Bech at Bay (24 page)

The sallow light dimly perceived from the fire escape strengthened. Bech and Robin found themselves in a room lined with books, books piled to the ceiling, disorder upon order, uniform sets submerged under late arrivals, biographies and commentaries and posthumous volumes, the original organization overwhelmed, torn bookmarks and offprints chaotically interleaved. An arid smell, as of man-made desert, seeped from so much paper. Dust mites, spilling allergens, rustled underfoot.

Beyond this room, glimpsed through a doorway carved through the Egyptian thickness of books, an underfurnished living room bared itself to the streetlight, to the scattered glimmer of lower Manhattan and the sullen gap of the Hudson. Nobody was there.

The occupant of this Village apartment, the mastermind behind its parched accumulations, sat behind the intruders, in a corner of the library, reading and sniffing oxygen. A baby-blue plastic tube led from a cylindrical tank beside his armchair up to his nose, where it forked to take in both nostrils. The man had advanced emphysema, from a lifetime of contented smoking while he read. A gooseneck lamp looked over his shoulder. His black-stockinged feet were up on an old-fashioned ottoman, with tassels and rolled seams and a top of multicolored leather sliced like a pie. His body, boneless and amorphous, merged with that
of his creased leather armchair, tucked like a kind of shroud around him. Time had nearly ceased to flow here. Nothing moved but the invalid’s limp, flat-ended fingers as he turned a page. He looked up blinking, resenting the interruption of his reading. “Bech,” he said at last. “My God. Climbing fire escapes now. Why the crazy get-up? I thought you were a madman, breaking in.”

“Get real, Cohen,” Bech snapped. “Capes are coming back. They
are
back. Monocles, next.”

“Or a dope addict,” the invalid wheezily continued, in skeltonic gasps. “I get about one a week. They diss me because … there’s nothing to steal. Just old books. Kids today have no idea … of the value of books. And who’s your little sidekick?
Zaftig
, I can see … through the catsuit. But so young, to get mixed up … in old men’s quarrels.” Cohen had taken off his reading glasses, to focus on the incursion from beyond the printed page. His eyes were pinched in folds of collapsing lids and puckered socket-skin. Seeing that Bech would not perform introductions, he said, in a mockery of politeness, “I almost liked your last book. The one about … the Korean War orphan. At least you weren’t trying … to pass off your feeble fantasies … as any country we know.”

Cohen had barely the breath to blow out a candle. His utterances resembled sentences lifted from book reviews and peppered with ellipses to make them more favorable. His reference was to
Going South
(1992), a tender, well-researched novella imagining the adventures of a parentless nine-year-old girl, Hang Kim, from a village near Huichon, caught up in the routed American armies retreating from the waves of Chinese troops all the way to Taejon. As Bech aged, his thoughts turned to war. He had fought in one over
a half-century ago. At the time, and for most of the time since, he had thought of war as an aberration, a dehumanizing episode to be gotten through and forgotten. But lately he had begun to wonder if Hemingway and Tolstoy weren’t right: war was truth, in an unbearably pure state. It has shaped the map and spawned the most vigorous moral principle, that of tribal loyalty.

Bech swirled his cape, performing, with an ironic bow, the courtesies Cohen had requested. “Rachel, meet my nemesis, Mr. Orlando Cohen, the arch-fiend of American criticism. Orlando, this is Ms. Rachel Teagarten, who helps me out in my work. She understands computers, copulation, and elementary cooking.”

“I suppose computers,” the old magus wheezed, “are worth understanding. I always think in this connection … of the chess-playing automaton … who turned out to be … a dwarf. The board had to be transparent, so he … could follow the moves. Imagine … following the moves upside down … crouched in a little airless box. And winning sometimes. He didn’t always win, actually—that is a myth. There was a series of dwarfs … some of whom were undoubtedly … more skillful than others.”

This long speech left Cohen utterly breathless. He inhaled prolongedly through his nose. His nose and ears had enlarged with age, or had remained the same while the rest of him shrunk. He had been a handsome man, once, and women had been tantalized and maddened by their failure to distract him from his chaste ambition to be the ultimate adjudicator of literature—all literature, but specializing in American. He had steadfastly refused to grant Bech a place, even a minor place, in the canon. In review after review he had found Bech’s books artificial, hollow,
dandyish, lame. His review of
Going South
, in
The New Criterion
, had been jeeringly titled “Halt and Lame.”

“Don’t try to buy time with gabble,” Bech advised him. “The jig is up.”

