Franny nodded solemnly. She was looking at a little warm blotch of sunshine, about the size of a poker chip, on the tablecloth. "I had to strain to write it," she said.
Lane started to say something to that, but the waiter was suddenly there to take away the empty Martini glasses. "You want another one?" Lane asked Franny.
He didn't get an answer. Franny was staring at the little blotch of sunshine with a special intensity, as if she were considering lying down in it.
"Franny," Lane said patiently, for the waiter's benefit. "Would you like another Martini, or what?"
She looked up. "I'm sorry." She looked at the removed, empty glasses in the waiter's hand. "No. Yes. I don't know."
Lane gave a laugh, looking at the waiter. "Which is it?" he said.
"Yes, please." She looked more alert.
The waiter left. Lane watched him leave the room, then looked back at Franny. She was shaping her cigarette ash on the side of the fresh ashtray the waiter had brought, her mouth not quite closed. Lane watched her for a moment with mounting irritation. Quite probably, he resented and feared any signs of detachment in a girl he was seriously dating. In any case, he surely was concerned over the possibility that this bug Franny had might bitch up the whole weekend. He suddenly leaned forward, putting his arms on the table, as though to get this thing ironed out, by God, but Franny spoke up before he did. "I'm lousy today," she said. "I'm just way off today." She found herself looking at Lane as if he were a stranger, or a poster advertising a brand of linoleum, across the aisle of a subway car. Again she felt the trickle of disloyalty and guilt, which seemed to be the order of the day, and reacted to it by reaching over to cover Lane's hand with her own. She withdrew her hand almost immediately and used it to pick her cigarette out of the ashtray. "I'll snap out of this in a minute," she said. "I absolutely promise." She smiled at Lane--in a sense, genuinely--and at that moment a smile in return might at least have mitigated to some small extent certain events that were to follow, but Lane was busy affecting a brand of detachment of his own, and chose not to smile back. Franny dragged on her cigarette. "If it weren't so late and everything," she said, "and if I hadn't decided like a fool to go out for honors, I think I'd drop English. I don't know." She tipped her ashes. "I'm just so sick of pedants and conceited little tearer-downers I could scream." She looked at Lane. "I'm sorry. I'll stop. I give you my word... It's just that if I'd had any guts at all, I wouldn't have gone back to college at all this year. I don't know. I mean it's all the most incredible farce."
"Brilliant. That's really brilliant."
Franny took the sarcasm as her due. "I'm sorry," she said.
"Stop saying you're sorry--do you mind? I don't suppose it's occurred to you that you're making one helluva sweeping generalization. If all English Department people were such great little tearer-downers, it would be an altogether different--"
Franny interrupted him, but almost inau-dibly. She was looking over his charcoal flannel shoulder at some abstraction across the dining room.
"What?" Lane asked.
"I said I know. You're right. I'm just off, that's all. Don't pay any attention to me."
But Lane couldn't let a controversy drop until it had been resolved in his favor. "I mean, hell," he said. "There are incompetent people in all walks of life. I mean that's basic. Let's drop the goddam section men for a minute." He looked at Franny. "You listening to me, or what?"
"Yes."
"You've got two of the best men in the country in your goddam English Department. Manlius. Esposito. God, I wish we had them here. At least, they're poets, for Chrissake."
"They're not," Franny said. "That's partly what's so awful. I mean they're not real poets. They're just people that write poems that get published and anthologized all over the place, but they're not poets." She stopped, selfconsciously, and put out her cigarette. For several minutes now, she had seemed to be losing color in her face. Suddenly, even her lipstick seemed a shade or two lighter, as though she had just blotted it with a leaf of Kleenex. "Let's not talk about it," she said, almost listlessly, squashing her cigarette stub in the ashtray. "I'm way off. I'll just ruin the whole weekend. Maybe there's a trapdoor under my chair, and I'll just disappear."
The waiter came forward very briefly, and left a second Martini in front of each of them.
Lane put his fingers--which were slender and long, and usually not far out of sight--around the stem of his glass. "You're not ruining anything," he said quietly. "I'm just interested in finding out what the hell goes. I mean do you have to be a goddam bohemian type, or dead, for Chrissake, to be a real poet? What do you want--some bastard with wavy hair?"
"No. Can't we let it go? Please. I'm feeling absolutely lousy, and I'm getting a terrible--"
"I'd be very happy to drop the whole subject--I'd be delighted. Just tell me first what a real poet is, if you don't mind. I'd appreciate it. I really would."
There was a faint glisten of perspiration high on Franny's forehead. It might only have meant that the room was too warm, or that her stomach was upset, or that the Martinis were too potent; in any case, Lane didn't seem to notice it.
"I don't know what a real poet is. I wish you'd stop it, Lane. I'm serious. I'm feeling very peculiar and funny, and I can't--"
"All right, all right--O.K. Relax," Lane said. "I was only trying--"
"I know this much, is all," Franny said. "If you're a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean you're supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything. The ones you're talking about don't leave a single, solitary thing beautiful. All that maybe the slightly better ones do is sort of get inside your head and leave something there, but just because they do, just because they know how to leave something, it doesn't have to be a poem, for heaven's sake. It may just be some kind of terribly fascinating, syntaxy droppings--excuse the expression. Like Manlius and Esposito and all those poor men."
Lane took time to light a cigarette for himself before he said anything. Then: "I thought you liked Manlius. As a matter of fact, about a month ago, if I remember correctly, you said he was darling, and that you--"
"I do like him. I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect... Would you excuse me for just a minute?" Franny was suddenly on her feet, with her handbag in her hand. She was very pale.
Lane got up, pushing back his chair, his mouth somewhat open. "What's the matter?" he asked. "You feel all right? Anything wrong, or what?"
"I'll be back in just a second."