Read Online Bech Is Back by John Updike - Free Book Online Page A

I need my spirits fortified.”
    “Hey, don’t go into your act,” Peter said. “I
like
you.”
    Peter was a short man, past thirty, with thinning ginger hair and a pumpkin’s gap-toothed grin. He might have even been forty; but a determined retention of youth’s rubberiness fended off the possibility. He flopped into a canvas sling chair and kept crossing and recrossing his legs, which were so short he seemed to Bech to be twiddling his thumbs. Peter was a colleague of sorts, based at the CBC office in Montreal, and used Glenda’s apartment here when she was in Montreal, as she often was, and vice versa. Whether he used Glenda when she was in Toronto was not clear to Bech; less and less was. Less and less the author understood how people lived. Such cloudy episodes as these had become his only windows into other lives. He wanted to go, but his going would be a retreat—Montcalm wilting before Wolfe’s stealthy ascent. He had a bit more brandy instead. He found himself embarked on one ofthose infrequent experiments in which, as dispassionate as a scientist bending metal, he tested his own capacity. He felt himself inflating, as before television exposure, while the brandy flowed on and Peter asked him all the questions not even Vanessa had been pushy enough to pose (“What’s happened to you and Capote?” “What’s the timer makes you Yanks burn out so fast?” “Ever thought of trying television scripts?”) and expatiating on the wonders of the McLuhanite world in which he, Peter, with his thumb-like legs and berry-bright eyes, moved as a successful creature, while he, Bech, was picturesquely extinct. Glenda flicked her pale hair and studied her hands and insulted her out-of-whack corpuscles with cigarettes. Bech was happy. One more brandy, he calculated, would render him utterly immobile, and Peter would be displaced. His happiness was not even punctured when the two others began to talk to each other in Canadian French, about calling a taxi to take him away.
    “
Taxi, non
,” Bech exclaimed, struggling to rise. “
Marcher, oui. Je pars, maintenant. Vous le regretterez, quand je suis disparu. Au revoir, cher Pierre
.”
    “You can’t walk it, man. It’s miles.”
    “Try me, you post-print punk,” Bech said, putting up his hairy fists.
    Glenda escorted him to the stairs and down them, one by one; at the foot, she embraced him, clinging to him as if to be rendered fertile by osmosis. “I thought he was in Winnipeg,” she said. “I want to have your baby.”
    “Easy does it,” Bech wanted to say. The best he could do was, “
Facile le fait
.”
    Glenda asked, “Will you ever come back to Toronto?”
    “
Jamais
,” Bech said, “
jamais, jamais
,” and the magical word, so true of every moment, of every stab at love, of every stepon ground you will not walk again, rang in his mind all the way back to the hotel. The walk was generally downhill. The curved lights of the great city hall guided him. There was a forested ravine off to his left, and a muffled river. And stars. And block after block of substantial untroubled emptiness. He expected to be mugged, or at least approached. In his anesthetized state, he would have welcomed violence. But in those miles he met only blinking stop lights and impassive architecture.
And they call this a city
, Bech thought scornfully.
In New York, I would have been killed six times over and my carcass stripped of its hubcaps
.
    The cries of children playing woke him. The sound of the flute at last had ceased. Last night’s pleasure had become straw in his mouth; the woman beside him seemed a larger sort of dreg. Her eyelids fluttered, as if in response to the motions of his mind. It seemed only polite to reach for her. The children beneath the window cheered.
    Next morning, in Toronto, Bech shuffled, footsore, to the Royal Ontario Museum and admired the Chinese urns and the totem poles and sent a postcard of a carved walrus tusk to Bea and her three