My Salinger Year

by Joanna Rakoff

  Her friend, whose name, I remembered now, was Pankaj, was shaking the bottle. He cracked it open and counted the pills in his palm. “How many did you take?” he asked Leigh. She held up three bloody fingers. “Three?” he said. “Three?” She nodded. He looked at me. “How many were in here?”

  I wasn’t entirely sure. “Ten?” I said. “I took only one. This morning. I hurt my knee. I didn’t—” I paused here, unsure of whether I should take the time to explain that I absolutely hadn’t given her the pills. “Why would she take them?” Counting the pills back into the bottle, he looked at me strangely. “They made me sick,” I told him. “I threw up. All I could do was sleep. I couldn’t read. I had the worst dreams.”

  “It’s fun,” called Leigh.

  Her friend shook his lovely head and sighed. “You’re just lucky she didn’t sell them,” he said. Then he turned his attention to Leigh. “Okay, let’s get to the hospital.”

  Later, when they returned with Leigh’s hand wrapped in pristine white gauze and sat down at the kitchen table with cold beers, Pankaj explained that Leigh had called him, sounding very strange, and he’d known something was wrong. He’d borrowed a car and driven to Brooklyn from Princeton in the snow. “I had,” he said, “an instinct.” I nodded. Don was still not home.

  At five, my phone rang, startling me out of this sad reverie. “Hey, lady, what’s shaking?” came Don’s low voice from the receiver. “How’s work?” He pronounced this last word with quotes around it, as if I were merely playing at having a job. To Don, “work” meant laying bricks or mopping floors or stamping metal in a factory. Don was a socialist.

  On our first date, we’d met at a clock-themed Italian restaurant on Avenue A, chosen—he explained, as he slid into the seat across from me—because of its proximity to the socialist bookstore up the street, where he had just finished a shift. “So, wait,” I asked Don, as we waited for plates of pasta. “Do you—do, um, contemporary socialists—really think you’re going to overthrow the federal government?”

  He swirled his wine, then took a small sip, a little shudder passing through him. “No. I mean, yes, there are some people who do. But most don’t.”

  “Then what’s the purpose of the party?” I really wanted to know. In the 1930s, my grandmother had been asked to run for Senate on the Socialist Party ticket. My great-uncle had been shot in a union rally at the Forward Building on East Broadway. My father, when he enlisted during the Korean War, was investigated by the FBI. But no one in my family would talk about politics. The 1950s had scared the impulse out of them. “What do you do? Other than sell books?”

  “We educate. We try to raise class awareness. We combat materialism. We work with unions and help laborers organize.” And then, suddenly, he took my hand, and his voice—already low, a gravelly bass—became lower. “We offer an alternative,” he said. “To everything else. We offer a different way of thinking about the world.”

  Now his voice came through the phone at me, gravelly and droll. He had a smoker’s rasp, though he abhorred smoking. “Listen,” he said. “Why don’t you meet me at the L after work.” The L was the one café in Williamsburg. Don often installed himself there in the evenings, writing in his journal and drinking so much coffee that his leg jumped up and down. “I talked to this realtor who may have a place for us.”

  “For us?” I asked. We’d known each other for just a few months. I had a boyfriend in California. Whom I would be joining. At some distant point in the future. “An apartment for us?”

  “Us,” he said. “You’ve heard this word before. It means you”—he spoke with exaggerated slowness—“and me.”

  My boss left at five on the nose, breezing by with a little wave. “Don’t stay too late!” she called. I was still typing, Dictaphone still whirring. A few minutes later, Hugh came by, a down coat over his sweater. “Go home,” he said. “You’ve done enough.” There was a brief surge of laughter—a rustling of bags and coats—as the bookkeepers and the messenger went home, and then the office fell quiet and dark, the only light in our wing of the office the one on my desk. I finished the letter I was typing and pulled it out of the Selectric, then slipped my coat off the back of my chair and made my way toward the door.

