Authors: John Updike
“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.
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 DeLillo, 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.
The voice on the phone was usually that of Meri [sic] Jo Zwengler, Vellum Press’s leather-clad chief of publicity. “But I don’t want to go on ‘Oprah,’ ” he would tell her. “I hate that hooting audience of Corn Belt feminists she has.”
Meri Jo would sigh. “It’s expected, Henry. It would be considered an insult to two-thirds of America if you don’t deign to appear.”
“Yeah, the illiterate two-thirds. Where were they when
Going South
sold less than twenty thousand copies?”
Meri Jo was stagily patient with him. “You’re a Laureate now, Henry. You’re not free to pull that Henry Bech reclusive don’t-bother-me-I’m-having-a-writer’s-block act.”
“Bech, whodat?” he quoted.
“Nobody’s asking that any more. You’re hot, Henry. I’m sorry. But the spike in sales should put your little girl through college, if you help nurse it along. We’re thinking of even bringing
When the Saints
back into print.”
“Why did you let it go out of print?”
“Don’t be difficult, Henry. Warehousing costs have been skyrocketing. We have a big overhead in our new quarters.”
Meri Jo’s annual salary, he estimated, would loom above a year’s worth of his royalties like a sequoia above a bonsai cherry tree. “Did I ask you,” he asked her, “to build yourselves a skyscraper, just because McGraw-Hill had one?”
“Hon, please be an angel and stop giving me a hard time,” she said. He imagined he could hear the squeak of leather and the click of studs on metal as she shifted her heft in her personally molded swivel chair. “You were wonderful on ‘Charlie Rose.’ ”
“
Charlie
was wonderful,” Bech protested. “I hardly said a word.” The interviewer’s long face, tinted the color of a salmon, loomed in memory; Rose had leaned forward ominously close, like an Avedon portrait of himself, and urged, “Tell me honestly, Henry, aren’t you
embarrassed
, to have won this Prize when so many other writers haven’t?” And the culture-purveyor’s eyes protruded toward him inquisitorially, so that he resembled Dick Van Dyke in Disney animation.
These professional personalities operated at an energy level that stretched Bech’s brain like chewing gum on the shoe of a man trying to walk away. Terry Gross, in her beguilingly adolescent and faintly stammery voice, had put it to him more brutally yet: “How can you explain it? It must feel like a weird sort of miracle, I mean, when Henry James and Theodore Dreiser and Robert Frost and Nabokov didn’t …”
“I’m not a Swedish mind-reader,” was all Bech could manage by way of apology. “I’m not even a Swedish mind.”
This seemed to him a pretty good quip, which he had prepared in the reveries of insomnia, but which, on its occasion for utterance, lacked the lilt of spontaneity. The short, short-haired interviewer’s giggle was perfunctory, and then like a dingo worrying the throat of a lamed kangaroo she went back to the attack: “No, but seriously …”
This was on a radio swing down through Megalopolis, from Christopher Lydon in a dismal stretch beyond Boston University to Leonard Lopate in the dingy corridors of New York City Hall to Philadelphia’s “Fresh Air” in a canister-lined chamber of WHYY and on to Diane Rehm’s WAMU aerie on Brandywine Street, in the bosky midst of American University in Washington, D.C. She had fascinatingly blued hair and a crystalline, beckoning voice—as if from another room she were calling some sorority girls to dinner—and in this particular chain of interviewers put Bech least on the defensive. Why, of course, she seemed to be saying, Mr. Bech has won the Nobel Prize for Liter-a-ture. Who better? Listeners, you tell
us.
The very first caller-in, whose sugary Southern accent buzzed in Bech’s earphones like tinnitus, wanted to know if
it was true, as she had read in the
National Enquirer
, that Mr. Bech had recently fathered a baby out of a young lady a third of his age?
“I suppose it’s not untrue,” Bech grudged into the microphone. Robin had blackmailed him into it, he resisted explaining. It was become a father or an accused serial killer.
“Mah questi-yun is, sir, do you think that such behavior is fay-yer to either the young lady or that little helpless baby, when, begging your pardon, you might drop daid any taahm?”
“Fair?” It was a concept he hadn’t encountered lately. As a child he would protest to his playmates that something wasn’t
fair
, but as the inexorable decades had washed over him, his indignation had been slowly leached away.
“And thet million dollars you’ve gone and won—do you intend to do any
goood
with it?”
He had repeatedly explained to interviewers and crasser talk-show hosts that by the time his taxes were paid to state, city, and nation it wouldn’t be anything like a million. It would be less than half a million. Counting the hours of his time and ergs of his energy the Prize had taken, and the universal consensus that he now owed the world something, he had come to figure it as a net financial loss. And, anyway, what does half a million dollars get you in New York City these days? A Jeff Koons statuette, or a closet in a Fifth Avenue co-op. He began to explain all this, but the caller, who had come to inhabit Bech’s head like an incurable parasite, steadily maintained her investigative line: “And is it true, suh, as I have read in several reputable sources, that, whaal travelling in the Communist world under the sponsorship of our U.S. government, you did
enjoy a lee-ay-son with a certain famous Bulgarian poet and had a child by that lady whom you have never officially acknowledged? A child brought up under strict Communist doctrines until he was a grown man, never knowing who his father was, while you enjoyed a capitalist laaf-staahl?”
The strange images and lies were coming so fast, and so winsomely, he could scarcely speak, though he had been speaking steadily since the Prize had been announced. His mouth opened, two inches from the sponge-muffled mike—like a miniature boxing glove, or a fist in a Keith Haring silhouette—but only a scraping noise emerged. Hating even a half-second of dead air, Diane Rehm melodiously enunciated, “Perhaps our guest does not care to answer?”
The voice in Bech’s head burrowed deeper, working its jaws faster and showing a rough underbelly of Christian resentment. “Well now Diane, if this man doesn’t care to answer, what’s he doin sittin’ on your show? If he’s gone to just clam up, maybe he should not have accepted the Praahz.”
“I have never been a father before,” Bech brought out. “Just like I have never won the Nobel Prize before.”
“Well, if you’ve never been a father before,” the voice said, “from all that I’ve read you should be teachin’ these black teenagers birth control.”
“Thank you for your call, Maureen,” Diane Rehm said firmly, and pressed a switch that eliminated Maureen from the airways. “Next,” she announced to the nation, “Betty Jean, from Greensboro, North Carolina.”
But Betty Jean was no better. She said, “Speaking of black teenagers, I don’t think all you celebrities’ having
babies out of wedlock is setting any kind of example, now is it?”
“But,” Bech said, at bay, “I wasn’t a celebrity until I won the Prize. I was just a writer, off in a corner. Anyway, I’d be delighted to marry the mother of my child, but she’s still mulling my offer over. She’s very modern.”