The Bell Jar Read Online Free PDF

drops stood out on them like sweat, and the ice cubes jingled as
he passed them around. Then the music twanged to a stop, and we heard Lenny’s
voice announcing the next number.
                    “Nothing like listening to
yourself talk. Say,” Lenny’s eye lingered on me, “Frankie vamoosed, you ought
to have somebody, I’ll call up one of the fellers.”
                    “That’s okay,” I said. “You
don’t have to do that.” I didn’t want to come straight out and ask for somebody
several sizes larger than Frankie.
                    Lenny looked relieved. “Just
so’s you don’t mind. I wouldn’t want to do wrong by a friend of Doreen’s.” He
gave Doreen a big white smile. “Would I, honeybun?”
                    He held out a hand to Doreen,
and without a word they both started to jitterbug, still hanging onto their
glasses.
                    I sat cross-legged on one of the
beds and tried to look devout and impassive like some businessmen I once saw
watching an Algerian belly dancer, but as soon as I leaned back against the
wall under the stuffed rabbit, the bed started to roll out into the room, so I
sat down on a bearskin on the floor and leaned back against the bed instead.
                    My drink was wet and depressing.
Each time I took another sip it tasted more and more like dead water. Around
the middle of the glass there was painted a pink lasso with yellow polka dots.
I drank to about an inch below the lasso and waited a bit, and when I went to
take another sip, the drink was up to lasso-level again.
                    Out of the air Lenny’s ghost
voice boomed, “Wye oh wye did I ever leave Wyoming?”
                    The two of them didn’t even stop
jitterbugging during the intervals. I felt myself shrinking to a small black
dot against all those red and white rugs and that pine paneling. I felt like a
hole in the ground.
                    There is something demoralizing
about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially
when you are the only extra person in the room.
                    It’s like watching Paris from an
express caboose heading in the opposite direction--every second the city gets
smaller and smaller, only you feel it’s really you getting smaller and smaller
and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that
excitement at about a million miles an hour.
                    Every so often Lenny and Doreen
would bang into each other and kiss and then swing back to take a long drink
and close in on each other again. I thought I might just lie down on the
bearskin and go to sleep until Doreen felt ready to go back to the hotel.
                    Then Lenny gave a terrible roar.
I sat up. Doreen was hanging on to Lenny’s left earlobe with her teeth.
                    “Leggo, you bitch!”
                    Lenny stooped, and Doreen went
flying up on to his shoulder, and her glass sailed out of her hand in a long,
wide arc and fetched up against the pine paneling with a silly tinkle. Lenny
was still roaring and whirling round so fast I couldn’t see Doreen’s face.
                    I noticed, in the routine way
you notice the color of somebody’s eyes, that Doreen’s breasts had popped out
of her dress and were swinging out slightly like full brown melons as she
circled belly-down on Lenny’s shoulder, thrashing her legs in the air and screeching,
and then they both started to laugh and slow up, and Lenny was trying to bite
Doreen’s hip through her skirt when I let myself out the door before anything
more could happen and managed to get downstairs by leaning with both hands on
the banister and half sliding the whole way.
                    I didn’t