My Salinger Year

by Joanna Rakoff

  Don came home on Monday, buoyant with energy, happy and rested, glad to see me. “How are you?” he said, sitting down beside me on the bed. I’d just finished Catcher and my head was spinning. “Tell me everything my Buba did.”

  When I spoke, my voice was hoarse, as if I’d just woken up. I’d barely uttered a word all weekend, except to order my eggs and coffee. Outside, the sky was gray, utterly devoid of color. “Nothing,” I said.

  “You didn’t go to the movies? I know how you love that.” He smiled, trying to cajole me into loquaciousness. I know you. A curious blankness, an apathy, had settled over me. I watched the sky darken, preparing for rain. I had, in Don’s absence, rather forgotten about him. I had not wondered what he was doing at the wedding, at the beach, if he was thrilled to be able to stare at the various young women in attendance without fear of my censure, if he had woken this morning with some blonde by his side. I had not really thought about him at all.

  On Tuesday, my boss returned in full force, or with aspirations toward it. She had sold her apartment and was in the process of selecting another one. The front-runner had a sunken living room and beautiful views of the East River. She brought in plans and walked around the office unfurling them on our desks so that we might weigh in. We all agreed: the sunken living room looked lovely, elegant, like something out of a Carole Lombard movie.

  She had also been to a spa in the days prior to her return, and she asked us, all of us, to feel her elbows, which had been thoroughly exfoliated for, she said, the first time in her life. “Feel my elbows!” she cried, when anyone asked about her trip. “Feel!” I felt, and as I felt, I thought of Seymour Glass, who writes in his journal about the imprints other people make on his hands, their humanity searing his flesh. “I have scars on my hands from touching certain people.” Seymour Glass, who is somehow too sensitive, too emotional—“quiet emotional”—for this world. Seymour Glass, who shoots himself in the head with a revolver, while his wife lies on the bed next to him.

  One morning in September, James came over to my desk with his usual mug of coffee in hand. “So, I read Don’s novel again,” he said, looking at me intently. He was trying not to smile. “And I’d like to take it on. To take him on.”

  “Really?” I said, rising so I was closer to his height. I had, I realized, been holding my breath while he spoke. “That’s amazing.”

  “I’ll call him today and let him know. And we’ll send it out.” Raising his eyebrows, he allowed himself to smile.

  “You won’t need him to do edits?” I asked, carefully modulating my voice so as to quell a rising panic. How could the novel go out as is? It wouldn’t sell. I knew it wouldn’t sell.

  “Yeah, I’ve been thinking about it,” said James, taking a small sip of coffee. “And I think this is the kind of novel where an editor is either going to love his style or”—he grimaced—“not love it. There are changes he could make, but I think I may as well just get it out there, find an editor who loves it, and let him direct Don in a rewrite. There are a lot of directions you could go with an edit. I don’t want to send him in the wrong direction. I want someone to fall in love with his writing.”

  I nodded.

  “Why?” said James, his grin turning mischievious. “Do you think the novel needs a rewrite?”

  “No!” I cried.

  “Come on,” James said, laughing.

  From my boss’s office came the squeak of her chair. “What’s going on out there?” she called.

  “I’m taking on Joanna’s boyfriend,” James called back. Since the installation of the computer, he had developed an admirable ability to banter with my boss. Or perhaps she had developed the ability to banter with him, for he was no longer merely the junior-most agent—still tied to his Dictaphone and his filing—he was now the Computer Expert, the Agency’s conduit to the digital era.

  “Really?” asked my boss. I heard the unmistakable flick of her lighter.

  “Really. He’s written an interesting novel.” James rolled his eyes at me, anticipating my boss’s tart response, but none came. “Joanna thinks it needs work before I send it out.”

  “She’s probably right,” said my boss with a laugh. A moment later, a stream of smoke came swirling out her door, like the trail from a genie’s lamp.

