Joanna Rakoff - My Salinger Year

As we retraced our steps, Hugh carrying a small brown sack with our sandwiches inside, I asked him why they hadn’t married.

Hugh’s jaw tensed, a muscle twitching along its length. “Well, they couldn’t, exactly,” he said with a small sigh. “There was Helen.”

“Who is Helen?” I asked.

“Helen?” said Hugh. He seemed, somehow, surprised that I didn’t possess this information. “Helen is Daniel’s wife. Was.”

This was enough to stop me in my tracks. “His wife ? But I heard. Well, I mean, my boss was always on the phone with her, or talking about her. It sounded like they were friends.”

To my surprise, Hugh turned to me and smiled. “They were friends. They are friends. It’s an unusual situation.” I looked at him. “Daniel lived with Helen part of the week and your boss the rest of it. They shared his care. They shared him , I guess.”

“Oh,” I said, stunned. My boss, with her nunlike aspect, her pantsuits and caftans, her devotion to the Agency, her pull-your-socks-up attitude, had shared her lover with his wife. No wonder she didn’t have the energy to seek out new clients.

“But he, um, did it in your boss’s apartment. While she was there.” Hugh’s face had become flushed from the effort of discussing this.

“What?” I asked. “What do you mean?” We had resumed walking and were once again approaching Park. How nice it would be , I thought, to just go in and sit down for lunch, to be waited on. To have a drink .

“Shot himself. In the head.” Hugh was nodding, like a wounded child, and I realized he was holding back tears. He had worked with my boss for twenty years. “Your boss was in the other room. I think he was in the bedroom and she was in the living room. But I might have misunderstood. It might have been the opposite—”

“ Oh my God.” We had reached our building, but I couldn’t stand the thought of going up. I couldn’t stand the thought of my boss in her apartment twenty blocks north, her apartment where, the night before, her lover of twenty years had taken a gun, pointed it at his head, and pulled the trigger. How does one get over that? How does one go on?

“Yeah,” said Hugh. “So you can see. She might be out awhile.”

She was out awhile. Days passed, days in which I repeatedly explained that my boss was not in the office, never specifying if it was for the day or the hour. My boss didn’t receive a large variety of callers, but the same few callers phoned over and over again: Salinger, amiable and chatty; Roger, nervous and chatty, more so with each passing day; the Other Client, sometimes smooth and charming, sometimes ill-tempered and impatient, his voice crackling and strange, due to bad connections. “I can receive contracts here whenever they’re ready,” he told me tersely. “And the advance money should be wired into my account. You have all the information.”

Days became a week and then two. One morning during the first week, my boss arrived in a voluminous raincoat and dark glasses—her feet, heartbreakingly, clad in the sort of narrow white canvas sneakers worn by children—silently crossed the threshold into our wing, ducked into her office and grabbed something, then ducked back out without a word to anyone. She was, not unexpectedly, selling her apartment.

Midway through the second week, the editor of the Other Client’s new book called to check in. We’d not yet gotten the contracts back to her. “What should I do?” I asked Hugh. “Should I call her?”

Hugh shook his head. “You’ve been doing contracts all this time. She trusts you. Just do the contract. Negotiate. It’ll be fine.”

Nervously, checking my work over and over, I did as he instructed. As it happened, the Agency rarely did deals with this particular publisher, and I had no recent contracts to draw on for models. I pulled every possible agreement I could think of, comparing clauses on royalties, first and second serial, on reprints and electronic rights, on everything, and checking, of course, the deal memo to see what rights we’d agreed to sell and which we’d retain to peddle in-house. Finally, after two days of this, checking and rechecking everything, I drafted the sort of long, laborious note my boss often dictated. Lately, those notes had been based on my preliminary work. Many changes needed to be made to this contract before the author could sign it. The publisher was not familiar with the Agency’s standards, the standards of another era.

Without my boss, the office was oddly quiet. I hadn’t realized how much life, how much urgency, she brought to each day. In her absence, everyone seemed to come in a bit later, to linger longer over lunch, to stay at home on Friday, when we closed early anyway. Summer Fridays, that great tradition of the publishing industry, a gentleman’s business, at its inception at least.

Without dictation, my days were surprisingly free, and surprisingly pleasant. Once again, I caught up on my permissions and filing, and then I turned to the Salinger letters. The letter from the boy in Winston-Salem had remained at the top of the pile, unanswered, for months now. Just send him the form letter , I told myself as I unfolded the missive.

I think about Holden a lot. He just pops into my mind’s eye and I get to thinking about him dancing with old Phoebe or horsing around in front of the bathroom mirror at Pencey. When I first think about him I usually get a big stupid grin on my face. You know, thinking about what a funny guy he is and all. But then I usually get depressed as hell. I guess I get depressed because I only think about Holden when I’m feeling very emotional. I can get quiet emotional.

Yes, “quiet” not “quite.” I assumed this was just a typo, and a beautiful, felicitous one, which I suspected Salinger would appreciate. Salinger who made typos himself. Which were reprinted in The New Yorker , apparently.

Don’t worry, though. I’ve learned that, as phony as it may be, you can’t go around revealing your goddam emotions to the world. Most people don’t give a flying hoot about what you think and feel most of the time, I guess. And if they see a weakness, why for God’s sake showing emotion is a weakness, boy, do they jump all over you! They seem to get right in your goddam face and revel in the fact that you are actually feeling something .

Oh God. I sighed a Hugh-worthy sigh. What could I say to him? Dear Boy from Winston-Salem, I too can get quiet emotional. You’re right, you can’t go around revealing your emotions to the world. I’ve been trying to take your advice and I think I’m succeeding. My boss’s lover killed himself and we’re all pretending nothing happened. I left the man I love in California and he’s pretending he’s not angry with me and I’m pretending I’m not lost without him. I don’t have enough money to pay my bills but I’m pretending I can go out to dinner and do all the things people in New York seem to do. So we’re all doing a pretty good job not revealing our emotions, right? But if you can’t reveal your emotions, how do you go on? What do you do with them? Because, you see, I keep crying at odd moments. Please advise. Yours, Joanna Rakoff .

No, I would not be sending a form letter to the boy from Winston-Salem. I folded up the letter and set it aside.

Gathering my strength, I grabbed another letter from the pile. The shaky, lacy handwriting of the elderly. The writer of this letter was a man with a Nebraska address. His was one of the war letters. “Like you, I served in the armed forces during World War II,” he wrote. “I lost many friends. Some died in my arms. Luckily, I had a wonderful wife waiting at home for me. If I hadn’t, I’m not sure what would have happened to me when I got back home from the war. I was able to go on with life, to run my business, and raise my children. Now that I’m retired, I find myself thinking about the war. I read The Catcher in the Rye in those years after I came home and I loved it then. Holden Caulfield seemed to fully capture the anger I felt and the isolation. It may have helped save me. Just last week, I read it again, and I found myself moved to tears.”