Are You Happy Now? (17 page)

“Y
OU WANT SOME
Xanax?” Flam offers the next day when Lincoln calls to give him the news.

“I’ll tough it out.”

“Well, anytime. Just ask. I’ve got a nice supply.”

Lincoln rises out of his funk just enough to realize that he has learned something new about his friend. “I didn’t know you take tranquilizers,” he says.

“I don’t, almost never. It just bolsters me to have a stockpile. When things get bad, usually just thinking that the pills are there is enough to keep me steady. You should use them the same way.”

“Let me see how it goes,” Lincoln says.

He waits two days before calling his parents. Though they aren’t totally surprised, given the prior separation, his mother wants specifics that Lincoln can’t bear to furnish. She offers to come out to comfort him, but Lincoln tells her that’s not necessary. His father hurries through the sympathy and moves swiftly to a dispiriting checklist of things Lincoln must do: cancel joint credit cards and bank accounts; notify the utility companies; warn the mortgage holder; sign up a lawyer. “Now, son,” the father continues, “I don’t know what was going on in your
marriage, but, whatever you do, when you talk to Mary again, don’t confess anything.”

“Dad!”

“Just good advice. You admit something, and it can come back to haunt you.”

“OK, Dad,” says Lincoln, thinking of his tryst with Amy and feeling slightly cheered to have an incriminating secret to withhold from his wife.

On top of everything else, breaking up a marriage turns out to be a terrible drain on one’s time. Lincoln spends countless hours on the phone following his father’s checklist, though he stops short of hiring a lawyer (canceling a seldom-used joint MasterCard doesn’t ignite the sense of helplessness and failure that comes with the thought of enlisting an actual human being—Lincoln will need more strength for that). But he also has to calculate whom to tell and how to tell them, then evade as best he can the inevitable questions.

On Friday afternoon, he trudges down to Duddleston’s office. Amy is on vacation (writing her novel, she has promised), so Lincoln only has to navigate past Mrs. Macintosh to land an audience with the boss. Facing other acquaintances, Lincoln has come right to the point. With his employer, Lincoln serves up a few publishing matters before dropping the news casually as he’s about to leave.

“My God, no!” Duddleston cries, reacting so strongly that Lincoln wonders for a moment if the good Presbyterian considers divorce a firing offense. After a moment, the boss proceeds in a more measured tone. “The two of you seemed so right for each other. Did you try seeing someone? A counselor? A therapist?”

“No, we decided not to do that.”

“Every marriage has its bumps. Victoria and I...” Mentioning his wife, Duddleston falters. The angled October sun streaming through the window leaves his face in shadow, and Lincoln gets the sense that Duddleston feels buried suddenly, struggling in
a dark place in his past. “It’s important to talk,” he continues, recovering. “Look, I’ll pay for it. Find yourselves a good marriage counselor and have them send the bills to me.”

“Jeez,” says Lincoln, flabbergasted at his boss’s generosity. “That’s too kind of you, but I can’t accept it. I’ll talk to Mary, and maybe we’ll see someone. But thank you so much.”

“I’m serious. Get someone. Talk.”

“Thank you, thank you,” says Lincoln, hurrying out of the office.

Walking to the L station after work the next Monday, Lincoln turns on his cell phone and finds a fresh message from Amy. “Call me,” she orders. He ignores the command. He’s simply not in the mood. But later that night, after he’s spent the evening with Flam at John Barleycorn, he calls Amy back.

“John, I heard,” she says. Beyond the sympathy in her voice, Lincoln detects a pinprick of curiosity.

“Heard what?” he says, being difficult.

“About the divorce.”

“Who told you that?”

Amy hesitates. “Mrs. Macintosh.”

“The old bat shouldn’t gossip.”

Amy recovers enough to hold her own. “Well, is it true?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s one of those things.”

“Do you mind my asking—what happened?”

No one else except his mother has been so brazen about getting the autopsy report. “It’s a long story,” he says wearily.

“I thought you two were trying to work it out.”

Suddenly he understands: “You’re not about to be named a correspondent, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“Fuck off,” says Amy, and she hangs up.

Lincoln lies down on his bed and concentrates on Flam’s little white container of Xanax.

Tony Buford calls the next day at work. “I thought I should check in and see how my editor is doing,” the poet says.

“OK,” Lincoln tells him. “The book’s in copy editing. I sent the manuscript over to our designer to get some ideas for the cover. And we need to think some more about that title.”

“I meant personally,” Buford corrects. “I was sorry to hear about you and your wife.”

Was there a story on the front page of the
Tribune
? Does all of Chicago know? “Who told you?” Lincoln asks bluntly.

