The Bell Jar (4 page)
“I’m not in the mood,” I said
coldly, turning my back on him and hitching my chair over nearer to Doreen and
Lenny.
Those two looked as if they’d
known each other for years by now. Doreen was spooning up the hunks of fruit at
the bottom of her glass with a spindly silver spoon, and Lenny was grunting
each time she lifted the spoon to her mouth, and snapping and pretending to be
a dog or something, and trying to get the fruit off the spoon. Doreen giggled
and kept spooning up the fruit.
I began to think vodka was my
drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my
stomach like a sword swallower’s sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.
“I better go now,” Frankie said,
standing up.
I couldn’t see him very clearly,
the place was so dim, but for the first time I heard what a high, silly voice
he had. Nobody paid him any notice.
“Hey, Lenny, you owe me
something. Remember, Lenny, you owe me something, don’t you, Lenny?”
I thought it odd Frankie should
be reminding Lenny he owed him something in front of us, and we being perfect
strangers, but Frankie stood there saying the same thing over and over until
Lenny dug into his pocket and pulled out a big roll of green bills and peeled
one off and handed it to Frankie. I think it was ten dollars.
“Shut up and scram.”
For a minute I thought Lenny was
talking to me as well, but then I heard Doreen say, “I won’t come unless Elly
comes.” I had to hand it to her the way she picked up my fake name.
“Oh, Elly’ll come, won’t you,
Elly?” Lenny said, giving me a wink.
“Sure I’ll come,” I said.
Frankie had wilted away into the night, so I thought I’d string along with
Doreen. I wanted to see as much as I could.
I liked looking on at other
people in crucial situations. If there was a road accident or a street fight or
a baby pickled in a laboratory jar for me to look at, I’d stop and look so hard
I never forgot it.
I certainly learned a lot of
things I never would have learned otherwise this way, and even when they
surprised me or made me sick I never let on, but pretended that’s the way I
knew things were all the time.
I wouldn’t have missed
Lenny’s place for anything.
It was built exactly like the
inside of a ranch, only in the middle of a New York apartment house. He’d had a
few partitions knocked down to make the place broaden out, he said, and then
had them pine-panel the walls and fit up a special pinepaneled bar in the shape
of a horseshoe. I think the floor was pine-paneled, too.
Great white bearskins lay about underfoot, and the
only furniture was a lot of low beds covered with Indian rugs. Instead of
pictures hung up on the walls, he had antlers and buffalo horns and a stuffed
rabbit head. Lenny jutted a thumb at the meek little gray muzzle and stiff
jackrabbit ears.
“Ran over that in Las Vegas.” He
walked away across the room, his cowboy boots echoing like pistol shots. “
Acoustics,” he said, and grew smaller and smaller until he vanished through a
door in the distance.
All at once music started to
come out of the air on every side. Then it stopped, and we heard Lenny’s voice
say “This is your twelve o’clock disc jock, Lenny Shepherd, with a roundup of
the tops in pops. Number Ten in the wagon train this week is none other than
that little yaller-haired gal you been hearin’ so much about lately...the one
an’ only
Sunflower!”
I
was born in Kansas, I was bred in Kansas,
And
when I marry I’ll be wed in Kansas.
..
“What a card!” Doreen said.
“Isn’t he a card?”
“You bet,” I said.
“Listen, Elly, do me a favor.”
She seemed to think Elly was who I really was by now.
“Sure,” I said.
“Stick around, will you? I
wouldn’t have a chance if he tried anything funny. Did you see that muscle?”
Doreen giggled.
Lenny popped out of the back
room. “I got twenty grand’s worth of recording equipment in there.” He ambled
over to the bar and set out three glasses and a silver ice bucket and a big
pitcher and began to mix drinks from several different bottles.
...to
a true-blue gal who promised she would wait--
She’s
the sunflower of the Sunflower State.
“Terrific, huh?” Lenny came over, balancing three
glasses. Big drops stood out on them like sweat, and the ice cubes jingled as
he passed them around. Then the music twanged to a stop, and we heard Lenny’s
voice announcing the next number.
“Nothing like listening to
yourself talk. Say,” Lenny’s eye lingered on me, “Frankie vamoosed, you ought
to have somebody, I’ll call up one of the fellers.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “You
don’t have to do that.” I didn’t want to come straight out and ask for somebody
several sizes larger than Frankie.
Lenny looked relieved. “Just
so’s you don’t mind. I wouldn’t want to do wrong by a friend of Doreen’s.” He
gave Doreen a big white smile. “Would I, honeybun?”
He held out a hand to Doreen,
and without a word they both started to jitterbug, still hanging onto their
glasses.
I sat cross-legged on one of the
beds and tried to look devout and impassive like some businessmen I once saw
watching an Algerian belly dancer, but as soon as I leaned back against the
wall under the stuffed rabbit, the bed started to roll out into the room, so I
sat down on a bearskin on the floor and leaned back against the bed instead.
My drink was wet and depressing.
