Franny and Zooey (7 page)

    Enough. Act, Zachary Martin Glass, when and where you want to, since you feel you must, but do it with all your might. If you do anything at all beautiful on a stage, anything nameless and joy-making, anything above and beyond the call of theatrical ingenuity, S. and I will both rent tuxedos and rhinestone hats and solemnly come around to the stage door with bouquets of snapdragons. In any case, for what little it's worth, please count on my affection and support, at whatever distance.

    --BUDDY

    As always, my passes at omniscience are absurd, but you, of all people, should be polite to the part of me that comes out merely clever. Years ago, in my earliest and pastiest days as a would-be writer, I once read a new story aloud to S. and Boo Boo. When I was finished, Boo Boo said flatly (but looking over at Seymour) that the story was "too clever." S. shook his head, beaming away at me, and said cleverness was my permanent affliction, my wooden leg, and that it was in the worst possible taste to draw the group's attention to it. As one limping man to another, old Zooey, let's be courteous and kind to each other.

    Much love, B.

THE last, the under, page of the four-year-old letter was stained a sort of off-cordovan color, and it was torn in two places along the folds. Zooey, finished reading, treated it with some little care as he put the letter back into page-one order. He tapped the pages, to even them out, against his dry knees. He frowned. Then, mercurially, as though he'd read the letter, by God, for the last time in his life, he stuffed it like so much excelsior into its envelope. He placed the thick envelope on the side of the tub and began to play a little game with it. With one finger he tapped the loaded envelope back and forth along the tub edge, seeing, apparently, if he could keep it in motion without letting it fall into the tub water. After a good five minutes of this, he gave the envelope a faulty tap and had to reach out quickly and grab it. Which ended the game. Keeping the retrieved envelope in his hand, he sat lower, deeper, in the water, letting his knees submerge. He stared abstractedly for a minute or two at the tiled wall beyond the foot of the tub, then glanced at his cigarette on the soapcatch, picked it off, and took a couple of test drags on it, but it had gone out. He sat up again, very abruptly, with a great slosh of tub water, and dropped his dry left hand over the side of the tub. A typewritten manuscript was lying, face up, on the bathmat. He picked it up and brought it aboard, as it were. He stared at it briefly, then inserted his four-year-old letter in the middle pages, where the stapling in a manuscript is tightest. He then propped the manuscript against his now wet knees, an inch or so above the waterline, and began to turn the pages. When he came to page 9, he folded the manuscript, magazine-style, and began to read or to study.

    The role of "Rick" had been heavily underlined with a soft-lead pencil.

    TINA (morosely): Oh, darling, darling, darling. I'm not much good to you, am I?

    RICK: Don't say that. Don't ever say that, you hear me?

    TINA: It's true, though. I'm a jinx. I'm a horrible jinx. If it hadn't been for me, Scott Kincaid would have assigned you to the Buenos Aires office ages ago. I spoiled all that. (Goes over to window) I'm one of the little foxes that spoil the grapes. I feel like someone in a terribly sophisticated play. The funny part is, I'm not sophisticated. I'm not anything. I'm just me. (Turns) Oh, Rick, Rick, I'm scared. What's happened to us? I can't seem to find us anymore. I reach out and reach out and we're just not there. I'm frightened. I'm a frightened child. (Looks out window) I hate this rain. Sometimes I see me dead in it.

    RICK (quietly): My darling, isn't that a line from "A Farewell to Arms"?

    TINA (Turns, furious): Get out of here. Get out! Get out of here before I jump out of this window. Do you hear me?

    RICK (grabbing her): Now you listen to me. You beautiful little moron. You adorable, childish, self-dramatizing--

    Zooey's reading was suddenly interrupted by his mother's voice--importunate, quasi-constructive--addressing him from outside the bathroom door: "Zooey? Are you still in the tub?"

    "Yes, I'm still in the tub. Why?"

    "I want to come in for just a teeny minute. I have something for you."

    "I'm in the tub, for God's sake, Mother."

    "I'll just be a minute, for goodness' sake. Pull the shower curtain."

