Australia and Canada

Clean straight streets. Cities whose cores are not blighted but innocently bustling. Anglo-Saxon faces, British once removed, striding long-legged and unterrorized out of a dim thin past into a future as likely as any. Empty territories rich in minerals. Stately imperial government buildings. Parks where one need not fear being mugged. Bech in his decline went anywhere but had come to prefer safe places.

The invitation to Canada was to Toronto, to be interviewed, as Henry Bech, the exquisitely unprolific author, on the television program Vanessa Views. Vanessa was a squat woman with skin like orange cheesecloth, who nevertheless looked, on a 23-inch screen, if not beautiful, alive. "It's all in the eyes," she explained. "The people with deep sockets do terribly. To project to the camera, you must have eyes set forward in your head. If your eyes turn inward, the viewers turn right off."

"Suppose your eyes," Bech asked, "turn toward each other?"

Vanessa refused to pick it up as a joke, though a female voice behind the lights and cameras laughed. "You are an author," Vanessa told him sternly. "You don't have to project. Indeed, you shouldn't. Viewers distrust the ones who do."

The two of them were caught in the curious minute before airtime. Bech, practiced rough-smoothie that he was, chatted languidly, fighting down the irreducible nervousness, a floating and rising sensation as if he were, with every second ticked from the huge studio clock, being inflated. His hands prickled, swelling; he looked at his palms and they seemed to have no wrinkles. His face felt stiff, having been aromatically swabbed with something like that strange substance with which one was supposed, 30 years ago, to color oleomargarine and thereby enhance the war effort. The female who had laughed behind the lights, he saw, was the producer, a leggy girl pale as untinted oleo, with nostrils reddened by a cold and lifeless, pale hair she kept flicking back with the hand not holding her handkerchief. Named Glenda, she had flown from Montreal to do this "show" (show? just poor old Henry Bech apologizing for his life); she appeared harried by her own efficiency, which she refused to acknowledge, brushing aside her directives to the cameramen as soon as she issued them. Like himself, Bech felt, she had been cast by life into a role it amused her not quite to fill.

Whereas his toadlike interviewer, whose very warts were telegenic, inhaled and made her eyes bulge and puffed up as if to fill this attenuated nation from coast to coast; the seconds waned into single digits on the studio clock and a muffled electronic fuss beyond the lights clicked into gear and Bech's heart bloated as if to choke him. She began to talk. Then, miracle that never failed, so did he.

He talked into the air. Even without the bright simulacrum of his head and shoulders gesticulating in the upper-left corner of his vision, where the monitor hung like an illuminated initial on a page of shadowy manuscript, Bech could feel the cameras licking his image up and flinging it, quick as light, from Ontario to British Columbia. He touched his nose to adorn a pensive pause, and the gesture splashed onto the shores of the Maritime Provinces and fell as silver snow upon the barren Yukon. As he talked, he marveled at his words as much as at the electronic marvel that broadcast them; for, just as this broadcasting was an airy and flattering shell upon the terrestrial, odorous, confused man who physically occupied a plastic chair and a few cubic feet of space in this tatty studio, so his words were a shell, an unreal umbrella, above his kernel of real humanity, the more or less childish fears and loves that he wrote out of, when he wrote. On the monitor now, while his throaty interviewer described his career with a "voice over," stills of his books were being flashed, and from their jackets photographs of Bech--big-eared and combative, a raw youth, on the flap of Travel Light; a few years older on Brother Pig, his hair longer, his gaze more guarded and, it seemed to Bech in the microsecond of its exposure, illicitly conspiratorial, seeking to strike up a mutually excusatory relationship with the reader; a profile, frankly and vapidly Bachrachian, from his collection of essays; and, wizened if not wiser, pouchy and classy as a golf bag, his face, haloed by wild wool that deserved to belong to a Kikuyu witch doctor, from the back of his "big" novel, that had been, a long decade ago, jubilantly panned. Bech realized, viewing the montage, that as his artistic powers had diminished he had come to look more and more like an artist. Then, an even older face, the shocking face of a geezer, of a shambler, with a furtive wit waiting to twitch the licked and criminal lips, flashed onto the screen, and he realized it was he, he as of this moment, oncamera live. The talking continued, miraculously.

