The combined decibels of the buskers drowned out, for all but the most attuned city ears, the approach of the train whose delay had been so indistinctly bruited. Featherwaite, like all these Brits who were breeding like woodlice in the rotting log piles of the New York literary industry, was no slouch at pushing ahead. Though there was hardly room to place one’s shoes on the filthy concrete, he had shoved and wormed his way to the front of the crowd, right to the edge of the platform. His edgy profile, with its supercilious overbite and artfully projecting eyebrows, turned with arrogant expectancy toward the screamingly approaching D train, as though hailing a servile black London taxi or gilded Victorian brougham. Featherwaite affected a wispy-banged Nero haircut. There were rougelike touches of color on his cheekbones. The tidy English head bit into Bech’s vision like a branding iron.
Prolix, he thought. Voulu. He had had to look up voulu in his French dictionary. It put a sneering curse on Bech’s entire oeuvre, for what, as Schopenhauer had asked, isn’t willed?
Bech was three bodies back in the crush, tightly immersed in the odors, clothes, accents, breaths, and balked wills of others. Two broad-backed bodies, padded with junk food and fermented malt, intervened between himself and Featherwaite, while others importunately pushed at his own back. As if suddenly shoved from behind, he lowered his shoulder and rammed into the body ahead of his; like dominoes, it and the next tipped the third, the stiff-backed Englishman, off the platform. In the next moment the train with the force of a flash flood poured into the station, drowning all other noise under a shrieking gush of tortured metal. Featherwaite’s hand in the last second of his life had shot up and his head jerked back as if in sudden recognition of an old acquaintance. Then he had vanished.
It was an instant’s event, without time for the D-train driver to brake or a bystander to scream. Just one head pleasantly less in the compressed, malodorous mob. The man ahead of Bech, a ponderous black with bloodshot eyes, wearing a knit cap in the depths of summer, regained his balance and turned indignantly, but Bech, feigning a furious glance behind him, slipped sideways as the crowd arranged itself into funnels beside each door of the now halted train. A woman’s raised voice—foreign, shrill—had begun to leak the horrible truth of what she had witnessed, and far away, beyond the turnstiles, a telepathic policeman’s whistle was tweeting. But the crowd within the train was surging obliviously outward against the crowd trying to enter, and in the thick eddies of disgruntled and compressed humanity nimble, bookish, elderly Bech put more and more space between himself and his unwitting accomplices. He secreted himself a car’s length away, hanging from a hand-burnished bar next to an ad publicizing free condoms and clean needles, with a dainty Oxford edition of Donne’s poems pressed close to his face as the news of the unthinkable truth spread, and the whistles of distant authority drew nearer, and the train refused to move and was finally emptied of passengers, while the official voice overhead, louder and less intelligible than ever, shouted word of cancellation, of disaster, of evacuation without panic.
Obediently Bech left the stalled train, blood on its wheels, and climbed the metallic stairs sparkling with pulverized glass. His insides shuddered in tune with the shoving, near-panicked mob about him. He inhaled the outdoor air and Manhattan anonymity gratefully. Avenue of the Americas, a sign said, in stubborn upholding of an obsolete gesture of hemispheric good will. Bech walked south, then over to Seventh Avenue. Scrupulously he halted at each red light and deposited each handed-out leaflet (GIRLS! COLLEGE SEX KITTENS TOPLESS! BOTTOMLESS AFTER 6:30 P.M.!) in the next city trash receptacle. He descended into the Times Square station, where the old IRT system’s innumerable tunnels mingled their misery in a vast subterranean maze of passageways, stairs, signs, and candy stands. He bought a Snickers bar and leaned against a white-tiled pillar to read where his little book had fallen open,
Death, be not proud, though some have callèd thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
He caught an N train that took him to Broadway and Prince. Afternoon had sweetly turned to evening while he had been underground. The galleries were closing, the restaurants were opening. Robin was in the loft, keeping lasagna warm. “I thought MoMA closed at six,” she said.
“There was a tie-up in the Sixth Avenue subway. Nothing was running. I had to walk down to Times Square. I hated the stuff the museum had up. Violent, attention-getting.”
“Maybe there comes a time,” she said, “when new art isn’t for you, it’s for somebody else. I wonder what caused the tie-up.”
