My Salinger Year (2 page)

And so I found myself, clad in my suit, handing over a
hastily composed résumé to an elegant lady in a skirt and jacket rather similar to my own. “You just finished a master’s in English?” she asked, with a frown, her dark hair sliding into her face.

“Yes.”

“Well,” she said, sighing and putting my résumé down. “That will make you more appealing to some editors, less appealing to others. We’ll find you something, though.” She sat back in her chair. “I’ll give you a call in the New Year. No one’s hiring this close to Christmas.”

I’d barely made it home from her office when the phone rang. “I have something for you,” she said breathlessly. “How would you feel about working at a literary agency rather than a publisher?”

“Great,” I said. I had no idea what a literary agency was.

“Fantastic,” she said. “This is a wonderful agency. An old, venerable agency. I think it’s actually the oldest agency in New York. The job is with an agent who’s been in the business a long, long time.” She paused. “Some assistants have found her a bit difficult to work for, but others love her. I think you’d be a good match. And she’s looking to hire someone right away. She wants to make a decision before Christmas.” Later, I would discover that the agent in question had been interviewing potential assistants for months. But for now, on this cold day in December, I tucked the phone into my neck and hung my suit up in the shower to steam out the wrinkles.

The next day, zipped and buttoned back into my suit, I took the train down to Fifty-First and Lex, then walked across Park and over to Madison, to meet with the agent in question.

“So,” she said, lighting a long brown cigarette, a gesture that somehow reminded me simultaneously of Don Corleone and Lauren Bacall. Her fingers were long, slender, white, with nonexistent knuckles and perfectly shaped ovoid nails. “You can type?”

“I can,” I affirmed, shaking my head stiffly. I had been expecting more difficult questions, abstract inquiries into my work ethic or habits, challenges to the central tenets of my master’s thesis.

“On a typewriter?” she asked, pursing her lips and letting out frills of delicate white smoke. Ever so slightly, she smiled. “It’s very different from using a”—her face went slack in disgust—“a
computer
.”

I nodded nervously. “It is,” I agreed.

An hour later, as the sky darkened and the city emptied for the holiday, I lay on the couch rereading
Persuasion
, hoping I’d never have to put that suit back on again, much less the stockings that went with it.

The phone rang once more. I had a job.

And so, on the first Monday after the New Year, I woke at seven, quietly showered, and made my way down the building’s crumbling stairs, only to find the world stopped: the street was covered in snow. I’d known, of course, that a blizzard was coming, or I suppose I’d known, for I didn’t own a television or a radio, and I didn’t traffic in circles where people talked excessively about the weather—we had larger, more important things to discuss; weather was something over which our grandmothers, our dull neighbors in the suburbs, obsessed. If I’d owned a radio, I would have known that the entire city was shut down, that the Department of Education had declared a snow day for the first time in almost twenty years, that up and down the coast people were dying or had died, trapped in cars, unheated houses, skidding on unplowed streets. The Agency utilized a phone tree system for emergency closures, wherein the president of the company—my boss, though I didn’t realize that this was her position until a few weeks into the job, for at the Agency all knowledge was assumed rather than imparted—would call
the next in command, going down the Agency’s hierarchy, until the receptionist, Pam, and the various agents’ assistants, and the strange, sad messenger, Izzy, all knew not to come into work. Because it was my first day, I didn’t yet figure onto the grid of numbers.

Though the city was indeed in an actual state of emergency, my trains came quickly—the L from Lorimer Street, the 5 express from Union Square—and at 8:30 I found myself in Grand Central, where the various purveyors of coffee and pastries and newspapers were eerily shuttered. Walking north, I arrived in the Great Hall, with its graceful canopy of stars, my heels echoing on the marble floor. I’d made it halfway across the chamber—to the central information booth, where in high school I’d often met friends—before I realized why my shoes were making such a racket: I was alone, or nearly so, in a space always filled with the sound of hundreds, thousands of feet racing across the marble. Now, as I stood stock-still in the middle of it, the hall was silent. I had been the only entity generating noise.

