My Salinger Year (28 page)

An hour later, I dashed out—without even putting on my coat—a brown paper package under my arm. On Madison, the sun shone in jagged beams and the air held the promise, the hint, of warmth, but it was still cold, icy gusts blowing up my sleeves, and I quickened my pace as I crossed the avenue to the gray building, which housed all the magazines owned
by Condé Nast. I’d imagined
The New Yorker
operating out of a brownstone on some genteel, tree-lined block, the editors gathering at four for tea in the parlor. I had imagined it, I supposed, as an operation akin to the Agency.

But the Condé Nast building was just a dully anonymous office tower, like all the buildings on Madison and Park and Lex. I walked quickly through the sleek gray lobby and boarded the appropriate elevator, trying not to smile to myself
—The New Yorker
!—when the doors closed with a thunderous ding. On my designated floor, I found a reception desk with
The New Yorker
’s distinctive logo discreetly hung above it and handed over my package to the older lady—her face sweetly powdered—at its helm. I glanced around, thinking perhaps I’d see one of the editors from the party, passing through on his way to lunch. But the area was empty. “This is from my boss,” I told her. “At the Agency.”

“Of course,” said the receptionist, smiling kindly. She had the rheumy voice of a longtime smoker and wore her hair pulled back in a bun. “I’ll have it delivered right away.”

And then I got back in the elevator without so much as a word, a glance, exchanged with another soul. In the lobby, I fought a crushing disappointment.
That was it? Really?
I thought as I walked up Madison, the wind sneaking through the weave of my sweater. The feverish anticipation of the morning dissolved in a haze of anguish and regret.

Across the avenue stood the entrance to the Agency’s building, but I couldn’t bear the thought of returning to my desk just yet. I had imagined—what?—spending an hour chatting with witty editors? Oh God, how
stupid
. With a shiver, I turned west on Forty-Ninth, where the wind hit me full in the face. It was just noon, still early for lunch, and the streets were eerily empty, the workers of midtown safely ensconced in their overheated offices, endlessly picking up the ringing phone, sending out missives via optic cable, closing deals
and crunching numbers and cutting film, their minds on where they would pick up their sandwiches or sushi half an hour hence.

At the corner of Fifth, I paused by the windows of Saks, already dressed for the holidays, with mannequins in beautifully draped crepe dresses, the deeply saturated colors of the season: red, maroon, pine green. Tourists flowed past me in clusters of four and five and six, en route to more elaborate window displays—Tiffany’s, Bergdorf’s, Bendel’s—or Central Park, so close and yet I’d never ventured up there on my lunch break. I’d eaten lunch at my desk pretty much every day during my year at the Agency. Why had I never thought of taking my salads to a bench, sitting in the sun, or walking around the pond, or up to the zoo?

In five minutes I was at the southeast entrance—past the Paris Theatre and the Plaza, and the rows of horse-drawn carriages, sidestepping piles of manure. There it was: the park. The acres of fields, the winding, intersecting paths, unfolding before me. I had played here as a kid, too, climbing the Alice in Wonderland statue, clambering through various playgrounds, feeding the ducks. Holden’s ducks. The huge, beautiful willows that dipped low over the pond were bare of leaves, their frilly branches spinning in the wind. I was freezing by now, my hands red and raw, my fingers numb. Tucking them under my arms, I walked down the sloping path to the pond. Holden calls it the lagoon—a word that for me connoted magic, the mermaids of
Peter Pan
—but in my family we’d just called it the pond. And there it was, the water black and sluggish, foreboding, a few rays of sun slicing across its center. Brown sparrows hopped around the path in front of me, and a pigeon or two fluttered down from the back of a bench at the prospect of food. But there were, indeed, no ducks. It was colder here, in the pond’s little vale, the wind whipping down from the top of the park.
The wind clicks around to the north
, I thought. Merwin’s most beautiful,
most compressed, most perfect poem, written for his first wife, Dido. I walked into it, my eyes watering, to the little curved bridge that crosses the pond, and looked up, toward the grand buildings on Fifth, the trees that stretched beyond, the path that led to the zoo—where Holden takes Phoebe, and where I, too, had watched the seals bark for fish, water sloshing over the edge of their tank. And then, suddenly, from the north—yes—came the unmistakable sound of moving water. Ducks. A fleet of them coming toward me with calm fortitude, brown mallard females of varying sizes. Fifteen, twenty of them, their feathers lush and fluffed. They swam under the bridge and I turned to watch them enter the pond proper, circling its perimeter in search of insects or tiny fish or scraps of sandwiches left by hearty cold-weather picnickers. They were so beautiful, the ducks, so beautiful and sweet, gliding with regal grandeur across the black depths of the pond, their million tiny feathers protecting them from the cold.

