Bech swirled his cape, performing, with an ironic bow, the courtesies Cohen had requested. “Rachel, meet my nemesis, Mr. Orlando Cohen, the arch-fiend of American criticism. Orlando, this is Ms. Rachel Teagarten, who helps me out in my work. She understands computers, copulation, and elementary cooking.”
“I suppose computers,” the old magus wheezed, “are worth understanding. I always think in this connection … of the chess-playing automaton … who turned out to be … a dwarf. The board had to be transparent, so he … could follow the moves. Imagine … following the moves upside down … crouched in a little airless box. And winning sometimes. He didn’t always win, actually—that is a myth. There was a series of dwarfs … some of whom were undoubtedly … more skillful than others.”
This long speech left Cohen utterly breathless. He inhaled prolongedly through his nose. His nose and ears had enlarged with age, or had remained the same while the rest of him shrunk. He had been a handsome man, once, and women had been tantalized and maddened by their failure to distract him from his chaste ambition to be the ultimate adjudicator of literature—all literature, but specializing in American. He had steadfastly refused to grant Bech a place, even a minor place, in the canon. In review after review he had found Bech’s books artificial, hollow, dandyish, lame. His review of Going South, in The New Criterion, had been jeeringly titled “Halt and Lame.”
“Don’t try to buy time with gabble,” Bech advised him. “The jig is up.”
“What jig?” Cohen managed to get out. The tip of his nose looked blue with anoxia. He had a strange contemplative habit of twitching his nose, of swinging its tip from side to side, rapidly.
“The jig of trashing me. What did I ever do to you?”
“You failed to write well.”
“How could that be? It was all I cared about, writing well.”
“You cared too much. You let the words hold you back … from descending into yourself. You were Jewish and tried to pretend … you were American.”
“Can’t you be both?”
“Bellow can. Salinger could, once. Mailer, alternately … never both at once. Malamud … I don’t know. He lost me in those last books … Dubin’s Lives and the one about the monkeys. He wanted credentials. Jews can’t get credentials. Not in a world run by goyim. Israel is a credential. It’s not a good one. The Arabs won’t stamp it.”
“You’re stalling, Orlando. See this? What is it?” Bech delved beneath his beautiful, midnight-blue cape and brandished the steel tool he came up with. It felt heavy, heavier than it looked.
“A gun,” Orlando Cohen said. His spatulate fingers adjusted the plastic leech whispering into his nostrils.
“A gat,” Bech corrected. “A rod. With a silencer. Not even the people downstairs are going to hear when I plug you. They’ll think it’s your dishwasher kicking into the next part of the cycle.”
The sick man’s eyes left Bech’s face. “Rachel,” he said. “How long has he … been like this?”
“Don’t answer the scumbag,” Bech commanded her. “The prick, he sucks up to Wasps. The stiff-necked old establishment. The more anti-Semitic they were—the Jameses, the Adamses, the Holmeses—the more he loves them. Hemingway, Fitzgerald—never mind their snide cracks. He even praised Capote, can you imagine? Praised Capote and panned me.”
Cohen replied, so faintly the duo had to strain to listen, picking up all sorts of muttered street noise and radio music in the process. “Capote … descended into himself. In In Cold Blood … he hit his vein. He wanted to be hung with Perry. He hated himself … the little squeaky monster he was. He worked his self-hatred … into an objective correlative. He made us care. Bech … you … you missed your vein. You were squeamish … and essentially lazy. You missed … the boat. The boat … to America.”