  For a moment, I paused in front of the wall of Salinger books and looked at the titles, the familiar spines. My parents owned most of these: paperbacks of The Catcher in the Rye and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour—an Introduction; a pristine hardback of Franny and Zooey. But I had read around them. Why? Why had I skipped Salinger? Partly due to happenstance. My high school English teacher never assigned Catcher. No older sibling put a copy in my fourteen-year-old hands and said, “You have to read this.” And then my Salinger moment—the window between twelve and twenty, when everyone in the literate universe seems to go crazy over The Catcher in the Rye—had passed. Now I was interested in difficult, gritty fictions, in large, expansive novels, in social realism. I was interested in Pynchon, Amis, Dos Passos. I was interested in Faulkner and Didion and Bowles, writers whose bleak, relentless styles stood in stark opposition to what I imagined Salinger to be: insufferably cute, aggressively quirky, precious. I had no interest in Salinger’s fairy tales of Old New York, in precocious children expounding on Zen koans or fainting on sofas, exhausted by the tyranny of the material world. I was not interested in characters with names like Boo Boo and Zooey. I was not interested in hyper-articulate seven-year-olds who quoted from the Bhagavad Gita. Even the names of the stories seemed juvenile and too clever-clever: “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut.”

  I didn’t want to be entertained. I wanted to be provoked.

  The realtor led us to a pretty row house on North Eighth Street, a block from the train, next to a large Polish bakery, leafless trees casting shadows onto the snow from the streetlights’ glow. “It’s back here,” he said, unlocking the front door and walking past the graceful staircase, past the doors to the first-floor apartments, and out a door at the back of the building. Where on earth are we going? I thought, trailing the two men. We were going to an interior courtyard, covered in snow, at the end of which stood a tiny, three-story house, dilapidated and neglected, but also like something out of a storybook, a secret.

  The apartment itself was small and strange, its wooden floors freshly painted an odd brick red—the fumes still filled the place—its doorways arched and lacking in actual doors. The living room held a closet and a tiny strip of kitchen, a miniature stove and fridge; the small bedroom overlooked the cement courtyard and the rear windows of the front house; the bathroom was tiled in lurid pink. The floor slanted visibly to one side.

  “How much is it?” Don asked the realtor. “Five hundred?”

  “Five forty,” said the realtor.

  “We’ll take it,” said Don.

  Incredulous, I widened my eyes at him. “We might need a day to talk it over. We might want to look at a few other places.”

  “No,” said Don, laughing. “We’ll take it. How much is the deposit?”

  Outside, the cold air felt delicious on my cheeks. We’re not really taking it, I thought. And yet just the thought of going back to Celeste’s—even to collect my things—made me stiffen with anxiety. The pasta. The overstuffed sofa. The paraplegic cat.

  A moment later, we were in the realtor’s office, filling out forms.

  “It’s going to be in her name,” said Don, and I shot him a look of alarm, my heart beating faster. If the apartment was in my name, it meant that responsibility for the rent lay with me, that Don was not culpable at all. This seemed terribly scary considering $540 represented more than half my paycheck.

  “You’re the one with the job,” Don explained, taking my arm, as we walked back toward his old apartment. “You’re the one with good credit.”

  “How do you know I have good credit?” I asked.

  “I just know,” he said, stopping and pulling a pair of worn leather gloves out of his pocket. “Besid
es, it has to be better than mine.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He took in a deep breath of frigid air. “I defaulted on my student loans,” he said.

  “You defaulted on your student loans?”

  “That’s what I just said.” Shaking his head, he smiled brilliantly. “It’s no big deal. The banks are evil, anyway. They’re just preying on eighteen-year-olds. What do they care if they lose my twenty grand?” He planted a cold kiss on my right cheek. “You’re so bourgeois. Seriously, Buba, it’s no big deal. I had a novel to write. I didn’t have time to worry about student loans.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say about this, what to think.

  “It was stupid, though.” He took my arm again, and we continued walking across North Ninth Street toward Macri Triangle, a grubby patch of grass overrun with rats that was somehow considered, by the City of New York, an official public park. “I couldn’t make the payments, so I deferred. You can keep deferring. You just have to do all this paperwork every six months. I got sick of doing the paperwork.”

