The Bell Jar Read Online Free PDF Page A

of the back room. “I got twenty grand’s worth of recording equipment in there.” He ambled over to the bar and set out three glasses and a silver ice bucket and a big pitcher and began to mix drinks from several different bottles.
    . . . to a true-blue gal who promised she would wait—
    She’s the sunflower of the Sunflower State.
    â€œTerrific, huh?” Lenny came over, balancing three glasses. Big 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.
    â€œNothing 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.”
    â€œThat’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 on to 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.
    â€œLeggo, 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 byleaning with both hands on the banister and half sliding the whole way.
    I