Afterward, the producer of the show emerged from behind the cables and the cameras, told him he was wonderful and, the day being fair, offered to take him for a tour of the city. He had three hours before a scheduled dinner with a Canadian poet who had fenced with Cocteau and an Anglican priest who had prepared a concordance of Bech's fiction. Glenda flicked back her hair absent-mindedly; Bech scanned her face for a blip, marking how far she expected him to go. Her eyes were an even gray shallowly backed by a neutral friendliness. He accepted.

• • •

In Australia, the tour of Sydney was conducted by two girls, Hannah, the dark and somber prop girl for the TV talk show on which he had been a seven-minute guest (along with an expert on anthrax, a leader of the Western Australia secessionist movement, a one-armed survivor of a shark attack and an aborigine protest painter), plus Moira, who lived with Hannah and was an instructor in the economics of under-development. The day was not fair. A downpour hit just as Hannah drove her little Subaru to the opera house, so they did not get out but admired the world-famous structure from the middle distance. A set of sails had been the architect's metaphor; but it looked to Bech more like a set of fish mouths about to nibble something. Him, perhaps. He gave Hannah permission to drive away. "It's too bad," Moira said from the back seat, "the day is so rotten. The whole thing is covered in a white ceramic that's gorgeous in die sun."

"I can picture it," Bech lied politely. "Inside, does it give a feeling of grandeur?"

"No," said Hannah.

"It's all rather tedious bits and pieces," Moira elaborated. "We fired die Dane who did the outside and finished the inside ourselves."

The two girls' life together, Bech guessed, comprised a lot of her elaboration, around the other's dark and somber core. Hannah had moved toward him, after the show, as though by some sullen gravitational attraction, such as the outer planets feel for the sun. He was down under, Bech told himself; his volume still felt displaced by an eternity in airplanes. But Hannah's black eyes had no visible backs to them. Down, in, down, they said.

She drove to a cliffy point from which the harbor, the rain lifting, gleamed like silver long left unpolished. Sydney, Moira explained, loved its harbor and embraced it like no other city in the world, not even San Francisco. She had been in San Francisco, on her way once to Afghanistan. Hannah had not been anywhere since leaving Europe at the age of three. She was Jewish, her eyes said, and her glossy, tapered fingers. She drove them down to Bondi Beach, and they removed their six shoes to walk on the soaked sand. The tops of Bedi's 50-year-old feet looked white as paper to him, cheap paper, as if his feet amounted to no more than the innermost lining of his shoes. The girls ran ahead and challenged him to a broad-jump contest. He won. Then, in the hop, step and jump, his heart felt pleasantly as if it might burst, down here, where death was not real. Blonde surfers, wet-suited, were tumbling in with the dusk; a chill wind began sweeping the cloud tatters away; Hannah at his side said, "That's one reason for wearing a bra."

"What is?" Moira asked, hearing no response from Bech.

"Look at my nipples. I'm cold."

Bech looked down and saw that, indeed, she wore no bra and that her erectile tissue had responded to the drop in temperature; the rare sensation of a blush caked his face, which still wore its make-up. He lifted his eyes from Hannah's sweater and saw that the entire beach was frilled, with pink and lacy buildings. Sydney, the girls explained, the tour continuing from Bondi to Wool-lahra to Paddington to Surry Hills and Redfern, abounds in ornate ironwork shipped in as ballast from England. The oldest buildings were built by convicts: barracks and forts of a pale stone cut square and set solid, as if by the very hand of rectitude.

