'What's the matter with her?' Lilly asked me, staring at Franny.
'I think it's the luckiest day of my life,' Franny said, still giggling.
'It's been just a little event among so many for me,' I told her, and Franny threw a dinner roll at me. We both laughed.
'Jesus God,' Lilly said, exasperated with us -- and seemingly revolted by the amount of food we had ordered.
'We could have had a most unhappy life,' Franny said. 'I mean, all of us!' she added, attacking the salad with her fingers; I opened the first bottle of wine.
'I still might have an unhappy life,' Lilly said, frowning. 'If I have many more days like today,' she added, shaking her head.
'Sit down and dig in, Lilly,' said Franny, who sat down at the room service table and started in on the fish.
'Yes, you don't eat enough, Lilly,' I told her, helping myself to the frogs' legs.
'I had lunch today,' Lilly said. 'It was a rather gross lunch, too,' she said. 'I mean, the food was all right but the portions were too big. I only need to eat one meal a day,' Lilly said, but she sat down at the table with us and watched us eat. She picked an especially slender green bean out of Franny's salad, eating half of it and depositing the other half on my butter plate; she picked up a fork and poked at my frogs' legs, but I could tell she was just restless -- she didn't want any.
'So what did you write today, Franny?' Lilly asked her. Franny had her mouth full, but she didn't hesitate.
'A whole novel,' Franny said. 'It was truly terrible, but it was something I just had to do. When I finished it, I threw it away.'
'You threw it away?' Lilly asked. 'Maybe some of it was worth saving.'
'It was all shit,' Franny said. 'Every word. John read a little of it,' Franny said, 'but I made him give it back so I could throw the whole thing out. I called room service and had them come pick it up.'
'You had room service throw it away for you?' Lilly said.
'I couldn't stand to even touch it any longer,' Franny said.
'How many pages was it?' Lilly asked.
'Too many,' Franny said.
'And what did you think of what you read of it?' Lilly asked me.
'Trash,' I said. 'There's only one author in our family.'
Lilly smiled, but Franny kicked me under the table; I spilled some wine and Franny laughed.
'I'm glad you have confidence in me,' Lilly said, 'but whenever I read the ending of The Great Gatsby, I have my doubts. I mean, that's just so beautiful,' Lilly said. 'I think that if I can't ever write an ending that perfect, then there's no point in beginning a book, either. There's no point in writing a book if you don't think it can be as good as The Great Gatsby. I mean, it's all right if you fail -- if the finished book just isn't, somehow, very good -- but you have to believe it can be very good before you start. And sometimes that damn ending to The Great Gatsby just wipes me out before I can get started,' Lilly said; her little hands were fists, and Franny and I realized that Lilly clutched what was left of a dinner roll in one of them. Lilly didn't like to eat, but she could somehow manage to mangle a whole meal while deriving no nourishment from it, whatsoever.
'Lilly, the worrier,' Franny said. 'You've got to just do it, Lilly,' Franny told her, kicking me under the table again as she said 'do it.'
I would go back to 222 Central Park South a wounded man. In fact, I wouldn't realize until after our enormous meal was over that I was in no condition to run for about twenty blocks and
a zoo; I doubted that I could even walk. My private parts were in considerable pain. I saw Franny grimace when she got up from the table to get her purse; she was suffering the aftermath of our excesses, too -- it was just as she had planned, of course: we would feel the pain of our lovemaking for days. And that pain would keep us sane; the pain would convince us both that awaiting us in this particular pursuit of each other was our certain self-destruction.
Franny found some money for a cab in her purse; when she gave me the money, she gave me a very chaste and sisterly kiss. To this day -- between Franny and me -- no other kind of kiss will do. We kiss each other now the way I imagine most brothers and sisters kiss. It may be dull, but it's a way to keep passing the open windows.
And when I left the Stanhope -- on that night shortly before Christmas, 1964 -- I felt truly safe, for the first time. I felt fairly sure that all of us would keep passing the open windows -- that we were all survivors. I guess, now, that Franny and I had been thinking only of each other, we had been thinking a little too selfishly. I think Franny felt that her invulnerability was infectious -- most people who are inclined toward feelings of invulnerability do think this way, you know. And I tended to try to follow Franny's feelings, as exactly as I could manage.
I caught a cab going downtown at about midnight and rode it down Fifth Avenue to Central Park South; despite the agony of my private parts, I was sure I could walk to Frank's from there. Also, I wanted to look at the Christmas decorations in front of the Plaza. I thought of walking just a little out of my way so that I could look at the toys displayed in the windows of F. A. O. Schwarz. I thought of how Egg would have loved those windows; Egg had never been to New York. But, I thought, Egg had probably imagined better windows, full of more toys, all the time.
I limped along Central Park South. Number 222 is between the East Side and the West, but nearer to the West -- a perfect place for Frank, I was thinking; and for us all, for all of us were the survivors of the Symposium on East-West Relations.
There is a photograph of Freud -- of the other Freud -- in his apartment in Vienna at 19 Berggasse. He is fifty-eight; it is 1914. Freud has an I-told-you-so sort of stare; he looks both cross and worried. He looks as emphatic as Frank and as anxious as Lilly. The war that would begin in August of that year would destroy the Austro-Hungarian Empire; that war would also convince Herr Professor Doktor Freud that his diagnosis of the aggressive and self-destructive tendencies in human beings had been quite correct. In the photograph one can imagine where Freud got his idea that the human nose was 'a genital formation.' Freud got that idea 'from the mirror,' as Frank says. I think Freud hated Vienna; to his credit, our Freud hated Vienna, too, as Franny was the first to point out. Franny also hated Vienna; she would always be a Freudian in her contempt for sexual hypocrisy, for example. And Frank would be a Freudian in the sense that he was anti-Strauss -- 'the other Strauss,' Frank would note; he meant Johann, the very Viennese Strauss, the one who wrote that dippy song: 'Happy is the man who forgets what he cannot change' (Die Fledermaus). But both our Freud and the other Freud were morbidly obsessed with what was forgotten -- they were interested in what was repressed, in what we dreamed. That made them both very un-Viennese. And our Freud had called Frank a prince; Freud had said that no one should call Frank 'queer'; the other Freud had also endeared himself to Frank -- when some mother wrote the good doctor and begged him to cure her son of his homosexuality, Freud brusquely informed her that homosexuality was not a disease; there was nothing to 'cure.' Many of the world's great men, the great Freud told this mother, had been homosexuals.
'That's right on target!' Frank was fond of shouting. 'Just look at me!'