Franny and Zooey Read online

The waiter left. Lane watched him leave the room, then looked back at Franny. She was shaping her cigarette ash on the side of the fresh ashtray the waiter had brought, her mouth not quite closed. Lane watched her for a moment with mounting irritation. Quite probably, he resented and feared any signs of detachment in a girl he was seriously dating. In any case, he surely was concerned over the possibility that this bug Franny had might bitch up the whole weekend. He suddenly leaned forward, putting his arms on the table, as though to get this thing ironed out, by God, but Franny spoke up before he did. "I'm lousy today," she said. "I'm just way off today." She found herself looking at Lane as if he were a stranger, or a poster advertising a brand of linoleum, across the aisle of a subway car. Again she felt the trickle of disloyalty and guilt, which seemed to be the order of the day, and reacted to it by reaching over to cover Lane's hand with her own. She withdrew her hand almost immediately and used it to pick her cigarette out of the ashtray. "I'll snap out of this in a minute," she said. "I absolutely promise." She smiled at Lane--in a sense, genuinely--and at that moment a smile in return might at least have mitigated to some small extent certain events that were to follow, but Lane was busy affecting a brand of detachment of his own, and chose not to smile back. Franny dragged on her cigarette. "If it weren't so late and everything," she said, "and if I hadn't decided like a fool to go out for honors, I think I'd drop English. I don't know." She tipped her ashes. "I'm just so sick of pedants and conceited little tearer-downers I could scream." She looked at Lane. "I'm sorry. I'll stop. I give you my word... It's just that if I'd had any guts at all, I wouldn't have gone back to college at all this year. I don't know. I mean it's all the most incredible farce."

  "Brilliant. That's really brilliant."

  Franny took the sarcasm as her due. "I'm sorry," she said.

  "Stop saying you're sorry--do you mind? I don't suppose it's occurred to you that you're making one helluva sweeping generalization. If all English Department people were such great little tearer-downers, it would be an altogether different--"

  Franny interrupted him, but almost inau-dibly. She was looking over his charcoal flannel shoulder at some abstraction across the dining room.

  "What?" Lane asked.

  "I said I know. You're right. I'm just off, that's all. Don't pay any attention to me."

  But Lane couldn't let a controversy drop until it had been resolved in his favor. "I mean, hell," he said. "There are incompetent people in all walks of life. I mean that's basic. Let's drop the goddam section men for a minute." He looked at Franny. "You listening to me, or what?"

  "Yes."

  "You've got two of the best men in the country in your goddam English Department. Manlius. Esposito. God, I wish we had them here. At least, they're poets, for Chrissake."

  "They're not," Franny said. "That's partly what's so awful. I mean they're not real poets. They're just people that write poems that get published and anthologized all over the place, but they're not poets." She stopped, selfconsciously, and put out her cigarette. For several minutes now, she had seemed to be losing color in her face. Suddenly, even her lipstick seemed a shade or two lighter, as though she had just blotted it with a leaf of Kleenex. "Let's not talk about it," she said, almost listlessly, squashing her cigarette stub in the ashtray. "I'm way off. I'll just ruin the whole weekend. Maybe there's a trapdoor under my chair, and I'll just disappear."

  The waiter came forward very briefly, and left a second Martini in front of each of them.

  Lane put his fingers--which were slender and long, and usually not far out of sight--around the stem of his glass. "You're not ruining anything," he said quietly. "I'm just interested in finding out what the hell goes. I mean do you have to be a goddam bohemian type, or dead, for Chrissake, to be a real poet? What do you want--some bastard with wavy hair?"

  "No. Can't we let it go? Please. I'm feeling absolutely lousy, and I'm getting a terrible--"

  "I'd be very happy to drop the whole subject--I'd be delighted. Just tell me first what a real poet is, if you don't mind. I'd appreciate it. I really would."

  There was a faint glisten of perspiration high on Franny's forehead. It might only have meant that the room was too warm, or that her stomach was upset, or that the Martinis were too potent; in any case, Lane didn't seem to notice it.