“What jig?” Cohen managed to get out. The tip of his nose looked blue with anoxia. He had a strange contemplative habit of twitching his nose, of swinging its tip from side to side, rapidly.

“The jig of trashing me. What did I ever do to you?”

“You failed to write well.”

“How could that be? It was all I cared about, writing well.”

“You cared too much. You let the words hold you back … from descending into yourself. You were Jewish and tried to pretend … you were American.”

“Can’t you be both?”

“Bellow can. Salinger could, once. Mailer, alternately … never both at once. Malamud … I don’t know. He lost me in those last books … 
Dubin’s Lives
and the one about the monkeys. He wanted credentials. Jews can’t get credentials. Not in a world run by goyim. Israel is a credential. It’s not a good one. The Arabs won’t stamp it.”

“You’re stalling, Orlando. See this? What is it?” Bech delved beneath his beautiful, midnight-blue cape and brandished the steel tool he came up with. It felt heavy, heavier than it looked.

“A gun,” Orlando Cohen said. His spatulate fingers adjusted the plastic leech whispering into his nostrils.

“A gat,” Bech corrected. “A rod. With a silencer. Not even the people downstairs are going to hear when I plug you. They’ll think it’s your dishwasher kicking into the next part of the cycle.”

The sick man’s eyes left Bech’s face. “Rachel,” he said. “How long has he … been like this?”

“Don’t answer the scumbag,” Bech commanded her. “The prick, he sucks up to Wasps. The stiff-necked old establishment. The more anti-Semitic they were—the Jameses, the Adamses, the Holmeses—the more he loves them. Hemingway, Fitzgerald—never mind their snide cracks. He even praised Capote, can you imagine? Praised Capote and panned me.”

Cohen replied, so faintly the duo had to strain to listen, picking up all sorts of muttered street noise and radio music in the process. “Capote … descended into himself. In
In Cold Blood
 … he hit his vein. He wanted to be hung with Perry. He hated himself … the little squeaky monster he was. He worked his self-hatred … into an objective correlative. He made us care. Bech … you … you missed your vein. You were squeamish … and essentially lazy. You missed … the boat. The boat … to America.”

“I am going to shut you up,” Bech told him. “I am going to squeeze this fucking trigger and rub you out. Don’t think I’m too squeamish. I’ve killed before.” In the war. There was no knowing how many. With a Browning automatic rifle you poured lead into a thicket or Belgian farm shed that had been sheltering enemy fire or took on a flak-wagon or machine-gun emplacement and at the end there was no telling how many of the bodies were yours, these German bodies that after a few freezing days in their piles looked like cordwood or enormous purple-and-green vegetables. In the Ardennes, in December of ’44, in the Twenty-eighth Infantry, in the bitter cold, the German soldiers were specks in the snow, distant, running, toward him or away from him wasn’t easy to tell in the snow glare; you squeezed, you squeezed the icy trigger of the M1,
metal so cold the oil would freeze and jam the bolt, you squinted into the glare and squeezed through the crumbling GI gloves whose fraying olive threads grew little balls of frozen snow, cold to the bones from the night in the wet foxhole, huddled with O’Malley and Perera and Lundgren, the loved strangers whose bodies were life’s warmth, up to your knees in icy water in the trench, the physical misery great enough and so incessant you could get light-hearted about the death that might hide behind the next tree, as you scuttled along, hump-backed with your pack, thick ancient beeches the trees were, their gray lines rounded and graceful like those of women in the snow. Country like a Christmas card, great Kraut-killing country, the men joked, the bleary heartless boy-men, and it was true, the Ardennes counteroffensive brought the Heinies up out of their bunkered, Kraut-trim emplacements into the open, upright, trying to advance, under Hitler’s mad orders. You squeezed and the distant scurrying dot dropped and you felt a spurt of warmth inside, a surcease in the misery, a leak of satisfaction and pride from some other, impossible world, a world at peace. He potted a few more, like ducks against a white sky, before the platoon fell back and he got his feet out of ice water. If he had killed for his country, he could kill for his art.

“Go ahead,” Cohen breathlessly urged him. “Pull it. Do it. I’m eighty-two and … can’t take five steps … without suffocating. Do me the favor.” Yet the old creep didn’t mean it; he was cunning; he was crazy to live. Cannily, Cohen went on, “What about your young friend here? Rachel. Think she’ll like the … rest of her days in the pen? They execute … women these days. Seems a heavy price to pay for … your elderly boyfriend’s vanity.”

