I laughed. She sort of was. “There’s the ‘Hapworth’ deal.”
“Right,” he said, swishing the dregs of his drink. “The ‘Hapworth’ deal. That’s a doozy.” Max, I now knew, had been an actor in his youth—like my father—and he retained the precise articulation of the trade. “Wait!” he cried. “You were here for the—” He wrinkled his lips in thought. “Were you here for the letter thing? Or did that happen right before you started?” I shrugged. I wasn’t sure. There were a lot of letter things. He banged his hands down on the table. “Listen to this.” His dark eyes now glistened with pleasure. “Sometime, I guess right before you started, I’m leafing through your boss’s circulating folder and it’s all, you know, ‘Please delete the following clauses from this contract’ and whatever.” I laughed. I knew this language all too well. “And then there’s this letter that’s addressed to a Ms. Ryder.” He paused to let it sink in. “So I started reading, and the letter basically said, ‘Dear Ms. Ryder, Many thanks for your recent letter to J. D. Salinger. As you may know, Mr. Salinger does not wish to receive mail from his readers’ ”—this was, of course, the language of the form letter I had been given; I nodded—“ ‘thus, we cannot pass your kind note on to him. Thank you, also, for returning Mr. Salinger’s letter from’ ”—he waved his hand around—“ ‘1958 or whatever. But, again, Mr. Salinger has specifically asked us not to forward any mail to him, so I am returning it to you.’ ”
“So, someone had sent Salinger one of his own letters?” I asked, confused.
Max held up a hand. Wait. “So, I looked at the address at the top of your boss’s letter and it’s Beverly Hills or Laurel Canyon or somewhere like that. Los Angeles. Hollywood.” He gave me a significant look, his eyelids lowered. “Then I look back at the letter your boss was responding to and it says, ‘Dear Mr. Salinger, I’m a huge fan of your work. Franny and Zooey, in particular, has long been a favorite of mine, and I’ve reread it many times over the years.’ ” Max shrugged. “Something like that. And then: ‘I know how highly you value your privacy and I know, too, that you don’t want your personal letters out in the world. Last month, I was at an auction and a letter of yours came up for sale. I bid on it—and won—with the intention of returning the letter to you. The letter is attached.’ ”
“That’s lovely!” I interjected, if not drunkenly, then a bit tipsily. Salinger’s letters, I knew, were enormously valuable. Former friends and acquaintances had sold their caches for huge sums, incurring Salinger’s wrath. At one point, he’d asked Dorothy Olding to burn their correspondence. She’d complied, which amazed me, in part because of the Agency’s obsessive record keeping and in part because, well, did she not feel some sort of obligation to scholars, to literary history? No, I supposed, she felt an obligation to her client. “What a nice thing to do.”
Max put up his hand again. “So the letter ends: ‘I hope this gives you even a small amount of peace of mind. Sincerely’ ”—he paused, widening his eyes—“ ‘Winona Ryder.’ ”
“You’re kidding!” I cried.
“I am not kidding.” Max crossed his arms and smiled. “Winona Ryder.”
“I don’t understand, though.” I sipped at my drink, which now consisted purely of ice. “My boss knows, of course, that Salinger would want that letter returned to him. I mean, he would, right? Didn’t he sue people for selling his letters?”
“Of course he would want the letter,” said Max, shaking his head and looking at me as if I were slightly dim. “Of course.”
“But why didn’t my boss just send it on to him?” I knew the answer to this question, but I wanted to hear Max say it.
“Because that’s the Agency way.” He sighed and slumped a little. He had just closed a frantic auction that had resulted in a two-million-dollar, two-book deal. He had two little babies at home now, twins. His life, actually, no longer consisted of book parties. This was a rare night for him. But something else, I knew, was troubling him. “We follow the letter of the law without any thought given to its subtleties. Salinger doesn’t want any mail? We’re not going to send him any mail, even if it’s mail he would probably want. It’s like”—he sighed again and ran his hands through his fluffy hair—“your boss doesn’t get it.”
“Get Salinger?” I asked.
“Salinger,” agreed Max. He looked away again, at the woodblock print of the man holding the hammer or anvil or whatever it was. Then he smiled sadly. “Publishing. Books. Life.”
