Bech (14 page)

“What did they want to ask me?”

“Oh, yes. And that seminar is waiting. You know what their nickname for it is?—‘Bellow’s Belles.’ Now
that’s
been turned into ‘Bellow’s Balls.’ Isn’t that a good sign, that they can be obscene?
My
girls delegated me to ask
you
”—and Bech inwardly questioned the source of that delegation—“if you’d please, please,
pretty
please be willing to judge a poetry contest of theirs. I got your schedule from Dean Coates and see you have a big empty slot late this afternoon; if you could
pos
sibly make it over to Ruffin Hall at five, they will recite for you in their best Sunday School manner some awful doggerel you can take back to your room, and give us the verdict before you go tomorrow. It is an imposition, I know. I know, I know. But they’ll be so thrilled they’ll
melt
.”

The zipper of her catsuit was open three inches below the
base of her throat. If he pulled the zipper down six inches more, Bech estimated, he would discover that she was wearing no bra. Not to mention no girdle. “I’d be pleased to,” he said. “Honored, you can tell them.”

“God, that’s swell of you,” Miss Eisenbraun responded briskly. “I hope you weren’t hoping to have a nap this afternoon.”

“In fact,” he told her, “I didn’t get much sleep. I feel very strange.”

“In what way strange?” She looked up into his face like a dentist who had asked him to open his mouth. She was interested. If he had said hemorrhoids, she would still be interested. A Jewish mother’s clinical curiosity. Abigail Bech had always been prying, poking.

“I can’t describe it.
Angst
. I’m afraid of dying. Everything is so implacable. Maybe it’s all these earth-smells so suddenly.”

She smiled and deeply inhaled. When she sniffed, her upper lip broadened, furry. The forgotten downiness of Jewish women. Their hairy thighs. “It’s worst in spring,” she said. “You get acclimated. May I ask, have you ever been in analysis?”

His escort of virgins, which had discreetly withdrawn several yards when Miss Eisenbraun had pulled her ambush, rustled nervously. Bech bowed. “I am awaited.” Trying to rise to jauntiness from in under her implication that he was mad, he added, “See you later, alligator.”

“In a while, crocodile”: streetcorner yids yukking it up in the land of milk and honey, giving the gentle indigenes something to giggle about. But with her he had been able to ignore, for an absent-minded moment, the gnawing of the worm inside.

How strange, really, his condition was! As absorbing as
pain, yet painless. As world-transforming as drunkenness, yet with no horizon of sobriety. As debilitating, inwardly, as a severed spine yet permitting him, outwardly, a convincing version of his usual performance. Which proved, if proof were needed, how much of a performance it was. Who was he? A Jew, a modern man, a writer, a bachelor, a loner, a loss. A con artist in the days of academic modernism undergoing a Victorian shudder. A white monkey hung far out on a spindly heaven tree of stars. A fleck of dust condemned to know it is a fleck of dust. A mouse in a furnace. A smothered scream.

His fear, like a fever or deep humiliation, bared the beauty veiled by things. His dead eyes, cleansed of healthy egotism, discovered a startled tenderness, like a virgin’s whisper, in every twig, cloud, brick, pebble, shoe, ankle, window mullion, and bottle-glass tint of distant hill. Bech had moved, in this compressed religious evolution of his, from the morning’s raw animism to an afternoon of natural romanticism, of pantheistic pangs. Between lunch (creamed asparagus, French fries, and meatloaf) and the poetry contest he was free; he took a long solitary walk around the edges of the campus, inhaling the strenuous odors, being witness to myriad thrusts of new growth through the woodland’s floor of mulching leaves. Life chasing its own tail. Bech lifted his eyes to the ridges receding from green to blue, and the grandeur of the theatre in which Nature stages its imbecile cycle struck him afresh and enlarged the sore accretion of fear he carried inside him as unlodgeably as an elastic young wife carries within her womb her first fruit. He felt increasingly hopeless; he could never be delivered of this. In a secluded, sloping patch of oaks, he threw himself with a grunt of decision onto the damp earth, and begged Someone, Something, for mercy. He had created God. And now the silence of the created universe
acquired for Bech a miraculous quality of willed reserve, of divine tact that would let him abjectly pray on a patch of mud and make no answer but the familiar ones of rustle, of whisper, of invisible growth like a net sinking slowly deeper into the sea of the sky; of gradual realization that the earth is populated infinitely, that a slithering slug was slowly causing a dead oak leaf to lift and a research team of red ants were industriously testing a sudden morsel, Bech’s thumb, descended incarnate.

