"We'll drop your bag and stuff where you're staying--just chuck them in the door--and then we'll go get some lunch," Lane said. "I'm starved." He leaned forward and gave an address to the driver.
"Oh, it's lovely to see you!" Franny said as the cab moved off. "I've missed you." The words were no sooner out than she realized that she didn't mean them at all. Again with guilt, she took Lane's hand and tightly, warmly laced fingers with him.
ABOUT an hour later, the two were sitting at a comparatively isolated table in a restaurant called Sickler's, downtown, a highly favored place among, chiefly, the intellectual fringe of students at the college--the same students, more or less, who, had they been Yale or Harvard men, might rather too casually have steered their dates away from Mory's or Cronin's. Sickler's, it might be said, was the only restaurant in town where the steaks weren't "that thick"--thumb and index finger held an inch apart. Sickler's was Snails. Sickler's was where a student and his date either both ordered salad or, usually, neither of them did, because of the garlic seasoning. Franny and Lane were both having Martinis. When the drinks had first been served to them, ten or fifteen minutes earlier,
Lane had sampled his, then sat back and briefly looked around the room with an almost palpable sense of well-being at finding himself (he must have been sure no one could dispute) in the right place with an unimpeachably right-looking girl--a girl who was not only extraordinarily pretty but, so much the better, not too categorically cashmere sweater and flannel skirt. Franny had seen this momentary little exposure, and had taken it in for what it was, neither more nor less. But by some old, standing arrangement with her psyche, she elected to feel guilty for having seen it, caught it, and sentenced herself to listen to Lane's ensuing conversation with a special semblance of absorption.
Lane was speaking now as someone does who has been monopolizing conversation for a good quarter of an hour or so and who believes he has just hit a stride where his voice can do absolutely no wrong. "I mean, to put it crudely," he was saying, "the thing you could say he lacks is testicularity. Know what I mean?" He was slouched rhetorically forward, toward Franny, his receptive audience, a supporting forearm on either side of his Martini.
"Lacks what?" Franny said. She had had to clear her throat before speaking, it had been so long since she had said anything at all.
Lane hesitated. "Masculinity," he said.
"I heard you the first time."
"Anyway, that was the motif of the thing, so to speak--what I was trying to bring out in a fairly subtle way," Lane said, very closely following the trend of his own conversation. "I mean, God. 1 honestly thought it was going to go over like a goddam lead balloon, and when I got it back with this goddam 'A' on it in letters about six feet high, I swear I nearly keeled over."
Franny again cleared her throat. Apparently her self-imposed sentence of unadulterated good-listenership had been fully served. "Why?" she asked.
Lane looked faintly interrupted. "Why what?"
"Why'd you think it was going to go over like a lead balloon?"
"I just told you. I just got through saying. This guy Brughman is a big Flaubert man. Or at least I thought he was."
"Oh," Franny said. She smiled. She sipped her Martini. "This is marvellous," she said, looking at the glass. "I'm so glad it's not about twenty to one. I hate it when they're absolutely all gin."
Lane nodded. "Anyway, I think I've got the goddam paper in my room. If we get a chance over the weekend, I'll read it to you."
"Marvellous. I'd love to hear it."
Lane nodded again. "I mean I didn't say anything too goddam world-shaking or anything like that." He shifted his position in the chair. "But--I don't know--I think the emphasis I put on why he was so neurotically attracted to the mot juste wasn't too bad. I mean in the light of what we know today. Not just psychoanalysis and all that crap, but certainly to a certain extent. You know what I mean. I'm no Freudian man or anything like that, but certain things you can't just pass over as capital-F Freudian and let them go at that. I mean to a certain extent I think I was perfectly justified to point out that none of the really good boys--Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Shakespeare, for Chrissake--were such goddam word-squeezers. They just wrote. Know what I mean?" Lane looked at Franny somewhat expectantly. She seemed to him to have been listening with extra-special intentness.
"You going to eat your olive, or what?"
Lane gave his Martini glass a brief glance, then looked back at Franny. "No," he said coldly. "You want it?"
"If you don't," Franny said. She knew from Lane's expression that she had asked the wrong question. What was worse, she suddenly didn't want the olive at all and wondered why she had even asked for it. There was nothing to do, though, when Lane extended his Martini glass to her but to accept the olive and consume it with apparent relish. She then took a cigarette from Lane's pack on the table, and he lit it for her and one for himself.
After the interruption of the olive, a short silence came over the table. When Lane broke it, it was because he was not one to keep a punch line to himself for any length of time. "This guy Brughman thinks I ought to publish the goddam paper somewhere," he said abruptly. "I don't know, though." Then, as though he had suddenly become exhausted--or, rather, depleted by the demands made on him by a world greedy for the fruit of his intellect--he began to massage the side of his face with the flat of his hand, removing, with unconscious crassness, a bit of sleep from one eye. "I mean critical essays on Flaubert and those boys are a goddam dime a dozen." He reflected, looking a trifle morose. "As a matter of fact, I don't think there've been any really incisive jobs done on him in the last--"
"You're talking like a section man. But exactly."
"I beg your pardon?" Lane said with measured quietness.
"You're talking exactly like a section man. I'm sorry, but you are. You really are."
"I am? How does a section man talk, may I ask?"
Franny saw that he was irritated, and to what extent, but, for the moment, with equal parts of self-disapproval and malice, she felt like speaking her mind. "Well, I don't
know what they are around here, but where I come from, a section man's a person that takes over a class when the professor isn't there or is busy having a nervous breakdown or is at the dentist or something. He's usually a graduate student or something. Anyway, if it's a course in Russian Literature, say, he comes in, in his little button-down-collar shirt and striped tie, and starts knocking Turgenev for about a half hour. Then, when he's finished, when he's completely ruined Turgenev for you, he starts talking about Stendhal or somebody he wrote his thesis for his M.A. on. Where I go, the English Department has about ten little section men running around ruining things for people, and they're all so brilliant they can hardly open their mouths--pardon the contradiction. I mean if you get into an argument with them, all they do is get this terribly benign expression on their--"
"You've got a goddam bug today--you know that? What the hell's the matter with you anyway?"
Franny quickly tipped her cigarette ash, then brought the ashtray an inch closer to her side of the table. "I'm sorry. I'm awful," she said. "I've just felt so destructive all week. It's awful, I'm horrible."
"Your letter didn't sound so goddam destructive."