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

marvel that broadcast them; for, just as this broadcasting was an airy and flattering shell upon the terrestrial, odorous, confused man who physically occupied a plastic chair and a few cubic feet of space in this tatty studio, so his words were a shell, an unreal umbrella, above his kernel of real humanity, the more or less childish fears and loves that he wrote out of, when he wrote. On the monitor now, while his throaty interviewer described his career with a “voice-over,” stills of his books were being flashed, and from their jackets photographs of Bech—big-eared and combative, a raw youth, on the flap of
Travel Light;
a few years older on
Brother Pig
, his hair longer, his gaze more guarded and, it seemed to Bech in the microsecond of its exposure, illicitly conspiratorial, seeking to strike up a mutually excusatory relationship with the reader; a profile, frankly and vapidly Bachrachian, from his collection of essays; and, wizened if not wiser, as pouchy as a golf bag, his face, haloed by wild wool that deserved to belong to a Kikuyu witch doctor, from the back of his “big” novel, which had been, a decade ago, jubilantly panned. Bech realized, viewing the montage, that as his artistic powers had diminished he had come to look more and more like an artist. Then, an even older face, the shocking face of a geezer, of a shambler, with a furtive wit waiting to twitch the licked and criminal lips, flashed onto the screen, and he realized it was he, he as of this moment, on camera, live. His talking continued, miraculously.
    Afterward, the producer of the show emerged from behind the cables and the cameras, told him he was wonderful, and, the day being fair, offered to take him for a tour of the city. He had three hours before a scheduled dinner with a Canadian poet who had fenced with Cocteau and an Anglican priest who had prepared a concordance of Bech’s fiction. Glenda flicked back her hair absent-mindedly; Bech scanned her face for a blip marking how far she expected him to go. Her eyes were an even gray shallowly backed by a neutral Northern friendliness. He accepted.
    In Australia, the tour of Sydney was conducted by two girls, Hannah, the dark and somber prop girl for the TV talk show on which he had been a seven-minute guest (along with an expert on anthrax; a leader of the Western Australia secessionist movement; a one-armed survivor of a shark attack; and an aborigine protest painter), plus Moira, who lived with Hannah and was an instructor in the economics of underdevelopment. The day was not fair. A downpour hit just as Hannah drove her little Subaru to the Opera House, so they did not get out but admired the world-famous structure from the middle distance. A set of sails had been the architect’s metaphor; but it looked to Bech more like a set of fish mouths about to nibble something. Him, perhaps. He gave Hannah permission to drive away. “It’s too bad,” Moira said from the back seat, “the day is so rotten. The whole thing is covered in a white ceramic that’s gorgeous in the sun.”
    “I can picture it,” Bech lied politely. “Inside, does it give a feeling of grandeur?”
    “No,” said Hannah.
    “It’s all rather tedious bits and pieces,” Moira elaborated.“We fired the Dane who did the outside and finished the inside ourselves.”
    The two girls’ life together, Bech guessed, contained a lot of Moira’s elaboration, around the other’s dark and somber core. Hannah had moved toward him, after the show, as though by some sullen gravitational attraction such as the outer planets feel for the sun. He was down under, Bech told himself; his volume still felt displaced by an eternity in airplanes. But Hannah’s black eyes had no visible backs to them. Down, in, down, they said.
    She drove to a cliffy point from which the harbor, the rain lifting, gleamed like silver long left unpolished. Sydney, Moira explained, loved its harbor and embraced it like no other city in the world, not