    Zooey took a parting look at the page he had been reading, then closed the manuscript and dropped it over the side of the tub. "Jesus Christ almighty," he said. "Sometimes I see me dead in the rain." A nylon shower curtain, scarlet, with a design of canary-yellow sharps, flats, and clefs on it, was bunched up at the foot of the tub, attached with plastic rings to an overhead chromium bar. Sitting forward, Zooey reached for it and shot it the length of the tub, closing himself off from view. "All right. God. Come in if you're coming in," he said. His voice had no conspicuous actor's mannerisms, but it was rather excessively vibrant; it "carried" implacably when he had no interest in controlling it. Years earlier, as a child panelist on "It's a Wise Child," he had been advised repeatedly to keep his distance from the microphone.

    The door opened, and Mrs. Glass, a medium-stout woman in a hairnet, sidled into the bathroom. Her age, under any circumstance, was fiercely indeterminate, but never more so than when she was wearing a hairnet. Her entrances into rooms were usually verbal as well as physical. "I don't know how you can stay in the tub the way you do." She closed the door behind her instantly, as someone does who has been waging a long, long war on behalf of her progeny against post-bath drafts. "It isn't even healthy," she said.

    "Do you know how long you've been in that tub? Exactly forty-five--"

    "Don't tell me! Just don't tell me, Bessie." "What do you mean, don't tell you?" "Just what I said. Leave me the goddam illusion you haven't been out there counting the minutes I've--"

    "Nobody's been counting any minutes, young man," Mrs. Glass said. She was already very busy. She had brought into the bathroom a small, oblong package wrapped in white paper and tied with gold tinsel. It appeared to contain an object roughly the size of the Hope diamond or an irrigation attachment. Mrs. Glass narrowed her eyes at it and picked at the tinsel with her fingers. When the knot didn't give, she applied her teeth to it.

    She was wearing her usual at-home vesture-- what her son Buddy (who was a writer, and consequently, as Kafka, no less, has told us, not a nice man) called her pre-notification-of-death uniform. It consisted mostly of a hoary midnight-blue Japanese kimono. She almost invariably wore it throughout the apartment during the day. With its many occultish-looking folds, it also served as the repository for the paraphernalia of a very heavy cigarette smoker and an amateur handyman; two oversized pockets had been added at the hips, and they usually contained two or three packs of cigarettes, several match folders, a screwdriver, a claw-end hammer, a Boy Scout knife that had once belonged to one of her sons, and an enamel faucet handle or two, plus an assortment of screws, nails, hinges, and ball-bearing casters--all of which tended to make Mrs. Glass chink faintly as she moved about in her large apartment. For ten years or more, both of her daughters had often, if impo-tently, conspired to throw out this veteran kimono. (Her married daughter, Boo Boo, had intimated that it might have to be given a coup de grace with a blunt instrument before it was laid away in a wastebasket.) However Oriental the wrapper had originally been designed to look, it didn't detract an iota from the single, impactful impression that Mrs. Glass, chez elle, made on a certain type of observer. The Glasses lived in an old but, categorically, not unfashionable apartment house in the East Seventies, where possibly two-thirds of the more mature women tenants owned fur coats and, on leaving the building on a bright weekday morning, might at least conceivably be found, a half hour or so later, getting in or out of one of the elevators at Lord & Taylor's or Saks or Bonwit Teller's. In this distinctly Manhattanesque locale, Mrs. Glass was (from an undeniably hoyden point of view) a rather refreshing eyesore. She looked, first, as if she never, never left the building at all, but that if she did, she would be wearing a dark shawl and she would be going in the general direction of O'Connell Street, there to claim the body of one of her half-Irish, half-Jewish sons, who, through some clerical error, had just been shot dead by the Black and Tans.

    Zooey's voice suddenly and suspiciously spoke up: "Mother? What in Christ's name are you doing out there?"