  The drama over “Hapworth” moved from the inside of the book—the leading, the margins, the running heads—to the outside. Roger had encountered a glitch: despite the ample space he’d given the lines, despite the wide margins, the book was still not thick enough for the title—or Salinger’s name, for that matter—to be stamped horizontally across its spine. “The letters run together,” he told me, worriedly. “It becomes a blur. It just looks terrible.”

  Salinger was displeased by this, of course, but he understood that Roger could do nothing about it. He decided to take matters into his own hands: he came up with a design for the spine himself. One entire day in October was lost to a flurry of faxing: Jerry faxing my boss designs. My boss looking them over, then faxing them to Roger, who made changes and faxed them back to us. And on and on. My boss did the faxing herself, running back and forth to the machine, which was just beyond the finance wing, catty-corner from the computer, adjacent to the coffeemaker and the photocopier and the microwave, the various reminders that this was 1996 rather than 1956.

  By the end of the day, the involved parties had reached a détente, of sorts: Roger agreed to use Salinger’s latest design, which was somewhat unusual, involving his name slanting down the spine on a diagonal. This agreement had not come easily. “Bite it, Roger,” my boss finally said, or so she reported to Hugh and me.

  “You didn’t really say that?” asked Hugh, laughing.

  “I most certainly did,” confirmed my boss. “This would have gone on forever. It’s just ridiculous. If he’s going to get this book in stores by the New Year”—the pub date was still January 1, though this seemed highly improbable to me and, I knew, to Hugh; we hadn’t even finished working out the contracts—“no one cares what the spine looks like. They’ll buy the book because it’s Salinger.”

  “True,” said Hugh. “But it’s Roger’s press. I can see why he wants it to look decent.”

  “It will look decent,” said my boss, holding out Salinger’s rendering to him.

  Hugh squinted at it. “Wow,” he said. “Can they even do that? Stamp it on the diagonal?”

  “Roger’s ordered a sample case, so we’ll see soon enough,” said my boss with a smile that I recognized, belatedly, as utterly wicked.

  Sometimes, at lunch, I walked through Rockefeller Center and glimpsed Jenny’s old building, a wash of sadness spreading through me. She was no longer inside, e-mailing her colleagues about lunch; she was in Cleveland. Though I rarely saw her when she worked just across town—her life, her world, had been so separate from mine—it comforted me to know she was there, a few blocks west. There was the hope, I supposed, that things would change, go back to the way they were.

  She and Brett had rented not a house but an apartment near the university—real estate in Cleveland was not, it turned out, as cheap as they’d thought—and she had found a job, a part-time job, at the science museum, as an educator, which meant she was one of the cheerful, sweet-natured docent-like people who brought kids to the discovery center—or whatever it was called in Cleveland—to observe ant farms and run their fingers along dinosaur bones and who knows what else, all the things we had done as kids at the Museum of Natural History. It was, I told her over the phone, the perfect job for her, relieved to be able to tell her the simple truth.

  After I hung up, though, I thought about Holden, of course. Like the boy from Winston-Salem, I was starting to think about Holden a lot. Holden loved the Museum of Natural History, too, the Indians and the deer drinking from the artificial pond and the birds migrating south in a V. “The best thing, though,” he says, “… was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move.” Those Indians, that deer, the birds in fl
ight, they remain utterly the same. “The only thing that would be different would be you.”

  One day my boss handed me a story by a client of hers of whom I’d heard nothing. He was elderly, I gathered, and had published a few acclaimed novels in the distant past, but these novels were long out of print and his name was all but lost to the channels of history. Certainly, it rang no bells with me. Later, I would look for his novels on the Agency’s shelves but find none. “Why don’t you send this out?” she said.

  “Under my own name?” I asked tentatively, certain she would say no. Uncertain as to whether I even wanted her to say yes.

  “Yes,” she said. “Of course.”