  "I don't know what a real poet is. I wish you'd stop it, Lane. I'm serious. I'm feeling very peculiar and funny, and I can't--"

  "All right, all right--O.K. Relax," Lane said. "I was only trying--"

  "I know this much, is all," Franny said. "If you're a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean you're supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything. The ones you're talking about don't leave a single, solitary thing beautiful. All that maybe the slightly better ones do is sort of get inside your head and leave something there, but just because they do, just because they know how to leave something, it doesn't have to be a poem, for heaven's sake. It may just be some kind of terribly fascinating, syntaxy droppings--excuse the expression. Like Manlius and Esposito and all those poor men."

  Lane took time to light a cigarette for himself before he said anything. Then: "I thought you liked Manlius. As a matter of fact, about a month ago, if I remember correctly, you said he was darling, and that you--"

  "I do like him. I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect... Would you excuse me for just a minute?" Franny was suddenly on her feet, with her handbag in her hand. She was very pale.

  Lane got up, pushing back his chair, his mouth somewhat open. "What's the matter?" he asked. "You feel all right? Anything wrong, or what?"

  "I'll be back in just a second."

  She left the room without asking directions, as though she knew from former lunches at Sickler's just where to go.

  Lane, alone at the table, sat smoking and taking conservative drinks from his Martini to make it last till Franny got back. It was very clear that the sense of well-being he had felt, a half hour earlier, at being in the right place with the right, or right-looking, girl was now totally gone. He looked over at the sheared-rac-coon coat, which lay somewhat askew over the back of Franny's vacant chair--the same coat that had excited him at the station, by virtue of his singular familiarity with it--and he examined it now with all but unqualified disaffection. The wrinkles in the silk lining seemed, for some reason, to annoy him. He stopped looking at it and began to stare at the stem of his Martini glass, looking worried and vaguely, unfairly conspired against. One thing was sure. The weekend was certainly getting off to a goddam peculiar start. At that moment, though, he chanced to look up from the table and see someone he knew across the room--a classmate, with a date. Lane sat up a bit in his chair and adjusted his expression from that of all-round apprehension and discontent to that of a man whose date has merely gone to the John, leaving him, as dates do, with nothing to do in the meantime but smoke and look bored, preferably attractively bored.

  THE ladies' room at Sickler's was almost as large as the dining room proper, and, in a special sense, appeared to be hardly less commodious. It was unattended and apparently unoccupied when Franny came in. She stood for a moment--rather as though it were a rendezvous point of some kind--in the middle of the tiled floor. Her brow was beaded with perspiration now, her mouth was slackly open, and she was still paler than she had been in the dining room. Abruptly, then, and very quickly, she went into the farthest and most anonymous-looking of the seven or eight enclosures--which, by luck, didn't require a coin for entrance--closed the door behind her, and, with some little difficulty, manipulated the bolt to a locked position. Without any apparent regard to the suchness of her environment, she sat down. She brought her knees together very firmly, as if to make herself a smaller, more compact unit. Then she placed her hands, vertically, over her eyes and pressed the heels hard, as though to paralyze the optic nerve and drown all images into a voidlike black. Her extended fingers, though trembling, or because they were trembling, loo
ked oddly graceful and pretty. She held that tense, almost fetal position for a suspensory moment--then broke down. She cried for fully five minutes. She cried without trying to suppress any of the noisier manifestations of grief and confusion, with all the convulsive throat sounds that a hysterical child makes when the breath is trying to get up through a partly closed epiglottis. And yet, when finally she stopped, she merely stopped, without the painful, knifelike intakes of breath that usually follow a violent outburst-inburst. When she stopped, it was as though some momentous change of polarity had taken place inside her mind, one that had an immediate, pacifying effect on her body. Her face tear-streaked but quite expressionless, almost vacuous, she picked up her handbag from the floor, opened it, and took out the small pea-green clothbound book. She put it on her lap--on her knees, rather--and looked down at it, gazed down at it, as if that were the best of all places for a small pea-green clothbound book to be. After a moment, she picked up the book, raised it chest-high, and pressed it to her--firmly, and quite briefly. Then she put it back into the handbag, stood up, and came out of the enclosure. She washed her face with cold water, dried it with a towel from an overhead rack, applied fresh lipstick, combed her hair, and left the room.

