Bech by John Updike Read Free Book Online Page A

bones, like the bones of birds, had evolved hollow, to save weight. At the mouth of the cave, the effeminate master of ceremonies, wearing a parrot headdress, was conferring with the hat-check girl. His intent was plainlyheterosexual; Bech’s head reeled at such duplicity. Though they added the weight of his coat to him, he rose like a balloon up the yellow stairs, bumped out through the green door, and stood beneath the street lamp inhaling volumes of the blue Rumanian night.
    He felt duty-bound to confront the other writer. They stood, the two of them, on the cobbled pavement, as if on opposite sides of a transparent wall one side of which was lacquered with Scotch and the other with vodka. The other’s rimless glasses were misted and the resemblance to Teddy Roosevelt had been dissipated. Bech asked him, “What do you write about?”
    The wife, patting her nose with a handkerchief and struggling not to cough, translated the question, and the answer, which was brief. “Peasants,” she told Bech. “He wants to know, what do
you
write about?”
    Bech spoke to him directly. “
La bourgeoisie
,” he said; and that completed the cultural exchange. Gently bumping and rocking, the writer’s car took Bech back to his hotel, where he fell into the deep, unapologetic sleep of the sated.
    The plane to Sofia left Bucharest the next morning. Petrescu and the ashen-faced chauffeur came into the tall
fin-de-siècle
dining room for Bech while he was still eating breakfast—
jus d’orange, des croissants avec du beurre
and
une omelette aux fines herbes
. Petrescu explained that the driver had gone back to the theatre, and waited until the ushers and the managers left, after midnight. But the driver did not seem resentful, and gave Bech, in the sallow morning light, a fractional smile, a
risus sardonicus
, in which his eyes did not participate. On the way to the airport, he scattered a flock ofchickens an old woman was coaxing across the road, and forced a military transport truck onto the shoulder, while its load of soldiers gestured and jeered. Bech’s stomach groveled, bathing the fine herbs of his breakfast in acid. The ceaseless tapping of the horn seemed a gnawing on all of his nerve ends. Petrescu made a fastidious mouth and sighed through his nostrils. “I regret,” he said, “that we did not make more occasion to discuss your exciting contemporaries.”
    “I never read them. They’re too exciting,” Bech said, as a line of uniformed schoolchildren was narrowly missed, and a fieldworker with a wheelbarrow shuffled to safety, spilling potatoes. The day was overcast above the loamy sunken fields and the roadside trees in their skirts of white paint. “Why,” he asked, not having meant to be rude, “are all these tree trunks painted?”
    “So they are,” Petrescu said. “I have not noticed this before, in all my years. Presumably it is a measure to defeat the insects.”
    The driver spoke in Rumanian, and Petrescu told Bech, “He says it is for the car headlights, at night. Always he is thinking about his job.”
    At the airport, all the Americans were there who had tried to meet Bech four days ago. Petrescu immediately delivered to Phillips, like a bribe, the name of the writer they had met last night, and Phillips said to Bech, “You spent the evening with
him
? That’s fabulous. He’s the top of the list, man. We’ve never laid a finger on him before; he’s been inaccessible.”
    “Stocky guy with glasses?” Bech asked, shielding his eyes. Phillips was so pleased it was like a bright light too early in the day.
    “That’s the boy. For our money he’s the hottest Red writerthis side of Solzhenitsyn. He’s
waaay
out. Stream of consciousness, no punctuation, everything. There’s even some sex.”
    “You might say he’s Red hot,” Bech said.
    “Huh? Yeah, that’s good. Seriously, what did he say to you?”
    “He said he’ll defect to the West as soon as his shirts come back from the