Franny and Zooey Read online

  Zooey put out a hand and stroked Bloomberg's arched back, once, twice, then quit, and got up from the coffee table and meandered across the room to the piano. It stood, in profile, wide open, in all its black, Steinway enormity, opposite the couch, its bench almost directly across from Franny. Zooey sat down on the bench, tentatively, then looked with very apparent interest at the sheet music on the stand.

  "He's so full of fleas it isn't even funny," Franny said. She grappled briefly with Bloomberg, trying to coerce him into a docile lap-cat's repose. "I found fourteen fleas on him last night. Just on one side." She gave Bloomberg's hips a mighty, downward push, then looked over at Zooey. "How was the script, anyway?" she asked. "Did it come last night finally, or what?"

  Zooey didn't answer her. "My God," he said, still looking at the sheet music on the stand. "Who took this out?" The sheet music was entitled "You Needn't Be So Mean, Baby." It was about forty years old. A sepia reproduction of Mr. and Mrs. Glass was featured on the cover. Mr. Glass was wearing a top hat and tails, and so was Mrs. Glass. They were smiling rather brilliantly at the camera, both of them leaning forward on their evening canes, feet wide apart.

  "What is it?" Franny asked. "I can't see."

  "Bessie and Les. 'You Needn't Be So Mean, Baby.'"

  "Oh." Franny giggled. "Les was Reminiscing last night. For my benefit. He thinks I have a stomachache. He took out every single sheet of music in the whole bench."

  "I'd be interested to know just how in hell we ever landed in this goddam jungle, all the way from 'You Needn't Be So Mean, Baby.' You figure it out."

  "I can't. I've tried," Franny said. "How was the script? Did it come? You said Whosis--Mr. LeSage or whatever his name is--was going to drop it off with the doorman before he--"

  "It came, it came," Zooey said. "I don't care to discuss it." He put his cigar in his mouth, and, with his right hand, up in the treble keys, he began to play, in octaves, the melody of a song called "The Kinkajou," which, somewhat notably, had shifted into and ostensibly out of popularity before he was born. "Not only it came," he said, "but Dick Hess called up here about one o'clock last night--just after our little fracas--and asked me to meet him for a drink, the bastard. At the San Remo, yet. He's discovering the Village. God almighty!"

  "Don't bang the piano keys," Franny said, watching him. "I'll be your director if you're going to sit there. That's my first direction. Don't bang the piano keys."

  "First of all, he knows I don't drink. Second, he knows I was born in New York and that if there's one thing I can't stand it's atmosphere. Third, he knows I live about seventy goddam

  blocks from the Village. And fourth, I told him three times I was in my pajamas and slippers."

  "Don't bang the keys," Franny directed, petting Bloomberg.

  "But no, it couldn't wait. He had to see me right away. Very important. No kidding, now. Be a good guy for once in your life and hop in a cab and c'mon down."

  "Did you? Don't bang the lid down, either. That's my second--"

  "Yes, certainly I didl I have no goddam will power!" Zooey said. He closed the keyboard lid, impatiently but without banging it. "The trouble with me is, I don't trust any out-of-towners in New York. I don't care how the hell long they've been here. I'm always afraid they're going to get run over, or beaten up, while they're busy discovering some little Armenian restaurant on Second Avenue. Or some damn thing." Morosely, he blew a stream of cigar smoke over the top of "You Needn't Be So Mean, Baby."

  "So, anyway, I went down there," he said. "And there was old Dick. So down, so blue, so full of important news that couldn't wait till this afternoon. Sitting at a table in blue jeans and a gruesome sports jacket. The Des Moines expatriate in New York. I could've killed him, I swear to God. What a night. I sat there for two solid hours while he told me what a superior son of a bitch I am, and what a family of psychotics and psychopathic prodigies I come from. Then, when he's all through analyzing me--and Buddy, and Seymour, both oPS whom he's never met--and when he's reached some sort of impasse in his mind whether he's going to be a sort of two-fisted Colette or a sort of short Thomas Wolfe for the rest of the evening, suddenly he pulls out this gorgeous monogrammed attache case from under the table and shoves a new, hour-long script under my arm." He made a pass at the air with one hand, as if to dismiss the subject. But he got up from the piano bench too restively for it to have been a real gesture of dismissal. His cigar was in his mouth, his hands were in his hip pockets. "For years I've been listening to Buddy sound off on the subject of actors," he said. "My God, what an earful I could give him on the subject of Writers I've Known." He stood abstracted for a moment, then became aimlessly mobile. He stopped at the 1920 Victrola, looked at it blankly, and barked, twice, for his own amusement, into its megaphone speaker. Franny, watching him, giggled, but he frowned, and moved on. At the tropical-fish tank, which was mounted on top of the 1927 Freshman radio, he abruptly stooped, taking his cigar out of his mouth. He peered into the tank with unmistakable interest. "All my black mollies are dying off," he said. He reached, automatically, for the container of fish food beside the tank.

