My Salinger Year

by Joanna Rakoff

  “You’re writing every day?” he asked, lowering his voice. I flushed again. Suddenly I understood Roger’s nervousness. It was strange to feel the force of a famous person’s attention. “First thing in the morning.”

  “I am.” This was mostly true.

  “That’s what you do,” he said. “So, I have a question for you.” Oh no, I thought, not again. “Have you met this Roger Lathbury fellow?”

  “I haven’t,” I admitted. “But I’ve spoken to him on the phone many times.”

  “Yes, well, I went down to meet him last week. I don’t know if you’ve gathered that. And I think he’s a fine fellow. He showed me some designs for the book. One was terrible, but one was good. Very good.”

  “Hmm,” I murmured, as I did with Roger.

  “I’m inclined to go ahead and let him publish the book. The ‘Hapworth’ book. I gather you’ve heard about this.”

  “I have.”

  “And what do you make of this Roger Lathbury fellow?”

  Ah, there was the question. How to answer it? “He seems like a good person. Like someone you can trust.” I believed this.

  “My feelings exactly,” said Salinger, though these words were slightly more distorted, elongated, than usual and it took me a few extra seconds to decode them. “I don’t know that your boss feels that way.”

  “Well,” I said cautiously, “it’s her job to look out for you.”

  “True.” He sneezed, rather violently, then let out a little snuffle, and when he began talking again, his voice had risen in volume. Did his hearing drop in and out? “Is she in? Your boss? I’d love to talk to her.”

  “I’m afraid she’s out at the moment. Shall I have her call you?” I wasn’t sure when she would be returning calls, but my mouth formed these words almost automatically.

  “Sure, sure, but no rush,” he said. Where did these reports of his tyrannical behavior come from? He was never anything but kind and patient on the phone. More so than plenty of people who called the Agency. More so than plenty of his fans, for that matter.

  The minute I put down the phone, Hugh came racing out of his office. “Jerry?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “You told him that she was out of the office?”

  I nodded again.

  Hugh pressed his mouth into a thin, tense line. “You want to go get a sandwich?”

  Outside, we found one of those grim New York summer days in which the sun hangs low behind a haze of gray and the air seems full to bursting with moisture. We both immediately began to sweat.

  At the corner of Forty-Ninth and Park, Hugh stopped and turned to face me, his pale eyes steely with reserve. “Daniel killed himself,” he said.

  “Oh,” I said, drawing in a sharp breath. “Oh.”

  “He had”—Hugh drew in his own breath—“psychological problems. He was bipolar. Your boss took care of him. Cared for him. It was a big job.” We were stopped at a light on the corner of Park, the flowers still blazing in the median strip, the Waldorf in front of us. “I think it was very hard on her. Though she would never admit it. And she’s taking care of Dorothy, too. Not in the same way.” He sighed his trademark sigh. “Dorothy has full-time caregivers. But your boss is overseeing her care.”

  “Daniel was her—” I wasn’t sure how to ask this, but Hugh saved me.

  “Lover,” he said tersely. It was not a word that fit comfortably in his mouth. “He was her lover. They’d been together for, oh gee, twenty years.”

  Lover? I thought, my mind spinning. Twenty years. Had she cared for him this whole time? Had she fallen in love with him first, discovered his problems, his difficulties, later? Had his illness only developed, emerged, later, after their lives were fully meshed? Or had she known everything from the start and accepted him as he was? Lover, I thought again. Why had they never married? Because of Daniel’s illness?

  We started across Park, me struggling a bit to match Hugh’s long gait. It was strange to be out in the world with him. I thought of him as purely a creature of the Agency. Like the Wizard of Oz, barricaded in his strange castle. In reality, he was married—with two stepdaughters—and I had met his wife, a pretty, pleasant woman with long graying hair, but it was still impossible to picture him, say, eating dinner with her in their apartment in Brooklyn Heights or going to a movie or anywhere other than the Agency.

  “How’s she doing?” I asked, finally, though this didn’t seem sufficient a question.

  “I haven’t talked to her. Carolyn says she seems to be doing okay. Keeping it together.” Hugh touched his hand to his forehead, which was beaded with perspiration, and grimaced. “But I don’t know how long that will last. It’s just terrible, this.”

