Read Online Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger - Free Book Online Page A

and began to turn the pages. When he came to page 9, he folded the manuscript, magazine-style, and began to read or to study.
     
        The role of "Rick" had been heavily underlined with a soft-lead pencil.
     
        TINA (morosely): Oh, darling, darling, darling. I'm not much good to you, am I?
     
        RICK: Don't say that. Don't ever say that, you hear me?
     
        TINA: It's true, though. I'm a jinx. I'm a horrible jinx. If it hadn't been for me, Scott Kincaid would have assigned you to the Buenos Aires office ages ago. I spoiled all that. (Goes over to window) I'm one of the little foxes that spoil the grapes. I feel like someone in a terribly sophisticated play. The funny part is, I'm not sophisticated. I'm not anything. I'm just me. (Turns) Oh, Rick, Rick, I'm scared. What's happened to us? I can't seem to find us anymore. I reach out and reach out and we're just not there. I'm frightened. I'm a frightened child. (Looks out window) I hate this rain. Sometimes I see me dead in it.
     
        RICK (quietly): My darling, isn't that a line from "A Farewell to Arms"?
     
        TINA (Turns, furious): Get out of here. Get out! Get out of here before I jump out of this window. Do you hear me?
     
        RICK (grabbing her): Now you listen to me. You beautiful little moron. You adorable, childish, self-dramatizing--
     
        Zooey's reading was suddenly interrupted by his mother's voice--importunate, quasi-constructive--addressing him from outside the bathroom door: "Zooey? Are you still in the tub?"
     
        "Yes, I'm still in the tub. Why?"
     
        "I want to come in for just a teeny minute. I have something for you."
     
        "I'm in the tub, for God's sake, Mother."
     
        "I'll just be a minute, for goodness' sake. Pull the shower curtain."
     
        Zooey took a parting look at the page he had been reading, then closed the manuscript and dropped it over the side of the tub. "Jesus Christ almighty," he said. "Sometimes I see me dead in the rain." A nylon shower curtain, scarlet, with a design of canary-yellow sharps, flats, and clefs on it, was bunched up at the foot of the tub, attached with plastic rings to an overhead chromium bar. Sitting forward, Zooey reached for it and shot it the length of the tub, closing himself off from view. "All right. God. Come in if you're coming in," he said. His voice had no conspicuous actor's mannerisms, but it was rather excessively vibrant; it "carried" implacably when he had no interest in controlling it. Years earlier, as a child panelist on "It's a Wise Child," he had been advised repeatedly to keep his distance from the microphone.
     
        The door opened, and Mrs. Glass, a medium-stout woman in a hairnet, sidled into the bathroom. Her age, under any circumstance, was fiercely indeterminate, but never more so than when she was wearing a hairnet. Her entrances into rooms were usually verbal as well as physical. "I don't know how you can stay in the tub the way you do." She closed the door behind her instantly, as someone does who has been waging a long, long war on behalf of her progeny against post-bath drafts. "It isn't even healthy," she said.
     
        "Do you know how long you've been in that tub? Exactly forty-five--"
     
        "Don't tell me! Just don't tell me, Bessie." "What do you mean, don't tell you?" "Just what I said. Leave me the goddam illusion you haven't been out there counting the minutes I've--"
     
        "Nobody's been counting any minutes, young man," Mrs. Glass said. She was already very busy. She had brought into the bathroom a small, oblong package wrapped in white paper and tied with gold tinsel. It appeared to contain an object roughly the size of the Hope diamond or an irrigation attachment. Mrs. Glass narrowed her eyes at it and picked at the tinsel with her fingers. When the knot didn't give, she applied her teeth to it.
     
        She was wearing her usual at-home vesture-- what her son