Authors: John Updike
Though by modernist prescription artists live on the edge of respectability, in a state of liberating derangement,
Bech had never before been hauled into court. He had heard that the wheels of justice ground fine, but he had not expected those wheels to be so wobbly, so oddly swivelled in every direction but that of the simple truth.
The first witness for the plaintiff was a mincing professor of English at Southern Cal who responded at length to Sergeant Kepper’s questions about the words involved. The prefix “arch,” by way of Anglo-Saxon and Old French, derives from a Greek verb meaning “to begin, to rule,” and signifies either the highest of its type, as in “archbishop” or “archangel” or, to quote Webster, “most fully embodying the qualities of his or its time.” Mr. Bech’s article asserted, then, that Mr. Ohrbach was the chief, or most fully developed, gouger in the entire Los Angeles area. “Gouge,” authorities tend to agree, is a word of Celtic origin, by way of Late Latin, referring to a chisel of concave cross section. Had the word Mr. Bech chosen been “chiseller,” it was interesting to note, the implication of wrongdoing would have been more distinct, and the connotation of brute strength rather less. The phrase “greedy reasons of his own rake-off” is less easy to decipher, and for a time the expert thought there might be a typographical error or an editorial slip involved. The expression “rake-off,” of course, stems from the old practice in gambling houses of the croupier with his rake taking the gambling house’s percentage out of the chips on the table. “Widened the prevailing tragic rift between the literary and cinematic arts” is also far from clear, since the two arts have never been close and the tragedy of their separation would seem to lie only in the eye of the beholder, in this case a writer of modestly paid fiction and journalism who might have had in mind the much greater financial rewards of film work.
“Objection: conjecture,” Rantoul automatically growled.
“Sustained,” the judge as automatically responded.
All this semantic disquisition was putting the jury to sleep. They sat there, in their two sextuple rows (five men, seven women; five whites, four blacks, two Asian-Americans, and a part-Cherokee) plus the two alternates, who sat beside but not in the elevated jury box, all hoping to see Lanna Jerome, with her rice-powder makeup, her artificial mole, her slinky, slimmed-down figure, her hair dyed soot-black and moussed into short spikes. “Slinky, slimmed-down”: as was common knowledge among her millions of fans, Lanna had a weakness for Dr Pepper and junk snacks. After her relationship with the governor of Nevada had broken up she put on thirty pounds in mournful bingeing. Bech had loved her all the more for that vulnerable, blubbery side of her.
Rantoul and the word-expert batted the prefix “arch” around, the latter finally conceding, mincingly, that its use here might signify merely a relatively high standing as a gouger, not a supreme and ruling status in an organized group of them.
The next witness for the prosecution, a self-styled “expert in media,” discoursed on the circulation figures of
Flying Fur
during its eighteen months of existence. Though the subscriptions in southern California were only forty-two in number, of which eighteen went to libraries, the influence of those few copies would be hard to overestimate; the magazine, as the latest “hip” word from New York City, was avidly read by agents, actors, producers, and other persons active in Mr. Ohrbach’s business, and an adverse reference in its pages would certainly do him incalculable professional damage.
Rantoul had a field day with that witness, and ate an
especially hearty lunch in the sky-view cafeteria. The trial was under way, and still Ohrbach had not showed up. However, Bech did have a glimpse, one afternoon, of the judge out by the elevators, going home. He was wearing a denim suit the tasty shade of honeydew melon, with bell-bottom pants and a lapel-less jacket. Out of his robes, he looked like a smooth young dude heading into the pleasures of the evening. He studiously avoided Bech’s eye.
In the legal world, eye avoidance is an art. Morris Ohrbach turned out to be a master of it. When, the next day, he at last appeared, he entered the courtroom bobbing and smiling in all directions, but his smiles landed nowhere, like the fist-flurry of a boxer warming up. His gaze, as benign and generalized as that of a Byzantine icon, flicked past Bech’s face. One of Ohrbach’s well-known eccentricities was a virtually religious avoidance of being photographed, so Bech had had no idea of what his archenemy looked like. The elderly plaintiff, of middle height, hunched over like a man about to break into a run; he had this vaguely smiling mouth, a large nose, and a shock of wavy white hair thrust forward by a cowlick that reminded Bech of his own stiffly wiry, hard-to-control hair. Bech’s hair was still basically dark, and his posture had not yet acquired an elderly stoop, but the resemblance was nevertheless strong. Ohrbach looked enough like him to be his father.
