Corinne went over and sat down on the chair close to his table, within touching distance of him. She already knew that everything was wrong with him. The wrongness was so heavy in the room she could hardly breath.
"How are you, Ray?" she asked, without crying.
"I’m fine. How are you, Corinne?"
Corinne touched his hand with hers. Then she withdrew her hand and placed it on her lap. "I see you’re working," she said.
"Oh, yes. How’ve you been, Corinne?"
"I’ve been fine," Corinne said. "Where are your glasses?"
"My glasses?" Ford said. "I’m not allowed to use them. I’m taking eye exercises. I’m not allowed to use them." He turned around in his seat and looked at the door Corinne had entered through. "From her cousin," he said.
"Her cousin? Is he a doctor?"
"I don’t know what he is. He lives on the other side of town. He gave her some eye exercises to give me."
Ford cupped his eyes with his right hand, then put down his hand and looked at Corinne. For the first time since she had entered the room, he looked at her with some kind of real interest.
"You in town, Corinne?"
"Yes. I’m at the Hotel King Cole. Didn’t she tell you I phoned?"
Ford shook his head. He pushed some papers around on his bridge table. "You in town, eh?"
Corinne saw now that he was drunk. Under his awareness, her knees began to knock together uncontrollably.
"I’m just going to stay overnight."
Ford seemed to give this remark a great deal of concentration. "Just overnight?"
"Yes."
Narrowing his eyes painfully, Ford looked down at the papers strewn messily all over the bridge table. "I have a lot of work here, Corinne," he said confidentially.
"I see, I see you have," Corinne said, without crying.
Ford again turned around to glance at the door to the room—this time almost falling off his chair. Then he leaned forward toward Corinne, warily, like a man in a crowded, decorous room who is about to risk telling someone at his table a bit of choice gossip or an off-color joke.
"She doesn’t like my work," he said, in a surreptitious voice. "Can you imagine that?"
Corinne shook her head. She was now half-blinded with tears.
"She didn’t like it when she first came to New York. She thinks I’m not meaty enough."
Corinne was now crying without making any attempt to control herself.
"She’s writing a novel."
He drew himself back from his confidential position and began again to push papers around on his bridge table. His hands stopped suddenly. He spoke to Corinne in a stage whisper. "She saw my picture in the Times book section before she came to New York. She thinks I look like somebody in the movies. When I don’t wear my glasses."
Then, fairly quietly, Corinne lost her head. She begged him to come home with her. She wildly touched his face with her hand.
But he suddenly interrupted her, blinking painfully, but sounding like the soberest, most rational man in the world. "Corinne, you know I can’t get away."
"What?"
"I’m with the Brain again," Ford explained briefly.
Corinne shook her head, choked with despair and incomprehension.
"The Brain, the Brain," he said rather impatiently. "You saw the original. Think back. Think of somebody pounding on the window of a restaurant on a dark street. You know the one I mean."
Corinne’s mind traveled anfractuously back, reached the place, then partially blacked out. When she looked at her husband again he had picked up a movie magazine, and was squinting at its cover. She turned away.
"Staying in town, Corinne?" he asked politely, putting down the magazine.
Corinne didn’t have to answer, because her hostess’s voice suddenly called—hollered— from the other side of the door. "Hey, open up, you two! My hands are full."
Ford rushed awkwardly to open the door. A highball was suddenly deposited in Corinne’s boneless hand.
The other two people, with glasses of their own, sat down—Ford at his messy little bridge table, Bunny Croft on the bare floor on the other side of the table.
She was wearing blue jeans, a man’s t-shirt and a red handkerchief knotted cowboy-style around her throat.
She stretched out her legs pleasurably, as though a good bull-session were about to begin.
"You’re terrific to come and see us, Corinne. It’s marvelous. We were going to go to New York last spring, but somehow we never did." She pointed a moccasined foot at Corinne’s husband. "If this big lug would stoop to writing for money once in a while we might be able to do a couple of ambitious things." She broke off. "I love your suit. You didn’t have that when I saw you in New York, did you?"
