Are You Happy Now? (18 page)

18

B
Y
T
HANKSGIVING
, L
INCOLN’S
life has eased back toward homeostasis. He has adjusted to his furnished apartment and come to know the neighbors he’d hoped he could avoid (two young couples, a trader, and the elderly widow on the first floor who has lived in the building since long before the neighborhood gentrified); gently curtailed his evenings out with Flam; and hired a lawyer, who is now working out the details of the divorce. She is an attractive young mother of twins who assumes the attitude—presumably to bolster spirits—that getting a divorce is one of life’s special pleasures: “That day when it becomes final, you’ll experience a rush of emotion that will bowl you over,” she promises. “That’s what I call the Freedom High.”

At the office, Lincoln’s various projects are moving forward, though Duddleston has wisely decided to hold Professor Fleace’s
Walking Tours of the Windy City
until spring, when someone in Chicago might actually dare to face the weather and walk around outside. The owner has also hired a replacement for Arthur Wendt: Warren Sternberg, who made a name bringing out
Deep Dish
, a history of Chicago pizza.

Through a bolt of serendipity, Lincoln and Tony Buford have found a suitable title for the collection of poetry. Lincoln had
given the manuscript to Pistakee’s multi-tattooed young designer, Gregor (just Gregor—he’s also an artist, intent on becoming his own brand), and appended the title
Still Life with DustBuster
as a placeholder until they came up with something better. Either Gregor didn’t understand or Lincoln failed to explain adequately; in any case, Gregor took the faux title as inspiration and designed a handsome cover, featuring his own photograph of a utility-closet corner with a DustBuster bedded among an old pair of shoes, a shopping bag of wire hangers, a used tennis ball, and a roll of heavy-duty extension cord. In his enthusiasm for his composition, Gregor neglected to leave sufficient room for all the words of the stand-in title, so he shortened it simply to
Still Life
. Perfect, thinks Lincoln when he sees the mock-up. Seldom has a title so exactly expressed a book’s content. With a minimum of persuasion, Buford goes for it, too.

By then, Lincoln has also repaired his relationship with Amy. For several weeks after she hung up on him, they steered clear of each other, going beyond even the cool discretion they’d exercised previously. The Pistakee offices are too intimate for that to last, however, and eventually their grudging nods give way to terse greetings. Finally, one day after work, Amy calls on his cell phone. “I’m not mad at you anymore,” she announces. “But I’ll get mad again if you’re not careful.”

“Don’t worry. What I said was stupid. I was just a little out of my mind because of what was going on.”

“I know. I was ready to give you the benefit of the doubt, but then you never called back to apologize.”

“I should have,” Lincoln confesses. “I’m sorry.” After Mary’s deception, Flam’s sarcasm, Duddleston’s reticent management style, and Buford’s manipulation, Lincoln feels as if he’s been dealing with people who operate on several levels at once, and he appreciates Amy’s candor. Turning upbeat, he asks, “How’s the book coming?”

“I should have something to show you after Thanksgiving.”

“Really? So soon?”

“Do you think it’s too soon?”

“All depends. How many pages do you have?”

“Around two hundred.”

Lincoln does a quick calculation in his head. That’s around a hundred seventy-five or so pages in a book, depending on the design.

Amy asks, “What are you thinking? Is that too short? I’m used to writing short stories, so this seems enormous.”

“No, that’s probably fine. Some of the classics are short.
Gatsby, Billy Budd
.”

Through the cell, Amy’s voice softens a notch, loses its hint of office efficiency. “I missed our discussions,” she confides. “You pushed me. I wrote the last third of the book on my own, and I’m afraid it’s not so good.”

“I’m sure it’s fine,” Lincoln tells her. Fighting the nippy wind blowing from the north, he’s struck suddenly by a mild melancholy. Just a few months ago, on those steamy summer evenings, his cell-phone conversations with Amy about her novel always gave him a shot of encouragement. Now, Amy’s venture seems like a mere diversion. “I’m eager to read it,” he adds.