“Nobody knew. Power failure. A shootout uptown. Some maniac,” he added, wondering at his own words. His insides felt agitated, purged, scrubbed, yet not yet creamy. Perhaps the creaminess needed to wait until the morning Times. He feared he could not sleep, out of nervous anticipation, yet he toppled into dreams while Robin still read beneath a burning light, as if he had done a long day’s worth of physical labor.
ENGLISH CRITIC, TEACHER DEAD / IN WEST SIDE SUBWAY MISHAP, the headline read. The story was low on the front page and jumped to the obituaries. The obit photo, taken decades ago, glamorized Featherwaite—head facing one way, shoulders another—so he resembled a younger, less impish brother of George Sanders. High brow, thin lips, cocky glass chin.… according to witnesses appeared to fling himself under the subway train as it approached the platform … colleagues at CUNY puzzled but agreed he had been under significant stress compiling permissions for his textbook of postmodern narrative strategies … former wife, reached in London, allowed the deceased had been subject to mood swings and fits of creative despair … the author of several youthful satirical novels and a single book of poems likened to those of Philip Larkin … Robert Silvers of The New York Review expressed shock and termed Featherwaite “a valued and versatile contributor of unflinching critical integrity” … born in Scunthorpe, Yorkshire, the third child and only son of a greengrocer and a part-time piano teacher … and so on. A pesky little existence. “Ray Featherwaite is dead,” Bech announced to Robin, trying to keep a tremble of triumph out of his voice.
“Who was he?”
“A critic. More minor than Mishner. English. Came from Yorkshire, in fact—I had never known that. Went to Cambridge on a scholarship. I had figured him for inherited wealth; he wanted you to think so.”
“That makes two critics this week,” said Robin, preoccupied by the dense gray pages of stock prices.
“Every third person in Manhattan is some kind of critic,” Bech pointed out. He hoped the conversation would move on.
“How did he die?”
There was no way to hide it; she would be reading this section eventually. “Jumped under a subway train, oddly. Seems he’d been feeling low, trying to secure too many copyright permissions or something. These academics have a lot of stress. It’s a tough world they’re in—the faculty politics is brutal.”
“Oh?” Robin’s eyes—bright, glossy, the living volatile brown of a slick moist pelt—had left the stock prices. “What subway line?”
“Sixth Avenue, actually.”
“Maybe that was the tie-up you mentioned.”
“Could be. Very likely, in fact. Did I ever tell you that my father died in the subway, under the East River in his case? Made a terrible mess of rush hour.”
“Yes, Henry,” Robin said, in the pointedly patient voice that let him know she was younger and clearer-headed. “You’ve told me more than once.”
“Sorry.”
“So why are your hands trembling? You can hardly hold your bagel.” And his other hand, he noticed, was making the poppy seeds vibrate on the obituary page, as if a subway train were passing underneath.
“Who knows?” he asked her. “I may be coming down with something. I went out like a light last night.”
“I’ll say,” said Robin, returning her eyes to the page. That summer the stock p
rices climbed up and up, breaking new records every day. It was unreal.
“Sorry,” he repeated. Ease was beginning to flow again within him. The past was sinking, every second, under fresher, obscuring layers of the recent past. “Did it make you feel neglected? A young woman needs her sex.”
“No,” she said. “It made me feel tender. You seemed so innocent, with your mouth sagging open.”
Robin, like Spider-man’s wife, Mary Jane, worked in a computer emporium. She not so much sold them as shared her insights with customers as they struggled in the crashing waves of innovation and the lightning-swift undertow of obsolescence. The exorbitant memory demands of Microsoft’s Windows 95 had overflowed two-year-old 4-RAM and 8-RAM IBMs and Compaqs. Once-mighty Macintosh had become a mere tidal pool, crawling with slowly suffocating Apple addicts. Simply holding one’s place in cyberspace required more and more megabytes and megahertzes. Such pell-mell dispensability uncomfortably reminded Bech of his possible own, within the cultural turnover. Giants of his youth—A. J. Cronin, Louis Bromfield, John Erskine, Pearl Buck—had slipped over the horizon of living readership into the limbo of small-town book sales. Like a traveller in one of Einstein’s thought experiments, he could be rapidly shrinking in such a recession and be the last to know it. Bech found himself described in scholarly offprints as “Early Postmodern” or “Post-Realist” or “Pre-Minimalist” as if, a narrowly configured ephemerid, he had been born to mate and die in a certain week of summer.