That afternoon, when the mail came in, there was a letter for me, with a Nebraska return address. Inside, I unfolded two sheets of small white paper covered over in large, shaky letters. The veteran. “Dear Miss Rakoff,” he wrote.

My heart began to speed up a little. My father had, in fact, been in the air force and had, in fact,
been stationed in Germany
. In Stuttgart. But years later, during the Korean War. He’d enlisted, I believed, in 1952, a year after
Catcher
came out and a year after he and my mother married. Could the veteran have done another tour, during the Korean War, and met my father? Now, in his dotage, was he conflating the two?

I set the letter aside, heart still beating. Could my father have met this man? How I wanted this to be so. Quietly, I picked up the phone’s heavy receiver and began to punch in the numbers of my father’s office. From her sanctum, my boss coughed heavily and shuffled some papers. I put the phone down. Before I could take my hand away, it rang, and I jumped a little in my seat. “I’m calling for Joanna Rakoff,” announced an unfamiliar voice.

“This is she,” I said.

“Yes, this is ——.” The caller uttered a name that meant nothing to me, but in such a tone that I understood he thought us acquainted. I racked my brain trying to think who this might be. “You sent us a story a few weeks ago. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you.” The editor of the small magazine. I’d expected a letter from him, or his assistant, not a call. “Well, I finally read it last night and I can’t get it out of my head. We’d be very pleased to accept it for the magazine.”

“Wonderful.” I wasn’t sure what else to say. “Thank you so much for taking a look at it.”

“Thank you for thinking of us.” He had the sort of gruff
voice I associated with the Far West. “We’d love to see more from your writers.”
My writers
, I thought, smiling.
My writers
.

“Oh my goodness,” my boss cried, when I told her. “I knew you could do it.” She beamed at me. “You’re on your way.” Then she stood—with a heaviness that had not been evident when I’d started—and motioned for me to walk out into my antechamber with her. Her gait reminded me of Leigh, those long draggy walks through the apartment. “Hugh,” she called, smiling. “Joanna sold a story.”

“That’s great,” said Hugh, with an avuncular smile.

“Yep, a hard sell. Very quiet story.” She nodded for emphasis. “She found me a new client, too.” My eyes widened at this. “I’m taking on that girl you pulled from the slush. The second novella is very good. I’m not sure how I’m going to sell it. I have to think. Apparently, she has a novel.” She turned to Hugh. “These are very spare, eerie tales. Very good. Very elegant.” They both turned and smiled at me, as if they were my parents. “I knew from the moment you walked in the door,” said my boss, lighting a cigarette, “that you were an Agency Type of Person.”

That night, I raced to meet Don at the L, only to find the small, makeshift room filled to capacity, with people standing by the door, waiting for tables to open up. Our neighborhood, all of a sudden, was teeming with the young and underemployed, scads of twenty-two-year-olds, fresh out of Brown and Wesleyan and Bard, having arrived after summers backpacking through France or surfing in Mexico. Increasingly, people we knew were moving north, to Greenpoint—the little neighborhood just above Williamsburg, still predominantly Polish, where good deals could still be had on linoleum-floored railroad apartments—or east, to the Italian neighborhood one stop farther in on the train, the Lorimer Street stop, by Leigh
and Don’s old apartment. Just a year earlier, when I’d camped out there, the latter had been considered a murky, marginal neighborhood.

