My Salinger Year

by Joanna Rakoff

  Don had a former student named Masha, with whom he’d remained friends. Masha emigrated from Russia in the early 1990s, and though he had enormous problems with communism—having not just experienced the philosophy in practice but been persecuted under it—Don was still thrilled to have found an actual Soviet with whom he could endlessly discuss socialism, even if those discussions turned into arguments. Masha lived with his wife—who had also been Don’s student—in Washington Heights, in a large, dark apartment crammed with relics of Russian life and the toys of their three children, the youngest of whom they considered a miracle baby, for though both Masha and his wife were dark—blue-black hair, olive complexions, thick brows—through some trick of genetics, this last child had emerged from the womb with pale pink skin and blond curls and lovely gray-blue eyes. Her disposition, too, was extraordinarily sunny. “She’s like a child of light,” Don told me. “She’s just so cute and sweet that no matter what she does you just want to pick her up and hug her.” The child’s name was Anna or Natalya, but everyone called her the Buba. “Why?” I asked. Don shrugged and laughed. A real laugh. Not his ironic, mean laugh, his default laugh, a sort of cackle. “She’s just the Buba. There’s just no other word for her. I can’t explain it. You have to meet her and you’ll understand. She’s just all light.” He stretched his arms above his head and yawned. We had seated ourselves on the gray couch in the tiny living room, a couch we’d pulled in off the street with the help of Don’s friend Bart, an enormously tall poet, who composed his own verse around lines from famous poems. “So I was there, visiting Masha, this one afternoon, right after I met you, and the Buba was sitting on his lap, and it suddenly hit me. That you’re like the Buba.”

  “I’m like the Buba?” I did not have blond curls or gray-blue eyes. And even during the years when I was an actual child, I had been told, frequently, that I lacked childlike qualities: My face was long and thin. I hated games. I preferred the company of adults.

  “You are,” Don said, delighted. “You’re rosy and full of light. You walk through the world and it’s as if you’re filled with light. It was the first thing I noticed about you.”

  “That’s not true,” I objected, awkwardly. “I’m not rosy. I’m kind of pale.”

  “True?” asked Don. “There’s no true. There’s no one truth. That’s a schoolgirl thing.” He looked at me intently, his mouth pressed into a line, as if he were fighting off a wave of some undefined emotion. “The world is subjective. Experiential.” Then his face turned slack and the ironic glint returned to his eyes. He shook his head professorially. “You need to read Kant.”

  It would not be an exaggeration to say that I’d always considered myself dark and heavy. A chubby child, burdened by sorrows: my own, those of my family, my plagued, storied race. But that instant, something shifted. Was it possible that Don was right? That the world perceived me in a manner entirely different from how I perceived myself? Was it possible, too, that one could be complicated, intellectual, awake to the world, that one could be an artist, and also be rosy and filled with light? Was it possible that one could be all those things and also be happy?

  The next morning, the weather turned. The cold damp that had lingered well into the official start of summer evaporated overnight. I woke to a column of sunlight spilling through our kitchen window. From the back of the closet, I pulled my favorite dress, dark green and in a style alluding to the 1940s, with a collar and buttons up the front, an imitation of those dresses on Leigh’s floor. It was wrinkled—crushed by the heavy wools of winter—but I pulled it on anyway, over a black slip, hoping it would uncrease on my way to the office, then raced out the door and into the fresh, warm air, turning onto Bedford, where the fig trees were in bloom, the tiny white flowers lining their slim gray branches, the street suddenly quaint and pretty, rather than industrial and ugly. Williamsburg’s charms were not, are not, physical. Bedford, the main thoroughfare of the North Side, could be the high street in, say, Milwaukee, with its low storefronts and brick row houses. This was not the New York of Woody Allen, the New York of high-rises and doormen and big dreams and Hollywood montages. But it was my New York. Mine. And I loved it.