Nevertheless, it pleased him to view Robin in her outlet—on Third Avenue near 27th Street, a few blocks from Bellevue—standing solid and calm in a gray suit whose lapels swerved to take in her bosom. Amid her array of putty-colored monitors and system-unit housings, she received the petitions of those in thrall to the computer revolution. They were mostly skinny young men with parched hair and sunless complexions. Many of them forgot, Robin confided, to sleep or to bathe, in the intensity of their keyboard communions. She spoke their foreign language. It seemed exotic to Bech, erotic. He liked to stare in the display windows at her, while she was copulating, mentally, with a rapt customer. She had a rough way of seizing her own hair, bushy as it was, and pulling it back from her face for a moment, before letting it spring back again around her features, which were knotted in earnest disquisitions on the merits, say, of upgrading a modem from 14.4 kilobytes a second to 33.6 kbps. Sometimes Bech would enter the store, like some grizzled human glitch, and take Robin to lunch. Sometimes he would sneak away content with his glimpse of this princess decreeing in her realm. He marvelled that at the end of the day she would find her way through the circuitry of the city and return to him. The tenacity of erotic connection presaged the faithful transistor and microchip.
Bech had not always been an evil man. He had dedicated himself early to what appeared plainly a good cause, art. It was amusing and helpful to others, he imagined as he emerged from the Army, to turn contiguous bits of the world into words, words which when properly arranged and typeset possessed a gleam that in wordless reality was lost beneath the daily accretions of habit, worry, and boredom. What harm could there be in art? What enemies could there be?
But he discovered that the literary world was a battlefield—mined with hatred, rimmed with snipers. His first stories and essays, appearing in defunct mass publications like Liberty and defunct avant-garde journals like Displeasure, roused little comment, and his dispatches, published in The New Leader, from Normandy in the wake of the 1944 invasion, and then from the Bulge and Berlin, went little noticed in a print world drenched in war coverage. But, ten years later, his first novel, Travel Light, made a small splash, and for the first time he saw, in print, spite directed at himself. Not just spite, but a willful mistaking of his intentions and a cheerfully ham-handed divulgence of all his plot’s nicely calculated and hoarded twists. A New York Jew writing about Midwestern bikers infuriated some reviewers—some Jewish, some Midwestern—and the sly asceticism of his next, novella-length novel, Brother Pig, annoyed others: “The contemptuous medieval expression for the body which the author has used as a title serves only too well,” one reviewer (female) wrote, “to prepare us for the sad orgy of Jewish self-hatred with which Mr. Bech will disappoint and repel his admirers—few, it is true, but in some rarefied circles curiously fervent.” And his magnum opus, The Chosen, in which he tried to please his critics by facing the ethnicity purposefully sidestepped in Brother Pig, ran into a barrage of querulous misprision, not a barbed phrase of which had failed to stick in his sensitive skin. “Ignore the cretins,” his wise acquaintance Norman Mailer had advised him. “Why do you even read such crap?” Joseph Heller sagely asked. Bech had tried to take their realistic advice, and in mid-career imagined that he had developed, if not the hide of a rhinoceros, at least the oily, resplendent back of a duck. He thought the reviews ran off him, chilly droplets swallowed in Lethe’s black waters.
However, as he aged into the ranks of the elderly, adverse phrases from the far past surfaced in his memory, word for word—“says utterly nothing with surprising aplomb,” “too toothless or shrewd to tackle life’s raw meat,” “never doffs his velour exercise togs to break a sweat,” “the sentimental coarseness of a pornographic valentine,” “prose arabesques of phenomenal irrelevancy,” “refusal or failure to ironize his reactionary positions,” “starry-eyed sexism,” “minor, minorer, minormost”—and clamorously rattled around in his head, rendering him, some days, while his brain tried to be busy with something else, stupid with rage. It was as if these insults, these hurled mud balls, these stains on the robe of his vocation, were, now that he was nearing the end, bleeding wounds. That a negative review might be a fallible verdict, delivered in haste, against a deadline, for a few dollars, by a writer with problems and limitations of his own was a reasonable and weaseling supposition he could no longer, in the dignity of his years, entertain. Any adverse review, even a single mild phrase of qualification or reservation within a favorable, indeed an adoring notice, stood revealed as the piece of pure enmity it was—an assault, a virtual murder, a purely malicious attempt to unman and destroy him. What was precious and potentially enduring about Bech was not his body, that fraternal pig with its little oink of an ego, but his oeuvre. Any slighting of his oeuvre attacked the self he chiefly valued. After fifty years of trying to rise above criticism, he liberated himself to take it personally. A furious lava—an acidic indignation begging for the Maalox of creamy, murderous satisfaction—had secretly become Bech’s essence, his angelic ichor.