  She looked quite stunning as she walked across the dining room to the table, not at all unlike a girl on the qui vive appropriate to a big college weekend. As she came briskly, smiling, to her chair, Lane slowly got up, a napkin in his left hand.

  "God. I'm sorry," Franny said. "Did you think I'd died?"

  "I didn't think you'd died," Lane said. He drew her chair for her. "I didn't know what the hell happened." He went around to his own chair. "We don't have any too goddam much time, you know." He sat down. "You all right? Your eyes are a little bloodshot." He looked at her more closely. "You O.K., or what?"

  Franny lit a cigarette. "I'm marvellous now. I just never felt so fantastically rocky in my entire life. Did you order?"

  "I waited for you," Lane said, still looking at her closely. "What was the matter anyway? Your stomach?"

  "No. Yes and no. I don't know," Franny said. She looked down at the menu on her plate, and consulted it without picking it up. "All I want's a chicken sandwich. And maybe a glass of milk... You order what you want and all, though. I mean, take snails and octopuses and things. Octopi. I'm really not at all hungry."

  Lane looked at her, then exhaled a thin, overly expressive stream of smoke down at his plate. "This is going to be a real little doll of a weekend," he said. "A chicken sandwich, for God's sake."

  Franny was annoyed. "I'm not hungry, Lane--I'm sorry. My gosh. Now, please. You order what you want, why don't you, and I'll eat while you're eating. But I can't just work up an appetite because you want me to."

  "All right, all right." Lane craned his neck and caught the waiter's attention. A moment later, he ordered the chicken sandwich and the glass of milk for Franny, and snails, frogs' legs, and a salad for himself. He looked at his wristwatch when the waiter had gone, and said, "We're supposed to be up at Tenbridge at one-fifteen, one-thirty, incidentally. No later. I told Wally we'd probably stop off for a drink and then maybe we'd all go out to the stadium together in his car. You mind? You like Wally."

  "I don't even know who he is."

  "You've met him about twenty times, for God's sake. Wally Campbell. Jesus. If you've met him once, you've met him--"

  "Oh. I remember... Listen, don't hate me because I can't remember some person immediately. Especially when they look like everybody else, and talk and dress and act like everybody else." Franny made her voice stop. It sounded to her cavilling and bitchy, and she felt a wave of self-hatred that, quite literally, made her forehead begin to perspire again. But her voice picked up again, in spite of herself. "I don't mean there's anything horrible about him or anything like that. It's just that for four solid years I've kept seeing Wally Campbells wherever I go. I know when they're going to be charming, I know when they're going to start telling you some really nasty gossip about some girl that lives in your dorm, I know when they're going to ask me what I did over the summer, I know when they're going to pull up a chair and straddle it backward and start bragging in a terribly, terribly quiet voice--or name-dropping in a terribly quiet, casual voice. There's an unwritten law that people in a certain social or financial bracket can name-drop as much as they like just as long as they say something terribly disparaging about the person as soon as they've dropped his name--that he's a bastard or a nymphomaniac or takes dope all the time, or something horrible." She broke off again. She was quiet for a moment, turning the ashtray in her fingers and being careful not to look up and see Lane's expression. "I'm sorry," she said. "It isn't just Wally Campbell. I'm just picking on him because you mentioned him. And because he just looks like somebody that spent the summer in Italy or someplace."

  "He was in France last summer, for your information," Lane stated. "I know what you mean," he added quickly, "but you're being goddam un--"

  "All right," Franny said wearily. "France." She took a cigarette out of the pack on the table. "It isn't just Wally. It could be a girl, for goodness' sake. I mean if he were a girl--somebody in my dorm, for example--he'd have been painting scenery in some stock company all summer. Or bicycled through Wales. Or taken an apartment in New York and worked for a magazine or an advertising company. It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so--I don't know--not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and--sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much as everybody else, only in a different way." She stopped. She shook her head briefly, her face quite white, and for just a fractional moment she felt her forehead with her hand--less, it seemed, to find out whether she was perspiring than to check to see, as if she were her own parent, whether she had a fever. "I feel so funny," she said. "I think I'm going crary. Maybe I'm already crazy."