The jury stirred, excited by the presence of someone who, if not exactly famous, had bilked the famous. The judge momentarily sat up straight, and paid scrupulous attention to the morning’s witnesses, a series of character
witnesses on Ohrbach’s behalf. They were women, Hollywood hostesses, who, at first timidly and then irrepressibly, testified to the plaintiff’s humanity—his courteous manners, his unfailing good humor and even temper, his personal and financial generosity to a host of causes ranging from the state of Israel to a little-league baseball team of impoverished Mexican-American youngsters.
“Morrie Ohrbach is a su
perb
human being!” one especially pneumatic widow cried, in an abrupt release of pressure; she had been previously stifled by Rantoul’s objections to her breathy account of how, during her bereavement some years before, the agent had been assiduously attentive and beautifully considerate. Further, she added defiantly, as Rantoul half-stood to object again,
all
the investments he had talked
her
into had made money—
scads
of it.
Another woman, squarish and brown and bedecked with Navajo jewelry, testified that when she heard that her dear friend Morris had been called a gouger in one of these snide Eastern magazines she broke down and cried, off and on, for days. He would drop by the house in the late afternoon and looked an absolute wreck—he got so thin she was afraid he’d sink, just a bundle of bones, in her swimming pool and drown. Morrie himself, poor soul, didn’t have a swimming pool any more; he lived in this tiny two-bedroom condo in Westwood and had had to sell all but one of his sports cars, that’s how much of a gouger he was.
Rantoul in cross-examination elicited that the move to Westwood and the sports-car sales had followed the adverse legal judgment in the Lanna Jerome case. “Oh, that
hid
eous woman!” was the unabashed response. “Everybody knows how she chased after the governor of Nevada until she
broke up his lovely home and absolutely
wrecked
his career! He could have been
Pres
ident!”
At lunch, Bech confessed he was getting scared. Ohrbach was being painted as a saint, and in fact he did look awfully sweet, and rather touchingly shabby. He had worn a linen suit with a yellow sheen, and a sad little bow tie that called attention to his neck wattles.
Rantoul snorted, “And Ah bet you think a Gila monster has a friendly face.” He had taken off his coat and turned back his sleeves to dig into some cafeteria corn on the cob. Flecks of starch dotted his jaw.
“There
is
something friendly about his face. Something sensitive and shy. When he came in, he seemed so outnumbered. Just poor old Sergeant Kepper and him, against all of us.”
“Us-all ruthless Eastern-establishment types,” Rantoul filled in. “You got the message he was sending. Ah’m sure glad, Henry, you ain’t on that there jury.”
Rita laughed, showing dazzling sharp teeth. “It is you who are sweet, Henry, to see in such a way.” Like Lanna Jerome, she had a mole near her chin. In Rita’s case, it looked genuine.
“To me,” said Gregg Nunn, “his face is weird. I get queasy and dizzy, looking at it. There’s no center. It’s like he’s a hologram. And his eyes. What color are his eyes? Nobody knows—we’re all too spooked to look, and if you notice, even when he seems to be smiling at you, his eyes are downcast, like he’s trying to see through the lids. He’s an alien—he can see through his eyelids!” As the boy expanded on his fantasy, his small round hands made wider and wider circles, and his voice attained so excited a pitch that several heads in the cafeteria turned around.
