Read Online Bech at Bay by John Updike - Free Book Online Page A

his mouth. She had halted him halfway in, with a stare of those wide scared eyes, eyes a many-petalled Ukrainian blue. For all the liquor she had consumed, she had been tight in the cunt, but he pushed on. She seemed relieved when he came, toosoon. He had tried to wait, staring at a painting above the headboard. Shabby as the furniture was, the walls held real paintings, rough to the touch: the Socialist state supporting its hordes of collaborationist daubers.
    As if he had accompanied Bech in his swift dip into memory, Thornbush sighed heavily and said, “They gave us a good time, the Commies. We’re going to miss ’em.”
    “They soured me on writers’ organizations. I don’t want to be president of the Forty.”
    “Is that what you want me to tell Edna? You think I can go to her and tell her that? She’s getting on, Henry. She’s going to retire one of these days. Why do you want to break her heart?”
    “Out of thirty-eight members not you or me,” Bech patiently said, “there must be somebody else who can do it. How about a woman? Or a black?”
    Once you start to argue with somebody like Thornbush, it becomes a negotiation. His painful grip on Bech’s arm resumed. “There aren’t forty of us, we’re four or five short of the full body. Those that can do it have all done it. We’re all old as bejesus. Any time a slot opens up in the membership, one old bastard puts up another, even older. As the Forty goes, you’re a
kid.
Come
on
; I’ve done it; there’s nothing to it. Two meetings a year, spring and fall; you can skip some of the dinners. All you’ve got to do is preside. Just
sit
there on your tochis.”
    Martina O’Reilly had emerged from the smoky wall of cloth, wearing an olive-drab loden coat, looking inquisitively everywhere but toward him. She was going to leave, Bech saw, and was giving him a chance to leave with her. If he missed this boat, who knew when there would be another? The docks were crumbling, like those off the West Fiftiesthat had bustled with tugs and toughs when he was boy. “I’m not a presider,” he told Izzy, more sharply, “I’m a—”
    A learner rather
, Stephen Dedalus had said, but Bech didn’t finish, stricken by the way that Martina, resolving now to leave alone, glancing about with the reckless quickness of a woman in tears, reached up with both hands and lightldy brushed back, in a symmetrical motion, some long strands straying from her severe hairdo.
    “Cop-out,” Izzy finished for him. “Above-it-all. That’s the beauty of you for this post—you don’t dirty yourself, generally, with being a nice guy. That’s why we especially need you, after a string of these twelve-tone gladhanders.
Edna
needs you; she’s got a bunch of senile fogeys on her hands.”
    “Izzy, let me think about it. I got to go.”
    “The fuck you’ll think about it. Your check is in the mail, too. I know a brush-off.” He had grabbed both Bech’s forearms and the (slightly) younger author feared that he would have to wrestle the powerful older to escape. Martina was receding in the corner of Bech’s squeezed field of vision. She was hatless, hurrying.
    “O.K.,” Bech said, “I’ll
do
it. I’ll do it, maybe. Have Edna call me and tell me the duties. Tell Pamela for me it was a great party, a great apotheosis.”
    “What’s your rush? There’s real eats coming. I wanted you to meet Pam’s brother, he’s a hell of a good egg, a genius in his line—moves real estate around like a chess player. And Pam wanted to talk to you about one of her pets, some benefit up at the Guggenheim.”
    “I bet she did. Another time. Izzy”—he found himself giving the man a hug, Communist-style, Brezhnev to Chou En-lai—“they don’t make bullshitters like you any more.”
    He hustled through a scrum of late arrivals in the foyer, whose walls were hung with silk prayer rugs from Kazakhstan, and saw ahead of him a pink cloth rose about to disappear. “Hey,” he called. “Hold