Bech Is Back Read Online Free

to see how it went.
    It went like a breeze. Arrows, to be trimmed away by the binder, pointed to the area he must inscribe. Norma, as if still auditioning for the role of helpmate, pulled the sheets with a sweet deftness from underneath his wrists. Then they undressed—since he had last seen her naked, her body had softened, touchingly, and his body, too, had a certain new slump to it—and went out to swim in the lukewarm, late-afternoon sea. From its gentle surface the lowering sun struck coins of corporate happiness; Bech blessed Superoil as he floated, hairy belly up. The title of his next novel, after
Think Big
was in the bag, came to him:
Easy Money
. Or had Daniel Fuchs used it during the Depression? When he and Norma left their vast bath, the soft coral sand took deep prints from Bech’s bare feet, as from those of a giant.
    Wake, eat, swim, sun, sign, eat, sun, sign, drink, eat, dance, sleep. Thus their days passed. Their skins darkened. Bech became as swarthy as his Brazilian jacket photos. The stack of boxes of signed sheets slowly grew on the other side of the cement dome. They had to maintain an average of two thousand signatures a day. As Norma’s tolerance for sun increased, she begrudged the time indoors, and seemed to Bech to be accelerating her pulling, so that more than once the concluding “h” got botched. “You’re slowing down,” she told him in self-defense, the third time this happened in one session.
    “I’m just trying to give the poor bastards their buck-fifty’sworth,” he said. “Maybe you should pay attention to
me
, instead of trying to pull and read at the same time.” She had taken to reading a novel at their signing table—a novel by, as it happened, a young writer who had, in the words of one critic, “made all previous American-Jewish writing look like so much tasteless matzo dough.”
    “I don’t need to pay attention,” she said. “I can hear it now; there’s a rhythm. Mm-diddle-um
-um
, boomity-boom. You lift your pen in the middle of ‘Henry’ and then hurry the ‘Bech.’ You love your first name and hate your last—why is that?”
    “The ‘B’ is becoming harder and harder,” he admitted. “Also, the ‘e’ and the ‘c’ are converging. Miss O’Dwyer at P.S. 87 tried to teach me the Palmer penmanship method once. She said you should write with your whole arm, not just your fingers.”
    “You’re too old to change now; just keep doing it your way.”
    “I’ve decided she was right. These are ugly signatures.
Ugly
.”
    “For God’s sake, Henry, don’t try to make them works of art; all Superbooks wants is for you to keep touching pen to paper.”
    “Superbooks wants super signatures,” he said. “At least they want signatures that show an author at peace with himself. Look at my big ‘H’s. They’ve turned into backward ‘N’s. And then the little ‘h’ at the end keeps tailing down. That’s a sign of discouragement. Napoleon, you know, after Waterloo, every treaty he signed, his signature dragged down right off the page. The parchment.”
    “Well, you’re not Napoleon, you’re just an unemployed self-employed who’s keeping me out of the sun.”
    “You’ll get skin cancer. Relax. Eleven hundred more and we’ll go have a piña colada.”
    “You’re fussing over them, I can’t stand it! You just
romped
through those early boxes.”
    “I was younger then. I didn’t understand my signature so well. For being so short, it has a lot of ups and downs. Suppose I was Robert Penn Warren. Suppose I was Solzhenitsyn.”
    “Suppose you were H. D., I’d still be sitting here in this damn dark igloo. You know, it’s getting to my shoulders. The pauses between are the worst—the tension.”
    “Go out in the sun. Read your pimply genius. I’ll be my own puller.”
    “Now you’re trying to hurt my feelings.”
    “I’ll be fine. I know my own rhythm.”
    “The Henry Bech backward crawl. I’ll see this through if it kills us