Bech at Bay
Excerpt
Bech Noir
BECH HAD A NEW SIDEKICK. Her monicker was Robin.
Rachel "Robin" Teagarten. Twenty-six, post-Jewish, frizzy
big hair, figure on the short and solid side. She interfaced
for him with an IBM PS/1 his publisher had talked him
into buying. She set up the defaults, rearranged the icons,
programmed the style formats, accessed the ANSI character
sets--Bech was a stickler for foreign accents. When
he answered a letter, she typed it for him from dictation.
When he took a creative leap, she deciphered his
handwriting and turned it into digitized code. Neither
happened very often. Bech was of the Ernest Hemingway
save-your-juices school. To fill the time, he and Robin slept
together. He was seventy-four, but they worked with that.
Seventy-four plus twenty-six was one hundred; divided by
two, that was fifty, the prime of life. The energy of youth
plus the wisdom of age. A team. A duo.
They were in his snug aerie on Crosby Street. He was
reading the Times at breakfast: caffeineless Folgers,
calcium-reinforced D'Agostino orang ... read full excerpt from Bech at Bay ebook
