“Lane!” Franny greeted him pleasurably—and she was not one for emptying her face of expression. She threw her arms around him and kissed him. It was a station-platform kiss—spontaneous enough to begin with, but rather inhibited in the follow-through, and with somewhat of a forehead-bumping aspect. “Did you get my letter?” she asked, and added, almost in the same breath, “You look almost frozen, you poor man. Why didn’t you wait inside? Did you get my letter?”
“Which letter?” Lane said, picking up her suitcase. It was navy blue with white leather binding, like half a dozen other suitcases that had just been carried off the train.
“You didn’t get it? I mailed it Wednesday. Oh, God! I even took it down to the post—”
“Oh, that one. Yes. This all the bags you brought? What’s the book?”
Franny looked down at her left hand. She had a small pea-green clothbound book in it. “This? Oh, just something,” she said. She opened her handbag and stuffed the book into it, and followed Lane down the long platform toward the taxi stand. She put her arm through his, and did most of the talking, if not all of it. There was something, first, about a dress in her bag that had to be ironed. She said she’d bought a really darling little iron that looked like it went with a doll house, but had forgotten to bring it. She said she didn’t think she’d known more than three girls on the train—Martha Farrar, Tippie Tibbett, and Eleanor somebody, whom she’d met years ago, in her boarding-school days, at Exeter or someplace. Everybody else on the train, Franny said, looked very Smith, except for two absolutely Vassar types and one absolutely Bennington or Sarah Lawrence type. The Bennington-Sarah Lawrence type looked like she’d spent the whole train ride in the John, sculpting or painting or something, or as though she had a leotard on under her dress. Lane, walking rather too fast, said he was sorry he hadn’t been able to get her into Croft House—that was hopeless, of course—but that he’d got her into this very nice, cozy place. Small, but clean and all that. She’d like it, he said, and Franny immediately had a vision of a white clapboard rooming house. Three girls who didn’t know each other in one room. Whoever got there first would get the lumpy day bed to herself, and the other two would share a double bed with an absolutely fantastic mattress. “Lovely,” she said with enthusiasm. Sometimes it was hell to conceal her impatience over the male of the species’ general ineptness, and Lane’s in particular. It reminded her of a rainy night in New York, just after theatre, when Lane, with a suspicious excess of curb-side charity, had let that really horrible man in the dinner jacket take that taxi away from him. She hadn’t especially minded that—that is, God, it would be awful to have to be a man and have to get taxis in the rain—but she remembered Lane’s really horrible, hostile look at her as he reported back to the curb. Now, feeling oddly guilty as she thought about that and other things, she gave Lane’s arm a special little pressure of simulated affection. The two of them got into a cab. The navy-blue bag with the white leather binding went up front with the driver.
“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.”