The Uncollected J. D. Salinger - The Uncollected J. D. Salinger Part 24
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The Uncollected J. D. Salinger Part 24

Corinne neither touched him nor even walked directly toward him, but she said his name. Without perceptibly starting, Ford turned around in the wooden restaurant chair he was sitting on and looked at his visitor. He looked confused.

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 breathe.

"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 this 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 asked Ford why he hadn't written. She accused him of being sick and unhappy. 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 unfractuously 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 her eyes away from him.

"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 looks exactly like some guy 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 suggested. 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.

The Long Debut of Lois Taggett.

by J.D. Salinger.

Lois Taggett was graduated from Miss Hascomb's School, standing twenty-sixth in a class of fifty-eight, and the following autumn her parents thought it was time for her to come out, charge out, into what they called Society. So they gave her a five-figure, la-de-la Hotel Pierre affair, and save for a few horrible colds and Fred-hasn't-been-well-latelys, most of the preferred trade attended. Lois wore a white dress, and orchid corsage, and a rather lovely, awkward smile. The elderly gentlemen guests said, "She's a Taggett, all right"; the elderly ladies said, "She's a very sweet child"; the young ladies said, "Hey. Look at Lois. Not bad. What'd she do to her hair?"; and the young men said, "Where's the liquor?"

That winter Lois did her best to swish around Manhattan with the most photogenic of the young men who drank scotch-and-sodas in the God-and-Walter Winchell section of the Stork Club. She didn't do badly. She had a good figure, dressed expensively and in good taste, and was considered Intelligent. That was the first season when Intelligent was the thing to be.

In the spring, Lois' Uncle Roger agreed to give her a job as receptionist in one of his offices. it was the first big year for debutantes to Do Something. Sally Walker was singing nightly at Alberti's Club; Phyll Mercer was designing clothes or something; Allie Tumbleston was getting that screen test. So Lois took the job as receptionist in Uncle Roger's downtown office. She worked for exactly eleven days, with three afternoons off, when she learned suddenly that Ellie Podds, Vera Gallishaw, and Cookie Benson were going to take a cruise to Rio. The news reached Lois on a Thursday evening. Everybody said it was a perfect riot down in Rio. Lois didn't go to work the following morning. She decided instead, while she sat on the floor painting her toenails red, that most of the men who came into Uncle Roger's downtown office were a bunch of dopes.

Lois sailed with the girls, returning to Manhattan early in the fall-still single, six pounds heavier, and off speaking terms with Ellie Podds. the remainder of the year Lois took courses at Columbia, three of them entitled Dutch and Flemish Painters, Technique of the Modern Novel, and Everyday Spanish.

Come springtime again and air-conditioning at the Stork Club, Lois fell in love. He was a tall press agent named Bill Tedderton, with a deep, dirty voice. He certainly wasn't anything to bring home to Mr. and Mrs. Taggett, but Lois figured he certainly was something to bring home. She fell hard, and Bill, who had been around plenty since he'd left Kansas City, trained himself to look deep into Lois' eyes to see the door to the family vault.

Lois became Mrs. Tedderton, and the Taggetts didn't do very much about it. It wasn't fashionable any longer to make a row if your daughter preferred the iceman to that nice Astorbilt boy. Everybody knew, of course, that press agents were icemen. Same thing.

Lois and Bill took an apartment in Sutton Place. It was a three-room, kitchenette job, and the closets were big enough to hold Lois' dresses and Bill's wide-shouldered suits.

When her friends asked her if she were happy, Lois replied, "Madly." But she wasn't quite sure if she were madly happy. Bill had the most gorgeous rack of ties; wore such luxurious broadcloth shirts; was so marvelous, so masterful, when he spoke to people over the telephone; had such a fascinating way of hanging up his trousers. And he was so sweet about-well, you know-everything . But. . . .

Then suddenly Lois knew for sure that she was Madly Happy, because one day soon after they were married, Bill fell in love with Lois. Getting up to go to work one morning, he looked over at the other bed and saw Lois as he'd never seen her before. Her face was jammed up against the pillow, puffy, sleep-distorted, lip-dry. She never looked worse in her life-and at that instant Bill fell in love with her. He was used to women who didn't let him get a good look at their morning faces. He stared at Lois for a long moment, thought about the way she looked as he rode down in the elevator; then in the subway he remembered one of the crazy questions Lois had asked the other night. Bill had to laugh right out loud in the subway.

When he got home that night, Lois was sitting in the morris chair. Her feet, in red mules, were tucked underneath her. She was just sitting there filing her nails and listening to Sancho's rhumba music over the radio. Seeing her, Bill was never so happy in his life. He wanted to jump in the air. He wanted to grit his teeth, then let out a mad, treble note of ecstasy. But he didn't dare. He would have had trouble accounting for it. He couldn't say to Lois, "Lois. I love you for the first time. I used to think you were just a nice little drip. I married you for your money, but now I don't care about it. You're my girl. My sweetheart. My wife. My baby. Oh, Jesus, I'm happy." Of course he couldn't say that to her; so he just walked over where she sat, very casually. He bent down , kissed her, gently pulled her to her feet. Lois said, "Hey! What's goin' on?" And Bill made her rhumba with him around the room.

For fifteen days Following Bill's discovery, Lois couldn't even stand at the glove counter at Saks' without whistling Begin the Beguine between her teeth. She began to like all of her friends. She had a smile for conductors on Fifth Avenue busses; was sorry she didn't have any small change with her when she handed them dollar bills. She took walks in the zoo. She spoke to her mother over the telephone every day. Mother became a Grand Person. Father, Lois noticed, worked too hard. They should both take a vacation. Or at least come to dinner Friday night, and no arguments, now.

Sixteen days after Bill fell in love with Lois, something terrible happened. Late on that sixteenth night Bill was sitting in the morris chair, and Lois was sitting on his lap, her head back on his shoulder. From the radio pealed the sweet blare of Chick West's orchestra. Chick himself, with a mute in his horn, was taking the refrain of that swell oldie, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.

"Oh, darling," Lois breathed.

"Baby," answered Bill softly.

They came out of a clinch. Lois replaced her head on Bill's big shoulder. Bill picked up his Cigarette from the ash tray. But instead of dragging on it, he took it in his fingers, as though it were a pencil, and with it made tiny circles in the air just over the back of Lois' hand.

"Better not," said Lois, with mock warning. "Burny, burny."

But Bill, as though he hadn't heard, deliberately, yet almost idly, did what he had to do. Lois screamed horribly, wrenched herself to her feet, and ran crazily out of the room.