I took the steps down Angel’s Flight to Hill Street: a hundred and forty steps, with tight fists, frightened of no man, but scared of the Third Street Tunnel, scared to walk through it—claustrophobia. Scared of high places too, and of blood, and of earthquakes; otherwise, quite fearless, excepting death, except the fear I’ll scream in a crowd, except the fear of appendicitis, except the fear of heart trouble, even that, sitting in his room holding the clock and pressing his jugular vein, counting out his heartbeats, listening to the weird purr and whirr of his stomach. Otherwise, quite fearless.
Here is an idea with money: these steps, the city below, the stars within throwing distance: boy meets girl idea, good setup, big money idea. Girl lives in that grey apartment house, boy is a wanderer. Boy—he’s me. Girl’s hungry. Rich Pasadena girl hates money. Deliberately left Pasadena millions ‘cause of ennui, weariness with money. Beautiful girl, gorgeous. Great story, pathological conflict. Girl with money phobia: Freudian setup. Another guy loves her, rich guy. I’m poor. I meet rival. Beat him to death with caustic wit and also lick him with fists. Girl impressed, falls for me. Offers me millions. I marry her on condition she’ll stay poor. Agrees. But ending happy: girl tricks me with huge trust fund day we get married. I’m indignant but I forgive her ‘cause I love her.
Hold me, darkness. What’s that? An old rock lyric, or a feeling?
The trouble is…
There’s no trouble. How could he, how could any member of the .00001 percent of the prospering population, dare to be troubled? Who said to Joseph McCarthy, “Have you no shame, sir?” You don’t have to be a vicious right-wing zealot to entertain the question.
Still.
It’s your life, quite possibly your only one. Still you find yourself having a vodka at three a.m., waiting for your pill to kick in, with time ticking through you and your own ghost already wandering among your rooms.
The trouble is…
He can feel something, roiling at the edges of the world. Some skittery attentiveness, a dark gold nimbus studded with living lights like fish in the deep black ocean; a hybrid of galaxy and sultan’s treasure and chaotic, inscrutable deity.
I didn’t know what to do. I sat there until it got dark. It happened very slowly, almost imperceptibly. At some moment when it seemed that there was quite a bit of light still left in the sky the lamps along the pathways flickered on and after that it was difficult to tell the real light from the fake light. Or I suppose the light cast from the lamps was no less real than the light in the sky, but there was something false about it, and finally, after a long time, that was all the light there was.
Sometime later that afternoon, Max Jackers surprised Jim by calling him back. “You folks over there,” he said, “you say you call yourselves creatives, is that what you’re telling me? And the work you do, you call that the creative, is that what you said? Jim said that was correct. “And I suppose you think of yourselves as pretty creative over there, I bet.”
“I suppose so,” said Jim, wondering what Max was driving at.
“And the work you do, you probably think that’s pretty creative work.”
“What are you asking me, Uncle Max?”
“Well if all that’s true,” said the old man, “that would make you creative creatives creating creative creative.” There was silence as Max allowed Jim to take this in. “And that right there,” he concluded, “is why I didn’t miss my calling. That’s a use of the English language just too absurd to even contemplate.”
With that, Max hung up.
And crazy little Ricardo, the carpenter’s fifteen-year-old son: “I want to talk seriously with you now about what I have been thinking. I have been thinking that you are not going back to the United States for over a year and that if in that time I got a job someplace and had real luck I could save almost fifty dollars. Would that be enough to ride with you to California in an airplane?
“… But there’s one thing I’ve been wondering about, if on the airplane it would be possible to sit next to you. I have never been in an airplane, and I would like to sit next to you, at least at first, if such a thing were possible.”
We were above Jeronimo and could see its bamboo roofs, the columns of woodsmoke mingled with the mist, and mattresses of morning fog lying in the fields. The sunlight that was full against this high slope where we stood had not reached Jeronimo. But its pattern was clear, even in the broth of mist. Its stone paths were laid out among the gardens like a star outlined on a patched flag. It looked wonderful from here, neither a town nor a farm but a settlement of precisely placed buildings on the river that was a twisted blue vein in the muscle of the jungle. At greater distances, smoke rose from the forest trenches of other clearings.
I open the truck’s door, step onto the brick side street. I look at Company Hill again, all sort of worn down and round. A long time ago it was real craggy and stood like an island in the Teays River. It took over a million years to make that smooth little hill, and I’ve looked all over it for trilobites. I think how it has always been there and always will be, at least for as long as it matters. The air is smoky with summertime. A bunch of starlings swim over me. I was born in this country and I have never very much wanted to leave. I remember Pop’s dead eyes looking at me. They were real dry, and that took something out of me. I shut the door, head for the café.
I see a concrete patch in the street. It’s shaped like Florida, and I recollect what I wrote in Ginny’s yearbook: “We will live on mangoes and love.” And she up and left without me—two years she’s been down there without me. She sends me postcards with alligator wrestlers and flamingos on the front. She never asks me any questions. I feel like a real fool for what I wrote, and go into the café.
The Salinger who emerges from this book is a close psychological relative of his most famous creation, the teenager Holden Caulfield, and the whiz-kid Glass children who would star in his later books. He’s the perennial outsider and spiritual pilgrim who feels stranded in a vulgar, materialistic world filled with hypocrites and bores. Doted upon by a mother who “believed in his talent completely,” Mr. Slawenski says, the young Salinger “came to expect the same reaction from others and had little patience or consideration for those who might doubt him or not share his point of view.” This sense of specialness would later calcify into an impatience with other people, an inability to grow past Holden’s adolescent either/or view of the world, which would eventually crimp Salinger’s later fiction, rendering it increasingly solipsistic and judgmental.
Around four, I offered to tour Cornelia through my record collection. Part of me didn’t want to play her any music, instead I wanted her to see how merely possessing all those albums was its own satisfaction, to know that they were there. The collector’s joy. There’d been a time when I knew every recording of every piece, the sign of a specialist who understands very little. But now to gaze upon the sleeves, to not play them. To be in awe. I wanted her to use silence to appreciate that, in comparison, the experience of listening was a lot more personal and complicated: how it depended on the day’s mood, the temperature of the air, what clothes you were wearing and how they felt, what you’d eaten for lunch, and then of course the equipment and the tones it produced and at what volume, and every associated emotion and memory brought by the listener. Never mind the music. The experience of music was so different for each individual, it wasn’t even worth discussing. As soon as I pressed PLAY, we may as well have existed in separate dimensions.
Everyone always moves so insouciantly into the future, one foot in front of the next, that it seems as if they’ve already been there and liked it enough to go back for more. Only their total confidence permits me to follow without undue terror. Yet sometimes— such as when you read in the Times of certain weird and bad events, like the guy who heard a noise outside his sister’s house, ran out the door to inspect, and then plunged into an old abandoned chalk quarry, just caved in, from which his body has never yet been recovered— you realize how the future is a place where no one has been, and from which you don’t come back.
