The Salinger Contract

by Adam Langer

  Conner had a driver for the evening—a chauffeur in a shabby black uniform driving an even shabbier black stretch limo, another needless expense. But when I told Conner I would happily drive him back to his hotel when we were done for the night, he slipped the chauffeur a twenty and told him to head home and pick him up at the Indiana Memorial Union at six a.m. so he could catch his flight for Chicago, the last stop on his tour.

  “Shit, I know I’ve lost something,” he told me. “There’s a reason my books aren’t selling anymore. And yeah, I could rationalize the whole thing and say it’s because people don’t read as much as they used to, or because they’re too distracted by their iPods, iPhones, and iPads, or whatever the hell people have now, or because the economy’s gone to hell and people don’t have money to spend on books, or because people who still like to read just want to read about wizards, vampires, and shit like that. But that’s not the whole story. I gotta be honest with you, man, and with myself, too. There’s a hell of a lot more to it than that.”

  We were sitting at an outdoor table at the Upland Brewing Company. Most of the tables were empty even though it was a lovely night. The inside tables were jammed. Monday Night Football fans were watching the Colts take on New England. This was one of the things I griped about consistently on the Buck Floomington blog. People don’t go outside in this town. Porches were littered with unused lawn furniture. After dinner, my kids were the only ones on the playground. Some of my wife’s colleagues even bought houses on large properties surrounded by tall trees to keep passersby from knowing there were children inside.

  Conner and I were splitting a plate of pita and hummus. He was drinking a dark beer while I drank club soda—since Ramona was born, I had probably consumed three beers total. The idea of alcohol had nearly always depressed me anyway, and reminded me of my mother in her cocktail waitress days before she started working for the Tribune: the bottles of Crème de Menthe I used to find on the butcher’s block when I came home from class; her boyfriends with their lame jokes and lamer attempts to ingratiate themselves—“Fetch me a Rob Roy, young man”; finding her passed out on the couch in the front room with the TV blaring; pouring all her liquor down the sink; feeling guilty for making her spend even more money on booze.

  “Yeah,” Conner said as we sat outside the brewery, listening to the muffled hollers of the football fans inside. “I don’t have what I used to. I don’t know how I lost it or where, and I’m not sure if I can ever get it back. Maybe authors shouldn’t write more than one or two books. Maybe you just keep writing the same book over and over anyway. I’ve already written more than Salinger, Dudek, or Harper Lee ever did.”

  As the night wore on, people inside the brewery were still watching the game, but the Colts had fallen three touchdowns behind. Someone had turned down the volume and had turned up Dierks Bentley’s “Lot of Leavin’ Left to Do.” The temperature on the patio was dropping fast, and Conner and I were the only ones outside. We asked our waitress, Abby, if she wanted to close out our tab.

  “You can stay out here till my shift’s over far as I’m concerned,” she said, then added to Conner, “I’m a fan, hon. I loved that Devil Shotgun. Have you ever written anything else?”

  Conner gave a somber half smile. “Yes and no,” he said.

  I left the table, ostensibly to use the john, but really so that Conner and Abby could continue their conversation. I didn’t peg Conner for a guy who would pick up women on the road, but then again, I wasn’t sure I would have resisted the temptation. Unfortunately, as far as I was concerned, the average age of my audience when Nine Fathers came out was about seventy-five, so I was never particularly well tested in this area. But when I came back from the Upland bathroom, Abby was gone and Conner was on the phone with Angie. Apparently, Angie had asked how many people had shown up to his reading.

  “Not too many,” he said, then quoted me: “It’s kind of a sleepy little college town.”

  “Yeah,” he added, he was off to Chicago in the morning and he expected a better turnout there. He told her he had run into “an old friend” but didn’t mention my name. The time I met Angie while interviewing Conner in the Poconos, she seemed suspicious—answered questions tersely; kept eyeing my minidisc recorder, legal pad, and pen with a dour, judgmental expression. “She’s just protecting me; she used to be a cop,” Conner had said. “She knows that talking too much can get you in trouble.”

  I wondered if Conner remembered Angie hadn’t liked me. Or maybe he just figured she wouldn’t remember who I was and didn’t want to bother explaining.

  “Kiss Atticus for me. I love you guys,” he told her before he hung up, but from his expression, it seemed clear she hadn’t said “I love you too.”

  “Marriage,” he said with a wry, weary laugh. “It’s a long, hard road, man.”

  With just about any other writer, I probably wouldn’t have had the patience to listen to another tale of writer’s block, of the difficulties of raising a family on mere advances, royalties, and film deals. “Get a real job,” people in this town would have said, and though I would have taken umbrage if that statement had been directed toward me specifically, I would have probably agreed with the sentiment. When nearly 10 percent of the country was unemployed and foreclosures were at a record high, the fact that here in South Central Indiana, at the end of an all-expenses-paid book tour, a particular genre novelist was having trouble finding a topic to write about would have seemed low on the list of national tragedies. But Conner’s chagrin seemed genuine, as did his concern for his family’s future.