The female reviewer, Deborah Frueh, who had in 1957 maligned Brother Pig as a flight of Jewish self-hatred lived far from New York, in the haven of Seattle, amid New Age mantras and medicinal powders, between Boeing and Mount Rainier. He could not get her ancient review out of his aging mind—the serene inarguable complacency of it, the certainty that she grasped the ineffable reality of being “covenanted” and he, poor pseudo-Jew, did not. He began to conceive of a way to reach her with the long arm of vengeance. She was still alive, he felt in his bones. She had been young when she dealt the young Bech her savage blow, but had emerged in 1979 to write, for the Washington Post, a stinging, almost pathologically sour review of Think Big beginning, “Somehow, I have never been persuaded to hop onto the Bech bandwagon. Even (or maybe especially) at its flashiest, his prose seems flimsy, the nowhere song of a nowhere man, devoid of any serious ethnic identification and stimulated by only the most trivial, consumeristic aspects of the United States.…” She, the spot bio accompanying this onslaught revealed, taught English poetry and the post-colonial novel at the University of Washington. From this remove her dismissive, pompous criticism ever more rarely reached the book-review columns of the Northeast Corridor. Perhaps academia had seduced her into Derridean convolution, culminating in self-erasure. But she could not hide from him, now that he had been aroused and become, on the verge of dotage, a man of action.
Though she was grit too fine to be found in the coarse sieve of Who’s Who, he discovered
her address in the Poets & Writers’ directory, which listed a few critical articles and her fewer books, all children’s books with heart-tugging titles like Jennifer’s Lonely Birthday and The Day Dad Didn’t Come Home and A Teddy Bear’s Bequest. These books, Bech saw, were her Achilles’ heel.
The renovated old factory where he lived assigned each of its tenants a storage room in the basement. But these partitioned, padlocked chambers by no means included all the basement space: exploration discovered far, dim-lit, brick-walled caverns that held rusted stitching machines and junked parts whose intricate shape defied speculation as to their mechanical purpose at the other, clanking end of the century. In a slightly less neglected recess, the building’s management—a realty corporation headquartered in New Jersey—kept some shelved cans of paint and, hung on pegboard, plumbing supplies and carpentry tools and other infrequently wielded implements of upkeep. The super had about a dozen SoHo buildings in his care and was seldom in the basement, though a split, scuffed Naugahyde armchair, a stack of musty Hustlers, and an antique, gray-encrusted standing ashtray, long ago lifted from a hotel lobby, testified to a potential presence capable of, in the era before downsizing, some low-down leisure. In one of his furtive forays into these lower levels of Manhattan’s lost Industrial Age, Bech found around a grimy corner a narrow wooden closet fitted between waste pipes and an abandoned set of water meters. The locked door was a simple hinged frame holding, where glass might have been, chicken wire rusted to a friable thinness. Peering inside, he saw a cobwebbed cache of dried dark jars, nibbled cardboard boxes, and a time-hardened contraption of rubber tubing with a tin hand-pump, coiled and cracked and speckled with oxidation. His attention fastened on a thick jar of brown glass whose label, in the stiff and innocent typographic style of the 1940s, warned POISON and displayed along its border an array of dead vermin, roaches and rats and centipedes in dictionary-style engraving. Snapping the frail brown wire enough to admit his hand, Bech lifted the bottle out. The size of a coffee can, it sloshed, half-full. In the dusty light he read on the label that among the ingredients was hydrocyanic acid. Fearful that the palms of his hands might become contaminated, Bech carried the antique vermicide up to his loft wrapped in a News the super had tossed aside (headline: KOCH BLASTS ALBANY) and did not unscrew the rusty lid until he had donned Robin’s mint-green rubber kitchen gloves. He exerted his grip. His teeth ground together; his crowns gnashed on their stumps of dentine. The lid’s seal snapped a second before his carotid artery would have popped. Out of fifty intervening years of subterranean stillness arose the penetrating whiff, cited in many a mystery novel, of bitter almonds. The liquid, which was colorless, seemed to be vaporizing eagerly, its ghostly essence rushing upward from the gaping mouth of the jar.