When he arrives at Penn Station, Holden goes into a phone booth and tries to think of someone he might call; he rejects the idea of calling his brother D. B., his sister Phoebe, Jane Gallagher, and finally Sally Hayes, a young woman who has invited him to help trim the tree over Christmas break. Finally, he gives up and hails a taxi.

After accidentally giving the taxi driver his home address, he corrects himself and asks the driver to head back downtown. As they’re passing Central Park, he asks the driver where the ducks go when the lagoon is frozen over; the driver thinks Holden is kidding him, but this becomes a question that bothers Holden throughout the book. He finally tells the driver to take him to the Edmont Hotel, where he gets a room.

When he gets to his room, Holden looks out the window and into the rooms on the other side of the hotel. He sees a man putting on fancy women’s clothes in one room, and a couple spitting water or alcohol in each other’s faces. Holden thinks that he’s in a hotel full of perverts, but he admits he thinks about sex all the time and would even enjoy doing the kinds of things he’s seeing if he wasn’t hung up on the underlying ideas around sex.