  “I honestly don’t know what I’m gonna do next, buddy,” he said. “I started three books; I ditched all of ’em. I wrote a screenplay, a coupla pilots; no one bought ’em. My agent’s frickin’ eighty years old and she rarely takes my calls anymore—she’s got her own personal shit to deal with, no point in me bugging her. Besides, I don’t have a new book idea anyway. You know, me and Angie, we banked our futures on this career. It seemed like an easy bet to make, but man, it’s just not payin’ off.”

  Conner didn’t mind the idea of going back to work at some newspaper job. If he and Angie economized, they could hire some help around the house. She could complete a master’s in education at East Stroudsburg University, then get a job teaching kids, which was what she’d said she wanted to do when she quit the police force. Selling the Delaware Water Gap house and moving someplace smaller sounded fine to him. They didn’t need a Porsche, either; it was a crappy car if you had a kid.

  But Angie had gotten used to their lifestyle and was exhausted by the idea of starting over. They had felt elated when they learned she was going to have a child, but the pregnancy had been hard, and lately neither of them had been getting any sleep. They argued all the time, something they had never done before.

  “I was hoping this book might change all that.” Conner let his voice drift off; he didn’t need to finish the sentence.

  “I don’t mean to lay all this on you, buddy,” he said. “You’re a good guy for listening and you’ve had more than enough of your own bullshit to deal with in your life. I’m amazed you can still hold it all together so well.”

  I told Conner all the stuff you’re supposed to say, all those darkest-­before-the-dawn clichés. I said he was a talented writer and that he would pull through and that all couples argued during that first year of parenthood, me and Sabine included. I told him just about every writer I had ever known wrote his best work when he had his back up against the wall and thought he would never write another word. And no matter how hackneyed and useless my advice seemed to me, Conner nodded and smiled ruefully, as if no one had ever given him such intelligent, sober counsel.

  At the end of the evening, I drove him back to his hotel. We vowed to keep in better touch. We shook hands, hugged, and he repeated his invitation to Pennsylvania. I could bring Sabine and the kids and make a whole family weekend out of it, he said. “A
nd better make it soon. Before we have to sell the house.”

  I wished him luck and said I trusted Chicago would be better than Bloomington.

  “I sure hope you’re right, man,” he said.

  I watched him stride toward the doors of the Indiana Memorial Union, then disappear into the lobby. I thought I’d probably never hear from him again, or if I did, it would be in another six or seven years after he had conquered his writers’ block and written three more thrillers. Maybe by then Sabine would have tenure, and we’d have a bigger house in Walnut Creek, where the schools were better. I certainly didn’t expect to hear from Conner the next night.

  4

  I didn’t recognize the number when it appeared on my cell phone. I figured it was either a wrong number or someone from the Highway Patrolmen’s Association Fund asking for dough. I was trying to fold laundry with one hand while using the other to keep Ramona from climbing onto the counter to take a pack of Gummi bears out of a cabinet—“No,” I was saying. “You already had dessert. And you’ve already brushed teeth.”

  “I’ll brush them again,” Ramona said.

  “Come on, stop it. Just get down from there.”

  Meanwhile, Sabine was trying to finish reading half a dozen papers for the panel she would be chairing at the American Political Science Association meeting while Beatrice was clinging to her leg. “Can you get her off me?” she asked.

  I was going to let the call go straight to voice mail, but I noticed the Chicago area code. I had two immediate thoughts—either my mother was sick or Conner was calling. I picked up.

  “Is this an OK time, buddy?” Conner asked. He sounded harried and out of breath.

  “Not really,” I said. “Can I call you back?”

  “Yeah, sure, I guess.” He hung up. I spent the next hour and a half reading Island of the Blue Dolphins to Ramona before she finally nodded off; meanwhile, Sabine fell asleep nursing Beatrice. I rinsed the rest of the dishes, put them in the dishwasher, turned it on, and finished folding the laundry. I put on a light fleece jacket, leashed my old border collie/husky mix Hal, then, when I got outside, I tried to call Conner back at the number he had called me from. Apparently, he had been calling from the Drake Hotel. I asked to be transferred to his room, but the desk clerk told me Conner wasn’t in the “Author’s Suite” anymore, and had said he would be checking out early.

  “This wouldn’t be Mr. Dunford, would it?” the desk clerk asked.

  “Who?”

  “Anyway, he’s not here.”

  I took Hal to Bryan Park and back—didn’t see a single human being on our entire walk. Then I went to bed, finding a slip of space next to my sleeping wife and our sprawled two-and-a-half-year-old. I had long passed my days of staying up late; I knew my kids would be up at six and wouldn’t care whether I had gotten my seven hours. It was well past midnight when my Charles Mingus “Fables of Faubus” ringtone woke me.

  “Hello?” I made my way out of our bedroom and into the darkened living room. I practically tripped over Hal, who growled slightly at my approach.

  “Hey, man.” Conner whispered loudly. “Did I wake you up?”

  “Not at all. I was just doing some writing. What’s going on?”

  “I gotta talk to somebody,” he said. “This is so messed up and I really don’t know who else I can talk to about it.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Shoot.”

  “No way. Not over the phone.”

