Bech by John Updike

if we could stand a trip together. As I size her up, she’s much too practical-minded to be a head. She just wants to make the Sixties scene, and maybe to bug you.”
    The boy was so hopeful, so reasonable, that Bech could not help treating him as a student, with all of a student’s purchased prerogatives, a student’s ruthless power to intrude and demand. Young American minds. The space race with Russia. Bech heard himself yield. “O.K. But you’re not taking her over into that sorcerer’s-apprentice cubbyhole of yours.”
    Wendell puzzled; he seemed in the half light a blameless furry creature delicately nosing his way through the inscrutable maze of the older man’s prejudices. At last he said, “I think I see your worry. You’re wrong. There is absolutely no chance of sex. All these things of course are sexual depressants. It’s a medical fact.”
    Bech laughed again. “Don’t you dare sexually depress Norma. It’s all she and I have any more.” But in making this combination of joke and confession, he had waved the maze away and admitted the boy more deeply into his life than he had intended—all because, Bech suspected, at bottom he wasafraid of being out-of-date. They agreed that Wendell would bring back some marijuana and they would give him supper. “You’ll have to take pot luck,” Bech told him.
    Norma was not pleased by his arrangements. “How ridiculous of you,” she said, “not to trust me alone with that child. You’re so immature and proprietorial. You don’t own me. I’m a free agent, by your preference.”
    “I wanted to save you embarrassment,” he told her. “I’ve read the kid’s stories; you don’t know what goes on in his mind.”
    “No, after keeping you company for three years I’ve forgotten what goes on in any normal man’s mind.”
    “Then you admit he
is
a normal man.
Not
a child. O.K. You stay out of that bastard’s atelier, or whatever he thinks it is. A pad.”
    “My, aren’t
you
the fierce young lover? I wonder how I survived thirty-odd years out from under your wing.”
    “You’re so self-destructive, I wonder too. And by the way it’s not been three years we’ve been keeping company, it’s two and a half.”
    “You’ve been counting the minutes. Is my time about up?”
    “Norma,
why
do you want to cop out with all these drugs? It’s so insulting to the world, to me.”
    “I want to have an
experience
. I’ve never had a
baby
, the only wedding ring I’ve ever worn is the one you loan me when we go to St. Croix in the winter, I’ve never been to Pakistan, I’m
never
going to get to Antarctica.”
    “I’ll buy you a freezer.”
    “That
is
your solution, isn’t it?—buy another box. You go from box to box, each one snugger than the last. Well I forone
don’t
think your marvelous life-style, your heady mixture of art for art’s sake and Depression funk, entirely covers the case. My life is closing in and I hate it and I thought this way I could open it up a little. Just a
little
. Just a teeny
crack
, a splinter of sunshine.”
    “He’s coming back, he’s coming back. Your fix is on the way.”
    “How can I possibly get high with you and Bea sitting there watching with long faces? It’s too grotesque. It’s too limiting. My kid sister. My kindly protector. I might as well call my mother—she can fly up from West Orange with the smelling salts.”
    Bech was grateful to her, for letting her anger, her anguish, recede from the high point reached with the wail that she had never had a baby. He promised, “We’ll take it with you.”
    “Who will? You and Bea?” Norma laughed scornfully. “You two nannies. You’re the two most careful people I’ve ever met.”
    “We’d
love
to smoke pot. Wouldn’t we, Bea? Come on, take a holiday. Break yourself of Nembutal.”
    Beatrice, who had been cooking lamb chops and setting the table for four while Bech and her sister were obstructively gesturing in the passageway between the kitchen and