Publishing, books, life, I thought as I walked, through the cool air, up to the L at Third Avenue. It seemed possible to get one right. But not all three.
The next day, while I was sleepily filing some cards, I found myself in S and—as Hugh had suggested I do so long ago—thumbed through the long drawer until I found the submission record for The Catcher in the Rye. There it was. A pink card just like the pink cards I typed up for my boss every day, preprinted with the names of all the publishers. I knew, of course, that publishing was a different, more ferocious beast than it had been in 1950, but I still expected—what?—evidence of the type of fierce bidding war Max conducted, the sort I read about in Publishers Weekly, editors fighting over nonfiction accounts of Ivy League murders or first novels from Iowa grads? A card marked all over with submission dates and editors’ initials? But the Catcher card was almost pristine. The novel, it seemed, had gone to one other editor before Little, Brown—months before going to Little, Brown—who had eventually turned it down. Someone had rejected The Catcher in the Rye.
Neither had the advance for the novel been extravagant or even particularly large. Salinger, I knew now, had not been unknown when Dorothy Olding sold Catcher. His New Yorker stories had already won him a following, though nothing like the popularity that would come, with readers lining up at newsstands the morning a new Salinger story was to appear in the magazine. But this was an era—forty-five years prior, not so long ago, really—when novelists didn’t receive lavish advances. Regardless, there was something about that modest advance, that initial rejection, that soothed me. Salinger had not always been Salinger. Salinger had once sat at his desk, trying to figure out what made a story, how to structure a novel, how to be a writer, how to be.
The next morning, my boss summoned me to her office. “That novella you passed on to me,” she said, her voice so low I could barely hear her. “It’s very good.”
If I spoke, I knew I’d break into a smile, so I merely nodded.
“It’s small, though. Quiet. As you said.” She pulled a cigarette out of her pack and tapped it thoughtfully on the desk. “I don’t know if I can sell it alone, as is. Give her a call and ask her if she has anything else? A full novel, ideally. Stories. Another novella, even.”
My boss would have flinched, I thought, at the little gasp of joy the writer gave when I explained that I was from the Agency and my boss would like to see more. “I have a novel,” she said. “A short novel.”
“Send it on,” I told her. “Send it on.”
One cold, cold night I met Allison for a drink at a dark, elegant lounge by her apartment. “Why are you doing this?” she asked me suddenly, halfway through a martini. “I’ve wanted to ask you that pretty much since we met. Why are you with Don? Seriously.”
“Oh,” I said, my voice sounding strange and hollow and far away, as if someone other than myself were speaking. Reflexively, my mind turned to Franny and Lane. Why was I doing this? And why had I never asked myself the same question?
The next night, still feeling the effects of that martini—and the one that had come after—I forced myself to stay home. From the gray couch, piled under blankets, I called Jenny, who was bogged down in wedding preparations. The boathouse: nixed once and for all. A former dance hall in midtown, with its red candy-box interior: booked for a date two Julys hence, the first available opening, a full three and a half years after Brett’s storybook proposal. “Maybe you should just elope,” I told her, the phone growing warmer from proximity to my ear. The wind blew fie
rcely, stray leaves flying in gusts against the window like moths. I wore a woolen bathrobe over which I’d fashioned a shawl out of an old afghan. Tonight, Don was out running—running in the cold, the dark, which sounded utterly unpleasant to me—in another effort to get his weight down for a fight. He had to fight as a flyweight, otherwise, he’d be pummeled. His novel had now amassed half a dozen rejections, which he had pinned to the fridge with magnets; they winked at me from the corner of my eye, the familiar logos of various publishers, the blocks of black text.
“I think Brett’s parents would die if we did that,” she said.
“Hmm,” I said, annoyance welling up. I tried to tamp it down, unsuccessfully. “But you want a big wedding,” I blurted. “Right?” Why did I need to call her out on this? Why couldn’t I just pretend that the Big Event was for Brett’s conservative parents?
“I do,” she admitted warily. “I think there’s value in taking vows in front of all your family and friends. And celebrating with them, too.” She took a sip of something. Very likely something sweet. She and Brett drank like middle schoolers: Malibu and Coke. Fuzzy navels. As if they were purposefully trying to appear unsophisticated, to mock the pretensions of the creative class, our craft beers and local wines. In Staten Island, they’d kept the bottle of Malibu right on their kitchen counter. “A wedding is kind of an excuse to have a big party.”
