My Salinger Year

by Joanna Rakoff

  3

  The World Wide Web

  A week later, Jenny came by my office at the end of the day. I had succeeded in convincing her to stay in town for an early dinner, though I worried that my small victory was Pyrrhic, that she had agreed to this plan purely out of guilt or obligation. She’d not been excited about seeing the Agency for herself—though I’d been to her office quite a few times—and this, more than anything, distressed me: she no longer cared about the details of my life apart from her.

  Still, she was trying, sort of, and she arrived at the Agency in her duffle coat, for though it was now June, the weather patterns appeared to be stuck in March: at 5:00 p.m., the skies outside Hugh’s window—just barely visible from my desk—grew dark and ominous, a gray rain pelting down, fierce winds shaking the blinds. “Hello!” I cried, embracing her. Pam, at the reception desk, averted her eyes from this unseemly display of emotion.

  “I’m here,” said Jenny, smiling, though her eyes flashed discomfort.

  “Let me take you back,” I said, and gestured for her to follow me down the front hallway. “I have to get my coat. And you can see my desk.”

  “Okay,” she said, in the sort of tone she used with her mother. “It’s really dark,” she whispered. “Are they trying to save money on electricity?”

  I held my finger to my lips like a librarian. Shhhhh! And smiled. Other than the finance department, with its glaring fluorescents, the office was lit almost entirely by shaded lamps, which meant that its warren of rooms were indeed much more dim than a modern office, like Jenny’s, with walls of windows and bright overheads. But this was part of what I loved about it: the soft, consoling glow cast by the lamps; the hush of my co-workers’ feet on the soft carpet, the leather armchairs and dark wood bookcases. It was like working in someone’s apartment or a private library.

  “Or a funeral home!” said Jenny as we walked across Forty-Ninth Street, back in the direction of her office. “Or a bar. I can’t believe your boss really smokes. At her desk!” Jenny had been, actually, the first of my friends to take up smoking, her junior year of high school, the side effect of dating a college guy. This shocked me at the time. “Isn’t it depressing, being in that office all day? Everyone looks so sad. It really does remind me of a funeral home. All those old-fashioned lamps. The rugs.”

  “Maybe a little,” I conceded, though it didn’t at all. I loved the lamps and rugs, loved that the office was hushed and softly lit. “Do you want to come back to Williamsburg for dinner? We could go to Planet Thailand.” I had been contriving to get Jenny over to my neighborhood for dinner or coffee, to show her my apartment, my lovely block, hopeful that if she came for the afternoon, she’d fall in love and move there.

  “I don’t think I can go all the way to Brooklyn,” she said. “It’ll take me forever to get on the ferry from there.”

  “It’s not that far,” I began. This was true: I was just one stop in from Manhattan. Twenty minutes from where we stood. “But should we just get on the train and go downtown? We could go to the Grey Dog? Or John’s Pizzeria?” Jenny loved John’s.

  She shifted uncomfortably on her Mary Janes. “Maybe we could just stop somewhere here? I should get on the ferry in an hour or so.”

  “Here?” We were on the West Side now, at the edge of the theater district, surrounded by overpriced restaurants designed for conventioneers and tourists, steak houses with laminated menus, chain Italian joints, loud Irish pubs. No one I knew would ever willingly eat in any such establishment.

  “There’s a place that my boss sometimes takes us to.” She spoke now in mollifying tones. “It has a terrible name, but the food is actually really good.”

  “What’s it called?” I asked.

  “Pasta Pasta!” she said, smiling. “Pasta Pasta Exclamation Point!”

  Ensconced in a booth, spearing quills of penne, I felt silly: Jenny was right. There had been no need to go downtown. The food was beside the point. We talked about Texas, about the latest installment of Jenny’s wedding saga—her parents had deemed the boathouse too expensive—about Don’s novel, which was still not done.

  “How is Brett?” I finally asked. “Has he heard from all the schools?” His acceptance letters—and rejection letters—from law schools had started arriving back in March. I knew he’d been accepted to two in New York: Brooklyn Law and Cardozo. And he’d been wait-listed at a few places.

