My Salinger Year (12 page)

And yet my boss—and all the older agents—still regarded me as something akin to a piece of furniture, perhaps even more so than when I’d first started. Parked in front of my desk, Carolyn and my boss could while away an hour discussing the quotidian details of their lives: the roasted chicken at such and such restaurant; Carolyn’s attempts to quit smoking by putting her cigarettes in the freezer so they wouldn’t taste as good; the rerouting of the bus that ran through their neighborhood; the perennial troubles of Daniel, who was still adjusting to some new medication. One day in the middle of May—I’d turned twenty-four the week before with little fanfare—as I typed and typed, Carolyn began talking about friends of hers named Joan and John, and their daughter, who had an odd name, an odd name that sounded oddly familiar to me. I’d heard her discuss Joan and John before, but now I realized, with a jolt, that she was talking about Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. These were Carolyn’s intimates, the people whose pedestrian travails—bathroom renovations and missed flights—she chattered about. “Who is she?” I asked James the next day. “What’s her story?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. She’s very tight-lipped. I have this idea that she’s from money and that she had a sort of wild youth.” I looked at him. “Why don’t you ask her? She’s really nice.” He smiled wickedly. “And once she has a drink, she really gets going.” It seemed to me that after having a drink, she fell asleep. Though perhaps that was after a
few
drinks. “You know that’s not always water on her desk.”

“You’re kidding!” I cried. Then I began thinking about the various cups and tumblers on my own boss’s desk. “No!”

He shrugged. “She’s from a different era.”

For the next few weeks, I lingered in Carolyn’s doorway after dropping off the circulating folders and on Fridays, when the staff gathered for scotch in the reception area,
made sure to sit near her. But I couldn’t bring myself to talk to her. I knew exactly why: She didn’t see me. I was simply part of the landscape of the office. In the entire year I worked there, she spoke not one word to me. When I deposited the folders on her desk, she merely nodded in my direction. At first, I took this personally. Then I saw it as a quirk of her personality, her genteel reticence. But eventually I realized that I was a position to her, rather than an individual: How many like me had she seen over her decades there? Dozens? We were disposable, interchangeable, in our wool skirts and college ties, our eyes shiny with puppyish excitement about books. She had no use for us. In a year, we’d be gone.

One Saturday in May, I took the bus home for a belated birthday celebration with my parents. After dinner, my dad called me into his study and handed me three short envelopes. “I’m passing these over to you,” he said. “Since you have a job now, it seems like the right time.”

I glanced down at the top envelope. Citibank.

“They’re bills,” my father explained, taking them back from me and scanning the return addresses. He separated two out and held them up for my inspection, like an offering. “These two are from your credit cards.” I must have looked baffled, because he continued. “You have two credit cards, right?” I nodded. Smoothing his white hair, he arranged his face into the mollifying expression he adopted before doling out bad news. I remembered it well from my teen years. “You may recall”—he had taken on the fake British accent he used sometimes at moments of intense discomfort, mastered while playing a butler at an Actors Studio production of some ossified drawing room mystery—“we gave you those two cards when you went to college. The idea was that you would use them for books or”—he threw up his hands—“anything. Plane tickets. Shoes.” I nodded again, though my palms were
beginning to sweat. “Well, I’ve been paying the interest while you’ve been in school. But now you’re done, so you can take them over.” I looked at him, too stunned to nod. All through college and grad school, I’d worked two jobs at a time, to pay for incidentals and small luxuries, under the impression that my parents were happy to cover my basic expenses. I had been under this impression because, well, they had told me that this was the case. My mother, in fact, had fought me about working. “You have your whole life to work,” she’d said endlessly. “Just concentrate on school now.”

My father held up the third envelope. “These are your student loans.” The saliva disappeared from my mouth. My father had more to say—low interest rates, consolidation, federal blah blah, Pell Grant—but I couldn’t focus on what he was saying. Student loans? As far as I knew, I’d gone to school on a National Merit Scholarship.

“I don’t remember filling out the paperwork for loans,” I said, my tongue sticking drily to the back of my teeth.