For the first time since before he was married, Lincoln spends Thanksgiving with his family, joining his mother, father, sister, and her two kids at the family’s weekend place in rural West Virginia. Lincoln had hesitated to accept the standing invitation, worried that he’d be repeatedly cross-examined about the end of his marriage. But it turns out that a newer crisis has inserted itself into the family circle. His sister’s husband, an investment banker from Boston, has failed to make the trip, citing pressure from a mysterious deal. Lincoln’s sister, Lillian, is elusive about the situation, and the husband, Brad, doesn’t call on Thanksgiving Day. Rather than pushing to dissect this latest worrisome marital development, Lincoln’s parents choose to avoid probing questions almost entirely. Just once, after the
Thanksgiving dinner, on a walk along the country road in front of their house, Lincoln’s father brings up the matter, asking if Lincoln is happy with his lawyer.

“She seems fine,” Lincoln says.

“I called a few acquaintances, and they gave her high marks,” his father continues. “The divorce bar can be a snake pit, you know. Very few scruples. But she worked at Mercer, Epstein before starting her family. Quite a good firm.”

“I know, Dad,” says Lincoln, slightly disconcerted to learn his father secretly vetted Lincoln’s choice. When he was a child and got invited on a playdate with a new friend, Lincoln’s mother would quietly call around to check the reliability of the friend’s family.

For the most part, his parents also avoid pressing Lincoln about the progress of his career, though on that same walk, his father casually asks how the job search in New York is going. “Got some letters out,” Lincoln says briskly. “Waiting to hear.”

In the silence that follows, Lincoln feels a grudging admiration for his father’s restraint, given that the worthy Democrat so desperately wants to welcome his only son to the pantheon of civic accomplishment. It was bad luck for both of them that the old man is utterly uninterested in sports, considers games a frivolous waste of time, so Lincoln never even got credit at home for his achievements on the basketball court.

They scuff along the road for a few more yards before his father says almost wistfully, “Probably not too late for law school.”

The family’s West Virginia property features a lovely, square, two-story, nineteenth-century farmhouse with a porch around two sides and the original wood floors and trim. (A shame Mary never saw the place, Lincoln thinks—she might have stayed if she’d realized this thing of beauty was in the family.) Lincoln’s room sits in one corner of the second floor, and he spends much of the holiday lying on his familiar old bed, reading books. Going back as far as Lincoln can remember, he and his mother
and sister came out for the summer, his father joining them on weekends. Because of those summers, the contents of the room are like a core sample of his childhood, the layered detritus of assorted ages. The stuffed dog and stuffed bunny. A gorgeous wood train carved by a former hippie who moved to the area in the sixties and created a thriving cottage business. Swimming ribbons. Several generations of baseball gloves. Posters of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. Trophies from a summer basketball league.

Sometimes when he wearies of his book, Lincoln lies back with a Proustian regard. After the order and calm of his suburban neighborhood, West Virginia came off as untamed and alluring—the river swimming hole with the rope swing over the water; the general store, with its unfamiliar offerings; the overweight natives with their twangy accents. Lincoln recalls those summers fondly, but his memories aren’t entirely heartening. He’s not far enough removed from his childhood to find comfort in nostalgia, and he has the nagging sense that he’ll never quite get to that happy station until he accomplishes something—until he’s tasted some success as an adult. Relishing his past would be so much more rewarding if it lay back beyond the Golden Era of his life, his Heroic Period. Instead, the divorce has returned him to a kind of adolescent limbo in which he’s waiting to be let out of the house to get going again.

Back in Chicago, Amy strides into Lincoln’s office on Monday morning and drops a heavy Kinko’s box on his desk. “All yours,” she says. She plops down in a chair.

“You finished!”

“I nearly got disowned. I spent the holiday holed up in my apartment, except for Thanksgiving dinner. My parents were pissed.”

Amy’s face is pale and lacks highlights, and her hair carelessly falls over her ears. She’s wearing an old, bulky purple sweater
with jeans. “You still haven’t told them what you’re working on?” Lincoln asks.

