Bech Is Back (6 page)

C
LEAN STRAIGHT
streets. Cities whose cores are not blighted but innocently bustling. Citizens of Anglo-Saxon blood, British once removed, striding long-legged and unterrorized out of a dim thin past into a future as likely as any. Empty territories rich in minerals. Stately imperial government buildings. Parks where one need not fear being mugged. Bech in his decline went anywhere but had come to prefer safe places.

The invitation to Canada was to Toronto, to be interviewed, as Henry Bech, the exquisitely unprolific author, on the television program
Vanessa Views
. Vanessa was a squat woman with skin like orange cheesecloth, who nevertheless looked, on a twenty-three-inch screen, if not beautiful, alive. “It’s all in the eyes,” she explained. “The people with deep sockets do terribly. To project to the camera, you must have eyes set forward in your head. If your eyes turn inward, the viewers turn right off.”

“Suppose your eyes,” Bech asked, “turn toward each other?”

Vanessa refused to pick it up as a joke, though a female voice behind the lights and cameras laughed. “You are an author,” Vanessa told him sternly. “You don’t have to project. Indeed, you shouldn’t. Viewers distrust the ones who do.”

The two of them were caught in the curious minute before airtime. Bech, practiced rough-smoothie that he was, chatted languidly, fighting down the irreducible nervousness, a floating and rising sensation as if he were, with every second ticked from the huge studio clock, being inflated. His hands prickled, swelling; he looked at his palms and they seemed to have no wrinkles. His face felt stiff, having been aromatically swabbed with something like that strange substance with which one was supposed, thirty years ago, to color oleomargarine and thereby enhance the war effort. The female who had laughed behind the lights, he saw, was the producer, a leggy girl pale as untinted oleo, with nostrils reddened by a cold, and lifeless, pale hair she kept flicking back with the hand not holding her handkerchief. Named Glenda, she appeared harried by her own efficiency, which she refused to acknowledge, brushing aside her directives to the cameramen as soon as she issued them. Like himself, Bech felt, she had been cast by life into a role it amused her to not quite fill.

Whereas his toadlike interviewer, whose very warts were telegenic, inhaled and puffed herself way up; she was determined to fill this attenuated nation from coast to coast. The seconds waned into single digits on the studio clock and a muffled electronic fuss beyond the lights clicked into gear and Bech’s pounding heart bloated as if to choke him. Vanessa began to talk. Then, miracle that never failed, so did he.

He talked into the air. Even without the bright simulacrum of his head and shoulders gesticulating in the upper-left corner of his vision, where the monitor hung like an illuminated
initial on a page of shadowy manuscript, Bech could feel the cameras licking his image up and flinging it, quick as light, from Ontario to British Columbia. He touched his nose to adorn a pensive pause, and the gesture splashed onto the shores of the Maritime Provinces and fell as silver snow upon the barren Yukon. As he talked, he marveled at his words as much as at the electronic marvel that broadcast them; for, just as this broadcasting was an airy and flattering shell upon the terrestrial, odorous, confused man who physically occupied a plastic chair and a few cubic feet of space in this tatty studio, so his words were a shell, an unreal umbrella, above his kernel of real humanity, the more or less childish fears and loves that he wrote out of, when he wrote. On the monitor now, while his throaty interviewer described his career with a “voice-over,” stills of his books were being flashed, and from their jackets photographs of Bech—big-eared and combative, a raw youth, on the flap of
Travel Light;
a few years older on
Brother Pig
, his hair longer, his gaze more guarded and, it seemed to Bech in the microsecond of its exposure, illicitly conspiratorial, seeking to strike up a mutually excusatory relationship with the reader; a profile, frankly and vapidly Bachrachian, from his collection of essays; and, wizened if not wiser, as pouchy as a golf bag, his face, haloed by wild wool that deserved to belong to a Kikuyu witch doctor, from the back of his “big” novel, which had been, a decade ago, jubilantly panned. Bech realized, viewing the montage, that as his artistic powers had diminished he had come to look more and more like an artist. Then, an even older face, the shocking face of a geezer, of a shambler, with a furtive wit waiting to twitch the licked and criminal lips, flashed onto the screen, and he realized it was he, he as of this moment, on camera, live. His talking continued, miraculously.