“Oh, I did it for you.” My father waved his hands impatiently. “I forged your signature. I do it all the time.”

“My scholarship …” But my voice trailed off. I didn’t need to ask, I supposed. What did it matter?

“It didn’t cover everything, every year. And we thought it would be good for you to have student loans. It’s good debt and you can deduct the interest from your taxes.” This meant absolutely nothing to me, but I resumed my nodding, aiming for brightness. “And it helps you build good credit. So when you want to buy a house, you’ll be in good shape. Same with the credit cards. You have great credit right now.”

“Great,” I said, forcing myself to smile. With a theatrical flourish, he handed me the envelopes. “When I want to buy a house. Yes.”

“The bills will start coming directly to you next month.”

“Great,” I croaked, then turned on my heel and left the room so he wouldn’t witness my tears. The minute I lay
down on my childhood bed they arrived, hot and heavy, and I buried my face in my old pillow, the feathers turned to dust.

Finally, I wiped my eyes and slit open the envelopes. The balance on one credit card was $5,643. The other $6,011. I owed Chase and Citibank $11,000. Almost two-thirds of my salary. How had I spent $11,000 in five years? On what? Books, I knew, and plane tickets home. In London, there had been food, and phone calls—my parents had asked me to call twice a week and instructed me to use the cards for this purpose. There had also been, yes, a few pairs of shoes. A backpack or two. And surely other things I could have lived without. I wished, now, that I could take it all back. I’d not, by any means, frittered away money recklessly, but I’d certainly spent more than I would have if I’d not thought the bills would be magically taken care of. How stupid I’d been.

The student loan bill was far more frightening. It didn’t state how much I owed in total—ominously—but merely indicated I needed to send my payment for May within the next ten days: a payment of $473. Or, almost two weeks’ salary. After rent, I’d have pretty much nothing left. Never mind the immediate problem, which was that I didn’t have $473 to send them and likely wouldn’t obtain such a sum in the next ten days. That I could barely pay for rent and food, as it was.

“Jo?” my mother called from the living room, but I couldn’t bring myself to answer.

Perhaps ten days later, a package from Orchises arrived, the Agency’s name handwritten on the front of the padded mailer. That afternoon, my boss leafed through the materials, over and over, trying, I supposed, to compose her thoughts on the matter. At the end of the day, she handed them back to me. It was cool and rainy, as it had been for a few days, and she didn’t complain when Hugh dashed into her office and closed the windows. “Okay,” she said wearily. “I guess we better
get these off to Jerry. I’ll dictate a cover letter. Tomorrow’s fine, though.”

“Okay,” I replied, surprised. She was not a tomorrow’s-fine person. She was a do-it-now person. She wanted, I supposed, the “Hapworth” situation to dissolve into thin air, to simply go away. If we waited until tomorrow to send the books, maybe Salinger would come to his senses. Maybe he’d call and say, “That guy’s a phony. What was I thinking?” This deal would be a huge amount of work, which would net the Agency a minuscule amount of money, if any. But now that we had the press’s books in hand, it was beginning to seem less abstract.

The next morning arrived—cold, rainy again—and I typed the sort of tiny letter that mystified me:
Dear Jerry, Enclosed are a few of Orchises Press’s recent releases, as well as a copy of its most current catalog, for your perusal. I look forward to hearing your thoughts
. And off they went to Cornish. We would wait again.

While she waited, my boss found it hard to focus on anything else, and I found myself, for the first time since I’d started, without a backlog of typing. I sat at my desk and read manuscripts. I fended off the usual calls for Salinger. I pored over contracts for my boss, as she’d trained me to do, seeking out errant clauses and words: a tedious task but one I loved, for I could lose myself in it, so fully did it require my concentration. And when I was done, when I finally had nothing else to do, I turned to the Salinger letters.

They had been sitting on my desk for months now, the pile growing larger and larger until my desk began to resemble Hugh’s. The previous week, I’d stuffed them into the large—and largely empty—filing cabinet at the lower right-hand corner of my desk. Every day more letters trickled in, and every week or two a large bundle arrived, courtesy of Salinger’s publisher, where someone very much like me presumably
spent hours each week crossing out its address and writing in ours.