In Toronto, the sight Glenda was proudest to show him was die city hall, two huge curved skyscrapers designed by a Finn. But what moved Bech, with their intimations of lost time and present innocence, were die great Victorian piles, within the university and along Bloor Street, that the Canadians, building across the lake from grimy grubbing America, had lovingly erected--brick valentines posted to a distant dowager queen. Glenda talked about the city's community of American draft evaders and the older escapees, the families who were fleeing to Canada because life in the United States had become, what with race and corruption and pressure and trash, impossible. Flicking back her hair as if to twitch it into life, Glenda assumed Bech (continued on page 126)Australia and Canada(continued from page 120) agreed with her and the exiles, and so a side of him did; but another side, an ugly patriotism, began to bristle as she chattered on about his country's sins and her own blameless land's Balkanization by the money that, even in its death throes, American capitalism was flinging north. Hearing this, Bech felt the pride of power, he who lived cowering on drug-ridden West 99th Street, avoiding even the venture of marriage, though his suburban mistress was more than ready, and the last editor who had faith in him was retiring. Bech felt, sitting beside Glenda, like something immense and confusedly vigorous about to devour something dainty. She talked lucidly on; a temperate sun beat down dryly on their windshield. Bech feigned assent and praised the architecture booming along the rectitudinal streets, because he believed that this woman--her body a handbreadth away on the front seat of a Canadian Ford--liked him, liked even the whiff of hairy savagery about him; his own body wore the chill, the numb expectancy all over his skin, that foretold a sexual conquest. He interrupted her. "Power corrupts," he said. "The powerless should be grateful."

She looked over dartingly. "Do I sound smug to you?"

"No," he lied. "But then, you don't seem powerless to me, either. Quite masterful, the way you run your TV crew."

"I enjoy it is the frightening thing. You were lovely, did I say that? So giving. Vanessa can be awfully obvious in her questions."

"I didn't mind. You do it and it flies over all those wires and vanishes. Not like writing, that sits there and gives you that Gorgon stare."

"What are you writing now?"

"As I said to Vanessa. A novel with the working title Think Big."

"I thought you were joking. How big is it?"

"It's bigger than I am."

"I doubt that."

I love you. It would have been easy to say, he was so grateful for her doubt, but his sensation of numbness, meaning love was near, had not yet deepened to total anesthesia. "I love," he told her, turning his face to the window, "your sensible, pretty city."

• • •

"Loved it," Bech said of his tour of Sydney. "Want to drop me at the hotel?"

"No," Hannah said.

"You must come home and let us give you a bite," Moira elaborated. "Aren't you a hungry lion? Peter said he'd drop around and that would make four."

"Peter?"

"He has a degree in forestry," Moira explained.

"Then what's he doing here?"

"He's left the forest for a while," Hannah said.

"Which of you--knows him?" Bech asked, jealously, hesitantly.

But his hesitation was slight compared with theirs; both girls were silent, waiting for the other to speak. At last Hannah said, "We sort of share him."

Moira added, "He was mine, but Hannah stole him and I'm in the process of stealing him back."

"Sounds fraught," Bech said; the clipped Australian lilt was already creeping into his enunciation.

"No, it's not so bad," Moira said into his ear. "The thing that saves the situation is, after he's gone, we have each other. We're amazingly compatible."

"It's true," Hannah somberly pronounced, and Bech felt jealous again, of their friendship, or love if it were love. He had nobody. Flaubert without a mother. Bouvard without a Pécuchet. Even Bea, whose sad suburban life had become a continuous prayer for him to marry her, had fallen silent, the curvature of the earth interceding.

They had driven in the darkness past palm-studded parks and golf courses, past shopping streets, past balconies of iron lace, into a region of dwarf row houses, spruced up and painted pastel shades. Bohemia salvaging another slum. Children were playing in the streets and called to their car, recognizing Hannah. Bech felt safe. Or would have but for Peter, die thought of him, the man from the forest, on whose turf the aged lion was daring intrude.

The section of Toronto where Glenda drove him, proceeding raggedly uphill, contained large homes, British in their fussy neo-Gothic brickwork but New World in their untrammeled scale and large lawns--lawns dark as overinked etchings, shadowed by great trees strayed south from die infinite forests northward. Within one of these miniature castles, a dinner party had been generated. The Anglican priest who had prepared the concordance asked him if he were aware of an unusual recurrence in his work of die adjectives lambent, untrammeled, porous, jubilant and recurrent. Bech said no, he was not aware, and that if he could have thought of odier adjectives, he would have used diem instead--that a useful critical distinction should be made, perhaps, between recurrent imagery and authorial stupidity, that it must have taken him, the priest, an immense amount of labor to compile such a concordance, even of an oeuvre so slim. Ah, not really, was the answer: The texts had been readied by the seminarians in his Systematic Theology seminar, and the collation and printout had been achieved by a scanning computer in 12 minutes flat.

