My Salinger Year

by Joanna Rakoff

  That afternoon, when the mail came in, there was a letter for me, with a Nebraska return address. Inside, I unfolded two sheets of small white paper covered over in large, shaky letters. The veteran. “Dear Miss Rakoff,” he wrote.

  I was very pleased to receive your letter last week. Of course, I’m sorry that Mr. Salinger isn’t interested in seeing his mail, but I’m not surprised either. I didn’t really expect or even want a response. I just wanted him to know how much his work meant to me. I very much appreciate the time you took to write back and I enjoyed reading your thoughts on Mr. Salinger’s work. I’m sure you’re too young to have lived through World War II, but it was a terrible time for those of us who served. Maybe your father served? Or your grandfather? In fact, I knew a man named Rakoff during my time in the air force. We were stationed together in Germany just after the war. Was this perhaps your father or grandfather or uncle? It’s an unusual name. I’d never met another person named Rakoff until your letter came.

  My heart began to speed up a little. My father had, in fact, been in the air force and had, in fact, been stationed in Germany. In Stuttgart. But years later, during the Korean War. He’d enlisted, I believed, in 1952, a year after Catcher came out and a year after he and my mother married. Could the veteran have done another tour, during the Korean War, and met my father? Now, in his dotage, was he conflating the two?

  I set the letter aside, heart still beating. Could my father have met this man? How I wanted this to be so. Quietly, I picked up the phone’s heavy receiver and began to punch in the numbers of my father’s office. From her sanctum, my boss coughed heavily and shuffled some papers. I put the phone down. Before I could take my hand away, it rang, and I jumped a little in my seat. “I’m calling for Joanna Rakoff,” announced an unfamiliar voice.

  “This is she,” I said.

  “Yes, this is ——.” The caller uttered a name that meant nothing to me, but in such a tone that I understood he thought us acquainted. I racked my brain trying to think who this might be. “You sent us a story a few weeks ago. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you.” The editor of the small magazine. I’d expected a letter from him, or his assistant, not a call. “Well, I finally read it last night and I can’t get it out of my head. We’d be very pleased to accept it for the magazine.”

  “Wonderful.” I wasn’t sure what else to say. “Thank you so much for taking a look at it.”

  “Thank you for thinking of us.” He had the sort of gruff voice I associated with the Far West. “We’d love to see more from your writers.” My writers, I thought, smiling. My writers.

  “Oh my goodness,” my boss cried, when I told her. “I knew you could do it.” She beamed at me. “You’re on your way.” Then she stood—with a heaviness that had not been evident when I’d started—and motioned for me to walk out into my antechamber with her. Her gait reminded me of Leigh, those long draggy walks through the apartment. “Hugh,” she called, smiling. “Joanna sold a story.”

  “That’s great,” said Hugh, with an avuncular smile.

  “Yep, a hard sell. Very quiet story.” She nodded for emphasis. “She found me a new client, too.” My eyes widened at this. “I’m taking on that girl you pulled from the slush. The second novella is very good. I’m not sure how I’m going to sell it. I have to think. Apparently, she has a novel.” She turned to Hugh. “These are very spare, eerie tales. Very good. Very elegant.” They both turned and smiled at me, as if they were my parents. “I knew from the moment you walked in the door,” said my boss, lighting a cigarette, “that you were an Agency Type of Person.”

  That night, I raced to meet Don at the L, only to find the small, makeshift room filled to capacity, with people standing by the door, waiting for tables to open up. Our neighborhood, all of a sudden, was teeming with the young and underemployed, scads of twenty-two-year-olds, fresh out of Brown and Wesleyan and Bard, having arrived after summers backpacking through France or surfing in Mexico. Increasingly, people we knew were moving north, to Greenpoint—the little neighborhood just above Williamsburg, still predominantly Polish, where good deals could still be had on linoleum-floored railroad apartments—or east, to the Italian neighborhood one stop farther in on the train, the Lorimer Street stop, by Leigh and Don’s old apartment. Just a year earlier, when I’d camped out there, the latter had been considered a murky, marginal neighborhood.

