Bech at Bay by John Updike

Author:John Updike [Updike, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-48206-8
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-09-20T16:00:00+00:00

Bech Noir

Bech had a new sidekick. Her monicker was Robin. Rachel “Robin” Teagarten. Twenty-six, post-Jewish, frizzy big hair, figure on the short and solid side. She interfaced for him with an IBM PS/1 his publisher had talked him into buying. She set up the defaults, rearranged the icons, programmed the style formats, accessed the ANSI character sets—Bech was a stickler for foreign accents. When he answered a letter, she typed it for him from dictation. When he took a creative leap, she deciphered his handwriting and turned it into digitized code. Neither happened very often. Bech was of the Ernest Hemingway save-your-juices school. To fill the time, he and Robin slept together. He was seventy-four, but they worked with that. Seventy-four plus twenty-six was one hundred; divided by two, that was fifty, the prime of life. The energy of youth plus the wisdom of age. A team. A duo.

They were in his snug aerie on Crosby Street. He was reading the Times at breakfast: caffeineless Folgers, calcium-reinforced D’Agostino orange juice, poppy-seed bagel lightly toasted. The crumbs and poppy seeds had scattered over the newspaper and into his lap but you don’t get something for nothing, not on this hard planet. Bech announced to Robin, “Hey, Lucas Mishner is dead.”

A creamy satisfaction—the finest quality, made extra easy to spread by the toasty warmth—thickly covered his heart.

“Who’s Lucas Mishner?” Robin asked. She was deep in the D section—Business Day. She was a practical-minded broad with no experience of culture prior to 1975.

“Once-powerful critic,” Bech told her, biting off his phrases. “Late Partisan Review school. Used to condescend to appear in the Trib Book Review, when the Trib was still alive on this side of the Atlantic. Despised my stuff. Called it ‘superficially energetic but lacking in the true American fiber, the grit, the wrestle.’ That’s him talking, not me. The grit, the wrestle. Sanctimonious bastard. When The Chosen came out in ’63, he wrote, ‘Strive and squirm as he will, Bech will never, never be touched by the American sublime.’ The simple, smug, know-it-all son of a bitch. You know what his idea of the real stuff was? James Jones. James Jones and James Gould Cozzens.”

There Mishner’s face was, in the Times, twenty years younger, with a fuzzy little rosebud smirk and a pathetic slicked-down comb-over like limp Venetian blinds throwing a shadow across the dome of his head. The thought of him dead filled Bech with creamy ease. He told Robin, “Lived way the hell up in Connecticut. Three wives, no flowers. Hadn’t published for years. The rumor in the industry was he was gaga with alcoholic dementia.”

“You seem happy.”

“Very.”

“Why? You say he had stopped being a critic anyway.”

“Not in my head. He tried to hurt me. He did hurt me. Vengeance is mine.”

“Who said that?”

“The Lord. In the Bible. Wake up, Robin.”

“I thought it didn’t sound like you,” she admitted. “Stop hogging the Arts section. Let’s see what’s playing in the Village. I feel like a movie tonight.”

“I’m not reading the Arts section.

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