Joanna Rakoff - My Salinger Year

“I’m sure you can, too,” she assured me, expelling a stream of smoke that seemed to contradict her statement of confidence. “Though it can be a little tricky.” With one hand, she tugged a stiff, cloudy cover off the white plastic box sitting next to the typewriter. Exposed, it resembled a firstgeneration tape recorder, tricked out with an excess of wires and outsized headphones and lacking the customary tab buttons labeled “play,” “rewind,” “fast-forward,” and “pause.” There was a slot for the cassette, but that was it. As with so many tools of efficiency from the 1950s and 1960s, it looked both charmingly archaic and spookily futuristic.

“Well,” she said, with an odd laugh. “This is it. There are pedals for playback and rewind. And I think you can control the speed.” I nodded, though I saw no controls of any sort. “Hugh can show you if you’re confused.” I wasn’t sure who Hugh was, nor was I sure that I understood what I would be doing with the Dictaphone, but I nodded again. “Well, I have a lot of typing, so I’ll give you some tapes and you can get started. Then we’ll have a little chat.” She strode back into her office and returned with three cassette tapes, a fresh cigarette in hand, not yet lit. “Here you go,” she said. “All yours!” And then she was gone, through the archway to the left of my desk, which led to the finance department, and beyond that the kitchen, and the other wing of the office, which held all the other agents’ offices and the door to the outside world.

I couldn’t actually type. I had lied about my typing skills at the urging of the lady at the placement agency. “No one your age can type,” she’d told me, wrinkling her pretty face in a gesture of dismissal. “You grew up with computers! Tell her you can do sixty words a minute. You’ll be up to speed in a week.” As it happened, I’d once been able to type sixty words per minute. Like all New York middle school students, I’d taken a state-mandated typing class in eighth grade. For a few years afterward, I pounded out papers on the typewriter at my dad’s office, never glancing down at the keys. Junior year, we acquired a Macintosh II, and my typing devolved into the loose, two-fingered, technique-free style of the digital age.

I pulled the dustcover off the Selectric. It was enormous, with more buttons and levers than I remembered from the machines on which I’d learned. And yet—and yet—there was one button I couldn’t find: the one that would turn it on. I ran my fingers all over the front and sides and back. Nothing. I stood up and peered at it from all angles, contorting myself around the edges of my desk. Then I sat back down and tried again, reaching all around it, tilting it back, in case the switch was underneath. Sweat soaked the underarms of my green sweater and slicked my forehead, and my nose pinged with that awful pricking, the sign that tears were coming. Finally, thinking perhaps there simply was no on/off button, that the machine was actually unplugged, I crouched under the desk, feeling around in the dark for the cord.

“Do you need some help?” called a soft, tentative voice, as my hands traced a dusty wire up from the floor.

“Um, maybe,” I said, unfolding myself as gracefully as I could. Next to my desk stood a man of indeterminate age who so resembled my boss he could have been her son: the same wolfish eyes and straight ash-brown hair, the same slack cheeks and painfully fair skin, his discolored with acne scars.

“Are you looking for the on button?” the man asked, miraculously.

“I am,” I admitted. “I feel so silly.”

He shook his head sympathetically. “It’s hidden away, in a really strange place. No one can find it. And it’s awkward to reach if you’re sitting in front of the thing. Here.” He joined me behind the desk, careful to keep a few feet between us, slipped his arm around the left side of the typewriter as if he were hugging it, and with an audible click flipped the switch. The machine let out a loud hum, like a sleeping cat, and began to vibrate, almost visibly.

“Thanks so much,” I said, with perhaps too much emotion.

“Sure,” he said. I pressed my back into the desk so he’d have room to climb out, which he did, gawkily, tripping over the plastic mat beneath my chair and an errant cord. He sighed and held out his hand, a plain gold wedding band around his ring finger, which surprised me. He seemed, somehow, alone . “I’m Hugh,” he said. “You’re Joanna.”

“I am,” I confirmed, taking his hand, which was warm and dry and very, very white.

“I’m right over there.” He cocked his head toward the door directly opposite my desk, which I’d taken to be a closet. “If you need anything, just come get me. Sometimes your boss doesn’t”—another heavy sigh—“explain things. So if there’s anything you don’t understand, just ask me.” His face changed suddenly, his mouth turning up. “I’ve been here a long time, so I know all the ins and outs of the office. I know how everything works.”

“How long?” I asked, before I thought better of it. “How long have you been here?”

“Let’s see.” He crossed his arms in front of his chest, compressing his brow in thought. His slow speech further slowed. “I started in 1977 as Dorothy’s assistant”—I nodded, as if I knew who Dorothy was—“and I did that for four years”—his voice drifted off—“I left for a while. In 1986. Or 1987? But I came back.” Once again, he sighed. “Twenty years, I guess. I’ve been here about twenty years.”

“Wow,” I said. I was twenty-three years old.

Hugh laughed. “I know, wow.” He shrugged. “I like it here. I mean, there are things I don’t like, but it suits me. What I do. Here.”

I wanted to ask what exactly that might be but wasn’t sure if this line of inquiry qualified as rude. My mother had instructed me never to inquire about a person’s money or position. This was an agency, so presumably Hugh was an agent.

Alone again at my desk, the light from Hugh’s office casting a reassuring glow on the carpet to my right, I picked up one of the cassette tapes and with some fumbling popped it into the Dictaphone, then began yet another search for an on button. No , I thought. There was nothing, no “pedals,” nothing but an unmarked dial. I picked up the smooth plastic box and inspected it, but found nothing, not a thing.

Softly, I rapped on Hugh’s half-open door. “Come in,” he said, and I did. There he sat, behind an L-shaped desk similar to mine, covered with a mountain of paper, a pile high enough to obscure his chest and neck: opened and unopened envelopes, their ragged edges frilled and curled; letters still folded in triad or in the process of unfurling; yellow carbon copies and black sheets of the carbon paper that had created them; oversized pink and yellow and white index cards; paper upon paper upon paper, a mess so vast and unfathomable I shook my head to make sure it was real.

“I’m a little behind,” he said. “Christmas.”

“Oh,” I said, nodding. “So, um, the Dictaphone—”

“ Foot pedals,” he said, sighing. “Under the desk. Like a sewing machine. There’s one for play, one for rewind, one for fast-forward.”

I spent the morning listening to my boss’s low, patrician voice murmuring to me through the Dictaphone’s ancient headgear, a peculiarly intimate experience. Letters: I was typing letters on the Agency’s letterhead—yellowish, undersized, thirty-pound stock—some several pages, some as brief as a line or two. “As discussed, attached are two copies of your contract with St. Martin’s Press for Two If by Blood . Please sign both copies and return them to me at your earliest convenience.” The longest ones were addressed to publishers, requesting intricate and often inexplicable changes to contracts, the striking of words and clauses, particularly those having to do with “electronic rights,” a term that meant nothing to me. These proved both unbearably tedious, requiring gymnastic feats of formatting and spacing, and oddly soothing, for I understood so little of their content that the typing itself—my fingers on the keyboard, the sound of the keys striking the paper—hypnotized me. Typing was, as the placement agency lady had assured me, like riding a bike: my fingers remembered their places on the keyboard and flew across it as if by their own will. By noon, I had a neat stack of letters—the product of one dictation tape—addressed envelopes neatly clipped to them, as Hugh had instructed.