walls. In a far room he glimpsed a bed, with a feathery Indian bedspread and velour pillows. Glenda, as firmly as she directed cameramen, led him the other way, to a small front room claustrophobically lined with books. She put on a record, explaining it was Gordon Lightfoot, Canada’s own. A sad voice, gentle to no clear purpose, imitated American country blues. Glenda talked about her career, her life, the man she had been married to.
“What went wrong?” Bech asked. Marriage and death fascinated him: he was an old-fashioned novelist in this.
She wanly shrugged. “He got too dependent. I was being suffocated. He was terribly nice, a truly nice person. But all he would do was sit and read and ask me questions about my feelings. These books, they’re mostly his.”
“You seem tired,” Bech said, picturing the feathery bed.
She surprised him by abruptly volunteering, “I have something wrong with my corpuscles, they don’t know what it is, I’m having tests. But I’m out of whack. That’s why I said I could offer you only coffee.”
Bech was fascinated, flattered, relieved. Sex needed participation, illness needed only a witness. A loving witness. Glenda was dear and directorial in her movement as she rose and flicked back her hair and turned the record over. The movement seemed to generate a commotion on the stairs, and thena key in the lock and a brusque masculine shove on the door. She turned a notch paler, staring at Bech; her long pink nose stood out like an exclamation point. Too startled to whisper, she told Bech, “It must be
Peter
.”
Downstairs, more footsteps than two entered the little house, and from the grumble of a male voice, Bech deduced that Moira had at last returned with Peter. Hannah slept, her body filling the bed with a protective turnipy warmth he remembered from Brooklyn kitchens. The couple below them bumbled, clattered, tittered, put on a record. It was a Chilean-flute record Hannah had played for him earlier—music shrill, incessant, searching, psychedelic. This little orphan continent, abandoned at the foot of Asia, looked to the New World’s west coasts for culture, for company. California clothes, Andean flutes. “My pale land,” he had heard an Australian poet recite; and from airplanes it was, indeed, a pale land, speckled and colorless, a Wyoming with a seashore. A continent as lonely as the planet. Peter and Moira played the record again and again; otherwise, they were silent downstairs, deep in drugs or fucking. Bech got up and groped lightly across the surface of Hannah’s furniture for Kleenex or lens tissue or anything tearable to stuff into his ears. His fingers came to a paperback book and he thought the paper might be cheap enough to wad. Tearing off two corners of the title page, he recognized by the dawning light the book as one of his own, the Penguin
Brother Pig
, with that absurdly literal cover, of a grinning pig, as if the novel were
Animal Farm
or
Charlotte’s Web
. The paper crackling and cutting in his ears, he returned to the bed. Beside him, stately Hannah, half-covered and unconscious, felt like a ship, her breathing an engine, her lubricated body steaming toward the morning, her smokestack nipples relaxed in passage. The flute musicstopped. The world stopped turning. Bech counted to ten, twenty, thirty in silence, and his consciousness had begun to disintegrate when a man harshly laughed and the Chilean flute, and the pressure in Bech’s temples, resumed.
“This is Peter Syburg,” Glenda said. “Henry Bech.”
“
Je
sais, je sais bien
,” Peter said, shaking Bech’s hand with the painful vehemence of the celebrity-conscious. “I saw your gig on the tube. Great. You talked a blue streak and didn’t tip your hand once. What a con job. Cool. I mean it. The medium is
you
, man. Hey, that’s a compliment. Don’t look that way.”
“I was just going to give him coffee,” Glenda interposed.
“How about brandy?” Bech asked. “Suddenly
“What went wrong?” Bech asked. Marriage and death fascinated him: he was an old-fashioned novelist in this.
She wanly shrugged. “He got too dependent. I was being suffocated. He was terribly nice, a truly nice person. But all he would do was sit and read and ask me questions about my feelings. These books, they’re mostly his.”
“You seem tired,” Bech said, picturing the feathery bed.
She surprised him by abruptly volunteering, “I have something wrong with my corpuscles, they don’t know what it is, I’m having tests. But I’m out of whack. That’s why I said I could offer you only coffee.”
Bech was fascinated, flattered, relieved. Sex needed participation, illness needed only a witness. A loving witness. Glenda was dear and directorial in her movement as she rose and flicked back her hair and turned the record over. The movement seemed to generate a commotion on the stairs, and thena key in the lock and a brusque masculine shove on the door. She turned a notch paler, staring at Bech; her long pink nose stood out like an exclamation point. Too startled to whisper, she told Bech, “It must be
Peter
.”
Downstairs, more footsteps than two entered the little house, and from the grumble of a male voice, Bech deduced that Moira had at last returned with Peter. Hannah slept, her body filling the bed with a protective turnipy warmth he remembered from Brooklyn kitchens. The couple below them bumbled, clattered, tittered, put on a record. It was a Chilean-flute record Hannah had played for him earlier—music shrill, incessant, searching, psychedelic. This little orphan continent, abandoned at the foot of Asia, looked to the New World’s west coasts for culture, for company. California clothes, Andean flutes. “My pale land,” he had heard an Australian poet recite; and from airplanes it was, indeed, a pale land, speckled and colorless, a Wyoming with a seashore. A continent as lonely as the planet. Peter and Moira played the record again and again; otherwise, they were silent downstairs, deep in drugs or fucking. Bech got up and groped lightly across the surface of Hannah’s furniture for Kleenex or lens tissue or anything tearable to stuff into his ears. His fingers came to a paperback book and he thought the paper might be cheap enough to wad. Tearing off two corners of the title page, he recognized by the dawning light the book as one of his own, the Penguin
Brother Pig
, with that absurdly literal cover, of a grinning pig, as if the novel were
Animal Farm
or
Charlotte’s Web
. The paper crackling and cutting in his ears, he returned to the bed. Beside him, stately Hannah, half-covered and unconscious, felt like a ship, her breathing an engine, her lubricated body steaming toward the morning, her smokestack nipples relaxed in passage. The flute musicstopped. The world stopped turning. Bech counted to ten, twenty, thirty in silence, and his consciousness had begun to disintegrate when a man harshly laughed and the Chilean flute, and the pressure in Bech’s temples, resumed.
“This is Peter Syburg,” Glenda said. “Henry Bech.”
“
Je
sais, je sais bien
,” Peter said, shaking Bech’s hand with the painful vehemence of the celebrity-conscious. “I saw your gig on the tube. Great. You talked a blue streak and didn’t tip your hand once. What a con job. Cool. I mean it. The medium is
you
, man. Hey, that’s a compliment. Don’t look that way.”
“I was just going to give him coffee,” Glenda interposed.
“How about brandy?” Bech asked. “Suddenly
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