  Don waved to me from a table at the front window, usually our favorite, a rarely won prize. But tonight the waiting throng kept jostling him and knocking his bag down. Every few minutes someone opened the door, letting in a gust of freezing air. I ordered coffee, though what I really wanted was food, food and wine. Not a bagel. Real food. Dinner. Don jostled his leg up and down, gnawed on a hangnail; his fingers were bitten to bloody stubs. He had his journal out, open in front of him, the pages moist from the tips of his fingers.

  “So, I have news,” I told him as the waitress set my coffee down. The coffee at the L was terrible, actually, though this apparently didn’t dissuade people from lining up for it. But the coffee at the L was beside the point, I supposed, glancing around me. Everyone was so attractive. Had they been this attractive a year ago? Don, I realized, was older than most everyone in the room. No, the point of the L was not the coffee. The point of the L was to be at the L. “I have news,” I said again, though this was not a phrase I habitually used. I just wanted his attention. “So, I sold a story.”

  Don glanced—unhappily, irritably—toward the counter, where a troupe of young girls—or, well, girls my age—congregated, ordering coffees in anticipation of a table, but he seemed to be staring past them. “This is bullshit,” he said. “Let’s get out of here. I can’t think straight.”

  Out on Bedford, in the frigid air, he smiled. “Much better,” he said. “What was going on in there?”

  Across the street, at Planet Thailand, it was also crowded, but we found a tiny table across from the stove. A few feet away, the chef shook a wide silver wok, enormous flames shooting up its sides. “I sold a story,” I told Don, again, after we’d ordered papaya salad and rice noodles.

  “What?” he said, looking at me with unvarnished hostility. “One of your stories? I didn’t even know you’d ever actually finished a story. Not since college.”

  “A client’s story,” I said. “One of my boss’s clients.”

  “Oh,” said Don, letting out an enormous breath. His face broke into a smile. “That’s completely different. As long as you’re not a threat to me. We can’t have that.” He let out one of his cackles.

  “Of course not,” I said, prying apart my chopsticks with a snap.

  “I thought all your boss’s clients were dead,” he said, wiping his glasses with the edge of his T-shirt.

  “This one is almost dead, I think,” I said, with a pang of disloyalty to my boss, to her client.

  “Like the Agency.” Something in Don’s voice had changed. At the L, I was invisible to him. This happened all too frequently. But he could see me now. I had reappeared for him. It scared me—and it bothered me—the way I could disappear right in front of his eyes. “That’s really great, Buba. Maybe you’re going to be a big agent. Like Max.” He took a long swallow of ice water. “Maybe you can represent me. Since James doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job.”

  I lifted my water glass and took a sip. There was no way I could speak. The thoughts coursing through my brain were too horrible, too disloyal to acknowledge: that I wouldn’t represent him, for I knew—I knew—that his book wouldn’t sell. This was why I’d approached James rather than Max about Don’s novel. I knew Max wouldn’t take it on. I was Max’s reader. If the manuscript had come to me cold—if it hadn’t been my boyfriend’s novel—I would have recommended a form rejection.

  I didn’t say this, though. Of course not. I smiled and lifted a few strands of papaya into my mouth. Just then something strange happened, something that seemed, in a way, to have been lifted out of a Salinger story: The chef spi
lled a spray of chili powder into the flame at his waist, sending a thick fug of smoke directly to our table. Our eyes watered and turned red, and my throat constricted—a terrible, helpless feeling—and, most remarkably, I saw Don for a moment as if from across an abyss, his face distorted by the reddish smoke. How far away he was. How far.

  When we got home, there was a small envelope waiting for me, hand addressed. I turned it over: the logo of the small magazine to which I’d sent my poems. “What’s that?” asked Don.

  “Nothing,” I said, and slipped it in my bag.

