My Salinger Year (5 page)

I looked from her face to her hand to the window, shivering in the cold air. “What happened?” I asked, incredulous. For I truly couldn’t fathom the scene before me.

“I put my hand through the window,” she said, still looking at her hand as if it were a specimen, as if marveling that it was attached to her own body.

“How?” I asked. “Why?” It occurred to me then that we needed to stop talking and get her to a hospital. The amount of blood on and around her was terrifying. I wondered if we were alone in the apartment building, if I should call an ambulance. Where was Don?

“I just wanted to. It looked so beautiful. I knew it wouldn’t hurt and it didn’t.”

Just then, there was a quick rap on the door, followed by the knob turning—Leigh had left it unlocked, yet again—and in walked a tall, handsome man of South Asian extraction—his black hair curling luxuriously around his ears, dusted white with snow—ridiculously underdressed for the weather in a cotton army jacket. We’d met once before, just for a moment,
and I knew he was a friend of Leigh’s from Antioch, now a grad student in biology at Princeton. Pausing by the front door, he looked toward the kitchen, then toward Leigh’s bedroom, where I stood watching him, unable to speak. “Where is she?” he asked.

“Here,” I said. “She’s bleeding.”

“Leigh,” he cried, more exasperated than worried, walking past me, into the bedroom. “What did you—” Before he reached her, at the window, his eye went to her bureau, and mine followed it: to an amber bottle.
That can’t be mine
, I thought, as he grabbed it.
She wouldn’t have
. “Vicodin?” he asked, wearily. “Where did you get these?”

Leigh looked at me and smiled. “From Joanna,” she said. “She gave them to me.” She smiled wider. “Thank you, Joanna. You’re such a good kid.” Her smile turned into a grimace. “Don is such a little shit. You should dump him. You’re so pretty.”

Her friend, whose name, I remembered now, was Pankaj, was shaking the bottle. He cracked it open and counted the pills in his palm. “How many did you take?” he asked Leigh. She held up three bloody fingers. “Three?” he said. “
Three?”
She nodded. He looked at me. “How many were in here?”

I wasn’t entirely sure. “Ten?” I said. “I took only one. This morning. I hurt my knee. I didn’t—” I paused here, unsure of whether I should take the time to explain that I absolutely hadn’t given her the pills. “Why would she take them?” Counting the pills back into the bottle, he looked at me strangely. “They made me sick,” I told him. “I threw up. All I could do was sleep. I couldn’t read. I had the worst dreams.”

“It’s fun,” called Leigh.

Her friend shook his lovely head and sighed. “You’re just lucky she didn’t sell them,” he said. Then he turned his attention to Leigh. “Okay, let’s get to the hospital.”

Later, when they returned with Leigh’s hand wrapped
in pristine white gauze and sat down at the kitchen table with cold beers, Pankaj explained that Leigh had called him, sounding very strange, and he’d known something was wrong. He’d borrowed a car and driven to Brooklyn from Princeton in the snow. “I had,” he said, “an instinct.” I nodded. Don was still not home.

At five, my phone rang, startling me out of this sad reverie. “Hey, lady, what’s shaking?” came Don’s low voice from the receiver. “How’s work?” He pronounced this last word with quotes around it, as if I were merely playing at having a job. To Don, “work” meant laying bricks or mopping floors or stamping metal in a factory. Don was a socialist.

On our first date, we’d met at a clock-themed Italian restaurant on Avenue A, chosen—he explained, as he slid into the seat across from me—because of its proximity to the socialist bookstore up the street, where he had just finished a shift. “So, wait,” I asked Don, as we waited for plates of pasta. “Do you—do, um, contemporary socialists—really think you’re going to overthrow the federal government?”

He swirled his wine, then took a small sip, a little shudder passing through him. “No. I mean, yes, there are some people who do. But most don’t.”

“Then what’s the purpose of the party?” I really wanted to know. In the 1930s, my grandmother had been asked to run for Senate on the Socialist Party ticket. My great-uncle had been shot in a union rally at the Forward Building on East Broadway. My father, when he enlisted during the Korean War, was investigated by the FBI. But no one in my family would talk about politics. The 1950s had scared the impulse out of them. “What do you do? Other than sell books?”

