Are You Happy Now? (24 page)

John forced himself to look. His right forearm had a bulge about four inches below the elbow and then made a slight dogleg to the left. “I think it’s broken,” he said.

The crowd had fallen silent. “Hang in there,” Will told him.

The barker appeared above John, the thin face in a scowl under the cowboy hat. “I told you no funny business,” he snarled. He knelt and pulled away John’s good arm. For a few seconds, he studied the situation, then carefully placed the good arm back. He stood and walked away without saying anything.

With Will looking anxiously down at him, John tried to say, “Sumbubbabitch,” but for some reason he couldn’t form the word. So he closed his eyes. He lost track of time and may have fainted. After a while, he saw a bright-red throbbing light broken by spidery veins on the inside of his eyelids. Will lifted John’s head and took off his helmet. When John opened his eyes, the throbbing red light covered one side of the tent wall. “Easy now,” Will said, putting his arms under John’s shoulders, lifting him.

Two cops stood behind Will. “We’ll get you to the hospital, son,” one of them assured. The barker’s cruel face peeked over the cop’s shoulder.

Still clutching his arm to his stomach, John walked in a cluster of helpmates down an aisle and then outside. The air felt frigid. John realized he was washed in sweat. The cluster swept him to a police car, its red light spinning. The cops helped him into the backseat and closed the door. A silent crowd stood around. As the police car pulled out, John saw Will’s anxious face fall away from the window, and John had a panicky need to have his friend beside him. He wanted to scream out, to stop the car, but he was beyond that now. The car eased forward. The flashing red light streaked across a gaudy landscape of game booths, food stands,
and clumps of gawking West Virginians, and John knew he was entering a place he had only heard about, but now he could never leave. He hugged his throbbing arm.

It’s late by the time Lincoln finishes the story. Amy’s head lies heavily on his chest, and he absently combs her soft hair with his fingers. He feels relieved—emptied, but unburdened.

“Did that really happen?” Amy asks without looking up. Lincoln can hear the toll of the all-nighter in her voice.

“More or less.”

“What kind of an answer is that?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever find out if the bear was real?”

“My father tried to check. They insisted it was a real bear.”

In the unit next door, an ice fisherman is watching
American Idol
with the volume too high. Amy falls quiet. Lincoln thinks that perhaps she has dropped asleep at last. But suddenly she lifts her head and scolds, “That didn’t ruin your childhood, John.”

No, it didn’t. But when he thinks back before the bear, he remembers—he
thinks
he remembers—how he used to operate with a kind of natural grace. Patterns unfolded, doors swung open. His path was clear—or, more to the point, he didn’t have to think about the path. It was just there, beckoning. Afterward, he faced uncertainty, missed chances, bad luck, and bad decisions. For all his talent and privileges, he was somehow unprepared for a world where you had to make hard choices, dig deep down to find what was really moving you. The bear introduced him to that. It was as if the creature were telling him that he didn’t really know, didn’t really get it. Sumbubbabitch.

No, Lincoln thinks, the wrestling match didn’t ruin his childhood. But it ended it.

22

F
OR THE NEXT
two days, Lincoln and Amy work furiously on the book, punctuating their efforts with interludes in bed. She spends the days and nights in room 14, only returning to 11 to shower and change. The collaborative editing goes remarkably smoothly. Once, defending a scene he’d added, Lincoln says the action will make the book more commercial, more likely to “grab readers,” and over time “grabby” becomes code to express the sensibility he’s trying to impose. Even Amy uses the word without rancor. At the same time, Amy robustly defends the literary merit of some of the material that Lincoln has deleted—language and ideas that she insists would make the book appealing to “thinking readers,” as she puts it. They end up retrieving sentences, paragraphs, even several sections from the computer file containing her original manuscript. Jokingly, they talk about joining the yin and the yang, the “thinky” and the “grabby.” Secretly Lincoln suspects there’s actually something to the notion.