  The story was good. Good, but quiet, in the parlance of the Agency—which also favored the term “edgy” to describe anything, it seemed, with graphic sex, like the work of some of Max’s clients—in that it wasn’t particularly plot-driven. But neither were many stories, including Salinger’s. It read more like a visitation with a character.

  In this day and age, I knew, this story was not, most likely, for the big magazines. But sometimes the unlikely occurred. Sometimes The New Yorker ran stories translated from Urdu or written entirely without the letter e. Sometimes it, too, ran stories that were merely quiet. The magazine had a new fiction editor, I knew, and he would surely be looking for new writers. I typed up a cover letter, clipped it to the story, and sent it off, into the world.

  That afternoon, James sent Don’s novel out. He was, of course, an Agency Type of Person, so he would not be holding an auction for the book, but would instead send it to one editor at a time. “If it were a big book,” he told me, “I’d do an auction.” Maybe James was right. We just needed one person to see the strange grandeur in Don’s writing, to see, too, how it might be unpacked, loosened, lightened, his story ordered and trimmed. Just one person.

  I wondered, though, if holding an auction might signal to editors that this was an important novel. If an auction might make it a big book.

  No, I thought, as I watched Izzy, the messenger, depart with the manuscript, his slicker ballooning over his gaunt form, no, that had been up to Don.

  I’d grown used to the quiet of our wing without my boss, grown used to mapping out my own time, and for those first few days following her return I had to force myself not to regard her as an interloper, an intrusion on my calm, peaceful workday. All the more so when the shouting began. We had all been treading delicately around her—with good reason—so I was shocked when, one afternoon, I heard Max raise his voice in her office. The door was closed, so I had no idea what he was yelling about—something he regarded as “bullshit” and “not acceptable”—and I froze in my chair, unable even to type.

  I was saved by the phone, out of which emanated a pleasant English accent. “Is this Joanne?” it asked.

  “It is,” I confirmed.

  The caller explained that she was the assistant to The New Yorker’s new fiction editor and she was calling about the story I’d sent. My heart began to beat faster. I’d been expecting a note. This was how rejections usually came. Perhaps they were going to take it? Could this be possible?

  “We’re going to have to pass on it, I’m afraid,” she said with a huge yawn. “Sorry, I have terrible jet lag. I can’t get used to the time change. I’ve been here for ages, but I still wake up ridiculously early and fall asleep at six o’clock.”

  From my boss’s office, the shouting had subsided. Max burst out the door. “All right,” he said, shaking his head in exasperation, as he walked away, studiedly not glancing in my direction. My boss sighed and slowly followed him, surely going off to talk to Carolyn.

  “Listen, the reason I’m calling is because we really liked this story. If the author has any others, please send them. And please do stay in touch. Send us more.” She yawned again, less dramatically. “It was close.”

  This pleased me more than it should have. I was close. I had aimed high and almost made it.

  Don was close, too. Sort of. A few days later, James strolled over to my desk and held a letter up to me. “First rejection,” he explained with a huge grin. “And it’s a really great one.” I had worked at the Agency long enough to understand that there were rejections and there were rejections. There was not for me and I just didn’t find these characters sympathetic and the story struck me as improbable at best, and also simply I’m afraid this is too similar to a novel we’re publishing next fall or too similar to a writer already on our list. And then there was I truly loved the writing but I just didn’t feel the story hung together and I’m so torn about this novel and I’d love to see this writer’s next novel, which was essentially the gist of the note James held in his hand.

  I was wrong, I thought, as he walked off to make a Xerox of it for Don.

  Walking home through the chilly wind, I remembered that the editor had actually said no. A good rejection letter was still a rejection letter. Perhaps I had been right.

  I would’ve preferred, I supposed, to be wrong. Though I wasn’t at all sure.

  I thought and thought about the fiction editor’s assistant. She had said to send more, and I felt, somehow, that we must send something immediately. I thought about the writer I’d pulled from the slush, the lovely novella about the girl and her alcoholic father. I’d been waiting for the right moment to present this potential client to my boss.

