Are You Happy Now? (20 page)

He arrived in midafternoon, and right away, he sets up his operation. He puts his laptop on the desk and attaches a small printer, which he places on the floor. He hides the paper copy of the manuscript in the top drawer of the dresser, then on his computer he copies all fourteen chapters of the book separately, labeling them as he goes “Amy/edit/1,” “Amy/edit/2,” and so on, creating a version of her work that he can chew up, discard, and rearrange as he likes.

Finally, he opens up “Amy/edit/1” and contemplates the first sentence. “Mary Reilly considered the slender, attractive young woman...” Lincoln sits on the rickety desk chair, his fingers
poised on the keyboard. Nothing. He scrolls down the text, substituting a word here or there, nibbling at an occasional sentence. After an hour of fitfully backing up and going forward, he comes to the end of the chapter. He’s hardly changed a thing.

In a misguided effort to find his muse, he cracks open the fifth of vodka he’s brought along. Still nothing after several glasses. In the crack in the window curtain, he can see snow falling through a shaft of light on the walkway. Glancing up once, he thinks he sees a blurred figure quickly pull away. Mrs. Lunker (as he’s taken to calling her in his head)? Is she spying? His trips up and back to regulate the radiator become a measure of his lack of inspiration: The room’s climate moves from desert heat to tundra cold and back again, with hardly a word altered. Someone with the flu moves in next door and rattles the paneling with thundering coughs. Lincoln realizes he’s getting drunk. Buford said happy people were more creative, and now Lincoln feels so glum he could hardly write his name.

At last, he shuts his computer down. He tells himself that after a long drive, what he needs is dinner and a good night’s sleep. When he checked in, Mrs. Lunker offered a pair of dining options—a supper club a few miles away or a bar with a microwave just down the road. He’s in no condition to drive, so Lincoln bundles up and walks along the slushy shoulder until he comes to Iggy’s Ice House, a wood-shingled structure plopped in the middle of a desolate parking lot.

Iggy’s is empty except for one customer and a jowly bartender. Lincoln sits at the bar four stools down from the other customer and orders a glass of red wine. The bartender, a model of bored efficiency, offers up the dining options—a bratwurst or a hamburger, each heated in a clear plastic bag in the microwave. Lincoln asks for one of each. The sandwiches have a damp, spongy texture and taste faintly of oatmeal, but Lincoln needs the fuel and orders a second round. As he eats, the other patron, an elderly man, glances over occasionally, flashing a wrinkled
smile. He waits politely for Lincoln to finish his second bratwurst before leaning over to ask, “You staying down at the Lunker?”

“Yes,” says Lincoln.

The old guy nods happily at the news. He has a neat, grandfatherly style, with a head of carefully combed white hair and a brown sweater-vest pulled over a red-checked shirt.

“From Minneapolis?”

“Chicago.”

Now Gramps throws his head back with a wide smile. These rural Midwesterners are so easy to please, thinks Lincoln.

“You a writer?”

What the fuck? “What makes you think that?” asks Lincoln.

The man’s blue-gray eyes sparkle. “You aren’t an ice-fisherman. Nobody’s making sales calls this close to Christmas. We get writers. They hope the solitude will give them inspiration.”

Lincoln thinks: so even my last desperate gestures are nothing but cliché. “How often?”

“Ohhhh.” The man drags out the moment. It’s hard to figure his age. He could be in his eighties, maybe older. He has the air of someone who takes care of himself. “Not so many in the end. But we had a fellow here last year around this time. He was working on a book about his dead brother.”

“Really?” Lincoln signals for his check. Time to escape. “A biography?”

“No,” says the old man. “His brother’s ghost. How it comes back to visit.”

Lincoln throws some bills on the bar.

The man continues, “He ended up killing hisself. When the thaw came in the spring, he walked out to the edge of the open water and threw hisself in.”

“Who?” asks Lincoln. “The writer or the brother?”

“Why, the writer.”