  At Third Avenue, we turned south, and Hugh led me to a narrow, ancient sandwich shop, so small, so tucked away that I would have never found it on my own. “How are you today?” he asked the man behind the counter. A large air conditioner rattled in the window, sending a stream of cold air in my direction, and I shivered a little, my perspiration drying. “I’ll have an egg salad on whole wheat and”—he turned to me—“whatever she’s having.”

  As we retraced our steps, Hugh carrying a small brown sack with our sandwiches inside, I asked him why they hadn’t married.

  Hugh’s jaw tensed, a muscle twitching along its length. “Well, they couldn’t, exactly,” he said with a small sigh. “There was Helen.”

  “Who is Helen?” I asked.

  “Helen?” said Hugh. He seemed, somehow, surprised that I didn’t possess this information. “Helen is Daniel’s wife. Was.”

  This was enough to stop me in my tracks. “His wife? But I heard. Well, I mean, my boss was always on the phone with her, or talking about her. It sounded like they were friends.”

  To my surprise, Hugh turned to me and smiled. “They were friends. They are friends. It’s an unusual situation.” I looked at him. “Daniel lived with Helen part of the week and your boss the rest of it. They shared his care. They shared him, I guess.”

  “Oh,” I said, stunned. My boss, with her nunlike aspect, her pantsuits and caftans, her devotion to the Agency, her pull-your-socks-up attitude, had shared her lover with his wife. No wonder she didn’t have the energy to seek out new clients.

  “But he, um, did it in your boss’s apartment. While she was there.” Hugh’s face had become flushed from the effort of discussing this.

  “What?” I asked. “What do you mean?” We had resumed walking and were once again approaching Park. How nice it would be, I thought, to just go in and sit down for lunch, to be waited on. To have a drink.

  “Shot himself. In the head.” Hugh was nodding, like a wounded child, and I realized he was holding back tears. He had worked with my boss for twenty years. “Your boss was in the other room. I think he was in the bedroom and she was in the living room. But I might have misunderstood. It might have been the opposite—”

  “Oh my God.” We had reached our building, but I couldn’t stand the thought of going up. I couldn’t stand the thought of my boss in her apartment twenty blocks north, her apartment where, the night before, her lover of twenty years had taken a gun, pointed it at his head, and pulled the trigger. How does one get over that? How does one go on?

  “Yeah,” said Hugh. “So you can see. She might be out awhile.”

  She was out awhile. Days passed, days in which I repeatedly explained that my boss was not in the office, never specifying if it was for the day or the hour. My boss didn’t receive a large variety of callers, but the same few callers phoned over and over again: Salinger, amiable and chatty; Roger, nervous and chatty, more so with each passing day; the Other Client, sometimes smooth and charming, sometimes ill-tempered and impatient, his voice crackling and strange, due to bad connections. “I can receive contracts here whenever they’re ready,” he told me tersely. “And the advance money should be wired into my account. You have all the information.”

  Days became a week and then two. One morning during the f
irst week, my boss arrived in a voluminous raincoat and dark glasses—her feet, heartbreakingly, clad in the sort of narrow white canvas sneakers worn by children—silently crossed the threshold into our wing, ducked into her office and grabbed something, then ducked back out without a word to anyone. She was, not unexpectedly, selling her apartment.

  Midway through the second week, the editor of the Other Client’s new book called to check in. We’d not yet gotten the contracts back to her. “What should I do?” I asked Hugh. “Should I call her?”

  Hugh shook his head. “You’ve been doing contracts all this time. She trusts you. Just do the contract. Negotiate. It’ll be fine.”

  Nervously, checking my work over and over, I did as he instructed. As it happened, the Agency rarely did deals with this particular publisher, and I had no recent contracts to draw on for models. I pulled every possible agreement I could think of, comparing clauses on royalties, first and second serial, on reprints and electronic rights, on everything, and checking, of course, the deal memo to see what rights we’d agreed to sell and which we’d retain to peddle in-house. Finally, after two days of this, checking and rechecking everything, I drafted the sort of long, laborious note my boss often dictated. Lately, those notes had been based on my preliminary work. Many changes needed to be made to this contract before the author could sign it. The publisher was not familiar with the Agency’s standards, the standards of another era.

