My Salinger Year (23 page)

“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?”

“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?

And was this worse or better than writing a book as revenge?

Or were the two not, perhaps, mutually exclusive?

That night, as I walked to the subway, I realized that Don, too, had murdered off a girl who had hurt him.

Three Days of Rain

On a stormy Thursday night, Don left for the wedding, duffel slung over his shoulder. “Bye,” he said, kissing me roughly, his arms wrapped in my blue waterproof shell. Often, he took my clothing—Levi’s, T-shirts, fisherman’s sweater, Frye boots—without asking, but I’d offered him the shell to prove that I wasn’t upset. He seemed nervous, tense, oddly exhausted by the effort of packing—worried that he had no suit to wear—and I wondered if, for the moment, he regretted disinviting me. Or, well, he’d never actually invited me. I’d just assumed that I was meant to go along. Regardless, I’d refused to help him pack. “Do you think I can wear this to the ceremony?” he’d called, holding up some wrinkled garment.