Bech Is Back by John Updike

even San Francisco. She had been in San Francisco once, on her way to Afghanistan. Hannah had not been anywhere since leaving Europe at the age of three. She was Jewish, said her eyes, and her glossy, tapered fingers. She drove down to Bondi Beach, and the three removed their six shoes to walk on the soaked sand. The tops of Bech’s fifty-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 young women ran ahead and challenged him to a broadjump 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. Blond 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; indeed, the woman wore no bra and her erectile tissue had responded to the drop in temperature. Therare sensation of a blush caked his face, which still wore its television makeup. He lifted his eyes from Hannah’s T-shirt and saw that, like fancy underpants, the entire beach was frilled, with pink and lacy buildings. Sydney, the girls explained, as the tour continued from Bondi to Woollahra 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 the City Hall, two huge curved skyscrapers designed by a Finn. But what moved Bech, with their intimations of lost time and present innocence, were the 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, unamused queen. Glenda talked about the city’s community of American draft evaders and the older escapees, the families who were fleeing to Canada post-Vietnam, because life in the United States had become, what with race and corruption and pressure and trash, impossible.
    Flicking back her pale hair as if to twitch it into life, Glenda assumed Bech agreed with her and the exiles, and so a side of him lackadaisically did; but another side, his ugly patriotism, bristled 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 vicarious power—he who lived cowering on drug-ridden West 99th Street, avoiding both the venture of marriage, though his suburban mistress was more than ready, and the venture of print, though his editor, dear old Ned Clavell, from his deathbed in the HarknessPavilion had begged him to come up at least with a memoir. While Glenda talked, Bech felt like something immense and confusedly vigorous about to devour something dainty. He feigned assent and praised the new architecture booming along the rectitudinal streets, because he believed that this woman—her body a hand’s-breadth 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