  I was thinking about the rent. The truth was I didn’t really understand how Don made a living. He seemed to spend most of his time at the gym—he was a boxer, “like Mailer,” as he said, “but better”—or in cafés, working on a novel that was, he said, nearly done. In the past, he’d taught English as a second language to adults—immigrants from Russia and Latin American housewives—but now he had just a few private students. He always seemed to have money for wine or coffee, but he also—I was noticing—doled out cash with strict discipline. He didn’t use credit cards. And now I knew why.

  “I mean, college should be free anyway,” he was saying. “In Europe nobody pays twenty grand a year for a BA. All my European friends think Americans are crazy.” Don’s European friends occasionally came up in conversation, but they’d yet to materialize in real life. The friends we saw regularly were largely from New York and Hartford, where Don grew up, and San Francisco, where he’d lived until a year or so prior. Most had indeed attended colleges where tuition exceeded twenty grand per year. His friend Allison had grown up in a town house on the Upper East Side—the daughter of a famous writer and a powerful editor—and gone to Bennington with Marc, his best friend from Providence, the child of academics. Like Don, they strove to shake the trappings of their privileged childhoods: Allison lived in a garret-like studio on Morton Street and complained of poverty but ate out every night. Marc had abandoned his expensive education to train as a cabinetmaker. Now he ran a high-end contracting business out of his loft on Fourteenth Street, a not-insubstantial piece of real estate.

  “Was there something strange about that apartment?” I asked.

  “The floor tilted a little.” He shrugged, then put his arm around me and drew me close. “But who cares. We’re not going to find another apartment for five hundred bucks a month. Right by the train. Right by everything. And that’s a beautiful block, North Eighth. All the trees.”

  “The trees,” I repeated, smiling, though all I could recall about them was the dusty shadows they’d thrown on the snow.

  When we got home, we found Leigh and Pankaj sitting at the table drinking beer with Allison and Marc, whom Don had apparently invited over and forgotten about—or forgotten to tell me about. I liked both of them—far more than most of Don’s friends—but I was exhausted. “Donald!” Leigh cried. The hand she raised in greeting was still bandaged. “Joanna! Come have a beer with us. We’re celebrating.” Rising from her chair, she placed her warm cheek on my cold one. She was wearing one of her beautiful dresses—a deep maroon crepe with tiny covered buttons down the front—and a full face of makeup: foundation, which smoothed the pits and ruts on her chin, and mascara, which gave her actual eyelashes, and a deep red lipstick. Her hair, too, had been washed and blown into shiny waves. She looked not just presentable but gorgeous. “I have a job.”

  “Wow,” I said. I’d not actually thought her capable of finding employment. “What kind of job?”

  “Who cares?” called Allison gleefully, clinking beers with Pankaj, who merely smiled. He was still wearing his unlined army coat, a scarf wrapped around his neck, though the apartment was stifling at the moment. I tried to catch his eye. We’d been through something together, I thought, we had a special understanding. But he looked down at the table, at his lap, the beer. “Hey, man,” he finally said to Don. “How’s the party?”

  A few minutes later, he and Leigh disappeared. First him, then her. “I’m going to change,” she said. “I’ve been in these clothes all day.”

  “Hey,” I called after her. “Guess who’s a client of my Agency?”

  “Thomas Pynchon,” answered Allison, sipping wine out of a large blue goblet. It was the only vessel in the apartment resembling an actual wineglass, and Allison always claimed it when she came to visit.

  “Close,” I said. “J. D. Salinger.”

  The room fell into stunned silence. Allison, Marc, and Don stared at me, openmouthed. “Here,” Marc said finally, pushing a beer in my direction.

  “J. D. Salinger?” asked Don, finally, shaking his head in disbelief. “For real?”

  I nodded. “He’s my boss’s client.”

  Suddenly everyone was talking at once.

  “Did you speak to him?” asked Marc. “Did he call?”

  “Is he working on a new novel?” asked Allison, her lips ghoulishly purple with wine. “I’ve heard stories—”

  “How old is your boss?” asked Don. “Didn’t Salinger start writing stories in, like, the ’40s?”

  “Was he nice?” asked Allison. “People get so angry about him, but I always got the feeling that he was really nice, that he truly just wanted to be left alone.”

  “He’s a fucking phony,” said Don with a smile.

