My Salinger Year

by Joanna Rakoff

  Outside, the bankers were gone, too, presumably toasting their own soaked feet. The wind blew in thick gusts down Madison, twisting my hair into my mouth and eyes, but the street was so silent, so blank and beautiful, that I lingered until my hands and feet and nose grew numb. This was the last Monday on which I’d have no place to be at 9:30 in the morning and there was, I realized, no rush to get home.

  There would be other blizzards in New York, but none that generated such silence, none in which I could stand on a street corner and feel myself to be the only person in the universe, none, certainly that stopped the city entire. By the time the next blizzard of such proportions arrived, the world had changed. Silence was no longer possible.

  I went home to Brooklyn. Officially, as far as my parents knew, I lived on the Upper East Side with my friend Celeste. After college, when I’d moved to London for grad school, Celeste—whom my parents habitually described as “good” and “nice”—had taken a job teaching preschool and found herself a rent-controlled studio on East Seventy-Third Street, between First and Second. When I stumbled back to New York, she let me sleep on her couch, grateful for the company, then suggested I stay on, splitting her rent. Officially, as far as my parents knew, I had an equally good and nice boyfriend, my college boyfriend, a composer, brilliant and hilarious, in grad school in California. The plan had been for me to come home from London after finishing my master’s, visit briefly with my parents, then move out to Berkeley, to the place he’d secured for us in a complex a few blocks off Telegraph, rings of apartments surrounding a bleak courtyard that looked as if it should contain a pool.

  But there was no pool. And I had veered from the plan. I had returned to New York and found that I couldn’t leave. And then I met Don.

  On my second day of work at the Agency, I again arrived uncomfortably early, so fearful was I of arriving late. This time around, I stuck my key in the lock, opened the door a few inches, and seeing that the office was dark, the receptionist’s desk unmanned, I quickly closed it and took the elevator back down to the lobby. Madison had been plowed, as had Fifth and the rest of midtown, but the city still felt sleepy, the curbs banked six feet high with snow, pedestrians creeping slowly through the narrow pathways carved along the sidewalks. There was a croissant shop in the lobby, inside which a few dazed customers perused glass cases under the unfriendly eye of a portly South Asian woman in a hairnet. I joined them, turning over in my mind the possibility of a second cup of coffee.

  By the time I got back upstairs, the receptionist had arrived and was snapping on the lamps in the foyer, still in her long brown coat. A light shone, too, from the office directly opposite her desk.

  “Oh, hi,” she said, in a manner that wasn’t exactly friendly. She unbuttoned her coat and slung it over her arm, then began walking down the hall, away from me.

  “I’m the new assistant,” I called. “Should I just, um, go to my desk? Or should I—”

  “Hold on, let me hang up my coat,” she said.

  A few minutes later she reappeared, fluffing her short hair. “What’s your name again? Joan?”

  “Joanna,” I told her.

  “Right. Joanne,” she said, seating herself heavily in her chair. She was a tall woman, with a figure my mother would have called statuesque, and she was dressed today in a turtleneck sweater and the sort of fitted pantsuit worn in the 1970s, with wide-legged trousers and wider lapels. Seated in her chair, she appeared not just to tower over but to fully preside over her desk and the room around it. Next to her phone sat a Rolodex of enormous magnitude. “Your boss isn’t in yet. She gets in at ten.” It was 9:30, the time I’d been told the workday started. “I guess you can wait out here.” She sighed, as if I were causing her a great inconvenience, then twisted her full mouth in contemplation.

  “Or you can go back to your desk. Do you know where it is?” I nodded. “Okay, I guess you can go back there. But don’t touch anything. She’ll be in soon.”

  “I can take her back,” called a voice from the lit office. A tall young man strode through the doorway. “I’m James,” he said, extending his hand. His head was covered in curly light brown hair, his eyes in gold-rimmed spectacles, as was the fashion that year, and his chin sprouted a thick reddish beard, all of which gave him the aspect of Mr. Tumnus, the noble faun in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I took his hand and shook it.

