My Salinger Year (7 page)

For weeks I typed and typed and typed. I typed so much that I dreamed of typing. In my dreams, my fingers ran over the keys and nothing happened, though my ribbon was intact and my machine appeared to be functioning. Instead of letters imprinting on paper, birds flew out of the innards of my typewriter, chirping and flapping, or swarms of white dusty moths, some huge, some tiny, and took up roost around the office. The hum of the machine filled my days, a backdrop to every conversation, every word I read, so that when I shut the Selectric off at the end of the day, and sheathed it in its plastic cover, the ensuing silence filled me with immeasurable joy.

James had an affinity for the office hardware and was often called upon to resolve technological issues, such as malfunctions with the fax machine or clogs in the photocopier. Both were relatively new additions to the office. Only a couple of years before my arrival, James told me, the agents had still communicated with their sister agency in England via an enormous telex machine. In the files, I found missives from the late 1980s imprinted on long, columnar sheets of
telex paper, in that device’s charmingly chunky lettering, a font I associated with a different era, with
Thin Man
movies and steamship travel. The Agency, it seemed, had held on to that era, fox stoles and all, as long as it could. It was still holding on, of course, but the modern age was encroaching, in manifold ways. A few years earlier, one of the agents—now retired—had convinced his colleagues that he needed a fax machine in order to properly look after their clients’ film rights, as was his province. In Hollywood, communication via fax was de rigueur; deals happened too quickly for the U.S. Postal Service. And so a fax machine was installed by the coffeemaker, the telex machine retired, though it sat in the office for years, just in case such technology should be called into service again.

The photocopier was a relatively recent acquisition, too. Until just a few years prior, assistants had typed every letter in duplicate, inserting into their typewriters a paper sandwich consisting of a thick sheet of creamy letterhead, a slender black wisp of carbon, and a piece of soft, pulpy yellow paper, on which the carbon imprinted a copy of the note. Copies of all correspondence, even those notes that simply said, “Attached is a countersigned agreement for your records,” were kept and eventually filed away in folders devoted to each of the Agency’s authors. Now, though, we assistants didn’t need to bother with carbons. We could simply type up our letters and Xerox them. How lucky we were! My boss, and Hugh, and James—and any number of others—reminded me of this from time to time. We were spoiled, my generation, by modern convenience!

James had started at the Agency six years earlier as assistant to Carolyn, who sold foreign rights and who had been there even longer than my boss, since the 1960s or earlier, no one knew for sure. Tiny as a child, Carolyn spoke in a low, sophisticated southern drawl and dyed her hair a rusty shade of red that—based on her freckled complexion—must have
approximated its color in her youth, which was now gone, though it was not clear how long. I guessed she was about seventy, but she could have been older or younger, her diminutive size and smoker’s wrinkles—like my boss, she smoked long, slender Mores—throwing off all guesses. Often, in the afternoons, she fell asleep at her desk, her head curled into her chest like a baby bird; the first time I’d happened upon her in this position—as I walked by her office on my way to the bathroom—I started, thinking she’d passed into a deeper state than sleep. Then she let out a long burp.

Though James now had his own lovely, book-lined office, he was still officially considered Carolyn’s assistant. Or so I discovered one morning, when I walked by his office and found him typing, calmly and quickly, the Dictaphone headgear perched oddly atop his leonine head. He was thirty, the same age as Don, and married. And yet he was still someone’s assistant, after six years of employment and with an Ivy League degree. With a
wife
.

