My Salinger Year

by Joanna Rakoff

  I nodded my head in sympathy.

  “And agents used to be upstanding. None of these multiple submissions”—she wrinkled her nose with distaste at this term—“no auctions, with publishers bidding against each other. It’s uncouth. That’s not the Agency way. We send things out to one editor at a time. We match writers with editors. We have morals.”

  I knew Max held auctions for his books—and knew that my boss knew this—but I simply nodded. In truth, I didn’t fully comprehend her objection to auctions. The idea, as I understood it, was to get the most money for the author. Why was that bad? She answered my question without my having to ask it.

  “No good comes of it, anyway. They say it’s good for the writers, but”—she waved her hand dismissively—“it just creates these inflated advances that never earn out.”

  Taking off her glasses, she rubbed the inside corners of her eyes with one slender thumb and forefinger. Until that moment, I’d never seen her without her glasses. She looked at least ten years younger, her pale eyes twice as large when not dwarfed by the massive frames. They were green, I saw now, not blue. I’d thought her my mother’s age—sixty-five or so—but now I wondered if she wasn’t younger, perhaps even much younger, got up in the garb of the elderly: the orthopedic shoes, the caftans, the dinner rings. Was this all some sort of costume? To what end? “Listen. You give a writer money, he’s going to spend it. That’s just how writers are. If you give him a lot of money up front, he’s just going to spend it all. Better to give the writer a little money up front. Enough to live on, but not enough to think he’s rich. Enough so that he won’t take forever to write his next book.”

  For my boss, the Agency was not just a business, it was a way of life, a culture, a community, a home. It had more in common with an Ivy League secret society or—though it would take me time to see the extent of this—a religion, with its practices defined and its gods to worship, Salinger being the first and foremost; Fitzgerald as a sort of demigod; Dylan Thomas, Faulkner, Langston Hughes, and Agatha Christie, lesser deities. The agents, of course, were mere priests, there to serve the gods, which meant that they were interchangeable. And which, in turn, meant that my boss—in her view—was as qualified as Claire to represent Claire’s clients. But more important, she believed that those clients saw the world from her perch: that their loyalty was to the Agency first, to Claire second.

  She was truly shocked that their loyalties were, first, to themselves, to their work. I couldn’t tell her much—I was twenty-four—but I could have told her that.

  Don was tired. Tired of working menial jobs, tired of having no—or little—money. He was determined to finish his novel by the summer, to get it out to agents. Now, when I got home from work, I found him not at the gym but sitting at his desk, staring at the screen and chewing on his nails or frantically typing, barely able to tear himself away and say hello to me. “I can’t change gears just because you’re home,” he explained testily. “I’m working.” I understood this and I appreciated the freedom, too, that it gave me to work or read. Though it still smarted, somehow, that he didn’t want to rip himself from his novel and kiss me, to sit down on the couch with me and hear about my day.

  One night in May, the phone rang as I left the office. “Meet me at the L,” he said. “I have to get out of the house. Maybe we can just sit and work?”

  “That would be great,” I said. An hour later, I walked through the café’s creaky wooden door and found him sitting at one of its small, round tables, his head bent over his laptop, hair falling in his face, journal splayed open on his lap. “Buba,” he said, standing up and taking me in his arms. “You’re all flushed from the rain.”

  We drank coffee and ate bagels with cream cheese and roasted peppers—the L’s culinary specialty—Don as always staring at his screen, occasionally typing a word or two; me, trying to figure the bones of a poem on a legal pad. Every so often, he took my hand and gave it a squeeze across the small table. His hands were no bigger than mine; no longer in finger and thumb, but wider and always warm, like a child’s. For a moment, I thought of my college boyfriend’s hands, which were long and elegant and cool; I had loved watching him turn the pages of a book or slice an apple, loved feeling them on my ribs, my neck. My breath slowed with desire. Stop, I told myself, taking a bracing sip of coffee. I had not imagined life with Don. There was no time for that: he had entered my life like a gale force, making me question all the small assumptions I’d held to be true without ever quite knowing it. That it was important to pay one’s taxes and sleep eight hours each night and fold one’s sweaters with tissue. But if I’d considered what drew me to Don, it would be this: that for him a night spent in a café working on a novel was the greatest pleasure. We wanted the same thing, I thought. And we wanted it more than anything. The life of the writer.