  Jenny nodded. “He has. He got into Case Western off the wait list, and he’s decided to go.”

  “Case Western?” I asked, my stomach dropping. “Why? He got into Cardozo.”

  “Well, he just thinks Case Western is the right place for him. It’s a really good school. And, you know, he’s from the Midwest. He misses that area. He thinks law school in Cleveland will be a little bit less intense. Law students in New York have got to be crazy competitive.”

  I nodded. “And you’ll stay here until he’s done?”

  She laughed. “No, I’ll go with him.” She rolled her eyes. “We’re engaged.”

  “Oh, right! I’d forgotten.” I took a bite of my cooling pasta. Pasta! I thought. Exclamation point! Did I have friends other than Jenny who would find that funny?

  “I’m actually kind of excited about it. I’ve never lived anywhere other than New York. Cleveland is a cool city. The art museum is great. And it will be so cheap. We can get, like, a huge house for less than we’re paying for our apartment.”

  I had gone to Oberlin. I knew all about Cleveland, but I just nodded, sipping the dregs of my house red. Jenny had not ordered wine, which made me feel like a lush. Everyone else I knew ordered wine with dinner by rote. What was the point of going to dinner—even at a cheesy, awful corporate restaurant in midtown—if you didn’t order wine? For a few minutes, we sat in silence, then Jenny smiled goofily—her old smile, which I saw so rarely now—and said, “I think we should split the tiramisu. It’s completely terrible. But also completely amazing.”

  “Sure,” I said, as she signaled for the waiter.

  “So what happened with Judy Blume?” she asked. A week or so ago, I’d told her that Judy was coming into the office. The old Jenny would have loved this turn of events, would have wanted to know everything. The new Jenny had waited until after dinner to ask about it. And though I wasn’t sure that she even cared, I explained what had transpired.

  “Of course she left!” Jenny cried.

  “Because my boss maybe told her that she wasn’t sure she could sell her new novel? And keeps her books in the least visible part of the office?” I smiled at her. “Or because the office looks like a funeral home?”

  “All of that, obviously,” she said, swirling a bit of cake in marsala. “But really because the Agency is like something out of Dickens. You step inside, and it’s like you’ve time traveled back a hundred years.” She gave me a funny look. “We were walking through the office and I was trying to figure out why it seemed so weird. And then, when we got to your desk, I realized, There are no computers!”

  “I told you I typed everything. On a typewriter.”

  “I know,” she said, shaking her head, dark waves bouncing glossily on her shoulders. “But I figured that was just some quirk of your boss. That she was old. I didn’t realize there were no computers at all. It’s 1996. How do they do any business? Everyone uses e-mail. How do they even communicate with the world?” She paused, cocking her head to the side. “If I were Judy Blume, I’m not sure that I would put my career in the hands of an agency that refuses to admit it’s almost the twenty-first century.”

  Back in March, James had found the wherewithal to approach my boss about entering the digital age, if in the most minor, tentative manner possible. Not an office full of computers. No network. Just a few desktops, for the assistants, so that we might do our work more efficiently. Maybe without Internet connections even.

  “Give me something in writing,” my boss finally conceded, in April. “Price it out.”

  By the end of the day, h
e was back, rapping firmly on her office door. “Just wanted to give you this,” he said, handing over a neatly typed sheaf of papers.

  It was June, the week after the Judy incident, before she sent me to fetch him. “Come in, come in,” she said as we approached. “Not you”—she tilted her head toward me—“just James.” And she shut the door.

  Half an hour later they emerged, chatting chummily. “Do they come in black?” my boss asked.

  “It’s possible,” said James, nodding.

  “All the computers I’ve seen are that awful putty color,” she complained. “Yech. Why do they make them that color?”

  “I’ll see about black.”

  “Mind you, I’m not saying yes.” My boss paused in front of my desk. “But you have intrigued me. It could help with Salinger.”

  “It could,” James agreed. What might this mean? Were they talking about the fan letters? That a computer would save me the labor of typing that form letter over and over and over? I smiled just thinking about this. They weighed on me, the letters: all those Salinger fans waiting for responses. A computer would help.

