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 at hand, 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 dreary life in Ossining had become a continuous unstated plea for him to marry her, had ceased to send signals, 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. Childrenwere playing in the streets and called to their car, recognizing Hannah. Bech felt safe. Or would have but for Peter, the thought of him, the man from the forest, on whose turf the aged lion was daring to 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 the infinite forests of the north. 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 the adjectives
lambent, untrammeled, porous, jubilant
, and
recurrent
. Bech said no, he was not aware, and that if he could have thought of other adjectives, he would have used them 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 seminar in post-Christian kerygmatics, and the collation and printout had been achieved by a scanning computer in twelve 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 the whiskey and wine and cordials accumulated, the old saint’s arm (in a shimmering grape-colored shirt) frequently encircled Glenda’s
“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 at hand, 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 dreary life in Ossining had become a continuous unstated plea for him to marry her, had ceased to send signals, 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. Childrenwere playing in the streets and called to their car, recognizing Hannah. Bech felt safe. Or would have but for Peter, the thought of him, the man from the forest, on whose turf the aged lion was daring to 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 the infinite forests of the north. 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 the adjectives
lambent, untrammeled, porous, jubilant
, and
recurrent
. Bech said no, he was not aware, and that if he could have thought of other adjectives, he would have used them 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 seminar in post-Christian kerygmatics, and the collation and printout had been achieved by a scanning computer in twelve 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 the whiskey and wine and cordials accumulated, the old saint’s arm (in a shimmering grape-colored shirt) frequently encircled Glenda’s
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