Bech by John Updike Page A

oblivious hemisphere whose glitter of whitecaps sullenly persistedwithout the sun. Shortly, a timid adolescent voice, the voice he had been waiting for, rustled at his shoulder. “I beg your pardon, sir, but by any chance are you …?”
    Wendell found Bech’s diffident directions no obstacle and came for the children promptly at one the next day. The expedition was so successful Beatrice prolonged her visit another week. Wendell took the children clamming and miniature-golfing; he took them to an Indian burial ground, to an abandoned windmill, to grand beaches fenced with No Trespassing signs. The boy had that Wasp knowingness, that facility with things: he knew how to insert a clam knife, how to snorkle (just to put on the mask made Bech gasp for breath), how to bluff and charm his way onto private beaches (Bech believed everything he read), how to excite children with a few broken shell bits that remotely might be remnants of ceremonially heaped conch shells. He was connected to the land in a way Bech could only envy. Though so young, he had been everywhere—Italy, Scandinavia, Mexico, Alaska—whereas Bech, except for Caribbean holidays and a State Department-sponsored excursion to some Communist countries, had hardly been anywhere. He lived twenty blocks north of where he had been born, and couldn’t sleep for nervousness the night before he and Norma and his rickety Ford risked the journey up the seaboard to the ferry slip. The continent-spanning motorcyclists of
Travel Light
had been daydreams based upon his Cincinnati sister’s complaints about her older son, a college dropout. Wendell, a mere twenty-three, shamed Bech with his Yankee ingenuity, his native woodcraft—the dozen and one tricks of a beach picnic, for instance: the oven of scooped sand, the corn salted in seawater, the fire of scavenged driftwood. Itall seemed adventurous to Bech, as did the boy’s removal, in the amber summer twilight, of his bathing suit to body-surf. Wendell was a pudgy yet complete Adonis stiff-armed in the waves, his buttocks pearly, his genitals distinctly visible when he stood in the wave troughs. The new generation was immersed in the world that Bech’s, like a foolish old bridegroom full of whiskey and dogma, had tried to mount and master. Bech was shy of things, and possessed few, not even a wife; Wendell’s room, above a garage on the summer property of some friends of his parents, held everything from canned anchovies and a Bible to pornographic photographs and a gram of LSD.
    Ever since Bech had met her, Norma had wanted to take LSD. It was one of her complaints against him that he had never got her any. He, who knew that all her complaints were in truth that he would not marry her, told her she was too old. She was thirty-six; he was forty-three, and, though flirting with the senility that comes early to American authors, still absurdly wary of anything that might damage his brain. When, on their cottage porch, Wendell let slip the fact that he possessed some LSD, Bech recognized Norma’s sudden new mood. Her nose sharpened, her wide mouth rapidly fluctuated between a heart-melting grin and a severe down-drawn look almost of anger. It was the mood in which, two Christmases ago, she had come up to him at a party, ostensibly to argue about
The Chosen
, in fact to conjure him into taking her to dinner. She began to converse exclusively with Wendell.
    “Where did you get it?” she asked. “Why haven’t you used it?”
    “Oh,” he said, “I knew a turned-on chemistry major. I’ve had it for a year now. You just don’t take it, you know, before bedtime like Ovaltine. There has to be somebody to take the trip with. It can be very bad business”—he had his solemnwhispering voice, stashed behind his boyish naïve one—“to go on a trip alone.”
    “You’ve been,” Bech said politely.
    “I’ve been.” His shadowy tone matched the moment of day. The westward sky was plunging toward rose; the sailboats were