Joanna Rakoff - My Salinger Year

“ Oh my God , Don!” Allison shrieked, her dark eyes glassy, her cheeks flushed red. “Why would she make this up? How would she make this up? There was a fire. Everyone knew about it. I remember my mom talking about it. It was in the paper. I read about it. She read about it.”

“Exactly,” said Don, grinning.

“I read about it, too,” said Marc, brushing back an errant lock of hair. “Or I read something. I’m trying to remember. Was it in the Times ? He says he’s writing but that he never wants to publish. That he writes for himself now. He doesn’t need to publish.”

Again, the room fell silent. Don’s face had grown slack and earnest. He looked at me and smiled. I knew that this accorded with his own ideas about writing. “Writing makes you a writer,” he’d told me. “If you get up every morning and write, then you’re a writer. Publishing doesn’t make you a writer. That’s just commerce.”

“Hey,” came a voice from the hallway. We turned to find Leigh, alone, now clad in her usual bathrobe, a tattered, sateen affair in maroons and blues. Her makeup was still in place, but she seemed to be moving in slow motion. “What’s going on?” she said, her speech ever so slightly slurred. She’s drunk , I thought, with a sudden clarity. I’d seen her like this many times before, I realized, but I’d never thought about it. Or I’d thought her simply tired. I was tired. And hungry, very hungry. Though I’d drunk just half my beer—if that—my head suddenly began to spin. An irresistible urge to lie down came over me.

“I’ll be right back,” I said, carefully rising from my chair. I made my way down the hallway, past the room of sad, crumpled dresses, and opened the door to the bathroom, where I found Pankaj, sitting on the toilet. “Oh!” I cried. “I’m sorry.” He looked at me strangely, blankly, and it was then that I saw his arm, which was wrapped with the sort of rubber tubing used in hospitals, a needle inserted in the crook below. His face, as I watched, arranged itself in an expression of both pain and the absence of pain. “Oh!” I cried again, stupidly.

For a moment we stared at each other, the blank remove on his face turning to sadness, then anger, until I left, returning not to the kitchen table, to Don and Leigh and the others, but to Don’s room, where I sat down heavily on his bed, a futon without a frame, then lay back and stared at the ceiling.

When Don came in to check on me, I rolled to face him. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s take the apartment.”

Late the next morning, I rapped softly on my boss’s half-open door and handed over the rest of her dictation. She had come in, again, without so much as a hello. And she’d not yet mentioned my letters from the day before. They sat on her desk, still neatly piled, awaiting signature. “Sit down for a second,” she said. I sat. Pulling a pack of cigarettes from her desk drawer, she began to slowly peel off the plastic. “Some people,” she began, shooting me a significant look, “take this job thinking they’re going to meet Jerry. Or even”—she smiled—“become friends with him. They think he’s going to call every day.” She peered at me over the tops of her glasses. “He’s not going to call. And if he does, Pam will put the call directly through to me. If I’m not here and by some chance he gets put through to you, don’t keep him on the phone. He’s not calling to chat with you. Understand?” I nodded. “I don’t want you thinking you’re going to be on the phone with him every day or you’re going to be”—she laughed—“ having lunch with him or something. Some assistants have even made excuses to call him. Without checking with me, of course. That is something you can never, ever do. Our job is not to bother him. We take care of his business so he doesn’t have to be bothered with it. Do you understand?”

“Absolutely.”

“So, you’re never, ever to call him. If something arises that you think needs his attention—though I can’t imagine what that would be—you tell me, and I’ll decide if he needs to know. You never call him. You never write to him. If he calls, you just say, ‘Yes, Jerry. I’ll let my boss know.’ Got it?”

I nodded, trying not to smile. I would never have thought to needlessly keep J. D. Salinger on the phone, much less pick up the receiver and call him.

My boss looked at me seriously and emitted one of her odd, low laughs. “He doesn’t want to read your stories. Or hear how much you loved The Catcher in the Rye .”

“I don’t have any stories,” I told her, half truthfully. I had stories. Just not finished ones.

“Good,” she said. “Writers always make the worst assistants.”

Everything was wrong. The two days of typing, the piles and piles of letters. Margins, tabs, proper names, everything. Every single letter had to be retyped. “You’ll be more careful this time, won’t you?” my boss said, and I smiled, holding back tears.

Trying now for competence rather than speed, I began again, checking my work after every line, as the phone in my boss’s office rang and rang. “Happy New Year,” she cried, again and again. “How was your holiday?” These one-sided conversations were somehow more distracting than plain old two-sided ones. I found myself filling in the other end of the dialogue and speculating on the parts I could hear. Motifs began to appear. My boss spoke frequently of someone named Daniel, who seemed to have been ill—perhaps gravely so—but was now doing better thanks to a change in medication. Her husband? I wondered. Her brother? Someone named Helen arose with slightly less frequency and less detail. But I couldn’t figure out who this person might be. Regardless, her words began to insert themselves in the letters. “Thank you for sending on the countersigned sandwich,” I typed. “I’ll be in touch in two weeks to discuss the details of the upholstery.” Again and again, I ripped a half-finished letter out and started all over. Please close your door , I silently begged my boss. Please stop ringing , I begged the phone. On cue, it rang again.

“Jerry,” my boss shouted. Why was she shouting? Her voice had grown louder as the day progressed. Please stop shouting , I thought. “Jerry, it’s so good to hear from you. How are you?”

At precisely that moment, my wish came true: my boss got up and closed her door.

Boom. The door burst open and my boss was yelling. “Hugh,” she called, appearing in the doorway, cigarette poised dramatically in one hand. “ Hugh! HUGH!” She marched toward his door, more quickly than I’d previously seen her move. “Where is he?” she muttered. I was pretty certain he was in his office, but said nothing.

“One second,” he called calmly.

“I don’t have a second,” said my boss, tittering with discomfort at her own testiness. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Hugh!”

“Okay.” He appeared in the doorway. “You rang ?”

“Oh, Hugh ,” my boss said, laughing against her will. “Jerry just called.”

“Jerry called?” Hugh’s face immediately lost its levity. It was as if my boss had told him that his parole officer was sitting in the reception area.

“Yes.” She nodded with satisfaction. “He wants to see his royalty statements”—she looked down at a slip of paper in her hand—“for Nine Stories and Raise High the Roof Beam . From 1979 through 1988.”

“Okay.” Hugh shuffled on his feet a little. “Paperback? Or hardback? Or trade paperback?”

My boss shook her head impatiently. “I don’t know. Just pull them all. How quickly can you get the numbers together?”