“No, Henry,” she said. “My heart is as fragile as any other woman’s, but that did not break it. One shabby performer crossing up another, it happens all the time. I think our plaintiff’s brain has been scrambled by too many years of escamoteo.”
“He seemed to miss Kepper’s signals entirely.”
“Your pet gouger is not in his prime—why should that sadden you so?”
The restaurant door was open to the soft California twilight, its pacific silence gashed by the grating sound of skateboards and roller skates hurtling muscular young bodies along.
“Speaking of people in their primes,” he said, “where is the place where your sister does her underwater act?”
“Far from here, in terms of both distance and ambiance. I did not want you to ogle my sister. I want you all for myself, Henry. I am more jealous than your New York sophisticated girls.” With a volcanic burst of flame and a thunderous cascade of scalding fat, their appetizer, Pork Strips à la Molokai, arrived. A pack of Rollerbladers cascaded past. Bech saw, with a simultaneous rising and sinking sensation, that his date had primed herself to go all the way.
The case for the defense was brisk and anticlimactic. Rantoul had found more witnesses than he needed to swear that Ohrbach was no angel. A revered octogenarian mogul from the old studio days, crowned by even more snowy hair than the plaintiff, answered, when asked what Ohrbach’s reputation was in the industry, with a single phrase, “The pits.” Another witness, an actress whose smooth, almond-eyed face was vaguely familiar to millions for having played female co-pilots, androids, and extraterrestrial princesses in low-budget space movies, wept as she described the shockingly fractional fortune left to her after Ohrbach’s ministrations.
Bech found her performance a bit overwrought, but it froze all the profiles of the jury—compacted, from his angle, like one of those patriotic posters Norman Rockwell had crammed with a cross-section of Americans. Not quite all profiles, actually, because one of the two alternates, a large round-faced woman in a series of unfortunate pants suits, had taken to staring at him. Her luminous moon face bothered the corner of his eye all day. Whenever he happened to glance toward her, she gave him a wink. He would have been more heartened by this if she hadn’t been only an alternate. It was a sign, he supposed, of habituation when a locality’s females began to zero in. He had been out here nearly three weeks, at the cost of a thousand or more a day. If he winked back at the alternate juror, the judge might declare a mistrial. Bech determinedly refocused on the back of Ohrbach’s head, and noticed a pathetic little bald spot, a peek of defenseless pink amid the snowy waves, where a cowlick swirled. When he had viewed his father at the Brooklyn morgue, Bech had been struck by how thin his hair had become; as long as Abe Bech was alive, the Grecian Formula, the year-round tan, and his ferocious will had enforced the illusion of a full and bristling head.
At the end of that day’s testimony, when the plaintiff quaveringly stood near the door and let his cloudy, sad, reflexive smile skid here and there across the courtroom faces, Bech accidentally caught his eye and, with winks on his mind, gave him one.
Or did he? He couldn’t believe he would do a thing so disastrous. His enemy’s eyes filmed over with fishiness; they were virtually colorless, dragged up from some depth of the sea where light made no difference. Bech blushed in embarrassment, and tried to picture ten million dollars, stacked up in bundled tens and twenties. That’s what that wink could cost him. Recalled to the stand, Ohrbach could testify, “Your honor, and ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the defendant winked at me. Surely that proves beyond the shadow of a doubt, if further proof were needed, that he views me as a pal, a fellow spirit and soulmate, and by no means as an arch-gouger!”
But Ohrbach, instead of pressing his sudden advantage, reverted to not showing up in court. Bech’s imprudent wink, if it occurred, had perhaps mortally offended him. The old finagler had felt mocked; the machinations of the law were not to be winked at. In his absence the trial dragged in a trance toward its termination. Circlets of gray hair had begun to appear in the judge’s Afro, and his list to the left approached the supine. Lanna Jerome did not come out of hiding in Palm Springs, but an accountant and a lawyer in her employ testified with a stultifying double-entry particularity as to financial wrongs and half-wrongs she had suffered. Her relationship with Morrie Ohrbach had begun with “Comin’ On Strong” and had ended with “Don’t Send Me Back My Letters, My Lawyer Will Be in Touch with Yours.”