“And to buy an amazing dress?” I suggested, willing cheer into my voice. I wanted—I did—to get in the spirit of things. But I still didn’t understand why all this was so important to her. Why did she need to bankrupt her parents? Why was she devoting so much time and energy to what, as she herself said, amounted to a big party? And then, all of a sudden—like a curtain drawing away—it all became clear to me. I heard her words as something more than platitudes: to take your vows in front of friends and family. And my heart melted. She needed this wedding—this perfect, minutely orchestrated wedding—to shout, This is who I am. To tell us all that she was not that girl who’d tried to kill herself freshman year, the girl who developed an unhealthy obsession with her poetry professor junior year, the girl who had baffled psychiatrists and mystified her parents, for she had once been so perfect, so good, so obedient.
Just as Franny Glass had once been, before she collapsed in a Princeton restaurant and installed herself on her parents’ couch.
Just as I had once been.
It had taken a few more years for my house of cards to collapse. Or, well, for me to knock it down. With Don. Don: my implement of destruction. Jenny had dated her share of Don-like guys. In fact, she’d been involved with one—obsessively, all consumingly so—when she met Brett. In fact, Brett was the guy’s roommate. The wedding would whitewash that mess, too, I supposed. But: No wonder Jenny hated Don. No wonder my life frightened and disturbed and repelled her.
In a few years, would I be marrying a law student who exclusively read histories of the Great War? I tried to imagine devoting the time and energy that Jenny had put into her wedding. Or, more important, choosing a partner, for life, who didn’t share my interests, my own particular view of the world. I could picture none of it. For a moment, I allowed my mind to turn to my college boyfriend, whom I had not been brave enough to call, who was surely in his Berkeley apartment, jotting notes on manuscript paper or reading Lermontov, and my breath caught with longing. In a year, would I be there with him, walking along Telegraph with his arms wrapped around me? If not there, then where? And then, suddenly, I knew. Not here. I would not be in this apartment, with its missing sink. I would not be typing letters for my boss. And I would not, most definitely would not, be waiting for Don to return from a run.
“It’s going to be great,” I told Jenny. “It’s going to be perfect.” And again, I wasn’t lying.
One morning, as I pored over yet another contract, I heard my boss cry, “Darn it!” A moment later, she came sauntering over to my desk. “What are your plans for lunch?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said nervously. Was she going to ask me to have lunch with her? This seemed highly improbable.
“Do you think you could drop something off at The New Yorker for me?” I sat up a little straighter at the mention of The New Yorker. “Izzy is out again.” Izzy was the Agency’s wizened, cheroot-smoking messenger, who communicated purely through grunt and hand gesture and whose deep, chesty cough kept him home three days out of five. “I tried the messenger service, but they won’t have anyone until the end of the day, and then I realized, well, the Condé Nast building is just across the street really. Why not just walk it over?”
“Of course,” I said, my heart now thunking crazily in my chest. The New Yorker. I was going to the offices of The New Yorker. Should I call the auburn-haired editor and let him know I was stopping by? Or the fiction editor’s assistant? No, I thought, I wouldn’t be giving them enough notice. I would be putting them in an awkward position, having to tell me, “Sorry, I’m swamped today.” But a Brown Derby sort of scenario occurred to me: I would drop off the package with a kind, interested editor who would engage me in conversation about the author or the Agency—surely he would know the Agency—or Salinger. Or, I’d run into the auburn-haired editor and he’d say, “Hey, let me introduce you to my boss!” And maybe one of them would say, “Well, if you ever want to leave the Agency, just give me a call.”
An hour later, I dashed out—without even putting on my coat—a brown paper package under my arm. On Madison, the sun shone in jagged beams and the air held the promise, the hint, of warmth, but it was still cold, icy gusts blowing up my sleeves, and I quickened my pace as I crossed the avenue to the gray building, which housed all the magazines owned by Condé Nast. I’d imagined The New Yorker operating out of a brownstone on some genteel, tree-lined block, the editors gathering at four for tea in the parlor. I had imagined it, I supposed, as an operation akin to the Agency.
