Bech by John Updike

Author:John Updike [Updike, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-679-64582-5
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-06-04T16:00:00+00:00

Two petite, groomed, curried girls met him at the airport and drove him in a pink convertible, at great speed, through the rolling, burgeoning landscape. Spring had arrived here. New York had been windy and raw. The marzipan monuments of Washington, seen from the airport, had glittered above cherry blossoms. Piedmont Air Lines had lifted him and rocked him above hills dull evergreen on the ridges and fresh deciduous green in the valleys, where streams twinkled. The shadow of the plane crossed racetrack ovals and belts of plowed land. Dot-sized horses slowly traced lines of gallop within fenced diagrams. Looking down, Bech was dizzy; twice they bounced down into small airports cut into hillsides. On the third stop, he alighted. The sun stood midway down the sky, as it had the day the phone had rung and Bea had mocked his acceptance, but now the time stood an hour later in the day; it was after five. The two girls, giggling, gushing, met him and drove him, in a deafening rush of speed (if the convertible flipped, his head would be scraped from his shoulders; he foresaw the fireman hosing his remains from the highway) to a campus, once a great plantation. Here many girls in high heels and sheer stockings and, Bech felt, girdles strolled across acres of hilly lawn overswept by the powerful smell of horse manure. In his citified nostrils, the stench rampaged, but nothing in the genteel appearance of the place acknowledged it—not the scrubbed and powdered faces of the girls, nor the brick-and-trim façades of the buildings, nor the magnolia trees thick and lumpy with mauve-and-cream, turnip-shaped buds. It was as if one of his senses had short-circuited to another channel, or as if a school of deaf-mutes were performing a minuet to the mistaken accompaniment of a Wagnerian storm. He felt suddenly, queasily hollow. The declining sun nubbled the lawn’s texture with shadowed tufts, and as Bech was led along a flagstone path to his first obligation (an “informal” hour with the Lanier Club, a branch of budding poetesses) profound duplicity seemed to underlie the landscape. Along with the sun’s reddening rays and the fecal stench a devastating sadness swept in. He knew that he was going to die. That his best work was behind him. That he had no business here, and was frighteningly far from home.

Bech was uncomfortable in colleges. War had come when he was eighteen, and a precocious acceptance from Liberty two years later. He stayed in Germany a year after V-E Day, editing a news-sheet for the U.S. occupation forces in Berlin, and returned home to find his mother dying. She was not quite fifty. When, having surrendered both breasts to the surgeon’s knife, she had beat her way back from the underworld of anaesthesia for the final time, Bech felt he knew too much to submit to a college curriculum. He used the GI Bill to take courses at NYU but evaded graduation. He joined the army of vets who believed they had earned the right to invent their lives.

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