When discussing Salinger’s “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes” in class, it was evident that most people assumed that Joanie, Arthur’s wife, was having an affair with Lee. Although we are never explicitly given the name of the girl who is in bed with Lee, through little hints Salinger drops throughout the scene, we can reasonably infer that the woman was Joanie. Going with that, as Lee states, this makes the whole scene that much more complicated. As stated in class, it’s both sad and impressive that Lee gives advice to his friend on the woman he happens to be sleeping with. What’s worse is that, by the end of the scene, when Arthur calls back to tell Lee that he wife has apparently walzed through the door, just like he said she would, Lee fully realizes the damage that has been done. Whether or not Arthur knows that his wife is with Lee is unknown, but it hurts that Arthur feels the need to lie in order to save face and convince Lee that he isn’t as crazy or paranoid as he may seem.
This is why, at the end of the story, Lee acts cold towards the woman. All she has said is that she feels like a dog by being in a relationship with two men. She doesn’t show any sense of compassion and sympathy towards Arthur, who seems genuinely worried that his marriage may be over. It’s symbolic how, when the lit cigarette drops to the ground, the girl attempts to help retrieve it before it burned anything, but Lee stops her. Damage has already been done, so there’s no use trying to stop it. Although the fire of love between Arthur and Joanie may have died out, a new fire has been started; a fire consisting of envy and guilty; a fire that is currently tearing Lee apart.
Even though Lee and Arthur don’t even seem like good friends, he still feels bad for the situation that he is in. Arthur has honestly no clue what’s going on so he just gets drunk in order to clear his head, but this just causes him to become more and more paranoid and worried about the whole situation. All Lee can say is that he needs to close his eyes and it will all be over. Joanie will be back and things will go back to normal...until she sneaks out again, and again, and again. Lee realizes that this will become a vicious cycle of Joanie leaving and Arthur becoming worried. He can see that Joanie has lost interest in Arthur and that their marriage is basically over, but Arthur can’t seem to bring himself to break it off. A reasonable explanation for this is that Arthur is a very traditional man. He believes that once the vows are said, the married couple has made a promise to be bound together for life. What he didn’t see is that Joanie is seemingly not ready for marriage. I do believe that, at some point in their relationship, that Joanie loved Arthur. But she has since moved on, seemingly taking her marriage less seriously. As RJ mentioned in class, Joanie’s character slightly resembles Aunt Sylvie in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. In Robinson’s novel, Sylvie is a nomad. She loves to hop on a train and just see where it takes her. She is a free spirit. In Salinger’s novel, Joanie is sort of a free spirit of her own. As stated by Arthur, “every night I come home, I half expect to find a bunch of bastards hiding all over the place. Elevator boys. Delivery boys. Cops--” (119). In a nutshell, Arthur states that his wife gets around, storing her apparent multiple suitors all around the house. In this way, Joanie feels as if she too is a free spirit. She doesn’t feel confined by marriage like Arthur does. She does what she pleases. Unfortunately, doing what makes her happy is consequently making her husband go batshit crazy.
Now, the majority of this blog post is based off the idea that Joanie is the girl in Lee’s room, seemingly having an affair with him. Even though this isn’t a direct conclusion that we can necessarily come to, because of how ambiguous Salinger is with the meaning behind his writing, all we can do is take the text given to us and make our own conclusions, which I believe was the goal Salinger had in mind when writing his stories.
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