The Salinger Contract (3 page)

At the end of the evening, I drove him back to his hotel. We vowed to keep in better touch. We shook hands, hugged, and he repeated his invitation to Pennsylvania. I could bring Sabine and the kids and make a whole family weekend out of it, he said. “And better make it soon. Before we have to sell the house.”

I wished him luck and said I trusted Chicago would be better than Bloomington.

“I sure hope you're right, man,” he said.

I watched him stride toward the doors of the Indiana Memorial Union, then disappear into the lobby. I thought I'd probably never hear from him again, or if I did, it would be in another six or seven years after he had conquered his writers' block and written three more thrillers. Maybe by then Sabine would have tenure, and we'd have a bigger house in Walnut Creek, where the schools were better. I certainly didn't expect to hear from Conner the next night.

I
didn't recognize the number when it appeared on my cell phone. I figured it was either a wrong number or someone from the Highway Patrolmen's Association Fund asking for dough. I was trying to fold laundry with one hand while using the other to keep Ramona from climbing onto the counter to take a pack of Gummi bears out of a cabinet—“No,” I was saying. “You already had dessert. And you've already brushed teeth.”

“I'll brush them again,” Ramona said.

“Come on, stop it. Just get down from there.”

Meanwhile, Sabine was trying to finish reading half a dozen papers for the panel she would be chairing at the American Political Science Association meeting while Beatrice was clinging to her leg. “Can you get her off me?” she asked.

I was going to let the call go straight to voice mail, but I noticed the Chicago area code. I had two immediate thoughts—either my mother was sick or Conner was calling. I picked up.

“Is this an OK time, buddy?” Conner asked. He sounded harried and out of breath.

“Not really,” I said. “Can I call you back?”

“Yeah, sure, I guess.” He hung up. I spent the next hour and a half reading
Island of the Blue Dolphins
to Ramona before she finally nodded off; meanwhile, Sabine fell asleep nursing Beatrice. I rinsed the rest of the dishes, put them in the dishwasher, turned it on, and finished folding the laundry. I put on a light fleece jacket, leashed my old border collie/husky mix Hal, then, when I got outside, I tried to call Conner back at the number he had called me from. Apparently, he had been calling from the Drake Hotel. I asked to be transferred to his room, but the desk clerk told me Conner wasn't in the “Author's Suite” anymore, and had said he would be checking out early.

“This wouldn't be Mr. Dunford, would it?” the desk clerk asked.

“Who?”

“Anyway, he's not here.”

I took Hal to Bryan Park and back—didn't see a single human being on our entire walk. Then I went to bed, finding a slip of space next to my sleeping wife and our sprawled two-and-a-half-year-old. I had long passed my days of staying up late; I knew my kids would be up at six and wouldn't care whether I had gotten my seven hours. It was well past midnight when my Charles Mingus “Fables of Faubus” ringtone woke me.

“Hello?” I made my way out of our bedroom and into the darkened living room. I practically tripped over Hal, who growled slightly at my approach.

“Hey, man.” Conner whispered loudly. “Did I wake you up?”

“Not at all. I was just doing some writing. What's going on?”

“I gotta talk to somebody,” he said. “This is so messed up and I really don't know who else I can talk to about it.”

“Sure,” I said. “Shoot.”

“No way. Not over the phone.”

“OK.” I waited for him to fill in the blanks, and when he didn't, I said, “You mean you want me to come all the way out to Chicago?”

“Nah, that's too far for you,” he said. “And I need to get away from here anyway, to make sure no one's following me.”

“Following you? What are you talking about?”

“I probably sound like I've been drinking, right?”

“Have you?”

“No. Look—can I borrow you tomorrow sometime during the day? Not for too long, maybe an hour or two? I know it's a huge favor to ask, but I can't call Ange. You're the one person I can call.”

“Sure,” I said. “Whatever you need.”

“You're a bud,” he said. “Hold on, let me look at my map.” There was a half minute of silence, then Conner said, “Can you drive to West Lafayette first thing in the morning? There's a Hilton Garden Inn there.”

“What's this all about?”

“Can't tell you now, man. Just need to bounce something off somebody. I'll tell you when you get here. You're a good listener; you like a good story, right? 'Cause this is a pretty good story so far.”

“All right,” I said. “I'll get there when I can.”

“Can you try to make it by nine?”

“Do my best.”

“And bring a bathing suit. They've got a pool. We might swim.”

“What?”

“It'll all make sense when you get here, at least as much sense as any of it makes to me.”

“OK.”

“When you get here, ask for my room. I'll be staying under a different name.”

“What name?”

“You should appreciate this, my friend.” Conner laughed. “Salinger.”

A
t this point, I should probably discuss my strange relationship with J. D. Salinger, which I really hadn't thought about all that much at the time, but it might clarify some events later on. When I was growing up on the north side of Chicago and attending high school at Lane Tech, where I pulled A's in English and D's in woodshop, a fair number of my friends were Salinger fans. In early December 1980, my best friend, Paul Benson—a guy I also lost track of shortly after I moved to Indiana—handed me his dog-eared, underlined copy of
Catcher
and told me to read it—“It'll rock your world, bro,” he said.