The writer who had cried "Touché!" to Cocteau was ancient and ebullient. His face was as red as a mountain climber's, his hair fine as thistledown. He chastened Bech with his air of the Twenties, when authors were happy in their trade and boisterous in plying it. As die whiskey and wine and cordials accumulated, die old saint's arm (in a shimmering grape-colored shirt) frequendy encircled Glenda's waist and bestowed a paternal hug; later, when she and Bech were inspecting togedier (the glaze of alcohol intervening so he felt he was bending above a glass museum case) a collector's edition of the Canadian's most famous lyric, Pines, Glenda, as if to "rub off" on die American the venerable poet's blessing, caressed him somehow with her entire body, while her two hands held the booklet. Her thigh rustled against his, a breast gently tucked itself into die crook of his arm, his entire skin went blissfully numb, he felt he were toppling forward. "Time to go?" he asked her.

"Soon," she answered.

Peter was not inside die girls' house, though die door was open and his dirty dishes strewed die sink. Bech asked, "Does he live here?"

"He eats here," Hannah said.

"He lives right around the corner," Moira elaborated. "Shall I go fetch him?"

"Not to please me," Bech said; but she was gone, and the rain recommenced. The sound drew the little house snug into itself--the worn Oriental rugs, the rows of books about capital and the Third World, die New Guinean and Afghanistan artifacts on the wall, all the frail bric-a-brac of women living alone, in nests without eggs.

Hannah poured them two Scotches and tried to roll a joint. "Peter usually does this," she said, fumbling, spilling. Bech as a child had watched Westerns in which cowpokes rolled cigarettes with one hand and a debonair lick. But his efforts at imitation were so clumsy Hannah took the paper and the marijuana from him and made of it a plump tongued packet, a little white dribbling piece of pie, which they managed to smoke, Bech's throat burning between sips of liquor. She put on a record. The music went through its grooves, over and over. The rain continued steady, though his consciousness of it was intermittent. At some point in the rumpled stretches of time, she cooked an omelet. She talked about her career, her life, the man she had left to live with Moira, Moira, herself. Her parents were from Budapest; they had survived the war in Portugal, and when it was over, only Australia would let them in. An Australian Jewess, Bech thought, swallowing to ease his burned throat. The concept seemed unappraisably near and far, like that of Australia itself. He was here, but it was there, a world's fatness away from his empty, sour, friendly apartment on West 99th. He embraced her, Hannah, and they seemed to bump (continued on page 176)Australia and Canada(continued from page 126) together like two clappers in the same bell. She was fat, solid. Her body felt in his arms hingeless; she was one of those wooden peasant dolls, containing congruent dolls, for sale in Slavic Europe, where he had once been, and where she had been born. He asked her among their kisses, which came and went in his consciousness like the sound of the rain, and which traveled circularly in grooves like the music, if they should wait up for Peter and Moira.

"No," Hannah said.

If Moira had been there, she would have elaborated, but she wasn't and didn't.

"Shall I come up?" Bech asked. For Glenda lived on the top floor of a Toronto castle a few blocks' walk--a swim, through shadows and leaves--from the house they had left.

"All I can give you," she said, "is coffee."

"Just what I need, fortuitously," he said. "Or should I say lambently? Porously?"

"You poor dear," Glenda said. "Was it so awful for you? Do you have to go to parties like that every night?"

"Most nights," he told her, "I'm scared to go out. I sit home reading Dickens and watching Nixon. And nibbling pickles. And picking quibbles. Recurrently."