"Yes."
Corinne wet her lips with her highball. The glass was filthy.
"Well, you didn’t wear it. At least I didn’t see it." Bunny crossed her legs lithely. "How do you like our dive? I call it the Rat’s Nest. I may have to sublet one room. Then Ray’ll have to sleep in the medicine cabinet—won’t you darling?"
"What?" Ford said, looking up from his drink.
"If we sublet this room, you’ll have to sleep in the medicine cabinet."
Ford nodded.
Bunny turned to Corinne, asking, "Where are you staying in town, anyway, Corinne?"
"At the Hotel King Cole."
"Oh, you told me. I love that little bar downstairs. With all the swords and stuff on the wall? Have you been in it?"
"No."
"The barkeep there looks exactly like some guy who’s in the movies. Some new guy. But exactly. I never can think of his name."
Ford stirred in his chair, and looked over at Bunny Croft. "Let’s have another drink," he said. His glass was empty.
Bunny looked back at him. "What am I supposed to do? Jump?" she inquired. "You have the combination to the bottle."
Ford stood up, holding onto the back of his chair, and left the room.
He was gone about five minutes—or five days, so far as Corinne knew. Bunny spoke to her steadily in his absence, but she missed nearly all of it except about the novel. Bunny said she hoped Corinne would have time while she was in town to at least take a look at her novel.
Ford came back into the room with about four fingers of undiluted whisky in his glass. Then Corinne stood up and said she had to go.
"Right now?" Bunny wailed. "Well, look. What about having lunch with us tomorrow or something?"
"I’m leaving on an early train," Corinne said, starting to walk out of the room unescorted. She heard her hostess spring to her moccasined feet, heard her say, "Well, golly . . ."
All of them—Ford, too—filed toward the front door of the apartment. Corinne first, Bunny at her heels, Ford in the rear.
At the door, Corinne abruptly turned around—in such a way that her shoulder was adjacent to Bunny’s face, partially blocking off Bunny’s view.
"Ray. Will you come home with me?"
Ford did not hear her. "I beg your pardon?" he said politely, unforgivably.
"Will you come home with me?"
Ford shook his head.
The action over, Bunny came briskly out from behind Corinne’s shoulder, and as though no entreaty of real significance had just been made and rejected, took Corinne’s hand. "Corinne. It’s really been terrific seeing you. I wish we could all write to each other or something. I mean, you know. Are you still at the same place in New York?"
"Yes."
"Swell."
Corinne took back her hand and extended it to her husband. He half pressed it; then she took it away from him.
"Golly, I hope you get a cab all right, Corinne. In this weather. Oh, you’ll get one . . . Turn on the hall light for Corinne, stupid."
Without looking back Corinne went as quickly as she could down the stairs, and broke into an awkward, knock-kneed kind of run when she reached the street.
20. A Girl I Knew
AT the end of
my freshman year of college, back in 1936, I flunked five out of five subjects. Flunking three out of five would have made me eligible to report for an invitation to attend some other college in the fall. But men in this three-out-of-five category sometimes had to wait outside the Dean’s office as long as two hours. Men in my group--some of whom had big dates in New York that same night--weren’t kept waiting a minute. It went one, two, three, the way most men in my group like things to go.
The particular college I had been attending apparently does not simply mail people’s grades home, but prefers to shoot them out of some kind of gun. When I got home to New York, even the butler looked tipped off and hostile. It was a bad night altogether. My father informed me quietly that my formal education was formally over. In a way, I felt like asking for a crack at summer school or something. But I didn’t. For one reason, my mother was in the room, and she kept saying that she just knew I should have gone to see my faculty adviser more regularly, that that was what he was there for. This was the kind of talk that made me want to go straight to the Rainbow Room with a friend. At any rate, one thing leading to another, when the familiar moment came to me to advance one of my fragile promises to really apply myself this time, I let it go by unused.