Kepper and his client were not here; they were off, perhaps hatching more character witnesses. Or witnesses to expose Bech, his whole discreditable career. His refusal to learn the diamond trade at his father’s knee. His restless resistance to his mother’s intrusive love. His failure to become a poet, like Auden and Delmore Schwartz, both of whom he had met in his post-war phase of haunting the Village, or a critic, like Dwight Macdonald and Clement Greenberg, who also had been caught in his skein of acquaintance. He had felt that what critics did was too pat, too dictatorial; he preferred, lazily, to submit to his subjective inklings and glimpses, and to turn these into epiphanies briefer than Joyce’s and less grim than Kafka’s. He had failed his publisher, hearty, life-loving, travel-tanned Big Billy Vanderhaven, by refusing to deliver, in the wake of
Travel Light’s
mild
succès d’estime
, the “big” novel just sitting there, in the realm of Platonic ideas, waiting to take the public and the book clubs by storm; he had failed his first editor, dapper, fastidious Ned Clavell, by refusing to remove from the sprawling text of
The Chosen
all those earthy idioms and verbal frontalia that chilled, in still-prissy 1963, the book’s critical and popular reception. Bech had just refused to pan out, as author, son, and lover. One woman after another, having given her naked all, stridently had pointed out that he was unable to make a commitment. Behind him stretched a chain of disappointments going back to his grade-school teachers at P.S. 87—kindly Irish nuns
manquées
, most of them—and his professors at NYU, whom he felt he had usually wound up disappointing, after a flashy first paper. He failed, or declined, to graduate. He was not a superb human being. He was a vain, limp leech on the leg of literature as it waded through swampy times. In the courthouse cafeteria, he lost his appetite, and left
half of his tuna-salad sandwich untouched, and all of the butter-almond ice cream he had taken for dessert, homesick for the Italian restaurant’s spumoni. Rantoul, having consumed a platter of meatloaf, gravy, mashed potatoes, and peas, delicately inquired after these remnants, and made them disappear.
The next character witnesses were other agents, who praised Ohrbach as their mentor and inspiration, as an immensely creative and concerned thinker on behalf of the film industry. It was Ohrbach, claimed one rough beast in a tieless silk shirt and a number of gold chains, who had originated the valuable concept of total agent involvement—no longer could one rest content with forging advantageous deals for the client, but one should follow up and make sure that the rewards, in the always uncertain and sometimes abbreviated career of a performing artist, were secure and themselves performing up to capacity. Not just career management, but total life-assets management was the basis of the concept, traceable (in the rough beast’s view, his ringed hands chopping the air and chest hair frothing from between his chains) to the genius of Morris Ohrbach. Then secretaries—ex-bimbos with plastic eyelashes and leathery, bone-deep tans—testified to Ohrbach’s generosity as a boss, and told of days off granted with pay when a mother died, of bonuses at both Christmas and Passover, of compassionate leaves of absence during spells of health or man trouble. Clients—sallow, slightly faded and off-center male and female beauties—confided how Morris would tide them over, would reduce his cut to 12 1/2 percent, would give them fatherly advice for free, out of his own precious time.
Throughout this torrent of homage, its object, who sat beside Sergeant Kepper at a table six feet in front of Bech,
actively pursued his good works, scribbling away on pieces of paper and annotating small stacks of correspondence and financial statements and occasionally dashing off and sealing a letter, with a licking and thumping of the envelope so noisy as to cause the court stenographer to glance around and the judge to direct a disciplinary stare. Was the judge, from his angle, receiving the same piteous impression, of vulnerable elderliness, that Bech was gathering from behind? The cords of Ohrbach’s slender neck strained, the shirt collar looked a size too big and not entirely fresh, the overgrown ears had sprouted white whiskers. The entire frail skull gently wagged in decrepitude’s absent-minded palsy.
Abe Bech had not allowed himself to appear old, though he had been seventy when he died. He had used a rinse to keep his hair dark, sat in the winter under a sun lamp, and gone off to the diamond district each day in a crisp white shirt laundered at a place that sent them back to you uncreased, on hangers. Like all salesmen, he gave his best self to his prospective customers, and saved his rage, sarcasm, and indifference for his family. Though circulatory problems had for some time been affecting his legs and hands, his cerebral hemorrhage had come out of the blue. In death as in life he had been abrupt and hard to reach. His last impact upon the metropolis—the only one to make the newspapers—was a half-hour delay underground at rush hour, inconveniencing thousands. Since the service elevator at the Clark Street station in Brooklyn Heights was out of commission, the stretcher bearers had brought his father, inscrutable and implacable in his body bag, up all those dirty tile steps, through the flood of exasperated commuters. In Bech’s mind it had the grandeur of a pharaoh’s funeral procession up from the Nile, into the
depths of a Pyramid where the soul’s embalmed shell would lie forever intact.
By leaning forward and reaching with his arm he could have tapped Ohrbach’s thin hunched shoulder and asked his forgiveness for calling him an arch-gouger. But the gesture would have admitted ten million dollars’ worth of guilt, and betrayed his team.