Bech by John Updike

furry plump hand clung tenaciously to the sill of Bech’s window. “Quite a scene,” he said.
    Bech told him, “We’re trying to get to the beach before it clouds over.” Every instant, the sky grew less transparent. Often the island was foggy while the mainland, according to the radio, blissfully baked.
    “Where’s everybody staying?” The boy’s assumption that they were all living together irritated Bech, since it was correct.
    “We’ve rented a shoe,” Bech said, “from an old lady who’s moved up to a cigar box.”
    Wendell’s eyes lingered on the three fair children crammed, along with sand pails and an inflated air mattress, into the back seat beside their mother. He asked them, “Uncle Harry’s quite a card, huh, kids?”
    Bech imagined he had hurt Wendell’s feelings. In rapid atonement he explained, “We’re in a cottage rented from Andy Spofford, who used to be in war movies—before your time, he played sidekicks that got killed—and lives mostly in Corsica now. Blue mailbox, third dirt road past the Up-Island Boutique, take every left turning except the last, when you go right, not
hard
right. Mrs. Cook is up from Ossining visiting for the week.” Bech restrained himself from telling Wendell that she was going through a divorce and cried every evening and lived on pills. Bea was an unspectacular middle-sized woman two years younger than Norma; she wore dull clothes that seemed designed to set off her sister’s edgy beauty.
    Wendell understood Bech’s apologetic burst as an invitation, and removed his hand from the door. “Hey, I know this is an imposition, but I’d love to have you just glance at the stuff I’m doing now. I’m out of that lower-case bag. In fact I’m into something pretty classical. I’ve seen the movie of
Ulysses
twice.”
    “And you’ve let your hair grow. You’re out of the barbershop bag.”
    Wendell spoke past Bech’s ear to the children. “You kids like to Sunfish?”
    “Yes!” Ann and Judy chorused; they were twins.
    “What’s Sunfish?” Donald asked.
    Going to the beach had been the children’s only entertainment. Their mother was drugged and dazed, Norma detested physical activity before dark, and Bech was frightened of the water. Even the ferry ride over to the island felt precarious tohim. He never sailed, and rarely swam in water higher than his hips. From his apartment on Riverside Drive, he looked across to New Jersey as if the Hudson were a wide flat black street.
    “Let’s do it tomorrow,” Wendell said. “I’ll come for them around one, if that’s O.K., ma’am.”
    Bea, flustered to find herself addressed—for Bech and Norma had almost enforced invisibility upon her, staging their fights and reconciliations as if she were not in the cottage—answered in her melodious grief-slowed voice, “That would be lovely of you, if you really want to bother. Is there any danger?”
    “Not a bit, ma’am. I have life jackets. I used to be a camp counselor.”
    “That must have been when you shot your polar bear,” Bech said, and pointedly restarted the motor.
    They arrived at the beach just as the sun went behind one of those irregular expanding clouds whose edges hold blue sky at bay for hours. The children, jubilant at freedom and the prospect of Sunfishing, plunged into the surf. Norma, as if unwrapping a fragile gift in faintly poor taste, removed her beach robe, revealing a mauve bikini, and, inserting plastic eyecups in her sockets, arranged herself in the center of a purple towel the size of a double bed. Bea, disconsolate in a loose brown suit that did not do her figure justice, sat down on the sand with a book—one of Bech’s, curiously. Though her sister had been his mistress for two and a half years, she had just got around to doing her homework. Embarrassed, fearful that the book, so near his actual presence, would somehow detonate, Bech moved off a few strides and stood, bare-chested, gazing at his splendid enemy the sea, an