  Without my boss, the office was oddly quiet. I hadn’t realized how much life, how much urgency, she brought to each day. In her absence, everyone seemed to come in a bit later, to linger longer over lunch, to stay at home on Friday, when we closed early anyway. Summer Fridays, that great tradition of the publishing industry, a gentleman’s business, at its inception at least.

  Without dictation, my days were surprisingly free, and surprisingly pleasant. Once again, I caught up on my permissions and filing, and then I turned to the Salinger letters. The letter from the boy in Winston-Salem had remained at the top of the pile, unanswered, for months now. Just send him the form letter, I told myself as I unfolded the missive.

  I think about Holden a lot. He just pops into my mind’s eye and I get to thinking about him dancing with old Phoebe or horsing around in front of the bathroom mirror at Pencey. When I first think about him I usually get a big stupid grin on my face. You know, thinking about what a funny guy he is and all. But then I usually get depressed as hell. I guess I get depressed because I only think about Holden when I’m feeling very emotional. I can get quiet emotional.

  Yes, “quiet” not “quite.” I assumed this was just a typo, and a beautiful, felicitous one, which I suspected Salinger would appreciate. Salinger who made typos himself. Which were reprinted in The New Yorker, apparently.

  Don’t worry, though. I’ve learned that, as phony as it may be, you can’t go around revealing your goddam emotions to the world. Most people don’t give a flying hoot about what you think and feel most of the time, I guess. And if they see a weakness, why for God’s sake showing emotion is a weakness, boy, do they jump all over you! They seem to get right in your goddam face and revel in the fact that you are actually feeling something.

  Oh God. I sighed a Hugh-worthy sigh. What could I say to him? Dear Boy from Winston-Salem, I too can get quiet emotional. You’re right, you can’t go around revealing your emotions to the world. I’ve been trying to take your advice and I think I’m succeeding. My boss’s lover killed himself and we’re all pretending nothing happened. I left the man I love in California and he’s pretending he’s not angry with me and I’m pretending I’m not lost without him. I don’t have enough money to pay my bills but I’m pretending I can go out to dinner and do all the things people in New York seem to do. So we’re all doing a pretty good job not revealing our emotions, right? But if you can’t reveal your emotions, how do you go on? What do you do with them? Because, you see, I keep crying at odd moments. Please advise. Yours, Joanna Rakoff.

  No, I would not be sending a form letter to the boy from Winston-Salem. I folded up the letter and set it aside.

  Gathering my strength, I grabbed another letter from the pile. The shaky, lacy handwriting of the elderly. The writer of this letter was a man with a Nebraska address. His was one of the war letters. “Like you, I served in the armed forces during World War II,” he wrote. “I lost many friends. Some died in my arms. Luckily, I had a wonderful wife waiting at home for me. If I hadn’t, I’m not sure what would have happened to me when I got back home from the war. I was able to go on with life, to run my business, and raise my children. Now that I’m retired, I find myself thinking about the war. I read The Catcher in the Rye in those years after I came home and I loved it then. Holden Caulfield seemed to fully capture the anger I felt and the isolation. It may have helped save me. Just last week, I read it again, and I found myself moved to tears.”

  As always, I sat too long with this letter, reading it over and over, trying to formulate an appropriate response. There were many war letters. But some—like this one—were so heartfelt, so true, it was—as always—difficult to simply send a form letter back. With this man, I found middle ground: I explained, as gently as I could, that Salinger had asked us not to send on his fan mail, so I couldn’t, unfortunately, pass on his letter. But I told him that under a different set of circumstances Mr. Salinger would have likely been very glad to read his letter and particularly glad to hear that Catcher had played some small part in his recovery following the war. As he knew, Mr. Salinger himself had suffered considerably during the war. He, too, had held friends in his arms as they shuddered through their last breaths. Warmest regards, Joanna Rakoff.