  “Follow me,” he said, and I trailed him down the main hallway, past a row of dark offices. As on the day before I longed to linger over the books lining the walls. My eye caught some thrillingly familiar names, like Pearl Buck and Langston Hughes, and some intriguingly foreign ones, like Ngaio Marsh, and my stomach began to flutter in the way it had on childhood trips to our local library: so many books, each enticing in its own specific way, and all mine for the taking. “Wow,” I said, almost involuntarily. James stopped and turned. “I know,” he said with a real smile. “I’ve been here six years and I still feel that way.”

  As predicted, my boss arrived at ten, swathed in a whiskey mink, her eyes covered with enormous dark glasses, her head with a silk scarf in an equestrian pattern. “Hello,” I started to say, rising from my chair, as one might for royalty or clergy. But she swooped past me into her office, as if her glasses prevented peripheral vision.

  Twenty minutes later her door opened and she emerged, having shed her coat, her enormous sunglasses now replaced by enormous glasses with clear lenses that covered half her pale face, exacerbating the corresponding paleness of her blue eyes. “Well,” she said, lighting a cigarette and positioning herself at one end of my L-shaped desk. “You’re here.”

  I smiled brightly. “I am,” I said, rising from my chair, my feet sliding a little in boots I’d borrowed from Don’s roommate, Leigh. My loafers had dried into a sad C shape on the radiator at Don’s apartment. This, of course, was where I was really living: Don’s apartment in Brooklyn.

  “Well, we have a lot to do,” she said, pushing a smooth lock of hair out of her face with one long finger. “Now, I know you can type.” I nodded encouragingly. “But have you ever used a Dictaphone?”

  “I haven’t,” I admitted. I had never even heard of such a thing. Had she mentioned it in the interview? I wasn’t sure. It sounded like something out of Dr. Seuss. “But I’m sure I can pick it up quickly.”

  “I’m sure you can, too,” she assured me, expelling a stream of smoke that seemed to contradict her statement of confidence. “Though it can be a little tricky.” With one hand, she tugged a stiff, cloudy cover off the white plastic box sitting next to the typewriter. Exposed, it resembled a firstgeneration tape recorder, tricked out with an excess of wires and outsized headphones and lacking the customary tab buttons labeled “play,” “rewind,” “fast-forward,” and “pause.” There was a slot for the cassette, but that was it. As with so many tools of efficiency from the 1950s and 1960s, it looked both charmingly archaic and spookily futuristic.

  “Well,” she said, with an odd laugh. “This is it. There are pedals for playback and rewind. And I think you can control the speed.” I nodded, though I saw no controls of any sort. “Hugh can show you if you’re confused.” I wasn’t sure who Hugh was, nor was I sure that I understood what I would be doing with the Dictaphone, but I nodded again. “Well, I have a lot of typing, so I’ll give you some tapes and you can get started. Then we’ll have a little chat.” She strode back into her office and returned with three cassette tapes, a fresh cigarette in hand, not yet lit. “Here you go,” she said. “All yours!” And then she was gone, through the archway to the left of my desk, which led to the finance department, and beyond that the kitchen, and the other wing of the office, which held all the other agents’ offices and the door to the outside world.

  I couldn’t actually type. I had lied about my typing skills at the urging of the lady at the placement agency. “No one your age can type,” she’d told me, wrinkling her pretty face in a gesture of dismissal. “You grew up with computers! Tell her you can do si
xty words a minute. You’ll be up to speed in a week.” As it happened, I’d once been able to type sixty words per minute. Like all New York middle school students, I’d taken a state-mandated typing class in eighth grade. For a few years afterward, I pounded out papers on the typewriter at my dad’s office, never glancing down at the keys. Junior year, we acquired a Macintosh II, and my typing devolved into the loose, two-fingered, technique-free style of the digital age.

  I pulled the dustcover off the Selectric. It was enormous, with more buttons and levers than I remembered from the machines on which I’d learned. And yet—and yet—there was one button I couldn’t find: the one that would turn it on. I ran my fingers all over the front and sides and back. Nothing. I stood up and peered at it from all angles, contorting myself around the edges of my desk. Then I sat back down and tried again, reaching all around it, tilting it back, in case the switch was underneath. Sweat soaked the underarms of my green sweater and slicked my forehead, and my nose pinged with that awful pricking, the sign that tears were coming. Finally, thinking perhaps there simply was no on/off button, that the machine was actually unplugged, I crouched under the desk, feeling around in the dark for the cord.

