My Salinger Year (21 page)

“Of course.” I rose and followed her.

“Sit down,” she said. I perched on the little couch opposite her desk. Lucy liked all things sleek and black, timeless.

“So you know Daniel?”

For a moment, I thought,
Who
? Then I realized, of course, that she was talking about my boss’s … someone, something. The person my boss was always talking to or about on the phone. He wasn’t her husband. He didn’t seem to be her brother. There was never a title, a label, applied to him. And he was often mentioned in the same breath as someone named Helen, whose role in my boss’s life I also didn’t understand.

“Yes,” I said. “I think so.”

“Well.” Lucy sighed and lit a cigarette. Then, to my amazement, tears began to fill her eyes and her face turned pink. She let out a little sob and buried her face in her hands. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh!” I cried. “
Lucy
.” Lucy was normally so brisk and cheerful, so resilient and matter-of-fact.

She grabbed a handkerchief and wiped her eyes, then sniffed deeply. “Daniel,” she said in a raspy voice. “Daniel died last night.”

“Oh!” I cried again. “Oh no. Is my boss okay?”

Lucy shook her head no. No, my boss was not okay.

“I knew he was sick,” I said. Suddenly everything seemed to make sense. All those phone calls. My boss’s distractedness. “I mean, I didn’t
know
. She talked about prescriptions. And she’d leave to—” Something in Lucy’s demeanor made me stop.

“We don’t know how long your boss is going to be out.” Shakily, she stubbed out her cigarette, then immediately pulled another out of the pack on her desk and inserted it into her holder, like a character in film noir. “So if you can just
hold things together. Is there anything pressing? Anything that needs to be done today? That you can’t do yourself?”

I shook my head. There were the contracts, but they could wait.

“What about the ‘Hapworth’ thing?” She laughed a little, despite herself. The deal seemed to be providing consistent comic relief for the entire office.

“It’s fine.” I thought about Roger’s odd tone at the end of our conversation. Was it fine? I wasn’t sure.

“Okay, so just cover for her. Okay? If anyone calls, just say she’s in a meeting or not in at the moment.”

I nodded. I was her assistant. Covering for her was my job.

Later that day, Jerry called. The office was still strained and hushed. Carolyn had left to take care of my boss.

“JOANNE!” he cried. Somehow, he had figured out my name, or an approximation of it. I wondered, for a moment, if Roger had corrected him. Or Pam. “How’s the poetry?”

I flushed. “Good,” I said. “Good.”

“You’re writing every day?” he asked, lowering his voice. I flushed again. Suddenly I understood Roger’s nervousness. It was strange to feel the force of a famous person’s attention. “First thing in the morning.”

“I am.” This was mostly true.

“That’s what you do,” he said. “So, I have a question for you.”
Oh no
, I thought,
not again
. “Have you met this Roger Lathbury fellow?”

“I haven’t,” I admitted. “But I’ve spoken to him on the phone many times.”

“Yes, well, I went down to meet him last week. I don’t know if you’ve gathered that. And I think he’s a fine fellow. He showed me some designs for the book. One was terrible, but one was good. Very good.”

“Hmm,” I murmured, as I did with Roger.

“I’m inclined to go ahead and let him publish the book. The ‘Hapworth’ book. I gather you’ve heard about this.”

“I have.”

“And what do you make of this Roger Lathbury fellow?”

Ah, there was the question. How to answer it? “He seems like a good person. Like someone you can trust.” I believed this.

“My feelings exactly,” said Salinger, though these words were slightly more distorted, elongated, than usual and it took me a few extra seconds to decode them. “I don’t know that your boss feels that way.”

“Well,” I said cautiously, “it’s her job to look out for you.”

“True.” He sneezed, rather violently, then let out a little snuffle, and when he began talking again, his voice had risen in volume. Did his hearing drop in and out? “Is she in? Your boss? I’d love to talk to her.”

“I’m afraid she’s out at the moment. Shall I have her call you?” I wasn’t sure when she would be returning calls, but my mouth formed these words almost automatically.

“Sure, sure, but no rush,” he said. Where did these reports of his tyrannical behavior come from? He was never anything but kind and patient on the phone. More so than plenty of people who called the Agency. More so than plenty of his fans, for that matter.

The minute I put down the phone, Hugh came racing out of his office. “Jerry?” he asked.

I nodded.

“You told him that she was out of the office?”

I nodded again.

Hugh pressed his mouth into a thin, tense line. “You want to go get a sandwich?”

Outside, we found one of those grim New York summer days in which the sun hangs low behind a haze of gray and the air seems full to bursting with moisture. We both immediately began to sweat.

At the corner of Forty-Ninth and Park, Hugh stopped and turned to face me, his pale eyes steely with reserve. “Daniel killed himself,” he said.

“Oh,” I said, drawing in a sharp breath. “Oh.”

“He had”—Hugh drew in his own breath—“psychological problems. He was bipolar. Your boss took care of him. Cared for him. It was a big job.” We were stopped at a light on the corner of Park, the flowers still blazing in the median strip, the Waldorf in front of us. “I think it was very hard on her. Though she would never admit it. And she’s taking care of Dorothy, too. Not in the same way.” He sighed his trademark sigh. “Dorothy has full-time caregivers. But your boss is overseeing her care.”

“Daniel was her—” I wasn’t sure how to ask this, but Hugh saved me.

“Lover,” he said tersely. It was not a word that fit comfortably in his mouth. “He was her lover. They’d been together for, oh gee, twenty years.”

Lover?
I thought, my mind spinning.
Twenty years
. Had she cared for him this whole time? Had she fallen in love with him first, discovered his problems, his difficulties, later? Had his illness only developed, emerged, later, after their lives were fully meshed? Or had she known everything from the start and accepted him as he was?
Lover
, I thought again. Why had they never married? Because of Daniel’s illness?

We started across Park, me struggling a bit to match Hugh’s long gait. It was strange to be out in the world with him. I thought of him as purely a creature of the Agency. Like the Wizard of Oz, barricaded in his strange castle. In reality, he was married—with two stepdaughters—and I had
met his wife, a pretty, pleasant woman with long graying hair, but it was still impossible to picture him, say, eating dinner with her in their apartment in Brooklyn Heights or going to a movie or
anywhere
other than the Agency.

“How’s she doing?” I asked, finally, though this didn’t seem sufficient a question.

“I haven’t talked to her. Carolyn says she seems to be doing okay. Keeping it together.” Hugh touched his hand to his forehead, which was beaded with perspiration, and grimaced. “But I don’t know how long that will last. It’s just terrible, this.”

At Third Avenue, we turned south, and Hugh led me to a narrow, ancient sandwich shop, so small, so tucked away that I would have never found it on my own. “How are you today?” he asked the man behind the counter. A large air conditioner rattled in the window, sending a stream of cold air in my direction, and I shivered a little, my perspiration drying. “I’ll have an egg salad on whole wheat and”—he turned to me—“whatever she’s having.”

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.