Bech Is Back (16 page)

Through the great bowed pane of Mr. Flaggerty’s office the vista of the East River and of Queen’s waterfront industrial sheds was being slowly squeezed away by rising new construction. Flaggerty also was tall, six three at least, and the hand he extended was all red-knuckled bones. He wore blue jeans and an open-necked shirt of the checkered sort that Bech associated with steelworkers out on their bowling night. He wondered,
How does this man take his authors to restaurants?
“It’s super Doreen is letting me handle you,” Flaggerty said.

“I’ve been told I’m hard to handle.”

“Not the way I hear it. The old-timers I talk to say you’re a pussycat.”

This young man had an uncanny dreamy smile and seemed content to sit forever at his glass desk smiling, tipped back into his chair so that his knees were thrust up to the height of his heaped In and Out baskets. His lengthy pale face was assembled all of knobs, melted together; his high brow especially had a bumpy shine. His desk top looked empty and there was no telling what he was thinking as he gazed so cherishingly at Bech.

Bech asked him, “Have you read the book?”

“Every fucking word,” Flaggerty said, as if this was unusual practice.

“And—?”

“It knocked me out. A real page-turner. Funny
and
gory.”

“You have any suggestions?”

Flaggerty’s wispy eyebrows pushed high into his forehead, multiplying the bumps. “No. Why would I?”

“The language didn’t strike you as—a bit rough in spots?” One of Ned Clavell’s favorite phrases.

This idea seemed doubly startling. “No, of course not. For me, it all worked. It went with the action.”

“The scene with Olive and the video crew—”

“Gorgeous. Raunchy as hell, of course, but with, you know, a lot of crazy tenderness underneath. That’s the kind of thing you do so well, Mr. Bech. Mind if I call you Henry?”

“Not at all. Sock it to me, Jim.” Bech still had not got what he wanted—an unambiguous indication that his manuscript had been pondered. He had the strange sensation, talking to Flaggerty, that his editor had not so much read the book as inhaled it: that Bech’s book had been melted down and evaporated in these slice-of-pie-shaped offices and sent into the ozone to join the former contents of aerosol cans. Here, in Vellum’s curved and pastel halls, languidly drifting young women in Vampira makeup outnumbered any signs of literary industry; the bulletin boards were monopolized by tampon and lingerie ads torn out of magazines, with all their chauvinistic implications underlined and annotated in indignant slashing felt-tip. Flaggerty’s walls were white and mostly blank, but for a grainy blowup of Thomas Wolfe about to board a trolley car. Otherwise they might be sitting in a computer lab. Bech asked him, “How do you like the title?”

“
Easy Money
?” So he had got that far. “Not bad. Might confuse people a little, with all these how-to-get-rich-in-the-coming-crash books on the market.”

“The original title was
Think Big
, but I found it hard to work under. It weighed on me. I couldn’t get going really until my wife told me to scrap the title.”

“
Think Big
, huh?” Flaggerty’s eyes, deep in their sockets of bone, widened. “I like it.” They were beryl: an acute pale cat color. “Don’t you?”

“I do,” Bech admitted.

“It comes at you a little harder somehow. More
zap
. More subliminal leverage.”

Bech nodded. This tall fellow for all his languor and rural costume talked Bech’s language. They were in business.

B
ECH
I
S
B
ACK!
was to be the key of the advertising campaign. Newspaper ads, thirty-second radio spots, cardboard cutouts in the bookstores, posters showing Bech as of over a decade ago and Bech now.
Fifteen Years in the Making
was a subsidiary slogan. But first, nine months of gestation had to be endured, while proofs languished in the detention cells of book production and jacket designs wormed toward a minimum of bad taste. Back in Ossining, Bea was frantic over the loss of Ann’s virginity. Judy had squealed on her younger sister. If only it had been Judy, Bea explained, she wouldn’t be so shocked; but Ann had always been the good one, the A student, the heir to Rodney’s seriousness.

“Maybe that’s why,” Bech offered. “It takes some seriousness to lose your virginity. Always flirting and hanging out with the cheerleaders like Judy, you get too savvy and the guys never lay a glove on you.”

“Oh, what do you know? You’ve never had daughters.”

“I had a sister,” he said, hurt. “I had a twenty-one-year-old mistress once.”

“I bet you did,” Bea said. “Typical. You’re just the kind of thing Rodney and I hoped would never happen to our girls.”

