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

the elevator!”
    Once they were sealed in together, softly plunging the fifteen stories down, he saw from the satisfied set of Martina’s unpainted lips that she was not surprised by his pursuit; she had hoped for it. “Thanks,” he said to her. “For holding the door.” She had thrust her slender bare hand into its rubber-edged jaws. “Getting hot in there,” he nervously added. “
Trop de
fest” He did feel warm, across his chest and under his arms: his exertions in coping with Izzy and escaping the party, but also a curious nagging satisfaction, a swollen sense of himself. President Bech. He had made, for wrong enough reasons, the right decision.
    He rather liked presiding. Perhaps seven or eight of the Forty attended the biannual meetings. In what had been the solarium of the dainty Baines mansion, Bech sat at the massive president’s desk—mahogany, with satinwood inlay—and in a facing row of leather wing chairs some of the most distinguished minds of his generation feigned respectful attention. Edna slipped the agenda to him beforehand on a sheet of paper and sat at his side with a tape recorder, taking notes on the proceedings. There might be a matter of repairs to the exquisitely designed building; or of the salary of Gabriel, the Hispanic caretaker who lived in the basement with his wife and three children; or of the insurance on the paintings and drawings that Reginald Marsh, John Sloan, William Glackens, William Merritt Chase, and the like had casually bestowed, as gentlemanly pleasantries, upon theplace, and that by now had grown so in value that the insurance was prohibitive. And then there was the matter of new members—in the past two years death had opened up six new vacancies, and of thirty-four nomination requests mailed out this year only three had been returned. The array of sage and even saintly old faces confronting Bech politely, inscrutably listened. Edna adjusted the volume of her tape recorder and placed it closer to the edge of the desk, to catch any utterance from the quorum of the Forty. The quorum had once been ten but in response to poor attendance had been reduced to five. The meetings were held at dusk, before one of the dinners, so rush traffic was roaring north on Third Avenue, buses chuffing, trucks shifting down, taxis honking. It was hard to hear, even for those not hard of hearing. Across the street, trailer tractors moved in and out, laboriously backing, of a nameless bleak building that took up a third of the block.
    J. Edward Jamison, whose novels of city manners had been thought sparklingly impudent as late as 1962, quaveringly spoke up: “There’s this fellow Pynchon appears to be first-rate. At least, my grandsons adore his stuff. Computers is what they mostly care about, though.”
    “He’d never accept,” croaked Amy Speer deLessups, one of the few female members and faithful in her attendance, perhaps because she lived in Turtle Bay, a modest hop to the south. Her rhyming confessions of her many amours had once created a sensation, thanks to her strict metrical defiance of the prevailing vers-libre mode. Now it was the amours themselves that seemed scandalous, in connection with this shrivelled, wispy body, lamed by arthritic joints. She walked with a cane, wore black velvet bell-bottoms, and carried her little wrinkled round face tipped up, a flirtatious habit left over from her days of comeliness. Shewent on, creakily turning in her chair to address Jamison and almost shouting in her pain, “He turns down
eve
rything. These younger ones are like that. They think it’s
smart
, not to belong. I was the same at their age.”
    Jamison perhaps had failed to hear her despite her effort, or had grasped only the most general import of her words, for he replied ambiguously, “Not a bad idea. Then there’s this Salinger my grandsons used to talk about. Not so much lately; now they’ve discovered the Internet, and girls.”
    “He won’t accept either,” Amy