"You do need the coffee, don't you?" she said, still dubious. Bech wondered why. Surely she was a sure thing. That shimmering body touch. Her apartment snuggled under the roof, bookcases and lean lamps looking easy to tip among the slanting walls. In a far room he glimpsed a bed, with a feathery Indian bedspread and velour pillows. Glenda, as firmly as she directed cameramen, led him the other way, to a small front room claustrophobically lined with books. She put on a record, explaining it was Gordon Light-foot, Canada's own. A sad voice, gentle to no clear purpose, imitated American country blues. Glenda talked about her career, her life, the man she had been married to.

"What went wrong?" Bech asked. Marriage, and disease, fascinated him.

She wanly shrugged. "He got too dependent. I was being suffocated. He was terribly nice, a truly nice person. But all he would do was sit and read and ask me questions about my feelings. These books, they're mostly his."

"You seem tired," Bech said, picturing the feathery bed.

She surprised him by abruptly volunteering, "I have something wrong with my corpuscles, they don't know what it is, I'm having tests. But I'm out of whack. That's why I said I could offer you only coffee."

Bech was fascinated, flattered, relieved. Sex needed participation, death needed only a witness. A loving witness. She was lovely in her movement as she rose and flicked back her hair and turned the record over. The movement seemed to generate a commotion on the stairs, and then a key in the lock and a brusque masculine shove on the door. She turned a notch paler, staring at Bech; the pink part of her nose stood out like an exclamation point. Too startled to whisper, she told Bech, "It must be Peter."

Downstairs, more footsteps than two entered the little house and from the grumble of a male voice, Bech deduced that Moira had at last returned with Peter. Hannah slept, her body filling the bed with a protective turnipy warmth he remembered from childhood kitchens. The couple below them bumbled, clattered, tittered, put on a record. It was a Chilean flute record Hannah had played for him earlier--music shrill, incessant, searching, psychedelic. This little white continent, abandoned at the foot of Asia, looked to the New World's west coasts for culture, for company. California clothes, Andean flutes. "My pale land," he had heard an Australian poet recite; and from airplanes it was, indeed, a pale land, speckled and colorless, a Wyoming with a seashore; and then tilting beneath the wing the red-tile roofs of Sydney like some westernmost suburb of London. A continent as lonely as the planet. Peter and Moira played the record again and again; otherwise, they were silent downstairs, deep in drugs or love. Bech got up and groped lightly across die surface of Hannah's furniture for Kleenex or lens tissue or anything tearable to stuff into his ears. His fingers came to a paperback book and he thought the paper might be cheap enough to wad. Tearing off two corners of the title page, he recognized by the dawning light the book as one of his own, the Penguin Brother Pig, with that absurdly literal cover, of a grinning pig, as if the novel were Animal Farm or Charlotte's Web. The paper crackling and cutting in his ears, he returned to the bed; beside him, stately Hannah, half-covered and unconscious, felt like a ship, her breathing an engine, her lubricated body steaming toward the morning's harbor of love, her nipples relaxed in passage. The flute music stopped. The world stopped turning. Bech counted to ten, 20, 30 in silence, and his consciousness had begun to disintegrate when a man laughed and the flute, and the pressure in Bech's temples, resumed.

• • •

"This is Peter Syburg," Glenda said. "Henry Bech."

"Je sais, je sais," Peter said, shaking Bech's hand with the painful vehemence of the celebrity-conscious. "I saw your gig on the tube. Great. You talked a blue streak and didn't tip your hand once. What a con job. Cool. I mean it. The medium is you, man. Hey, that's a compliment. Don't look that way."

"I was just going to give him coffee," Glenda interposed.

"How about brandy?" Bech asked. "I need my spirits fortified."

"Hey, don't go into that act," Peter said. "I like you."