Don waved to me from a table at the front window, usually our favorite, a rarely won prize. But tonight the waiting throng kept jostling him and knocking his bag down. Every few minutes someone opened the door, letting in a gust of freezing air. I ordered coffee, though what I really wanted was food, food and wine. Not a bagel. Real food. Dinner. Don jostled his leg up and down, gnawed on a hangnail; his fingers were bitten to bloody stubs. He had his journal out, open in front of him, the pages moist from the tips of his fingers.

“So, I have news,” I told him as the waitress set my coffee down. The coffee at the L was terrible, actually, though this apparently didn’t dissuade people from lining up for it. But the coffee at the L was beside the point, I supposed, glancing around me. Everyone was so attractive. Had they been this attractive a year ago? Don, I realized, was older than most everyone in the room. No, the point of the L was not the coffee. The point of the L was to be at the L. “I have news,” I said again, though this was not a phrase I habitually used. I just wanted his attention. “So, I sold a story.”

Don glanced—unhappily, irritably—toward the counter, where a troupe of young girls—or, well, girls my age—congregated, ordering coffees in anticipation of a table, but he seemed to be staring past them. “This is bullshit,” he said. “Let’s get out of here. I can’t think straight.”

Out on Bedford, in the frigid air, he smiled. “Much better,” he said. “What was going on in there?”

Across the street, at Planet Thailand, it was also crowded, but we found a tiny table across from the stove. A few feet away, the chef shook a wide silver wok, enormous flames shooting up its sides. “I sold a story,” I told Don, again, after we’d ordered papaya salad and rice noodles.

“What?” he said, looking at me with unvarnished hostility.
“One of
your
stories? I didn’t even know you’d ever actually finished a story. Not since college.”

“A
client’s
story,” I said. “One of my boss’s clients.”

“Oh,” said Don, letting out an enormous breath. His face broke into a smile. “That’s completely different. As long as you’re not a threat to me. We can’t have that.” He let out one of his cackles.

“Of course not,” I said, prying apart my chopsticks with a snap.

“I thought all your boss’s clients were dead,” he said, wiping his glasses with the edge of his T-shirt.

“This one is almost dead, I think,” I said, with a pang of disloyalty to my boss, to her client.

“Like the Agency.” Something in Don’s voice had changed. At the L, I was invisible to him. This happened all too frequently. But he could see me now. I had reappeared for him. It scared me—and it bothered me—the way I could disappear right in front of his eyes. “That’s really great, Buba. Maybe you’re going to be a big agent. Like Max.” He took a long swallow of ice water. “Maybe you can represent me. Since James doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job.”

I lifted my water glass and took a sip. There was no way I could speak. The thoughts coursing through my brain were too horrible, too disloyal to acknowledge: that I wouldn’t represent him, for I knew—I
knew
—that his book wouldn’t sell. This was why I’d approached James rather than Max about Don’s novel. I knew Max wouldn’t take it on. I was Max’s reader. If the manuscript had come to me cold—if it hadn’t been my
boyfriend’s
novel—I would have recommended a form rejection.

I didn’t say this, though. Of course not. I smiled and lifted a few strands of papaya into my mouth. Just then something strange happened, something that seemed, in a way, to have been lifted out of a Salinger story: The chef spilled a spray of chili powder into the flame at his waist, sending a thick fug of
smoke directly to our table. Our eyes watered and turned red, and my throat constricted—a terrible, helpless feeling—and, most remarkably, I saw Don for a moment as if from across an abyss, his face distorted by the reddish smoke. How far away he was. How far.

When we got home, there was a small envelope waiting for me, hand addressed. I turned it over: the logo of the small magazine to which I’d sent my poems. “What’s that?” asked Don.

“Nothing,” I said, and slipped it in my bag.

When he seated himself at his desk—the more rejections came in, the more he stared at the screen of his computer—I got into bed and opened it up. The note was from the poetry editor, accepting one of my poems.