Order had collapsed, everyone was jabbering; the hubbub subsided when Jason Marr indicated he would speak. “What this outfit needs,” he said, “is a little affirmative action. Its spectrum needs to be broadened. I would like to nominate Toni Morrison, Henry Louis Gates, Cornel West, Albert Murray, and Lanford Wilson, right off the top of my head.”
“I second them all,” Amy exclaimed.
Edna interposed, “Toni Morrison is already a member.”
“Then I nominate Rita Dove,” said Marr suavely.
“Yes, women!” Amy cried. “There are so many these days! Wise women! Elaine Pagels! Ellen Zwilich! Eudora Welty! We no longer need swim on our backs, turning our foolish broken hearts into song, that was what we did in my day. Babies and songs—nothing else mattered enough. Even Dorothy Thompson and Martha Gellhorn, they thought they should be in love. I knew them both.”
“Miss Welty is already a member,” said Edna.
“I loved Gellhorn,” Lulu interposed. “Even just the name. Como una matadora.”
“They were never members,” Edna felt obliged to point out. She was getting tired. Her little cardiographs were trailing off into weak, irregular beats, and the tape recorder, if Bech read its little red light aright, was spinning a spool empty of tape. He was beginning to feel rescued, free. In his biggest, most presidential voice he announced, “These are all excellent nominations. We’ll put them into writing. Send in any others to Edna, with seconds. We will get ballots in the mail by Christmas.” One of Edna’s young minions had come in, attractively breathless; her whispered secret was imparted from Edna to Bech. “I am informed,” he announced, “that the caterer downstairs says the hot hors d’oeuvres are getting cold. Does anyone except me want a drink? If the answer is aye, I propose we adjourn. Thank you all for coming. It was an exceptional turnout.” In the absence of a gavel, he rapped his knuckles on the wood, and the hollow, bow-sided desk resounded sonorously, like an African drum.
As the little elderly mob, growling and quarrelling and laughing, pressed toward the stairs, Edna at his side put down her pencil. “That was a bit of a scrape,” she muttered, pronouncing it “scripe.”
“Yeah, what’s going on? What’s eating Izzy? He twisted my arm to take this job, and now he gives off nothing but negative vibes.”
“Deep waters, Henry,” she said. He looked at her; she had never before employed a tone this intimate. His éminence grise. His First Lady. She was prim and efficient but with a lurking antipodean strangeness, an occasional hoot of laughter out of the outback. Her profile was a cameo, in eighteenth-century English style—precise pursed mouth, high-bridged Romneyesque nose. The white wings of her short page boy swung forward as she fussed, motherly, with the recording device and her yellow pad of jagged notes. While they all played at being the Forty, she worked. She was sixtyish, but, then, he was a year short of seventy. Spinsters preserve themselves, he figured. The buds of passion remain coiled tight. He had once been to Australia, and sampled the handsome native women there, but had never talked to Edna about it—the pale parched land, the alkaline sky, the lacy iron balconies in Sydney, the opera house like a ship under full sail. An America without Calvinism or Judaism, just sunny brown space and the rough male humor of a penal colony. He found himself, in the wake of the battle they had breasted together, quite close to Edna. What was it Izzy had told him? She’s dying for you. His dying for her wouldn’t be the worst fate. She had the requisite severity, a silver purity.
His relationship with Martina was deteriorating. Behind that Communist innocence lurked a Nineties American woman—canny, ambitious, condition-conscious, self-preserving. Bech could hardly blame her for seeing men younger than himself (she would need the exercise, the multiple orgasms he could no longer provide), but the suspicion that she and Izzy had something going nagged. That polymathic slob, that kept man, that pseudo-Talmudic maze-maker. Bech had an opportunity to spy on the situation when Pamela invited him and, separately, Martina, to a Christmas party in her penthouse. The artistic crowd that had shrouded the Festschrift gala in smoke and stale rivalries was in attendance only spottily—a plump Princeton savant who believed that Genesis was written by a woman; Vernon Klegg celebrating his latest dryly written, alcoholsoaked succès d’estime; and a skinny, bespectacled poet whose poems all dealt, in cindery glints, with Ohio industrial depression. “I had pictured your husband as looking different,” Bech confided to the poet’s iron-haired but still-lissome wife.