  A few minutes later—my poem somewhat complete—I looked up from my legal pad to see Don staring off into what appeared to be the middle distance. Turning, I followed his gaze to the counter, where a woman stood ordering coffee. Williamsburg was small and I’d seen this woman here before. She was tall and thin, with striking features: a large, hawkish nose; small, deep-set eyes; a long, curving slash of a mouth. Her hair was black and straight, but with dramatic streaks of yellow at her temples. She had the look of a gallery girl: fashionable and severe, her legs long in slim-cut pants. “Do you know her?” I asked Don.

  “No, but I kind of want to,” he said. “Looking at her, I was just thinking about how plenty of ugly men are sexy. When you’re a man, you can be, objectively, ugly, but also be really sexy. Like Gérard Depardieu. But most ugly women are just, well, ugly.” He laughed, folding his hands behind his head and stretching. “But then there are the few who aren’t.”

  “Like her,” I said slowly. I couldn’t quite believe that Don—my boyfriend, ostensibly—was assessing the attractiveness of the woman standing behind me. But he was.

  “Yeah, look at her.” He leaned in across the table toward me. “She has an amazing body but her nose is huge and yet it somehow makes her more attractive.”

  “Hmm,” I said, hastily sliding my legal pad into my bag. “I’m going home.”

  Don looked at me. “I’ll come with you.”

  “No, you stay. There’s a lot”—I splayed my arms open—“to interest you here. I’ll see you later.”

  I was in bed, reading, when he came in, an hour or so later, the quilt tucked tightly around me. He sat down on the edge of the bed, rubbing my arm through the cotton. “You know, Buba, men like to look at women. That’s what they do.”

  “Really?” I said, keeping my eyes on my book, Laurie Colwin’s Family Happiness, in which an Upper East Side matron discovers her family’s equilibrium depends on her maintaining her long-running affair.

  “Really,” he said. “I wasn’t attracted to that woman. I just thought it was interesting that she could, objectively, be so unattractive and yet—”

  “I know, I know.” I didn’t want to hear anymore. “I understand.”

  “You don’t understand,” he said, not unkindly. “You think that life is a fairy tale and when a man falls in love with a woman he never looks at anyone else again. But that’s not true.” With a sigh, I put my book down and turned to face him. “Maybe your Buddhist boyfriend at Oberlin thought you were the end all and be all of womanhood. Or had taken so many women’s studies classes that he was afraid to look at some chick and think ‘she’s hot,’ that it would make him a bad person or something.” His voice had taken on a hard, angry edge. “But I have news for you, every guy in the world is looking at every woman in the world and deciding whether he would sleep with her or not.”

  “Right.” Throwing off the covers, I scooted past him and into the bathroom to brush my teeth.

  “It’s part of being a man,” he called. I heard the thud as he took off one boot and then the other. “You can’t shut it off. Any guy who tells you different is lying. Even your fucking Oberlin boyfriend.”
>
  Did Salinger love the books of Orchises Press? Their content? Their design? We did not know. All we knew was that one day, a couple of weeks after we’d sent them on, I picked up my phone and someone shouted, “HELLO? HELLO?” followed by my boss’s name. This time, I recognized Salinger’s voice and volume. “IT’S JOANNA,” I yelled, wondering if I should have identified myself as “Suzanne,” just to expedite things. “Is that Suzanne?” Salinger asked, lowering his voice to something closer to a normal speaking level.

  “Yes, Mr. Salinger,” I replied, smiling. I could be Suzanne. Why not?

  “Well, then let me ask you something,” he said.

  “Sure,” I said, but my heart immediately began to beat faster. My boss’s warnings with regard to Salinger had focused on not initiating a conversation with him. There had been no stipulations, no guidelines, regarding what to do if he initiated a conversation with me. Presumably, such situations hadn’t arisen in many years. Decades even. The “Hapworth” deal had thrust us into new territory. A Wild West of Salinger etiquette.

