My Salinger Year (20 page)

Still, I was—perhaps foolishly—looking forward to the comforts of my parents’ cool, spacious house: the puffs of central air wafting through the vents in my old room; my soft childhood bed with its pink-sprigged sheets; our green lawn and the enormous, sprawling trees that shaded it. Running out for bagels with my dad on Sunday morning. I was looking forward to being taken care of, if only a little.

“A present?” I asked Don warily.

“Something to take with you,” he said, smiling. “Give me your bag.” I held it open for him and he slipped a large, less-than-crisp manila envelope inside. “Don’t open it until you get home.”

I opened it on the bus. Inside, I found his novel, “Fellow Traveler.” He’d told me the title on our first date. “It’s a reference to the larger themes of the book,” he explained, swirling the wine in his glass. I nodded. “You know the term, right? Fellow traveler.” I didn’t. “Your grandmother was a socialist,” he cried. “And you don’t know what a fellow traveler is?”

“My grandmother stopped talking about politics in the ’50s,” I explained. “For obvious reasons.”

“Still!” Don shook his head, incredulous. “A fellow traveler is a friend of the party who isn’t a card-carrying member.”

“Is the novel about communism?” I asked. “Is it about the party? The present-day party?” This sounded strange and great to me.

“No, no. That would be deeply boring.” He smiled at me, the sort of wide, joyous smile that makes one feel anything is possible. “But it
is
about class. And it’s about how you can be part of something but also outside it. My hero—I mean, he’s sort of an antihero, but anyway—participates in mainstream society, but he’s not really part of it. And his girlfriend—his
ex
-girlfriend—is from this very, very wealthy background. She tried to kind of incorporate him into her world but it just didn’t work.” A little laugh escaped him, though his smile was gone. “Because he’s working-class.” That fictional girlfriend was based on his college love, who had grown up in Beverly Hills or suchlike, in what Don described as baronial splendor, but which sounded to me like simply upper-middle-class L.A. She’d broken up with him after college and he’d never quite forgiven her.

By the time the bus rolled into my hometown, I’d made it halfway through. The novel concerned a dark-haired young man from a working-class background who attended a fancy liberal arts college just outside New York City but for reasons never specified now works as a security guard at an office building, where he spends most of his time watching hot secretaries move around their offices. The first forty or so pages involve the protagonist watching one of these women masturbate on a desk. That night, while flipping channels, he pauses for a moment on a porno and realizes that the woman in the film is his college girlfriend, a wealthy, wholesome Los Angelen, with whom he’d parted ways because they simply
could not bridge the class divide. In this pre-Google age, he sets off to figure out what happened to her.

Or that was what I gathered. Again, the prose was so dense—so purposefully opaque—that at times I couldn’t even understand what was happening. This was not the opacity of, say, David Foster Wallace, whose stories I was reading just then. A few weeks earlier, I’d accompanied Max to Wallace’s reading at KGB, which was so crowded I’d had to stand in a hallway—Wallace, sweaty and bandanna clad, had brushed past me when he arrived—and been transfixed by the force and energy of his language. The next day, when Max went to lunch, I filched his galley of
Infinite Jest
and read it at my desk, my pulse speeding up so that I barely remembered to fork bites of salad into my mouth. I’d returned it before Max got back and that night, on my way home, had picked up a used copy of
Girl with Curious Hair
at the Strand for a few dollars, hiding it from Don, who was scornful of all purchases—why couldn’t I take books out of the library?—but also scornful of any writer who received too much attention. “How good could he be if his book’s a best seller?” he’d said of Wallace. Very good, I saw now. Revolutionary, life-changingly good. Wallace’s sentences thrummed with a strange kind of life, propelling the story forward and pushing the reader further and further into his characters’ psyches, revealing and revealing, peeling back layers to get to the bone. They jumped off the page. Don’s sentences seemed to bore further into the page. They obscured rather than revealed.

But there was intelligence underpinning the novel, certainly, and the bones of a cracking story. He needed to open that story up, to let it breathe, let it stand for itself.

