Bech at Bay by John Updike

mass magazines ran their cartoons toward the back. He pulled books from his shelves fitfully, quickly pleased or bored by a page, but he rarely settled to read a book through. This browsing was selfish and superstitious: he was looking for clues that would help him turn his own peculiar world into words, and he resisted submitting for long to another author’s spell. After half an hour of reposing in his antique beanbag chair, in the carpeted island in the center of his single great room furnished in scattered islands, he would need to go outside, where the dour but populated streets fed another kind of scanning. Running-shoe-shod tourists cruising the galleries; art salesmen lugging wrapped rectangles; a fork-bearded, red-shirted geezer fresh, it seemed, from the hills of Kentucky; a young man with bleached-blond ponytail flying by on an absurdly small motorized scooter; a pair of young women totally in black prolongedly embracing, either in passionate reunion or determined demonstration of gay pride, the shorter of them wearing thrillingly brutal square-heeled black boots dotted with silver studs; a plump social worker leading on a knotted cord a quartet of the blind, with their sunken sockets and undirected smiles—all such bits of street theatre excited Bech with a sense of human life, a vast inchoate atmosphere waiting, like the gray sky seen through the fire escapes overhead, to be condensed and experienced as drops of rain or as letters of type.
    For years he had lived at 99th Street and Riverside Drive, before a romantic excursion into marriage had taken him to a Westchester suburb and another excursion (into the body of his wife’s sister) had brought him ingloriously back to the city. Within its confines, he had headed south, off the numbered grid. Here in S0H0 the flash andglitter of youthful aspiration mingled with the clangor of old warehouse enterprise. There were cobblestones and elaborate dirty ironwork; there were still greasy bicycle shops and men in bloody butchers’ aprons. The area below Houston—that light-filled slash in Manhattan’s close-woven fabric—had once been known as Hell’s Hundred Acres, because of its infernal sweatshops and frequent fires. Long black limousines out of Little Italy prowled between aisles of graffiti-sprayed metal shutters. Signs in Chinese popped up on its southeastern edge. From spots on Broome and Spring Streets Bech could see both the gleaming needle of the Chrysler Building and the looming outcrop of the financial district, topped by the twin spireless World Trade towers, box cathedrals. In the lowlands of SoHo Bech experienced an oddly big sky and a sensation—important, he felt, for an artist—of the disreputable, if not (there were too many art galleries and cappuccino joints) of the proletarian.
    Martina earnestly considered his confessed queasiness in regard to the Forty. She brought to every issue he raised an intent, unsmiling consideration he associated with Communist peace conferences, of which he had attended a few. “What is the point, again,” she asked, “of the Forty?”
    “To exist, simply. A city on a hill, sort of. A mountain seen from the plain. This woman, Lucinda
Baines
, left her dandy townhouse and a lot of ill-gotten
gains
for a kind of French Academy, though we have none of their responsibilities. They keep working away at a French dictionary, for one thing, and have braided uniforms.”
    The long-dead Lucinda, he realized, had become one of his love objects, and little efficient Edna another. His imagination bred a needy flock he lived to serve and placate—eweswho gave him an identity as shepherd. He was an old-fashioned gallant, Henry Bech; in all the women of his life he was seeking truth and goodness. A great reservoir of both must lie, he reasoned, with an entity able to take his sexual agitation and turn it into a limpid, postcoital peace. Martina moved around the carpeted island, set in a sea of boards splintered by vanished