Joanna Rakoff - My Salinger Year

I was in bed, reading, when he came in, an hour or so later, the quilt tucked tightly around me. He sat down on the edge of the bed, rubbing my arm through the cotton. “You know, Buba, men like to look at women. That’s what they do.”

“Really?” I said, keeping my eyes on my book, Laurie Colwin’s Family Happiness , in which an Upper East Side matron discovers her family’s equilibrium depends on her maintaining her long-running affair.

“Really,” he said. “I wasn’t attracted to that woman. I just thought it was interesting that she could, objectively, be so unattractive and yet—”

“I know, I know.” I didn’t want to hear anymore. “I understand.”

“You don’t understand,” he said, not unkindly. “You think that life is a fairy tale and when a man falls in love with a woman he never looks at anyone else again. But that’s not true.” With a sigh, I put my book down and turned to face him. “Maybe your Buddhist boyfriend at Oberlin thought you were the end all and be all of womanhood. Or had taken so many women’s studies classes that he was afraid to look at some chick and think ‘she’s hot,’ that it would make him a bad person or something.” His voice had taken on a hard, angry edge. “But I have news for you, every guy in the world is looking at every woman in the world and deciding whether he would sleep with her or not.”

“Right.” Throwing off the covers, I scooted past him and into the bathroom to brush my teeth.

“It’s part of being a man,” he called. I heard the thud as he took off one boot and then the other. “You can’t shut it off. Any guy who tells you different is lying. Even your fucking Oberlin boyfriend.”

Did Salinger love the books of Orchises Press? Their content? Their design? We did not know. All we knew was that one day, a couple of weeks after we’d sent them on, I picked up my phone and someone shouted, “HELLO? HELLO?” followed by my boss’s name. This time, I recognized Salinger’s voice and volume. “IT’S JOANNA,” I yelled, wondering if I should have identified myself as “Suzanne,” just to expedite things. “Is that Suzanne?” Salinger asked, lowering his voice to something closer to a normal speaking level.

“Yes, Mr. Salinger,” I replied, smiling. I could be Suzanne. Why not?

“Well, then let me ask you something,” he said.

“Sure,” I said, but my heart immediately began to beat faster. My boss’s warnings with regard to Salinger had focused on not initiating a conversation with him. There had been no stipulations, no guidelines, regarding what to do if he initiated a conversation with me. Presumably, such situations hadn’t arisen in many years. Decades even. The “Hapworth” deal had thrust us into new territory. A Wild West of Salinger etiquette.

“You saw those books from that fellow in Virginia?” he asked. Though his voice was just slightly louder than it needed to be, his speech, I realized, had the mildly garbled quality of those who’ve long lost their hearing.

“I did,” I confirmed.

“What did you think of them?” he asked.

“I thought they were nice.” Nice? Where did this word come from? “I liked some more than others. The design, you mean?”

“The books,” he said gently.

“Yes.” I tried to gather my thoughts, but they would not gather. “I liked some of them more than others,” I said again. “But I’ve seen their books before. They publish a lot of poetry. Some very good poets.”

“You read poetry?” he asked, his words more focused now, more sharp.

My heart beat faster. I was certain that if my boss walked in at this moment, she would be extremely displeased. “I do,” I said.

“Do you write poetry?”

“I do,” I said, desperately hoping he wouldn’t ask me to repeat myself, wouldn’t put me in the position of having to utter the word “poetry” aloud when my boss could walk in at any moment.

“Well, that’s great,” he said. “I’m really glad to hear that.” I did not know then, would not know for months and months—when I finally read “Seymour—an Introduction”—that Salinger equated poetry with spirituality. Poetry, for Salinger, represented communion with God. What I knew then was that I was somehow betraying my boss—if not expressly, then in spirit.

Just then I spied her crossing through the finance wing, into our section of the office. “Would you like to speak to her?” I asked. “She’s just getting back to her desk.”

“Yes, thank you, Suzanne,” he said almost quietly. “You have a good day. Nice to talk to you.”

“It’s Jerry,” I whispered as she neared my desk.

“Oh!” she cried and trotted into her office.

The requisite shouting began, followed by the requisite closing of the door. After a period of quiet, my boss wandered out of her office, a stunned look in her eyes. Her cheeks were flushed.

“Well, he wants to go through with it,” she said, lighting a cigarette. Though her words were designed to express resignation, she seemed, I thought, excited . The truth was there had not been much going on. Now things were happening. This was a small deal, yes, but it was big news in the world, or it would be, if anyone found out about it. Salinger had, of course, said that he wanted no announcement of the book, no write-up in Publishers Weekly , no piece in the Times about his coming out of his seclusion, nothing. We were to tell no one and neither was Roger Lathbury, not even his wife. We could talk about it in the office with restraint and caution—by which she meant “don’t talk to Olivia”—but we were not to breathe a word of it in the outside world.

An hour later, she handed me a dictation tape, which confirmed the height of her spirits. “Dear Mr. Lathbury,” the letter began, “You might want to sit down before you read this…”

She signed it with a flourish. That night, I was the last to leave, which meant I brought the mail down to the box on the corner of Forty-Eighth Street. Okay, Jerry, here goes nothing , I thought, and slipped the letter in the box, where it fell softly, without a rustle. Just, I supposed, as he would have wanted.

One morning, as May drew to a close, my boss once again raced out of her office, calling for Hugh. This time, he came right out, alarmed—as was I—by the true panic in her voice. “Judy just called,” she said wearily. “She’s coming in. I need you to pull all her royalty statements and get me all her books and, well”—she waved her hands up and down in a gesture of frustration—“just anything you can. Clips, anything.”

“Okay,” said Hugh.

“Judy?” I whispered.

“Oh, right,” said Hugh. “Judy Blume.”

My jaw fell open. “Judy Blume ?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied impassively. “The children’s book writer. Have you heard of her?”

“I’ve heard of her,” I told him, trying not to laugh.

“She was Claire’s client. So now she’ll be passed on to your boss. Or Max, I guess.”

Dutifully, I gathered copies of Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Freckle Juice, Blubber, Forever… , and my favorite, Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself—which I found, with some difficulty, on an out-of-the-way shelf in the finance wing, a strange place for the work of an author so well known—and piled them neatly on one corner of my boss’s desk. There they sat, for several days. On Tuesday, I dropped off some correspondence and found my boss scrutinizing the cover of Deenie . On Wednesday, I found her peeking at the first pages of Forever… , as if afraid of breaking the spine. It was the same edition I’d had on my bookshelf as a kid. The cover embossed with a gold locket.