  Lane was looking at her with genuine concern--more concern than curiosity. "You're pale as hell. You're really pale--you know that?" he asked.

  Franny shook her head. "I'm fine. I'll be fine in a minute." She looked up as the waiter came forward with their orders. "Oh, your snails look beautiful." She had just brought her cigarette to her lips, but it had gone out. "What'd you do with the matches?" she asked.

  Lane gave her a light when the waiter had gone. "You smoke too much," he said. He picked up the small fork beside his plate of snails, but looked at Franny again before he used it. "I'm worried about you. I'm serious. What the hell's happened to you in the last couple of weeks?"

  Franny looked at him, then simultaneously shrugged and shook her head. "Nothing. Absolutely nothing," she said. "Eat. Eat them snails. They're terrible if they're cold."

  "You eat."

  Franny nodded and looked down at her chicken sandwich. She felt a faint wave of nausea, and looked up immediately and dragged on her cigarette.

  "How's the play?" Lane asked, attending to his snails.

  "I don't know. I'm not in it. I quit."

  "You quit?" Lane looked up. "I thought you were so mad about the part. What happened? They give it to somebody else?"

  "No, they did not. It was all mine. That's nasty. Oh, that's nasty."

  "Well, what happened? You didn't quit the whole department, did you?"

  Franny nodded, and took a sip of her milk. Lane waited till he had chewed and swallowed, then said, "Why, for God's sake? I thought the goddam theatre was your passion. It's about the only thing I've ever heard you--"

  "I just quit, that's all," Franny said. "It started embarrassing me. I began to feel like such a nasty little egomaniac." She reflected. "I don't know. It seemed like such poor taste, sort of, to want to act in the first place. I mean all the ego. And I used to hate myself so, when I was in a play, to be backstage after the play was over. All those egos running around feeling terribly charitable and warm. Kissing everybody and wearing their makeup all over the place, and then trying to be horr
ibly natural and friendly when your friends came backstage to see you. I just hated myself... And the worst part was I was usually sort of ashamed to be in the plays I was in. Especially in summer stock." She looked at Lane. "And I had good parts, so don't look at me that way. It wasn't that. It was just that I would've been ashamed if, say, anybody I respected--my brothers, for example--came and heard me deliver some of the lines I had to say. I used to write certain people and tell them not to come." She reflected again. "Except Pegeen in 'Playboy,' last summer. I mean that could have been really nice, only the goon that played the Playboy spoiled any fun it might have been. He was so lyrical--God, was he lyrical!"

  Lane had finished his snails. He sat looking deliberately expressionless. "He got terrific reviews," he said. "You sent me the reviews, if you recall."

  Franny sighed. "All right. O.K., Lane."

  "No, I mean you've been talking for a half hour as though you're the only person in the world that's got any goddam sense, any critical ability. I mean if some of the best critics thought this man was terrific in the play, maybe he was, maybe you're wrong. That ever occur to you? You know, you haven't exactly reached the ripe, old--"

  "He was terrific for somebody that just has talent. If you're going to play the Playboy right, you have to be a genius. You do, that's all--I can't help it," Franny said. She arched her back a trifle, and, with her mouth a trifle open, she put her hand on top of her head. "I feel so woozy and funny. I don't know what's the matter with me."

  "You think you're a genius?"

  Franny took her hand down from her head. "Aw, Lane. Please. Don't do that to me."

  "I'm not doing any--"

  "All I know is I'm losing my mind," Franny said. "I'm just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else's. I'm sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It's disgusting--it is, it is. I don't care what anybody says."

  Lane raised his eyebrows at that, and sat back, the better to make his point. "You sure you're just not afraid of competing?" he asked with studied quietness. "I don't know too much about it, but I'd lay odds a good psychoanalyst--I mean a really competent one--would probably take that statement--"