So the path taken by Thoreau has been trampled by wackos and suicides. “I’m actually editing someone else’s book,” Lincoln
explains, as if to forestall an intervention by the old man and the good people of Lac du Flambeau. “I’m just an editor.”

“Ah! That’s good.” The old man smiles. “Giving it your own stamp.”

“Right.” Lincoln waves good night, and the moment he steps outside, the slap of frigid air on his face loosens an idea: his own stamp. Of course. He’ll convert Amy’s novel to first person. Why didn’t he think of it before? There’s energy that way and drive. First novels are almost always first person; the voice is more natural, more intimate. “I” as a verb—someone, somewhere has said that, and it’s true, you build action just following the narrator’s psychic evolution. I, I, I, I. That’s it!

As he hurries back to the motel and flops straight into bed, Lincoln is aware, vaguely, that this inspiriting idea has washed up from his alcohol-sopped imagination and may not survive the harsh morning light. Nonetheless, he sleeps better than he has in weeks.

20

L
INCOLN RISES EARLY
the next morning. In the chill, gray North Woods dawn, after gobbling aspirin and grabbing coffee and doughnuts from the spread laid out in the Lunker’s reception room, he comes to grips with his idea from the night before. Using first person means Lincoln has to channel Mary Reilly, Amy’s protagonist. As he sits at the little desk in room 14 and starts to work, Lincoln finds it surprisingly easy to drop into the head of a twenty-one-year-old woman, smart and opinionated, emerging from a sheltered life and eager for experience.

He works straight through to noon, almost finishing the first chapter, when there’s a knock on his door. “Mr. Lincoln?” calls out Mrs. Lunker. “Do you want me to clean your room?”

Fresh sheets, new towels. “Sure,” Lincoln answers. He’ll take a break for that.

The proprietress enters pushing a cart. “I usually have an Indian girl do the cleaning, but I let her off this time of year since things are slow,” the woman explains. Talking to Lincoln, she glances past him and around the room, looking for evidence of his mysterious activities. Her nervous manner suggests that she knows he’s a writer and that she hasn’t forgotten last year’s
suicide. “Were you able to get your work done this morning?” she asks.

Lincoln realizes he had better clear out while she is there. “Yes, thanks. Now, I think I’ll run and get a bite to eat,” and he’s out the door before she can continue her cross-examination.

The room sparkles when he returns, and he works feverishly through the afternoon. He struggles occasionally to express Mary Reilly’s thoughts, particularly when the subjects turn physical and intimate. But Amy has provided some of that material in the original, and Lincoln can simply jigger the language to bring it around to first person. Besides, having to speak through the voice of a young woman teases out Lincoln’s imagination. He finds he can make observations about colors, appearances, moods with a fluency he hardly expected. Editing a book last year on the costume collection at the History Museum has given him the vocabulary to talk about clothes. And, he reminds himself, he grew up listening to a mother and a sister. After a while, he gets cocky. As a modern man, he holds that the sexes aren’t really that different, but he starts to believe that for purposes of fiction, the differences favor a woman’s voice. Women are more confessional, more honest about themselves. They’re willing to appear vulnerable. Men are guarded, stiff. So much to hide. If Mary Reilly were a man, the book would be a fraction as long, a CliffsNotes version of the story. Every now and then, Lincoln worries about how Amy will react to his changes, but he tells himself he hasn’t really altered the substance of her book, just redirected it slightly. And she can always rewrite his rewrite, if it comes to that.

Lincoln works late into the evening, and he pounds away virtually nonstop the next day, Christmas Eve, even waving away Mrs. Lunker when she comes to clean. On Christmas morning, coffee and pastries are laid out as always in the reception room, but the kind woman is concerned about Lincoln’s dinner. The few restaurants in Lac du Flambeau are closed, and even Iggy’s
Ice House shuts down for the day. “Everyone spends Christmas with family,” Mrs. Lunker warns.

Lincoln worries that she’s about to invite him to dine with her and her husband, a brooding, silent man who rarely looks up from the newspaper classifieds. “Oh, I’ll find something,” he assures her.