    Mrs. Glass had undressed the package and now stood reading the fine print on the back of a carton of toothpaste. "Just kindly button that lip of yours," she said, rather absently. She went over to the medicine cabinet. It was stationed above the washbowl, against the wall. She opened its mirror-faced door and surveyed the congested shelves with the eye--or, rather, the masterly squint--of a dedicated medicine-cabinet gardener. Before her, in overly luxuriant rows, was a host, so to speak, of golden pharmaceuticals, plus a few technically less indigenous whatnots. The shelves bore iodine, Mercurochrome, vitamin capsules, dental floss, aspirin, Anacin, Bufferin, Argyrol, Musterole, Ex-Lax, Milk of Magnesia, Sal Hepatica, Aspergum, two Gillette razors, one Schick Injector razor, two tubes of shaving cream, a bent and somewhat torn snapshot of a fat black-and-white cat asleep on a porch railing, three combs, two hairbrushes, a bottle of Wildroot hair ointment, a bottle of Fitch Dandruff Remover, a small, unlabelled box of glycerine suppositories, Vicks Nose Drops, Vicks VapoRub, six bars of castile soap, the stubs of three tickets to a 1946 musical comedy ("Call Me Mister"), a tube of depilatory cream, a box of Kleenex, two seashells, an assortment of used-looking emery boards, two jars of cleansing cream, three pairs o£ scissors, a nail file, an unclouded blue marble (known to marble shooters, at least in the twenties, as a "purey"), a cream for contracting enlarged pores, a pair of tweezers, the strapless chassis of a girl's or woman's gold wristwatch, a box of bicarbonate of soda, a girl's boarding-school class ring with a chipped onyx stone, a bottle of Stopette--and, inconceivably or no, quite a good deal more. Mrs. Glass briskly reached up and took down an object from the bottom shelf and dropped it, with a muffled, tinny bang, into the wastebasket. "I'm putting some of that new toothpaste they're all raving about in here for you," she announced, without turning around, and made good her word. "I want you to stop using that crazy powder. It's going to take all the lovely enamel off your teeth. You have lovely teeth. The least you can do is take proper--"

    "Who said so?" A sound of agitated tub water came from behind the shower curtain. "Who the hell said it's going to take all the lovely enamel off my teeth?"

    "I did." Mrs. Glass gave her garden a final critical glance. "Just please use it." She nudged an unopened box of Sal Hepatica a little with the trowel of her extended fingers to align it with the other sempervirents in its row, and then closed the cabinet door. She turned on the cold-water tap. "I'd like to know who washes their hands and then doesn't clean the bowl up after them," she said grimly. "This is supposed to be a family of all adults." She increased the pressure of the water and cleansed the bowl briefly but thoroughly with one hand. "I don't suppose you've spoken to your little sister yet," she said, and turned to look at the shower curtain.

    "No, I have not spoken to my little sister yet. How 'bout getting the hell out of here now?"

    "Why haven't you?" Mrs. Glass demanded. "I don't think that's nice, Zooey. I don't think that's nice at all. I asked you particularly to please go see if there's anything--"

    "In the first place, Bessie, I just got up about an hour ago. In the second place, I talked to her for two solid hours last night, and I don't think she frankly wants to talk to any goddam one of us today. And in the third place, if you don't get out of this bathroom I'm going to set fire to this ugly goddam curtain. I mean it, Bessie."

    Somewhere in the middle of these three illustrative points, Mrs. Glass had left off listening and sat down. "Sometimes I could almost murder Buddy for not having a phone," she said. "It's so unnecessary. How can a grown man live like that--no phone, no anything? No one has any desire to invade his privacy, if that's what he wants, but I certainly don't think it's necessary to live like a hermit." She stirred irritably, and crossed her legs. "It isn't even safe, for heaven's sake! Suppose he broke his leg or something like that. Way off in the woods like that. I worry about it all the time."

    "You do, eh? Which do you worry about? His breaking a leg or his not having a phone when you want him to?"

    "I worry about both, young man, for your information."

    "Well... don't. Don't waste your time. You're so stupid, Bessie. Why are you so stupid? You know Buddy, for God's sake. If he were twenty miles in the woods, with both legs broken and a goddam arrow sticking out of his back, he'd crawl back to his cave just to make certain nobody sneaked in to try on his galoshes while he was out." A short, pleasurable, if somewhat ghoulish, guffaw sounded behind the curtain. "Take my word for it. He cares too much about his goddam privacy to die in any woods."

    "Nobody said anything about dying," Mrs. Glass said. She gave her hairnet a minor and needless adjustment. "I've been trying the whole entire morning to get those people that live down the road from him on the phone. They don't even answer. It's infuriating not to be able to get him. How many times I've begged him to take that crazy phone out of his and Seymour's old room. It isn't even normal. When something really comes up and he needs one-- It's infuriating. I tried twice last night, and about four times this--"