Bech Is Back (15 page)

His voice softened as his prick hardened. “You talk as though this was the first time I’ve ever written about Jews. That’s not so.
Brother Pig
had that union organizer in it, and there were even rabbis in
The Chosen
. I just didn’t want to do what all the others were doing, and what Singer had done in Yiddish anyway.”

She snuffled, quite his Christian maiden now, and burrowed her pink nose deeper into the grizzly froth of his chest while her touch lower down took on a quicksilver purity and slidingness. “I have a terrible confession to make,” she said. “I never got through
The Chosen
. It was assigned years ago in a reading group I belonged to up here, and I tried to read it, and kept getting interrupted, and then the group discussed it and it was as if I
had
read it.”

Any guilt Bech might have been feeling toward her eased. Claire had read
The Chosen;
it had been dedicated to her. Norma had read it twice, taking notes. He rolled across Bea’s body and switched off the light. “Nobody who did read it liked it,” he said in the dark, and kneeled above her, near her face.

“Wait,” she said, and dunked her cigarette with a sizzle. Something like a wet smoke ring encircled him; tightened, loosened. What beasts we all are. What pigs, Thelma would say.
I love your shit.

Bea found him a typist—Mae, a thirty-year-old black woman with an IBM Selectric in a little ranch house the color of faded raspberries on Shady Lane; there was a green parakeet in a cage and a small brown child hiding behind every piece of furniture. Bech was afraid Mae wouldn’t be able to spell, but as it turned out she was all precision and copyediting punctilio; she was in rebellion against her racial stereotype, like a Chinese rowdy or an Arab who hates to haggle. It was frightening, seeing his sloppily battered-out, confusingly revised manuscript go off and come back the next weekend as stacks of crisp prim typescript, with a carbon on onionskin and a separate pink sheet of queried corrigenda. He was being edged closer to the dread plunge of publication, as when, younger, he would mount in a line of shivering wet children to the top of the great water slide at Coney Island—a shaky little platform a mile above turquoise depths that still churned after swallowing their last victim—and the child behind him would nudge the backs of his legs, when all Bech wanted was to stand there a while and think about it.

“Maybe,” he said to Bea, “since Mae is such a whiz, and must need the money—you never see a husband around the place, just that parakeet—I should go over it once more and have her retype.”

“Don’t you dare,” Bea said.

“But you’ve said yourself, you loathe the book. Maybe I can soften it. Take out that place where the video crew masturbates all over Olive’s drugged body, put in a scene where they all come up to Ossining and admire the fall foliage.” Autumn had invaded their little woods with its usual glorious depredations. Bech had begun to work in his insulated room two springs ago. Spring, summer, fall, winter, spring, summer, fall: those were the seven seasons he had labored, while little
Donald turned twelve and Ann, so Judy had tattled, lost her virginity.

“I loathe it, but it’s you,” Bea said. “Show it to your publisher.”

This was most frightening. Fifteen years had passed since he had submitted a manuscript to The Vellum Press. In this interval the company had been sold to a supermarket chain who had peddled it to an oil company who had in turn, not liking the patrician red of Vellum’s bottom line, managed to foist the firm off on a West Coast lumber-and-shale-based conglomerate underwritten, it was rumored, by a sinister liaison of Japanese and Saudi money. It was like being a fallen woman in the old days: once you sold yourself, you were never your own again. But at each change of ownership, Bech’s books,
outré
enough to reassure the public that artistic concerns had not been wholly abandoned, were reissued in a new paperback format. His longtime editor at Vellum, dapper, sensitive Ned Clavell, had succumbed to well-earned cirrhosis of the liver and gone to that three-martini luncheon in the sky. Big Billy Vanderhaven, who had founded the firm as a rich man’s plaything in the days of the trifling tax bite and who had concocted its name loosely out of his own, had long since retired to Hawaii, where he lived with his fifth wife on a diet of seaweed and macadamia nuts. A great fadster, who had raced at Le Mans and mountain-climbed in Nepal and scuba-dived off Acapulco, “Big” Billy—so called sixty years ago to distinguish him from his effete and once socially prominent cousin, “Little” Billy Vanderhaven—had apparently cracked the secret of eternal life, which is Do Whatever You Damn Well Please. Yet, had the octogenarian returned under the sponsorship of that Japanese and Saudi money to take the helm of Vellum again, the effect could have been scarcely less
sensational than Henry Bech turning up with a new manuscript. Bech no longer knew the name of anyone at the firm except the woman who handled permissions and sent him his little checks and courtesy copies of relevant anthologies, with their waxen covers and atrocious typos. When at last, gulping and sitting down and shutting his eyes and preparing to slide, he dialed Vellum’s number, it was the editor-in-chief he asked for. He was connected to the snotty voice of a boy.

