Bech at Bay by John Updike

the caterer downstairs says the hot hors d’oeuvres are getting cold. Does anyone except me want a drink? If the answer is aye, I propose we adjourn. Thank you all for coming. It was an exceptional turnout.” In the absence of a gavel, he rapped his knuckles on the wood, and the hollow, bow-sided desk resounded sonorously, like an African drum.
    As the little elderly mob, growling and quarrelling and laughing, pressed toward the stairs, Edna at his side put down her pencil. “That was a bit of a scrape,” she muttered, pronouncing it “scripe.”
    “Yeah, what’s going on? What’s eating Izzy? He twisted my arm to take this job, and now he gives off nothing but negative vibes.”
    “Deep waters, Henry,” she said. He looked at her; she had never before employed a tone this intimate. His
éminence grise.
His First Lady. She was prim and efficient butwith a lurking antipodean strangeness, an occasional hoot of laughter out of the outback. Her profile was a cameo, in eighteenth-century English style—precise pursed mouth, high-bridged Romneyesque nose. The white wings of her short page boy swung forward as she fussed, motherly, with the recording device and her yellow pad of jagged notes. While they all played at being the Forty, she
worked.
She was sixtyish, but, then, he was a year short of seventy. Spinsters preserve themselves, he figured. The buds of passion remain coiled tight. He had once been to Australia, and sampled the handsome native women there, but had never talked to Edna about it—the pale parched land, the alkaline sky, the lacy iron balconies in Sydney, the opera house like a ship under full sail. An America without Calvinism or Judaism, just sunny brown space and the rough male humor of a penal colony. He found himself, in the wake of the battle they had breasted together, quite close to Edna. What was it Izzy had told him?
She’s dying for you.
His dying for her wouldn’t be the worst fate. She had the requisite severity, a silver purity.
    His relationship with Martina was deteriorating. Behind that Communist innocence lurked a Nineties American woman—canny, ambitious, condition-conscious, self-preserving. Bech could hardly blame her for seeing men younger than himself (she would need the exercise, the multiple orgasms he could no longer provide), but the suspicion that she and Izzy had something going nagged. That polymathic slob, that kept man, that pseudo-Talmudic maze-maker. Bech had an opportunity to spy on the situation when Pamela invited him and, separately, Martina, to a Christmas party in her penthouse. The artistic crowd thathad shrouded the Festschrift gala in smoke and stale rivalries was in attendance only spottily—a plump Princeton savant who believed that Genesis was written by a woman; Vernon Klegg celebrating his latest dryly written, alcoholsoaked
succès d’estime
; and a skinny, bespectacled poet whose poems all dealt, in cindery glints, with Ohio industrial depression. “I had pictured your husband as looking different,” Bech confided to the poet’s iron-haired but still-lissome wife.
    “Oh? How?” she responded, too brightly. There was something giddy, on the edge of naughty, about this woman that Bech wearily ascribed to his ancient roguish reputation, which had preceded him.
    “More blue-collar,” he said. “He’s always doing sestinas and pantoums about rusty I-beams and how he scrubbed out vats of acid in a rubber suit.”
    “That was his brother who did the vats. Jim worked in the mills only summers; he was the family dreamer. They all sacrificed so he could go to college.”
    “And is he grateful?”
    “Very,” she said. “But they hate his poems. They want him to write about higher things, not about
them
, and the mills.”
    Across the round table, delicate, pampered Jim in his rimless glasses nodded and cringed beneath the chattery, fluttery attentions of his hostess. He had won prizes, and Pamela liked that. But she noticed Bech noticing, and