But the Condé Nast building was just a dully anonymous office tower, like all the buildings on Madison and Park and Lex. I walked quickly through the sleek gray lobby and boarded the appropriate elevator, trying not to smile to myself—The New Yorker!—when the doors closed with a thunderous ding. On my designated floor, I found a reception desk with The New Yorker’s distinctive logo discreetly hung above it and handed over my package to the older lady—her face sweetly powdered—at its helm. I glanced around, thinking perhaps I’d see one of the editors from the party, passing through on his way to lunch. But the area was empty. “This is from my boss,” I told her. “At the Agency.”
“Of course,” said the receptionist, smiling kindly. She had the rheumy voice of a longtime smoker and wore her hair pulled back in a bun. “I’ll have it delivered right away.”
And then I got back in the elevator without so much as a word, a glance, exchanged with another soul. In the lobby, I fought a crushing disappointment. That was it? Really? I thought as I walked up Madison, the wind sneaking through the weave of my sweater. The feverish anticipation of the morning dissolved in a haze of anguish and regret.
Across the avenue stood the entrance to the Agency’s building, but I couldn’t bear the thought of returning to my desk just yet. I had imagined—what?—spending an hour chatting with witty editors? Oh God, how stupid. With a shiver, I turned west on Forty-Ninth, where the wind hit me full in the face. It was just noon, still early for lunch, and the streets were eerily empty, the workers of midtown safely ensconced in their overheated offices, endlessly picking up the ringing phone, sending out missives via optic cable, closing deals and crunching numbers and cutting film, their minds on where they would pick up their sandwiches or sushi half an hour hence.
At the corner of Fifth, I paused by the windows of Saks, already dressed for the holidays, with mannequins in beautifully draped crepe dresses, the deeply saturated colors of the season: red, maroon, pine green. Tourists flowed past me in clusters of four and five and six, en route to more elaborate window displays—Tiffany’s, Bergdorf’s, Bendel’s—or Central
Park, so close and yet I’d never ventured up there on my lunch break. I’d eaten lunch at my desk pretty much every day during my year at the Agency. Why had I never thought of taking my salads to a bench, sitting in the sun, or walking around the pond, or up to the zoo?
In five minutes I was at the southeast entrance—past the Paris Theatre and the Plaza, and the rows of horse-drawn carriages, sidestepping piles of manure. There it was: the park. The acres of fields, the winding, intersecting paths, unfolding before me. I had played here as a kid, too, climbing the Alice in Wonderland statue, clambering through various playgrounds, feeding the ducks. Holden’s ducks. The huge, beautiful willows that dipped low over the pond were bare of leaves, their frilly branches spinning in the wind. I was freezing by now, my hands red and raw, my fingers numb. Tucking them under my arms, I walked down the sloping path to the pond. Holden calls it the lagoon—a word that for me connoted magic, the mermaids of Peter Pan—but in my family we’d just called it the pond. And there it was, the water black and sluggish, foreboding, a few rays of sun slicing across its center. Brown sparrows hopped around the path in front of me, and a pigeon or two fluttered down from the back of a bench at the prospect of food. But there were, indeed, no ducks. It was colder here, in the pond’s little vale, the wind whipping down from the top of the park. The wind clicks around to the north, I thought. Merwin’s most beautiful, most compressed, most perfect poem, written for his first wife, Dido. I walked into it, my eyes watering, to the little curved bridge that crosses the pond, and looked up, toward the grand buildings on Fifth, the trees that stretched beyond, the path that led to the zoo—where Holden takes Phoebe, and where I, too, had watched the seals bark for fish, water sloshing over the edge of their tank. And then, suddenly, from the north—yes—came the unmistakable sound of moving water. Ducks. A fleet of them coming toward me with calm fortitude, brown mallard females of varying sizes. Fifteen, twenty of them, their feathers lush and fluffed. They swam under the bridge and I turned to watch them enter the pond proper, circling its perimeter in search of insects or tiny fish or scraps of sandwiches left by hearty cold-weather picnickers. They were so beautiful, the ducks, so beautiful and sweet, gliding with regal grandeur across the black depths of the pond, their million tiny feathers protecting them from the cold.
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