He let his attention be drawn to a little
scene that was being acted out sublimely, unhampered by writers and directors
and producers, five stories below the window and across the street.
A fair-sized maple tree stood in front of
the girls’ private school-one of four or five trees on that fortunate side of
the street-and at the moment a child of seven or eight, female, was hiding
behind it. She was wearing a navy-blue reefer and a tam that was very nearly
the same shade of red as the blanket on the bed in van Gogh’s room at Aries.
Her tam did, in fact, from Zooey’s vantage point, appear not unlike a dab of
paint. Some fifteen feet away from the child, her dog-a young dachshund,
wearing a green leather collar and leash-was sniffing to find her, scurrying in
frantic circles, his leash dragging behind him.
The anguish of separation was scarcely
bearable for him, and when at last he picked up his mistress’s scent, it wasn’t
a second too soon. The joy of reunion, for both, was immense. The dachshund
gave a little yelp, then cringed forward, shimmying with ecstasy, till his
mistress, shouting something at him, stepped hurriedly over the wire guard
surrounding the tree and picked him up. She said a number of words of praise to
him, in the private argot of the game, then put him down and picked up his
leash, and the two walked gaily west, toward Fifth Avenue and the Park and out
of Zooey’s sight.
Zooey reflexively put his hand on a
crosspiece between panes of glass, as if he had a mind to raise the window and
lean out of it to watch the two disappear. It was his cigar hand, however, and
he hesitated a second too long. He dragged on his cigar.
“God damn it,” he said, “there are nice
things in the world-and I mean nice things. We’re all such morons to get so
sidetracked.
J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
