Bech at Bay (23 page)

Bech had made a pilgrimage to the blue-green skyscraper near the river to make sure a suicide leap was feasible. Its
towering mass receded above him like giant railroad tracks—an entire railroad yard of aluminum and glass. The jutting semicircular petals of its balconies formed a scalloped dark edge against the clouds as they hurtled in lock formation across the china-blue late-summer firmament. It always got to the pit of Bech’s stomach, the way the tops of skyscrapers appeared to lunge across the sky when you looked up, like the prows of ships certain to crash. The building was fifty-five stories high and had curved sides. Its windows were sealed but the balconies were not caged in, as more and more high spaces were, to frustrate Icaruses dying to test the air. The top of the Empire State Building was now caged in; in Bech’s boyhood it had not been, and when he was eight or so his father had held his ankles while he rested his chest on the broad parapet and looked straight down. Bech had never forgotten that dizzying moment of risk and trust, nor a photograph he had once seen in the old
Life
, of a beautiful young woman who had jumped and whose body lay as tranquilly intact on the dented top of a parked car as on a bier banked with flowers.

Within Bech a siren wailed, calling Aldie out, out of his cozy claustral nest of piped-in, faxed, E-mailed, messengered, videoed cultural fluff and straw—culture, that tawdry, cowardly anti-nature—into the open air, the stinging depths of space, cosmic nature pure and raw. Bech envisioned Manhattan yawning below the hesitating suicide—a crammed clutter of tarred rooftops and water tanks, with coded letters in whitewash addressed apparently to God’s eye. Let go, Aldie, sky-dive, jump, merge your nasty little self with the vasty scribbled earth.

“I can’t believe this is you,” Robin told him. “This killer.”

“I have been grievously provoked,” he said.

“Just by reviews? Henry, nobody takes them seriously.”

“I thought I did not, but now I see that I have. I have suffered a lifetime’s provocation. My mission has changed; I wanted to add to the world’s beauty, but now I merely wish to rid it of ugliness.”

“Poor Aldie Cannon. Don’t you think he means well? Some of his columns I find quite entertaining.”

“He may mean well but he commits atrocities. His facetious half-baked columns are crimes against art and against mankind. He has crass taste—no taste, in fact. He has a mouth to talk but no ears with which to listen.” Liking in his own ear the rhythm of his tough talk, Bech got tougher. “Listen, sister,” he said to Robin. “You want out? Out you can have any time. Walk down two flights. The subway’s over on Broadway or up on Houston. I’ll give you the buck-fifty. My treat.”

She appeared to think it over. She said what women always say, to stall. “Henry, I love you.”

“Why the hell would that be?”

“You’re cute,” Robin told him. “Especially these days. You seem more, you know,
together.
Before, you were some sort of a sponge, just sitting there, waiting for stuff to soak in. Now you’ve, like they say on the talk shows, taken charge of your life.”

He pulled her into his arms with a roughness that darkened the fox-fur glints in her eyes. A quick murk of fear and desire clouded her features. His hoary head cast a shadow on her silver face as he bowed his neck to kiss her. She made her lips as soft as she could, as soft as the primeval ooze. “And you like that, huh?” he grunted. “My becoming bad.”

“It lets me be bad.” Her voice had gotten small and hurried, as if she might faint. “I love you because I can be a bad girl with you and you love it. You eat it up. Yum, you say.”

“Bad is relative,” he told her sagely, from the height of his antiquity. “For my purposes, you’re a good girl. The worse you are the better you are. So it excites you, huh? Trying to bring this off.”

Robin admitted, “It’s kind of a rush.” She added, with a touch of petulance as if to remind him how girlish she was, “It’s my project. I want to stick with it.”

“Now you’re talking. Here, I woke up with an inspiration. Flash the twerp this.” It was another scrap of Buddhist death-acceptance:
LET THE ONE WITH ITS MYSTERY BLOT OUT ALL MEMORY OF COMPLICATIONS. PLEASE JUMP.

“It seems pretty abstract.”

“He’ll buy it. I mean, his subconscious will buy it. He thinks of himself as an intellectual. He majored in philosophy at Berkeley, I read in that stuff you downloaded from the Internet.”

