The Edmont Hotel — The Catcher in the Rye

Holden takes a cab from Penn Station to the Edmont, a hotel he has heard is cheap enough and a little sleazy. He asks the driver where the ducks go when the Central Park lagoon freezes. The driver thinks he is crazy and will not answer. The room faces a courtyard. Across the way a man puts on silk stockings and a couple squirt water and laugh. Holden calls it perverted and keeps watching.

He thinks of phoning Phoebe or Jane and talks himself out of both. Phoebe would ask questions. Jane would make him feel the summer. He goes down to the Lavender Room underage, dances with three older women who pity him, buys drinks, and is left with the bill. The band sounds fake. He is too young for the room and he knows it.

Back upstairs the loneliness turns towards sex as a way not to be alone. He is a virgin, ashamed of that, and he has heard you can arrange a prostitute through the elevator man. He paces, rehearses lines, hates the rehearsal, and picks up the phone anyway. Desire is not what lifts the receiver. Isolation is. The elevator man is a transaction. Phoebe would have been a person.