“I am going to shut you up,” Bech told him. “I am going to squeeze this fucking trigger and rub you out. Don’t think I’m too squeamish. I’ve killed before.” In the war. There was no knowing how many. With a Browning automatic rifle you poured lead into a thicket or Belgian farm shed that had been sheltering enemy fire or took on a flak-wagon or machine-gun emplacement and at the end there was no telling how many of the bodies were yours, these German bodies that after a few freezing days in their piles looked like cordwood or enormous purple-and-green vegetables. In the Ardennes, in December of ’44, in the Twenty-eighth Infantry, in the bitter cold, the German soldiers were specks in the snow, distant, running, toward him or away from him wasn’t easy to tell in the snow glare; you squeezed, you squeezed the icy trigger of the M1, metal so cold the oil would freeze and jam the bolt, you squinted into the glare and squeezed through the crumbling GI gloves whose fraying olive threads grew little balls of frozen snow, cold to the bones from the night in the wet foxhole, huddled with O’Malley and Perera and Lundgren, the loved strangers whose bodies were life’s warmth, up to your knees in icy water in the trench, the physical misery great enough and so incessant you could get light-hearted about the death that might hide behind the next tree, as you scuttled along, hump-backed with your pack, thick ancient beeches the trees were, their gray lines rounded and graceful like those of women in the snow. Country like a Christmas card, great Kraut-killing country, the men joked, the bleary heartless boy-men, and it was true, the Ardennes counteroffensive brought the Heinies up out of their bunkered, Kraut-trim emplacements into the open, upright, trying to advance, under Hitler’s mad orders. You squeezed and the distant scurrying dot dropped and you felt a spurt of warmth inside, a surcease in the misery, a leak of satisfaction and pride from some other, impossible world, a world at peace. He potted a few more, like ducks against a white sky, before the platoon fell back and he got his feet out of ice water. If he had killed for his country, he could kill for his art.
“Go ahead,” Cohen breathlessly urged him. “Pull it. Do it. I’m eighty-two and … can’t take five steps … without suffocating. Do me the favor.” Yet the old creep didn’t mean it; he was cunning; he was crazy to live. Cannily, Cohen went on, “What about your young friend here? Rachel. Think she’ll like the … rest of her days in the pen? They execute … women these days. Seems a heavy price to pay for … your elderly boyfriend’s vanity.”
“She chose to come along. I didn’t drag her.”
“I love seeing Henry so energized,” Robin told Cohen.
“He should have put his energy … into his work. Travel Light … Think Big … stunts. You can’t believe a word. I ignore The Chosen because everybody agreed … it was an embarrassment.”
“Not Charles Poore in the daily Times. He loved it.”
“Poore, that old lady. What did he know? You tried to con us. You thought you could skip out … of yourself and write American. Bech … let me ask you. Can you say the Lord’s Prayer?”
Bech didn’t dignify his inquisitor with an answer, just laid the revolver—a Luger, a war souvenir lifted from the body of a dead officer, a gun that may well have killed Jews before—a little off from pointing at his enemy’s heart. He laid it sideways in air, giving Cohen’s struggling, insatiable tongue permission to continue.
“Well, ninety percent of the zhlubs around you can. It’s in their heads. They can rattle … the damn thing right off … how can you expect to write about people … when you don’t have a clue to the crap … that’s in their heads? The Holy Ghost … These goyim came here thinking … the Holy Ghost had them by the hand. The Holy Ghost. Who the hell is that? Some pigeon, that’s all … anybody knows. Those first winters … they’d never seen anything like it … back in England. They stuck it out … but that Godawful faith … Bech … when it burns out … it leaves a dead spot. Love it or leave it … a dead spot. That’s where America is … in that dead spot. Em, Emily, that guy in the woods … Hem, Mel, Haw … they were there. No in thunder … the Big No. Jews don’t know how to say No. All we know is Yes. Yes, I’ll kill Isaac … Yes, let’s wrestle. That’s why you’re lousy, Bech. You gave it a shot … some say a good shot … bu
t not me. For me it fell flat. You aimed away … from the subject you had … into the one no one has … except the people who can inhabit nowhere. America, opportunity, jazz, O.K.… but it’s a nowhere. A coast-to-coast nowhere. You thought … like those Hollywood meshuggeners … Jews slaphappy with getting out of the ghetto … you could tickle it into becoming … a place, with cute people. Mickey Rooney, Lewis Stone … Jesus. James, Twain, Adams, those mean old boys … you got to love them. You, Bech, I don’t have to love. You are a phony. You made yourself up … worse even than Capote. Go ahead. Pull it. I’m dying for it, no kidding. I can’t breathe, can’t talk, can’t fuck, can’t eat … can’t even sleep more than an hour at a time. Pull it. Look the other way, Rachel. Death’s not as pretty … as you kids these days seem to think. You think it’s nothing … but it’s still … something.” The revered critic’s nose twitched, its blue tip swinging back and forth for perhaps the last time.
