Bech at Bay by John Updike

statuary was dangerously scattered about on veneered French antiques. Moonlighting young actresses and actors in all-black unisex outfits passed, with the eerie schooled grace and white-faced expressionlessness of mimes, slippery hors d’oeuvres besprinkled with scallion snips. High on the two-story wall of the duplex, above a circular spiralling glass stairway, a huge Tibetan banner, a
thang-ka
, suspendedabove the heads of the living a tree, a
tshog shing
, of rigid, chalk-colored, but basically approachable deities. In the vast living room that yet was too small for this gabbling assemblage, cigarette smoke, that murderous ghost of the past, was briefly thick again. Bech saw around him dozens of half-forgotten faces, faces of editors and agents and publicists and publishers who had moved on (fired and rehired, sold out to a German conglomerate, compelled to scribble news briefs for a Stamford cable station) yet remained eerily visible within the gabby industrial backwater of New York publishing. And there were painters—hawk-nosed, necktieless, hairy, gay—because Izzy was among his other accomplishments a reviewer for
ARTnews
and an expert on Persian miniatures, Quaker furniture, misericords, and so on. And there were composers—smooth, barrel-chested party animals in double-breasted suits, their social skills brought to a high polish by lives of fine-tuning students and buttering up patrons—because Izzy was himself an accomplished amateur violinist who, had not his big brain dragged him away from his finger exercises, might have had a concert career and who, it was said, contributed not just the words but the melody line of several crowd-pleasing songs in the musical comedy,
Occam!
, based upon his first novel, as well as several of the numbers in the bawdy review,
Nefertiti Below the Neck
, loosely derived from his second. And there were history professors Izzy had befriended in the course of his researches, including the famously tall one and the famously short one, who insisted on huddling
tête-à-tête
, like the letter “f” ligatured to the letter “i,” and, finally, there were writers—in a single glance Bech spotted Lucy Ebright with her shining owl eyes and swanlike neck, and Seth Zimmerman with his self-infatuated giggle, and Vernon Klegg in his alcoholicdaze. But it was Pamela Thornbush, Lady Festschrift herself, who came up to Bech, her rosy cheeks echoed by the freckled pink breasts more than half exposed by the velvet plunge of her plum-colored Prada. She had another woman in tow, a firm-bodied young woman dressed in mousy gray, with the dull skin and militant, faintly angry bearing that Bech associated with the beauties of Eastern Europe, those formerly Communist hussies whose attractions were at the service of the Stasi, the ÁVÓ, the KGB. “Dear Henry,” Pamela said, though they had not met many times previously, “Izzy was just touched to tears by what you wrote about him; I never have seen him so moved, honestly. And this is our beautiful Martina, who pulled the whole project together. She still blushes when she talks about your fresh letter.”
    Bech grasped the slim cool hand proffered, which mustered a manly squeeze while her eyes levelled into his own. She was his height, perhaps an inch less. Her eyes were a grave shade of hazel. “At my age,” he told her, “it’s either fresh or frozen.”
    How strangely, unironically
there
this Martina was, though not quite beautiful; she had no sheen of glamour. She was all business. “I hope you noticed,” she said, “that I defended your paragraph from the copyeditors. As you predicted, they wanted to break the flow.” She spoke with the easy quickness of a thoroughly naturalized American, yet the words had an edge of definiteness, as if she did not quite trust them to convey her full meaning—a remnant, Bech guessed, of her immigrant parents’ accents.
    “Copyeditors do hate flow,” he said. “I haven’t looked into the book