Bech himself took the stand. The courtroom, seen at last from so different an angle, had a surreal pop-up quality—the judge looming close, the jury fanned out like a grandstand viewed from the playing field, the scattered marks on the court stenographer’s spewing paper almost legible. In his old high-school debating voice, as clear as footprints in the mud, Bech testified that the epithet in question had seemed to him, after much time spent gathering evidence from responsible sources, both apt and fair. He had meant “arch” in its second, more common dictionary sense of “extreme: most fully embodying the qualities of his or its kind.”
He had always imagined that it would be very difficult to lie in court, after taking an oath on the Bible, but nothing, he discovered, would be easier. One becomes an actor, a protagonist in a drama, and words become mere instruments of the joust. Words: how could he have dedicated his life to anything so flimsy, so flexible, so ready to deceive? Asked by Rantoul if he had meant to express it as his opinion that Ohrbach was an arch-gouger or as a fact, he said that he had meant to express it as his opinion. Bech had been amply coached in this legal distinction, upon which mighty First Amendment matters somehow hinged, though it made no real sense to him. What good is an opinion if it doesn’t express a fact? But he refrained from saying this, and his thick-necked lawyer gave him an approving grimace.
Sergeant Kepper rose to cross-examine. “Would you describe yourself, Mr. Bech, as infatuated with Lanna Jerome?”
The little courtroom went so quiet Bech heard a juror’s shoe scrape; the stenographer’s machine tapped what seemed two measures of skeletal melody. “No,” he lied. “I admire her talents, of course, but so do millions.”
“Never mind the millions,” Kepper said raspingly. “The tone of your description of her relations with the plaintiff reminded me, may I say, of a jealous would-be lover.”
“Objection,” Rantoul cried. “Conjecture. Irrelevant.”
“Overruled,” the judge said quietly. “It could be relevant. Proceed, counsellor.”
“Might it be fair to say,” Kepper proceeded, “that your infatuation with Miss Jerome led you to show, in print, hatred, ill will, and spite toward Mr. Ohrbach?”
Bech recognized the legal language, the poison on the tip of the lance. “Not at all,” he said, with an invincible sincerity. “I feel now and felt then no ill will toward Mr. Ohrbach. I have never met him, and have had no dealings with him.” He suppressed the insane urge to confess that, far from ill will, he had come in these days in court to feel a filial affection.
He was ready to plead guilty, had they only known it. But Sergeant Kepper’s pokes toward the chinks in the defendant’s armor became listless, and Bech was soon allowed to step down. There were no more witnesses.
Next day, Kepper’s summation of Ohrbach v. Bech was distracted and jerky, with much misspeaking and idle oratory about the dangers of unbridled media. He spoke of east and west coasts, the West being the open-hearted seat of creativity and entertainment, and the East of cavilling, negativistic criticism. Who is this Henry Bech, a modestly paid litterateur (with emphasis on the last syllable, pronounced toor), to understand the ins and outs of agent-client relations in a vastly successful popular art? Yet, though his stubby arms sawed up and down, his heart and mind seemed to have moved on. In Rantoul’s opinion, Kepper had been persuaded to take Ohrbach’s case on a contingency basis, and knew the jig was up when no out-of-court settlement was reached beforehand. All this—all this expense and terror—had been simply going thr
ough the motions.
Ohrbach had absented himself from the denouement. The ghost had evaporated from the machine.
Rantoul, striving to rouse the case from its torpor, drawled out almost a comically eloquent word-picture of the preposterous injustice of this claim of libel, in view of the plaintiff’s notorious reputation; if in this great country an honest opinion, supported by a rich array of evidence, that a man is an arch-gouger can’t be expressed in a journal of information, what is the point of the Constitution and all the wars fought to defend it against tyrannies of both the fascist and Communist persuasion?
It took the jury, though, four whole hours, while caterpillars becoming butterflies chewed at the lining of Bech’s stomach, to arrive at the verdict of not guilty. One of the Asian-Americans, Gregg Nunn later discovered and confided in a gossippy letter to Bech, thought Flying Fur was a pornographic publication, and as a born-again Christian he wasn’t so crazy about Lanna Jerome’s affair with the governor of Nevada either, or her well-publicized statements in defense of abortion rights and single motherhood.
Bech’s father, Abe Bech, had had terrible varicose veins in the last decade of his life, symptomatic of the circulatory difficulties that eventually killed him. Nevertheless, he walked off to the subway each morning, the Atlantic Avenue station, and stood on his feet in the gloomy, glittering diamond store all day, when he wasn’t limping up and down 47th Street looking for a deal. Dealing is what fathers do, so that sons can disdain it and try to fly away, over the rooftops. But in the end we are brought back to reality and find ourselves tossing a man and his whole life of dealing—doing the necessary, by his own lights—into the hopper for the sake of a peppy phrase. For $1,250 plus expenses. “I feel so guilty,” he told Rita.
