Bech Is Back by John Updike

Author:John Updike [Updike, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-679-64581-8
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-06-04T16:00:00+00:00

BECH WED

THE HOUSE in Ossining was a tall mock-Tudor with an incongruous mansard roof, set on a domed lawn against a fringe of woods on an acre and a half tucked somewhere between the Taconic State and the Briarcliff-Peekskill parkways. Its exterior timbers were painted the shiny harsh green of park benches and its stucco had been aged to a friable tan; the interior abounded in drafty wasteful spaces—echoing entrance halls and imperious wide staircases and narrow windowless corridors for vanished servants to scuttle along. Bea and Rodney while their marriage thrived had fixed it up, scraping the white paint and then, next layer down, the dusty-rose off the newel posts and banisters until natural oak was reached; they had replaced all the broken glass and fragmented putty in the little greenhouse that leaned against the library, retiled the upstairs bathrooms, replastered the back-stair walls, and laid down a lilac hedge and a composition tennis court. As their marriage ran into difficulties, the scraping stopped halfway up the left-hand banister and the tennis court was taken over by the neighborhood children and their honey-limbed baby-sitters. Now Bech was installed in the mansion like a hermit crab tossed into a birdhouse. The place was much too big; he couldn’t get used to the staircases and the volumes of air they arrogantly commandeered, or the way the heat didn’t pour knocking out of steam radiators from an infernal source concealed many stories below but instead seeped from thin pipes sneaking low around the baseboards, pipes kept warm by personalized monthly bills and portentous, wheezing visits from the local oil truck. In the cellar, you could see the oil tanks—two huge rust-brown things greasy to the touch. And here was the furnace, an old converted coal-burner in a crumbling overcoat of plastered asbestos, rumbling and muttering all through the night like a madman’s brain. Bech had hardly ever visited a basement before; he had lived in the air, like mistletoe, like the hairy sloth, Manhattan subgenus. Though he had visited his sister in Cincinnati, and written his freshest fantasy, Travel Light, upon impressions gathered during avuncular visits there, he had never in his bones known before what America was made of: lonely outposts, log cabins chinked with mud and moss.

Insulation was a constant topic of conversation with the neighbors, and that first winter Bech dragged his uprooted crab tail back and forth to the building-supply center along Route 9 and hauled home in Bea’s sticky-geared Volare station wagon great rolls of pink insulation backed by silver paper; with a hardening right hand he stapled this cumbersome, airy material between the studs of an unused and unplastered third-floor room, intended for storage, and made himself, all lined in silver imprinted with the manufacturer’s slogans, a kind of dream-image, a surreal distillation, of his cloistered, forsaken apartment high above the windswept corner of 99th and Riverside. Here, his shins baking in the intersecting rays of two electric heaters, he was supposed to write.

“Write?” he said to Bea, who had proposed this space allocation.

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