My Salinger Year (29 page)

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.

“Take care, Joanne,” he said.

“Jerry,” I said. For the first time, his name felt comfortable coming out of my mouth. There was so much more I wanted to say. “Jerry, good-bye.”

I never wrote back to the boy from Winston-Salem.

I never wrote back to the veteran in Nebraska, for I could not bear to tell him that his friend was no relation to me. My father had confirmed this, with some disappointment—no one in his small family had served in Germany during World War II. Perhaps this was where I got it from—my belief in fate, in magic, in felicity, the mermaid lagoon. From my father.

Nor did I write again to the high school girl. Her rage was too enormous for me to bear. And what could I say to her but
Wait, wait, and you’ll see. It gets easier once you’re no longer graded, once you have to assess your actions for yourself
.

I should have, I suppose. I should have written and told her exactly that, though surely I would have only fanned her flames. But she’s haunted me all these years, as has the veteran, and the boy from Winston-Salem, whose letter I still have, its creases soft from wear. I keep it pinned to the cork-board above my desk, a talisman, a reminder. In some ways, I wish I’d taken them all. The thought of them, those letters,
those documents of so many people’s lives, just tossed away, grows more and more unbearable as the years pass. I could have saved them and I didn’t.

When I gave notice, my boss stared at me in disbelief. “But you were doing so well,” she said. “You sold that story and—” She didn’t finish. “I was so sure you were an Agency Type of Person.” The sadness in her pale eyes was too much for me, though I knew this sadness was not really to do with me. She had lost so much, so many, in the last year. Max had just left, too, in a storm of rancor, his office abandoned nearly overnight. Losing her assistant was nothing in comparison. I was eminently replaceable. The city was full of boys and girls like me, clamoring at the gates of literature. And yet—and yet—I wavered, as she tried to dissuade me. “Why?” she asked me.

“I just—” Could I tell her I wanted to be a writer? I wasn’t sure that I could. “There are things I want to do. I love this”—I held my hands up, gesturing to the books, the very walls around me—“I love it here. But there are things that if I don’t do now, I’ll never do.”

“I understand,” she said, and I truly believed she did.

With Don, I wavered, too. Of course I did. James had not found that editor who would fall in love with his novel. I went home with him for Christmas, as planned. We returned to Brooklyn in time for New Year’s Eve. Another party at which I had nothing to say. The next morning I woke up and the first thing I thought was
Jerry’s birthday
. He would be turning seventy-eight. It was also the original publication date for the “Hapworth” book, the book that would never happen, the book that would always consist of one single case of sample covers, stored, I presumed, in Roger’s basement. He didn’t seem the type to throw such relics away. Around the time I left, a story about the book appeared in a paper we’d heard of: the
Post
. Salinger never officially told my boss that the
deal was off. His silence told us all we needed to know. I had used the same trick with my college boyfriend, I supposed. He had recovered from it, or so he said, but I wasn’t sure I had. Would the same, I wondered, be true of Jerry and Roger?

Regardless, with Don, I told the truth. “I feel like a different person from that girl you met,” I said.

“It’s not you, it’s me,” said Don with a laugh. Not a cackle. Just a laugh.

“Sort of,” I told him. This was true and not true. Maybe he was right. There
was
no one truth. Truth: a schoolgirl thing.

When I left, I packed up a bag of clothing to drop off at Goodwill: my plaid skirts, my loafers. I was not a schoolgirl anymore.

Thirteen years later, I tiptoed out of my children’s room and collapsed into my own bed, with a book. Through the bedroom window came the dull rush of traffic on the Williamsburg Bridge, the cars bound for Brooklyn, for my old neighborhood. Less than a year after I left the Agency, my grandmother died, leaving me her apartment on the Lower East Side. Like her, I was raising two children there, children who played in the same parks my father and his brother played in, and my grandmother and her sisters before him. Like my father, they walked across the Williamsburg Bridge to visit their friends, who were the children of my friends. And like Holden—and like me—their childhood played out against, was defined by, the city’s grand institutions. They, too, spent Saturdays passing under the great whale at the Museum of Natural History and inspecting the armor at the Met. They, too, rode the carousel in Central Park. They tossed crumbs to the ducks in the pond.

From the hallway, I heard the pad of my husband’s feet. “You’re awake!” he said. All too often, I fell asleep with the
children. Though I also rose hours before they woke to write in my closet-sized office, a lesson I’d learned all those years before, during my year at the Agency, from Salinger.

“I know,” I said, with a yawn. “I don’t know how it happened.”

Leaving his post by the doorjamb, he came over and sat down next to me. “I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

I sat up, suddenly fully awake. Three thousand miles away, in the foothills of San Jose, my father lay dying. Within a few months of my parents’ retiring to California—also not long after I left the Agency—his doctors diagnosed a syndrome similar to Parkinson’s. A syndrome whose effects he’d, apparently, felt for years. “Some patients are experts at masking the symptoms,” one of his doctors told us. “Your father was an actor, wasn’t he?”