“Why on earth why? The plaintiff, he was one podrido son of a bitch.”
Her voice had lost its paralegal primness and relaxed back toward a maternal Latina rhythm. They were naked in his bed in the futuristic hotel, side by side, sharing a joint. She had biscuit-brown shoulders and spiralling dark down on her forearms and a tousled short hairdo just like the pre-punk Lanna Jerome’s. They had been discussing Bech’s countersuit, not only for the legal expenses but for his mental anguish and time lost and the inestimable damage to his professional reputation. Tom Rantoul was licking his chops. “We’ll nail that turkey,” he vowed, “so he’ll never gobble again.” The case, to be financed on a contingency basis, would take months to prepare, and it seemed that Bech’s life was here now, on this coast. He had been asking around, looking up the contacts he had made two years before, and even got a few nibbles. Could he do TV scripts? A lot of the sitcoms take place in the Northeast, because of the audience demographics, and yet there was a whole generation of Hollywood writers to whom New York was just a fable, an Old World from which their fathers and grandfathers had immigrated. The fee named for a trial script equalled half of Bech’s earnings for all last year. He said he’d have to think it over.
“I loved him,” he told Rita. “The stooped way he moved and kept bobbing his head, asking everybody’s pardon and not expecting to get it. When my father died,” he went on, “we found in his bureau drawers these black elastic stockings I had bought him, so his legs wouldn’t hurt so much. He had never worn them. They still had the cardboard in them. Pieces of cardboard shaped like feet.”
“Sweetheart, O.K. I see it. The cardboard feet. Dying down in the subway. Life is rough. But that other judío was trying to eat you. You eat him, or he eats you. Which would you rather?”
“Hey, I don’t know,” the defendant responded, touching two fingers to the erectile tip—the color of a sun-darkened, un-sulphur-treated apricot—of her nearer breast. “Neither seems ideal.”
And neither coast is ideal; Bech in a few more weeks of consultation and courtship returned to our own, while on that far shore a broken female heart slowly mended, and legal wheels, like masticating jaws, ground on and on and then, one day when nobody was looking, stopped.
Bech Noir
Bech had a new sidekick. Her monicker was Robin. Rachel “Robin” Teagarten. Twenty-six, post-Jewish, frizzy big hair, figure on the short and solid side. She interfaced for him with an IBM PS/1 his publisher had talked him into buying. She set up the defaults, rearranged the icons, programmed the style formats, accessed the ANSI character sets—Bech was a stickler for foreign accents. When he answered a letter, she typed it for him from dictation. When he took a creative leap, she deciphered his handwriting and turned it into digitized code. Neither happened very often. Bech was of the Ernest Hemingway save-your-juices school. To fill the time, he and Robin slept together. He was seventy-four, but they worked with that. Seventy-four plus twenty-six was one hundred; divided by two, that was fifty, the prime of life. The energy of youth plus the wisdom of age. A team. A duo.
They were in his snug aerie on Crosby Street. He was reading the Times at breakfast: caffeineless Folgers, calcium-reinforced D’Agostino orange juice, poppy-seed bagel lightly toasted. The crumbs and poppy seeds had scattered over the newspaper and into his lap but you don’t get something for nothing, not on this hard planet. Bech announced to Robin, “Hey, Lucas Mishner is dead.”
A creamy satisfaction—the finest quality, made extra easy to spread by the toasty warmth—thickly covered his heart.
“Who’s Lucas Mishner?” Robin asked. She was deep in the D section—Business Day. She was a practical-minded broad with no experience of culture prior to 1975.
“Once-powerful critic,” Bech told her, biting off his phrases. “Late Partisan Review school. Used to condescend to appear in the Trib Book Review, when the Trib was still alive on this side of the Atlantic. Despised my stuff. Called it ‘superficially energetic but lacking in the true American fiber, the grit, the wrestle.’ That’s him talking, not me. The grit, the wrestle. Sanctimonious bastard. When The Chosen came out in ’63, he wrote, ‘Strive and squirm as he will, Bech will never, never be touched by the American sublime.’ The simple, smug, know-it-all son of a bitch. You know what his idea of the real stuff was? James Jones. James Jones and James Gould Cozzens.”