One day, as we waited to hear from Salinger, I pulled open the drawer to add a few more letters and found it filled to capacity.
One at a time
, I told myself.
You don’t have to do it all today
. Taking a deep breath, I grabbed a few letters off the top. Ah, there he was: the boy from Winston-Salem.

Rolling a piece of paper into the typewriter, I began tapping out the form letter. “Thank you for your recent letter to J. D. Salinger. As you may know, Mr. Salinger does not wish to see his fan mail, so we cannot send your kind letter—”
Kind letter?
I stopped there, thinking. Could I at least bring the form letter into the modern era? Give this kid a bit of hope? “Quiet emotional?” With a rip, I pulled my letter out of the Selectric and tossed it in the trash can. Then I pushed the letter aside and grabbed another, which turned out to be a Tragic Letter, from a woman in Illinois whose daughter—an aspiring writer whose favorite author was Salinger—had died of leukemia at twenty-two. Now she wanted to start a literary
magazine in memory of her daughter and name it
Bananafish
, after the daughter’s favorite story. Would Mr. Salinger grant her permission to do so?

This was not so simple either. Letter in hand, I ambled over to Hugh’s office and explained the situation. “Can we let her call the magazine
Bananafish
?” I asked, “She doesn’t seem crazy.” I held up the letter: white paper, Times New Roman. “Is it possible that Salinger would approve of … this?”

“Who knows?” said Hugh with a sigh. “We can’t ask him about it, if that’s what you’re wondering.” I nodded, disappointed. “And we can’t give her permission to use the title.”

“So I should just send her the form letter?” My chest tightened at the thought of this.

“Yes,” said Hugh, nodding.

As I left, he called after me, “You know that titles can’t be copyrighted, right?”

I stopped. “What do you mean?”

“A title can’t be copyrighted,” he explained. “So if I want to write a book and call it
The Great Gatsby
, I can. As long as none of the actual text is lifted from
The Great Gatsby
.” I didn’t fully understand. “So she can call her magazine
Bananafish
. It’s perfectly legal. You can’t copyright a title. And you can’t copyright a word.”

“Oh!” I cried. “Thanks.”

“But you’ll send her the form letter, right?” Hugh asked, in overly loud tones, smiling impishly.

“Of course!” I was already halfway to my desk.
As you may know
, I typed,
Mr. Salinger has asked us not to forward his mail, so I cannot send on your kind letter. With regard to your question about entitling your magazine
Bananafish,
we cannot grant you permission to do so, because Mr. Salinger holds no claim over the term. Titles cannot be copyrighted. Words cannot be copyrighted. You are free
, I typed,
to do as you wish
.

That is where I should have stopped, but I went on.
We
are so very sorry to hear of your loss. We hope that your new venture provides some consolation. Surely, a literary magazine is a worthy vehicle for honoring your daughter’s memory. We wish you the best of luck with it
.

Before I could back down, I signed it and sent it off. The original letter, I knew, was supposed to go in the bin, but I couldn’t bring myself to put it there. I thought of the boy from Winston-Salem:
Most people don’t give a flying hoot about what you think and feel
. I grabbed the Bananafish letter and stashed it in my file drawer in a manila folder that had previously been empty, purposeless.

Back in January, the Agency had held a large, formal retirement party for an agent named Claire Smith. By my first day, Claire had cleaned out her office, but she stopped in once or twice before the party, her bellowing laugh echoing through the hallways. She was tiny and energetic and not terribly old—perhaps in her early sixties—and I wondered why she was retiring. She didn’t at all seem the type to move to Florida and take up golf. Hugh, of course, supplied the answer: She had cancer. Lung cancer. Advanced. On her visits to the office, she’d worn a turban, but I’d thought it mere fashion. My boss’s mode of dress—enormous rings and necklaces, nebulous flowing garments—was one step away from turbans. “But, um,” I began, telling myself not to continue, “wasn’t she smoking? When she was here?”