I hadn't read Salinger before, but Paul and I were always trading books and we tended to trust each other's judgment. I gave him Kerouac and Burroughs; he gave me Vonnegut and Salinger. We liked Ayn Rand and William F. Buckley Jr., too, but let's not get into that—we were kids and it was a different era.

The night I cracked
Catcher
, I was sitting in the front room of the apartment where I lived with my mom. She was out, as usual, and I was alone watching
Monday Night Football
when Howard Cosell announced that John Lennon had been shot. I watched TV all night, listening to every update, finally learning that Lennon was dead, that his assassin's name was Mark David Chapman, and that Chapman had had a copy of
Catcher in the Rye
in his back pocket. Lennon was my favorite Beatle, and, just a few days earlier, I had read Aaron Gold's “Tower Ticker” gossip column in the
Chicago Tribune
, which reported that Lennon and Yoko Ono were considering playing the Uptown Theater to promote their new album,
Double Fantasy
. Sometimes, the
Tribune
gave free event tickets to its employees, and I had been planning to ask my mom if she could get me some. I wasn't so sure I wanted to read the novel anymore.

I was still debating reading the book a few months later when John Hinckley, another nut who liked
Catcher
, tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan. I learned about that in my debate class, when my teacher, Vicki Ryan, wheeled in a TV so we could watch the news. I vowed never to read Salinger's book. It was nearly a decade before I actually did read it. I was a fifth-year senior at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and I read the book on the 50 Bus, on rides between my apartment and campus.

Catcher
made no great or lasting impression on me. It probably had too many negative associations for me to see its brilliance. It seemed like a manifesto for the antisocial, something I might have gotten more out of at age thirteen. I skipped the rest of Salinger's oeuvre.

Still, from time to time, whenever I saw Salinger's novels or story collections on my friends' bookshelves, or when I heard authors such as Conner talk about how much they admired the guy, I wondered how those books could have influenced them so greatly. I wondered too how Mr. Salinger—in seclusion for more than forty years in Cornish, New Hampshire—felt about the readers who admired his work. If somehow knowing he had touched Hinckley and Chapman had convinced him that escaping society had been the right move. I wondered how it would feel to write something—a story, a novel, an article—that would inspire someone to change his or her life for better or worse. In some small way, I got the chance to find out after I published
Nine Fathers
.

Though my book was a work of fiction, like all novels, particularly all first novels, it had its basis in autobiography. It was a satirical rendering of the life I had led as the son of a single mom, who kept just about all her past existence secret from me and who'd cut her ties with her previous life so resolutely that she never told me anything about my father, Sidney Joseph Langer, other than his name and that she met him at the Coq d'Or Lounge at the Drake Hotel, where she was working as a cocktail waitress. For all I knew, and for all the questions my mom left unanswered, she might well not have known any more about him than she told me. My “novel-in-stories” (that's what it said on the jacket) concerned a young man searching for his own identity and imagining nine different fathers he might have had. There was a rich father, a poor father, an artist, a criminal, a tinker, a tailor, a soldier, a sailor, and a spy. The book, which was told in nine different genres, was about the journeys I might have taken if I'd had a little more courage. I had often looked up old Sidney L. in phone books and in online directories and considered calling or visiting the people who had that name and lived at those addresses. But I never did.

The book was one I needed to write, but in retrospect, not one that anyone needed to read. I didn't think it would make much of an impression on my mother. She had often encouraged me to read, and kept numerous books on her shelves from her high school and college years—and like all Americans who came of age in the early 1960s, she kept some Salinger books in her collection. But I don't recall her reading much of anything aside from nature magazines and puzzle books. Plus, in
Nine Fathers
, though I'd used my father's real name in the hopes that he might happen upon it and find me, I'd described the character based on my mother as vaguely and sympathetically as possible. I'd changed all the biographical details, didn't mention her temper or her mood swings. I'd left out just about anything that would have led readers to believe she neglected me. I didn't mention her wealthy, cocktail-swilling boyfriends, most a minimum of ten years older than her. I didn't write about the packs of Virginia Slims she asked me to buy for her, about the spending sprees, the occasional shoplifting charge, or the Rob Roys or Crème de Menthe. I didn't even include the fact that her job at the
Tribune
consisted of writing the Anagrams and Jumble
for the
Trib
's puzzle page, which I thought would have struck readers as hackneyed symbolism even though it was actually true.

Shortly before it was published, I gave my mother a copy of
Nine Fathers
. By then, she had reached retirement age, but she was still working at the
Tribune
. When I would speak to her over the phone, I would wait for her to mention the book, but she never did, and I grew to suspect she hadn't read it, and probably never would.

