My Salinger Year (24 page)
Authors: Joanna Rakoff
“I don’t know,” I murmured, not looking up from my manuscript, the first I’d pulled out of the slush pile. Rumors abounded of great writers pulled from the slush, but the queries my boss received suggested there was no veracity to them. Each week I sifted through letters printed on cloud stationery and cat stationery, letters in novelty fonts like Zapf Dingbats or Lucida Calligraphy, letters that recounted dreams or spoke
of astrological charts, letters proposing books on Ayurveda for gerbils or the Tao of parasailing, letters from budding crime novelists and mystery writers, with self-created logos at the top, featuring guns or daggers or blood dripping from the letters of their names, letters from eroticists involving the word “moist,” letters from memoirists recounting atrocities. The letter from the writer whose novella I was now reading had stood out in its simplicity. Times New Roman on plain white paper. Stories in small, respected magazines; no MFA but a BA from Barnard. I was halfway through the novella, about a little girl whose alcoholic father drags her to bars with him—rather than sending her to school—and was pleased to find that it was good. Really good. Small in scope, elegiac in tone, precise in language. Good.
“Well, can you take a look?” he asked, irritated.
I looked up and shrugged.
“Come on, Buba, you’re good at this kind of thing,” he pleaded. “Tell me what to wear. I don’t have a suit, so some sort of shirt and pants. With a tie?”
I succumbed. “You can’t wear a tie if you’re not wearing a jacket. You’ll look like a Bible salesman.” This was my mother’s line. I had never actually seen a Bible salesman.
“Fuck it,” said Don, throwing what looked like a guayabera into the duffel.
In the courtyard, he paused for a moment and looked back at me, pursing his lips in a kiss. I raised my hand to wave, but it was too late. He’d already turned away.
It was spooky in the apartment alone, at night. The shadows from the trees in the courtyard moved darkly across our red floors, and the noises from the apartments above and below only reinforced my solitude. I was alone in a big city, in an apartment with a door so flimsy I myself could force it open.
In the morning, though, I felt a strange lightness. Don
was gone. I had no obligation to call him, to check in with him, to align my plans with his. I lingered at home longer than usual, drinking strong coffee made in my little espresso pot—I always felt selfish using it when Don was home, as it only brewed enough for one—and put on a plaid dress I knew he hated, long and loose and comfortable.
In Williamsburg, everything was the same—young people heading for their offices clad in vintage dresses and chunky glasses fogged over from the rain—but in midtown it became clear, suddenly, that it was August. The streets were empty. As a treat, I bought my coffee at the elegant food shop from which I’d heretofore purchased only that single, transformative sandwich and where I was the sole customer, the servers standing with their arms crossed across their crisp white shirts, tapping their feet in boredom. My office, too, was empty. The agents were all at their country houses in Rhinebeck or the North Fork or simply in their air-conditioned apartments, taking reading days. The accountant was on vacation, as was one of the two bookkeepers. Olivia was gone, of course, and Max and Lucy still without an assistant. Even Hugh wasn’t in. The office felt off-kilter, spectral, without him. Pam and I and the second bookkeeper were, it seemed, the only people in the office, the world.
Alone, I couldn’t sit still. While my coffee grew cold on my desk, I gathered the week’s filing and walked through the office, placing contracts and cards and correspondence in their appropriate folders and filing cabinets, which took all of twenty minutes. I had some contracts to go over, some permissions forms to fill out, and, of course, the never-ending piles of slush and Salinger letters. It was ten thirty. I had three hours until the office closed at one thirty. Taking a sip of chilled, murky coffee, I opened the drawer of letters and pulled a handful out at random. A man in the Netherlands—Salinger had a large following among the Dutch, based on his fan mail—who loved
The Catcher in the Rye
and had, on
a trip to New York earlier this year, traced Holden’s steps around the city. Though it was winter, he had in fact seen ducks in Central Park. Was Salinger aware that the ducks now stayed in Central Park through the winter? A girl at a boarding school who had just read
Franny and Zooey
and was arguing with her friends about whether Franny was pregnant or not. The girl said yes, but some of her friends said no. Could Salinger settle the debate?