As for the real-life sex, they assure each other that this is just a passing occasion—curious circumstances have brought them together, and there’s nothing beyond the diversion and pleasure. Lunker sex, they call it, honoring the location, and
they acknowledge that it must end when they leave for Chicago. There’s not even much discussion of the matter, the dictates—jobs, ages, outlooks—are so obvious. One afternoon, as they lie in bed in a becalmed after-moment, Amy admits that she feels too young to link up with a divorced man trailing an ex-wife. Stung by her candor, Lincoln reminds himself of Amy’s naïveté, the slightly annoying sense he’s had from the start that she’s an intern at life. With equal candor, he tells her that what he needs now, after the disastrous end to his marriage, is a mature woman, someone who’s been through several serious relationships and knows herself and her emotions. The strong bond Amy and Lincoln have built in two days of intense editing helps them accept each other’s confessions with grace.

In keeping with their continuing policy of discretion, they try to hide their relationship from the curious proprietor of the motel, though inevitably, the maneuver fails. “I ran into Mrs. Lunker outside, and I had to tell her that I was your girlfriend,” Amy admits on Saturday morning.

“Why’d you do that?” Branding the relationship makes Lincoln feel uneasy, as if unnamed it could disappear into the past.

“What else could I say? My bed has been untouched for three days. She asked where I’ve been sleeping, and I didn’t want her to think I was a slut.”

“Hmmm.” Why didn’t Amy think to muss the sheets? Why didn’t he think to suggest it? After a moment Lincoln says, “You know, that’s not really her name.”

“You call her that.”

“Not to her face. I just named her that because of the motel. I think her real name is Geiselbrecht, or something.”

Amy considers for a moment. “No wonder she gave me a funny look,” she says.

By Saturday night, they have completed all but the last three chapters, which Amy will finish in Chicago. That night, their last
in Wisconsin, they go out for a celebratory dinner at the Fireside Inn. Lincoln is feeling buoyant about the book, and he plans to thank Amy over dinner for her hard work and her forbearance of his occasional insensitivity. But they’ve barely finished ordering two steaks, and the hovering waitress has just disappeared, when Amy beats him to it. “No matter what happens to the book, John, you’ve been incredibly helpful,” she says. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate all you’ve done.” She locks her eyes on his and keeps her voice soft and low.

Her sincerity unsettles Lincoln: in his mind, his motives have been selfish, even crass. “Well, let’s see if Duddleston goes for it,” Lincoln responds. “That will be the test of my help.”

Though the Fireside Inn has put away the teeming buffet, the restaurant again bustles with diners, many tables filled with what Lincoln assumes are three or even four generations of a family. Over one bottle of wine, then another, he and Amy natter on about the book, the office, the U of C, Amy’s family. By dessert, Lincoln even allows himself to reflect a bit on what went wrong in his marriage. (“It was as if we were still dating, without the newness or anticipation.”) Sitting at their two-person table in a corner of the busy restaurant, Lincoln feels cushioned by the hordes of hefty, cordial Wisconsinites, by the huge steaks and mounds of mashed potatoes, the overheated air, the low, ambient murmur of conversation. By the vision of Amy’s soft breasts behind her tan sweater. Afterward, they return to the motel and enjoy one last night in bed together. Early that morning, Amy whispers to him, “I’m glad we don’t call it Geiselbrecht sex.”

They drive back to the city separately. In the office on Monday morning, Lincoln finds that work has piled up. Professor Morgenthau’s manuscript has returned from the copy editor, whose corrections must now be checked. Meantime, Gregor’s idea for a cover design needs rethinking (why use a photo of a modern battleship on a book about the management theories of the Founding Fathers?). Lincoln has missed the deadline
for writing jacket flap copy for
Walking Tours of the Windy City
, and Pistakee’s distributor has left a message: he desperately needs advice for his sales reps on how to pitch bookstores on Antonio Buford’s collection of poetry.

