My Salinger Year (18 page)

“I’m eating,” I told her, with a big smile. “I am.” But was I? With my new bills, I could barely live. Every day, I called the bank to check my balance, and all too often I’d dipped into my overdraft, even though I budgeted every cent and painstakingly balanced my checkbook. I shopped for groceries once a week, on Saturday morning, carefully totaling up my cart before I approached the register, putting back anything too extravagant, like packaged cookies and cereal. For lunch, I limited myself to five dollars, which bought me a sad little Greek salad at the chain sandwich shop around the corner: limp romaine lettuce, sometimes turning brown at the edges; a pale winter tomato; a few translucent slices of
tomato and pearly cucumber; and a crumble of feta, atop which sat one slim, salty olive. That olive made it all worth it.

That day, though, I did something I’d never, ever done: I walked directly and purposely to the elegant food shop on Forty-Ninth from which the agents obtained their lunches. Around me, the Masters of the Universe ordered frisée salads, rubbing elbows with their female counterparts, thin, tanned women with Cartier bangles dangling from their thin, tanned wrists. The sandwiches sat like pastries on silver cake stands. After much deliberation, I chose a slender flat of bread filled with some sort of pink cured meat. At the register, I grabbed a chocolate cookie, ordered a coffee, and handed over a crisp twenty. I was not, at that exact moment, overdrawn, but my heart still sped up as I placed my meager change in my wallet. Sandwich in hand, I walked over to Fifth, the sun warming my shoulders, sat down on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral with the tourists, and took a bite, a dense, salty, oily, warm bite. It was, there was no doubt, the most delicious sandwich I’d ever tasted. I ate half, planning to save the remainder for the next day, then went ahead and devoured that, too.

The next morning, I put on a spring dress I’d never worn before, a long-ago gift from my mother, red and shorter than anything else in my wardrobe, my knees pale beneath its bright hem. From the back of the closet, I pulled a pair of shoes, black leather sandals with a ladylike heel, yet another contribution from my mother. We had no mirror in the apartment, so I wasn’t sure if this ensemble looked all right, but in my heels and close-cut dress I felt stronger, more erect, able to keep my head in line with my spine, as my acting teachers had always told me to do. I was a sloucher, a slumper, a huncher.

When I emerged from the subway that morning, I
crossed Fiftieth Street without a second thought and pulled open the back door of the Waldorf, gliding up the escalator and past the bookshop, with a glance at the window to make sure
Catcher
was still there. In the upper lobby, I again found clusters of freshly shaved bankers and consultants and who knew what, in their crisp suits, peering disinterestedly up at me from conference agendas and sales reports. Suddenly I longed to be one of them, among them, at home in this world, a shining card in my wallet that would allow me to sit down and order a five-dollar cup of coffee. My father and I—this memory came at me with brute force—had spent so many hours of my childhood in lobbies like this, making up stories about the people passing by. He had grown up in a sort of enforced poverty, my father, with his socialist parents, his activist mother—my grandmother, down on Grand Street, whom I owed a visit—and as an adult he’d relished even the smallest of luxuries, but none more so than the fancy hotel, that emblem of louche idleness.

I walked on through the men in their suits, my spine still neatly stacked, and continued down the stairs, smiling giddily. And then I looked up, way up, to the lobby’s soaring, intricate ceiling, its borders painted in gold leaf, a pattern so complex and beautiful that for the first time I understood the true meaning of the phrase “took my breath away.” For I did, truly, lose a breath as the patterns—leaves and vines and diamonds—revealed themselves to me, and as I understood the ceiling’s true height, the magnitude of air and space between those gold vines and my small self. My shoe, with its narrow heel, caught on the thick carpet, and for a moment I thought—I knew, my heart beating faster—that I was going to trip and fall down that small flight of stairs, the world around me rotating, but then I simply laid my hand on the railing, steadied myself, and continued down.

The Pitch

They would be meeting. In person. Jerry and Roger Lathbury. This was big news. Jerry did not meet people. Jerry avoided people. Even people he’d known for decades. The two men had been corresponding on their own, circumventing my boss and the Agency. “It might be good to send me copies of your letters,” I heard my boss say. But Jerry did not send copies of his letters. Nor did Roger. My boss described this as “highly irregular,” shaking her head and laughing a little as she did when anxious or displeased. They bothered her, these letters. What if Jerry was agreeing to some strange terms? Or in some way putting himself at risk? Roger seemed, certainly, like the nicest, most genuine of fellows, but what if he were not? What if he were somehow manipulating Salinger into—what? My boss did not know.

And it didn’t matter, for there was nothing we could do about it, about any of it. The situation now transcended the realm of business. Jerry and Roger were becoming friends.

Or at least Jerry was becoming friends with Roger. Roger was a bit too anxious, a bit too baffled by Salinger’s enthusiasm,
to truly reciprocate. He had started calling with more and more frequency. Every time he received a letter from Salinger, he called. Every time he sent a letter to Salinger, he called, worried that he had said the wrong thing.

And thus it was I who often ended up listening to Roger’s concerns, his fears. Pam had been instructed, I gathered, to put Roger through to me first. “I’ve done some mock-ups,” he told me in late June. “A couple. I think I understand what Jerry likes in a design and I think he’s going to like these. Or, I think he’ll like one better than the other.”

“Oh?” I said, trying to hide the alarm in my voice. We’d yet to work out all the details of this deal. There was no contract. Not even a draft of a contract. It seemed to me that laying out a book before the contracts were signed did indeed qualify as highly irregular. It also struck me as bad luck.

“I retyped it,” he told me, “so that I could mock up a design. I could have scanned it, but I thought Salinger would prefer it if I retyped it.”

