Joanna Rakoff - My Salinger Year

“How’s your new job?” I asked Olivia.

“I quit,” she said with a shrug. “It was awful. I’m just too old to be yelled at.”

“She’s going to focus on her painting,” said Chris, with a close-mouthed smile. “We’re converting the guest room into a studio for her. The light’s not great, right?” Olivia shrugged. “But it’s a pretty big room.”

“Actually, we have news,” said Olivia. She wore a pair of pale jeans—the most conventional clothing I’d ever seen on her body—and high-wedge sandals. Chris looked at her, blinking behind his glasses, as if he weren’t quite sure he was implicated in said news. “We’re actually getting married.”

“Wow!” I cried. “How wonderful!” As if to undercut the seriousness of what she’d just told me, Olivia grimaced and shrugged, then held the bottle to her lips and took a long drink. On her left hand glinted a delicate gold engagement ring. I had not thought her the engagement-ring type. But I’d not thought Jenny the engagement-ring type. Maybe, I thought, everyone is the engagement-ring type.

“Pretty,” said Allison, who had crept over to us. “It seems like everyone’s getting married, right?”

“It does,” I said. Did it?

“It does,” agreed Olivia. “My sister’s getting married, too, actually.”

“Wow,” said Allison, a strange glint in her dark eyes. “Maybe you should have a double wedding. Like on The Brady Bunch .”

“Hey,” I cried. “Should we get a drink? I think there’s wine in the fridge.”

Allison shook her head. “Just beer. Lisa doesn’t drink, so Marc, being a guy, got only beer.” She was Don’s age, I suddenly realized, though I’d never thought about this before, had thought of us as equals, peers. No, she was Marc’s age: two years older than Don. Thirty-three. How had I been so stupid? So utterly unaware. Of course. Everyone she knew probably was getting married. She seemed so content, her life so organized and productive: her little apartment, her little studio, her Good Job. “I think I’m going to head out,” she said.

“We’ll go with you,” I said. “We can get a drink. A real drink.”

She smiled limply. “Dearie, I’d love to see you, but I’m just not in the mood for Don’s bullshit tonight. I’ve had enough for one evening.” My jaw dropped open. I felt, strangely, as if I’d been slapped. “And you have people here”—she gestured to Olivia and Chris, whom I now had no desire to see—“we’ll make a plan, okay? Breakfast tomorrow.” I nodded mutely.

The party never really took off. It was barely eleven when Don and I walked through the hot rain to the Mee Noodle Shop on First Avenue for dumplings and dan dan noodles. I forced myself, as we ate, to say nothing about the wedding. To wait for Don to bring it up. But as we crossed the street to the Brooklyn-bound train, something in me dissolved. “Should I see if we can borrow my parents’ car?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” Don shook his head impatiently. “You might need a car reservation for the ferry. It might be too late.”

“Do you want to check?” I asked. We were descending the stairs to the L now, along with a stream of other people who looked rather like us: girls in sundresses from the 1950s; boys in jeans and boots too heavy for the weather.

“I can’t think about this now,” said Don sharply, almost shouting. A girl with hair dyed bright red turned to look at him, and he glared openly back at her. “Can we just talk about this another time?”

Silently, I nodded. When we reached the platform, I took a seat on the bench and pulled out my book, a novel by one of Max’s clients, about a boy’s obsessive, unrequited love for a much older woman. I was near the end and overcome with that sense of loss that comes with the close of a great novel. Soon, I would have to leave these characters. But for now, I read on, trying to ignore Don’s tense, grumbling presence, his leg jumping up and down next to mine.

At home, I silently took off my dress and put on my nightgown, silently brushed my teeth, and got in bed, book in hand. “Listen,” called Don from the other room, “I want to go to Marc’s wedding alone.”

I put down my book. “Alone?” I asked, as if I were unfamiliar with the word. “You don’t want me to come with you?” Immediately, I thought of the letter, brown shoulders, Maria. “Why?”

“A lot of reasons,” he said dismissively, as if this were an odd, unreasonable question. “It’s too much to talk about it. I don’t feel like explaining it all.”

“You don’t feel like explaining it?” I stared at him, incredulous.

“It’s late,” he said. “I’m tired. I just don’t feel like talking about it now.” He stretched his arms over his head, raising one hand higher, then the other. “Besides, I don’t have to explain myself to you.” He let out one of his cackle-like laughs. “Marc is my friend. If I want to go to his wedding alone, I think that’s my business. Right?”

Maddeningly, my eyes filled with tears. I didn’t care about this wedding. I didn’t, really and truly, know Marc that well, and Lisa even less. But I cared about—or I’d thought I cared about—Don. Who not only didn’t want to take me to his best friend’s wedding—didn’t want to share whatever joy, whatever catharsis, might come from that event—but didn’t even feel he had an obligation to explain his inclinations to me. “No,” I said. “No. It’s my business, too. You embarrassed me tonight. So that makes it my business. And everyone at the wedding will be wondering where I am. So that makes it my business. And we live together, so that makes it my business .”

He had dropped his aloofness and was smiling at me in a patient, conciliatory way, as if I were a child throwing a tantrum. “Buba,” he said. “Come on. Don’t be mad. It’s not such a big deal. I made it sound like a bigger deal than it is. I just didn’t want to talk about it, because I knew this would happen. It’s just that, you know, all those guys will be there. Topher and Will and all those guys. My bros from Hartford. And I feel like, you know, Marc is getting married. It’s like the end of an era. I just want to hang out with them by myself. Me and my boys.”

“ Really?” This explanation didn’t seem so complicated as to warrant postponing it until the following day. I had no idea whether to believe it or not, but I was too angry from the conversation that preceded it to calm down. “ Really? You want to hang out with your boys ? This doesn’t have to do with some girl who’s going to be there? Let’s see”—I was about to jump off a cliff—“the possibilities are endless. Maybe it’s one of your million ex-girlfriends, whose picture or garter belt or whatever you’re keeping in that box under the bookshelf? Or some woman you had a crush on in high school? Or maybe you’re just hoping to meet someone who wants her panties ripped off? And you can write her letters next week, telling her how much you miss her brown shoulders?”

Now it was his turn to stare at me, incredulous. Then, as I watched, his wounded look turned into a smooth mask of cool amusement.

“Wow, Buba. I don’t know what to say—”

“ Don’t call me Buba,” I shouted. “I’m not a child.”

“I call you Buba,” he said, “because I love you.”

“You love me.” My voice had slowed. I seemed to be talking through a stream of molasses. In all this time, he had never told me he loved me. Love, it seemed, was yet another bourgeois construct. Had I ever expected him to love me? “You love me, but you don’t want to bring me to Marc’s wedding?”