Pulling out my letterhead, I typed a form letter to the Dutchman. So many fans referred to those ducks in Central Park. As a kid, I’d fed these ducks with my dad, sometimes well into the cold weather. I distinctly remembered standing at a pond somewhere on the East Side, near the Met, in the Tyrolean-style coat I’d worn around age six, my hands freezing as I tore bread into bits. Could this man be right?
Did
the ducks stay in Central Park through the winter?
Writing to the prep school girl, I couldn’t resist adding a line explaining that Mr. Salinger prefers his stories to stand on their own, without explanation or commentary from the author. “Even if I were able to pass on your letter—which, as stated above, I cannot—it’s unlikely he would indulge your question with an answer. If there is ambiguity in Mr. Salinger’s stories, it is purposeful. As I’m sure you know, he has often been asked whether or not Franny is pregnant”—I knew this to be true, from the letters that came in and from Hugh, though I had no idea what it meant—“but, again, he leaves it to the reader to decide whether or not this is so. In literature, as in life, sometimes there are no right answers.” Part of me wanted to keep going, to tell this girl that she needed to be firm in her convictions, to resolve debates herself, without seeking outside authority, that the fact that she’d written to Salinger—who she surely knew would not be likely to write back—showed pluck and gumption, and she should run with those qualities; that the world outside Choate or Exeter or Deerfield Academy was even more complicated, and she
would need to know her own mind to get by. And part of me thought that if Salinger were writing this letter himself, he might actually say those things. Or tell her to read poetry instead of
Franny and Zooey
. But I said none of that. I had said enough. “Best,” I typed. “Joanna Rakoff.”
It was funny, I thought, that I typed my name over and over again at the bottom of these letters. For there was a way in which the me who wrote the letters was not me at all. In the same way that the me who answered the phones, who soothed Roger’s anxieties and told producers, in plummy tones, that she was “terribly sorry but Mr. Salinger simply doesn’t allow stage or screen adaptations of his work,” was not me at all, or was a version of me. Me as an Agency Type of Person.
And then a strange realization arrived: the me who talked to Salinger—nervously, about poetry—was the actual me. Though he still didn’t know my real name.
At twelve thirty, the bookkeeper shut off his desk lamp and headed out. A few minutes later, I walked through the reception area en route to the bathroom and saw that Pam had left.
New York in August.
As I walked back to my desk, the phones suddenly began to ring. This was what happened when Pam went home. The phones rang throughout the office. I raced back to my desk and breathlessly picked up the phone. A gravelly voice shouted my boss’s name, followed by a “please.” It was as if I’d conjured him.
“Jerry,” I shouted. “This is Joanne.”
“Joanne,” he said, in a slightly softer voice. Though I had acclimated to the shouting. It no longer sounded all that loud to me. “They have you answering phones?”
“Pam had to leave early,” I explained.
“All right,” he said. “Don’t get stuck answering phones. You’ll never get out. You’re a poet.”
“My boss actually isn’t in today,” I said quickly, to stave off any nervous chatter on my part.
“She’s been out a lot lately,” he said. “Is everything all right?”
He was the first person to notice that she’d been out most of the summer.
“Yes, fine,” I said. “She’s had a lot of reading.”
“Good, good.” There was a staticky sound, as if he were rubbing his cheek on the receiver.
“Can I help you with anything?” I knew—I knew—I wasn’t supposed to help Salinger with anything.
“No, no,” he said. “Just some questions about ‘Hapworth.’ But it can wait.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be here until 1:30 today if you need anything.”
“Okay, then. You take care.”
When I hung up the phone, my eyes hit the wall of his books, their titles printed so that I didn’t have to twist my head. It was almost 1:30. There was no one in the office. My phone had rung exactly once today. I got up from my desk and pulled down a paperback version of each volume.