  "Bessie fed them this morning," Franny cautioned him. She was still stroking Bloomberg, still succoring him, forcibly, into the subtle and difficult world outside warm afghans.

  "They look starved," Zooey said, but withdrew his hand from the fish food. "This guy has a very drawn look." He tapped the glass with his fingernail. "What you need is some chicken soup, buddy."

  "Zooey," Franny said, to get his attention. "How does it stand now? You have two new scripts. What's the one LeSage dropped by in the cab?"

  Zooey went on peering in at the fish for a moment. Then, on a sudden but apparently pressing impulse, he stretched out supine on the carpet. "In the one LeSage sent over," he said, crossing his feet, "I'm supposed to be Rick Chalmers in, I swear to God, a 1928 drawing-room comedy straight out of French's catalogue. The only difference is that it's brought gloriously up to date with a lot of jargon about complexes and repressions and sublimations that the writer brought home from his analyst's."

  Franny looked at what she could see of him. Only his soles and heels were visible from where she sat. "Well, what about Dick's thing?" she asked. "Have you read it yet?"

  "In Dick's thing, I can be Bernie, a sensitive young subway guard, in the most courageous goddam offbeat television opus you ever read."

  "You mean it? Is it really good?"

  "I didn't say good, I said courageous. Let's keep on our toes here, buddy. The morning after it's produced, everybody in the building'll go around slamming each other on the back in an orgy of mutual appreciation. LeSage. Hess. Pomeroy. The sponsors. The whole courageous bunch. It'll all start this afternoon. If it hasn't already. Hess'll go into LeSage's office and say to him, 'Mr. LeSage, sir, I've got a new script about a sensitive young subway guard that just stinks of courage and integrity. And I know, sir, that next to scripts that are Tender and Poignant, you love scripts that have Courage and Integrity. This one, sir, as I say, stinks of both. It's full of melting-pot types. It's sentimental. It's violent in the right places. And just when the sensitive subway guard's problems are getting the best of him, destroying his faith in Mankind and the Little People, his nine-year-old niece conies home from school and gives him some nice, pat chauvinistic philosophy handed down to us through posterity and P.S. 564 all the way from Andrew Jackson's backwoods wife. It can't miss, sir! It's down-to-earth, it's simple, it's untrue, and it's familiar enough and trivial enough to be understood and loved by our greedy, nervous, illiterate sponsors.'" Zooey abruptly raised himself up to a sitting position. "I just took a bath, and I'm sweating like a pig," he commented. He got to his feet, and, doing so, glanced briefly, and as if against his better judgment, at Franny. He started to look away but, instead, looked at her more closely. She had her head down, and her eyes on Bloomberg, in her lap, whom she had continued to stroke. But there was a change. "Ah," Zooey said, and came closer to the couch, apparently looking for t
rouble. "Madam's lips are moving. The Prayer is rising." Franny didn't look up. "What the hell are you doing?" he asked. "Taking refuge from my un-Christian attitude to the popular arts?"

  Franny looked up then, and shook her head, blinking. She smiled at him. Her lips had, in fact, been moving, and were moving now.

  "Just don't smile at me, please," Zooey said, evenly, and walked out of the vicinity. "Seymour was always doing that to me. This goddam house is lousy with smilers." At one of the bookcases, he gave a misaligned book an orderly little push with his thumb, then passed on. He went over to the middle window in the room, which was separated by a window seat from the cherrywood table where Mrs. Glass paid bills and wrote letters. He stood looking out of it, his back to Franny, his hands in his hip pockets again, his cigar in his mouth. "Did you know I may go to France this summer to make a picture?" he asked, irritably. "Did I tell you?"

  Franny looked over at his back with interest. "No, you didn't!" she said. "Are you serious? What picture?"

  Zooey, looking out over the macadamized school roof across the street, said, "Oh, it's a long story. Some French joker's over here, and he heard the album I did with Philippe. I had lunch with him one day a couple of weeks ago. A real schnorrer, but sort of likable, and apparently he's hot over there right now." He put one foot up on the window seat. "Nothing's final--nothing's ever final with these guys--but I think I've got him half snowed into the idea of making a picture out of that Lenormand novel. The one I sent you."