“She chose to come along. I didn’t drag her.”

“I love seeing Henry so energized,” Robin told Cohen.

“He should have put his energy … into his work.
Travel Light … Think Big
 … stunts. You can’t believe a word. I ignore
The Chosen
because everybody agreed … it was an embarrassment.”

“Not Charles Poore in the daily
Times.
He loved it.”

“Poore, that old lady. What did he know? You tried to con us. You thought you could skip out … of yourself and write American. Bech … let me ask you. Can you say the Lord’s Prayer?”

Bech didn’t dignify his inquisitor with an answer, just laid the revolver—a Luger, a war souvenir lifted from the body of a dead officer, a gun that may well have killed Jews before—a little off from pointing at his enemy’s heart. He laid it sideways in air, giving Cohen’s struggling, insatiable tongue permission to continue.

“Well, ninety percent of the zhlubs around you can. It’s in their heads. They can rattle … the damn thing right off … how can you expect to write about people … when you don’t have a clue to the crap … that’s in their heads? The Holy Ghost … These goyim came here thinking … the Holy Ghost had them by the hand. The Holy Ghost. Who the hell is that? Some pigeon, that’s all … anybody knows. Those first winters … they’d never seen anything like it … back in England. They stuck it out … but that Godawful faith … Bech … when it burns out … it leaves a dead spot. Love it or leave it … a dead spot. That’s where America is … in that dead spot. Em, Emily, that guy in the woods … Hem, Mel, Haw … they were there. No in thunder … the Big No. Jews don’t know how to say No. All we know is Yes. Yes, I’ll kill Isaac … Yes, let’s wrestle. That’s why you’re lousy, Bech. You gave it a
shot … some say a good shot … but not me. For me it fell flat. You aimed away … from the subject you had … into the one no one has … except the people who can inhabit nowhere. America, opportunity, jazz, O.K.… but it’s a nowhere. A coast-to-coast nowhere. You thought … like those Hollywood meshuggeners … Jews slaphappy with getting out of the ghetto … you could tickle it into becoming … a
place
, with cute people. Mickey Rooney, Lewis Stone … Jesus. James, Twain, Adams, those mean old boys … you got to love them. You, Bech, I don’t have to love. You are a phony. You made yourself up … 
worse
even than Capote. Go ahead. Pull it. I’m dying for it, no kidding. I can’t breathe, can’t talk, can’t fuck, can’t eat … can’t even sleep more than an hour at a time. Pull it. Look the other way, Rachel. Death’s not as pretty … as you kids these days seem to think. You think it’s nothing … but it’s still … something.” The revered critic’s nose twitched, its blue tip swinging back and forth for perhaps the last time.

Bech uncertainly glanced sideways at Robin. He admired, in her profile, the emphatic black eyebrow, a boldface hyphen, stark and Mediterranean in feeling. Iphigenia and Esther, Electra and Delilah had possessed such fatal unflinching eyebrows. If he wanted to shoot, she would watch him shoot. She was the best sidekick a man could have.

“Robin,” he told her. “Go pull the tube out of the slime-ball’s nostrils.”

She quickly did as she was told, padding forward in her catsuit, thinking perhaps this was a preliminary courtesy, when one old man killed another after decades of enmity.

Bech explained, lowering the gun, “Let’s see if he can breathe on his own.”

Cohen had steeled himself, but panic was creeping up, from his lungs to his face. The tip of his nose was revolving in continuous motion, tracing a tiny circle. He strained forward, to unpinch his lungs, and scrabbled at the side of his chair for the whispering baby-blue tube. His words were mere husks, in clumps of two or three. “Not like this. Use the gat. Bech … believe me … your stuff … won’t last. It’s … upper-middlebrow … schlock. Not even upper. Middle-middle.”

“You fetid bag of half-baked opinions,” Bech snarled. “You rotten spoiler. You’ve been stealing my oxygen for years.”

“Your stuff … it’s … it’s …” Cohen had slumped sideways in the chair. The book he had left on the arm (Walter Benjamin,
Selected Writings, Volume I
, 1913–1926) hit the floor with a thud. His complexion approached the tint of a fish, his throat puffing like stifled gills. “Fifties!” he concluded with a triumphant leer. “You’re Fifties!” His yellow eyeballs rolled upward and his reading glasses flopped into his lap.

“Let’s blow this joint,” Bech told Robin. “I smell escaping gas.”