The Salinger Contract Read Free Page A

Xerox of Conner, smack dab in the center aisle. The shot looked just like the ones we had used in Lit —Conner with a full head of black curls and five o’clock shadow, his serious, pale-blue eyes staring straight at you as if he had something important to say and was hoping you’d give him the time to listen. He was wearing a sport coat, a pressed light-blue shirt, and boots. His hands were stuffed in the pockets of his jeans, one thumb tucked in a belt loop. On one of his wrists was an expensive-looking watch. He looked tough and earnest, the publishing world’s answer to Josh Brolin—what John Irving should have looked like but didn’t. I was studying Conner’s photo when I noticed Beatrice tugging on my sleeve.
    â€œWho’s that person you keep staring at?” she asked.
    â€œGuy I used to know,” I said. “His name is Conner.”
    â€œIs he your friend?”
    I said I wasn’t sure, but I would probably go to his reading, and maybe I would ask him to come by our house for dinner or dessert. “Maybe you’ll get to meet him too,” I said. “Wouldn’t you like that?”
    â€œNo.” Beatrice began to toddle off in the direction of the children’s section. She seemed a bit scared of the guy in the picture, or perhaps scared of what she thought my friendship with him might bring. But I couldn’t begin to imagine what could possibly frighten her about a good-looking, all-American guy like Conner, or about the fact that I still wanted to be his friend.

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    A s it turned out, Conner didn’t come to our house for dinner or dessert; it was a school night and the kids needed to be in bed by nine. But I did go to the reading. I had figured I would sit in the back and mill about until he was done greeting his fans. But the turnout was poor. Really poor. Authors tend to exaggerate the number of people who come to readings, or at least I do. Usually, if you divide by three, you get the true figure. When you say only seven or eight people showed up, everyone gets depressed, uncomfortable, and judgmental, particularly in a college town where no one regards writing books as an actual career.
    â€œRight, but what do you do for money?” my wife’s colleagues continually asked me when I trailed along to departmental parties or when I ran into them at Lowes or Home Depot or Best Buy. In their line of work, or whatever they did that passed for work, writing was just one of the many things you did to keep your job—you didn’t expect anybody to read what you wrote, let alone pay you for it. After all, you’d gotten your job by convincing your employers you’d read hundreds of books they probably hadn’t read themselves. When you told these folks honestly that you had a lousy turnout, they tended to guess twenty-five or thirty people came. But when I showed up at the Bloomington Borders for the Conner Joyce reading, only eight people were there, including the events coordinator.
    On the metal folding chairs positioned in rows in front of a podium and a signing table were a pair of trampy white women in their late thirties or early forties; they were wearing tight, sequined blue jeans and were holding copies of People magazine’sbachelors issue, circa 2005, for Conner to sign. There was the de rigueur weedy, sunlight-averse guy with copies of each of Conner’s books stacked in a wheeled pushcart, undoubtedly hoping to move autographed first editions on eBay (“Just your signature. No inscription,” he said). There was a doughy lady in her early fifties with a library copy of Ice Locker and a digital camera so she could take a photo of Conner for her blog, Authors Are My Weakness . Conner gamely agreed, but after she snapped the pic and he mentioned his wife, she didn’t stick around.
    A homeless dude was sprawled across three chairs in the front row; there was a white boy with baggy jeans, a turned-around