Later, when she comes to clean, she gives him a sheaf of printouts, with maps to three restaurants that are open. She’s been searching the Internet. “I’ve eaten at the Fireplace Inn,” she says of one of the three. “A little expensive, but very nice.”

“Thank you, thank you,” Lincoln tells her. “Merry Christmas!”

“Merry Christmas!”

In fact, Lincoln is on such a roll that the McDonald’s in neighboring Minocqua will do him just fine. By the afternoon, he’s already up to Amy/edit/5. He’s been virtually alone now for three days with Mary Reilly, and her voice and sensibility have taken over part of his brain. He tells himself it’s as if she’s whispering in his ear. He looks up from his keyboard and knows how she’d respond to the mauve curtains covering the window (“Don’t make me look at them!”), to the Brueghel print of a village scene in winter hanging above the bed (“Are all the Lunker rooms so classically decorated, or did we get lucky?”). She speaks to him through long-ago remarks—things said by his sister, his mother, his ex-girlfriends, his soon-to-be ex-wife, and Amy herself. Lincoln jots them into a notebook he’s keeping and then tunes them and sprinkles them through the text. On his brief forays out of the motel room, he regards the icy, piney landscape through Mary Reilly’s eyes (she sees it as harsh, repressed, male) and turns his car radio to a classical music station out of respect for her aesthetic interests.

Even writing about sex from her point of view starts to come easily. Again, Amy has provided the basics, but Lincoln surprises himself at his gush of articulation as he imagines sensuality from the other side. The descriptions emerge (to his ear) as candid
without being clinical—far less self-conscious than they would be if he were speaking through the voice of a man. He even lets Mary Reilly spout on at one point about vaginal contractions when she has her first big orgasm. Is Lincoln out of his mind? Perhaps, he admits to himself. But rereading the scene he’s just written provides an affirmation of sorts: he gets a hard-on.

On the day after Christmas, Lincoln’s cell phone rings. “How’s it coming?” Amy asks without a greeting.

“OK.” He’s startled and slightly annoyed to be pulled out of his Mary Reilly trance. “I’m moving right along.”

“I want to come up there.”

“Here?”

“Yes.”

“But...I’m not done yet. I need a couple more days, then I’ll bring it down.”

“I can’t stand it. I feel like part of me is being raped and ravaged up there, and I’m stuck here. I’m coming up.”

“What about work?”

“I’ll call in sick.”

“But I need solitude. It’s going to be a great book, but I’m at it sixteen or eighteen hours a day. If we start going over the manuscript now, the whole edit will screech to a halt.”

“I can be reading the beginning while you’re finishing the end.”

“But...”

“John, this is
my
book,
my
life.”

Amy won’t relent. In the end, Lincoln can only manage to put her off for a few days. She’ll borrow a friend’s car and drive up New Year’s Eve, a Thursday. They have to be back in the office on January 4, a Monday. Lincoln will try to finish most of the rewrite before she gets there.

The mere thought of her arrival slows him. Mary Reilly checks out of the motel (in a pique of jealousy?), and Lincoln has trouble hearing her voice. What’s more, his feverish confidence
begins to cool. He rereads the first chapter and finds he’s no longer so certain about the tone he’s imposed on the manuscript. He edits some of Mary’s more intimate thoughts and descriptions, tempers her flights of intellect (she’s still an undergraduate, after all). Moving forward, he bogs down trying to inject some realistic drama into the section where Mary starts to suspect that her new friend is somehow linked to the sexual predator. What does Lincoln know about crime? Looking for inspiration, he wastes part of an afternoon skimming novels by John Grisham and James Patterson that he buys at a Minocqua bookstore.

At one point, Lincoln writes in Mary Reilly’s voice:

I considered the emptied coffee cup Jennifer had left behind, searching for evidence in my own ineffectual way, studying the delicate red half-moon of lipstick stain as if it were a fingerprint
.

Looking the sentence over, he realizes he’s borrowed the lunar lipstick image from an Anthony Buford poem, “Dirty Dishes.” Lincoln deletes the line, wondering how that could happen.