Bech at Bay by John Updike Page B

me,” said Bech gallantly.
    “She’s been my best buddy at Aesop,” the much-honored scrivener went on. “The rest of those young slobs over there now are computerniks who think the written word is obsolete junk. They don’t care about grammar, they don’t care about margins. This young lady is a real throwback, to the age of us dinosaurs.”
    “I have always loved books,” Martina said, with a little wriggle that loosened the wordmaster’s bearlike grip. “I like the way,” she said, “the reader can set his or her own pace, instead of some director on speed or Prozac, who sets it for you.” Did Bech imagine it, or did her lips threaten a stammer, as her almost-native English stiffened on her tongue? Bech was annoyed to think that she was impressed, or intimidated, by Izzy.
    The novelist’s massive eyebrows—thickets, wherein arcs as red as burning filaments struggled to stay alight amid hairs from which all color and curl had been extracted—lifted in appreciation of this bulletin from the pharmaceutical generation. “There’s never been enough organized thought,” he announced, “on how a reader’s input helps create the book. We have no equivalent to the art installation, where the viewer is also the orderer.”
    “Well, there was
Hopscotch
,” Bech said. “And Barthes somewhere writes about how he always skips around in Proust.”
    “A computer system,” Izzy was wool-gathering on, his eyes popping and bubbles of saliva exploding between his lips, “say,
À la Recherche
on CD-ROM, could generate a new path, an infinite series of new paths, through it, making a new novel every time—there could be one in which Jupien is the hero, or in which Albertine becomes Odette’s lover!”
    “A reader doesn’t want decision-making power,” Martina said, a bit testily, in the face of Thornbush’s eminence. Perhaps she was showing Bech she was less intimidated than he, onlooking, had thought. “You read because no decisions are asked of you, the author has made them all. That is the luxury.”
    “But isn’t this,” Izzy said, displaying that he was not too old to have developed a Derridean streak, “a mode of tyranny? Isn’t a traditional author the worst sort of maniacal Yahweh, telling us how everything must be?”
    Bech glanced upward, wondering if Yahweh, who used to consider it a dreadful uncleanness to have His name in a mortal mouth, would strike Thornbush dead. Or had Izzy through marriage and promiscuously roving the world of ideas become so little a Jew as to enjoy a goyish immunity? A cool hard pressure on his hand recalled Bech to earth; Martina, formal and mannish, was shaking his hand goodbye. “I’ll leave you two to settle these great matters,” she said. “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Bech. Thanks again for your wonderful contribution.”
    “Goodbye so soon? Perhaps,” he ventured, “when and if I get my own Festschrift …”
    Her serious deepset eyes met his; no smile crimped her unpainted lips. “Or sooner,” she said sternly.
    Sooner? Bech scented sex, that hint of eternal life. Her face, unadorned, held a naked promise that her figure did not deny. Izzy rotated his great neckless head to watch her gray-clad derrière, firm but a touch more ample than was locally fashionable, disappear into a smoky wall of animated cloth. “Cute,” he muttered. “Bright. Knock the Commies all you want, they put some backbone into their brats you don’t see in American kids that age—gone limp in front of the damn television.”
    “She came here when she was three, she told me,” Bech said.
    “You learn more by three than all the rest of your life,” Thornbush rebutted. “Read Piaget. Read Erikson. Read anybody, for Chrissake—what the hell do you do all day in that empty loft downtown? Nobody can figure it out.”
    But he had an agenda. Now it was Bech’s turn to feel the force of Izzy’s grip, on his upper arm, through a patched tweed sleeve. “Henry, listen. How’d