“Matt Breeson mentioned it. I’ve been dealing with him on my contract.” Buford pauses, then continues, “Sorry—didn’t mean to be impertinent.”

“That’s OK. I’m just kind of sick of talking about it. And thinking about it.”

“Understood. So listen, I’ve come up with some ideas for the title of my collection. Want to hear?”

“Sure.”

“OK. Here’s the one I like best:
Still Life with DustBuster
.”

Lincoln says nothing.

“You know, because one of the poems is about a DustBuster,” Buford explains.

“I remember. What else have you got?”

“Well, I’ve got several.
Shards of a Man. Building Blocks. Facets. Taking Stock
...” Buford keeps rolling them out, and Lincoln listens, but he can’t hear. The words are white noise. His mind is drifting. Mary has left him for another man. A man with hemorrhoids. “
Surroundings. How to Get By. Reflections—
”

“OK!” Lincoln interrupts. “There’s a lot to think about there.”

“I’ve got more.”

“Listen, why don’t you just e-mail me the whole list, so I can chew it over.”

“Sure. I’ll put them in the order I like best, favorite on top.”

“OK. Now I’ve got to get back to work.”

“Sure, sure, you’re a busy guy. But have you got just one more second?”

Lincoln sighs silently. “Of course.”

Buford starts slowly, picking his words carefully. “I know it’s none of my business—we’ve got the editor-writer relationship, nothing more—but, well, in all the back-and-forth over my mom and my book, I’ve come to feel pretty close to you.”

“Yes?” Where in God’s name can this be going?

“And I really hate to see you get torn up over the marital situation.”

What has Matt Breeson told him? “I think I’m handling it pretty well,” Lincoln says.

“Of course you are, of course you are. But just bear with me here. I’ve started a new group, a new process, really. I’m calling it Poetry Therapy, and it combines poetry appreciation with yoga, but yoga without all the New Age, spiritual crap. You get the best of both worlds—yoga to relax your body and poetry to sharpen your mind. I’ve got ten or so people in my group. We meet on Thursday evenings in the DePaul student center. I really think it would do you good.”

“Ahhh.” Lincoln can’t find words to describe the horror of the image that has risen in his mind: ten rubbery nerds in body-baring Spandex, rolling around on smelly gym mats, sweating and sighing while someone in a pretentious voice reads aloud from
Leaves of Grass
. “Gee, I appreciate your concern,” Lincoln says. “But I’m trying to get through this on my own.”

“Sure.” Buford doesn’t sound entirely convinced. “Just keep it in mind. I really think this could help.”

“Thanks. Send me the titles. Bye.”

Flam remains heroic in his kindnesses, offering not just Xanax but a continuing patient ear and a willingness to talk Lincoln back from the cliffs of despair and paranoia. They eat together most evenings, usually at John Barleycorn, though occasionally they venture to some other inexpensive spot on the
North Side. “I’m not even mad,” Lincoln confesses one night. “It’s as if anger is beside the point. I’m mostly just dazed.”

“It’s probably like grief,” Flam suggests. “There are stages you have to go through, and you’ll get to anger eventually.”

“I can’t believe she was falling in love with someone else while we were living together. It makes me question everything—as if I’ve been wrong from the start. My whole reality is tilted.”

“There is no reality,” Flam says. “You just have to tell yourself a good story and stick to it.”

Flam’s companionship bolsters Lincoln through the first agonizing weeks, but in his misery Lincoln even grows short with his generous friend and frustrated at the awkward bachelorhood they share. Lincoln starts to lose patience with Flam’s amusements, such as his habit over dinner of disgorging the news of the day, particularly items confirming the idiocy of somebody or some institution. Flam has become particularly enthralled by a story embraced by the tabloid
Sun-Times
about a man in suburban Schaumburg who weighs over nine hundred pounds and can’t get out of bed. He needs hospital care, but the health authorities have decided that the best treatment is to keep him at home on a strict diet until he’s lost enough weight to move. “They’re starving the poor bastard!” Flam cries one evening at Barleycorn as Lincoln hides behind his mug of beer.

The next day, the news turns tragic. The fat man bribed a neighborhood boy to smuggle in several bags of hamburgers, fries, and candy. The man binged, then died, probably of a heart attack. “Murder!” pronounces Flam. “The state killed him.”

Lincoln can’t keep it in. “For God’s sake, the man ate himself to death. The health authorities were doing what they could.”

“Then it’s suicide facilitated by the state. They probably didn’t want to have to pay to get the fat guy to the hospital and take care of him there.”