  Most mornings, I took the 6 train to Fifty-First Street, emerging at the corner of Fiftieth and Lex in the shadow of the Waldorf-Astoria’s wedding-cake glory. My boss, I knew, sometimes had lunch at the Waldorf’s pub, the Bull and Bear, the entrance of which was at the back of the hotel—clubby and discreet—on the Lexington Avenue side, the southeast corner. I’d never been inside, of course, but I’d memorized its faded, genteel insignia, purely from walking in its proximity every morning. At night, as I traipsed back to the subway from my office, I encountered the Waldorf’s grand front entrance, magically lit and reminiscent of the castle at the entrance to Disneyland.

  On this particular morning, I skipped up the steps of the subway station, a warm breeze blowing the skirt of my dress. On Lex, I found a strange sight: a crowd of fire trucks racing down the avenue, their sirens off, the street strangely untrafficked. They were beautiful, those trucks, a brilliant red against the brilliant blue of the sky, and like the Agency they seemed like visitors from a different, pre-digital era, from the picture books my parents read to me in childhood.

  I was early, as usual, and I stood on the corner, watching the trucks disappear down Lex. When I looked up, there was the Waldorf, looming in front of me. And before I could think better of it, I’d crossed to the northwest side of the avenue and pushed open the hotel’s back doors, which led—I discovered—to a not particularly grand, shabby even, vestibule. To my left, the Bull and Bear, now closed; to my right, the hotel’s other restaurant, Oscar’s. In front of me, an escalator leading I knew not where. I stepped on.

  The escalator dropped me in a hallway, carpeted in a pattern of dark red and gold, punctuated by large potted plants. I paused for a moment, unsure of where to go. If I walked straight, through the archway in front of me, surely I’d eventually reach the west side of the building, the main entrance, which opened onto Park. I could exit through that entrance, then walk a block over to my office on Madison. But before I made it through the archway, I noticed a tiny, dim storefront on my left: an antiquarian bookshop. My breath caught with delight. I had stayed at hotels of this sort as a child, with my parents: the King David in Tel Aviv; The Breakers in Palm Beach; Brown’s in Denver. Before dinner, my mother and I would browse in the lobby shops, trying on sunglasses and pendants and scarves. Of course, I thought, a grand hotel in New York—the cultural capital of the country—would have a bookshop.

  I was close enough to the glass now to make out some of the titles: a beautiful, ornate copy of Don Juan; an oversized edition of Peter Pan with what appeared to be the original illustrations; the moss-green binding of Alice in Wonderland. And there, at the center—the window’s most prominent spot—a book in blazing red, a book whose cover was so familiar I almost didn’t see it, until I did, and gave a start, so strange was it to see this book out of context. It was, of course, a first edition of The Catcher in the Rye, its cover bearing an illustration of a carousel horse rearing in fury, or fright. I knew now—Hugh had told me—that Salinger’s neighbor in Westport, a painter named Michael Mitchell, had drawn that horse specifically for Salinger, for Catcher. For the paperback, the publisher had chosen a more explicit image—Holden Caulfield in a red hunting cap—that Salinger, not surprisingly, had loathed. Out of alliance with Salinger, the Agency kept no copies of that maligned edition in the office.

  But a few copies of this first edition, with its raging stallion, sat across from my desk. I had memorized the font on the spine. I saw it in my sleep. This copy was different in that it was slightly more pristine, the red more brilliant, the white more white. And that it had on it a price tag: twenty-five thousand dollars.

  Around the corner from the bookshop, I found a ladies’ room where I washed my hands in the water that came forth from heavy gold-toned faucets, drying them on paper towels as thick and s
oft as cloth, then smoothed down my hair and swiped my lips with gloss: a five-minute vacation from the dishes in the bathtub, the ramen dinners. For a moment, I indulged myself: imagined that my parents were in the lobby waiting for me, that we were going to the Met, would have lunch under the skylights, amid the Rodins, as we did when I was a child. Then I slung my bag back over my shoulder and walked out, past the bookshop, through the archway, and into the hotel’s upper lobby, which was filled with businessmen. Men, all of them men, with short hair and shiny shoes. They were young—some as young as I, their faces dewy and unlined, their smiles painfully open and warm, so different from Don’s tight grin—and I wondered who they were and what they were doing here. Was it money that allowed them to smile that way? Money and security?

