Bech at Bay by John Updike Page A

industrial machinery, on solid bare feet, in a white terrycloth robe that an inamorata of Bech’s, the volatile Claire Hoagland, had stolen long ago from their room in the Plaza, in one of her caprices. There was little capriciousness in Martina; she took literary giants seriously, even in their underwear.
    “I wonder,” she mused, “if it wasn’t a dead idea even then. I mean, old guys sitting around drinking port and smoking cigars and telling each other what fine fellows they are—how William Dean Howells can you get?”
    “Poor Howells,” Bech said. “Everybody thinks of him as a toastmaster. In fact, the older he got, the more radical he became. I can’t say the same for myself. You should have seen Edna’s face when I defended the Forty so stoutly—her jaw dropped nearly back to Alice Springs.”
    It was charming when Martina laughed, the cautious dimpling and half-smothered eruption, her Socialist conscience checking her acquired American freedom to mock. “It is unlike you,” she said. “You usually scoff at pomp and pretension.”
    “But the Forty is not pompous, it’s
touch
ing. Almost nobody comes. Those that do are deaf or senile. The place has paintings on the wall we can’t afford the insurance on. Everything inside is so exquisite and Grecian—high sculpted plaster ceilings and no two fireplaces carved alike—and across the street squats this huge uncaring flankof some building where dozens of trailer trucks seem to live.”
    “New York is full of uncaring buildings,” she solemnly said. “What does your friend Isaiah Thornbush think about this Forty?”
    “Who knows? He got me into the presidency, and then at the spring meeting he hardly spoke up. At one point he announced he agreed with MacDeane about something, but it could have been about dying, preventing extraordinary measures. We got onto that somehow. The discussion rambled.”
    “Why do you like presiding?”
    Martina had spent the night, and so was there to greet the mid-morning sun as it threw golden rhomboids of warmth into the loft. She had curled her body in one of them, on a sofa opposite Bech’s beanbag, across his glass coffee table and striped Peruvian rug. Bea, Bech’s nicely domestic ex-wife, had covered a cracked old leather sofa of his with nubbly beige wool; nestled upon it, with her bare feet palely protruding from her robe, Martina suggested a big blintz—the terrycloth the enfolding crepe, her flesh the pure soft cheese. Her sunstruck toes wiggled in idle pleasure, and her hair swirled in a loose tangle all about her broad face, its brows, usually thick and straight and stern, interrogatively arched.
    How good it was of women, Bech thought, not for the first time, to allow you intimacy with them, sharing their pleasure in the simplest elements of life. You can, through chinks in the male armor, feel a fraction of the bliss that must tumble in upon them all day long. “I suppose I like having the attention,” he answered, “even as a formality, of men and women whose accomplishments I respect. Old poops now, it may be, they once put their minds and heartson the line and tried to make something decent. Think of all that MacDeane knows about Millard Fillmore. Think of how he’s made himself care about Calhoun. Even Von Klappenemner—all the Beethoven he’s passed through his head and his arms, he’s earned the right to call one of the symphonies piffling. I find that moving.”
    “I find it rather shocking,” Martina said, “and likewise that you’re so impressed. You saw the Writers’ Unions perform their thuggery in Communist countries—why isn’t the Forty more of the same?”
    “Well, those were closed shops, and the politicians were pulling the strings. We’re above politicians, or beneath their notice. Mailer a couple of years ago had George Shultz, when he was Reagan’s Secretary of State, address a PEN conference, and everybody jumped all over him.”
    “And you didn’t like