The catcher in the rye

I still had to get those damn theater tickets, so I bought a paper and looked up to see what shows were playing. On account of it was Sunday, there were only about three shows playing. So what I did was, I went over and bought two orchestra seats for I Know My Love. It was a benefit performance or something. I didn’t much want to see it, but I knew old Sally, the queen of the phonies, would start drooling all over the place when I told her I had tickets for that, because the Lunts were in it and all. She liked shows that are supposed to be very sophisticated and dry and all, with the Lunts and all. I don’t. I don’t like any shows very much, if you want to know the truth. They’re not as bad as movies, but they’re certainly nothing to rave about. In the first place, I hate actors. They never act like people. They just think they do. Some of the good ones do, in a very slight way, but not in a way that’s fun to watch. And if any actor’s really good, you can always tell he knows he’s good, and that spoils it. You take Sir Laurence Olivier, for example. I saw him in Hamlet. D.B. took Phoebe and I to see it last year. He treated us to lunch first, and then he took us. He’d already seen it, and the way he talked about it at lunch, I was anxious as hell to see it, too. But I didn’t enjoy it much. I just don’t see what’s so marvelous about Sir Laurence Olivier, that’s all. He has a terrific voice, and he’s a helluva handsome guy, and he’s very nice to watch when he’s walking or dueling or something, but he wasn’t at all the way D.B. said Hamlet was. He was too much like a goddam general, instead of a sad, screwed-up type guy. The best part in the whole picture was when old Ophelia’s brother — the one that gets in the duel with Hamlet at the very end — was going away and his father was giving him a lot of advice. While the father kept giving him a lot of advice, old Ophelia was sort of horsing around with her brother, taking his dagger out of the holster, and teasing him and all while he was trying to look interested in the bull his father was shooting. That was nice. I got a big bang out of that. But you don’t see that kind of stuff much. The only thing old Phoebe liked was when Hamlet patted this dog on the head. She thought that was funny and nice, and it was. What I’ll have to do is, I’ll have to read that play. The trouble with me is, I always have to read that stuff by myself. If an actor acts it out, I hardly listen. I keep worrying about whether he’s going to do something phony every minute.

After I got the tickets to the Lunts’ show, I took a cab up to the park. I should’ve taken a subway or something, because I was getting slightly low on dough, but I wanted to get off that damn Broadway as fast as I could.

It was lousy in the park. It wasn’t too cold, but the sun still wasn’t out, and there didn’t look like there was anything in the park except dog crap and globs of spit and cigar butts from old men, and the benches all looked like they’d be wet if you sat down on them. It made you depressed, and every once in a while, for no reason, you got goose flesh while you walked. It didn’t seem at all like Christmas was coming soon. It didn’t seem like anything was coming. But I kept walking over to the Mall anyway, because that’s where Phoebe usually goes when she’s in the park. She likes to skate near the bandstand. It’s funny. That’s the same place I used to like to skate when I was a kid.

When I got there, though, I didn’t see her around anywhere. There were a few kids around, skating and all, and two boys were playing Flys Up with a soft ball, but no Phoebe. I saw one kid about her age, though, sitting on a bench all by herself, tightening her skate. I thought maybe she might know Phoebe and could tell me where she was or something, so I went over and sat down next to her and asked her, “Do you know Phoebe Caulfield, by any chance?”

“Who?” she said. All she had on was jeans and about twenty sweaters. You could tell her mother made them for her, because they were lumpy as hell.

“Phoebe Caulfield. She lives on Seventy-first Street. She’s in the fourth grade, over at—”

“You know Phoebe?”

“Yeah, I’m her brother. You know where she is?”

“She’s in Miss Callon’s class, isn’t she?” the kid said.

“I don’t know. Yes, I think she is.”

“She’s prob’ly in the museum, then. We went last Saturday,” the kid said.

“Which museum?” I asked her.

She shrugged her shoulders, sort of. “I don’t know,” she said. “The museum.”

“I know, but the one where the pictures are, or the one where the Indians are?”

“The one where the Indians.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said. I got up and started to go, but then I suddenly remembered it was Sunday. “This is Sunday,” I told the kid.

She looked up at me. “Oh. Then she isn’t.”