  “See if they come in black,” my boss was saying, “and then we’ll talk. And confirm the numbers.”

  “Okay.” James allowed himself a small smile. I could see that he was trying to decide whether to say what he did indeed say next. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me,” my boss said. “I’m not saying yes. And if I did say yes, it would only be for the Salinger stuff. I don’t want people on the World Wide Web all day, doing whatever they do.” She waved her hands around, to indicate the utter craziness that was the Internet. “I don’t want people”—she glanced in my direction and gave James a knowing nod—“e-mailing their friends in Zimbabwe all day.”

  “I don’t think,” said James, with a wink at me, “that will be a problem.”

  The next day, Pam dropped on my desk a thick envelope bearing rows of colorful foreign postage. Inside, I found the Other Client’s new novel, his first literary venture in a decade. He was on leave from teaching at the moment, staying with his wife’s family in New Zealand. “I just have a feeling about this,” my boss told Hugh and me, bouncing excitedly on her toes, the thick manuscript clutched to her chest. “This is going to be huge,” she told me the next morning. She’d read the entire thing in one night. “Prepare yourself for a multiple submission.” I nodded, afraid to open my mouth. Multiple submissions, I’d thought, were not the Agency way. But veering from the Agency way could only be a good thing for the Agency.

  “It’s going to be a lot of work,” she warned me. Perhaps, I thought, this was her problem with contemporary agenting, or contemporary publishing, in general: not that it was unscrupulous, but that it was too taxing. Thirty years earlier, she could have sold this book on a one-page proposal and a handshake.

  For a week, my boss consulted with Max, working and reworking a list of editors to whom she’d send the novel, many of them younger and unknown to her, outside her network of cronies. The manuscript was handed to me to be sent out for xeroxing—our office machine couldn’t handle twelve copies of a three-hundred-page tome—and while I waited for the messenger to arrive, I peeked at the front page. I’d been relieved, honestly, that my boss hadn’t asked me to read the novel. It sounded gruesome and sensational and vaguely misogynist, the sort of violent thriller sold in airports. The first pages showed this to be absolutely true. The narrator excruciatingly details a Grand Guignol scene in which he finds the bodies of three dead girls in an attic, arranged in a sort of diorama. The writing, sure, was elegant and precise, the tone controlled and engaging—almost masterful—but there was still something about those pages—something beyond the grotesque subject matter—that turned my stomach.

  In the end, my boss was right: the book sold for a large amount of money, to a great editor, at the new literary imprint of a good publisher. A crossover literary thriller. Gold. “We did it!” my boss said, generously, to the group gathered near my desk. Had I ever seen her in such high spirits? I wasn’t sure. But I was happy—as all assistants are, perhaps—to see my boss happy. Ecstatic.

  “You did it,” I said, smiling. It was true.

  “I suppose,” she said with a shrug. She was, I suddenly realized, an unlikely leader, a reluctant president. She disliked being at the center of attention, having us all at her beck and call. This was why she came and went with barely a word to me. Not out of hauteur. She was shy, quiet, retiring. “We’re going for drinks tonight. All of us.”

  And so we filed out, at five, to the stark, 1980s-style restaurant around the corner and sat at the bar—birds on a wire—drinking cocktails. Outside the office, we had, somehow, nothing to say to one another, each of us too afraid of betraying allegiances. Only Carolyn and my boss made it past the first round. The rest of us filed out quickly, pulling on sweaters and light jackets. It was June, but still cold. The blizzard had set the tone for the rest of the year. At some point, things had to warm up.

  The next week, a brown-suited deliveryman deposited a block of enormous boxes in the finance wing, across from the shelf that held Judy’s books. From my desk I watched James hunched over a mass of cables, setting up a hulking desktop PC. Decidedly putty colored. I stopped by on my way to the bathroom. “No black?” I asked.

  “Sony actually makes a black desktop,” said James, smiling. “But it was a lot more expensive. Your boss decided it wasn’t worth it. She thinks computers are just a passing fad.”