While she was at the terminal pattering through the dance of computer control, he found in the same ancient text—Seng Ts’an’s “Poem on Trust in the Heart”—a line that greatly moved him.
Space is bright, but self-illumined; no power of mind is exerted.
Self-illumined: that was what he in his innocence had once hoped to be.
Nor indeed could mere thought bring us to such a place
, the text went on, comfortingly. Yes. Mere thought was what he was done with.
It is the Truly-so, the Transcendent Sphere, where there is neither He nor I.

Robin came back to him. “It went through, but I wonder.”

“Wonder what?”

“Wonder how much longer before they find us and wipe us out. There’s more and more highly sophisticated security programs. Crackers are costing industry billions; the FBI has a whole department now for computer crime.”

“The seed is sown,” Bech said, still somewhat in Buddhist mode. “Let’s go to bed. I’ll let you suck my thumb, if you beg nicely. You bad bitch,” he added, to see if her eyes would darken again. They did.

But the sniffers were out there, racing at the speed of light through the transistors, scouring the binary code for alien configurations and rogue algorithms. Now it was Robin who each morning rushed, in her inherited terry-cloth robe, on her pink-sided bare feet, down the two flights to the ground-floor foyer and seized the
Times
and scanned its obituary page. The very day after her Trojan horse, detected and killed, failed to respond, there it was:
ALDOUS CANNON
, 43,
CRITIC, COMMENTATOR.
Jumped from the balcony of his apartment on the forty-eighth floor. No pedestrians hurt, but an automobile parked on Sutton Place severely damaged. Distraught wife alleged the writer and radio personality, whose Web site on the Internet was one of the most visited for literary purposes by college students, had seemed preoccupied lately, and confessed to sensations of futility. Had always hoped to free up time to write a big novel. In a separate story in Section B, a wry collegial tribute from Christopher Lehmann-Haupt.

Bech and Robin should have felt jubilant. They had planted a flickering wedge of doubt beneath the threshold of consciousness and brought down a wiseguy, a media-savvy smart-ass. But it became clear after their initial, mutually congratulatory embrace, there above the sweating carton of orange juice and the slowly toasting bagels, that they felt stunned, let down, and ashamed. They avoided the sight and touch of each other for the rest of the day, though it was a Saturday. They had planned to go up to the Metropolitan Museum and check out the Ivan Albright
show and then try to get an outdoor table at the Stanhope, in the deliciously crisp September air. But the thought of art in any form sickened them—sweet icing on dung, thin ice over the abyss. Robin went shopping for black jeans at Barneys and then took a train to visit her parents in Garrison, while Bech in a stupor like that of a snake digesting a poisonous toad sat watching two Midwestern college-football teams batter at each other in a screaming, chanting stadium far west of the Hudson, where life was sunstruck and clean.

Robin spent the night with her parents, and returned so late on Sunday she must have hoped her lover would be asleep. But he was up, waiting for her, reading. First some Froissart, on the Battle of Crécy (“the bodies of 11 princes, 1200 knights, and about 30,000 common men were found on the field”), and then a dip into the little volume of Donne:

His eyes kept sliding off the page. The day’s lonely meal had generated a painful gas in his stomach. His mouth tasted chemically of nothingness. Passive consumption, moral insufficiency. The alleged selflessness of the artist—what a crock. All was vanity, a coy dance of veils grotesque in a septuagenarian. Robin’s key timidly scratched at the lock and she entered; he met her near the threshold and they gently bumped heads in a show of contrition. They had together known sin. Like playmates who had mischievously destroyed a toy, they slowly repaired their relationship. As Aldie Cannon’s wanton but not unusual (John Berryman, Jerzy Kosinski) self-erasure slipped deeper down into the stack of used newspapers, and the obligatory notes of
memorial tribute tinnily, fadingly sounded in the PEN and Authors Guild newsletters, the duo on Crosby Street recovered their dynamism and a fresh will to adventure, in the quixotic cause of ridding literary Gotham of villains.

Bech bought himself a cape and Robin a mask. A black mask, covering half her tidy white bobbed nose and framing her warm, intricate eyes in a stiff midnight strangeness. It turned him on; he made her wear it during lovemaking. “I feel so dirty,” she confessed. “I feel like one of those corrupted countesses in French pornography. I feel like O.”

Bech was good in bed but impotent elsewhere. “I can’t sit at a desk any more,” he said. “I want to get out and
do
something,” he said. “Ever since Aldie jumped, it’s like I’ve got St. Vitus’ dance.”