“We educate. We try to raise class awareness. We combat materialism. We work with unions and help laborers organize.”
And then, suddenly, he took my hand, and his voice—already low, a gravelly bass—became lower. “We offer an alternative,” he said. “To everything else. We offer a different way of thinking about the world.”

Now his voice came through the phone at me, gravelly and droll. He had a smoker’s rasp, though he abhorred smoking. “Listen,” he said. “Why don’t you meet me at the L after work.” The L was the one café in Williamsburg. Don often installed himself there in the evenings, writing in his journal and drinking so much coffee that his leg jumped up and down. “I talked to this realtor who may have a place for us.”

“For
us
?” I asked. We’d known each other for just a few months. I had a boyfriend in California. Whom I would be joining. At some distant point in the future. “An apartment for
us
?”

“Us,” he said. “You’ve heard this word before. It means you”—he spoke with exaggerated slowness—“and me.”

My boss left at five on the nose, breezing by with a little wave. “Don’t stay too late!” she called. I was still typing, Dictaphone still whirring. A few minutes later, Hugh came by, a down coat over his sweater. “Go home,” he said. “You’ve done enough.” There was a brief surge of laughter—a rustling of bags and coats—as the bookkeepers and the messenger went home, and then the office fell quiet and dark, the only light in our wing of the office the one on my desk. I finished the letter I was typing and pulled it out of the Selectric, then slipped my coat off the back of my chair and made my way toward the door.

For a moment, I paused in front of the wall of Salinger books and looked at the titles, the familiar spines. My parents owned most of these: paperbacks of
The Catcher in the Rye
and
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour—an Introduction;
a pristine hardback of
Franny and Zooey
. But I had read around them. Why? Why had I skipped Salinger? Partly due to happenstance. My high school English teacher never assigned
Catcher
. No older sibling put a copy in my fourteen-year-old hands and said, “You have to read this.” And then my Salinger moment—the window between twelve and twenty, when everyone in the literate universe seems to go crazy over
The Catcher in the Rye
—had passed. Now I was interested in difficult, gritty fictions, in large, expansive novels, in social realism. I was interested in Pynchon, Amis, Dos Passos. I was interested in Faulkner and Didion and Bowles, writers whose bleak, relentless styles stood in stark opposition to what I imagined Salinger to be: insufferably cute, aggressively quirky, precious. I had no interest in Salinger’s fairy tales of Old New York, in precocious children expounding on Zen koans or fainting on sofas, exhausted by the tyranny of the material world. I was not interested in characters with names like Boo Boo and Zooey. I was not interested in hyper-articulate seven-year-olds who quoted from the Bhagavad Gita. Even the names of the stories seemed juvenile and too clever-clever: “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut.”

I didn’t want to be entertained. I wanted to be provoked.

The realtor led us to a pretty row house on North Eighth Street, a block from the train, next to a large Polish bakery, leafless trees casting shadows onto the snow from the streetlights’ glow. “It’s back here,” he said, unlocking the front door and walking past the graceful staircase, past the doors to the first-floor apartments, and out a door at the back of the building.
Where on earth are we going?
I thought, trailing the two men. We were going to an interior courtyard, covered in snow, at the end of which stood a tiny, three-story house,
dilapidated and neglected, but also like something out of a storybook, a secret.

The apartment itself was small and strange, its wooden floors freshly painted an odd brick red—the fumes still filled the place—its doorways arched and lacking in actual doors. The living room held a closet and a tiny strip of kitchen, a miniature stove and fridge; the small bedroom overlooked the cement courtyard and the rear windows of the front house; the bathroom was tiled in lurid pink. The floor slanted visibly to one side.

“How much is it?” Don asked the realtor. “Five hundred?”

“Five forty,” said the realtor.

“We’ll take it,” said Don.

Incredulous, I widened my eyes at him. “We might need a day to talk it over. We might want to look at a few other places.”

“No,” said Don, laughing. “We’ll take it. How much is the deposit?”

Outside, the cold air felt delicious on my cheeks.
We’re not
really
taking it
, I thought. And yet just the thought of going back to Celeste’s—even to collect my things—made me stiffen with anxiety. The pasta. The overstuffed sofa. The paraplegic cat.

A moment later, we were in the realtor’s office, filling out forms.

“It’s going to be in her name,” said Don, and I shot him a look of alarm, my heart beating faster. If the apartment was in my name, it meant that responsibility for the rent lay with me, that Don was not culpable at all. This seemed terribly scary considering $540 represented more than half my paycheck.