  “This is going to make form letters so much easier,” I said, crouching down beside him. “The Salinger fan mail, especially. Oh my God.” I wondered what would happen to my typewriter, the huge hulking mass of it. Perhaps they’d let me take it home. I’d come to love it, in a strange, Stockholm syndrome sort of way. And I imagined myself typing away the evening, seated at the blue schoolhouse desk I’d pulled in off the street, a stack of unblemished white paper to my left. Perhaps I would write a novel, the novel I’d been toying with, nervously plotting out, the typewriter’s whir and hum coaxing me into a meditative state.

  James stood up and stretched. “Not really,” he said. I furrowed my brow in his direction. “This is the computer.” With the back of his hand, he wiped a sheen of sweat off his forehead. “The computer.” Uncomprehendingly, I looked from James to the partially installed monitor. “We’re just getting one computer. Which we’ll all share. We’ll still type up correspondence on our Selectrics.”

  “But—” I asked, hoping that I’d misheard something. “Why?” I looked at him a disproportionate sense of alarm filling me. “What’s this for?”

  “We’ll use it to monitor copyright infringement. So, there are all these personal Web pages, right? And people are posting excerpts from Salinger and Fitzgerald and Dylan Thomas. We need to make sure that those excerpts are within the limits of fair usage. Which is eight hundred words or less for prose; five lines for poetry.”

  “Oh,” I said, still stunned.

  “Hugh can also use it for research so he doesn’t have to go to the library as much.” Hugh, I knew, would be deeply displeased by this suggestion. He loved going to the library. “And I think everyone else can use it, if they need to, just not for personal stuff.”

  A few days later, my boss walked around the office rounding everyone up, then brought the lot of us—Lucy and Max laughing like high school kids—over to the computer, pristine and beige, its monitor dark. “Well,” she said. “We’ve done it.” She cast her eyes around at us, meaningfully. “This is the office computer.” She gestured to the keyboard. “Is it on?” she asked James. He shook his head no. “Okay, it’s not on,” she confirmed. Olivia looked at me and smirked. “We’ve put it here, right in the central part of the office, in full view, so that no one will be tempted to use it for personal e-mail or”—she paused, searching her mind for other activities in which one might engage with a computer—“anything. People waste a lot of time on computers and we’re not going to have any of that. This com
puter is for research”—she nodded at Hugh, who nodded curtly back—“and for monitoring Agency business. If you need to use it for anything, just come to me and ask. But if I come out and see you sitting here, I’m going to assume you’re doing something you shouldn’t be doing.” Surveying our faces, she shook her head with exasperation, as if we were a pack of mischievous children entrusted to her care. “Okay?”

  “Okay!” cried Max, raising his fist in the air.

  “Now, Max,” said my boss, an edge rising in her voice. It was strange: Max generated pretty much all the Agency’s new business. He’d just settled a deal for something in the sum of two million dollars. But my boss still regarded him as an interloper, a rebel without proper respect for the Agency’s filing system. She did not, I suspected, consider him “an Agency person,” like James and Hugh—and me. She’d quietly doled out this praise half a dozen times now. And though I relished it—I was nothing if not, as Don perpetually told me, the Obedient Child—it occurred to me that if these were my two potential futures, the choice was abundantly clear: I wanted to be Max, not my boss. To be Max was not just to broker big deals but to be utterly engaged with contemporary literature, as entangled with the ins and outs of narrative style as I’d been as a grad student, albeit in a far less rarefied way; to be in daily conversation with great writers and editors who cared deeply about words, language, story, which was another way of simply being engaged with the world, of trying to make sense of the world, rather than retreating from it, trying to place an artificial order on the messy stuff of life, preferring dead writers to living ones.

  But then another, sobering thought occurred to me. Before I started this job, hadn’t I wanted to count myself among the living ones?

  That night, as I brushed my teeth in the bathroom, Don called to me from the couch. “Buba! Come here. I want to show you something.” Inside me, something cracked and splintered into a million pieces. “Please stop calling me that,” I shouted, storming into the living room. “I’m not a child.” His large eyes grew larger and I thought, for a second—unbelievably—they might be filling with tears. “Do you know why I call you that?” he asked. I shook my head. And so he told me.