrowly configured ephemerid, he had been born to mate and die in a certain week of summer.

Nevertheless, it pleased him to view Robin in her outlet—on Third Avenue near 27th Street, a few blocks from Bellevue—standing solid and calm in a gray suit whose lapels swerved to take in her bosom. Amid her array of putty-colored monitors and system-unit housings, she received the petitions of those in thrall to the computer revolution. They were mostly skinny young men with parched hair and sunless complexions. Many of them forgot, Robin confided, to sleep or to bathe, in the intensity of their keyboard communions. She spoke their foreign language. It seemed exotic to Bech, erotic. He liked to stare in the display windows at her, while she was copulating, mentally, with a rapt customer. She had a rough way of seizing her own hair, bushy as it was, and pulling it back from her face for a moment, before letting it spring back again around her features, which were knotted in earnest disquisitions on the merits, say, of upgrading a modem from 14.4 kilobytes a second to 33.6 kbps. Sometimes Bech would enter the store, like some grizzled human glitch, and take Robin to lunch. Sometimes he would sneak away content with his glimpse of this princess decreeing in her realm. He
marvelled that at the end of the day she would find her way through the circuitry of the city and return to him. The tenacity of erotic connection presaged the faithful transistor and microchip.

Bech had not always been an evil man. He had dedicated himself early to what appeared plainly a good cause, art. It was amusing and helpful to others, he imagined as he emerged from the Army, to turn contiguous bits of the world into words, words which when properly arranged and typeset possessed a gleam that in wordless reality was lost beneath the daily accretions of habit, worry, and boredom. What harm could there be in art? What enemies could there be?

But he discovered that the literary world was a battlefield—mined with hatred, rimmed with snipers. His first stories and essays, appearing in defunct mass publications like
Liberty
and defunct avant-garde journals like
Displeasure
, roused little comment, and his dispatches, published in
The New Leader
, from Normandy in the wake of the 1944 invasion, and then from the Bulge and Berlin, went little noticed in a print world drenched in war coverage. But, ten years later, his first novel,
Travel Light
, made a small splash, and for the first time he saw, in print, spite directed at himself. Not just spite, but a willful mistaking of his intentions and a cheerfully ham-handed divulgence of all his plot’s nicely calculated and hoarded twists. A New York Jew writing about Midwestern bikers infuriated some reviewers—some Jewish, some Midwestern—and the sly asceticism of his next, novella-length novel,
Brother Pig
, annoyed others: “The contemptuous medieval expression for the body which the author has used as a title serves only too well,” one reviewer (female) wrote, “to prepare us for the sad
orgy of Jewish self-hatred with which Mr. Bech will disappoint and repel his admirers—few, it is true, but in some rarefied circles curiously fervent.” And his magnum opus,
The Chosen
, in which he tried to please his critics by facing the ethnicity purposefully sidestepped in
Brother Pig
, ran into a barrage of querulous misprision, not a barbed phrase of which had failed to stick in his sensitive skin. “Ignore the cretins,” his wise acquaintance Norman Mailer had advised him. “Why do you even read such crap?” Joseph Heller sagely asked. Bech had tried to take their realistic advice, and in mid-career imagined that he had developed, if not the hide of a rhinoceros, at least the oily, resplendent back of a duck. He thought the reviews ran off him, chilly droplets swallowed in Lethe’s black waters.