  Quickly, as if ripping off a Band-Aid, I typed up an envelope, folded the letter, and placed it inside, then grabbed another letter. No, I thought, you can’t go around revealing your goddam emotions to the world.

  Don was not, he said, nervous about James’s verdict on his novel. He was not, he said, anxiously waiting to hear back. “James is not the only agent in the world,” he told me, laughing, as he so often did whenever we discussed anything even vaguely serious. “If he turns it down, then it just wasn’t for him. I can find someone else.”

  And yet he still sat, at night, reading over the novel again and again, grimacing at this word or that, as if an imperfect modifier would make or break the whole venture. He was training a couple of nights per week now, and he came home, lugging his bag of gear, in a manic state of exhaustion. Even punching an enormous vinyl bag—or a reedy Puerto Rican kid—couldn’t calm him down. Marc’s wedding, too, was bothering him. Until now, it had been an abstraction, an idea, rather than an actual event that would transpire at some point in the space-time continuum, though I wasn’t exactly sure when. Don would not be the best man—Marc’s brother would play that role—but Marc had asked him to read a poem. Don was scouring our various anthologies, looking for something appropriate. “What kind of poem do you read when your friend marries someone completely boring and wrong for him?” he asked me, laughing.

  “I don’t know,” I told him, “but maybe I could use it at Jenny’s wedding.” As far as I knew, I was to be a bridesmaid at Jenny’s wedding, alongside her two best friends from college.

  One Saturday night, as the skies ominously clouded over, Don and I dressed—Don silently, desultorily—and took the L a few stops to Marc’s loft on Fourteenth Street for a party. The idea was a sort of pre-wedding blowout, but this being August in New York, no one was around. We found the loft populated with a few Marc-like guys—muscular, clad in Carhartts and Red Wing boots, self-consciously blue-collar gear, completely inappropriate for the weather—drinking beer out of bottles and nodding uncomfortably at each other.

  Marc was leaning on the kitchen counter, talking to Allison, whom I’d not expected to see. Her parents kept a summerhouse on the Vineyard and she spent weekends there, though she had no shortage of invitations to Sag Harbor and Woodstock and various parts of Connecticut, the houses of her high sch
ool friends, alums of various uptown private schools, their lives funded by never-mentioned trust funds. Lately, she’d become my friend as much as—more than—Don’s. We met for dinner and coffee; we lolled on the couch in her tiny studio; we ventured to the cheap Russian salon down the street to have our nails painted a deep, blackish maroon, then stared at our transformed hands, at glamorous odds with our jeans and T-shirts, our scuffed boots.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” I cried, throwing an arm around her. And I was. My life, lately, had narrowed to Don and work. Where had all my friends gone? They had receded from my life, as Don had advanced. Before I’d moved to New York, it seemed as though everyone was there, playing cockroaches in experimental plays, or making broody films at Columbia, or working at galleries, or teaching dance to the poor kids in Brownsville or the rich kids at St. Ann’s. When I first returned, there had been parties and dinners and coffees and shopping trips—joyous cries of “You’re back”—but now everyone seemed so busy, so involved with the minutiae of their own lives. And then: I had allowed myself to be subsumed by Don.

  “I couldn’t miss the pre-wedding party,” she said with a roll of her dark eyes. According to Don, she’d long been in love with Marc, since undergrad, and I wondered now if this were true. She’d never mentioned it to me, certainly; yes, she avoided talking about the wedding, and about Lisa—whose charms, like Don, she found nonexistent, or at least unequal to Marc’s, though she regarded the discrepancy with cool remove rather than vitriol. Now she seemed nervous, tense, irritable. Rather like Don. Suddenly I wished I’d stayed home.

  “You ready for the big day?” Don asked Marc, patting him on the back. He was trying for cheer, for bonhomie, which gave him the aspect of an actor in a community theater production of Our Town.

  “I don’t know,” said Marc, with an enormous smile. When he smiled, he seemed to radiate pure waves of goodwill and genuine happiness. This was, I supposed, the difference between Marc and Don: Marc was fully at home in the world, content with his life. He needed, he wanted, nothing more than what he had. Don wanted everything, everyone; Don wanted and wanted. “I guess I’d better be ready, right?”