Afterward, the producer of the show emerged from behind the cables and the cameras, told him he was wonderful, and, the day being fair, offered to take him for a tour of the city. He had three hours before a scheduled dinner with a Canadian poet who had fenced with Cocteau and an Anglican priest who had prepared a concordance of Bech’s fiction. Glenda flicked back her hair absent-mindedly; Bech scanned her face for a blip marking how far she expected him to go. Her eyes were an even gray shallowly backed by a neutral Northern friendliness. He accepted.

In Australia, the tour of Sydney was conducted by two girls, Hannah, the dark and somber prop girl for the TV talk show on which he had been a seven-minute guest (along with an expert on anthrax; a leader of the Western Australia secessionist movement; a one-armed survivor of a shark attack; and an aborigine protest painter), plus Moira, who lived with Hannah and was an instructor in the economics of underdevelopment. The day was not fair. A downpour hit just as Hannah drove her little Subaru to the Opera House, so they did not get out but admired the world-famous structure from the middle distance. A set of sails had been the architect’s metaphor; but it looked to Bech more like a set of fish mouths about to nibble something. Him, perhaps. He gave Hannah permission to drive away. “It’s too bad,” Moira said from the back seat, “the day is so rotten. The whole thing is covered in a white ceramic that’s gorgeous in the sun.”

“I can picture it,” Bech lied politely. “Inside, does it give a feeling of grandeur?”

“No,” said Hannah.

“It’s all rather tedious bits and pieces,” Moira elaborated.
“We fired the Dane who did the outside and finished the inside ourselves.”

The two girls’ life together, Bech guessed, contained a lot of Moira’s elaboration, around the other’s dark and somber core. Hannah had moved toward him, after the show, as though by some sullen gravitational attraction such as the outer planets feel for the sun. He was down under, Bech told himself; his volume still felt displaced by an eternity in airplanes. But Hannah’s black eyes had no visible backs to them. Down, in, down, they said.

She drove to a cliffy point from which the harbor, the rain lifting, gleamed like silver long left unpolished. Sydney, Moira explained, loved its harbor and embraced it like no other city in the world, not even San Francisco. She had been in San Francisco once, on her way to Afghanistan. Hannah had not been anywhere since leaving Europe at the age of three. She was Jewish, said her eyes, and her glossy, tapered fingers. She drove down to Bondi Beach, and the three removed their six shoes to walk on the soaked sand. The tops of Bech’s fifty-year-old feet looked white as paper to him, cheap paper, as if his feet amounted to no more than the innermost lining of his shoes. The young women ran ahead and challenged him to a broadjump contest. He won. Then, in the hop, step, and jump, his heart felt pleasantly as if it might burst, down here, where death was not real. Blond surfers, wet-suited, were tumbling in with the dusk; a chill wind began sweeping the cloud tatters away. Hannah at his side said, “That’s one reason for wearing a bra.”

“What is?” Moira asked, hearing no response from Bech.

“Look at my nipples. I’m cold.”

Bech looked down; indeed, the woman wore no bra and her erectile tissue had responded to the drop in temperature. The
rare sensation of a blush caked his face, which still wore its television makeup. He lifted his eyes from Hannah’s T-shirt and saw that, like fancy underpants, the entire beach was frilled, with pink and lacy buildings. Sydney, the girls explained, as the tour continued from Bondi to Woollahra to Paddington to Surry Hills and Redfern, abounds in ornate ironwork shipped in as ballast from England. The oldest buildings were built by convicts: barracks and forts of a pale stone cut square and set solid, as if by the very hand of rectitude.