Peter was a short man, past 30, with thinning ginger hair and a pumpkin's gat-toothed grin. He might have even been 40; but a determined retention of youth's rubberiness fended off the possibility. He flopped into a canvas sling chair and kept crossing and recrossing his legs, which were so short he seemed to Bech to be twiddling his thumbs. Peter worked on the margins of television, in some sort of problematical film making, and used Glenda's apartment when she was in Montreal. Whether he used Glenda when she was in Toronto was not clear to Bech; less and less was. Less and less the author understood how people lived. Such cloudy episodes as these had become his only windows into other lives. He wanted to go, but his going would be a retreat, Moiucalm willing before Wolfe's stealthy ascent, so he had more brandy instead. He found himself embarked on one of those infrequent experiments in which he tested, dispassionately as a scientist bending metal, his own capacity. He felt himself inflating, as before television exposure, while the brandy flowed on and Peter asked him all the questions not even Vanessa had been pushy enough to pose ("What's happened to you and Capote?" "What's the timer makes you Yanks burn out so fast?" "Ever thought of trying television scripts?") and expatiating on the wonders of the post-Gutenberg world in which he, Peter, with his thumb like legs and berry-bright eyes, moved as a successful creature, while he, Bech, was picturesquely extinct. Glenda flicked her hair and studied her hands and insulted her corpuscles with cigarettes. Bech was happy. One more brandy, he calculated, would render him utterly immobile, and Peter would be displaced. His happiness was not even punctured when the two others began to talk to each other in French, about calling a taxi to take him away.

"Taxi, non," Bech exclaimed, struggling to rise. "Marcher, oui. Je pars, maintenant. Vous le regretterez, quand je suis disparu. Au revoir, cher Pierre."

"You can't walk it, man. It's miles."

"Try me, you postprint punk," Bech said, putting up his hairy fists.

Glenda escorted him to the stairs, and down them, one by one; at the foot, she embraced him, clinging to him as if to be rendered fertile by osmosis. "I thought he was in Winnipeg," she said. "I want to have your baby."

"Easy does it," Bech wanted to say. The best he could do was, "Facile le fait."

Glenda asked, "Will you ever come back to Toronto?"

"Jamais," Bech said, "jamais, jamais," and the magical word, so true of every moment, of every stab at love, of every step on ground you will not walk again, rang in his mind all the way back to the hotel. The walk was generally downhill. The curved lights of city hall guided him. There was a forested ravine off to his left, and a muffled river. And stars. And block after block of substantial, untroubled emptiness. He expected to be mugged, or at least approached. In his anesthetized state, he would have welcomed violence. But in those miles he met only blinking stop lights and impassive architecture. And they call this a city, Bech thought scornfully. In New York, I would have been killed six times over and my carcass stripped of its hubcaps.

The cries of children playing woke him. The sound of the flute had ceased. Last night's pleasure had become straw in his mouth; the woman beside him seemed a larger sort of dreg. Her eyelids fluttered, as if in response to the motions of his mind. It seemed only polite to reach for her. The children beneath the window cheered.

Next morning, in Toronto, Bech shuffled, footsore, to the Royal Ontario Museum and admired the Chinese urns and the totem poles and sent a postcard of a carved walrus tusk to Bea and her children.

Downstairs, in Sydney, Moira was up, fiddling with last night's dishes and whistling to herself. Bech recognized the tune. "Where's Peter?" he asked.

"He's gone," she said. "He doesn't believe you exist. We waited up hours for you last night and you never came home."

"We were home," Hannah said.

"Oh, it dawned on us finally. Peter was so moody I told him to leave. I think he still loves you and has been leading this poor lass astray."

"What do you like for breakfast?" Hannah asked Bech, as wearily as if she and not he had been awake all night. Himself, he felt oddly (it, for being 50 and on the underside of the world. "Tell me about Afghanistan--should I go there?" he said to Moira, and he settled beside her on the carpeted divan while Hannah, in her lumpy blue robe, shuffled in the kitchen, making his breakfast. "Grapefruit if you have it," he shouted to her, interrupting Moira's word tour of Kabul. "Otherwise, orange juice." My God, he thought to himself, she has become my wife. Already I'm flirting with another woman.

Bech boarded the plane (from Australia, from Canada) so lightheaded with lack of sleep it alarmed him hardly at all when the machine rose into the air. His stomach hurt as if lined with grit, his face looked gray in the lavatory mirror. His adventures seemed perilous, viewed backward. Mysterious diseases, strange men laughing in the night, loose women. He considered the nation he was returning to: its riots and scandals, its daily derelictions and gnashing metal. He thought of Bea, his plump suburban softy, her belly striated with fine silver lines, and vowed to marry her: to be safe.