At the station’s west side, I pushed open the heavy glass doors and stepped out into the freezing wind. Slowly, I made my way west through the deep snow on Forty-Third Street, until I encountered something even stranger than a silent, unpopulated Grand Central Station: a silent, unpopulated Madison Avenue. The streets had not yet been plowed. The only sound was the wind. An untouched mantle of snow stretched evenly from the shops on its east side to those on its west, marred by not a footprint, a candy wrapper, not even a leaf.

Trudging my way north, I found a trio of bankers running—or trying to run—through the heavy snow and shrieking with delight, their trench coats trailing behind them like capes. “Hey,” they called to me. “We’re having a snowball fight! Come on!”

“I have to go to work,” I told them.
It’s my first day
, I
almost told them, then stopped myself. Better to pass as experienced, seasoned. I was one of them now.

“Everything’s closed,” they called. “Play in the snow!”

“Have a good day,” I called back and slowly made my way toward Forty-Ninth Street, where I located the narrow, unremarkable building that housed the Agency. The lobby consisted of a narrow hallway leading to a pair of creaky elevators. This was a building of insurance salesmen and importers of African carvings, of aging family doctors in solo practice and Gestalt therapists. And the Agency, which occupied the whole of a mid-level floor. Stepping off the elevator, I tried the door and found it locked. But it was only 8:45 and the office, I knew, didn’t open until 9:00. The Friday before Christmas, I’d been asked to stop by to sign some paperwork and pick up a few things, including a key to the front door. It seemed odd to me that they’d give a key to a complete stranger, but I’d dutifully put it on my key chain, right there in the creaky elevator, and now I pulled it out and let myself into the dark, silent office. I longed to inspect the books that lined the foyer but feared someone might arrive and find me engaged in behavior that would betray me as the grad student I so recently was. Instead I forced myself to walk past the receptionist’s desk, down the front hallway, with its rows of Ross Macdonald paperbacks, to turn right at the little kitchen area and walk through the linoleum-floored finance department, arriving at the east wing of the office, which held my new boss’s sanctum and the large antechamber where I would sit.

And there I sat, spine erect, feet freezing in my soaked shoes, inspecting the contents of my new drawers—paper clips, stapler, large pink index cards imprinted with mysterious codes and grids—afraid to pull out my book, lest my new boss happen upon me. I was reading Jean Rhys and fancied myself akin to her impoverished heroines, living for weeks on nothing but the morning croissant and café crème provided by their residence hotels, the rents on which were,
in turn, provided by their married ex-lovers, as compensation for ending their affairs. I suspected my boss would not approve of Jean Rhys. During our interview, she’d asked me what I was reading, what I preferred to read. “Everything,” I told her. “I love Flaubert. I just finished
Sentimental Education
and I was amazed by how contemporary it seemed. But I also love writers like Alison Lurie and Mary Gaitskill. And I grew up reading mysteries. I love Donald Westlake and Dashiell Hammett.”

“Well, Flaubert is all well and good, but to work in publishing, you need to be reading writers who are alive.” She paused and I suspected that my answer had been wrong. As always, I should have prepared myself more properly. I knew nothing about publishing, nothing about literary agencies, nothing about this specific literary agency.

“I love Donald Westlake, too,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “He’s so funny.” Then, for the first time since I’d stepped into her office, she smiled.

I was tentatively inspecting the books on the shelf above my head—some Agatha Christie paperbacks and what appeared to be a series of romance novels—when the heavy black phone on my desk rang. I picked it up, before realizing that I wasn’t sure of the proper greeting. “Hello?” I said tentatively.

“Oh no,” a voice shouted at me. “Are you there? I knew you were there. Go home.” It was my boss. “The office is closed. We’ll see you tomorrow.” There was a silence, in which I struggled to figure out what to say. “I’m so sorry you came all the way downtown. Go home and get warm.” And then she was gone.

Outside, the bankers were gone, too, presumably toasting their own soaked feet. The wind blew in thick gusts down Madison, twisting my hair into my mouth and eyes, but the street was so silent, so blank and beautiful, that I lingered
until my hands and feet and nose grew numb. This was the last Monday on which I’d have no place to be at 9:30 in the morning and there was, I realized, no rush to get home.

