Free Bech Is Back by John Updike Page A

of Gethsemane. “I never thought I’d be here,
ever
,” she told him, and as she turned, her face seemed still to brim with reflected morning light. Bech kissed her and over her shoulder read a multilingual warning not to leave valuables on the window sill.
    “Why didn’t you ask Rodney to bring you,” he asked, “if it meant so much?”
    “Oh, Rodney. His idea of a spiritual adventure was to go backpacking in Maine.”
    Bech had married this woman in a civil ceremony in lower Manhattan on an April afternoon of unseasonable chill and spitting snow. She was the younger, gentler sister of a mistress he had known for years and with whom he had always fought. He and Bea rarely fought, and at his age this appeared possibly propitious. He had married her to escape his famous former self. He had given up his apartment at 99th and Riverside—an address consecrated by twenty years of
Who’s Who
s—to live with Bea in Ossining, with her twin girls and only son. These abrupt truths, still strange, raced through his mind as he contemplated the radiant stranger whom the world called his wife. “Why didn’t you tell me,” he asked her now, “you took this kind of thing so much to heart?”
    “You knew I went to church.”
    “The E
pis
copal church. I thought it was a social obligation. Rodney wanted the kids brought up in the upper middle class.”
    “He thought that would happen anyway. Just by their being his children.”
    “Lord, I don’t know if I can hack this: be an adequate stepfather to the kids of a snob and a Christian fanatic.”
    “Henry, this is your Holy Land, too. You should be thrilled to be here.”
    “It makes me nervous. It reminds me of
Samson and Delilah
.”
    “You
are
thrilled. I can tell.” Her blue eyes, normally as pale as the sky when the milkiest wisps of strato-cirrus declare a storm coming tomorrow, looked up at him with a new, faintly forced luster. The Holy Land glow. Bech found it distrustworthy, yet, by some twist, in some rarely illumineddepth of himself, flattering. While he was decoding the expression of her eyes, her mouth was forming words he now heard, on instant replay, as “Do you want to make love?”
    “Because we’re in the Holy Land?”
    “I’m so excited,” Bea confessed. She blushed, waiting for his response. Another hunger artist.
    “Wouldn’t it be blasphemous?” Bech asked. “Anyway, we’re being picked up to sight-see in twenty minutes. What about breakfast instead?” He kissed her again, feeling estranged. He was too old to be on a honeymoon. His marriage was like this Zionist state they were in: a mistake long deferred, a miscarriage of passé fervor and antiquated tribal righteousness, an attempt to be safe on an earth where, for Jews, there was no safety.
    Their quarters in the Mishkenot included a kitchen. Bea called from within it, “There’s two sets of silver. One says Dairy and the other says Meat.”
    “Use one or the other,” Bech called back. “Don’t mingle them.”
    “What’ll happen if I do?”
    “I don’t know. Try it. Maybe it’ll trip the trigger and bring the Messiah.”
    “Now who’s being blasphemous? Anyway, the Messiah
did
come.”
    “We can’t all read His calling card.”
    Her only answer was the clash of silver.
    I’m too old to be married
, Bech thought, though he smiled to himself as he thought it. He went to the window and looked at the view that had sexually stimulated his wife. Beyond the near, New Testament hills, the color of unglazed Mexican pottery, were lavender desert mountains like long folds in God’s comfortless lap.
    “Is there anything I should know about eggs and butter?” Bea called.
    “Keep them away from bacon.”
    “There isn’t any bacon. There isn’t any meat in the fridge at all.”
    “They didn’t trust you. They knew you’d try to do something crummy.” His Christian wife was thirteen years younger than he. Her belly bore silver stretch marks from carrying twins. She made