  “Do you need some help?” called a soft, tentative voice, as my hands traced a dusty wire up from the floor.

  “Um, maybe,” I said, unfolding myself as gracefully as I could. Next to my desk stood a man of indeterminate age who so resembled my boss he could have been her son: the same wolfish eyes and straight ash-brown hair, the same slack cheeks and painfully fair skin, his discolored with acne scars.

  “Are you looking for the on button?” the man asked, miraculously.

  “I am,” I admitted. “I feel so silly.”

  He shook his head sympathetically. “It’s hidden away, in a really strange place. No one can find it. And it’s awkward to reach if you’re sitting in front of the thing. Here.” He joined me behind the desk, careful to keep a few feet between us, slipped his arm around the left side of the typewriter as if he were hugging it, and with an audible click flipped the switch. The machine let out a loud hum, like a sleeping cat, and began to vibrate, almost visibly.

  “Thanks so much,” I said, with perhaps too much emotion.

  “Sure,” he said. I pressed my back into the desk so he’d have room to climb out, which he did, gawkily, tripping over the plastic mat beneath my chair and an errant cord. He sighed and held out his hand, a plain gold wedding band around his ring finger, which surprised me. He seemed, somehow, alone. “I’m Hugh,” he said. “You’re Joanna.”

  “I am,” I confirmed, taking his hand, which was warm and dry and very, very white.

  “I’m right over there.” He cocked his head toward the door directly opposite my desk, which I’d taken to be a closet. “If you need anything, just come get me. Sometimes your boss doesn’t”—another heavy sigh—“explain things. So if there’s anything you don’t understand, just ask me.” His face changed suddenly, his mouth turning up. “I’ve been here a long time, so I know all the ins and outs of the office. I know how everything works.”

  “How long?” I asked, before I thought better of it. “How long have you been here?”

  “Let’s see.” He crossed his arms in front of his chest, compressing his brow in thought. His slow speech further slowed. “I started in 1977 as Dorothy’s assistant”—I nodded, as if I knew who Dorothy was—“and I did that for four years”—his voice drifted off—“I left for a while. In 1986. Or 1987? But I came back.” Once again, he sighed. “Twenty years, I guess. I’ve been here about twenty years.”

  “Wow,” I said. I was twenty-three years old.

  Hugh laughed. “I know, wow.” He shrugged. “I like it here. I mean, there are things I don’t like, but it suits me. What I do. Here.”

  I wanted to ask what exactly that might be but wasn’t sure if this line of inquiry qualified as rude. My mother had instructed me never to inquire about a person’s money or position. This was an agency, so presumably Hugh was an agent.

  Alone again at my desk, the light from Hugh’s office casting a reassuring glow on the carpet to my right, I picked up one of the cassette tapes and with some fumbling popped it into the Dictaphone, then began yet another search for an on button. No, I thought. There was nothing, no “pedals,” nothing but an unmarked dial. I picked up the smooth plastic box and inspected it, but found nothing, not a thing.

  Softly, I rapped on Hugh’s half-open door. “Come in,” he said, and I did. There he sat, behind an L-shaped desk similar to mine, covered with a mountain of paper, a pile high enough to obscure his chest and neck: opened and unopened envelopes, their ragged edges frilled and curled; letters still folded in triad or in the process of unfurling; yellow carbon copies and black sheets of the carbon paper that had created them; oversized pink and yellow and white index cards; paper upon paper upon paper, a mess so vast and unfathomable I shook my head to make sure it was real.

  “I’m a little behind,” he said. “Christmas.”

  “Oh,” I said, nodding. “So, um, the Dictaphone—”

  “Foot pedals,” he said, sighing. “Under the desk. Like a sewing machine. There’s one for play, one for rewind, one for fast-forward.”

