The Salinger Contract Read Free

moved away. I fell out of touch with most of my old contacts, and I barely spent any time in Manhattan, let alone in Philadelphia. When Nine Fathers was published, I kept wishing vainly that my old assistant, Miriam, who now worked as one of Terry Gross’s producers for Fresh Air , would book me for an interview in Philly so that I would have an excuse to call Conner up.
    But that never happened. Conner had his life writing crime novels in Pennsylvania; I sat on my front porch with my laptop, or in my wife’s library carrel in Indiana, surfing other people’s iTunes playlists and trying to think of ideas for a follow-up to Nine Fathers that wouldn’t offend my mother.
    When I saw the poster at Borders advertising Conner’s reading, I was with Beatrice. We were shopping to replace her copy of Knuffle Bunny Too , which I had accidentally washed along with a load of her cloth diapers. This had become my life—cooking dinner, walking the dog, squiring Ramona to school and Beatrice to day care, and taking the two of them to cafés, ballet class, gymnastics, play dates, birthday parties, and bookstores. I would write a few pages per day on drafts of stories and books I wasn’t sure I would ever finish while my spouse slaved away on the syllabi, scholarly articles, and book proposals that would win her tenure so that we would never have to worry about health insurance or the price of college tuition.
    Dr. Sabine Krummel, my spouse, was a graduate of both the Freie Universität of Berlin and Columbia University. She had published one book with Routledge Press ( Fusion and Diffusion: A Network Analysis of How Rules Governing Nuclear Power Safety Procedures Transfer Across European Member State Borders ) and had a contract for her follow-up book with Cambridge University Press ( Autostimulation and Autonomy Under Import Substitution in Postcolonial Society ). She was “a shoo-in for tenure, man,” at least according to her dreadlocked, eternally stoned department chair, Dr. Joel Getty, who was better known by his nickname, “Spag.”
    Occasionally, I groused to Sabine about our life in Bloomington, and how much it paled in comparison to the life we had led in Manhattan. To keep ourselves amused, we kept a private blog under the pen name Buck Floomington. We wrote awful, nasty stuff about Sabine’s colleagues that we never shared with anyone: who was sleeping with whom, who liked to go shooting at the target range behind Brad’s Guns outside Indianapolis, who had threatened his family with a chainsaw, who hired only Asian women to serve as his work studies, who kept a shrine to basketball coach Bobby Knight in his rec room, who had gotten banned from the strip mall massage studio for demanding a hand job … It was cathartic. Sometimes, in the desolate, insular heartland, you do whatever you can to keep your mind alive.
    Still, what from the outside may have looked like complacency actually felt a lot like security. Bloomington was a quiet college town that may have offered little, but it also expected little in return. And though most of the faculty spouses I knew had either settled or given up, there was a certain comfort in surrender. Sure, I could have finished a second book or freelanced this or that article. I could have competed for a lecturing gig at Butler University or Ivy Tech or for an editorial job at some magazine, such as Indianapolis Monthly or Bloom . But if I wanted to spend my days literally bleaching the shit out of diapers and mastering the art of vegetarian cooking with the aid of cookbooks by the only authors I read anymore, Mark Bitt­man and Deborah Madison, then that was fine too.
    The Bloomington Borders, located next to a FedEx Kinko’s and across from a Panera Bread in the College Mall, was going out of business, and all kids’ books were 50 percent off. Beatrice and I were stocking up on Mo Willems and Dr. Seuss books when I saw the color