Free Bech by John Updike Page A

the brandy and burned itself into Bech’s memory—the silver gloss of her nail, the sheen of her hair, the symmetry of her arms relaxed on the white tablecloth, everything except the expression on her face.
    Petrov asked aloud Bech’s opinion of Dürrenmatt.
    Actuality is a running impoverishment of possibility. Though he had looked forward to seeing her again at the cocktail party and had made sure that she was invited, when it occurred, though she came, he could not get to her. He saw her enter, with Petrov, but he was fenced in by an attaché of the Yugoslav Embassy and his burnished Tunisian wife; and,later, when he was worming his way toward her diagonally, a steely hand closed on his arm and a rasping American female told him that her fifteen-year-old nephew had decided to be a writer and desperately needed advice. Not the standard crap, but real brass-knuckles advice. Bech found himself balked. He was surrounded by America: the voices, the narrow suits, the watery drinks, the clatter, the glitter. The mirror had gone opaque and gave him back only himself. He managed, in the end, as the officials were thinning out, to break through and confront her in a corner. Her coat, blond, with a rabbit collar, was already on; from its side pocket she pulled a pale volume of poems in the Cyrillic alphabet. “Please,” she said. On the flyleaf she had written, “to H. Beck, sincerelly, with bad spellings but much”—the last word looked like “leave” but must have been “love.”
    “Wait,” he begged, and went back to where his ravaged pile of presentation books had been and, unable to find the one he wanted, stole the legation library’s jacketless copy of
The Chosen
. Placing it in her expectant hands, he told her, “Don’t look,” for inside he had written, with a drunk’s stylistic confidence,
    D EAR V ERA G LAVANAKOVA—
    It is a matter of earnest regret for me that you and I must live on opposite sides of the world.

BECH TAKES POT LUCK
    T HOUGH H ENRY B ECH’S few persistent admirers among the critics praised his “highly individual and refractory romanticism,” his “stubborn refusal to mount, in this era of artistic coup d’état and herd movement, any bandwagon but that of his own quixotic, excessively tender, strangely anti-Semitic Semitic sensibility,” the author nevertheless had a sneaking fondness for the fashionable. Each August, he deserted his shabby large apartment at 99th and Riverside and rented a cottage on a Massachusetts island whose coves and sandy lanes were crammed with other writers, television producers, museum directors, undersecretaries of State, movie stars whose Forties films were now enjoying a camp revival, old
New Masses
editors possessively squatting on seaside acreage bought for a song in the Depression, and hordes of those handsome, entertaining, professionless prosperous who fill the chinks between celebrities. It innocently delighted Bech, a child of the urban middle class, to see these luxurious people padding in bare feet along the dirty sidewalks of the island’s one town, or fighting foroverpriced groceries in the tiny general store of an up-island hamlet. It gratified him to recognize some literary idol of his youth, shrunken and frail, being tumbled about by the surf; or to be himself recognized by some faunlike bikinied girl who had been assigned
Travel Light
at the Brearley School, or by a cozy Westchester matron, still plausible in her scoop-back one-piece, who amiably confused Bech’s controversial chef-d’œuvre
The Chosen
with a contemporary best-seller of the same title. Though often thus accosted, Bech had never before been intercepted by a car. The little scarlet Porsche, the long blond hair of its driver flapping, cut in front of Bech’s old Ford as he was driving to the beach, and forced him to brake within inches of two mailboxes painted with flowers and lettered, respectively, “Sea Shanty” and “Avec du Sel.” The boy—it was a boy’s