  "Yes! Oh, that's exciting, Zooey. If you go, when do you think you'd go?"

  "It is not exciting. That's exactly the point. I'd enjoy doing it, yes. God, yes. But I'd hate like hell to leave New York. If you must know, I hate any kind of so-called creative type who gets on any kind of ship. I don't give a goddam what his reasons are. I was born here. I went to school here. I've been run over here--twice, and on the same damn street. I have no business acting in Europe, for God's sake."

  Franny gazed thoughtfully at his white broadcloth back. Her lips, however, were still silently forming words. "Why do you go, then?" she asked. "If you feel that way."

  "Why do I go?" Zooey said, without looking around. "I go mostly because I'm tired as hell of getting up furious in the morning and going to bed furious at night. I go because I sit in judgment on every poor, ulcerous bastard I know. Which in itself doesn't bother me too much. At least, I judge straight from the colon when I judge, and I know that I'll pay like hell for any judgment I mete out, sooner or later, one way or another. That doesn't bother me so much. But there's something--Jesus God--there's something I do to people's morale downtown that I can't stand to watch much longer. I can tell you exactly what I do. I make everybody feel that he doesn't really want to do any good work but that he just wants to get work done that will be thought good by everyone he knows--the critics, the sponsors, the public, even his children's schoolteacher. That's what I do. That's the worst I do." He frowned in the direction of the school roof; then, with his fingertips, pressed some perspiration away from his forehead. He turned, abruptly, toward Franny when he heard her say something. "What?" he said. "I can't hear you."

  "Nothing. I said 'Oh, God.'"

  "Why 'Oh, God'?" Zooey asked, impatiently.

  "Nothing. Don't jump on me, please. I was only thinking, that's all. I just wish you could've seen me on Saturday. You talk about undermining people's morale! I absolutely ruined Lane's whole day. I not only passed out on him every hour on the hour but here I'd gone all the way up there for a nice, friendly, normal, cocktaily, supposedly happy football game, and absolutely everything he said I either jumped on or contradicted or--I don't know--just spoiled." Franny shook her head. She was still stroking Bloomberg, but absently. The piano appeared to be her focal point. "I simply could not keep a single opinion to myself," she said. "It was just horrible. Almost from the very second he met me at the station, I started picking and picking and picking at all his opinions and values and--just everything. But everything. He'd written some perfectly harmless test-tubey paper on Flaubert that he was so proud of and wanted me to read, and it just sounded to me so strictly English Department and patronizing and campusy that all I did was--" She broke off. She shook her head again, and Zooey, still half-pivoted in her direction, narrowed his eyes at her. She was looking even paler, more post-operative, as it were, than she had on waking. "It's a wonder he didn't shoot me," she said. "I'd have absolutely congratulated him if he had."

  "You told me that bit last night. I don't want any unfresh reminiscences this morning, buddy," Zooey said, and resumed looking out of the window. "In the first place, you're way off when you start railing at things and people instead of at yourself. We both are. I do the same goddam thing about television--I'm aware of that. But it's wrong. It's us. I keep telling you that. Why are you so damned dense about it?"

  "I'm not so damned dense about it, but you keep--"

  "It's us," Zooey repeated, overriding her. "We're freaks, that's all. Those two bastards got us nice and early and made us into freaks with freakish standards, that's all. We're the Tattooed Lady, and we're never going to have a minute's peace, the rest of our lives, till everybody else is tattooed, too." More than a trifle grimly, he brought his cigar to his mouth and dragged on it, but it had gone out. "On top of everything else," he said immediately, "we've got 'Wise Child' complexes. We've never really got off the goddam air. Not one of us. We don't talk, we hold forth. We don't converse, we expound. At least I do. The minute I'm in a room with somebody who has the usual number of ears, I either turn into a goddam seer or a human hatpin. The Prince of Bores. Last night, for instance. Down at the San Remo. I kept praying that Hess wouldn't tell me the plot of his new script. I knew damn well he had one. I knew damn well I wasn't going to get out of the place without a new script to take home. But I kept praying he'd spare me from an oral preview. He's not stupid. He knows it's impossible for me to keep my mouth shut." Zooey suddenly, sharply, turned around, without taking his foot off the window seat, and picked up, snatched up, a match folder that was on his mother's writing table. He turned back to the window and the view of the school roof and put his cigar into his mouth again--but at once took it out. "Damn him, anyway," he said. "He's so stupid it breaks your heart. He's like everybody else in television. And Hollywood. And Broadway. He thinks everything sentimental is tender, everything brutal is a slice of realism, and everything that runs into physical violence is a legitimate climax to something that isn't even--"

  "Did you tell him that?"