The Catcher in the Rye, Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour—an Introduction
. For eight months I’d stared at these titles, so much so that they were imprinted on my brain. Sometimes, when I walked along Bedford or Madison, they floated into my head unbidden, like a mantra. “
Seymour,”
I’d think, “
an Introduction
.” And sometimes as I fell asleep they appeared before me, floating on the insides of my eyelids in their trademark font and colors: maroon, mustard, black on turquoise or creamy white.
I grabbed my bag and slid them in, then slung it over my shoulder and walked out the door.
I thought about going to the MoMA, or the movies, or up to the Met—all things I loved to do alone and now felt obligated to do with Don—but the lines at the museums were sure to be long and the theaters were filled with summer blockbusters. I thought about calling or dropping in on a friend, but who
were
my friends?
Where
were my friends?
So instead I did what I really wanted to do, what I knew all along I’d do: I went home and read. First
Franny and Zooey
, because I wanted to see if I agreed with the prep school girl or not, or because I knew my father loved it, that he identified with Zooey, who was an actor, as my father had once been. Then
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour—an Introduction
, then
Nine Stories
, and then, finally, on Sunday morning, as the rain slicked down, as I drank another cup of coffee from my espresso pot,
The Catcher in the Rye
. I read and read and read. I did not stop for the ringing phone—Allison, who had ducked away from the wedding weekend to check on me—and only occasionally stopped to grab a peach or a piece of cheese or a glass of water. I carried the books into the bath with me—as Zooey carries his script into the bath with him—and on Monday, Labor Day, when I had eaten all the food in the apartment, I brought
Catcher
with me to the Mediterranean place on the corner and read it over eggs with harissa, then went straight home and finished it, with tears rolling down my face.
Salinger was not cutesy. His work was not nostalgic. These were not fairy tales about child geniuses traipsing the streets of Old New York.
Salinger was nothing like I’d thought. Nothing.
Salinger was brutal. Brutal and funny and precise. I loved him. I loved it all.
Have you read Salinger? Very likely you have. Can you recall that moment you encountered Holden Caulfield for the first time? The sharp intake of breath as you realized that this was a novel, a voice, a character, a way of telling a story, a view of the world unlike any you’d previously encountered. Maybe you were a teenager, brimming with frustration and rage, certain that no one understood the complexities of your soul, and then there was Holden, a conduit for all of that misplaced emotion. Maybe, like the boy from Winston-Salem, you thought about Holden whenever things became too much and he calmed you down, made you grin. Or maybe you, like the doomed young girl—cancerous cells multiplying in her blood as she lay on the couch and read—loved the precision, the million tiny strokes, the sparseness of Salinger’s early stories, of “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” or “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” or “Just Before the War with the Eskimos,” all of them hilarious and heartbreaking, rife with glowing, pulsing symbolism.
Or maybe you, like me, loved it all. I loved Holden, in his
grief-fueled rage. I loved poor Seymour, whispering Taoist tales to his infant sister. I loved Bessie Glass, fretting about the apartment in a housecoat, her pockets laden down with tools. I loved Esmé, of course. Who doesn’t? And I especially loved—or was a little in love with—Buddy Glass, second son, who narrates a few of the Glass family stories and whose life is increasingly consumed by grief.
But I suppose I loved Franny—and “Franny”—best of all. Do you recall this story? Do you remember its perfection? Its compression? Let me remind you: In Princeton, a handsome fellow named Lane Coutell stands on a train platform, waiting for his girl—Franny, of course—to arrive for a game weekend. In his pocket, he holds a letter she sent earlier in the week, which he’s read so often he’s practically memorized it, and as she steps off the train, he’s overwhelmed by a wave of emotion that can’t quite exactly be described as love—he’s too limited a person to truly feel love, at least at twenty-one—but is perhaps a mixture of affection and ownership, with some pride mixed in; pride, of course, at having landed a girl as beautiful and brilliant and
original
as Franny. And yet when she asks, “Did you get my letter?” he pretends at nonchalance. “Which letter?” He is very, very young.