Now that I understood this, I looked away in embarrassment when I encountered him typing or filing correspondence in the big metal cabinets behind the finance desks. But James didn’t mind, really, typing letters for Carolyn, he told me one afternoon in February, the office already dark as midnight, though it was barely four o’clock. My boss had gone home early to take care of a matter involving the people I often heard her talking about or to: Daniel and Helen. I still didn’t understand who they were and how they fit into her life, but it was clear that they took up much of her time. She also regularly left early to check in on Dorothy, who I now knew was the Agency’s former president, a formidable and legendary agent, in her nineties and felled by a stroke. She’d never married, never had children. “She kind of married the Agency,” James told me. And now the Agency—in the form of my boss, her successor—took care of her. She herself had been the successor to the Agency’s founder, and the person
who’d discovered Salinger, who’d sent his stories to
The New Yorker
over and over again, until finally William Maxwell accepted one, “Slight Rebellion off Madison,” which would eventually become
The Catcher in the Rye
. “You can look at the card,” Hugh told me excitedly. The Agency used a bizarre, overly complicated system for tracking submissions—of both books and stories, though there wasn’t much business in the latter anymore—involving the oversized pink cards I’d found in my desk that first day, on which one recorded the various editors who had seen it, the days on which one called to check in on it, the sale and contractual terms when sold, and so on. These cards appeared to have been invented by the Agency’s founder and were produced specifically for our use. It was the assistants, of course, who typed them up, squeezing impossible amounts of information into the network of grids and lines. “You know what else is neat?” Hugh said, an almost mischievous glint in his pale eyes. “Look up the card for
The Catcher in the Rye
.” Dorothy had, of course, made that sale, too. The large, windowed area we now used as a conference room had once been her office. Hugh, when he first started at the Agency, as her assistant, had sat in there with her, taking live dictation. Perhaps we assistants
did
have it easy now, with our Xerox machine and our Dictaphones.

“Typing is sort of a mindless task,” James opined, stretching his arms behind his head and hoisting his loafer-clad feet on his desk. “I spend so much time
thinking
. Or editing. Or, just, figuring out difficult things, so it’s nice to turn on the machine”—he gave it a friendly pat—“and type for a while. It relaxes me.” James sat up and smiled. He took himself, our work, so seriously. His smiles always took me by surprise. Hugh’s, too. “Still. It’s ridiculous that we don’t have computers.”

“You think?” I asked. This was the first I’d heard such an opinion expressed, and I was afraid that it was a trap.

“Um, yeah,” he said, laughing. “Don’t you?”

I did. Of course, I did. And yet I also, at that moment in time, didn’t know what I thought. About anything. I had an inkling—a vague suspicion that I was afraid to articulate even to myself—that this had something to do with work, with my boss. That in order to become part of something—and I did, desperately, want to be part of the Agency, more than I had wanted anything in ages, and without really understanding why—I had to relinquish some semblance of myself, my own volition and inclinations.

We’d moved in just a box or two before I realized why the apartment looked off-kilter, strange, wrong: the kitchen had no sink. How had we not noticed this when we looked at it? “I noticed it,” Don admitted. “But who cares? It’s five hundred dollars a month. We can wash the dishes in the bathtub.”

“I think we should ask the landlord to install a sink,” I said. “It’s just weird.”

“Why should the landlord install a sink?” Don scoffed, shaking his head at my naïveté. “He can find someone else to take the apartment without one. Like that.” He snapped his fingers for emphasis. “You can ask, but it’s not going to happen. And then the landlord is going to hate us.”

That night, a more pressing problem arose: we couldn’t figure out how to turn on the heat. There were vents in the floor, but nothing came out of them. In the hallway outside our front door we found a thermostat and turned it up, but nothing happened.

It was cold. Unusually cold for New York in January. And the walls of the little building appeared to lack any insulation at all. Inside, the air was as cold as out. I put on my warmest pajamas, a heavy sweater, piled blankets on the bed, but I still froze.

“I’ll turn on the oven and open the door,” said Don.

“Is that safe?” I asked. “What if the pilot blows out? Couldn’t we be gassed?”

Don shrugged. “It’s fine. This apartment is so drafty. There’s plenty of ventilation even if the windows are closed.”

“Okay,” I agreed, nervously. The next morning, we were still alive and the apartment was warm: it was so small that the oven could heat it entirely. As soon as I got to work, I called the realtor, who said he’d call the landlord. Her name, he told me, was Kristina. “She’s a real character,” he said.

That night, I arrived home to find Don talking to a squat woman with a platinum-blond bouffant and an excess of tanned flesh spilling out of a red tank top. “Hello,” she said in a thick Polish accent. “You are the wife. I am Kristina. I am very happy to meet you. Very happy to have such a nice couple, a nice professional couple, in this apartment. You met the man downstairs?”

“Um, no,” I said, taking off my coat. Don still had the oven on and the apartment was quite warm. Had he left it on all day? While we weren’t here?