  "Certainly I told him that! I just got through telling you I can't keep my mouth shut. Certainly I told him that! I left him sitting there wishing he was dead. Or one of us was dead--I hope to hell it was me. Anyway, it was a true San Remo exit." Zooey took down his foot from the window seat. He turned around, looking both tense and agitated, and pulled out the straight chair at his mother's writing table and sat down. He relit his cigar, then hunched forward, restively, both arms on the cherrywood surface. An object his mother used as a paperweight stood beside the inkwell: a small glass sphere, on a black plastic pedestal, containing a snowman wearing a stovepipe hat. Zooey picked it up, gave it a shake, and sat apparently watching the snowflakes swirl.

  Franny, looking at him, now had a hand visored over her eyes. Zooey was sitting in the main shaft of sunlight in the room. She might have altered her position on the couch, if she meant to go on looking at him, but that would have disturbed Bloomberg, in her lap, who appeared to be asleep. "Do you really have an ulcer?" she asked suddenly. "Mother said you have an ulcer."

  "Yes, I have an ulcer, for Chrissake. This is Kaliyuga, buddy, the Iron Age. Anybody over sixteen without an ulcer's a goddam spy." He gave the snowman another, more vigorous shake. "The funny part is," he said, "I like Hess. Or at least I like him when he's not shoving his artistic poverty down my throat. At least he wears horrible neckties and funny padded suits in the middle of that frightened, super-conservative, super-conforming madhouse. And I like his conceit
. He's so conceited he's actually humble, the crazy bastard. I mean he obviously thinks television's good enough to deserve him and his big, bogus-courageous, 'offbeat' talent--which is a crazy kind of humility, if you feel like thinking about it." He stared at the glass ball till the snowstorm had abated somewhat. "In a way, I sort of like LeSage, too. Everything he owns is the best--his overcoat, his two-cabin cruiser, his son's grades at Harvard, his electric razor, everything. He took me home to dinner once and stopped me in the driveway to ask me if I remembered 'the late Carole Lombard, in the movies.' He warned me I'd get a shock when I met his wife, she was such a dead ringer for Carole Lombard. I suppose I'll like him for that till I die. His wife turned out to be a really tired, bosomy, Persian-looking blonde." Zooey looked around abruptly at Franny, who had said something. "What?" he asked.

  "Yes!" Franny repeated--pale, but beaming, and apparently fated, too, to like Mr. LeSage till death.

  Zooey smoked his cigar in silence for a moment. "What gets me so down about Dick Hess," he said, "what makes me so sad, or furious, or whatever the hell I am, is that the first script he did for LeSage was pretty good. It was almost good, in fact. It was the first one we did on film--I don't think you saw it, you were at school or something. I played a young farmer in it who lives all alone with his father. The boy has a notion that he hates farming, and he and his father have always had a terrible time making a living, so when the father dies, he sells all the cattle and makes big plans to go to the big city to make a living," Zooey picked up the snowman again but didn't give it a shake-merely turned it around, by the pedestal. "It had some nice bits," he said. "After I sell all the cows, I keep going out to the pasture to look for them. And when I go for a farewell walk with my girl, right before I leave for the big city, I keep steering her over toward the empty pasture. Then, when I get to the big city and get a job, I spend all my spare time hanging around the stockyards. Finally, in heavy traffic on the main street in the big city, a car makes a left turn and changes into a cow. I run after it, just as the light changes, and get run over--stampeded." He gave the snowman a shake. "It probably wasn't anything you couldn't watch while you were cutting your toenails, but at least you didn't feel like slinking home from the studio after rehearsals. It was fresh enough, at least, and it was his own, it wasn't part of a hackneyed trend in scripts. I wish to hell he'd go home and fill up again. I wish to hell everybody'd go home. I'm sick to death of being the heavy in everybody's life. God, you should see Hess and LeSage when they're talking about a new show. Or a new anything. They're as happy as pigs till I show up. I feel like those dismal bastards Seymour's beloved Chuang-tzu warned everybody against. 'Beware when the so-called sagely men come limping into sight.'" He sat still, watching the snowflakes swirl. "I could happily lie down and die sometimes," he said.