  When he seated himself at his desk—the more rejections came in, the more he stared at the screen of his computer—I got into bed and opened it up. The note was from the poetry editor, accepting one of my poems.

  That night, I couldn’t sleep. Don, as always, fell like a stone, on his side, earplugs in, mask pulled over his eyes. But my mind wouldn’t stop churning. Maybe I would be an agent, a big agent. Maybe I would seek out new clients for my boss, and eventually she’d let me take one on myself. Maybe. I thought back to that night, just a month or so before, when I’d talked to Jenny—we’d not spoken since—and the thought of being at the Agency in a year had struck me as incomprehensible, nonsensical. And yet—and yet—how could I leave now? I was, as my boss said, on my way.

  Quietly, so as not to wake Don, I heated some milk on the stove, then sat down at my desk—a few feet from the bed—turned on my computer and, with some confusion, our little modem, and—with a chorus of blips and bleeps and staticky feedback—went online. In my in-box, I found a note from my college boyfriend. My heart thrummed merely at the sight of his name. “I’ve not heard from you in a while,” he wrote. “I just wanted to check and see if you’re okay. I’m worried that you’re afraid to be in touch with me. Jo, I’m really not mad. I just miss you.” He was mad. I knew he was mad. He deserved to be mad. It’s okay, I wanted to write to him. Be angry at me. Yell and scream. This would all be so much easier if you would just be angry. I don’t deserve your forgiveness. But I couldn’t; I didn’t. Instead, I told him that I’d sold a story. It’s the most thrilling feeling. I can’t quite explain it. I don’t understand it. Rationally, I know that it’s just a business transaction. But I can’t help feeling that there’s more to it: that I brought this story into the world. People will read it because I placed it. Until I placed it, the story belonged only to the writer. Now it will belong to the world. (Also, a magazine just accepted one of my poems. I’m almost afraid to mention it, afraid that if I tell anyone, I’ll jinx everything.)

  In the morning, I woke to find I’d left the modem on. Our phone had been busy all night. I began to shut it off, to close my various windows, then noticed there was a new message. “You’re participating in the production of art,” my college boyfriend told me. “Whether you’re making it yourself or shepherding it into the world. You’re doing the right thing. Just stay in the world. If I could come to New York, I would.”

  Come, I thought, as I brushed my teeth, please come. I thought of how he had saved me in London, from a crumbling student house off Cartwright Gardens and a terrible, aching loneliness, a loneliness that it seemed only he had the power to cure. He had found for us a beautiful flat in Belsize Park, with wedding-cake moldings and double-height ceilings, a world away from the sink-less, freezing apartment I shared with Don. After he left—to visit his parents before moving to Berkeley for school—I’d cried and cried, but it was only in those months, alone, that I’d truly been able to write. The poems had come, one after another, as I jogged through Hampstead Heath, the stories, too. Why, why? I had missed him so terribly, sobbing on the phone, counting the days until I came back to the States; I had opted not to go on to doctoral work, in part, because I missed him, because London without him seemed like a movie set, the beautiful row houses and gardens, mere props for a life that didn’t exist. Because I loved him, truly loved him, had loved him from the moment I met him, at eighteen.

  And then, unbidden, I thought of Salinger. My whole life seemed to have narrowed down to Salinger, Salinger, Salinger, in this case a line from “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period.” The narrator of the story, a teacher at a correspondence-based art school, writes a letter to his one talented pupil, urging her to invest in good oils and brushes, to commit to the life of the artist. “The worst that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly.”

  Could I allow myself to be slightly unhappy constantly? I thought about the way my college boyfriend looked at me—I had never, not ever, disappeared before his eyes—and the way his skin felt in the morning, warm and loamy, and the long nights we’d spent talking, ever since we’d met, the vibration of his low voice in my ear. For a moment, I allowed myself to miss him—to truly miss him—and the pain that shot through me was almost physical. I ached for him. I loved him. I wanted him. But right now I needed to be slightly unhappy constantly.

  Slightly unhappy constantly alone.