  “You saw those books from that fellow in Virginia?” he asked. Though his voice was just slightly louder than it needed to be, his speech, I realized, had the mildly garbled quality of those who’ve long lost their hearing.

  “I did,” I confirmed.

  “What did you think of them?” he asked.

  “I thought they were nice.” Nice? Where did this word come from? “I liked some more than others. The design, you mean?”

  “The books,” he said gently.

  “Yes.” I tried to gather my thoughts, but they would not gather. “I liked some of them more than others,” I said again. “But I’ve seen their books before. They publish a lot of poetry. Some very good poets.”

  “You read poetry?” he asked, his words more focused now, more sharp.

  My heart beat faster. I was certain that if my boss walked in at this moment, she would be extremely displeased. “I do,” I said.

  “Do you write poetry?”

  “I do,” I said, desperately hoping he wouldn’t ask me to repeat myself, wouldn’t put me in the position of having to utter the word “poetry” aloud when my boss could walk in at any moment.

  “Well, that’s great,” he said. “I’m really glad to hear that.” I did not know then, would not know for months and months—when I finally read “Seymour—an Introduction”—that Salinger equated poetry with spirituality. Poetry, for Salinger, represented communion with God. What I knew then was that I was somehow betraying my boss—if not expressly, then in spirit.

  Just then I spied her crossing through the finance wing, into our section of the office. “Would you like to speak to her?” I asked. “She’s just getting back to her desk.”

  “Yes, thank you, Suzanne,” he said almost quietly. “You have a good day. Nice to talk to you.”

  “It’s Jerry,” I whispered as she neared my desk.

  “Oh!” she cried and trotted into her office.

  The requisite shouting began, followed by the requisite closing of the door. After a period of quiet, my boss wandered out of her office, a stunned look in her eyes. Her cheeks were flushed.

  “Well, he wants to go through with it,” she said, lighting a cigarette. Though her words were designed to express resignation, she seemed, I thought, excited. The truth was there had not been much going on. Now things were happening. This was a small deal, yes, but it was big news in the world, or it would be, if anyone found out about it. Salinger had, of course, said that he wanted no announcement of the book, no write-up in Publishers Weekly, no piece in the Times about his coming out of his seclusion, nothing. We were to tell no one and neither was Roger Lathbury, not even his wife. We could talk about it in the office with restraint and caution—by which she meant “don’t talk to Olivia”—but we were not to breathe a word of it in the outside world.

  An hour later, she handed me a dictation tape, which confirmed the height of her spirits. “Dear Mr. Lathbury,” the letter began, “You might want to sit down before you read this …”

  She signed it with a flourish. That night, I was the last to leave, which meant I brought the mail down to the box on the corner of Forty-Eighth Street. Okay, Jerry, here goes nothing, I thought, and slipped the letter in the box, where it fell softly, without a rustle. Just, I supposed, as he would have wanted.

  2

  The Obscure Bookcase

  One morning, as May drew to a close, my boss once again raced out of her office, calling for Hugh. This time, he came right out, alarmed—as was I—by the true panic in her voice. “Judy just called,” she said wearily. “She’s coming in. I need you to pull all her royalty statements and get me all her books and, well”—she waved her hands up and down in a gesture of frustration—“just anything you can. Clips, anything.”

  “Okay,” said Hugh.

  “Judy?” I whispered.

  “Oh, right,” said Hugh. “Judy Blume.”

  My jaw fell open. “Judy Blume?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he replied impassively. “The children’s book writer. Have you heard of her?”

  “I’ve heard of her,” I told him, trying not to laugh.

  “She was Claire’s client. So now she’ll be passed on to your boss. Or Max, I guess.”