Eventually the author arose and tried to brush the dirt from his knees and elbows. To his fear, and shame, was added anger, anger at the universe for having extracted prayer from him. Yet his head felt lighter; he walked to Ruffin Hall in the mood of a condemned spy who, entering the courtyard where the firing squad waits, at least leaves behind his dank cell. When the girls read their poetry, each word hit him like a bullet. The girl with the small head and the long neck read:

There was more to this poem, about Nature, about fine-veined leaves and twigs sharp as bird feet, and more poems, concerning meadows and horses and Panlike apparitions that
Bech took to be college boys with sticks of pot, and then more poets, a heavy mannish girl with an unfortunate way of rolling her lips after each long Roethkësque line, and a nun-pale child who indicted our bombing of thatched villages with clotted Lowellian tropes, and a budding Tallulah swayed equally by Allen Ginsburg and Edna St. Vincent Millay; but Bech’s ears closed, his scraped heart flinched. These youthful hearts, he saw, knew all that he knew, but as one knows the rules of a game there is no obligation to play; the sealed structure of naturalism was a school to them, a prison to him. In conclusion, a splendid, goggle-eyed beauty incanted some Lanier, from “The Marshes of Glynn,” the great hymn that begins

and goes on

and ends

Something filmed Bech’s eyes, less full-formed tears than the blurry reaction pollen excites in the allergic.

After the poetry reading, there was supper at Madame
President’s—you know her: hydrangea hair and sweeping manners and a listening smile as keen and neat as an ivory comb. And then there was a symposium, with three students and two members of the English faculty and Bech himself, on “The Destiny of the Novel in a Non-Linear Future.” And then a party at the home of the chairman of the department, a bluff old Chaucerian with a flesh-colored hearing aid tucked behind his ear like a wad of chewing gum. The guests came up and performed obeisances, jocular or grave, to Bech, their distinguished interloper, and then resumed seething among each other in the fraught patterns of rivalry and erotic attraction that prevail in English departments everywhere. Amid them Bech felt slow-witted and paunchy; writers are not scholars but athletes, who grow beerbellies after thirty. Miss Eisenbraun detached herself and walked him back across the campus. A pandering Southern moon rode above the magnolias and the cupolas.

“You were wonderful tonight,” she told him.

“Oh?” Bech said. “I found myself very lumpish.”

“You’re just marvelously kind to children and bores,” she pursued.

“Yes. Fascinating adults are where I fall down.”

A little pause, three footsteps’ worth, as if to measure the depth of the transaction they were contemplating. One, two, three: a moderate reading. Yet to lift them back over the sill of silence into conversation, a self-conscious effort, something kept in a felt-lined drawer, was needed. She pulled out French.

“
Votre malaise—est-il passé?
” The language of diplomacy.

“
Il passe, mais très lentement
,” Bech said. “It’s becoming part of me.”

“Maybe your room has depressed you. Their guest accommodations are terribly little-girly and sterile.”

“Exactly. Sterile. I feel I’m an infection. I’m the only germ in a porcelain universe.”

She laughed, uncertain. They had reached the glass doors of the dormitory where he slept. An owl hooted. The moon frosted with silver a distant ridge. He wondered if in his room his fear would make him pray again. A muffled radio somewhere played country rock.

“Don’t worry,” he reassured her. “I’m not catching.”