  Nine thirty was approaching now, so I hurried down the wide, royal staircase that appeared in front of me—my shoes sinking into the deep carpet—and descended to the lower lobby, where I found even more men, checking in and out, affixing name badges, making calls on the house phones, talking to the concierge or the doorman; men laughing in crowds of three and four, or standing alone, flipping through dense binders of charts and graphs. They turned and glanced at me as I walked by, smiling and nodding as if I were part of their world, the realm of currency and privilege. “Good day, miss,” the doorman said to me, tipping his hat. “Can I get you a cab?”

  “Oh, no, thank you,” I replied, in a voice that was not quite my own. “It’s such a beautiful day. I’d rather walk. I’m just going a few blocks.”

  “It is a beautiful day,” he agreed. “You enjoy it now.”

  “Thank you,” I said in this alien voice—the voice of the me who stayed in suites at the Waldorf and took cabs across town in inclement weather—and walked through the door he held open for me, onto Park, where a battalion of tulips had commandeered the median strip. They swayed in the warm breeze, their heavy heads dipping south as one.

  Now that the sun was finally out, the darkness of the Agency struck me as mildly oppressive, or perhaps depressive. It’s spring, I wanted to shout to Lucy, in her black shifts, nunlike and sober, and my boss, in her baggy brown suit, and even to the forest-green carpeting that muffled our footsteps, the deep brown wood that framed each room in bookcases. In the winter, the darkness had served as a cozy refuge, but now I counted the minutes until lunch, when I could walk in the warm sun, my arms bare. “Pretty frock,” Lucy called as I passed her office. “Is it an antick-cue?” Before I could answer, she pushed herself up from her chair and joined me. “I’ve been wanting to ask,” she said, her voice slightly below its normal throaty boom. “Are you eating?”

  I looked at her uncomprehendingly. “Eating what?” I asked.

  “Well,” she began, then broke into nervous laughter and gestured theatrically at my dress. My eyes followed her hands, and I suddenly saw what she meant, or part of what she meant: my dress swam on me. “You’re looking a bit”—she searched for the right word—“wan.” Maddeningly, I felt as if I might cry. “I know it can be really hard to live on an assistant’s salary.” She laughed again. “If anyone knows, it’s me.”

  “I’m eating,” I told her, with a big smile. “I am.” But was I? With my new bills, I could barely live. Every day, I called the bank to check my balance, and all too often I’d dipped into my overdraft, even though I budgeted every cent and painstakingly balanced my checkbook. I shopped for groceries once a week, on Saturday morning, carefully totaling up my cart before I approached the register, putting back anything too extravagant, like packaged cookies and cereal. For lunch, I limited myself to five dollars, which bought me a sad little Greek salad at the chain sandwich shop around the corner: limp romaine lettuce, sometimes turning brown at the edges; a pale winter tomato; a few translucent slices of tomato and pearly cucumber; and a crumble of feta, atop which sat one slim, salty olive. That olive made it all worth it.

  That day, though, I did something I’d never, ever done: I walked directly and purposely to the elegant food shop on Forty-Ninth from which the agents obtained their lunches. Around me, the Masters of the Universe ordered frisée salads, rubbing elbows with their female counterparts, thin, tanned women with Cartier bangles dangling from their thin, tanned wrists. The sandwiches sat like pastries on silver cake stands. After much deliberation, I chose a slender flat of bread filled with some sort of pink cured meat. At the register, I grabbed a chocolate cookie, ordered a coffee, and handed over a crisp twenty. I was not, at that exact moment, overdrawn, but my heart still sped up as I placed my meager change in my wallet. Sandwich in hand, I walked over to Fifth, the sun warming my shoulders, sat down on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral with the tourists, and took a bite, a dense, salty, oily, warm bite. It was, there was no doubt, the most delicious sandwich I’d ever tasted. I ate half, planning to save the remainder for the next day, then went ahead and devoured that, too.

  The next morning, I put on a spring dress I’d never worn before, a long-ago gift from my mother, red and shorter than anything else in my wardrobe, my knees pale beneath its bright hem. From the back of the closet, I pulled a pair of shoes, black leather sandals with a ladylike heel, yet another contribution from my mother. We had no mirror in the apartment, so I wasn’t sure if this ensemble looked all right, but in my heels and close-cut dress I felt stronger, more erect, able to keep my head in line with my spine, as my acting teachers had always told me to do. I was a sloucher, a slumper, a huncher.

