The Catcher in the Rye | Page 9

they don't knock me out too much. What really knocks me out is a
book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific\

friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That
doesn't happen much, though. I wouldn't mind calling this Isak Dinesen up. And Ring
Lardner, except that D.B. told me he's dead. You take that book Of Human Bondage, by
Somerset Maugham, though. I read it last summer. It's a pretty good book and all, but I
wouldn't want to call Somerset Maugham up. I don't know, He just isn't the kind of guy
I'd want to call up, that's all. I'd rather call old Thomas Hardy up. I like that Eustacia Vye.
Anyway, I put on my new hat and sat down and started reading that book Out of
Africa. I'd read it already, but I wanted to read certain parts over again. I'd only read
about three pages, though, when I heard somebody coming through the shower curtains.
Even without looking up, I knew right away w ho it was. It was Robert Ackley, this guy
that roomed right next to me. There was a shower right between every two rooms in our
wing, and about eighty-five times a day old Ac kley barged in on me. He was probably the
only guy in the whole dorm, besides me, that wasn't down at the game. He hardly ever
went anywhere. He was a very peculiar guy. He was a senior, and he'd been at Pencey the
whole four years and all, but nobody ever called him anything except "Ackley." Not even
Herb Gale, his own roommate, ever called him "Bob" or even "Ack." If he ever gets
married, his own wife'll probably call him "Ackley." He was one of these very, very tall,
round-shouldered guys--he was about six four--with lousy teeth. The whol\
e time he

roomed next to me, I never even once saw him brush his teeth. They always looked
mossy and awful, and he damn near made you sick if you saw him in the dining room
with his mouth full of mashed potatoes and peas or something. Besides that, he had a lot
of pimples. Not just on his forehead or his chin, like most guys, but all over his whole
face. And not only that, he had a terrible personality. He was also sort\
of a nasty guy. I
wasn't too crazy about him, to tell you the truth.
I could feel him standing on the shower ledge, right behind my chair, taking a
look to see if Stradlater was around. He hated Stradlater's guts and he never came in the
room if Stradlater was around. He hated everybody's guts, damn near.
He came down off the shower ledge and came in the room. "Hi," he said. He
always said it like he was terrifically bored or terrifically tired. He \
didn't want you to
think he was visiting you or anything. He wanted you to think he'd come in by mistake,
for God's sake.
"Hi," I said, but I didn't look up from my book. With a guy like Ackley, if you
looked up from your book you were a goner. You were a goner anyway, but not as quick
if you didn't look up right away.
He started walking around the room, very slow and all, the way he always did,
picking up your personal stuff off your desk and chiffonier. He always picked up your
personal stuff and looked at it. Boy, could he get on your nerves sometimes. "How was
the fencing?" he said. He just wanted me to quit reading and enjoying myself. He didn't
give a damn about the fencing. "We win, or what?" he said.
"Nobody won," I said. Without looking up, though.
"What?" he said. He always made you say everything twice.
"Nobody won," I said. I sneaked a look to see what he was fiddling aroun\
d with
on my chiffonier. He was looking at this pictur e of this girl I used to go around with in
New York, Sally Hayes. He must've picked up that goddam picture and looked at it at
least five thousand times since I got it. He always put it back in the wrong place, too,
when he was finished. He did it on purpose. You could tell.
"Nobody won," he said. "How come?"
"I left the goddam foils and stuff on the subway." I still didn't look up at him.
"On the subway, for Chrissake! Ya lost them, ya mean?"
"We got on the wrong subway.