As the passengers began to disembark, I was already making edits: trim the front section to get to the real story more quickly; streamline a good percentage of the sentences; more exposition, less description, so the actual story
was more clear, so the reader wasn’t distracted by confusion about what was actually, literally happening and could get lost in the story, the rhythm of the language. More scenes in the present, fewer flashbacks.

“Jo!” my father called from the curb, smiling. He wore a faded blue Lacoste golf shirt and navy pants that fell off his hips, in unconscious parody of gangster style. His white hair fluffed out from his forehead in the way my mother hated. Whatever anger I’d been harboring for him disappeared in a breath. “You look terrific,” he said. “Very glamorous.”

Seeing as I’d just spent two hours on a bus, this seemed unlikely. “Dad,” I said and hugged him, breathing in his wonderful scent, of Old Spice and Ivory soap, with undertones of Pepto-Bismol and the medical-grade hand cleanser he used at his office. And then I burst into tears.

“Hey, hey,” he said, startled, patting my back. My family was always startled by me, it seemed, as if I were an alien somehow dropped into their midst. Had I not resembled my mother to an uncanny degree—once, a high school friend had mistaken a photo of her, at eighteen, for one of me—I’d have harbored suspicions that I’d been adopted. “Stop,” he said, “or you’re going to make
me
cry. You don’t want that. A grown man crying. Blech.” He pulled me away from him and peered into my face.

“No,” I agreed, my voice catching.

“Now, grandma’s at the house. She can’t wait to see you.” He gestured toward the parking lot. “So let’s go.” He took my tote bag off my shoulder.

“I can carry that,” I said.

“Nonsense,” he replied.

As we drove along the parkway that led to our house, lush trees bowing over the black macadam, my father singing along to Benny Goodman, the world suddenly seemed to shift, to crack open. And a pang hit me—maybe I was wrong.
Maybe Don’s novel was genius. Maybe it was
more
brilliant than
Infinite Jest
, made so by its very inscrutability. Maybe, I thought, maybe the problem was me.

That night, the phone rang. I picked up the extension in the kitchen, expecting my uncle Saul. “Jo?” a low voice asked. My college boyfriend.

“Oh my—” I said, then stopped myself. “How did you know I was here?
Did
you know I was here?”

“I called your apartment and your, um, boyfriend—” He paused. “Your boyfriend, right?” My face flamed, then crumpled to hear him say this. “Yeah, I heard about it from Joel—” This was Celeste’s ex-boyfriend, whom she’d dropped a year or so after moving to the city, though they maintained a tortured contact.

“I, I—” I began, then stopped, because it seemed I was once again going to cry.

“Hey, it’s okay,” my college boyfriend said, his voice barely a whisper. He was a mumbler, even under the best circumstances. I loved this about him: when he spoke, in his low, rumbling tones—the words running together—he seemed to be speaking solely for me. “I get it. I understand. There was nothing for you out here. You wanted to be yourself. Not just my girlfriend.” This was, I was astonished to realize, wholly true. “Did you get my letter?”

I nodded, unable to speak. “I did,” I said, finally, looking around to see if my parents or my grandmother were nearby. They appeared to still be dressing, at the other end of the house. Stretching the cord into the den, I sat down in my mother’s battered black recliner.

“I just wanted to apologize for, well, I was angry when I wrote it. There’s a lot of stuff I didn’t mean, things I said because I was angry.”

“You don’t need to apologize to me,” I said. There they were, the tears, hot and fast. “Please. Don’t. I deserve it. You should be angry.”

“The letter—”

“I didn’t read it,” I confessed, before he could go any further. “It’s been in my bag for a month.”

“You didn’t read it,” he said, then began to laugh. I loved his laugh. “Why didn’t you read it?”

“I was afraid,” I said, a large, gulping sob escaping me.

“Well, you should have been. It’s an angry letter.” He laughed again. “That’s why I’m calling. I’m not angry anymore. I guess I just needed to write the letter. You know you really hurt me. Deeply. It was horrible.” Hearing him say this was too much. “I didn’t want to live in this apartment alone. It’s an awful apartment. It’s depressing.”