“Oh? How?” she responded, too brightly. There was something giddy, on the edge of naughty, about this woman that Bech wearily ascribed to his ancient roguish reputation, which had preceded him.
“More blue-collar,” he said. “He’s always doing sestinas and pantoums about rusty I-beams and how he scrubbed out vats of acid in a rubber suit.”
“That was his brother who did the vats. Jim worked in the mills only summers; he was the family dreamer. They all sacrificed so he could go to college.”
“And is he grateful?”
“Very,” she said. “But they hate his poems. They want him to write about higher things, not about them, and the mills.”
Across the round table, delicate, pampered Jim in his rimless glasses nodded and cringed beneath the chattery, fluttery attentions of his hostess. He had won prizes, and Pamela liked that. But she noticed Bech noticing, and accosted him after dessert. The shining skin exposed by her low-cut Herrera gown of watered silk flashed like a breastplate; she pressed him into a conversational corner. He wanted, under the stimulus of the three colors of wine served with the meal, to reach down and fish up one of her tits, to see if her freckles extended to the nipple. Did she go topless, that is, in her and Izzy’s privacy beside their East Hampton pool? As a girl she had surely sunbathed with minimum coverage on the salty, rainbow-ridden foredeck of her father’s yachts as they ploughed the Sound and the turquoise Caribbean. She read these thoughts, or sensed their heat, and pressed her freckled décolletage two inches closer to his already rumpled shirtfront. “Henry, what’s happening between you and Martina? She seems so distracted and sour.”
“She does?” He searched out where in the little crowd of penthouse visitants Martina and her dull charcoal dress had lodged. She was, his secret garden fragrant of spices and overripe, leaf-embowered fruits, in close conversation with the blue-collar poet; without doubt Jim was the hero of the evening. “Well, maybe she doesn’t like the way the Communist countries have adopted capitalism,” Bech suggested. “They’ve taken the gangsters and the exploitation of the masses and left out all the rest.”
“Henry, darling”—the “darling” meant that she knew he wanted to fish up her tits; she too had imbibed a tricolor of wine—“only you think of Martina as a Communist. She left Czechoslovakia when she was a toddler.”
“As the twig is bent,” Bech said.
“Isaiah and I thought you two were perfect for each other. Lately she has dropped to him one or two hints that we were wrong.”
“Being perfect for each other is itself an imperfection, don’t you think, in the murky sexual arena? I mean, sadomasochism has to have some room for exercise. How do you and Izzy handle perfection, may I ask?”
Pamela tapped him on the sternum, deftly mirroring his desire to touch her in the corresponding, but naked, spot. Perky shiksa tits, without that sallow Jewish heaviness, that nagging memory of one’s mother’s. Pam’s apple cheeks glowed; her teeth, small and round and tilted inwards like a baby’s, were exposed by a flirtatious laugh back to the molars, which lacked a single metal filling. Had they been crowned? What is natural and what is not? With rich women one never knows. Were Pamela’s eyes so wide-open because he was fascinatingly provocative, or because she had had lid surgery? He peered at the delicate skin beneath her arched brows, looking for tiny scars. “We share interests,” she told him. “And we adore the children we’ve had by other marriages.”
“Ah, children,” Bech said, numbed by his memory of the three children of Bea Latc
hett’s with whom he had for a time shared a Westchester County domicile—three little quick stabs, followed by a throb of loss. Ann and Judy, the twins, had married away from the East Coast, but Donald, their little brother, lived in New York, as a fashion photographer’s assistant. Once a year he and his former stepfather had lunch. Donald was—to judge by his tight but tinted haircut and right-eared earring and failure ever to mention a girlfriend—gay, but Bech never inquired. If the boy had been warped, Bech blamed himself; when he and Bea had split up, Donald had been ten, and heartbreakingly willing to love them both.
“And on the rare occasions when we don’t agree,” Pamela was explaining, “we know how to fight healthily.”
“Yes, I can see health written all over you. But sedentary old Izzy? Pamela, tell me”—he touched her bare arm, just under the freckled ball of her shoulder, a compromise—“don’t you find him sometimes terribly, how can I say this, oppressive?”
