My Salinger Year (8 page)

“No!” Hugh cried. “We can’t. You didn’t tell them yes, did you?” His face was turning red with panic.

“No, of course not,” I said. “But, we shouldn’t ask him if he wants to be included?” This was, after all, the
Norton
. The anthology used on every campus in America.

“No.” Hugh shook his head and sucked in his upper lip. “No anthologies. No excerpts. If you want to read Salinger, you have to buy his books.”

I thought of the last category simply as the Crazies. This was, if not the largest genre of caller in sheer volume, then certainly the most consuming, in terms of time. Occasionally said craziness was clear from the moment I picked up the phone, and I quickly extricated myself, replacing my receiver with a satisfying little thud. Other times, I’d pick up the phone and find myself talking, say, with a polite man—“Oh, yes, hello! Thank you so much for taking my call!”—who explained that he was the dean of a community college in southern New Jersey. “We would be very honored if J. D. Salinger would serve as our commencement speaker this year. The ceremony is on May 28 and we can, of course, offer a small honorarium, as well as accommodations at a very fine inn.” There was more—the history of the college, information about the current student body—but I interjected as soon as he took a breath.

“It’s so lovely of you to think of Mr. Salinger, but I’m afraid Mr. Salinger isn’t accepting speaking engagements at the moment.”

“Yes, I
know
.” The dean’s polite formality quickly devolved into testiness. “But I thought he might make an exception for our particular school because”—insert your reason here; in this case it was—“as I
mentioned
, our student body is largely comprised of veterans—from the Gulf War—and seeing as Mr. Salinger is a veteran himself and has written about
the experiences of veterans adjusting to life in civilian society …” There was more. Already, I realized that there was always more.

“I completely understand. But Mr. Salinger isn’t accepting any speaking engagements at all.”

“Well, could you at least put me in touch with him so I could extend our invitation directly? I’m sure if he let me explain the situation, he’d be happy to come. We put all our speakers up at a
lovely
inn—”

“I’m afraid I can’t put you in touch with Mr. Salinger. He’s explicitly asked us not to give out his phone number or address.”

“Well, if I sent on a written invitation, could you forward it?”

I took a deep breath. It would be so much easier to lie. To say, “Sure! Of course!” And just toss the thing in the garbage, let them blame Salinger when they never got a reply. But I stuck to the script. There was a perverse pleasure in it. “I’m afraid that I can’t. Mr. Salinger has asked us not to forward any mail that arrives for him.”

“So if I sent on an invitation, what exactly would happen to it?” I could virtually hear the blood vessels bursting in this man’s face. This venture, I knew, was personal to him. It was not about bringing glory to his tiny college but about the relationship he’d forged with Salinger in his mind. “Would you just send it back to me? What would you do with it?”

Was I really supposed to tell him that his invite would be either returned to him or thrown in the round trash can below my boss’s desk (if I dared pass it on to her) or lost in Hugh’s pile of papers?

Yes, I was.

“But isn’t that illegal? Don’t you have an obligation to make sure Mr. Salinger receives all his mail? If it’s sent through the U.S. Postal Service?” This argument came up from time to time.

“Mr. Salinger has hired us as his agents. He has hired us to act on his behalf. Our job is to carry out his wishes.”

“But how do you know what his wishes are?” The dean was shouting by now, and I was sweating under the arms. “How do you know what he wants? Who
are
you anyway?”

“Mr. Salinger has detailed his wishes for us and we are simply carrying them out,” I said smoothly. He had a point, though. How
did
we—how did
I
—know the confines of Salinger’s wishes? What if he really did want to drive down to the Pine Barrens and stay at a very nice inn and talk to some veterans? Such a thing didn’t seem outside the realm of possibility. “I’m so sorry, Dean Something”—I’d also discovered that remembering and using the callers’ names helped defuse their anger—“but Mr. Salinger has explicitly instructed us to turn down all speaking engagements. It’s been a pleasure talking with you and I’m sure you’ll find a perfect speaker for your commencement.”