  When I emerged from the subway that morning, I crossed Fiftieth Street without a second thought and pulled open the back door of the Waldorf, gliding up the escalator and past the bookshop, with a glance at the window to make sure Catcher was still there. In the upper lobby, I again found clusters of freshly shaved bankers and consultants and who knew what, in their crisp suits, peering disinterestedly up at me from conference agendas and sales reports. Suddenly I longed to be one of them, among them, at home in this world, a shining card in my wallet that would allow me to sit down and order a five-dollar cup of coffee. My father and I—this memory came at me with brute force—had spent so many hours of my childhood in lobbies like this, making up stories about the people passing by. He had grown up in a sort of enforced poverty, my father, with his socialist parents, his activist mother—my grandmother, down on Grand Street, whom I owed a visit—and as an adult he’d relished even the smallest of luxuries, but none more so than the fancy hotel, that emblem of louche idleness.

  I walked on through the men in their suits, my spine still neatly stacked, and continued down the stairs, smiling giddily. And then I looked up, way up, to the lobby’s soaring, intricate ceiling, its borders painted in gold leaf, a pattern so complex and beautiful that for the first time I understood the true meaning of the phrase “took my breath away.” For I did, truly, lose a breath as the patterns—leaves and vines and diamonds—revealed themselves to me, and as I understood the ceiling’s true height, the magnitude of air and space between those gold vines and my small self. My shoe, with its narrow heel, caught on the thick carpet, and for a moment I thought—I knew, my heart beating faster—that I was going to trip and fall down that small flight of stairs, the world around me rotating, but then I simply laid my hand on the railing, steadied myself, and continued down.

  1

  The Pitch

  They would be meeting. In person. Jerry and Roger Lathbury. This was big news. Jerry did not meet people. Jerry avoided people. Even people he’d known for decades. The two men had been corresponding on their own, circumventing my boss and the Agency. “It might be good to send me copies of your letters,” I heard my boss say. But Jerry did not send copies of his letters. Nor did Roger. My boss described this as “highly irregular,” shaking her head and laughing a little as she did when anxious or displeased. They bothered her, these letters. What if Jerry was agreeing to some strange terms? Or in some way putting himself at risk? Roger seemed, certainly, like the nicest, most genuine of fellows, but what if he were not? What if he were somehow
manipulating Salinger into—what? My boss did not know.

  And it didn’t matter, for there was nothing we could do about it, about any of it. The situation now transcended the realm of business. Jerry and Roger were becoming friends.

  Or at least Jerry was becoming friends with Roger. Roger was a bit too anxious, a bit too baffled by Salinger’s enthusiasm, to truly reciprocate. He had started calling with more and more frequency. Every time he received a letter from Salinger, he called. Every time he sent a letter to Salinger, he called, worried that he had said the wrong thing.

  And thus it was I who often ended up listening to Roger’s concerns, his fears. Pam had been instructed, I gathered, to put Roger through to me first. “I’ve done some mock-ups,” he told me in late June. “A couple. I think I understand what Jerry likes in a design and I think he’s going to like these. Or, I think he’ll like one better than the other.”

  “Oh?” I said, trying to hide the alarm in my voice. We’d yet to work out all the details of this deal. There was no contract. Not even a draft of a contract. It seemed to me that laying out a book before the contracts were signed did indeed qualify as highly irregular. It also struck me as bad luck.

  “I retyped it,” he told me, “so that I could mock up a design. I could have scanned it, but I thought Salinger would prefer it if I retyped it.”

  “Hmm,” I murmured into the phone, wondering if Salinger would know the difference. It was Friday and my boss was at home, of course. Roger often called on Friday mornings, and I was beginning to think this a conscious choice, that he was using me as a sounding board. Or a therapist. Clearly, this deal, already, was causing him enormous anxiety. Or perhaps he was just an anxious, chatty person. He had told me all about his daughters, his syllabi, his collection of literary relics, and his wife’s good-natured antipathy to his publishing ventures.