Lincoln carefully puts down the knife and fork he was using on his open-faced tuna-melt sandwich. He speaks in weary tones.
“The man was pathetic. He’s not worth our time. Let’s talk about something else.”

“Suit yourself,” Flam grumbles, and the dinner concludes in monosyllables.

By the time Lincoln is in bed at home, he’s digested the evening sufficiently to know exactly what Flam is now thinking: no wonder Mary left that cold son of a bitch.

The next day, Lincoln gets to work line editing one of Arthur Wendt’s manuscripts,
Revolutionizing Business
, a book on management principles gleaned from the Founding Fathers, by Mitchell Morgenthau, another beloved U of C professor. Lincoln is trudging through the second chapter when his phone rings. “Your wife,” Kim tells him when he picks up.

Lincoln has a terrible taste of stale coffee in his mouth. He swallows hard, trying to wash it away. “OK.”

“Linc? How are you? I tried to get you earlier on your cell phone, but it was turned off.”

“I’m at work.”

“I know. This was the other day.”

“You didn’t leave a message.”

“I know. I didn’t feel right just being a disembodied voice. I wanted to talk to you for real, and I figured you’d see it was me on your ‘Missed Calls’ function.”

“I don’t ever use that.”

“Well, no matter, here we are. How are you?”

In the moment while Lincoln considers what to say, he reflects that her voice sounds different—a little higher, slightly tinny, something being held back. She’s not calling to beg forgiveness. “I’m OK.”

“Really? I worry about you. Are you hanging out with Flam?”

Flam. His friend. Lincoln flashes back to dinner yesterday and thinks: How could I be so ungrateful? “Yes.”

Mary natters on for a minute or so about applying to business school. “Then I spent the whole weekend studying for the
goddamned GMAT,” she goes on. “Morning to night. I’ve never done anything so boring. I hope business school isn’t like this.”

The precise ease with which she describes this annoyance makes Lincoln assume that she spent the weekend in romps from the kitchen floor to the dining-room sofa to the bed in Jerry Cirone’s expensive downtown condo.

“Have you hired a lawyer yet?” she asks abruptly.

“Not yet.”

“Well, you probably should, so we can try to sell our apartment. It’ll be tough, but I think the quicker we get it out on the market the better.”

She’s so, so far ahead of him. The world is ahead of him. “You should know,” he says sullenly.

“Linc, I wish you wouldn’t be that way.”

For a moment Lincoln wonders: Would it really be possible to be any other way—wounded, confused, self-doubting, depressed, angry, and, finally, petulant as a teenager when confronting the source of the pain? “I’ve got to get back to work,” he tells her. “I’m in the middle of editing something.”

“Good-bye, Linc,” she says simply and hangs up.

Lincoln gets up and walks slowly to the men’s room, trying to recover some equilibrium. When he returns to his desk, first thing he calls Flam and apologizes for being a prick last night.

“You think last night was out of character?” Flam asks with a laugh. “No apology necessary. Does a barracuda apologize for its teeth?”

Then Lincoln works straight through the day, snacking on a tin of Starbucks mints in his desk, using the wandering sentences of
Revolutionizing Business
as the koan in which to lose himself and seek enlightenment.

He thinks often that he should just pack up and leave—abandon Chicago at last and move to New York. But that would defy another piece of advice from his father: don’t quit your job until you have a new one. Lincoln has already sent out more than a
dozen inquiries, some to the familiar New York editors, some to a new round. Like every other business, however, publishing is feeling squeezed. Most of the editors he contacted haven’t even responded.

So rather than indulging in Poetry Therapy or Xanax, Lincoln devises his own prescription for coping: he jogs. Every evening after work, he heads east from his building to the lake. It’s dark, but the streets and the lakefront path are mostly well lit and usually populated by other runners. Lincoln enters the park through the Waveland underpass and each time faces a critical choice: Should he turn left, away from the city, toward the lonely, quiet regions to the north, the path edging between the shadowy trees and the black oblivion of the lake? Or go right, running toward the jagged explosion of buildings and lights of downtown Chicago, the illuminated Ferris wheel on Navy Pier a kind of lighthouse to mark the shoals of inflated promises and manufactured joys? Lincoln never knows which way he’ll turn, but lets impulse take over. And then he runs, pounding, gasping, sweating, punishing his body, exhausting his brain, driving out all thoughts but the deep, total awareness of physical discomfort. He runs for an hour, longer on some nights, stopping finally when he’s circled back, walking the last few blocks to his building, soaking wet now, cooling in the fall night air, feeling for the first time all day a measure of relief. And sometimes walking back, the question drifts into his emptied head: Am I going to die in exile in Chicago?