“Is it my father?” I asked. I hadn’t heard the phone ring, but that didn’t mean anything.

“No, no,” said my husband. “J. D. Salinger. Died.”

“Oh.” I let out a long breath. “Oh.”

“I know he was—” His hazel eyes blinked behind his glasses as he tried to formulate this thought. What
was
Salinger in the tableau of my life? In the twelve years he’d known me, I’d reread
Franny and Zooey
and
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters
annually,
Catcher
every two or three years. My Salinger paperbacks were falling apart, their pages yellow and crumbling, their covers taped together. I could buy new copies, but I didn’t. “I know he was important to you.”

“He was,” I said, allowing myself to be embraced. “He was.”

“You should go to sleep,” he said, finally. “It’s late.” Our two-year-old had taken forever to get to bed, a not-uncommon occurrence.

“Yes,” I agreed. But a few minutes later I found myself in the living room, pulling
Franny and Zooey
off the shelf. Our edition was a hardback, actually, bequeathed to me—along
with paperbacks of
Catcher
and
Seymour
—when my parents moved to California, the same edition I’d stared at, day in and day out, during my year at the Agency.

Here’s the thing: People say you outgrow Salinger. That he’s a writer whose work speaks to the particular themes and frustrations of adolescence. The latter might be true. Certainly, I can attest to the fact that many of the people who wrote letters to him ranged in age from approximately twelve to twenty-two. I don’t know how I would have regarded Salinger had I read him in middle school. But I encountered Salinger as a grown-up or rather, someone who, like Franny, was just sloughing off my childhood, my received ideas about how to live in the world. And, thus, with each passing year—each rereading—his stories, his characters, have changed and deepened.

At twenty-four, I identified so strongly with Franny—her exasperation with the world, with the men like Lane who dominated it—that the story’s structural perfection, its gorgeous precision and symbolism, its balance of social satire and psychological realism, its dead-on dialogue, eluded me. At twenty-four, I’d thought,
I want to write like that
. At thirty-seven, I still wanted to write like that, but I had a better understanding of
why
, a hope that someday that “why” would become a “how.”

All these years later, I still
—still
—felt like Franny, overwhelmed by the suffering around me, by all those egos. Perhaps, like Holden Caulfield, “I act quite young for my age.” Perhaps I’ll always be a person who gets “quiet emotional,” like the boy from Winston-Salem, who knows you can’t go around bleeding all over the world, but can’t manage to stanch myself. Perhaps I had married someone rather too much like Lane Coutell. Three years later, I would pack up my children and leave him for my college boyfriend.

But now I equally love—my heart truly breaks for—Bessie
Glass, who’s lost two of her seven children, one to his own hand. Bessie, who wanders through her apartment like a ghost, who fears—so much that she can’t think straight—that whatever demons plagued Seymour might plague Franny, too. There is a point in “Zooey” that is almost unbearable, a point at which I always have to put the book down and take a breath: Zooey is haranguing Bessie for not recognizing
The Way of a Pilgrim
as belonging to Seymour. Franny, you see, had told her mother that she happened upon the book at her college library. “You’re so stupid, Bessie,” Zooey says furiously. “She got [it] out of Seymour and Buddy’s old room, where [it’s] been sitting on Seymour’s desk for as long as I can remember.” And then Bessie says, “I don’t go in that room if I can help it, and you know it … I don’t look at Seymour’s old—at his things.”

That was the point at which the tears arrived. A few pages later, Zooey asks Franny if she wants to talk to Buddy. “I want,” Franny says, “to talk to Seymour.”

That was the point at which my husband found me sobbing, loudly, phlegmily, haplessly trying not to wet the pages of this book that had passed from my father’s hand to my mother’s and now to mine.

Salinger’s stories, to a one, are anatomies of loss, every inch of them, from the start to the finish. Even
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters
—one of the funniest stories in the English language—is soaked with the fact of Seymour’s death, Seymour’s suicide. Seven years later, Buddy is still mourning. Even
Catcher
is ultimately a portrait in grief: Holden’s madness has all to do with his brother Allie’s death. And Franny is not pregnant. She’s in mourning. As is the entire Glass family. A family in mourning, never to recover. A world in mourning, never to recover.

My husband stared at me, shocked, from the doorjamb. “This is about your dad, isn’t it?” he said. “It’s making you think about your dad. About what’s going to happen.” My
father, we knew, was not going to recover. He would grow worse and worse, until he couldn’t move and couldn’t talk, and then: the end. “It’s reminding you of your dad.”

With the back of my hand, I wiped the tears from my face and swiped my nose. “No,” I said. “It’s just about Salinger.”