  At the end of the day, I rapped softly at my boss’s door.

  “So, I normally just send form letters back to the slush,” I said awkwardly. “But there was one query this summer that seemed interesting. So, I, um, asked for her novel. It’s actually a novella.” Suddenly I realized that I had potentially broken various rules. I should have brought the query letter to my boss first and asked permission to contact the writer. Seemingly all the blood in my body rushed to my face. “I don’t know if it’s to your taste. It’s quiet. And small in scale. But I think it’s good. I think it could sell.”

  My boss smiled. “You know,” she said, “you should have talked to me before you asked to see her work. When you contact an author, you’re representing the Agency.” I understand, I started to say, but before I could make a sound, she’d held out her hand. “Let me see it,” she said.

  That Friday, the mail contained a bundle of Salinger letters sent over from Little, Brown and several letters for me: the Salinger fans, writing back. I opened one, neatly typed on an ancient typewriter, smiling with delight, for reasons I couldn’t quite pinpoint. “Dear Miss Rakoff,” the note began, “if that’s who you really are.” My smile quickly disappeared. “Your name is so ridiculous that I am pretty certain it’s fake. I don’t know who you really are, but I’m assuming you’re using a pseudonym to protect yourself.” I laughed so loudly that Hugh shuffled in his chair, disrupted from whatever minutiae occupied him at that moment. “Well, whoever you are, I’m writing to tell you that you have no right to keep my letter, or anyone’s letter, from J. D. Salinger. I didn’t write to you. I wrote to him. If you think you can keep my letter, you’re wrong. Please send it to J. D. Salinger immediately.” I had no recollection of this person’s name, which probably meant I’d sent him a standard form letter, but I wasn’t sure. By this point I’d answered, God, hundreds of—a thousand?—fan letters.

  I opened the next, which was addressed in bubbly, girlish script: the girl seeking an A via a response from Salinger. What was I expecting? An expression of gratitude for my harsh but helpful words? What I found instead were two pages filled with expletives, fired off in a bout of rage. “Who are you to judge me?” she asked. “You don’t know anything about me. I bet you’re some dried-up bitch who doesn’t even remember what it’s like to be young, just like all my teachers. I didn’t ask you for advice. I didn’t write to YOU. I wrote to J. D. Salinger. Probably you’re just jealous that you’re not young anymore, so you feel like you have to punish kids like me. Or you’re jealous of Salinger because he’s famous and you’re just some person.” There was a sort of beautiful truth to h
er note. I was, indeed, just some person.

  Some person who was now beginning to understand why Hugh had handed me that form letter. To save me from myself.

  “I’m talking to bigger printers,” Roger told me one day in October. There was a slight swagger in his voice that I’d not detected before. The enormity of this project was, it seemed, affecting him. Until now, he had been a publisher of small books, below-the-radar books, books that sold in hundreds rather than thousands. Now—it had hit him—he was publishing Salinger. Salinger. Whose books sold in the millions. Back in June, Roger had planned an initial print run of ten thousand: larger than any book in his catalog, but still quite modest. My boss had gone a ways toward convincing him that, as Hugh said, collectors could buy up ten thousand books before they even arrived in stores.

  “If we go with a bigger print run, I run into another problem as well,” he said. “Where to store the books. Now, normally, I stash them in my father-in-law’s basement—”

  “Wait, what?” I asked, laughing. The situation had now officially crossed the line into the absurd. J. D. Salinger was publishing with a press that stored books in someone’s basement.

  “Yes, well, I store them in my basement, too, but it fills up pretty quickly …” his voice trailed off. “So if we’re talking a print run of thirty, forty, fifty thousand, I’d need to rent a storage facility, so that’s next on my list.” He sounded troubled, exhausted, as if these calculations were keeping him awake at night. Surely a larger print run meant a larger outlay of cash for Roger, who taught at a state university. Could he even afford any of this?