“I had to tell them I’m writing a book, but I wouldn’t tell them what it’s about. You’re the only one who knows.”

When she’s gone, Lincoln removes the top of the Kinko’s box to consider the first page of the manuscript:

THE ULTIMATE POSITION

By Amy O’Malley

(draft)

So she went with that title. Quickly he closes the box and places it with other manuscripts on the side table in his office. He anticipates the book with such a mixture of longing and dread that he knows he has to approach it at the right time and in the right frame of mind.

That moment arrives approximately three minutes later. He closes his office door and starts to read. He shudders when he sees the first word—“Mary”—but he plows on and rather likes the first sentence. “Mary Reilly considered the slender, attractive young woman sitting in the hard plastic chair, and something candid in the visitor’s aspect—her willingness to ignore the tiny beads of perspiration forming on her upper lip, a condition brought on by the overworked and failing office air-conditioner—told Mary that this would not be the ordinary sex interview.” The rest of the opening chapter has problems, but Lincoln’s optimism builds through the day. With only a pause to get a sandwich for lunch, he reads the manuscript straight through.

He finishes about six that evening, and after coming home, he pours himself a vodka on the rocks. He sits in his nubby easy chair and gazes out the window, staring absently through the jagged tree branches to the darkened houses across the street. Jesus Christ, he thinks, this might work. The main character,
Mary Reilly, has a quirky inner life. The narrative flows. The dialogue’s fresh.

And the book is all about sex.

Lincoln savors his vodka. Jesus Christ.

The story follows the outline that he and Amy had discussed. Mary Reilly, a young researcher for a sex study at a fictitious university in a Midwestern city, becomes fascinated with one of her subjects, a slightly older, somewhat mysterious graduate student in theology named Jennifer Blythe. Over the course of several weeks of interviews—and then over lunch and dinner as the two women fall into a friendship—Jennifer recounts a series of sexual escapades that turn increasingly bizarre (there’s that search for the Ultimate Position). At first, Mary is intrigued, but soon she grows alarmed. There’s something needy and finally degrading in Jennifer’s obsessive drive to test the limits of her experience. Meantime, as Mary tries to investigate the background of her new friend, a sexual predator starts attacking women in the university town, and Mary comes to wonder if Jennifer knows something about the perpetrator—she seems to be engaging in the same sexual acts that later get unleashed on the victims. The book is too cerebral to qualify as a thriller—Amy cares most about exploring the growing relationship between the two women—but the ending holds Lincoln’s interest, even though he knew what was coming: Jennifer turns out to be an unhinged fabulist who picked up hidden details from a cop acquaintance, then invented her lurid encounters to capture and hold Mary’s friendship.

Lincoln rises and pours himself another vodka, then returns to his post in front of the window. Of course, the manuscript needs work. For one thing, the sex has to get better. Amy’s renditions have such a mechanical quality that she could be describing how to vacuum the living room. Though Amy sets the story in the Midwest, the book offers no sense of place—the plot could be unfolding in Honolulu. Several of the secondary characters come
off as one-dimensional buffoons. Even with the predator stalking the city, the pace slackens in the middle section.

Still, all that can be fixed. Lincoln wishes he had someone to high-five or bump chests with. He briefly considers calling Amy at home but decides no, it’s better to approach her in the clarifying light of day. So he sits down at his computer and types out some suggestions. By eleven that night, he has written a dense, five-page memo. He prints it out and reads it over with yet more vodka. With the late hour and his alcohol-fueled energy, he drifts for a moment into an odd misperception: he imagines that
he
has written the novel and some brilliant editor has grasped his vision perfectly, exactly understanding his meaning and purposes and making brilliant strategic suggestions to realize the novel’s greatness. No, Lincoln scolds himself. Mustn’t get proprietary, that’s the worst thing an editor can do. It’s Amy’s book. And so he goes to bed and lies awake for most of the rest of the night, reworking her sentences in his head.