Lincoln hunkers down, and by midafternoon he’s polished off the flap copy (“To appreciate the greatness of a glorious city, you need to walk its streets with a master of its history, its people, and its hidden treasures. No one knows Chicago like the University of Chicago’s Norman Fleace...”); he’s mothballed Gregor’s battleship; and he’s lobbied the baffled distributor on behalf of Buford’s poetry (“Think of it as the newest literary extension of rap...”). Lincoln is working his way through
Revolutionizing Business
when Duddleston walks in.

As the boss sits gingerly and asks about Lincoln’s vacation, a yellow alert goes off in Lincoln’s head: Duddleston is being tentative—that usually means trouble. After a minute or so, speaking in the deliberate, rehearsed tone that confirms the danger, he gets to the point: “Over the holiday, I took some time going over the numbers. And we had an OK year. Up a little from last year, actually—not much, but up.”

“That’s good, given the climate,” says Lincoln. Duddleston has always closely guarded Pistakee’s financials, speaking of them only in generalities.

“Good, yes.” The owner pauses. “But not a growth pattern that’s healthy. Recession or no, that’s not a trajectory that takes us where we want to go. If we were a publicly traded company, I wouldn’t buy our stock.”

“I see.”

“Pistakee is seven years old, and we continue to tread water.”

Lincoln nods gravely. Where is this going?

“I know publishing is a tough business—I knew that coming in. And the economy hasn’t helped lately. But, frankly, I expected more.”

“As you should.” Lincoln nods, his anxiety rising. Is this the end of Pistakee? What happens to me?

“So I spent an afternoon with Jerome Geelhood, the consultant. You remember him?”

“Of course.” How could Lincoln forget? Jerome Geelhood turned twenty-five years of failure in assorted publishing ventures into a business that offered hackneyed and obvious advice for high fees.

“And after a lot of thought and running the numbers various ways, we came to the conclusion that Pistakee needs to grow its list. We need more volume—in print and in digital, when it comes to that.”

“Grow?” repeats Lincoln witlessly, whipsawed by the change of direction. He was already formulating questions about severance pay and temporary health insurance.

“We currently publish twenty books a year,” Duddleston explains. “We need to ramp up to thirty. That will help get the attention of the distributor and the bookstores, and it will speed the building of our backlist. And as you know, the more books you publish, the greater the odds that one will break through and turn into a hit.”

“Right,” says Lincoln.

Duddleston leans forward and puts his hands on his knees. “The difficult thing,” he says, looking grim, “is that for this to work, we can’t add head count. We’re going to have to handle the additional books with our current staff. That means the editors—you, Hazel, and Warren—are going to have to take on a bigger load.”

“I see.” Though hugely relieved that he still has a job, Lincoln works his face into a frown.

“And as the executive editor, obviously, the biggest burden will fall on you.”

“Right.” Lincoln strokes his chin; meanwhile, his mind races: an opening for
The Ultimate Position
! After a moment he says carefully, “You know, just off the top of my head, one thing we might consider is buying a few more polished manuscripts
from real writers. Not that, say, Professor Fleace and Professor Morgenthau can’t write, but their books need more massaging to get them up to publishing speed. That’s what eats up the editors’ time. We might look for books that are close to being ready to go.”

Duddleston sits back, pleased that his key employee is on board. “Good idea. Excellent. I’m sure those books are out there. Let’s talk about it at the next editorial meeting.”

“Will do,” Lincoln promises.

The two smile and nod at each other, and the moment lingers a bit too long. For all his fluctuating anxiety about staying in his boss’s good graces, Lincoln has slowly come to understand that Duddleston—self-conscious about his lack of publishing credentials—is reciprocally wary of his executive editor. Finally, Duddleston says, “I realize you already carry a big load, Abe, and now I’m adding to it. So here’s what I propose. I’ve asked Matt to draw up a profit-sharing plan for you. I’m not offering it to either of the other editors, so please consider it confidential. But if we can bump up that margin by a few points by the end of the year, there’ll be a bonus in it for you.”