The Bell Jar Read Online Free PDF

didn’t realize Lenny’s place had been air-conditioned until I wavered out onto the pavement. The tropical, stale heat the sidewalks had been sucking up all day hit me in the face like a last insult. I didn’t know where in the world I was.
    For a minute I entertained the idea of taking a cab to the party after all, but decided against it because the dance might be over by now, and I didn’t feel like ending up in an empty barn of a ballroom strewn with confetti and cigarette butts and crumpled cocktail napkins.
    I walked carefully to the nearest street corner, brushing the wall of the buildings on my left with the tip of one finger to steady myself. I looked at the street sign. Then I took my New York street map out of my pocketbook. I was exactly forty-three blocks by five blocks away from my hotel.
    Walking has never fazed me. I just set out in the right direction, counting the blocks under my breath, and when I walked into the lobby of the hotel I was perfectly sober and my feet only slightly swollen, but that was my own fault because I hadn’t bothered to wear any stockings.
    The lobby was empty except for a night clerk dozing in his lit booth among the key rings and the silent telephones.
    I slid into the self-service elevator and pushed the button for my floor. The doors folded shut like a noiseless accordion. Then my ears went funny, and I noticed a big, smudgy-eyed Chinese woman staring idiotically into my face. It was only me, of course. I was appalled to see how wrinkled and used up I looked.
    There wasn’t a soul in the hall. I let myself into my room. It was full of smoke. At first I thought the smoke had materialized out of thin air as a sort of judgment, but then I remembered it was Doreen’s smoke and pushed the button that opened the window vent. They had the windows fixed so you couldn’t really open them and lean out, and for some reason this made me furious.
    By standing at the left side of the window and laying my cheek to the woodwork, I could see downtown to where the UN balanced itself in the dark, like a weird green Martian honeycomb. I could see the moving red and white lights along the drive and the lights of the bridges whose names I didn’t know.
    The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.
    I knew perfectly well the cars were making a noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn’t hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for the good it did me.
    The china-white bedside telephone could have connected me up with things, but there it sat, dumb as a death’s head. I tried to think of people I’d given my phone number to, so I could make a list of all the possible calls I might be about to receive, but all I could think of was that I’d given my phone number to Buddy Willard’s mother so she could give it to a simultaneous interpreter she knew at the UN.
    I let out a small, dry laugh.
    I could imagine the sort of simultaneous interpreter Mrs. Willard would introduce me to when all the time she wanted me to marry Buddy, who was taking the cure for TB somewhere in upper New York State. Buddy’s mother had even arranged for me to be given a job as a waitress at the TB sanatorium that summer so Buddy wouldn’t be lonely. She and Buddy couldn’t understand why I chose to go to New York City instead.
    The mirror over my bureau seemed slightly warped and much too silver. The face in it looked like the reflection in a ball of dentist’s mercury. I thought of crawling in between the bed sheets and trying to sleep, but that appealed to me about as much as stuffing a dirty, scrawled-over letter into a fresh, clean envelope. I decided to take a hot bath.
    There must be quite a few things a hot bath