In Toronto, the sight Glenda was proudest to show him was the City Hall, two huge curved skyscrapers designed by a Finn. But what moved Bech, with their intimations of lost time and present innocence, were the great Victorian piles, within the university and along Bloor Street, that the Canadians, building across the lake from grimy, grubbing America, had lovingly erected—brick valentines posted to a distant, unamused queen. Glenda talked about the city’s community of American draft evaders and the older escapees, the families who were fleeing to Canada post-Vietnam, because life in the United States had become, what with race and corruption and pressure and trash, impossible.

Flicking back her pale hair as if to twitch it into life, Glenda assumed Bech agreed with her and the exiles, and so a side of him lackadaisically did; but another side, his ugly patriotism, bristled as she chattered on about his country’s sins and her own blameless land’s Balkanization by the money that, even in its death throes, American capitalism was flinging north. Hearing this, Bech felt the pride of vicarious power—he who lived cowering on drug-ridden West 99th Street, avoiding both the venture of marriage, though his suburban mistress was more than ready, and the venture of print, though his editor, dear old Ned Clavell, from his deathbed in the Harkness
Pavilion had begged him to come up at least with a memoir. While Glenda talked, Bech felt like something immense and confusedly vigorous about to devour something dainty. He feigned assent and praised the new architecture booming along the rectitudinal streets, because he believed that this woman—her body a hand’s-breadth away on the front seat of a Canadian Ford—liked him, liked even the whiff of hairy savagery about him; his own body wore the chill, the numb expectancy all over his skin, that foretold a sexual conquest.

He interrupted her. “Power corrupts,” he said. “The powerless should be grateful.”

She looked over dartingly. “Do I sound smug to you?”

“No,” he lied. “But then, you don’t seem powerless to me, either. Quite masterful, the way you run your TV crew.”

“I enjoy it, is the frightening thing. You were lovely, did I say that? So giving. Vanessa can be awfully obvious in her questions.”

“I didn’t mind. You do it and it flies over all those wires and vanishes. Not like writing, that sits there and gives you that Gorgon stare.”

“What are you writing now?”

“As I said to Vanessa. A novel with the working title
Think Big
.”

“I thought you were joking. How big is it?”

“It’s bigger than I am.”

“I doubt that.”

I love you
. It would have been easy to say, he was so grateful for her doubt, but his sensation of numbness, meaning love was at hand, had not yet deepened to total anesthesia. “I love,” he told her, turning his face to the window, “your sensible, pretty city.”

• • •

“Loved it,” Bech said of his tour of Sydney. “Want to drop me at the hotel?”

“No,” Hannah said.

“You must come home and let us give you a bite,” Moira elaborated. “Aren’t you a hungry lion? Peter said he’d drop around and that would make four.”

“Peter?”

“He has a degree in forestry,” Moira explained.

“Then what’s he doing here?”

“He’s left the forest for a while,” Hannah said.

“Which of you … knows him?” Bech asked, jealously, hesitantly.

But his hesitation was slight compared with theirs; both girls were silent, waiting for the other to speak. At last Hannah said, “We sort of share him.”

Moira added, “He was mine, but Hannah stole him and I’m in the process of stealing him back.”

“Sounds fraught,” Bech said; the clipped Australian lilt was already creeping into his enunciation.

“No, it’s not so bad,” Moira said into his ear. “The thing that saves the situation is, after he’s gone, we have each other. We’re amazingly compatible.”

“It’s true,” Hannah somberly pronounced, and Bech felt jealous again, of their friendship, or love if it were love. He had nobody. Flaubert without a mother. Bouvard without a Pécuchet. Even Bea, whose dreary life in Ossining had become a continuous unstated plea for him to marry her, had ceased to send signals, the curvature of the earth interceding.

They had driven in the darkness past palm-studded parks and golf courses, past shopping streets, past balconies of iron lace, into a region of dwarf row houses, spruced up and painted pastel shades: Bohemia salvaging another slum. Children
were playing in the streets and called to their car, recognizing Hannah. Bech felt safe. Or would have but for Peter, the thought of him, the man from the forest, on whose turf the aged lion was daring to intrude.