I hung up the phone. My sweater was soaked through under the arms, though my boss had decided to air out her office: an icy wind was now snaking through her windows, swirling around my desk. My body convulsed, briefly, as the chill air insinuated itself into my hot points. Confrontation made me very, very anxious. Then it hit me: I wasn’t anxious. I was ill. I had a fever. As a kid, sickness came upon me this way, out of nowhere: my head suddenly too heavy to keep up.

I stood up from my chair, my legs wobbling dangerously. Halfway across the office, I realized I was
running
, fueled by adrenaline.
Slow down
, I told myself, forcefully. Under the thin, anemic glare of the bathroom’s fluorescents, I splashed water on my face—noting my forehead’s coolness—then caught myself in the warped, peeling mirror: My cheeks were flushed pink, my eyes glistening brightly. This wasn’t illness. This wasn’t anxiety.

This was excitement.

Things were happening. I wasn’t
becoming
part of something. I was
already
part of something.

My best friend from high school, Jenny, worked a few blocks away, in the McGraw-Hill Building, editing social studies textbooks. Or text
book
, for she spent the entirety of her tenure working on one enormous project, a fifth-grade social studies primer that was being adapted for the public schools of the state of Texas. Apparently, Texas was so enormously powerful—so large, with so many schools and students, so much money—that it could demand a textbook tailored specifically to its needs, with a whole chapter on the Alamo, and another on the history of the state, and—most distressingly—the chapter on the civil rights movement omitted entirely. Jenny made light of all this, but she was genuinely troubled by it, and yet she also loved her job, the cleanness and rigor of it, the meetings at which her presence was required. She had drifted through college, transferring twice and picking up a variety of prescriptions along the way, but now she had a purpose, a structure to her life. Now she had Texas.

“It’s so nice just to be
normal
,” she’d told me a few months earlier, when I returned from London. In high school, we’d not wanted to be normal. We’d made fun of the normal people. We’d hated them.

“I know,” I said reflexively, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to be normal. I wanted to be extraordinary. I wanted to write novels and make films and speak ten languages and travel around the world. I wanted everything. So, I’d thought, had Jenny.

Perhaps as much as normalcy, she loved having money, her own money. She had a fraught relationship with her parents—more so than any of our friends—and she’d rushed into the trappings of grown-up life earlier than the rest of us. Editing textbooks paid far more than the literary jobs available
to those who had recently graduated from Swarthmore with a degree in poetry—as had Jenny—and, thus, she’d made a calculated decision to toil in the less glamorous realm of educational publishing. At the time, this was unfathomable to me. As was her equally calculated decision to move to a remote, cultureless, suburban section of Staten Island, in a newly built complex of identical fiberboard apartments. The commute to midtown took her a full hour and a half—each way—and meant that she couldn’t, for instance, meet after work to go to the Angelika for the new Hal Hartley movie, or for drinks at Von, or—certainly not—to see a band at Mercury Lounge. She had to join her fiancé, Brett, at the train and start the arduous journey home.

But Staten Island was cheaper, she said, than any of the neighborhoods to which my other friends were moving, most of them in Brooklyn: Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, the Fifth Avenue part of Park Slope, Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, a nebulous square off Flatbush that we would eventually learn to call Prospect Heights, and, more than anywhere else, my neighborhood, Williamsburg, and its neighbor to the north, Greenpoint, areas so densely populated with friends, and friends of friends, and distant acquaintances, or simply the loose network of Oberlin-Bard-Vassar-etc. that I couldn’t buy a cup of coffee at the L without running into several people I knew. Often, when I went out for breakfast on Sunday morning, at the Mediterranean place around the corner, I was seated by a dancer who’d been a year ahead of me at school and waited on by a painter who’d been two years ahead. At night, Don and I could meet Lauren for Thai food, or Leigh and Allison for gin and tonics at the Rat Pack–era bar on Bedford and watch an alternative circus, which involved one college friend of mine eating fire, another clowning in the style of Jacques Lecoq, another riding a unicycle and playing trombone. For me, this was heaven, heaven that could only be improved by Jenny moving in down the street.