“You’re the one with the job,” Don explained, taking my arm, as we walked back toward his old apartment. “You’re the one with good credit.”

“How do you know I have good credit?” I asked.

“I just know,” he said, stopping and pulling a pair of worn leather gloves out of his pocket. “Besides, it has to be better than mine.”

“What do you mean?”

He took in a deep breath of frigid air. “I defaulted on my student loans,” he said.

“You
defaulted
on your student loans?”

“That’s what I just said.” Shaking his head, he smiled brilliantly. “It’s no big deal. The banks are evil, anyway. They’re just preying on eighteen-year-olds. What do they care if they lose my twenty grand?” He planted a cold kiss on my right cheek. “You’re so bourgeois. Seriously, Buba, it’s no big deal. I had a novel to write. I didn’t have time to worry about student loans.”

I wasn’t sure what to say about this, what to think.

“It was stupid, though.” He took my arm again, and we continued walking across North Ninth Street toward Macri Triangle, a grubby patch of grass overrun with rats that was somehow considered, by the City of New York, an official public park. “I couldn’t make the payments, so I deferred. You can keep deferring. You just have to do all this paperwork every six months. I got sick of doing the paperwork.”

I was thinking about the rent. The truth was I didn’t really understand how Don made a living. He seemed to spend most of his time at the gym—he was a boxer, “like Mailer,” as he said, “but better”—or in cafés, working on a novel that was, he said, nearly done. In the past, he’d taught English as a second language to adults—immigrants from Russia and Latin American housewives—but now he had just a few private students. He always seemed to have money for wine or coffee, but he also—I was noticing—doled out cash with strict discipline. He didn’t use credit cards. And now I knew why.

“I mean, college should be free anyway,” he was saying. “In Europe nobody pays twenty grand a year for a BA.
All my European friends think Americans are
crazy
.” Don’s European friends occasionally came up in conversation, but they’d yet to materialize in real life. The friends we saw regularly were largely from New York and Hartford, where Don grew up, and San Francisco, where he’d lived until a year or so prior. Most had indeed attended colleges where tuition exceeded twenty grand per year. His friend Allison had grown up in a town house on the Upper East Side—the daughter of a famous writer and a powerful editor—and gone to Bennington with Marc, his best friend from Providence, the child of academics. Like Don, they strove to shake the trappings of their privileged childhoods: Allison lived in a garret-like studio on Morton Street and complained of poverty but ate out every night. Marc had abandoned his expensive education to train as a cabinetmaker. Now he ran a high-end contracting business out of his loft on Fourteenth Street, a not-insubstantial piece of real estate.

“Was there something strange about that apartment?” I asked.

“The floor tilted a little.” He shrugged, then put his arm around me and drew me close. “But who cares. We’re not going to find another apartment for five hundred bucks a month. Right by the train. Right by everything. And that’s a beautiful block, North Eighth. All the trees.”

“The trees,” I repeated, smiling, though all I could recall about them was the dusty shadows they’d thrown on the snow.

When we got home, we found Leigh and Pankaj sitting at the table drinking beer with Allison and Marc, whom Don had apparently invited over and forgotten about—or forgotten to tell
me
about. I liked both of them—far more than most of Don’s friends—but I was exhausted. “Donald!” Leigh cried. The hand she raised in greeting was still bandaged. “Joanna!
Come have a beer with us. We’re celebrating.” Rising from her chair, she placed her warm cheek on my cold one. She was wearing one of her beautiful dresses—a deep maroon crepe with tiny covered buttons down the front—and a full face of makeup: foundation, which smoothed the pits and ruts on her chin, and mascara, which gave her actual eyelashes, and a deep red lipstick. Her hair, too, had been washed and blown into shiny waves. She looked not just presentable but gorgeous. “I have a job.”

“Wow,” I said. I’d not actually thought her capable of finding employment. “What kind of job?”

“Who cares?” called Allison gleefully, clinking beers with Pankaj, who merely smiled. He was still wearing his unlined army coat, a scarf wrapped around his neck, though the apartment was stifling at the moment. I tried to catch his eye. We’d been through something together, I thought, we had a special understanding. But he looked down at the table, at his lap, the beer. “Hey, man,” he finally said to Don. “How’s the party?”