Free My Salinger Year by Joanna Rakoff Page B

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’tquite 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?”
    “I think he’s pretty much done.” Jenny was ostensibly a writer herself. In high school, in college, her life began and ended with poetry. Her work was beautiful, brilliant, strange. But since meeting Brett, she rarely talked about poetry anymore. “He’s just making final changes. He seems to be working over every sentence a thousand times.”
    “Mmm,” said Jenny, resting her cheek on her hand. She looked tired, I noticed. Though her cheeks were rosy, as always, and her eyes bright, there was a drawn look to her face, dark circles under her eyes. “Have you read it?”
    “He won’t let me. He doesn’t want anyone to look at it until it’s completely done.”
    “I get that,” she said, chewing thoughtfully. Her sandwich,on some kind of flat, oily bread, looked much better than mine. “Have you read
any
of his stuff?”
    I hesitated. In fact, the previous week, he’d given me a story, for the first time. I’d come home from work to find him leafing through papers at his desk. Nervously, he clipped a few together and handed them to me, before I’d even taken my coat off, then put one hand on my shoulder, another on my hip, and folded me down onto the couch. “Sit,” he said, laughing. “Stay.” He stood, though, pacing lightly back and forth in front of me. “I wrote this a long time ago—two or three years ago—and it’s very different from what I’m working on now. But it’s maybe the only successful short story I’ve written.” He paused, running his hands through his hair. Without pomade, it was thin and lank, a few white threads among the brown. “I’m not
really
a story person. I’m a novelist.” He smiled. “I think big. Big picture. Big ideas. Stories are miniature.”
    I nodded. “You want me to read this?” I asked. “Now?”
    He nodded. “You can take your coat off.”
    The story