The Bell Jar (3 page)

               
That was another thing--the rest
of us had starched cotton summer nighties and quilted housecoats, or maybe
terry-cloth robes that doubled as beachcoats, but Doreen wore these full-length
nylon and lace jobs you could half see through, and dressing gowns the color:
of skin, that stuck to her by some kind of electricity.She had an interesting,
slightly sweaty smell that reminded me of those scallopy leaves of sweet fern
you break off and crush between your fingers for the musk of them.

               
“You know old Jay Cee won’t give
a damn if that story’s in tomorrow or Monday.” Doreen lit a cigarette and let
the smoke flare slowly from her nostrils so her eyes were veiled. “Jay Cee’s
ugly as sin,” Doreen went on coolly. “I bet that old husband of hers turns out
all the lights before he gets near her or he’d puke otherwise.”

               
Jay Cee was my boss, and I liked
her a lot, in spite of what Doreen said. She wasn’t one of the fashion magazine
gushers with fake eyelashes and giddy jewelry.Jay Cee had brains, so her
plug-ugly looks didn’t seem to matter. She read a couple of languages and knew
all the quality writers in the business.

               
I tried to imagine Jay Cee out
of her strict office suit and luncheon-duty hat and in bed with her fat
husband, but I just couldn’t do it. I always had a terribly hard time trying to
imagine people in bed together.

               
Jay Cee wanted to teach me
something, all the old ladies I ever knew wanted to teach me something, but I
suddenly didn’t think they had anything to teach me. I fitted the lid on my
typewriter and clicked it shut.

               
Doreen grinned. “Smart girl.”

               
Somebody tapped at the door.

               
“Who is it?” I didn’t bother to
get up.

               
“It’s me, Betsy. Are you coming
to the party?”

               
“I guess so.” I still didn’t go
to the door.

               
They imported Betsy straight
from Kansas with her bouncing blonde ponytail and Sweetheart-of-Sigma-Chi
smile. I remember once the two of us were called over to the office of some
blue-chinned TV producer in a pin-stripe suit to see if we had any angles he
could build up fur a program, and Betsy started to tell about the male and
female corn in Kansas. She got so excited about that damn corn even the
producer had tears in his eyes, only he couldn’t use any of it, unfortunately,
he said.

               
Later on, the Beauty Editor
persuaded Betsy to cut her hair and made a cover girl out of her, and I still
see her face now and then, smiling out of those “P.Q.’s wife wears B.H. Wragge”
ads.

               
Betsy was always asking me to do
things with her and the other girls as if she were trying to save me in some
way. She never asked Doreen. In private, Doreen called her Pollyanna Cowgirl.

               
“Do you want to come in our
cab?” Betsy said through the door.

               
Doreen shook her head.

               
“That’s all right, Betsy,” I
said. “I’m going with Doreen.”

               
“Okay.” I could hear Betsy
padding off down the hall.

               
“We’ll just go till we get sick
of it,” Doreen told me, stubbing out her cigarette in the base of my bedside
reading lamp, “then we’ll go out on the town. Those parties they stage here
remind me of the old dances in the school gym. Why do they always round up
Yalies? They’re so
stoo
pit!”

               
Buddy Willard went to Yale, but now I thought of it,
what was wrong with him was that he was stupid. Oh, he’d managed to get good
marks all right, and to have an affair with some awful waitress on the Cape by
the name of Gladys, but he didn’t have one speck of intuition. Doreen had
intuition. Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of
my own bones.

We
were stuck in the theater-hour rush. Our cab sat wedged in back of Betsy’s cab
and in front of a cab with four of the other girls, and nothing moved.

               
Doreen looked terrific. She was
wearing a strapless white lace dress zipped up over a snug corset affair that
curved her in at the middle and bulged her out again spectacularly above and
below, and her skin had a bronzy polish under the pale dusting powder. She
smelled strong as a whole perfume store.

               
I wore a black shantung sheath
that cost me forty dollars. It was part of a buying spree I had with some of my
scholarship money when I heard I was one of the lucky ones going to New York.
This dress was cut so queerly I couldn’t wear any sort of a bra under it, but that
didn’t matter much as I was skinny as a boy and barely rippled, and I liked
feeling almost naked on the hot summer nights.

               
The city had faded my tan,
though. I looked yellow as a Chinaman. Ordinarily, I would have been nervous
about my dress and my odd color, but being with Doreen made me forget my
worries. I felt wise and cynical as all hell.

               
When the man in the blue lumber
shirt and black chinos and tooled leather cowboy boots started to stroll over
to us from under the striped awning of the bar where he’d been eyeing our cab,
I couldn’t have any illusions. I knew perfectly well he’d come for Doreen. He
threaded his way out between the stopped cars and leaned engagingly on the sill
of our open window.

               
“ And what, may I ask, are two
nice girls like you doing all alone in a cab on a nice night like this?”

               
He had a big, wide, white
toothpaste-ad smile.

               
“We’re on our way to a party,” I
blurted, since Doreen had gone suddenly dumb as a post and was fiddling in a
blasé way with her white lace pocketbook cover.

               
“That sounds boring,” the man
said. “Whyn’t you both join me for a couple of drinks in that bar over there?
I’ve some friends waiting as well.”

