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

that shuddered beside the plastic swizzle stick, upon the plastic tray. In Korea, the girls in school uniforms would slip him notes on blue-lined paper reading,
Derest Mr Bech Mr Kim our teacher assined your stori on being Jewsh in English clas it was my favrite ever I think you very famus over the world I love you
. In Nigeria, the woman teaching him the high-life had reached out and placed two firm black hands gently upon his hips, to settle him down: he had been doing a jumpy, aggressive frug to this different, subtler beat. In the air, the 747 hit some chop and jiggled, but stayed aloft. Not a drop of his golden drink spilled. God bless America.

AUSTRALIA AND CANADA
    C LEAN STRAIGHT streets. Cities whose cores are not blighted but innocently bustling. Citizens of Anglo-Saxon blood, British once removed, striding long-legged and unterrorized out of a dim thin past into a future as likely as any. Empty territories rich in minerals. Stately imperial government buildings. Parks where one need not fear being mugged. Bech in his decline went anywhere but had come to prefer safe places.
    The invitation to Canada was to Toronto, to be interviewed, as Henry Bech, the exquisitely unprolific author, on the television program
Vanessa Views
. Vanessa was a squat woman with skin like orange cheesecloth, who nevertheless looked, on a twenty-three-inch screen, if not beautiful, alive. “It’s all in the eyes,” she explained. “The people with deep sockets do terribly. To project to the camera, you must have eyes set forward in your head. If your eyes turn inward, the viewers turn right off.”
    “Suppose your eyes,” Bech asked, “turn toward each other?”
    Vanessa refused to pick it up as a joke, though a female voice behind the lights and cameras laughed. “You are an author,” Vanessa told him sternly. “You don’t have to project. Indeed, you shouldn’t. Viewers distrust the ones who do.”
    The two of them were caught in the curious minute before airtime. Bech, practiced rough-smoothie that he was, chatted languidly, fighting down the irreducible nervousness, a floating and rising sensation as if he were, with every second ticked from the huge studio clock, being inflated. His hands prickled, swelling; he looked at his palms and they seemed to have no wrinkles. His face felt stiff, having been aromatically swabbed with something like that strange substance with which one was supposed, thirty years ago, to color oleomargarine and thereby enhance the war effort. The female who had laughed behind the lights, he saw, was the producer, a leggy girl pale as untinted oleo, with nostrils reddened by a cold, and lifeless, pale hair she kept flicking back with the hand not holding her handkerchief. Named Glenda, she appeared harried by her own efficiency, which she refused to acknowledge, brushing aside her directives to the cameramen as soon as she issued them. Like himself, Bech felt, she had been cast by life into a role it amused her to not quite fill.
    Whereas his toadlike interviewer, whose very warts were telegenic, inhaled and puffed herself way up; she was determined to fill this attenuated nation from coast to coast. The seconds waned into single digits on the studio clock and a muffled electronic fuss beyond the lights clicked into gear and Bech’s pounding heart bloated as if to choke him. Vanessa began to talk. Then, miracle that never failed, so did he.
    He talked into the air. Even without the bright simulacrum of his head and shoulders gesticulating in the upper-left corner of his vision, where the monitor hung like an illuminatedinitial on a page of shadowy manuscript, Bech could feel the cameras licking his image up and flinging it, quick as light, from Ontario to British Columbia. He touched his nose to adorn a pensive pause, and the gesture splashed onto the shores of the Maritime Provinces and fell as silver snow upon the barren Yukon. As he talked, he marveled at his words as much as at the electronic