“You’re the editor-in-chief?” he asked incredulously.

“No I am not,” the voice said, through its nose. “This is her secretary.”

“Oh. Well could I talk to her?”

“May I ask who is calling, please?”

Bech told him.

“Could you spell that, please?”

“Like the beer but with an ‘h’ on the end, ‘h’ as in ‘Heineken.’ ”

“Truly? Well aren’t we boozy this morning!”

There was a cascade of electronic peeping, a cup-shaped silence, and then a deep female voice saying, “Mr. Schlitzeh?”

“No, no. Bech. B-E-C-H. Henry. I’m one of your authors.”

“You sure are. Absolutely. It’s an honor and a pleasure to hear your voice. I first read you in Irvington High School; they assigned
Travel Light
to the accelerated track. It knocked me for a loop. And it’s stayed with me. Not to mention those others. What can I do for you, sir? I’m Doreen Pease, by the way. Sorry we’ve never met.”

From all this Bech gathered that he was something of a musty legend in the halls of Vellum, and that nevertheless here was a busy woman with her own gravity and attested velocity and displacement value. He should come to the point. “I’m sorry, too,” he began.

“I
wish
we could get you in here for lunch some time. I’d love to get your slant on the new format we’ve given your reprints. We’re just crazy about what this new designer has done, she’s
just
out of the Rhode Island School of Design, but those stick figures against those electric colors, with the sateen finish, and the counterstamped embossing—”

“Stunning,” Bech agreed.

“You know, it gives a
un
ity; for me it gives the shopper a handle on what
you
are all about, you as opposed to each individual title. The salesmen report that the chains have been really enthusiastic: some of them have given us a week in the window. And that ain’t just hay, for quality softcover.”

“Well, actually, Mrs.—Miss?—Miz?—”

“Doreen will do fine.”

“It’s about a book I’m calling.”

“Yess?” That was it, a single spurt of steam, impatient. The pleasantries were over, the time clock was running.

“I’ve written a new one and wondered whom I should send it to.”

The silence this time was not cup-shaped, but more like that of a liqueur glass, narrow and transparent, with a brittle stem.

She said, “When you say you’ve written it, what do you mean exactly? This isn’t an outline, or a list of chapters, you want us to bid on?”

“No, it’s finished. I mean, there may be some revisions on the galleys—”

“The first-pass proofs, yess.”

“Whatever. And as to the bid, in the old days, when Big—when Mr. Vanderhaven was around, you’d just take it, and print it, and pay me a royalty we thought was fair.”

“Those
were
the old days,” Doreen Pease said, permitting
herself a guffaw, and what sounded like a puff on her cigar. “Let’s get our pigeons all in line, Mr. Bech. You’ve finished a manuscript. Is this the
Think Big
you mention in interviews from time to time?”

“Well, the title’s been changed, tentatively. My wife, I’m married now—”

“I read that in
People
. About six months ago, wasn’t it?”

“Two and a half years, actually. My wife had this theory about how to write a book. You just sit down—”

“And do it. Well of course. Smart girl. And you’re calling me to ask who to send it to? Where’s your agent in all this?”

He blushed—a wasted signal over the phone. “He gave up on me years ago. That was fine. I hate people reading over my shoulder.”

“Henry, I’m cutting my own throat saying this, but if I were you I’d get me one. Starting now. A book by Henry Bech is a major development. But if you want to play it your way, send it straight here to me. Doreen Pease. Like the vegetable with an ‘e’ on the end.”

“Or I could bring it down on the train. I seem to live up here in Westchester.”

“Tell me where and we’ll send a messenger in a limo to pick it up.”

He told her where and asked, “Isn’t a limo expensive?”

“We find it cuts way down on postage and saves us a fortune in the time sector. Anyway, let’s face it, Henry: you’re top of the line. What’d you say the title was?”

“
Easy Money
.”

“Oh yesss.”

The hiss sounded prolonged. He wondered if he was tiring her. “Uh, one more thing, Miss Pease, Doreen. If it turns out you like it and want to print it—”

“Oh, Christ, I’m sure we’ll want to, it can’t be that terrible. You’re very sweetly modest, Henry, but you have a name, and names don’t grow on trees these days; television keeps coming up with so many new celebrities the public has lost track. The public is a conservative animal: that’s the conclusion I’ve come to after twenty years in this business. They like the tried and true. You’d know that better than I would.” She guffawed; she had decided that he was somehow joshing her, and that all her worldly wisdom was his also.

“What I wanted to ask,” Bech said, “was would I be assigned an editor? My old one, Ned Clavell, died a few years ago.”

