Bech at Bay (6 page)

The Festschrift party was held in the Thornbush penthouse, the fifteenth and sixteenth floors of a chaff-colored brick building on Park in the Sixties. Sharp-edged minimalist statuary was dangerously scattered about on veneered French antiques. Moonlighting young actresses and actors in all-black unisex outfits passed, with the eerie schooled grace and white-faced expressionlessness of mimes, slippery hors d’oeuvres besprinkled with scallion snips. High on the two-story wall of the duplex, above a circular spiralling glass stairway, a huge Tibetan banner, a
thang-ka
, suspended
above the heads of the living a tree, a
tshog shing
, of rigid, chalk-colored, but basically approachable deities. In the vast living room that yet was too small for this gabbling assemblage, cigarette smoke, that murderous ghost of the past, was briefly thick again. Bech saw around him dozens of half-forgotten faces, faces of editors and agents and publicists and publishers who had moved on (fired and rehired, sold out to a German conglomerate, compelled to scribble news briefs for a Stamford cable station) yet remained eerily visible within the gabby industrial backwater of New York publishing. And there were painters—hawk-nosed, necktieless, hairy, gay—because Izzy was among his other accomplishments a reviewer for
ARTnews
and an expert on Persian miniatures, Quaker furniture, misericords, and so on. And there were composers—smooth, barrel-chested party animals in double-breasted suits, their social skills brought to a high polish by lives of fine-tuning students and buttering up patrons—because Izzy was himself an accomplished amateur violinist who, had not his big brain dragged him away from his finger exercises, might have had a concert career and who, it was said, contributed not just the words but the melody line of several crowd-pleasing songs in the musical comedy,
Occam!
, based upon his first novel, as well as several of the numbers in the bawdy review,
Nefertiti Below the Neck
, loosely derived from his second. And there were history professors Izzy had befriended in the course of his researches, including the famously tall one and the famously short one, who insisted on huddling
tête-à-tête
, like the letter “f” ligatured to the letter “i,” and, finally, there were writers—in a single glance Bech spotted Lucy Ebright with her shining owl eyes and swanlike neck, and Seth Zimmerman with his self-infatuated giggle, and Vernon Klegg in his alcoholic
daze. But it was Pamela Thornbush, Lady Festschrift herself, who came up to Bech, her rosy cheeks echoed by the freckled pink breasts more than half exposed by the velvet plunge of her plum-colored Prada. She had another woman in tow, a firm-bodied young woman dressed in mousy gray, with the dull skin and militant, faintly angry bearing that Bech associated with the beauties of Eastern Europe, those formerly Communist hussies whose attractions were at the service of the Stasi, the ÁVÓ, the KGB. “Dear Henry,” Pamela said, though they had not met many times previously, “Izzy was just touched to tears by what you wrote about him; I never have seen him so moved, honestly. And this is our beautiful Martina, who pulled the whole project together. She still blushes when she talks about your fresh letter.”

Bech grasped the slim cool hand proffered, which mustered a manly squeeze while her eyes levelled into his own. She was his height, perhaps an inch less. Her eyes were a grave shade of hazel. “At my age,” he told her, “it’s either fresh or frozen.”

How strangely, unironically
there
this Martina was, though not quite beautiful; she had no sheen of glamour. She was all business. “I hope you noticed,” she said, “that I defended your paragraph from the copyeditors. As you predicted, they wanted to break the flow.” She spoke with the easy quickness of a thoroughly naturalized American, yet the words had an edge of definiteness, as if she did not quite trust them to convey her full meaning—a remnant, Bech guessed, of her immigrant parents’ accents.

“Copyeditors do hate flow,” he said. “I haven’t looked into the book yet, actually. I thought it might make me too jealous. I’m all of sixty-eight, and nobody fests my schrift.”

“You’re too young, Mr. Bech. You must reach a round number.”

“I’m not sure,” he said, seriously—this steady-eyed woman was an invitation, received however late in life, to be serious; he checked their vicinity to verify that Pamela, the freckled, fabulous, still-girlish heiress, had moved on, having made this little conversational match—“that I have Izzy’s gift for round numbers. Look at the bastard. The perfect host, lapping up homage. He should have been a Roman emperor.”

Thornbush, with the sixth sense that the literary jungle breeds, intuited from far across the room that Bech was talking about him; his protuberant eyes, with their jaundiced whites, slid toward his old colleague, even as a ring of adorers exploded into laughter at his most recent witticism, hot from his fat and flexible tongue.

In response to Bech’s uncharacteristic seriousness, Martina intensified her own. For emphasis she rested her cool fingers on the back of his hand, where it clasped a drink at his chest, a bourbon getting watery as he radiated heat. “People are afraid of you,” she said in a scallion-scented gust of sincerity that tingled the hairs in his avid nostrils. “You’re so pure. I think they think you’d laugh at the idea of a Festschrift. You’d scoff at the concept that people love you.”

He considered the possible truth of this, as he contemplated the waxy white crimps of her ear. This ear was bared beneath a taut side of sensible brown hair, and was, as he had hazarded in their only previous communication, dainty. Fancy anticipates reality. He liked the old-fashioned severity of her hairdo, pulled back into a ponytail secured by a ringlet of silk, a pink cloth rose—an appealing
cheap touch. He liked thrift in a woman, an ascetic self-careless streak; it showed the fitness needed to travel even briefly with him on his rocky road. “They’re right, I would,” Bech answered. “Praise that you squeeze out of people is worth about ten cents on the dollar. Enough about me. Tell me about you.”