Bech uncertainly glanced sideways at Robin. He admired, in her profile, the emphatic black eyebrow, a boldface hyphen, stark and Mediterranean in feeling. Iphigenia and Esther, Electra and Delilah had possessed such fatal unflinching eyebrows. If he wanted to shoot, she would watch him shoot. She was the best sidekick a man could have.
“Robin,” he told her. “Go pull the tube out of the slime-ball’s nostrils.”
She quickly did as she was told, padding forward in her catsuit, thinking perhaps this was a preliminary courtesy, when one old man killed another after decades of enmity.
Bech explained, lowering the gun, “Let’s see if he can breathe on his own.”
Cohen had steeled himself, but panic was creeping up, from his lungs to his face. The tip of his nose was revolving in continuous motion, tracing a tiny circle. He strained forward, to unpinch his lungs, and scrabbled at the side of his chair for the whispering baby-blue tube. His words were mere husks, in clumps of two or three. “Not like this. Use the gat. Bech … believe me … your stuff … won’t last. It’s … upper-middlebrow … schlock. Not even upper. Middle-middle.”
“You fetid bag of half-baked opinions,” Bech snarled. “You rotten spoiler. You’ve been stealing my oxygen for years.”
“Your stuff … it’s … it’s …” Cohen had slumped sideways in the chair. The book he had left on the arm (Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume I, 1913–1926) hit the floor with a thud. His complexion approached the tint of a fish, his throat puffing like stifled gills. “Fifties!” he concluded with a triumphant leer. “You’re Fifties!” His yellow eyeballs rolled upward and his reading glasses flopped into his lap.
“Let’s blow this joint,” Bech told Robin. “I smell escaping gas.”
“But—” He knew what she meant. If he wasn’t going to shoot him, wasn’t it cruel to let him asphyxiate? Or was this rough justice, on the anoxic literary heights?
“Listen, doll. We’re doing him a favor, just like he asked. The poor sap is addicted. Nobody likes air after they’ve tasted pure oxygen. How does he breathe when he goes to the john? When he grabs his hour of sleep? Between us, I bet he socks in a solid seven, eight hours a night, with maybe one trip to the hopper to take a piss.”
Orlando Cohen, fabled maker and destroyer of reputations, lay crumpled in his chair like a baby transfixed in the mystery of crib death. Robin suppressed a cry and a step toward the unconscious dotard. Bech’s steely gray-gloved hand on her arm restrained her impulsive motion.
“Don’t let that dickhead manipulate you,” he told his companion. “You’re like any broad. You’re too soft. A cold-hearted k’nocker like that, he takes advantage. He’ll get it together as soon as he hears us out the window and down the fire escape. Did you dig that canned lecture on American lit? He’s given it a thousand times.”
Off in the city, a police siren began to ululate; not for them on this caper, but perhaps the next. Clatteringly, the duo descended into the weedy dark back garden, where the shadows of ailanthus leaves restlessly stabbed. Robin brushed up against Bech in these shadows, her face, without its mask, startlingly white. “I want a baby,” she said softly.
“Hey,” Bech said. “I said broads were soft-hearted, I didn’t say they had to act on it.”
“I want to bear your child,” she insisted.
“I’m seventy-four,” he said. “I’m past my ‘sell by’ date.”
They made their stealthy way out, past overflowing trashcans and dying rosebushes, onto Christopher Street, where they became, in the early-evening lamplight, another discreetly quarrelling couple. “I felt scared,” Robin confessed, “when I thought you were going to shoot that wheezy old man.”
“I should have shot the putz,” Bech responded morosely. “He’s done me a world of woe. He’s tried to negate me.”
“Why didn’t you then?” Her hand tugged on his arm like another question, there under the red-lined cape, which lifted a little behind them, as a breeze from Bleecker Street conveyed an ozone suggestion of a thunderstorm before midnight.
“I believed him; it was worse for him to live.”
“You know what I think?”