The twins were seventeen. They would be eighteen on Valentine’s Day. The deflowerer, if Judy could be believed, was one of the preppy crowd crunching around in the driveway with their fathers’ cars. “I don’t see that it’s any big deal,” Bech said. “I mean, it’s a peer, it’s puppy love, it’s not rape or Charles Manson or anybody. Didn’t I just read in a survey somewhere that the average American girl has had intercourse by around sixteen and a half?”

“That’s with everybody figured in,” Bea snapped. “The ghettos and Appalachia and all that. If I’d wanted my girls to be ghetto statistics I would have moved to a ghetto.”

“Listen,” Bech said, hurt again. “Some of my best ancestors grew up in a ghetto.”

“Don’t you
understand
?” Bea asked, her face white, her lips thinned. “It’s a de
file
ment. A woman can never get it
back
.”

“What would she do with it if she could get it back? Come on, sweetie. You’re making too fucking much of this.”

“Easy for you to say. Easy for you to say anything, evidently. Do you think this would have happened if that book of yours hadn’t been in the house, all that crazy penthouse sex you cooked up out of your own sordid little flings?”

“I didn’t know Ann had read it.”

“She didn’t have to. She heard us talking about it. It was in the air.”

“Oh, please. It doesn’t take a book of mine to put sex in the air.”

“No of course not. Don’t blame books for anything. They just sit there behind their authors’ grins. You act as though the world is one thing and art is another and God forbid they
should ever meet. Well, my daughter’s virginity has been sacrificed, as I see it, to that damn dirty book of yours.”

Bech had never seen Bea like this before, raging. What frightened him most were her eyes, unseeing, and the mouth that went on, a machine of medium-soft flesh that could not be shut off. This face that had nested in every fork of his body floated like some careening gull in the wind of her fury, staring red-rimmed at him as if to swoop at the exposed meat of his own face. “Jesus,” he offered with mild exasperation. “The kid is seventeen. Let her experiment if that’s what she wants.”

“It’s
not
what she wants, how could she want one of those awful boys? She
does
n’t want it, that’s the point; what she wants is to show
me
. Her mother. For leaving her father and screwing you.”

“I thought it was Rodney who left.”

“Oh, don’t be so literal, you know how these things are. It takes two. But then my taking up with you, so quickly really, in that house on the Vineyard that time, and the way we’ve been here, so h-happy with each other”—her face was going from white to pink, and drifting closer to his—“I never thought of how it must look to them. The children. Especially the girls. Don’t you see, I’ve made them confront what they shouldn’t have had to so early, their own mother’s”—now her face was on his shoulder, her breath hot on his neck—“s-sexuality! And of
course
they’re appalled, of
course
they want to do self-destructive things out of spite!” He was in her grip, no less tight for her being grief-stricken. As her storm of remorse worked its way through Bea’s fragile, Christian nervous system, tough, Semitic Bech, dreamer and doer both, author of the upcoming long-awaited
Think Big
, pondered open-eyed the knobbed and varnished and lightly charred mantel of their fieldstone fireplace. Above it there
was an oil painting, with a china-blue, single-clouded sky, of a clipper ship that Bea’s maternal great-grandfather had once captained, depicted under full sail and cleaving a bottle-green sea as neatly crimped by waves as an old lady’s perm. Upon the mantel stood two phallic clay candlesticks, one by Ann and one by Judy, executed by the twins in some vanished summer’s art camp at Briarcliff and now by consecrated usage set on either end of the mantelpiece; beside it leaned a fishing rod with broken reel that Donald had chosen to abandon in the corner where the fieldstones met the floral-wallpapered wall. Bourgeois life: its hooks came in all sizes.

He patted Bea’s back and said, “And for all this you blame me?”

“Not you,
us
.”

Like Adam and Eve. The first great romantic image, the Expulsion. The aboriginal trinity of producer, advertiser, and consumer. This woman’s fair head was full of warping myths. Her sobbing had become its own delicious end, a debauchery of sorts, committed not with him but with Rodney’s ghost, to the accompaniment of spiritual stride piano played by that honorary member of many a Jew-excluding organization, Judge R. Austin Latchett.

Tad slugs her
. Bech looked around for cold water, and threw some. “What about birth control?” he asked.

Bea looked up out of her tear-mottled face. “What about it?”

“If the kid’s humping, she better have it or you’ll really have something to cry about.”