  “OK.” I waited for him to fill in the blanks, and when he didn’t, I said, “You mean you want me to come all the way out to Chicago?”

  “Nah, that’s too far for you,” he said. “And I need to get away from here anyway, to make sure no one’s following me.”

  “Following you? What are you talking about?”

  “I probably sound like I’ve been drinking, right?”

  “Have you?”

  “No. Look—can I borrow you tomorrow sometime during the day? Not for too long, maybe an hour or two? I know it’s a huge favor to ask, but I can’t call Ange. You’re the one person I can call.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Whatever you need.”

  “You’re a bud,” he said. “Hold on, let me look at my map.” There was a half minute of silence, then Conner said, “Can you drive to West Lafayette first thing in the morning? There’s a Hilton Garden Inn there.”

  “What’s this all about?”

  “Can’t tell you now, man. Just need to bounce something off somebody. I’ll tell you when you get here. You’re a good listener; you like a good story, right? ’Cause this is a pretty good story so far.”

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll get there when I can.”

  “Can you try to make it by nine?”

  “Do my best.”

  “And bring a bathing suit. They’ve got a pool. We might swim.”

  “What?”

  “It’ll all make sense when you get here, at least as much sense as any of it makes to me.”

  “OK.”

  “When you get here, ask for my room. I’ll be staying under a different name.”

  “What name?”

  “You should appreciate this, my friend.” Conner laughed. “Salinger.”

  5

  At this point, I should probably discuss my strange relationship with J. D. Salinger, which I really hadn’t thought about all that much at the time, but it might clarify some events later on. When I was growing up on the north side of Chicago and attending high school at Lane Tech, where I pulled A’s in English and D’s in woodshop, a fair number of my friends were Salinger fans. In early December 1980, my best friend, Paul Benson—a guy I also lost track of shortly after I moved to Indiana—handed me his dog-eared, underlined copy of Catcher and told me to read it—“It’ll rock your world, bro,” he said.

  I hadn’t read Salinger before, but Paul and I were always trading books and we tended to trust each other’s judgment. I gave him Kerouac and Burroughs; he gave me Vonnegut and Salinger. We liked Ayn Rand and William F. Buckley Jr., too, but let’s not get into that—we were kids and it was a different era.

  The night I cracked Catcher, I was sitting in the front room of the apartment where I lived with my mom. She was out, as usual, and I was alone watching Monday Night Football when Howard Cosell announced that John Lennon had been shot. I watched TV all night, listening to every update, finally learning that Lennon was dead, that his assassin’s name was Mark David Chapman, and that Chapman had had a copy of Catcher in the Rye in his back pocket. Lennon was my favorite Beatle, and, just a few days earlier, I had read Aaron Gold’s “Tower Ticker” gossip column in the Chicago Tribune, which reported that Lennon and Yoko Ono were considering playing the Uptown Theater to promote their new album, Double Fantasy. Sometimes, the Tribune gave free event tickets to its employees, and I had been planning to ask my mom if she could get me some. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to read the novel anymore.

  I was still debating reading the book a few months later when John Hinckley, another nut who liked Catcher, tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan. I learned about that in my debate class, when my teacher, Vicki Ryan, wheeled in a TV so we could watch the news. I vowed never to read Salinger’s book. It was nearly a decade before I actually did read it. I was a fifth-year senior at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and I read the book on the 50 Bus, on rides between my apartment and campus.

  Catcher made no great or lasting impression on me. It probably had too many negative associations for me to see its brilliance. It seemed like a manifesto for the antisocial, something I might have gotten more out of at age thirteen. I skipped the rest of Salinger’s oeuvre.

  Still, from time to time, whenever I saw Salinger’s novels or story collections on my friends’ bookshelves, or when I heard authors such as Conner talk about how much they admired the guy, I wondered how those books could have influenced them so
greatly. I wondered too how Mr. Salinger—in seclusion for more than forty years in Cornish, New Hampshire—felt about the readers who admired his work. If somehow knowing he had touched Hinckley and Chapman had convinced him that escaping society had been the right move. I wondered how it would feel to write something—a story, a novel, an article—that would inspire someone to change his or her life for better or worse. In some small way, I got the chance to find out after I published Nine Fathers.

  Though my book was a work of fiction, like all novels, particularly all first novels, it had its basis in autobiography. It was a satirical rendering of the life I had led as the son of a single mom, who kept just about all her past existence secret from me and who’d cut her ties with her previous life so resolutely that she never told me anything about my father, Sidney Joseph Langer, other than his name and that she met him at the Coq d’Or Lounge at the Drake Hotel, where she was working as a cocktail waitress. For all I knew, and for all the questions my mom left unanswered, she might well not have known any more about him than she told me. My “novel-in-stories” (that’s what it said on the jacket) concerned a young man searching for his own identity and imagining nine different fathers he might have had. There was a rich father, a poor father, an artist, a criminal, a tinker, a tailor, a soldier, a sailor, and a spy. The book, which was told in nine different genres, was about the journeys I might have taken if I’d had a little more courage. I had often looked up old Sidney L. in phone books and in online directories and considered calling or visiting the people who had that name and lived at those addresses. But I never did.