  Marc narrowed his eyes, annoyed. “You’re kidding, right?” he said, taking a swig of beer. “Just because he wants to be left alone doesn’t mean he’s some kind of fraud.” Like Don, Marc was short and muscular and possessed of a certain intensity. He had the looks of a 1970s film star: blue eyes, chiseled jaw, long nose, wavy blond hair. Looks so stunning that even men commented on them. His fiancée, Lisa, was oddly plain—unusually plain—and as silent and reserved as Marc was garrulous and open. These were just a few of the grounds on which Don objected to her. He was convinced Marc would call off the wedding.

  “My friend Jess worked at Little, Brown a few years ago”—Allison looked at Marc—“Salinger’s publisher you know?” Marc nodded. “She was just an assistant and she had nothing to do with Salinger, with the Salinger books. But her desk was near the reception area, and one night she was working late and the main phone line just kept ringing and ringing and ringing. It was like nine thirty at night. Who calls an office at nine thirty, right? So finally she picked it up and there was someone screaming—like screaming—on the other end. Screaming, ‘THE MANUSCRIPT IS OKAY! I SAVED THE MANUSCRIPT!’ And something about a fire, and other stuff that she couldn’t understand. Just screaming. So she thought this was a crazy person, right?” We nodded. “The next day, she got to work and it turns out—”

  “It was Salinger,” said Don.

  “It was Salinger,” confirmed Allison, her cheeks hollowing in annoyance. “There’d been a fire at his house. His whole house had burned down. Or half his house. Anyway, his house was actually on fire when he called, but somehow he thought the most important thing was to call his publisher and let them know that his new book was okay. Like before even saving his family or calling the fire department.”

  “How do you know he didn’t save his family or call the fire department first?” asked Don.

  “Jess told me,” said Allison.

  “Why is it crazy to call your publisher and let them know your manuscript hasn’t been destroyed in a fire?” Don persisted.

  “That’s not the crazy part, Don,” Allison groaned. “He called in the middle of the night, when no one was there. He assumed that the people at Little, Brown knew th
at there was a fire in some small town in New Hampshire—”

  “You know what?” Don’s gravelly voice had grown raspier with drink. “This sounds like bullshit to me. Salinger’s not working on another book. Why should he? What is he now, a millionaire how many times over? Your friend just made this all up.”

  “Oh my God, Don!” Allison shrieked, her dark eyes glassy, her cheeks flushed red. “Why would she make this up? How would she make this up? There was a fire. Everyone knew about it. I remember my mom talking about it. It was in the paper. I read about it. She read about it.”

  “Exactly,” said Don, grinning.

  “I read about it, too,” said Marc, brushing back an errant lock of hair. “Or I read something. I’m trying to remember. Was it in the Times? He says he’s writing but that he never wants to publish. That he writes for himself now. He doesn’t need to publish.”

  Again, the room fell silent. Don’s face had grown slack and earnest. He looked at me and smiled. I knew that this accorded with his own ideas about writing. “Writing makes you a writer,” he’d told me. “If you get up every morning and write, then you’re a writer. Publishing doesn’t make you a writer. That’s just commerce.”

  “Hey,” came a voice from the hallway. We turned to find Leigh, alone, now clad in her usual bathrobe, a tattered, sateen affair in maroons and blues. Her makeup was still in place, but she seemed to be moving in slow motion. “What’s going on?” she said, her speech ever so slightly slurred. She’s drunk, I thought, with a sudden clarity. I’d seen her like this many times before, I realized, but I’d never thought about it. Or I’d thought her simply tired. I was tired. And hungry, very hungry. Though I’d drunk just half my beer—if that—my head suddenly began to spin. An irresistible urge to lie down came over me.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said, carefully rising from my chair. I made my way down the hallway, past the room of sad, crumpled dresses, and opened the door to the bathroom, where I found Pankaj, sitting on the toilet. “Oh!” I cried. “I’m sorry.” He looked at me strangely, blankly, and it was then that I saw his arm, which was wrapped with the sort of rubber tubing used in hospitals, a needle inserted in the crook below. His face, as I watched, arranged itself in an expression of both pain and the absence of pain. “Oh!” I cried again, stupidly.