For Jenny, though, it turned out this was hell. She had cast off such childish things. Heaven was, she told me, eyes shining, driving to a large supermarket and unloading a week’s worth of groceries directly into her apartment from her designated parking spot. Like me, Jenny was a child of the 1970s—her mother an Afro-sporting feminist who published poetry in
Lilith
and ran a women’s shelter—but she seemed to be morphing into a housewife from the 1950s, by sheer force of will. Her wedding, at the Central Park Boathouse, was to be a royal affair.

One unseasonably warm day toward the end of March—the sort of day when you realize that spring might actually arrive at some point, that it won’t be winter forever—I walked across Forty-Ninth Street, to Sixth Avenue, checked in with security, took the elevator up to the umpteenth floor, and met Jenny at her cubicle, which was large and white and newly constructed, at the center of an enormous open room filled with dozens and dozens of identical cubicles, their interior walls lined with pinned-up photos of boyfriends or husbands or smiling children, with postcards from faraway places. Jenny had a photo of Brett and one of her sister, Natalie, smiling goofily. But her cubicle was dominated by work: alongside the photos were printouts of e-mails. She gestured to these, made a monster face, and moaned, “BLARGH!”

“What?” I asked, laughing.

“My boss has decided that our office is going to be completely paperless,” she explained.

“How is that possible?” Now this sounds like a ridiculous question. But in 1996 it truly did seem impossible to eliminate paper from an office. Especially an office devoted to the production of
books
.

“Well, we’re going to do everything by e-mail. No more interoffice memos.” She pointed to her desk. “It’s driving me
insane
. Every two seconds I get ten new e-mails about NOTHING. She’ll send out something that I need to look at while
I’m working—like updated style sheets—and I just have to print it out, but there’s no printer on this floor, so I have to walk downstairs or upstairs to the printer, and half the time someone has taken my printouts accidentally, so I have to come back here and print them again, then go back downstairs and AGH!”

This didn’t sound like such a big deal to me, but I said nothing. I worked in an office that considered the photocopier a newfangled invention. What did I know.

“But what’s really driving me crazy is that
no one
talks to each other anymore. At all.” She widened her lovely brown eyes and stretched out her mouth. “So, my boss is just right there”—she pointed across the room to an empty cubicle identical to her own—“but instead of getting up, walking the fifteen feet over to my desk, and saying, ‘Hey, Jennifer, how close are we to being done on the Mexican immigration chapter,’ she
e-mails
me, from
across the room
! And I then have to e-mail her back, from
across the room
.” She smacked her hand into her head for emphasis.

“Could you just get up and answer her in person?” I asked.

“Apparently not! I tried that, and she looked at me like I was a complete weirdo and then said, ‘I can’t talk right now. Could you just e-mail me?’ ”

“That,” I agreed, “is crazy.”

Jenny put on her coat—a navy-blue duffle she’d worn for ages, in which she looked about twelve—and we headed out to the hallway and down so fast in the elevator that my ears popped. In the lobby, her mood shifted, her buoyancy gone. We had left her territory and were out in the world, where anything could happen. In high school, in college, we’d talked about everything, talked for hours and hours, through long road trips and whole nights, a unified front against the world. But we were no longer fully unified, and we didn’t
quite know how to face the world with these points of departure between us.

This is, I know, an old story.

In silence, Jenny and I walked across the southern end of Rockefeller Center, to the little Dean & DeLuca outpost, and scanned the prewrapped sandwiches in the refrigerated case. I refrained from looking at the prices—everything would be too much, so what did it matter—but chose mozzarella and tomato because I suspected it was the cheapest, being vegetarian. “Hmm,” said Jenny, “should I have the
nine-dollar
bowl of soup or the
eight-dollar
sandwich?” She picked up the latter. “The extremely tiny eight-dollar sandwich.” She raised her eyebrows. “Or maybe I should just have an enormous three-dollar doughnut.” I loved her all over again, even though she was marrying a person who had told me that he “didn’t really read fiction,” because it was hard for him to get around the fact that “it’s all lies.”

“How’s Don?” she asked in a falsely cheerful voice. She was fiercely loyal to my college boyfriend and baffled by my defection to Don. Brett had just sent off his law school applications. “How’s his novel?”