“Hmm,” I murmured into the phone, wondering if Salinger would know the difference. It was Friday and my boss was at home, of course. Roger often called on Friday mornings, and I was beginning to think this a conscious choice, that he was using me as a sounding board. Or a therapist. Clearly, this deal, already, was causing him enormous anxiety. Or perhaps he was just an anxious, chatty person. He had told me all about his daughters, his syllabi, his collection of literary relics, and his wife’s good-natured antipathy to his publishing ventures.

“And it’s a good thing, too. In typing up the story, I noticed that there are a few small typos.” He seemed a bit pleased by this, to have caught
The New Yorker
in error.

“Really?” I asked, surprised.
The New Yorker
’s fact-checking and copyediting departments were legendary. Mistakes, I’d thought, simply didn’t slip through.

“Oh yes,” Roger affirmed. “Small typos, but typos still. I
went ahead and corrected them. Salinger is such a stickler for details, I’m assuming he’d want them corrected.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” I said, discreetly rolling a piece of letterhead into my typewriter, though I couldn’t type when on the phone—other than with Don, or my mother, or Jenny, or someone else who wouldn’t be offended—as the Selectric made too much noise. Actually, I wasn’t at all sure.

“I also considerably widened the margins to give the book some length. If it’s too thin, I won’t be able to fit the title on the spine horizontally. Jerry wants a horizontal title. He hates vertical titles. So I’ve made some really wide margins. But Salinger prefers that. Not too much text on the page. He wants the story to
breathe
.”

“Vertical titles?” I’d never heard this term before and wondered if Roger—or Salinger—had invented it. It sounded like a Joy Division album. Or a collection of abstract poetry.

“Yes, yes!” In his overexcitement, Roger sometimes sounded like the White Rabbit. I pictured him as small and pudgy, his hair parted deeply on one side and combed over to the other. “Vertical titles. When the title is printed sideways along the spine of the book. So you have to turn your head sideways to read it. Most titles are printed that way, actually. Because you need a relatively thick spine to print a title horizontally. Look at Salinger’s books.” I glanced at the bookshelf in front of me. “All of them have horizontal titles.” Squinting, I saw he was right. They did indeed. Each word of each title printed across each book’s spine, the words stacked on top of one another.

The following Wednesday Salinger drove down to D.C. and met Roger for lunch at the National Gallery, a busy, public place if there ever was one, but Salinger was not—as Roger half expected—mobbed by fans or converged on by photographers. The two men sat and looked over Roger’s designs, then parted ways at the little waterfall by the stairs leading up to the lobby.

“He insisted on paying for lunch,” reported Roger, who seemed baffled by the fact that he, Roger Lathbury of Alexandria, Virginia—the kid who read
Nine Stories
in his suburban bedroom—had somehow ended up eating sandwiches with J. D. Salinger. He had, of course, called first thing Thursday morning to give me a postmortem. “The pub date will be January 1,” he told me. “Jerry’s birthday.”

“January 1 of next year?” I asked. Producing and publishing a book usually took longer than six months. Could Roger really get this book in stores by the New Year?

“Yes, yes, of course. No need to wait,” he confirmed. “There’s not that much to do. Jerry chose the design I thought he would. And we decided against running the title at the top of each page. Because it’s an epistolary story. You know. It’s a letter. So it takes you out of the moment to have the title running across the top of the page. Jerry agrees.”

The two men agreed on everything, it seemed, except for one. Salinger did not want the typos corrected. In fact, he’d bristled at Roger’s correcting them without consulting him first.

“I don’t understand it,” said Roger. “He actually seemed put out that I’d fixed them”—he paused, unsure if he should even speak of the potential catastrophe—“I thought for a moment he was going to say, ‘Let’s just forget this whole thing.’ Because I corrected some small mistakes. But okay. I’ll put the typos back in.”

“Did he say why?” I asked. I’d had a feeling—based on nothing—that Salinger would respond in this way. My suspicion was that with Jerry it was all about control: Had Roger asked him about correcting the typos in advance, he might have said, “Sure, correct them.” But the fact that Roger had gone ahead and done so, without consulting him, just annoyed him.

“Sort of.” Roger’s voice was fading, the adrenaline rush of the lunch dissolving as he recounted its downside. “Not
really. He just said he wanted it printed exactly as it had originally run in
The New Yorker
. It was almost as if he were saying the typos were intentional. Though he didn’t exactly say that. But it made me realize …” He drifted off and I wondered, for a moment, if he’d hung up or the connection had been lost. Then he cleared his throat.

“Are you okay?” I asked. I liked him. I did. I wanted him to be okay. I wanted him to not mess this up. To not correct any more typos.

One night in early July, at a rooftop party, I spent hours talking to two young
New Yorker
editors. They were a few years my senior—and a few Don’s junior—and dressed like caricatures of prep school types, like characters from a Whit Stillman movie. They were, in other words, exactly as I’d pictured
New Yorker
editors, if I’d actually had the wherewithal to even imagine the people behind the magazine that had so profoundly shaped my life, which I did not, nor did I ever imagine that I might really and truly find myself in the same room with such people, much less at the center of their orbit, as I did that night. I’d read
The New Yorker
religiously growing up, emulating my father’s complicated, well-hewn reading system, which involved starting with the movie reviews, then turning to theater, then Talk of the Town, then features. But I’d not, somehow, understood the magazine’s larger cultural significance until college. I’d thought it was a magazine for people who lived in New York, or were from New York, like my father. New Yorkers. I thought, too, that the magazine was a secret, something consumed only by my father and me. No one else read it in our small, conservative town, just as no one else read the
Times
.