Her face stiffened, intensifying Bech’s suspicions of plastic surgery. She said, “Isaiah is the most sensitive and quick-witted man I have ever met. Don’t be jealous, Henry. You have your own style. There’s room enough in the world for both epic poets and writers of haiku.”
“Is that what I write? Haiku? Even Think Big?”
Pamela, like many a woman before her, saw that it had been a mistake to get him on the subject of his writing: he took it too seriously, more seriously than sex or money. You cannot flirt with a writer about his books. She changed the subject: without even a shift of those wide-open eyes of hers, she grabbed a bulky man passing by in a double-breasted blue blazer. “Henry, I don’t think you met my brother when you were here before. Zeke loves your books. He says you write rings around my darling husband.”
“He’s just teasing you,” Bech assured her, shaking the big puffy hand extended into his. Zeke Towers, Jr., had one of those practiced handshakes that don’t quite come into your grip but somehow withhold the palm, giving you just the fingers. The family freckles covered his big face so thickly he looked diseased, or clad in a Tom Sawyer mask.
“The Travellers,” young Zeke pronounced, his boyish face betraying a deep mnemonic effort. “It knocked me out, back when I was in college. It was assigned in two different courses.”
“Travel Light, I think you must mean. About a motorcycle gang cruising from town to town in the Midwest, raping and pillaging.”
The fascinating face, which, like a plate of nouvelle cuisine, was bigger than it needed to be to contain what was on it, lit up with relief. “Yeah, terrific—I’d never been hardly west of the Hudson, and here was all this sex and violence.”
“All made up,” Bech assured him.
“And then that other one, set in New York, with the scene where the television crew—”
“Think Big. I’ve always been kind of embarrassed about that book—it became a best-seller.”
“And that was bad?” Zeke Jr. asked in genuine puzzlement. Bech gathered that the man’s brother-in-law didn’t talk this perverse way. For Izzy, worldly success was a legitimate goal.
“Pretty bad. And then it ruined my perfectly fine marriage. My wife’s sister was so indignant I had written a best-seller and appeared in People that she seduced me and her sister kicked me out.” He confessed all this partly to interest and offend Pamela; but she, as was her way, had ducked off, leaving him with the conversational companion of her choosing.
It was hard to tell with Wasp males how old they were; they don’t stop being boys. Zeke Jr. must have been fifty or so, and he blinked as if he had never heard self-deprecating doubletalk before. “That sounds rough,” he said. “Hey, listen, I bet you’ve been asked this before, but what I’ve always wondered about you writer types is, Where the hell do you get your ideas?”
More and more, as Bech went out to parties, he found himself being interviewed. It was a mode of conversation he disliked but had become adept in. “A good question,” he said firmly, repeating it: “Mr. Bech, where do you get your ideas?” Having given himself a moment to think, he now answered: “Your ideas are the product, generally, of spite. There is somebody you want to get even with, or some rival you want to outdo. The fiction then is what the psychiatrists call a working out. Or is it an ‘acting out’?”
“You’d have to ask Pam about that. Until she got linked up with Izzy, she was on the couch five days a week.”
“But she’s the picture of health now.” Rosy cheeks, buoyant dappled breasts, seamless plastic surgery. Was Bech falling in love yet again?
“Izzy’s done wonders for her, I can tell you. My dad died happy, seeing his daughter in good hands at last.”
“He sounds like an easy man to make happy.”
Zeke Jr. was again puzzled, but had already built puzzlement into his expectations of Bech, and was determined to be polite. Why? Uneasily the unprolific author wondered what charm he held for this financial buccaneer, this boyish wielder of air rights and metropolitan acreage. “My dad had been lucky in life,” young Zeke said reverently, as if taking a frat pledge, “and nothing was too good for his family. He would have spoiled the hell out of us, if he hadn’t also exemplified the work ethic.”
Before such piety, Bech was almost silent. “My father,” he confessed, “thought nothing could be too bad for us. He was a spoiler. He managed to die in the subway at rush hour.”
“My dad came from Queens,” said Zeke Jr., taking the high road. “He began with just a couple of vacant lots, and then in the Depression he’d assume the mortgages of bankrupt commercial property, stuff nobody else’d touch. He never looked back. Even into his eighties he was working ten, twelve hours a day. ‘I love the hassle and the wrassle,’ he’d say.”