  I spent the morning listening to my boss’s low, patrician voice murmuring to me through the Dictaphone’s ancient headgear, a peculiarly intimate experience. Letters: I was typing letters on the Agency’s letterhead—yellowish, undersized, thirty-pound stock—some several pages, some as brief as a line or two. “As discussed, attached are two copies of your contract with St. Martin’s Press for Two If by Blood. Please sign both copies and return them to me at your earliest convenience.” The longest ones were addressed to publishers, requesting intricate and often inexplicable changes to contracts, the striking of words and clauses, particularly those having to do with “electronic rights,” a term that meant nothing to me. These proved both unbearably tedious, requiring gymnastic feats of formatting and spacing, and oddly soothing, for I understood so little of their content that the typing itself—my fingers on the keyboard, the sound of the keys striking the paper—hypnotized me. Typing was, as the placement agency lady had assured me, like riding a bike: my fingers remembered their places on the keyboard and flew across it as if by their own will. By noon, I had a neat stack of letters—the product of one dictation tape—addressed envelopes neatly clipped to them, as Hugh had instructed.

  As I popped out the first tape and put in the second, my phone rang and I froze: I still wasn’t sure of the appropriate greeting. “Hello,” I said with false confidence, tucking the phone behind my ear. This was my first real phone call.

  “Joanna!” a mirthful voice cried.

  “Dad?” I asked.

  “It is I,” affirmed my father, in his Boris Karloff voice. My father, in his youth, had been an actor. His comedy group performed in the Catskills, at bungalow colonies and the occasional resort. The other members became famous: Tony Curtis, Jerry Stiller. My father became a dentist. A dentist who told jokes. “Dear old dad. How’s your first day at work?”

  “Okay.” My parents had asked for my work number minutes after I told them I had a job. I hadn’t thought they’d call my first day. “I’ve just been typing up letters.”

  “Well, you’re a secretary now,” said my dad, laughing. I came from a family of scientists, and my every move seemed to provide them with amusement. “Oh, sorry, an assistant.”

  “I think it’s slightly different from being a secretary,” I said, hating the solemn tone of my voice. This was another constant refrain in my family: Joanna takes everything too seriously. Joanna can’t take a joke. We’re just teasing, Joanna! You don’t need to get upset. And yet I always did. “I’m going to be reading manuscripts.” This was the only non-secretarial task that came to mind. My boss, as it happened, hadn’t mentioned it, but everyone I’d spoken to in the weeks since accepting the job had emphasized that assisting an agent primarily involved reading manuscripts. No one
had mentioned typing. “Stuff like that. They were looking for someone with a background like mine. In English.”

  “Yes, yes,” cooed my dad. “Of course. Listen, I’ve been thinking. How much are they paying you again?”

  I looked around to make sure I was alone. “Eighteen five.”

  “Eighteen thousand dollars?” my father cried. “I thought it was more.” He made a guttural sound of disgust, the last remaining evidence that he’d been raised in a Yiddish-speaking household. “Eighteen thousand dollars a year?”

  “Eighteen thousand five hundred.” This sum struck me as huge. In college, I’d earned fifteen hundred dollars per semester as a writing tutor, and in grad school I’d scraped by on minimum wage, serving beer at a pub and fitting hiking boots at a camping store off Oxford Street. Eighteen thousand five hundred dollars was a vast and unimaginable amount of money to me, perhaps because I imagined it as a lump sum, handed over in stacks of crisp bills.

  “You know, Jo, I don’t think you can live on that. Do you think you could ask them for more?”

  “Dad, I’ve already started the job.”

  “I know, but maybe you could tell them you’ve looked at your expenses and you just can’t live on that little money. That’s, let’s see”—my father could do complex calculations in his head—“fifteen hundred dollars a month. After taxes, maybe eight hundred, nine hundred a month. Are they paying for your health insurance?”

  “I don’t know.” I’d been told the Agency provided insurance, which would kick in three months after I started—or maybe six months—and which I assumed they covered. But I’d honestly not paid very much attention to the financial details. The fact that I had an actual job seemed to supersede any other concerns. This was 1996. The country was in the grips of a recession. Almost no one I knew was gainfully employed. My friends were in grad school—getting MFAs in fiction or PhDs in film theory—or working at coffee shops in Portland, or selling T-shirts in San Francisco, or living with their parents on the Upper West Side. A job, an actual nine-to-five job, was an almost alien concept, an abstraction.