Suddenly I was laughing, too, for the first time in what felt like months. Months and months and months. “It
is
awful! Why did you choose it? You knew I would hate it. The catwalk! And it was so dark.”

“I don’t know, Jo, I don’t know.” He was laughing so much he could barely speak. “It’s a good location. I thought I was being practical.”

“I know,” I said.

“So listen, the thing I want you to understand is I’m not angry anymore”—his voice cracked and for a moment we sat in silence—“I just want you back in my life. I don’t want you to be afraid to call or write. Please call. Please write. I miss you. You were my best friend.”

Just then, my father called, “Jo? I think we’re ready.”

“I miss you, too,” I said, my own voice breaking, spent from tears. It was such a relief to say it, to admit it, even though the ramifications of this admission were too enormous for me to contemplate. And yet, strangely, as I leaned my head against the chair’s cool leather, I found myself angry
at him, as much as I was relieved. Why hadn’t he railed at me? Screamed at me? Called me names?

“Jo?” His voice had fallen to a whisper.

“I’m here,” I said. “I’ll try not to be afraid.” But I was afraid. Afraid that I didn’t deserve him. Afraid of what I’d done. Afraid of myself.

On Monday, I knocked softly on James’s door. He was typing intently, though without the Dictaphone headgear, which meant he was composing his own letter or memo. His workload, lately, had increased: two weeks earlier, Olivia had finally left—improbably, she’d accepted a job at an ultraconservative literary magazine, assisting a famously cantankerous editor—and James was handed a bit of Max’s work for the Fitzgerald estate, to lighten Max’s load until he could find a suitable new assistant. One had already come and gone, in a flurry of spilled coffee and botched phone calls and tantrums.

“Hey,” said James, smiling, his fingers still on the keyboard. “What’s up?”

“I’m not sure if I’ve ever told you this,” I began, shifting my weight onto my left foot. I wore a blue cotton twinset selected for me by my mother the previous day and a pair of cream-colored, wide-legged trousers selected by my mother the previous fall. I suspected that I looked like a Jazz Age golfer. “Well, did you know that Don is actually a writer?”

“I suspected,” said James with a smile.

“He’s been working on a novel for years now. It’s a literary thriller.”

“Wow, cool. That sounds great.” James and Don had met a few times and discovered—in a strange coincidence—that James represented one of Don’s cousins, a Harvard guy who’d written a memoir about working on Wall Street in the 1980s.

Don’s family was not quite as working-class as he liked to think. “Does he have representation?”

I shook my head. “He’s just finished. He was about to start talking to agents.”

“I’d love to take a look.” James hoisted his feet, in their brown brogues, onto his desk. “Do you want to just bring me the manuscript tomorrow?”

“Sure.” A strange weight seemed to have lifted from my shoulders. How had it been so easy? I had learned, I suppose, the first lesson of agenting: the pitch.

Sentimental Education

The next morning, I arrived at work slightly late—Don had kept me, fretting about small changes in the novel, printing and reprinting pages—and found the office strangely silent. Pam, from her perch, gave me a significant look. Carolyn was sitting in James’s office. I slipped in, as unobtrusively as possible, and dropped Don’s manuscript—in a manila envelope—on the desk. “Thanks,” murmured James, with a lack of enthusiasm that made me nervous. At the coffee machine, Max and Lucy hunched in hushed conversation, but they stopped as I passed. My boss, I was surprised to see, was not yet in her office.

Before I’d even sat down, a messenger arrived with a thick padded envelope: the contracts for the Other Client’s new book, for which we’d been waiting. I slit it open and began a cursory read, then pulled a sheaf of Salinger letters out of my desk. I was reading one from a woman in Sri Lanka—her handwriting enormous and slanting—and contemplating a cup of coffee, when Lucy appeared at my desk, clutching her
own mug. “Can I talk to you for a sec?” She gestured with her head toward her office, hair falling in her eyes.