She waited, irritating Bech, for the thousandth time, with the playful, self-pleasuring expertise with which women play the relational game. “What?” he had to respond, gruffly.
“I think,” she said, “you’re a bit soft-hearted yourself.”
“I was,” he allowed, “but they beat it out of me. They nagged and nitpicked and small-minded me out of it.”
“They couldn’t,” she said. “They’re just critics, but you—”
Once again, her artful pause forced him to make a response: “Yes?”
“You’re you.”
“And who isn’t?”
“Everybody is, but few take it as much to heart as you have. Henry—”
“What? Cut it out with the dialogue.”
“Do you think maybe we’ve rid the world of enough evil for now?”
“There’s plenty left. There’s a guy who teaches at Columbia, Carlos something-era, an English professor, or whatever they call it now, who really got my goat in the Book Review the other week. He said I lacked duende. Duende! I looked it up in the Spanish dictionary and it said ‘ghost, goblin, fairy.’ And then there’s Gore Vidal, who—And Garry Wills, who—”
“Darling.”
“What now?”
“You’re sputtering. Let’s think about our baby.”
“I can’t bring a baby into a world as polluted by wicked criticism as this one.”
“Nobody criticizes a baby.”
“They would any of mine. Robin, we were just getting going as a duo.”
“Were?”
“I want to wreak more vengeance.”
“No you don’t,” Robin told him. “What a duo wants is to become a trio. Here’s a deal: knock me up, or I go to the cops. The bulls.”
“And tell them what?”
“Everything.”
“This is blackmail.”
“I’d call it devotion. To your best interests.” They turned right on Bedford, to cut through to Houston, to walk on to Crosby. The city hung around them like an agitprop backdrop, murmurous and surreal, perforated by lights and lives in the millions. A bat-colored cloud bank gathered in the east, trailing wisps, above the saffron dome of the city’s glow. Rachel Teagarten snuggled closer, complacently, under his cape. Bech wondered if this little tootsie wasn’t getting to be a bit of a drag.
Bech and the Bounty of Sweden
A storm of protest greeted the announcement that Henry Bech had won the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature. Fumed a New York Times editorial:
The Swedish Academy’s penchant for colorful nonentities and anti-establishment gadflies as recipients of its dynamite-based bounty has surpassed mere caprice and taken on, in this latest selection, dimensions of wantonness. If the time for an American winner had at last come round again, then a deliberate affront must be read in this bypassing of solid contenders like Mailer, Roth, and Ozick, not to mention Pynchon and D
eLillo, in favor of this passé exponent of fancy penmanship, whose skimpy oeuvre fails even to achieve J. D. Salinger’s majestic total abstention from publication.
The Post quoted Isaiah Thornbush as saying, “With all respect to my dear colleague and old friend Henry, this turns the Prize into a prank. I was, quite frankly, stunned.” BECH? WHODAT??? was the Daily News’s front-page headline, and People ran as its cover the least flattering photo they could find on file, showing Bech and his then wife, Bea, in bib overalls feigning repairs to the grape arbor of their mock-Tudor, mock-Edenic residence in Ossining. New York rose to the occasion with a languidly acid John Simon retrospective entitled “The Case (Far-Fetched) for Henry Bech.”
Meanwhile, the phone in his Crosby Street loft kept ringing, sometimes interrupting the septuagenarian winner in the midst of changing diapers for his eight-month-old baby, Golda (when it came to naming her daughter, Robin Teagarten was not so post-Jewish after all), so that the spicy smell of ochre babyshit and the shrilling of the phone became the two wings of one exasperating experience. Golda was sturdy and teething and had her mother’s challenging calm stare, not fox-colored thus far but an infant’s contemplative, unblinking slate blue. She was old enough to think there was something fishy about this knobby-handed old man groping about in her crotch and bottom crack with chilly baby wipes, and then too firmly pressing the adhesive fasteners in place upon her glossy, wobbly belly. Golda would tease him and show off her strength by twisting on the changing towel, corkscrewing like a baroque putto. She preferred her mother’s cool quick touch, or the light brown hands of Leontyne, the lilting au pair from Antigua by way of Crown Heights.