Joanna Rakoff - My Salinger Year

“That’s right,” he said. “That’s right.”

On Monday, my boss came in for an hour or so. She looked paler than usual but seemed almost preternaturally calm. As always, she walked past me without a word, seated herself in her office with a minimum of fuss, and began murmuring into her Dictaphone. The normalcy of this should have comforted me, but instead it brought tears to my eyes. I fled to the other wing of the office. “Hey,” James called, as I passed the coffee machine. “I’m reading Don’s novel and I like it.” I stopped dead in my tracks.

“Really?” A mixture of surprise and relief washed over me, mixed with something else: that strange feeling I associated with getting an A on a paper on which I hadn’t quite worked hard enough.

“Yeah,” he said, pouring cream into his coffee. “I mean, it’s dense .” I nodded. “But I like it.” Raising his mug to his lips, he took a tentative sip. “So far. I’m about a third of the way through. After he sees his girlfriend in the, er, film”—his face turned red at this—“and he’s remembering meeting her. All the sweaters she brings to school. Like a thousand sweaters.” He laughed. “I remember going to girls’ rooms in college and thinking, How do they have so many sweaters? ” Before I could stop him, he’d pulled out a mug and poured coffee into it for me.

“Girls are crazy for sweaters,” I agreed.

“Anyway”—he shrugged and handed me the carton of cream—“I’ll finish it and see.”

When I returned to my desk, I heard the telltale creak of my boss’s chair. Slowly, she made her way toward me, her face curiously blank. “Here’s some dictation for you,” she said, in that same soft, sleepy way, though trying, I could see, for cheer. I stood up and took the tape from her.

“Great,” I said. “I’ll get right to it.”

“Tomorrow’s fine.” One of her hands, with its long, slender fingers, rested lightly on my desk, but her gaze was on the far wall, the wall of Salinger books. Then, slowly, she turned to me. “You did an excellent job on those contracts.” The Other Client. “That wasn’t easy.”

That afternoon, after she left—exhausted by this brief foray into the world, her eyes glazed, her forehead damp—the revised contracts came back and I looked them over. Most of the changes had been made, but the electronic rights clause had not been taken out, as I’d requested, per Agency policy. This clause had started showing up in contracts right around the time I started at the Agency and was the source of much consternation for my boss and the other agents, as it awarded the publisher rights to all digital offshoots of the book in question, including CD-ROMs and “forms not mentioned herein or as yet unknown.” Any number of contracts had been held up this year as the Agency haggled with various publishers over electronic rights, which had caused Max, in particular, some agony, for he was the one with living clients who desperately needed the money they’d receive on signing the contract. But my boss, who set the Agency’s standards, wouldn’t allow any contract to be finalized unless that vague, pernicious clause had been struck. In some contracts, reference was made to something called an “electronic book.” When my boss first encountered this term, she’d shouted, “I don’t know what an electronic book is, but I’m not giving away the rights to it.”

Hoping to iron this out without bothering my boss, I drafted another letter—“CLAUSE 83.1.a: STRIKE”—and clipped it to the contracts. As I typed up an address label, Hugh came by, picked up the contracts, and glanced over my note. “This might take a while?” he said, half a statement, half a question. I shrugged. “I think he really needs the money.”

“Really?” This was somehow disheartening to learn. The Other Client was so established. Not famous, but respected. Established. When Don was sixty, would he still be impoverished? “But he teaches, right? At ——.” I named the prestigious MFA program.

Hugh shook his head tersely. “You didn’t hear about this? Last spring? It was in all the papers.”

“I was in London.”

“Right.” Hugh breathed in deeply and sighed, one action canceling out the other. “He was embroiled in a sort of”—he waved his hands around as if to conjure the appropriate word—“scandal. It’s not clear what happened.” I looked at him expectantly. “A student accused him of sexual harassment.”

“ What?” I thought back on my phone conversations with him: terse, polite, sometimes impatient. But not suggestive of sexual harassment. Though what sort of phone behavior exactly would indicate a predilection for sexual harassment? Heavy breathing?

“He was put on probation for two years,” said Hugh tightly. “Without pay.”

That afternoon, I seated myself at the computer and checked the Agency’s sole e-mail account, which it was my job to monitor, printing out and delivering to the appropriate agents any notes that arrived. My boss, for her part, dictated responses, which I typed up, presented to her for approval, then retyped into the computer. Sometimes, after I was done, I furtively checked my own e-mail, but today I went directly to the New York Times’ s Web site, which had launched just a few months before. It was slow and confusing, clunky, and I found it hard to stare at the screen long enough to read an entire article. But now I saw its full value: I typed in the name of the Other Client and immediately his story unfurled. The details weren’t as bad as I’d expected. He had, it seemed, grabbed a student’s breasts at a departmental party, though some witnesses suggested he had simply looked at her breasts, and others insisted his transgression consisted of making a lewd comment about said breasts. Regardless, this was the age of political correctness, and the Other Client had been thoroughly castigated in a campus tribunal, at which scads of students testified against him. He was sexist, misogynistic, they said. He made crude comments in class and was generally unsupportive of their writing, his criticism so harsh and unconstructive that they were left with no idea how to proceed with their work and despairing of whether they even should.

The strange elation I’d felt about the sale of his novel was fully gone, replaced by an uneasiness. This was, as Don would say, schoolgirl stuff: judging an artist by his actions rather than his work. How many great writers had not been the greatest of humans? Would I dismiss Philip Roth for ripping through wives? Or Hemingway? Or Mailer? And yet why was it the male writers whose behavior we were always having to excuse, or risk seeming prudish and judgmental? Don would say it was their —his —prerogative, their biological prerogative.

The Other Client’s novel, I realized, takes place in a small town not so different from the town in which he’d lived for years, the town that housed the prestigious MFA program, in which a serial killer gruesomely murders and eviscerates young girls. Was it a coincidence that a man who had been brought down by a woman—in an isolated close-knit town—would immediately begin work on a novel in which the girls of an isolated close-knit town are being picked off before they can reach womanhood?

Suddenly I felt physically ill: parched, nauseated, hot and cold all over. The air-conditioning was running at full blast and I shivered a little in its chill. I looked around to see if anyone had noticed how long I’d been sitting at the computer, but the office was empty. August. Still, I got up and stretched, then made my way to the kitchen for a glass of water, contemplating an Advil.

In doing so, I passed the slim bookcase that held the Other Client’s books. They were all, as my boss had remarked back in May, “smaller” than this one. The sorts of novels sometimes described as “quiet.” Meaning they were about ordinary people living their lives. Meaning they earned good reviews but didn’t sell in vast quantities, as did books about serial killers. Had the Other Client, stripped of his regular paycheck, made a conscious choice—a calculated choice—to write a book that would sell?