That letter, written in dithering girlspeak, espouses nothing but love for Lane, so much so that any reader—except Lane—would suspect the lady doth protest too much. And indeed once Franny and Lane are seated at lunch, Franny cannot—absolutely cannot—stick with Lane’s program. She can’t pretend she cares about Lane’s paper on Flaubert. Though she doesn’t express it this way, the world strikes her as filled with phonies—with egos, to use her term—and she can no longer go along with the enterprise of pretending this isn’t so, of pretending that her professors are geniuses, that anyone who publishes in a small magazine is a poet, that bad actors are good. She can, in short, no longer participate
in the world, with its web of socially constructed lies. She’s dropped out of the play in which she’s been cast as the lead. She’s stopped doing her reading for class. She’s
done
. Done with everything except the little book she’s been obsessively reading,
The Way of a Pilgrim
, in which a humble Russian peasant wanders the land trying to figure out how to pray. His answer—which Franny has adopted for herself—is the Jesus Prayer, a simple mantra, which she repeats over and over, trying to synchronize it with her heartbeat, as per the pilgrim’s instructions. If you have read the story, then you know: This is not a story about Christianity. Franny’s adoption of the Jesus Prayer has less to do with Jesus than with her desire to transcend her own troublesome ego, to stop the superficial thoughts and desires that plague her. To somehow find a way to live in a world that sickens her. To be her authentic self. To not be the person the world is telling her to be, the girl who must bury her intelligence in her letters to Lane, who must compromise herself in order to live.
Maybe you, like me, identified so strongly with Franny Glass, upon first reading, that you wondered if Salinger had somehow—through some sort of bizarre, science-fiction-style maneuver—tunneled into your brain. Or maybe you, like me, found yourself sobbing with recognition, with relief, that there was someone else who had felt such exhaustion, such despair, such frustration with everything, everyone, including yourself, your inability to be properly nice to your well-intentioned father, or your inexplicable ability to shred the heart of the man who loves you most. Someone else who was trying to figure out how to live in this world.
I understood now the various characters and places and questions the Salinger fans mentioned in their letters. The ducks in Central Park. Seymour Glass kissing Sybil’s foot. Phoebe. The red hunting cap. I understood now all the “goddam” and “helluva” and “bastard” and “crumb-bum.” And
the effect was rather like finding the missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that has been sitting, half-finished, on your coffee table for months. Suddenly the full picture was clear.
It goes without saying, I suppose, that I now understood why the fans wrote to him, not just wrote to him but confided in him, confided in him with such urgency, with such empathy and compassion, with such
confession
. Because the experience of reading a Salinger story is less like reading a short story and more like having Salinger himself whisper his accounts into your ear. The world he creates is at once palpably real and terrifically heightened, as if he walked the earth with his nerve endings exposed. To read Salinger is to engage in an act of such intimacy that it, at times, makes you uncomfortable. In Salinger, characters don’t sit around contemplating suicide. They pick up guns and shoot themselves in the head. All through that weekend, even as I ripped through his entire oeuvre, I kept having to put the books down and breathe. He shows us his characters at their most bald, bares their most private thoughts, most telling actions. It’s almost too much. Almost.
And so, of course, his readers felt an urge to write back. To say
this is where it hurts
or
here’s how you made it better
.
But I also understood—I did, I did—why he didn’t want to receive those letters anymore. I thought, for the millionth time, of the boy from Winston-Salem.
You can’t go around revealing your goddam emotions to the world
. No, but you could reveal them to J. D. Salinger. You would presume he’d understand. And perhaps he would; perhaps he did. For years, Hugh told me, he’d tried to respond to his fans. But the emotional toll grew too great. It was, in a way, already too great for me.
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.