“He was a bit before my era here, but I’ve heard a ton about him. He must have been a wonderful man.”

“He had his points. He cared a lot about not splitting infinitives or putting too much vermouth into a martini.”

“Yess. I think I know what you’re saying. I’m reading you, Henry.”

She was? He seemed to hear her humming; but perhaps it was another conversation fraying into this line.

“I think in that case,” Doreen decided, “we better give you over to our Mr. Flaggerty. He’s young, but very brilliant.
Very
. And sensitive. He knows when to
stop
, is I think the quality you’ll most appreciate. Jim’s a delicious person, I
know
you’ll be
very
happy with him.”

“I don’t have to be
that
happy,” Bech said, but in a burble of electronic exclamations their connection was broken off. Neither party felt it necessary to re-place the call.

The limo arrived at five. A young man with acne and a neo-Elvis wet look crawled out of the back and gave both Ann and Judy, who crowded into the front hall, a lecherous goggle eye. Bech began to fear that he was guarding treasure, in the form
of these blossoming twins. Rodney, their biological father, after a period of angry mourning for his marriage, had descended into the mid-Manhattan dating game and exerted an ever feebler paternal presence. He showed up Sundays and took Donald to the Bronx Zoo or a disaster movie, and that was about it. The only masculine voices the children heard in the house belonged to Bech and the old man who came in a plastic helmet to read the water meter. But now that Bech’s book was submitted and, as of November, “in the works,” the homely mock-Tudor house tucked against the woods no longer felt like a hermitage. Calls from Vellum’s publicity and production departments shrilled at the telephone, and a dangerous change in the atmosphere, like some flavorless pernicious gas, trickled through the foundation chinks into the heated waste spaces of their home: Bech, again a working author, was no longer quite the man Bea had married, or the one his stepchildren had become accustomed to.

Vellum Press (the “The” had been dropped during a streamlining operation under one of its former corporate owners) had its offices on the top six floors of a new Lexington Avenue skyscraper the lacteal white of ersatz-ivory piano keys; the architect, a Rumanian defector famous in the gossip press for squiring the
grandes dames
of the less titled jet set, had used every square inch of the building lot but given the skyline a fillip at the top, with a round pillbox whose sweeping windows made the publisher’s offices feel like an airport control tower. When Bech had first published with Vellum in 1955, a single brownstone on East 67th Street had housed the operation. In those days Big Billy himself, ruddy from outdoor sport, sat enthroned in a leather wing chair in what had been two fourth-floor maid’s rooms, the partition broken through. He would toy with a Himalayan paper-knife and
talk about his travels, his mountain-climbing and marlin-fishing, and about his losing battle with the greed and grossly decayed professional standards of printers. Bech enjoyed these lectures from on high, and felt exhilarated when they were over and he was released to the undogmatic, ever fresh street reality of the ginkgos, of the polished nameplates on the other brownstones, of the lean-legged women in mink jackets walking their ornamentally trimmed poodles. Ned Clavell’s office had been a made-over scullery in the basement; from its one narrow window Bech could see these same dogs lift a fluffy hind leg, exposing a mauve patch of raw poodle, and daintily urinate on the iron fencing a few yards away. Ned had been a great fusser, to whom every page of prose gave a certain pain, which he politely tried to conceal, or to voice with maximum politeness, his hands showing a tremor as they shuffled sheets of manuscript, his handsome face pale with the strain of a hangover or of language’s inexhaustible imperfection. His voice had had that hurried briskness of Thirties actors, of Ronald Colman and George Brent, and meticulously he had rotated his gray, brown, and blue suits, saving a double-breasted charcoal pinstripe for evening wear. A tiny gold rod had pressed the knot of his necktie out and the points of his shirt collar down; he wore rings on both hands, and had never married. Bech wondered now if he had been homosexual; somehow not marrying in those years could seem a simple inadvertence, the oversight of a dedicated man. “Piss off, you bitch!” he used to blurt out, from beneath his pencil-line mustache, when one of the poodles did its duty; and it took years for Bech to realize that Ned did not mean the dog but the woman with taut nylon ankles who was overseeing the little sparkling event. Yet Ned had been especially pained by Bech’s fondness for the earthier American
idioms, and they spent more than one morning awkwardly bartering tits, as it were, for tats, the editor’s sharpened pencil silently pointing after a while at words he took no relish in pronouncing. Dear dead Ned: Bech sensed at the time he had his secret sorrows, his unpublished effusions and his unvented appetites, but the young author was set upon his own ambitions and used the other man as coolly as he used the mailman. Now the man was gone, taking his decent, double-breasted era with him.