Bech by John Updike Page B

taking the final tack toward harbor. Inside the cottage, the children, happy and loud after an expedition with Wendell to the lobster hatchery, were eating supper. Beatrice went in to give them dessert, and to get herself a sweater.
    Norma’s fine lean legs twitched, recrossing, as she turned to Wendell with her rapacious grin. Before she could speak, Bech asked a question that would restore to himself the center of attention. “And is this what you write about now? In the classic manner of
Ulysses
movies?”
    Under the embarrassment of having to instruct his instructor, Wendell’s voice dropped another notch. “It’s not really writable. Writing makes distinctions, and this breaks them down. For example, I remember once looking out my window at Columbia. Someone had left a green towel on the gravel roof. From sunbathing, I suppose. I thought, Mmm, pretty green towel, nice shade of green,
beau
tiful shade of green—and the color at
tacked
me!”
    Norma asked, “How attacked you? It grew teeth? Grew bigger? What?” She was having difficulty, Bech felt, keeping herself out of Wendell’s lap. The boy’s innocent eyes, browless as a Teddy bear’s, flicked a question toward Bech.
    “Tell her,” Bech told him. “She’s curious.”
    “I’m
hor
ribly curious,” Norma exclaimed. “I’m
so
tired of being myself. Liquor doesn’t do anything for me anymore, sex,
any
thing.”
    Wendell glanced again toward Bech, worried. “It—attacked me. It tried to become me.”
    “Was it wonderful? Or terrible?”
    “It was borderline. You must understand, Norma, it’s not a playful experience. It takes everything you have.” His tone of voice had become the unnaturally, perhaps ironically, respectful one he had used in English 1020.
    “It’ll even take,” Bech told her, “your Saks charge-a-plate.”
    Bea appeared in the doorway, dim behind the screen. “As long as I’m on my feet, does anybody want another drink?”
    “Oh,
Bea
,” Norma said, leaping up, “stop being a martyr. It’s my turn to cook, let me help you.” To Bech, before going in, she said, “
Please
arrange my trip with Wendell. He thinks I’m a nuisance, but he
adores
you. Tell him how good I’ll be.”
    Her departure left the men silent. Sheets of mackerel shards were sliding down the sky toward a magenta sunset; Bech felt himself being sucked into a situation where nothing, neither tact nor reason nor the morality he had learned from his father and Flaubert, afforded leverage. Wendell at last asked, “How stable is she?”
    “Very un-.”
    “Any history of psychological disturbance?”
    “Nothing but the usual psychiatry. Quit analysis after four months. Does her work apparently quite well—layout and design for an advertising agency. Likes to show her temper off but underneath has a good hard eye on the main chance.”
    “I’d really need to spend some time alone with her. It’s very important that people on a trip together be congenial. They last at least twelve hours. Without rapport, it’s a nightmare.” The boy was so solemn, so blind to the outrageousness of what he was proposing, that Bech laughed. As if rebuking Bech with his greater seriousness, Wendell whispered in the dusk, “The people you’ve taken a trip with become the most important people in your life.”
    “Well,” Bech said, “I want to wish you and Norma all theluck in the world. When should we send out announcements?”
    Wendell intoned, “I feel you disapprove. I feel your fright.”
    Bech was speechless. Didn’t he know what a mistress was? No sense of private property in this generation. The early Christians; Brook Farm.
    Wendell went on carefully, considerately, “Let me propose this. Has she ever smoked pot?”
    “Not with me around. I’m an old-fashioned father figure. Two parts Abraham to one part Fagin.”
    “Why don’t she and I, Mr. Bech, smoke some marijuana together as a dry run? That way she can satisfy her female curiosity and I can see