“Let’s walk up to Washington Square. We’ll cruise the remaining bookstores on Eighth Street.”

“They were right, the bastards,” Bech fumed, “I have nothing to say. I just wanted to pose, and print was the easiest place for a shy guy. I’m an elderly useless
poseur.
”

Out walking, he wore, with trepidation at first, his cape—a shiny blue satin, a shade lighter than navy, with a comforting lining of red lamb’s wool, and a gold-plated clasp in the shape of a talon. He thought people would stare if not laugh, but he had underestimated the commonplace
bizarrerie
of Manhattan street theatre—the love-starved throngs, the poignant chorus of vain attention-getting. Hair dyed pastel colors, see-through blouses, lovely young shoulders blotched by tattoos, chalk-white black-lipped vampire makeup, the determinedly in-your-face costumes of the proclaimedly gay, the secret oddities of
Psychopathia
Sexualis
turned inside out and put on show, like the convolute, inviting forms of flowers. Such exhibitionists denied Bech a single sideways glance at his cape as it swirled dramatically around him. Their eyes went to Robin—the candid purity of her face, boyish in its fashionable short haircut, formal like a waxen seal set on the untold pleasures of her body, curvaceous in its mauve catsuit.

To go with his cape Bech affected stovepipe trousers and narrow black slipperlike shoes, with rippled rubber treads. In these shoes he moved stealthily across pavements, lightly climbed stairs to bright gatherings—gallery openings, poetry readings—of tufted young aspirants to artistic fame who were startled to see that he, who had haunted, for a truncated page or two, their laborious double-columned high-school readers, was still alive. He slit his eyes against the glaze of their winey sweat and shuttling banter; he lifted his nose to scent evil and detected only the mild aroma of an illiterate innocence. These pretty children did not read, not in the old impassioned, repressed way, scouring print for forbidden knowledge, as his generation had done. Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Joyce—the great God-killers. His enemies breathed his own air and lurked in dark lairs. His slippers carried him one night up the fire escape of a four-story red-brick building on Christopher Street, in the slant reaches, junglelike with ailanthus, of the West Village.

Robin in her mask followed him up, across the rusty iron slats. Tall old sash windows revealed roach-ridden kitchens and book-lined walls crawling with the wires of outmoded stereo sets. Noises could be heard through these windows, cries of emotion and laughter, whether in reality or on television was not perfectly clear. Bech climbed on, up the spindly metal welded by workmen long dead, toward a
fourth-floor apartment where thirty years ago he had been a guest. He had been in his forties; his host in his fifties. The fire-escape slats threw diagonal harps of shadow across the crumbling bricks. One landing, seen downward through another, made a shimmering pattern located, like the elusive effects of Op Art, in no particular space. The fourth-floor windowpanes were black, but held oily orange traces of a reading lamp dimly burning several rooms away. Bech tested the sash but it was shut. The loathsome bookworm inside had barricaded himself against the warm October night—its cries of human intercourse, its garbagy smells of life.

From beneath his cape, Bech whipped out a strip of duct tape, attached it to a lower pane of the upper sash, deftly struck it with the blunt end of a glinting burglary tool. The muffled sound of fracture suggested that of a single ripe fruit falling. Swiftly his gray-gloved hand was in, twisting the worn window lock, and the weathered sash eased up on its rotten cords. He slithered over the sill, Robin as close behind him as a shadow. Inadvertently her hand on the sill caught his trailing cape. With a silent, predatory gesture, the silhouetted avenger tugged the lined satin free.

They were in a kind of pantry. Shelves designed for pans and crockery were filled with books, a lot of them bound galleys for review, stashed sideways and two deep, yellowing, collecting dust. Stealthily the intruders passed through an exiguous kitchen, scrubbed and bare, as a daytime caretaker would leave it. Three apples in a wooden bowl were the only visible food. Judgment of Paris, Bech thought. Venus the winner. Trouble in Troy. The apples imparted to his nostrils the faint tang of orchards gone under to malls. Then came a small dining room, its walls hung with spidery
engravings of what seemed conferences—men in white wigs and black knickers plotting revolutions. They were making sweeping gestures. Kill the King,
écrasez I’infâme
, make it new. A half-open door led to a small bedroom, a single bed made up taut as a hospital bed, with a number of upright pillows. Sleeping upright. Buried alive. Bech’s own breath empathetically grew short.