Bea blinked. “Maybe it was only one time.”

Bech flattened a tear at the side of her nose, tenderness returning. “I’m afraid it’s not something you do only once. You get hooked. Have you ever talked to the girls about all this?”

“I suppose so,” Bea said vaguely. “I know at school they took hygiene.… It’s
hard
, Henry. For a long time they’re so young it wouldn’t make any sense and then suddenly they’re so old you assume they must know it all and you’d feel foolish.”

“Well, there’re worse things than feeling foolish.” It was hard for him, on his side, to believe that Bea needed his advice, his wisdom. Female mockery and its Southern cousin female adulation had played in his ears for five decades, so it was hard for him to hear this shy wifely tune, this halting request for guidance in a world little more transparent in its fundamental puzzles to female intution than to male. “You must talk to her,” Bech advised firmly.

“But how can I let her know I know anything without betraying Judy?”

The prototypical maze, Bech remembered reading somewhere, was the female insides. He tried to be patient. “You don’t have to let her know. Just tell her as an item of general interest.”

“Then I should be talking to them both at the same time.”

She had a point there, he admitted to himself. Aloud he said, “No. In this area being a twin doesn’t count anymore. You can imply to Ann you’ve had or will have the same conference with Judy, but for now you want to talk privately with
her
. Listen. The girl must know she’s gotten in deep, she
wants
to hear from her mother. She’s not going to grill you about what you know or how you know.”

The more persuasively he talked, the more slack and dismayed her expression grew. “But what do I say ex
act
ly, to start it off?”

“Say, ‘Ann, you’re reaching an age now when many girls in our society enter into sexual relations. I can’t tell you I approve,
because I don’t; but there are certain medical options you should be aware of.’ ”

“It doesn’t sound like me. She’ll laugh.”

“Let her. She’s a little girl inside a woman’s body. She’s suddenly been given the power to make a new human life out of her own flesh. It’s more frightening than getting a driver’s license. She’s more frightened than you are.”

“How do you know so much?”

“I’m a man of the world. People are my profession.”

A new thought struck Bea. “Don’t boys like that use things?”

“Well, they used to, but in this day and age I expect they’re too spoiled and lazy. They don’t like that snappy feeling.”

“But if I begin to talk contraception with her so calmly, it amounts to permission. I’m saying it’s
fine
.” Panic squeezed this last word out thin as a wire.

“Well, maybe it is fine,” he said. “Think of Samoa. Of Zanzibar. Western bourgeois civilization, don’t forget, is a momentary episode in the history of
Homo sapiens
.”

She heard the impatience of his tone, his boredom with wedded worry and wisdom. “Henry, I’m sorry. I’m being stupid. It’s just I’m so scared of doing the wrong thing. For some reason I can’t think.”

“Well,” he began in a deep voice, for the third time. “It’s easy to give advice where it’s not your own life and death. On the matter of my book, you were very hard-headed.”

“And you resent it,” she pointed out, dry-eyed at last.

After this fraught discussion of sexuality, it seemed to Bech, Bea pulled back, she who had once been so giving and playful, so honestly charmed to find this new, hairier, older, more gnarled and experienced man in her bed. Now when at night, finished reading, he turned off his light and experimentally
caressed her, she stiffened at his touch, for it interrupted her inner churning. Even under him and enclosing him, she felt absent. “What are you thinking about?” he would ask.

It would be as if he had startled her awake, though the whites of her eyes gleamed sleeplessly in the Ossining moonlight. Sometimes she would confess, blaming herself for both the girl’s sin and this its frigid penance, “Ann.”

“Can’t you give it a rest?”

“God in Heaven I wish I could.”

At Vellum, lanky, laconic Flaggerty had a young female assistant, a quick black-haired girl fresh from Sarah Lawrence, and Bech wondered if it was her hands that appeared in the Xeroxes the firm sent him of his galley sheets. Whoever it was had held each sheet flat on the face of the photocopier, and in the shadowy margins clear ghosts of female fingers showed, some so vivid a police department could have analyzed the fingerprints. Bech inspected these parts of disembodied hands with interest; they seemed smaller, slightly, than real hands, but then womanly smallness, capable of Belgian embroidery and Rumanian gymnastics, is one of the ways by which the grosser sex is captivated. He looked through the photocopied fingers for the hard little ghost of a wedding or engagement ring and found none; but then she might have been employing only her right hand.