The handpiece lay detached from its catch, waiting for Franny. It looked almost as dependent as a human being for some acknowledgment of its existence. To get to it, to redeem it, Franny had to shuffle across the floor through a quantity of newspapers and sidestep an empty paint bucket. When she did reach it, she didn’t pick it up but merely sat down beside it on the bed, looked at it, looked away from it, and pushed back her hair. The night table that ordinarily stood alongside the bed had been moved close enough to it so that Franny could reach it without quite standing up. She put her hand under a particularly soiled-looking piece of canvas covering it and passed the hand back and forth till she found what she was looking for—a porcelain cigarette box and a box of matches in a copper holder. She lit a cigarette, then gave the phone another, long, exceedingly worried look. With the exception of her late brother Seymour, it should be noted, all her brothers had overly vibrant, not to say sinewy, voices on the telephone. At this hour, it was very possible that Franny felt deeply hesitant about taking a chance on just the timbre, let alone the verbal content, of any of her brothers’ voices on the phone. However, she puffed nervously on her cigarette and, rather bravely, picked up the phone. “Hello. Buddy?” she said.
“Hello, sweetheart. How are you—are you all right?”
“I’m fine. How are you? You sound as though you have a cold.” Then, when there was no immediate response: “I suppose Bessie’s been briefing you by the hour.”
“Well—after a fashion. Yes and no. You know. Are you all right, sweetheart?”
“I’m fine. You sound funny, though. Either you have a terrible cold or this is a terrible connection. Where are you, anyway?”
“Where am I? I’m right in my element, Flopsy. I’m in a little haunted house down the road. Never mind. Just talk to me.”
Franny unplacidly crossed her legs. “I don’t know exactly what you’d like to talk about,” she said. “What all’d Bessie tell you, I mean?”
There was a most characteristically Buddylike pause at the other end. It was exactly the kind of pause—just a trifle rich with seniority of years—that had often tried the patience of both Franny and the virtuoso at the other end of the phone when they were small children. “Well, I’m not terribly sure what all she told me, sweetheart. Past a certain point, it’s a little rude to go on listening to Bessie on the phone. I heard about the cheeseburger diet, you can be sure. And, of course, the Pilgrim books. Then I think I just sat with the phone at my ear, not really listening. You know.”
“Oh,” Franny said. She switched her cigarette over to her telephone hand and, with her free hand, reached again under the canvas cover on the night table and found a tiny ceramic ashtray, which she placed beside her on the bed. “You sound funny,” she said. “Do you have a cold, or what?”
“I feel wonderful, sweetheart. I’m sitting here talking to you and I feel wonderful. It’s a joy to hear your voice. I can’t tell you.”
Franny once again pushed back her hair with one hand. She didn’t say anything.
“Flopsy? Can you think of anything Bessie may have missed? You feel like talking at all?”
With her fingers, Franny slightly altered the position of the tiny ashtray beside her on the bed. “Well,” she said, “I’m a little talked out, to be honest with you. Zooey’s been at me all morning.”
“Zooey? How is he?”
“How is he? He’s fine. He’s just tiptop. I could just murder him, that’s all.”
“Murder him? Why? Why, sweetheart? Why could you murder our Zooey?”
“Why? Because I just could, that’s all! He’s completely destructive. I’ve never met anyone so completely destructive in my life! It’s just so unnecessary! One minute he launches this all-out attack on the Jesus Prayer—which I happen to be interested in—making you think you’re some kind of neurotic nitwit for even being interested in it. And about two minutes later he starts raving to you about how Jesus is the only person in the world he’s ever had any respect for—such a marvellous mind, and all that. He’s just so erratic. I mean he goes around and around in such horrible circles.”
“Tell about it. Tell about the horrible circles.”
Here Franny made the mistake of giving a little exhalation of impatience—she had just inhaled cigarette smoke. She coughed. “Tell about it! It would just take me all day, that’s all!” She put a hand to her throat, and waited for the wrong-passage discomfort to pass. “He’s just a monster,” she said. “He is! Not really a monster but—I don’t know. He’s so bitter about things. He’s bitter about religion. He’s bitter about television. He’s bitter about you and Seymour—he keeps saying you both made freaks out of us. I don’t know. He jumps from one—”
“Why freaks? I know he thinks that. Or thinks he thinks it. But did he say why? What’s his definition of a freak? He say, sweetheart?”
Just here, Franny, in apparent despair at the naïveté of the question, struck her forehead with her hand. Something she very probably hadn’t done in five or six years—when, for example, halfway home on the Lexington Avenue bus, she discovered she had left her scarf back at the movies. “What’s his definition?” she said. “He has about forty definitions for everything! If I sound slightly unhinged, that’s the reason why. One minute—like last night—he says we’re freaks because we were brought up to have only one set of standards. Ten minutes later he says he’s a freak because he never wants to meet anybody for a drink. The only time—”
“Never wants to what?”
“Meet anybody for a drink. Oh, he had to go out last night and meet this television writer for a drink downtown, in the Village and all. That’s what started it. He says the only people he ever really wants to meet for a drink somewhere are all either dead or unavailable. He says he never even wants to have lunch with anybody, even, unless he thinks there’s a good chance it’s going to turn out to be Jesus, the person—or the Buddha, or Hui-neng, or Shankaracharya, or somebody like that. You know.” Franny suddenly put out her cigarette in the tiny ashtray—with some awkwardness, not having her second hand free to brace the ashtray. “You know what else he said to me?” she said. “You know what he swore up and down to me? He told me last night he once had a glass of ginger ale with Jesus in the kitchen when he was eight years old. Are you listening?”
“I’m listening, I’m listening . . . sweetheart.”
“He said he was—this is exactly what he said—he said he was sitting at the table in the kitchen, all by himself, drinking a glass of ginger ale and eating saltines and reading ‘Dombey and Son,’ and all of a sudden Jesus sat down in the other chair and asked if he could have a small glass of ginger ale. A small glass, mind you—that’s exactly what he said. I mean he says things like that, and yet he thinks he’s perfectly qualified to give me a lot of advice and stuff! That’s what makes me so mad! I could just spit! I could I It’s like being in a lunatic asylum and having another patient all dressed up as a doctor come over to you and start taking your pulse or something. . . . It’s just awful. He talks and talks and talks. And if he isn’t talking, he’s smoking his smelly cigars all over the house. I’m so sick of the smell of cigar smoke I could just roll over and die.”
“The cigars are ballast, sweetheart. Sheer ballast. If he didn’t have a cigar to hold on to, his feet would leave the ground. We’d never see our Zooey again.”
There were several experienced verbal stunt pilots in the Glass family, but this last little remark perhaps Zooey alone was coordinated well enough to bring in safely over a telephone. Or so this narrator suggests. And Franny may have felt so, too. In any case, she suddenly knew that it was Zooey at the other end of the phone. She got up, slowly, from the edge of the bed. “All right, Zooey,” she said, “All right.”
Not quite immediately: “Beg pardon?”
“I said, all right, Zooey.”
“Zooey? What is this? . . . Franny? You there?”