“He is Mexican. Nice man, but he drinks. Mexicans, they work hard, but they drink. Poles, they don’t work hard, and they drink. The man upstairs, he is Polish, but he’s okay. Old.” Her eyes narrowed and her jaw began to protrude in an expression of distaste. “The man who lived in this apartment before you? He
destroyed
it. Holes in the walls. Gah.” She pursed her lips, her jowls doubling into themselves, and shook her head in disgust. Suddenly she turned to Don, who was sitting at his desk, wearing his glasses—round, wire-rimmed—in a plaid shirt and jeans. My jeans, actually. We were about the same size. “You are Jewish?” she asked him, though it came out more as a statement than a question.

“Me?” he said, smiling. “No. I’m not Jewish.”

“Of course you are!” she cried, throwing up her bare arms. “Look at you.” She turned to me with a conspiratorial
smile. “He thinks because I’m Polish I don’t like Jews. But I do. I love Jews. Jews are good tenants. Pay the rent on time. Quiet. Reading books.” She gestured to Don’s desk, which was indeed littered with serious-looking tomes. “Jews are best tenants, yes?” She turned to me again and smiled, as if I, too, were a slumlord with fiercely held opinions on such matters. I smiled back. “He is Jewish, yes?”

“
She’s
Jewish,” said Don, laughing, waving his hand in my direction.
Oh my God
, I thought.
Really?

“
She?”
Kristina scrunched up her face in contemplation. “No. Look at her. She’s so beautiful.” She gave Don a stern look. “You play joke. Stop.”

“So, we were wondering how to turn on the heat in here,” I interjected, before this line of discussion could go any further. “We noticed that there’s a thermostat in the hallway, but turning it up didn’t seem to have any effect.”

Kristina was shaking her head vehemently. “That is from when this was one-family house. It does not work now. We disconnect.”

“Oh, great,” I said. I was still standing by the door, unsure if I should sit down. “So how do we turn on the heat?”

Kristina’s blond head began shaking again, even more frenetically. “Heat? What you need heat for? It small apartment. It’s warm in here.
Hot
.” She gestured to the round folds of her body. “Look at what I am wearing. And I’m hot. No heat. You don’t need heat.”

Don began laughing nervously. “Right, that’s because the oven’s on. We couldn’t figure out how to turn on the heat, so we turned on the oven and opened the door.”

Kristina’s eyes narrowed in her fleshy face. She crossed her arms over her bosom and sighed, pursing her lips again into a forbidding line. We were no longer her friends, no longer her dream tenants.

“I’m gonna check for you. But what you need heat for?” She smiled broadly. “You have oven. Oven is fine. Oven is
same as heater.” She picked up a nylon track jacket, also red, with white stripes down the sleeves, slipped it on, and zipped it to her chin. “Jewish?” she said, looking at me and smiling. “You think I am stupid.”

Salinger hadn’t called since the day he’d requested the royalty statements—we still didn’t know why he wanted them; James and Hugh chalked it up to yet another of his eccentricities—but others began to call
for
him, just as my boss had told me they would.

Some of the callers were simply old—Salinger’s peers—and perhaps didn’t understand the extent of Salinger’s self-enforced isolation from the world. When last they’d checked, he’d been a tortured young writer, on the cover of
Time
magazine, the future of American literature writ large. These callers felt an enormous kinship with Salinger, for they, too, had served during World War II, or grown up on the Upper West Side in the 1930s. Often, they had a personal matter to discuss with Salinger: They thought a character in one of his stories was based on their cousin. Or they thought their cousin had done basic training with Salinger. Or they’d lived down the street from him in Westport in 1950. Now, at the dawn of their dotages, they wanted to be in touch with this man whose work had been so significant to them in their youth. Or they’d reread
Catcher
and only now realized the extent to which it was about Salinger’s experiences during the war. Or they’d just turned back to “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and found themselves sobbing with recognition, for they, too, had been suicidal after the Battle of the Bulge. No man should ever see what they saw.

Equally harmless were editors of textbooks and anthologies, guilelessly hoping to include “Teddy” in their collection of stories on marriage and divorce or an excerpt from
Catcher
in the new edition of
The Norton Anthology of American Literature.
“We can grant permission for
Catcher
to appear in the Norton anthology, right?” I’d asked Hugh.