By daylight the Mojave Desert yielded, an oasis at a time, to the California paradise. Pastel houses and palm trees multiplied to make a horizontal city, oddly colorless under a sky as blue and unflecked as a movie-set backdrop. The train crept to a final bump in mission-style Union Station, and there fell upon all its length the flurry and sudden hustle of a little world coming apart, with some porters to tip and others to beckon, with farewells to be said or avoided, with baggage to be gathered and safeguarded. Alice, at Bech’s side all morning in the club car, sleeping with her head on his shoulder, had squeezed his hand and stood up and said, “I’ll be back.” The sun beating through the window put him in a doze. The train bumped. Where was he? Where was she? He went onto the platform, into the unreally benign air. She had put the distance of two or three cars between them when he spotted her, leading a porter with a trolley, down beside the locomotive, where the engineer, his task completed, traded guffaws with a uniformed station official. She merged with a man in a gauche brown outfit—slacks one shade, jacket another—and melted into the crowd, Tad’s claim reclaimed. Bech had the impression that Oglethorpe was tall and bald. What happened next? Over the years he forgot why, whenever he saw a woman with a touch of rash or roughness on her cheeks, intended by nature to be silken, he was saddened and stirred.

He had imagined he would somehow see her again. The universe, having witnessed so sublime a coupling, would arrange it. And so it had, in its unsatisfactory fashion. The last fan in line went away with his authentic Henry Bech signature, that tiny piece of him chipped from his dwindling life span, and there was no one left in the auditorium lobby but the bookstore staff, packing all his unsold books into boxes, and the tired but cheery local matron, perhaps herself a secret sexual radical, who had chaired the committee that had arranged to get him here. Alice had vanished, and the librarian of Indianapolis had also gone home.

The sight of his books, the seven thin, passé titles, being briskly stashed in boxes disgusted Bech. No matter how many he sold and signed, there were always bushels left, representing tons of wasted paper. These women who showed up at his readings did it, it seemed clear, to mock his books—clever, twisted, false books, empty of almost everything that mattered, these women he had slept with were saying. We, we are your masterpieces.

HOW WAS IT, REALLY?