               
He nodded in the direction of
several informally dressed men slouching around under the awning. They had been
following him with their eyes, and when he glanced back at them, they burst out
laughing.

               
The laughter should have warned
me. It was a kind of low, know-it-all snicker, but the traffic showed signs of
moving again, and I knew that if I sat tight, in two seconds I’d be wishing I’d
taken this gift of a chance to see something of New York besides what the
people on the magazine had planned out for us so carefully.

               
“How about it, Doreen?” I said.

               
“How about it, Doreen?” the man
said, smiling his big smile. To this day I can’t remember what he looked like
when he wasn’t smiling. I think he must have been smiling the whole time. It
must have been natural for him, smiling like that.

               
“Well, all right,” Doreen said
to me. I opened the door, and we stepped out of the cab just as it was edging
ahead again and started to walk over to the bar.

               
There was a terrible shriek of
brakes followed by a dull thump-thump.

               
“Hey you!” Our cabby was craning
out of his window with a furious, purple expression. “Waddaya think you’re
doin’?”

               
He had stopped the cab so
abruptly that the cab behind bumped smack into him, and we could see the four
girls inside waving and struggling and scrambling up off the floor.

               
The man laughed and left us on
the curb and went back and handed a bill to the driver in the middle of a great
honking and some yelling, and then we saw the girls from the magazine moving
off in a row, one cab after another, like a wedding party with nothing but
bridesmaids.

               
“Come on, Frankie,” the man said
to one of his friends in the group, and a short, scrunty fellow detached
himself and came into the bar with us.

               
He was the type of fellow I
can’t stand. I’m five feet ten in my stocking feet, and when I am with little
men I stoop over a bit and slouch my hips, one up and one down, so I’ll look
shorter, and I feel gawky and morbid as somebody in a sideshow.

               
For a minute I had a wild hope
we might pair off according to size, which would line me up with the man who
had spoken to us in the first place, and he cleared a good six feet, but he
went ahead with Doreen and didn’t give me a second look. I tried to pretend I
didn’t see Frankie dogging along at my elbow and sat close by Doreen at the
table.

               
It was so dark in the bar I
could hardly make out anything except Doreen. With her white hair and white
dress she was so white she looked silver. I think she must have reflected the
neons over the bar. I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of
a person I’d never seen before in my life.

               
“Well, what’ll we have?” the man
asked with a large smile.

               
“I think I’ll have an
old-fashioned,” Doreen said to me.

               
Ordering drinks always floored
me. I didn’t know whisky from gin and never managed to get anything I really
liked the taste of. Buddy Willard and the other college boys I knew were
usually too poor to buy hard liquor or they scorned drinking altogether. It’s
amazing how many college boys don’t drink or smoke. I seemed to know them all.
The farthest Buddy Willard ever went was buying us a bottle of Dubonnet, which
he only did because he was trying to prove he could be aesthetic in spite of
being a medical student.

               
“I’ll have a vodka,” I said.

               
The man looked at me more
closely. “With anything?”

               
“Just plain,” I said. “I always
have it plain.”

               
I thought I might make a fool of
myself by saying I’d have it with ice or soda or gin or anything. I’d seen a
vodka ad once, just a glass full of vodka standing in the middle of a snowdrift
in a blue light, and the vodka looked clear and pure as water, so I thought
having vodka plain must be all right. My dream was someday ordering a drink and
finding out it tasted wonderful.

               
The waiter came up then, and the
man ordered drinks for the four of us. He looked so at home in that citified
bar in his ranch outfit I thought he might well be somebody famous.

               
Doreen wasn’t saying a word, she
only toyed with her cork placemat and eventually lit a cigarette, but the man
didn’t seem to mind. He kept staring at her the way people stare at the great
white macaw in the zoo, waiting for it to say something human.

               
The drinks arrived, and mine
looked clear and pure, just like the vodka ad.

               
“What do you do?” I asked the
man, to break the silence shooting up around me on all sides, thick as jungle
grass. “I mean what do you do here in New York?”

               
Slowly and with what seemed a
great effort, the man dragged his eyes away from Doreen’s shoulder. “I’m a disc
jockey,” he said. “You prob’ly must have heard of me. The name’s Lenny
Shepherd.”

               
“I know you,” Doreen said
suddenly.

               
“I’m glad about that, honey,”
the man said, and burst out laughing. “That’ll come in handy. I’m famous as
hell.”

               
Then Lenny Shepherd gave Frankie
a long look.

               
“Say, where do you come from?”
Frankie asked, sitting up with a jerk. “What’s your name?”

               
“This here’s Doreen.” Lenny slid
his hand around Doreen’s bare arm and gave her a squeeze.

               
What surprised me was that
Doreen didn’t let on she noticed what he was doing. She just sat there, dusky
as a bleached-blonde Negress in her white dress, and sipped daintily at her
drink.

               
“My name’s Elly Higginbottom,” I
said. “I come from Chicago.” After that I felt safer. I didn’t want anything I
said or did that night to be associated with me and my real name and coming
from Boston.

               
“Well, Elly, what do you say we
dance some?”

               
The thought of dancing with that
little runt in his orange suede elevator shoes and mingy T-shirt and droopy
blue sports coat made me laugh. If there’s anything I look down on, it’s a man
in a blue outfit. Black or gray, or brown, even. Blue just makes me laugh.