What was this kid—kid, he could be sixty, if you factor in the rejuvenating effects of gym workouts and winter visits to the Fountain of Youth—trying to sell him? Maybe an earnest, innocent selling manner had become his only style, just like Bech could only do prose haiku. He wasn’t used to such friendly attention from men in such expensive blazers, with a silk handkerchief tumbling from the breast pocket like a paisley orchid. “Where do you get your ideas?” Bech asked him.
“Ideas?”
“For deals.”
Zeke Jr.’s candid eyes narrowed; the skin beneath his eyes took on a crěpey pallor, a tinge of corruption. “Oh—they just develop. It’s a team effort. Not like what you do—think up all this stuff out of nowhere. That to me is awesome.”
Thank God, Izzy came up to them, bringing the fresh air of familiar rudeness. “Henry is awesome,” he said. “Especially in the sack.”
“Who says?” Bech asked.
“Rumor hath it,” said Thornbush smugly. “Henry, you are talking here to one of your foremost fans. Though it galls me to admit it, my main distinction in this lad’s eyes is having a claim to your acquaintance.”
“Not just a claim. You’ve done the mining.”
“And pure gold it was. Is.” The tenacious Izzy grip had closed around Bech’s upper arm, which became a kind of tiller in these choppy currents. Bech found himself being steered toward a wall where an ice bucket and a militant array of bottles were being tended by a slender young mime sporting a nostril-ring.
“A privilege and pleasure to meet you, Mr. Bech,” his alleged admirer’s voice called after them.
Izzy turned in stately, politic fashion. “Zeke,” he said, “I’d invite you to join us for brandy and cigars but I know you never let yourself be contaminated. Your better half was making noises in the dining room about the long ride back to Greenwich.”
“You really feel at home with a shaygets like that?” Bech had to ask when he and the other writer were alone in a corner—the only such corner—containing bookshelves. Bech vainly scanned them for one of his own books; he knew their spines better than his past mistress’s faces. Pamela must keep them in her bedroom.
“Don’t underrate the boy,” Izzy assured him. “He may not look it, but he’s a genius at what he does. New York real es
tate has been rocky lately, but young Zeke never gets caught holding the bag. Very impressive. He’s as ruthless as his old man, and smoother. You can be glad old Zeke isn’t here any more. A fucking monster—never got past eighth grade, and with every prejudice in the book. Came out of the South Jersey pine woods—Appalachia without the mountain air. He would have blocked the marriage if I hadn’t told him I would rescue his daughter from Jewish shrinks. Takes a Jew to chase a Jew, I knew he’d think.”
Izzy had lit up a cigar, a smuggled Havana, and Bech was holding the brandy. His third sip of the raw cognac put him in touch, via a knight’s move of the consciousness, with the volatile essence of truth. “How would he have blocked it?” he asked.
“Disinherit,” Izzy said.
“But surely,” Bech protested, “you didn’t marry Pamela for her money?”
“It was part of the picture. Just like her tits. Would you want to marry a woman if they sawed off her tits? Stick with her, sure—but take her on? Hey, what’s with you and La O’Reilly?”
“She’s souring on me. She ever talk to you about it?”
Under those prodigious eyebrows the old wizard’s eyes veiled meretriciously. “She and I don’t talk romance, just the word business. I was surprised you put such a move on her. You don’t generally go for bluestocking, methodical types; you like destructive.”
“Martina has her sweet destructive side,” Bech said. He must not finish this brandy, he vowed to himself.
“I think she’s jealous of Edna,” Thornbush volunteered.
“Edna? Dear little birdy, virginal Edna?” Yet the very name had conjured up the chaste inner spaces of the Forty’s mansion, and the distinguished dim visages over whom he now and then presided as if over a congress of the ghosts of the dignity, the integrity, the saintly devotion that had once attached to the concept of the arts in the American republic. Edna had as pure a profile as Miss Liberty on the old dime.
“She says you talk about her. You talk about the Forty all too tenderly, in Martina’s view. She thinks you’ve gone establishment. I tell her, ‘Not Bech. He’s the last of the desperadoes. Dérèglement de tous les sens, that’s his motto.’ ”