Although my father announced the same night that he was going to put me directly into his business, I felt confident that nothing wholly unattractive would happen for at least a week or so. I knew it would take a certain amount of deep, constructive brooding on my father’s part to figure out a way of getting me into the firm in broad daylight--I happened to give both his partners the willies on sight.
I was taken a little aback, four or five evenings later, when my father suddenly asked me at dinner how I would like to go to Europe to learn a couple of languages the firm could use. First to Vienna and then maybe to Paris, he said unelaborately.
I replied in the effect that the idea sounded all right to me. I was breaking off anyway with a certain girl on Seventy-Fourth Street. And I very clearly associated Vienna with gondolas. Gondolas didn’t seem like too bad a setup.
A few weeks later, in July of 1936, I sailed for Europe. My passport photograph, it might be worth mentioning, looked exactly like me. At eighteen. I was six feet two, weighed 119 pounds with my clothes on, and was a chain smoker. I think that if Goethe’s Werther and all his sorrows had been placed on the promenade deck of the S.S. Rex beside me and all my sorrows, he would have looked by comparison, like a rather low comedian.
The ship docked at Naples, and from there I took a train to Vienna. I almost got off the train at Venice, when I found out just who had the gondolas, but two people in my compartment got off instead--I had been waiting too long for a chance to put my feet up, gondolas or no gondolas.
Naturally, certain when-you-get-to-Vienna rules had been laid down before my ship sailed from New York. Rules about taking at least three hours of language lessons daily; rules about not getting too friendly with people who take advantage of other, particularly younger, people; rules about not spending money like a drunken sailor; rules about the wearing of clothes in which a person wouldn’t catch pneumonia; and so on. But after a month or so in Vienna I had most of that taken care of: I was taking three hours of German lesson every day--from a rather exceptional young lady I had met in the lounge of the Grand Hotel. I had found, in one of the far- outlying districts, a place that was cheaper than the Grand Hotel--the trolleys didn’t run to my place after ten at night, but the taxis did. I was dressing warm--I had bought myself three pure wool Tyrolean hats. I was meeting nice people--I had lent three hundred shillings to a very distinguished-looking guy in the bar of the Bristol Hotel. In short, I was in a position to cut my letter home down to the bone.
I spent a little more than five months in Vienna. I danced. I went ice-skating and skiing. For strenuous exercise, I argued with an Englishman. I watched operations at two hospitals and had myself psychoanalyzed by a young Hungarian woman who smoked cigars. My German lessons never failed to hold my unflagging interest. I seemed to move, with all the luck of the undeserving, from gemutlichkeit to gemutlichkeit. But I mention these only to keep the Baedeker straight.
Probably for every man there is at least one city that sooner or later turns into a girl. How well or how badly the man actually knew the girl doesn’t necessarily affect the transformation. She was there, and she was the whole city, and that’s that.
Leah was the daughter in the Viennese-Jewish family who lived in the apartment below mine--that is, below the family I was boarding with. She was sixteen, and beautiful in an immediate yet perfectly slow way. She had very dark hair that fell away from the most exquisite pair of ears I have ever seen. She had immense eyes that always seemed in danger of capsizing in their own innocence. Her hands were very pale brown, with slender, actionless fingers. When she sat down, she did the only sensible thing with her beautiful hands there was to be done: she placed them on her lap and left them there. In brief, she was probably the first appreciable thing of beauty I had seen that struck me as wholly legitimate.
For about four months I saw her two or three evenings a week, for an hour or so at a time. But never outside the apartment house in which we lived. We never went dancing; we never went to a concert; we never even went for a walk. I found out soon after we met that Leah’s father had promised her in marriage to some young Pole. Maybe this fact had something to do with my not quite palpable, but curiously steady disinclination to give our acquaintanceship the run of the city. Maybe I just worried too much about things. Maybe I consistently hesitated to risk letting the thing we had together deteriorate into a romance. I don’t know any more. I used to know, but I lost the knowledge a long time ago. A man can’t go along indefinitely carrying around in his pocket a key that doesn’t fit anything.