There would be other blizzards in New York, but none that generated such silence, none in which I could stand on a street corner and feel myself to be the only person in the universe, none, certainly that stopped the city entire. By the time the next blizzard of such proportions arrived, the world had changed. Silence was no longer possible.

I went home to Brooklyn. Officially, as far as my parents knew, I lived on the Upper East Side with my friend Celeste. After college, when I’d moved to London for grad school, Celeste—whom my parents habitually described as “good” and “nice”—had taken a job teaching preschool and found herself a rent-controlled studio on East Seventy-Third Street, between First and Second. When I stumbled back to New York, she let me sleep on her couch, grateful for the company, then suggested I stay on, splitting her rent. Officially, as far as my parents knew, I had an equally good and nice boyfriend, my college boyfriend, a composer, brilliant and hilarious, in grad school in California. The plan had been for me to come home from London after finishing my master’s, visit briefly with my parents, then move out to Berkeley, to the place he’d secured for us in a complex a few blocks off Telegraph, rings of apartments surrounding a bleak courtyard that looked as if it should contain a pool.

But there was no pool. And I had veered from the plan. I had returned to New York and found that I couldn’t leave. And then I met Don.

On my second day of work at the Agency, I again arrived uncomfortably early, so fearful was I of arriving late. This
time around, I stuck my key in the lock, opened the door a few inches, and seeing that the office was dark, the receptionist’s desk unmanned, I quickly closed it and took the elevator back down to the lobby. Madison had been plowed, as had Fifth and the rest of midtown, but the city still felt sleepy, the curbs banked six feet high with snow, pedestrians creeping slowly through the narrow pathways carved along the sidewalks. There was a croissant shop in the lobby, inside which a few dazed customers perused glass cases under the unfriendly eye of a portly South Asian woman in a hairnet. I joined them, turning over in my mind the possibility of a second cup of coffee.

By the time I got back upstairs, the receptionist had arrived and was snapping on the lamps in the foyer, still in her long brown coat. A light shone, too, from the office directly opposite her desk.

“Oh, hi,” she said, in a manner that wasn’t exactly friendly. She unbuttoned her coat and slung it over her arm, then began walking down the hall, away from me.

“I’m the new assistant,” I called. “Should I just, um, go to my desk? Or should I—”

“Hold on, let me hang up my coat,” she said.

A few minutes later she reappeared, fluffing her short hair. “What’s your name again? Joan?”

“Joanna,” I told her.

“Right. Joanne,” she said, seating herself heavily in her chair. She was a tall woman, with a figure my mother would have called statuesque, and she was dressed today in a turtleneck sweater and the sort of fitted pantsuit worn in the 1970s, with wide-legged trousers and wider lapels. Seated in her chair, she appeared not just to tower over but to fully preside over her desk and the room around it. Next to her phone sat a Rolodex of enormous magnitude. “Your boss isn’t in yet. She gets in at ten.” It was 9:30, the time I’d been told the workday started. “I guess you can wait out here.” She sighed,
as if I were causing her a great inconvenience, then twisted her full mouth in contemplation.

“Or you can go back to your desk. Do you know where it is?” I nodded. “Okay, I guess you can go back there. But don’t touch anything. She’ll be in soon.”

“I can take her back,” called a voice from the lit office. A tall young man strode through the doorway. “I’m James,” he said, extending his hand. His head was covered in curly light brown hair, his eyes in gold-rimmed spectacles, as was the fashion that year, and his chin sprouted a thick reddish beard, all of which gave him the aspect of Mr. Tumnus, the noble faun in
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
. I took his hand and shook it.

“Follow me,” he said, and I trailed him down the main hallway, past a row of dark offices. As on the day before I longed to linger over the books lining the walls. My eye caught some thrillingly familiar names, like Pearl Buck and Langston Hughes, and some intriguingly foreign ones, like Ngaio Marsh, and my stomach began to flutter in the way it had on childhood trips to our local library: so many books, each enticing in its own specific way, and all mine for the taking. “Wow,” I said, almost involuntarily. James stopped and turned. “I know,” he said with a real smile. “I’ve been here six years and I still feel that way.”