There Mishner’s face was, in the Times, twenty years younger, with a fuzzy little rosebud smirk and a pathetic slicked-down comb-over like limp Venetian blinds throwing a shadow across the dome of his head. The thought of him dead filled Bech with creamy ease. He told Robin, “Lived way the hell up in Connecticut. Three wives, no flowers. Hadn’t published for years. The rumor in the industry was he was gaga with alcoholic dementia.”
“You seem happy.”
“Very.”
“Why? You say he had stopped being a critic anyway.”
“Not in my head. He tried to hurt me. He did hurt me. Vengeance is mine.”
“Who said that?”
“The Lord. In the Bible. Wake up, Robin.”
“I thought it didn’t sound like you,” she admitted. “Stop hogging the Arts section. Let’s see what’s playing in the Village. I feel like a movie tonight.”
“I’m not reading the Arts section.”
“But it’s under what you are reading.”
“I was going to get to it.”
“That’s what I call hogging. Pass it over.”
He passed it over, with a pattering of poppy seeds on the polyurethaned teak dining table Robin had installed. For years he and his female guests had eaten at a low glass coffee table farther forward in the loft. The sun slanting in had been pretty, but eating all doubled up had been bad for their internal organs. Robin had got him to take vitamins, too, and the calcium-reinforced o.j. She thought it would straighten his spine. He was in his best shape in years. She had got him doing sit-ups and push-ups. He was hard and quick, for a man who’d had his Biblical three score and ten. He was ready for action. He liked the tone of his own body. He liked the cut of Robin’s smooth broad jaw across the teak table. Her healthy big hair, her pushy plump lips, her little flattened nose. “One down,” he told her, mysteriously.
But she
was reading the Arts section, the B section, and didn’t hear. “Con Air, Face/Off,” she read. This was the summer of 1997. “Air Force One, Men in Black. They’re all violent. Disgusting.”
“Why are you afraid of a little violence?” he asked her. “Violence is our poetry now, now that sex has become fatally tainted.”
“Or Contact,” Robin said. “From the reviews it’s all about how the universe secretly loves us.”
“That’ll be the day,” snarled Bech. Though in fact the juices surging inside him bore a passing resemblance to those of love. Mishner dead put another inch on his prick.
A week later, he was in the subway. The Rockefeller Center station on Sixth Avenue, the old IND line. The downtown platform was jammed. All those McGraw-Hill, Exxon, and Time-Life execs were rushing back to their wives in the Heights. Or going down to West 4th to have some herbal tea and put on drag for the evening. Monogamous transvestite executives were clogging the system. Bech was in a savage mood. He had been to MoMA, checking out the Constructivist film-poster show and the Project 60 room. The room featured three “ultra-hip,” according to the new New Yorker, figurative painters: one who did “poisonous portraits of fashion victims,” another who specialized in “things so boring that they verge on non-being,” and a third who did “glossy, seductive portraits of pop stars and gay boys.” None of them had been Bech’s bag. Art had passed him by. Literature was passing him by. Music he had never gotten exactly with, not since USO record hops. Those cuddly little WACs from Ohio in their starched uniforms. That war had been over too soon, before he got to kill enough Germans.
Down in the subway, in the flickering jaundiced light, three competing groups of electronic buskers—one country, one progressive jazz, and one doing Christian hip-hop—were competing, while a huge overhead voice unintelligibly burbled about cancellations and delays. In the cacophony, Bech spotted an English critic: Raymond Featherwaite, former Cambridge eminence lured to CUNY by American moolah. From his perch in the CUNY crenellations, using an antique matchlock arquebus, he had been snottily potting American writers for twenty years, courtesy of the ravingly Anglophile New York Review of Books. Prolix and voulu, Featherwaite had called Bech’s best-selling comeback book, Think Big, back in 1979. Inflation was peaking under Carter, the AIDS virus was sallying forth unidentified and unnamed, and here this limey carpetbagger was calling Bech’s chef-d’oeuvre prolix and voulu. When, in the deflationary epoch supervised by Reagan, Bech had ventured a harmless collection of highly polished sketches and stories called Biding Time, Featherwaite had written, “One’s spirits, however initially well-disposed toward one of America’s more carefully tended reputations, begin severely to sag under the repeated empathetic effort of watching Mr. Bech, page after page, strain to make something of very little. The pleasures of microscopy pall.”