I met Leah a nice way.
I had a phonograph and two American phonograph records in my room. The two American records were a gift from my landlady--one of those rare, drop-it-and-run gifts that leave the recipient dizzy with gratitude. On one of the records Dorothy Lamour sang Moonlight and Shadows, and on the other Connie Boswell sang Where Are You? Both girls got pretty scratched up, hanging around my room, as they had to go to work whenever I heard my landlady’s step outside my door.
One evening I was in my sitting room, writing a long letter to a girl in Pennsylvania, suggesting that she quit school and come to Europe to marry me--a not infrequent suggestion of mine in those days. My phonograph was not playing. But suddenly the words to Miss Boswell’s song floated, just slightly damaged, through my open window:
"Where are you?
Where have you gone wissout me?
I sought you cared about me.
Where are you?"
Thoroughly excited, I sprang to my feet, then rushed to my window and leaned out.
The apartment below mine had the only balcony of the house. I saw a girl standing on it, completely submerged in the pool of autumn twilight. She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together. The way the profile of her face and body refracted in the soupy twilight made me feel a little drunk. When a few seconds had throbbed by, I said hello to her. She then looked up at me, and though she seemed decorously startled, something told me she wasn’t too surprised that I had heard her doing the Boswell number. This didn’t matter, of course. I asked her, in murderous German, if I might join her on the balcony. The request obviously rattled her. She replied, in English, that she didn’t think her “fahzzer” would like me to come down to see her. At this point, my opinion of girls’ fathers, which had been low for years, struck bottom. But nevertheless I managed a drab little nod of understanding.
It turned out all right, though. Leah seemed to think it would be perfectly all right if she came up to see me. Entirely stupefied with gratitude, I nodded, then closed my window and began to wander hurriedly through my room, rapidly pushing things under other things with my foot.
I don’t
really remember our first evening in my sitting room. All our evenings were pretty much the same. I can’t honestly separate one from another; not anymore, anyway.
Leah’s knock on my door was always poetry--high, beautifully wavering, absolutely perpendicular poetry. Her knock started out speaking of her own innocence an beauty, and accidentally ended speaking of the innocence and beauty of all very young girls. I was always half-eaten away by the respect and happiness when I opened the door for Leah.
We would solemnly shake hands at my sitting-room door. Then Leah would walk, self- consciously but beautifully, to my window seat, sit down, and wait for our conversation to begin.
Her English, like my German, was nearly all holes. Yet invariably I spoke her language and she mine, although any other arrangement at all might have made for a less perforated means of communication.
"Uh. Wie geht es Ihnen? I’d start out. (How are you?) I never used the familiar form in addressing Leah.
"I am very well, sank you very much," Leah would reply, never failing to blush. It didn’t help much to look at her indirectly; she blushed anyway.
"Schon hinaus, nicht wahr?" I’d ask, rain or shine. (Nice out, isn’t it?)
"Yes," she’d answer, rain or shine.
"Uh. Waren Sie heute in der Kino?" was a favorite question of mine. (Did you go to the movies today?) Five days a week Leah worked in her father’s cosmetics plant.
"No. I was today working by my fahzzer."
"Oh, dass ist recht! Uh. Ist es schon dort?" (Oh, that’s right. Is it nice there?)
"No. It is a very big fabric, with very many people running around about."
"Oh. Dass ist schlecht." (That’s bad.)
"Uh. Wollen Sie haben ein Tasse von Kaffee mit mir haben?” (Will you have a cup of coffee with me?)
"I was already eating."
"Ja, aber Haben Sie ein Tasse anyway." (Yes, but have a cup anyway.)
22 Out-of-print J. D. Salinger Stories Page 25
