Bech at Bay by John Updike Page B

that?”
    “I didn’t like the jumping, no. Free speech ought to be Shultz’s right too. He gave a rather nice speech, but nobody listened. All that mob of intelligentsia cared about was hissing Reagan and the contras.”
    Martina slowly uncurled, pressing her feet into the cushion against the sofa’s far arm. “Wasn’t that clever of Izzy,” she purred, “to know that you were presidential timber? Under that curly head of hair, behind those rumpled eyes, such a true-blue conservative.”
    “Oh, Izzy,” he said, offended by her familiar use of the old phony’s name. “He gives intelligence a bad name.” Was she, he wondered in his most paranoid moments, a tool of Izzy’s Stasi? His fingerprints were all over her.
    She put her feet down, so for a moment they were viewed by Bech as if in a glass case, through the coffee-table top, their yellow heels and pink toes and blue instep veins mounted on red-and-black Peruvian stripes, and thenshe sidestepped languidly around the coffee table, her hands on the loose knot of her terrycloth robe. “Henry, I think it’s so darling, that you have all these traditional sentiments. What did people used to say? Corny. It’s a real turn-on.” She lightly undid the belt. From within the parted folds of her robe, her naked body, displayed inches from his face, emitted the warmth and scent of food, a towering spread of it, doughy-pliant yet firm, lustrous, with visible mouthable details, tits pussy hips navel armpits, each with its flavor, its glaze, its tang of overwhelming goodness. Martina fucked administeringly, amused from a small distance and then the distance diminishing until she was lost in its absence. The Forty and its dainty mansion could not hold a candle to this.
    The fall meeting was better attended than the spring’s had been. Of the faithful, little Aaron Fisch had died; there would be no more nominations for Arshile Gorky. Seidensticker, MacDeane, Jamison, Von Klappenemner, Izzy, and Amy deLessups were there, along with six or seven more, not all of whom Bech knew. There were: Jason Marr, one of the two African-Americans among the Forty, a pale and suave preacher’s son whose essays, long-lined poems, and surrealistic fictions were unremittingly full of rage and dire prophecy; X. I. Fong, a refugee from Mao’s China whose large pale pencilled abstractions thrillingly approched invisibility; Isabella Úrsula “Lulu” Buendía Fleming, a Venezuelan diplomat’s daughter whose many years as a girl and then young woman in Washington had led to fluent English, an American marriage, and a remarkable graft of magic realism upon the humdrum substance of suburbanMaryland; and three or four others in the back row, probably composers, wearing dark suits. Edna read the minutes of the last meeting, which were approved. How could Edna’s meticulous handiwork ever be disapproved? Several special repair requests—the copper flashing on the slate roof over the front portal had buckled in last summer’s heat wave, and a bronze sundial, in the shape of a rampant griffin, donated by the late Paul Manship to stand in the ivy bed in the rear garden, had been bent and spray-painted by vandals—were passed. A tribute to Aaron Fisch was read, surprisingly, by Lulu Fleming; that was why, Bech realized, she had made the trip up from Bethesda. She found in Fisch’s work a worthy Lower East Side equivalent of the idealistic mural art of Rivera and Siqueiros, with something of Salvador Dalí’s hallucinatory high finish, itself derived from the ardent literalism of Catholic altar painting; it was in this broad and bloody stream of anonymous popular style that our deceased friend and colleague Aaron Fisch, she asserted, ultimately stood.
    The report on election results was discouraging. None of the four candidates duly nominated and seconded over the course of the summer received a majority of the votes cast by mail ballot or the ten-vote minimum established by the by-laws. Oral