Each time I took another sip it tasted more and more like dead water. Around
the middle of the glass there was painted a pink lasso with yellow polka dots.
I drank to about an inch below the lasso and waited a bit, and when I went to
take another sip, the drink was up to lasso-level again.
Out of the air Lenny’s ghost
voice boomed, “Wye oh wye did I ever leave Wyoming?”
The two of them didn’t even stop
jitterbugging during the intervals. I felt myself shrinking to a small black
dot against all those red and white rugs and that pine paneling. I felt like a
hole in the ground.
There is something demoralizing
about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially
when you are the only extra person in the room.
It’s like watching Paris from an
express caboose heading in the opposite direction--every second the city gets
smaller and smaller, only you feel it’s really you getting smaller and smaller
and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that
excitement at about a million miles an hour.
Every so often Lenny and Doreen
would bang into each other and kiss and then swing back to take a long drink
and close in on each other again. I thought I might just lie down on the
bearskin and go to sleep until Doreen felt ready to go back to the hotel.
Then Lenny gave a terrible roar.
I sat up. Doreen was hanging on to Lenny’s left earlobe with her teeth.
“Leggo, you bitch!”
Lenny stooped, and Doreen went
flying up on to his shoulder, and her glass sailed out of her hand in a long,
wide arc and fetched up against the pine paneling with a silly tinkle. Lenny
was still roaring and whirling round so fast I couldn’t see Doreen’s face.
I noticed, in the routine way
you notice the color of somebody’s eyes, that Doreen’s breasts had popped out
of her dress and were swinging out slightly like full brown melons as she
circled belly-down on Lenny’s shoulder, thrashing her legs in the air and screeching,
and then they both started to laugh and slow up, and Lenny was trying to bite
Doreen’s hip through her skirt when I let myself out the door before anything
more could happen and managed to get downstairs by leaning with both hands on
the banister and half sliding the whole way.
I didn’t realize Lenny’s place
had been air-conditioned until I wavered out onto the pavement. The tropical,
stale heat the sidewalks had been sucking up all day hit me in the face like a
last insult. I didn’t know where in the world I was.
For a minute I entertained the
idea of taking a cab to the party after all, but decided against it because the
dance might be over by now, and I didn’t feel like ending up in an empty barn
of a ballroom strewn with confetti and cigarette butts and crumpled cocktail
napkins.
I walked carefully to the
nearest street corner, brushing the wall of the buildings on my left with the
tip of one finger to steady myself. I looked at the street sign. Then I took my
New York street map out of my pocketbook. I was exactly forty-three blocks by
five blocks away from my hotel.
Walking has never fazed me. I
just set out in the right direction, counting the blocks under my breath, and
when I walked into the lobby of the hotel I was perfectly sober and my feet
only slightly swollen, but that was my own fault because I hadn’t bothered to
wear any stockings.
The lobby was empty except for a
night clerk dozing in his lit booth among the key rings and the silent
telephones.
I slid into the self-service
elevator and pushed the button for my floor. The doors folded shut like a
noiseless accordion. Then my ears went funny, and I noticed a big, smudgy-eyed
Chinese woman staring idiotically into my face. It was only me, of course. I
was appalled to see how wrinkled and used up I looked.
There wasn’t a soul in the hall.
I let myself into my room. It was full of smoke. At first I thought the smoke
had materialized out of thin air as a sort of judgment, but then I remembered
it was Doreen’s smoke and pushed the button that opened the window vent. They
had the windows fixed so you couldn’t really open them and lean out, and for
some reason this made me furious.
By standing at the left side of
the window and laying my cheek to the woodwork, I could see downtown to where the
UN balanced itself in the dark, like a weird green Martian honeycomb. I could
see the moving red and white lights along the drive and the lights of the
bridges whose names I didn’t know.
The silence depressed me. It
wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.
I knew perfectly well the cars
were making a noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the
buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn’t
hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and
blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for the good it
did me.
The china-white bedside
telephone could have connected me up with things, but there it sat, dumb as a
death’s head. I tried to think of people I’d given my phone number to, so I
could make a list of all the possible calls I might be about to receive, but
all I could think of was that I’d given my phone number to Buddy Willard’s
mother so she could give it to a simultaneous interpreter she knew at the UN.
I let out a small, dry laugh.
I could imagine the sort of
simultaneous interpreter Mrs. Willard would introduce me to when all the time
she wanted me to marry Buddy, who was taking the cure for TB somewhere in upper
New York State. Buddy’s mother had even arranged for me to be given a job as a
waitress at the TB sanatorium that summer so Buddy wouldn’t be lonely. She and
Buddy couldn’t understand why I chose to go to New York City instead.
The mirror over my bureau seemed
slightly warped and much too silver. The face in it looked like the reflection
in a ball of dentist’s mercury. I thought of crawling in between the bed sheets
and trying to sleep, but that appealed to me about as much as stuffing a dirty,
scrawled-over letter into a fresh, clean envelope. I decided to take a hot
bath.