She let her level gaze drop while her sallow cheek, above her firm, excitingly antagonistic jaw, resisted a blush. “You had it only slightly wrong. My parents got out in ’68, when I was three years old. My husband wasn’t a gunrunner but in mergers and acquisitions, if you can see the difference.”

“Was? Was in mergers and acquisitions, or was your husband?”

“The latter. I’m sorry I wrote ‘unbuttoned.’ I was nervous. Pamela was frantic to have you in the Festschrift. I thought you’d spit on it. I was both grateful and disappointed when you didn’t.”

This, again, took them to a level of seriousness where neither was quite prepared to breathe. “I succumbed,” he admitted. “To your blandishments. I’ve been to Czechoslovakia,” he added.

“Of course. Everybody goes now. It’s cheap, and Prague is raunchy.”

“I was there when it was still real. Still Communist. That huge statue of Stalin. Those aging hippieish dissidents. It seemed like a very lively, tender place. Vulnerable.”

“Yes, we are. The Czechs were put too close to fiercer peoples. Even when we got free, we smiled our way out.”

“Nothing wrong with that. Would that we all could.”

Her hands were clutched in front of her, one cupping the other, which held a glass of red wine tipped at a dangerous
angle. He dared reach out and touch her. Her hand had seemed cooler when she had touched him. “Watch your back,” he said. “Here comes the birthday boy.”

Izzy Thornbush, the hairs of his bald head standing upright in the light, loomed. Standing beside Martina as if in military formation, he squeezed her shoulders hard enough to make her snicker in surprise. But she kept her wine from sloshing out. “She’s some tootsie, huh, Henry, like we used to say?”

“The term hadn’t occurred to me,” said Bech gallantly.

“She’s been my best buddy at Aesop,” the much-honored scrivener went on. “The rest of those young slobs over there now are computerniks who think the written word is obsolete junk. They don’t care about grammar, they don’t care about margins. This young lady is a real throwback, to the age of us dinosaurs.”

“I have always loved books,” Martina said, with a little wriggle that loosened the wordmaster’s bearlike grip. “I like the way,” she said, “the reader can set his or her own pace, instead of some director on speed or Prozac, who sets it for you.” Did Bech imagine it, or did her lips threaten a stammer, as her almost-native English stiffened on her tongue? Bech was annoyed to think that she was impressed, or intimidated, by Izzy.

The novelist’s massive eyebrows—thickets, wherein arcs as red as burning filaments struggled to stay alight amid hairs from which all color and curl had been extracted—lifted in appreciation of this bulletin from the pharmaceutical generation. “There’s never been enough organized thought,” he announced, “on how a reader’s input helps create the book. We have no equivalent to the art installation, where the viewer is also the orderer.”

“Well, there was
Hopscotch
,” Bech said. “And Barthes somewhere writes about how he always skips around in Proust.”

“A computer system,” Izzy was wool-gathering on, his eyes popping and bubbles of saliva exploding between his lips, “say,
À la Recherche
on CD-ROM, could generate a new path, an infinite series of new paths, through it, making a new novel every time—there could be one in which Jupien is the hero, or in which Albertine becomes Odette’s lover!”

“A reader doesn’t want decision-making power,” Martina said, a bit testily, in the face of Thornbush’s eminence. Perhaps she was showing Bech she was less intimidated than he, onlooking, had thought. “You read because no decisions are asked of you, the author has made them all. That is the luxury.”

“But isn’t this,” Izzy said, displaying that he was not too old to have developed a Derridean streak, “a mode of tyranny? Isn’t a traditional author the worst sort of maniacal Yahweh, telling us how everything must be?”

Bech glanced upward, wondering if Yahweh, who used to consider it a dreadful uncleanness to have His name in a mortal mouth, would strike Thornbush dead. Or had Izzy through marriage and promiscuously roving the world of ideas become so little a Jew as to enjoy a goyish immunity? A cool hard pressure on his hand recalled Bech to earth; Martina, formal and mannish, was shaking his hand goodbye. “I’ll leave you two to settle these great matters,” she said. “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Bech. Thanks again for your wonderful contribution.”

“Goodbye so soon? Perhaps,” he ventured, “when and if I get my own Festschrift …”

Her serious deepset eyes met his; no smile crimped her unpainted lips. “Or sooner,” she said sternly.

Sooner? Bech scented sex, that hint of eternal life. Her face, unadorned, held a naked promise that her figure did not deny. Izzy rotated his great neckless head to watch her gray-clad derrière, firm but a touch more ample than was locally fashionable, disappear into a smoky wall of animated cloth. “Cute,” he muttered. “Bright. Knock the Commies all you want, they put some backbone into their brats you don’t see in American kids that age—gone limp in front of the damn television.”

“She came here when she was three, she told me,” Bech said.

“You learn more by three than all the rest of your life,” Thornbush rebutted. “Read Piaget. Read Erikson. Read anybody, for Chrissake—what the hell do you do all day in that empty loft downtown? Nobody can figure it out.”