But an interview I did with Steve Edwards, the host of a Chicago NPR show, caught her attention. Having written hundreds of author profiles, I understood the sorts of stories that captivated an interviewer. You were supposed to be snappy and glib, and you had to talk about how your writing was autobiographical, even, maybe especially, when it wasn't. And so I talked about my mother's secrecy and the mystery that constituted my father's life. I talked about the puzzles on the
Tribune
comics page and the Coq d'Or Lounge. I talked about the boyfriends Mom used to bring home—those silver-­haired executives reeking of aftershave who ordered me to fetch ice for their cocktails and matches for their cigars, then offered me sips and puffs that I refused.

I didn't think I had said anything particularly offensive or controversial. But the day after the talk show, my mom sent me a stern e-mail: “You have sullied your parentage,” she wrote. I tried to call her to get an explanation, but she never gave me one. For more than a year, she refused to take my calls. She didn't answer the e-mails I sent either. Only after Ramona, her first grandchild, started to speak full sentences did my mom begin to speak to me again, but our relationship had been irrevocably damaged. There had been a time when the two of us could talk for hours about anything; now, our conversations rarely lasted more than five minutes. I had written something that had wounded her and she could no longer trust me, she said. Mere words I had spoken had changed the trajectory of lives—mine, my mother's, and those of my wife and children. I began to sort of understand how it might have felt to be J. D. Salinger, how he might have been led to a life of seclusion. Once I'd had great plans for more novels, but after
Nine Fathers
, I weighed my words carefully and worried about the consequences of putting them into print. I had not completed another novel or story, and I was beginning to think I never would.

R
oom 110 at the West Lafayette Hilton was registered to a Mr. Jerome Salinger. It gave out onto Interstate 65, an unremarkable but functional highway that connected greater Chicagoland to Indianapolis. Conner had drawn the maroon curtains over his negligible view, their paisley pattern billowing stale gusts from the air conditioner, which was on full-blast even though, lately, Indiana mornings had been starting out cool.

Conner had moved the room's faux-mahogany desk and chairs away from the window, as if he were a spy afraid someone might see him through the window and try to assassinate him. He slapped me hard on the shoulder, thanked me for coming, and apologized for the “mysterious invitation.” I noticed the beds were still made, and that Conner was wearing the same jacket, shirt, and jeans he'd worn at Borders.

“Yeah,” he said, noticing what I was looking at. “Couldn't sleep, man. Didn't even try. You hungry?”

I shook my head. “Already ate.”

“Coffee?”

“Water's good.” I filled myself a glass from the bathroom sink.

“So,” I said as I took a sip, “what do you need?”

“You bring a swimsuit?” he asked.

“Yeah, but I'm not much of a swimmer.”

“Let's head down to the pool anyway,” he said. “Might be safer.”

“Safer?”

Conner assured me he wasn't worried for my safety, only his, and that the precautions were probably unnecessary anyway. He was just feeling paranoid that someone might have been listening to him or photographing him, and a swimming pool was more difficult to bug than a room. If he weren't married and if he didn't have a kid, he wouldn't have given a damn. But now safety was constantly on his mind. So I followed along with Conner's routine, which, if nothing else, was more interesting than my own. At this time of day, I would have been at home doing the diaper laundry, emptying the dishwasher, reading cookbooks, inspecting recipes on Epicurious, stalking old girlfriends on Facebook, and imagining other novels I could write that would probably get me into trouble—for example,
Nine Exes
.

Conner changed into a pair of black swim trunks; mine were orange and still a bit damp from the previous day at Bryan Park, where the kids and I had spent the day riding the water slides. We took the stairs down to the pool, which was empty save for a chain-smoking mom and her two boys who were eating Zagnut bars and littering the pool with their candy wrappers.

“You know, you're the only person I can tell this story to; you're the only person who'll
get
it.” Conner took a sip of club soda and stepped into the pool.

I got in after him—the water was piss-warm and motionless. “All right, what's the story?” I asked.

“First, let me ask you something. Do you remember that book I told you to read when we were hangin' in the Pokes?”

I remembered. In fact, it surprised me that he remembered; I figured the time we spent together had made more of an impression on me than on him.

“Yeah,” I told him. “We were talking about John Le Carré.
The Russia House
.”

“That's right. There was a line in it I told you about. One of my favorites. You remember what it was?”

I didn't. In fact, I hadn't managed to read the book all the way through. I had always found Le Carré's books dense and slow-going, though I didn't mind some of the movies and BBC TV series based on his novels.

“That's all right,” he said. “It's something the Russian agent says to Barley, the British publisher—‘Promise me that if ever I find the courage to think like a hero, you will act like a merely decent human being.'”

Conner repeated those last five words. He lingered over their syllables as if they were part of some prayer he had learned back in Catholic school—
a merely decent human being
.

“I have a feeling this story may turn out to be kind of like that,” he said.

“Why?” I asked. “Are you about to become a hero?”

“Not me,” he said. “Maybe the opposite.”

“You mean a villain?”

“Yeah,” Conner said. “Maybe something like that.”