  Dutifully, I gathered copies of Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Freckle Juice, Blubber, Forever …, and my favorite, Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself—which I found, with some difficulty, on an out-of-the-way shelf in the finance wing, a strange place for the work of an author so well known—and piled them neatly on one corner of my boss’s desk. There they sat, for several days. On Tuesday, I dropped off some correspondence and found my boss scrutinizing the cover of Deenie. On Wednesday, I found her peeking at the first pages of Forever …, as if afraid of breaking the spine. It was the same edition I’d had on my bookshelf as a kid. The cover embossed with a gold locket.

  On Thursday, I arrived at work to find my boss already ensconced at her desk. The books were gone. “Oh, good, you’re here,” she called as I took off my coat.

  “I’m here!” I called back with exaggerated cheer. I had been looking forward to that half hour in the office alone. Lately, I’d been coming in earlier and earlier to bask in the cool quiet of the office. Sometimes I caught up on work. Sometimes I just sat at my desk and read, drinking coffee and slowly unpeeling a sticky bun from the ersatz Italian market in Grand Central. Sometimes I worked on poems, typing them up on my Selectric.

  “Now,” said my boss, making her way to my desk, “how would you like to read something? A manuscript? I’d need it read very quickly. Tonight.”

  “I’d love to,” I said evenly, trying not to smile. I had been waiting for this moment.

  “You’ve heard of Judy Blume?” asked my boss, her brow furrowed.

  How was I having this conversation again? “Yes,” I said. “I’ve heard of her.”

  “Well, this is her new novel. I don’t quite know what to make of it.”

  “Great!” This didn’t surprise me. My boss, as far as I knew, had no children, and she—like a certain breed of adult—appeared to have never been a child herself, but rather to have materialized on earth fully formed, in a taupe-hued pantsuit, cigarette in hand.

  “Can you read it tonight?”

  I could.

  That night, I arrived home at twilight, my coat under my arm—the days getting longer, the air warmer, though still not warm—and found a letter waiting for me atop the radiator in the hallway of the building that fronted ours. My breath stopped at the sight of my college boyfriend’s small, neat hand, the blue ink from his fountain pen, the fountain pen I had given him a year earlier.

  Quickly, I stuffed the letter in my bag, a black leather carryall I’d bought in London, flat alongside the manuscript, and willed my heart to stop beating so loudly and quickly. I wanted terribly to rip it open, right in the hallway, and devour it—though I suspected it would not be the kindest of missives—but I also coul
dn’t bear the thought of doing so, not with Don potentially waiting for me in the apartment, hunched over his laptop. It was not that I feared he’d be jealous. It was that I couldn’t risk succumbing to the wave of emotion that would surely hit the moment I read the first line.

  We were supposed to go to a party that night, Don and I. We were always supposed to go to a party. Parties at the fancy apartments of my college friends’ parents or at the decrepit apartments in which my college friends actually lived. Parties in lofts: Marc’s huge loft on Fourteenth Street that doubled as the offices of his contracting business, so one had to be careful not to get drunk and lean on a circular saw; lofts down by the water, enormous windows looking out on the Manhattan skyline, studios filled with half-finished paintings, kitchens salvaged from photo shoots; lofts in Dumbo, newly finished and pristine, the owners pleased that actual artists had come to their parties. Parties in East Village tenements, their kitchens floored in crumbling linoleum, which inevitably ended up on the roof, looking out over the water towers to Williamsburg across the river. There were parties at Don’s old apartment, thrown by Leigh and her new roommate, and at my old friend Robin’s apartment on Riverside, her enormous dog licking everyone’s shoes, and parties in the back rooms of restaurants, where the bill always came to be more than anyone could afford.

  In the courtyard, I saw that our light was indeed on, which meant Don was home. Inside, I found him not writing but lying on the couch, in boxer shorts and a sleeveless undershirt, listening to Arlo Guthrie and reading the third volume of Remembrance of Things Past, which he’d informed me was properly called In Search of Lost Time. He often quoted passages or recounted scenes from Proust, but when I asked directly if he’d read the seven volumes in their entirety—I knew no one who had—he said, “That’s a silly question.” His favorite passage had to do with the narrator’s wondering why he loves Albertine most when she’s sleeping.