  One afternoon in November, my boss came running out of her office, cigarette in hand, calling for Hugh. What happened? I wondered. It had been ages since the last yelling-for-Hugh incident. She’d been subdued since the summer, understandably. This time, she seemed less panicked, more shocked. Before Hugh could emerge from his office, she turned to me, tapping her slender foot. “Do you know who that was on the phone?” I shook my head as Hugh—with a great rustling of paper—hustled out of his office, smoothing his hair.

  “What happened?” asked Hugh.

  “A reporter just called for me,” said my boss. “From some paper in D.C.”

  “The Post?” asked Hugh. I could see him trying to make sense of the situation without having to be told. The mark of a genius assistant.

  A stream of smoke swirled into my boss’s face and she stepped back, waving it away, flecks of ash dropping onto the carpet. “Not the Post. The Journal? Some paper I’ve never heard of.” She looked at us. “It seems Roger Lathbury talked to them. About ‘Hapworth.’ ”

  “You’re kidding.” Hugh had that look on his face, as if he had bitten into something spoiled and wasn’t sure if he should spit it out or swallow.

  “Nope.” My boss smiled grimly, her mouth closed.

  “Did you talk to them?” asked Hugh.

  “Of course I didn’t talk to them,” she cried. With a laugh, she shook her head. “I can’t believe Pam even tried to put that person through.”

  “Are you sure Roger talked to them?” Hugh scratched his chin.

  “How else would they know about the book?” With one swift gesture, my boss stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray that sat on the credenza by Hugh’s office. “Jerry certainly didn’t tell them about it!”

  Hugh said nothing, his mouth sealed into a tight line. He had known this would happen. He had not trusted Roger from the start.

  I had, though. I had trusted Roger. I’d not thought he’d do something like this. I had, it was true, feared that he’d mess the deal up through some sort of weird nervous behavior. I’d not thought, though, that he’d do the thing Salinger most abhorred: talk to the press.

  “Do I tell Jerry about this?” my boss mused, tapping a long finger on the credenza.

  Hugh raised his eyebrows in a gesture of befuddlement. “I guess you have to,” he said. “He’s not going to be happy.”

  No, I supposed he wouldn’t. Part of me wondered why exactly we had to tell Jerry. He would never see the story, would he? In some obscure paper? No. But I supposed this had more to do with Roger: If he was talking to this little paper, then he would certainly talk to bigger ones. And then there was the larger issue—what was really at stake—that Roger simply couldn’t be trusted. He wasn’t the kindred spirit Jerry had thought him. He was a phony, just like everyone else.

  My boss retreated to her office without ceremony and closed the door. It was a long time before she emerged again. “What did he say?” Hugh called.

  “Nothing,” said my boss. “He thanked me
for telling him. He sounded a little sad.” She herself sounded a little sad.

  “Well, he thought this guy was a friend,” said Hugh, appearing in his doorway. Hugh, I knew, had not believed in any of this from the start. He thought it all ridiculous. He didn’t, however, seem pleased to have been proven correct. He, too, seemed simply sad.

  A few days later, as dark closed in around me, my boss already gone—her smoke still lingering viscously in the air—Salinger called. “I’m so sorry, Jerry,” I said. I had only recently been able to actually call him “Jerry” and it still felt strange. “My boss has left for the day.”

  “That’s okay,” he said in his pleasant way. “I can talk to her tomorrow. Could she call me in the morning?”

  “I’ll have her call you first thing,” I said.

  “Hey, Joanne, let me ask you a question.” For the first time, this sentence did not fill me with anxiety. “What do you think of this Roger Lathbury fellow?”

  I didn’t question why he was asking me again. “I like him,” I said. “I think he’s a good guy.”

  “I do, too,” he said, his voice a bit more hoarse than usual. A bit sad, I supposed. “I do, too.” It was over. I knew. The deal was off. The contracts were signed, but they gave Jerry full power, full control. Jerry could call off the deal at any time.