Her laugh changed quality; it became an upwards offer of her throat, followed by her breasts, her body. She was not wearing the catsuit but a black cocktail dress with a square neckline, yet the effect was the same, of a loose slipperiness about her that invited a peeling. She was holding to her breasts a manilla envelope full of poems awaiting his verdict. “I think your room is underfurnished,” she told him.

“My rooms in New York are too.”

“You need something to sleep beside.”

“An oxygen tent?”

“Me.”

Bech said, “I don’t think we should,” and cried. He seemed to mean, to himself, that he was too hideous, too sick; yet also in his mind was the superstition that they must not defile the sleeping dormitory, this halcyon Lesbos, with copulation. Ruth Eisenbraun stared amazed, her hands tightening on the envelope of poems, at the moonlight making ice of Bech’s impotent tears. Her firm willing body, silhouetted against the dewy smell of sleeping grass, seemed to him another poem abysmal in its ignorance, deceitful in its desire to mitigate the universe. Poetry and love, twin attempts to make the best of a bad job. Impotent: yet in his stance, his refusal to embrace a hasty cure, we must admire a type of rigidity, an erect pride in his desolation, a determination to defend it as his territory. A
craven pagan this morning, he had become by midnight a stern monk.

This is all speculation. Truly we are in the dark here. Knowing Bech on other, better lit occasions, we doubt that, given this importunate woman, the proximity of the glass doors, and the key in his pocket, he did not for all his infirmity take her inside to his sickbed and let her apply to his wound the humid poultice of her flesh. Also, on her side, Ruth was a professor of literature; she would not have misread the works so badly as to misjudge the man. Picture them then. Above Bech and Ruth hangs the black dome of their sepulchre; the nipples of her breasts also appear black, as they swing above him, teasing his mouth, his mouth blind as a baby’s, though his eyes, when he shuts them, see through the succulent padding to the calcium xylophone of her rib cage. His phallus a counterfeit bone, a phantasmal creature, like Man, on the borderline of substance and illusion, of death and life. They establish a rhythm. Her socket becomes a positive force, begins to suck, to pound. Enough. Like Bech, we reach a point where words seem horrible, maggots on the carcass of reality, feeding, proliferating; we seek peace in chaste silence.

Wait, wait. Here is another slide, a fifth, found hiding under a stack of gold domes from Russia. It shows Bech the next morning. Again, he has slept on his back, his head held high by two pillows, a china figurine through which dreams idly blow. The pillows having been piled one on top of the other prevent our knowing whether or not two heads lay down on the bed. He rises grudgingly, stiffly. Again, he is wonderfully productive of excrement. His wound feels scabbier, drier; he knows now he can get through a day with it, can
live with it. He performs his toilet—washes, wipes, brushes, shaves. He sits down at the little pseudo-Sheraton desk and shuffles the sheaf of poems as if they are physically hot. He awards the first prize, a check for $25, to the girl with the small head and blue eyes on stalks, writing as his citation:

Bech suspected that “poetess” wasn’t quite right any more, but arranged to have the envelope delivered to Miss Eisenbraun anyway—delivered by someone else. He was driven to the airport by a homely, tall, long-toothed woman whose voice, he realized, was the voice that beguiled him over the telephone. “Ah’m
so
sorreh, Misteh Bech, evrehbodeh saiys you were
dahl
in, but Ah had to attend mah sisteh’s weddin in Roanoke, it was one of those sudden affaihs, and jes got back this mawnin! Believe me, suh, Ah am
moht
ifahd!”

“Neveh you mind,” Bech told her, and touched his inside breast pocket to make sure his check was in it. The landscape, unwinding in reverse, seemed greener than when he arrived, and their speed less dangerous. Bea, who with much inconvenience had hired a babysitter so she could meet him at La Guardia, sensed, just seeing him emerge from the giant silver thorax and scuttle across the tarmac in the rain, that something had happened to him, that there wasn’t enough of him left for her to have any.

BECH SWINGS?