Are You Happy Now? (31 page)

“Darn,” says Lincoln.

“She said she has her days free because she’s working nights at a restaurant.”

“Did she happen to say where?”

“Ohhhh.” The poor woman really wants to help. “She said it was a sushi place on the North Side. Oh, I’ll never remember the name. Something Japanese. She said she was the only Caucasian waitress there. Let’s see...I think she said it was on George Street.”

“Thank you,” says Lincoln. “Thank you.”

“I hope you find her. Do you want to publish her?”

“We’ll see, perhaps. We’ll see.”

With a little Internet scouting, Lincoln narrows the likely spot to Mika Sushi at George near Seminary, a restaurant he’s never patronized. That night, a Thursday, he takes a cab there. The
restaurant is bright and modest, one large room with unadorned white walls and a sushi bar on one side. It’s doing a good business this evening. Lincoln gets a small table in front. Moments later, Amy emerges from the kitchen carrying two platters of sushi, her face gripped in fierce concentration as she maneuvers her load through the swinging doors. Lincoln is jolted by a shot of nostalgia—or
some
resounding emotion. He remembers that intense look from the Lunker Motel when they were locked together on the rewrite, and he feels an overwhelming impulse to run up and throw his arms around her. In fact, the urge hits him so powerfully that he’s afraid if he actually did it he’d squeeze hard enough to crack one of her ribs. What’s that about? When Amy spots him, he beckons her with a nod and a smile, but she throws him a look of exasperation and hurries to a table in the back. Feeling slightly embarrassed, Lincoln orders a beer from his waitress and pretends to study the menu. A few minutes later, he senses Amy standing beside him.

“I can’t talk to you, John,” she says. “We’re busy tonight.”

“No problem. Just checking in.” He smiles again but can’t penetrate her hostility.

“You’re never that innocent,” she tells him.

“Hey, I just wanted to catch up. We’ve been through a lot together.”

“And I’ve worked hard to put it all behind me.”

Lincoln’s waitress comes up. She’s a stunning young Japanese woman dressed, like Amy, in Mika’s uniform of a white blouse and black skirt. She seems to think that Amy wants to steal a customer because she positions herself between Amy and Lincoln and pulls out her notepad. “You order,” she says to Lincoln in accented English. Amy wheels and disappears into the kitchen.

Lincoln eats his sushi dinner while reading an old paperback of William Kennedy’s
Ironweed
. (“Riding up the winding road of Saint Agnes Cemetery in the back of the rattling old truck, Francis Phelan became aware that the dead, even more than the
living, settled down in neighborhoods.” Now, there’s a classy opening, Lincoln thinks.) At one point, Amy approaches his table. “This is stupid,” she says.

“Why?”

“You’re going to get me fired again.”

“You quit, remember?”

She retreats once more to the kitchen.

Lincoln can’t parse her anger, but he knows Amy well enough, has felt the heat of her ambition at close enough hand, to be fairly confident that he’ll win her over eventually—if not tonight, then another night or another. As he’s paying his bill, she comes by yet again. “I get off in an hour,” she tells him tartly. “Meet me at the Golden Nugget on Clark.” She walks away before he can respond.

At the Golden Nugget, an overbright and characterless twenty-four-hour diner, Lincoln nurses a coffee and his Kennedy at a booth near a window. Despite the iciness from Amy, he worries that when he sees her, he’ll get hit by another nostalgic thunderbolt, or whatever it was, so he keeps an eye on the street to prep himself for her arrival. Assortments of noisy young people wander in and out, refugees of the bars in the neighborhood. Amy shows up just after an hour. She hangs her coat on a hook and slides into the booth opposite Lincoln. Again, something inside explodes, and he worries that she can hear his heart drumming against his chest. He’d forgotten—or, at least, shelved in his memory—Amy’s physical allure. The trim blouse and skirt of the waitress uniform emphasize her gentle curves, and she’s cut her hair and combed it behind her ears in a sleek style that seems very Japanese to Lincoln. This is
business
, he reminds himself. Stay on message.

“I know why you’re here,” she says, sounding world-weary.

“You do?”

“You want to publish my book on your stupid website.”

This sets Lincoln back momentarily. “How did you know where I was working?”

“Word gets around. Nothing escapes Google.”

“Well...” he starts.

She interrupts. “Can I get something here?”

Lincoln calls over the waitress, and Amy orders tea. Waiting for it to arrive, she delivers her speech. “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my career, my plans, what I want to do. And I’ve decided I want to help people. I’ve got this sympathy that I want to exercise. That’s what makes me happy. That’s my calling. This whole writing thing—it was a fantasy that was never really me. I mean, everyone writes short stories in college, and the smart ones move on to the real world. All I needed was a little taste of the publishing business to come to my senses. God, John—the egos, the selfishness, the
failure
rate. Who needs it?”

“You have talent,” Lincoln urges.

“I was clueless when I met you. So naïve. I’ve grown up.”

“That was six months ago.”

“Disappointing my parents, the whole disaster at Pistakee—you can learn an incredible amount from trauma.”

Lincoln reads this as a swipe at their age differences. He’s the old washout, thwarted in his hopes, cuckolded in his personal life. Covered with calluses that block out insight, lock in ignorance. Her insult pains, but he braces and pulls out his own speech. “You
are
talented. That’s not idle flattery. How many other people at twenty-two years old have written an entire novel? That took talent
and
discipline. You deserve to get your book out there. Other people should see it. Let it compete in the marketplace. I think it’s good, but if it isn’t, then you’ll know. You can move on without any regrets or second thoughts. But you should at least try—try once. And the thing is, this is so simple and painless. We’ll post it. And maybe no one will even notice. Chances are, no one will notice. Your parents will probably never even know. Unless it’s a hit, of course, and then they’ll be proud. But don’t quit now. Don’t turn into a loser before your time.”

As Amy sits there, a slight, impulsive smile flutters around the edges of her mouth. Lincoln assumes his flattering argument has won her over. “You are relentless, John,” she responds after a slight pause. “You tire me out just to listen to you. You never let go. You’re going to be eighty years old, living in some miserable, smelly one-room apartment, and you’ll still be maneuvering to get your big literary break. You’re perfect for Chicago. You always talk about New York, but you belong right here.”

“Now you’re trying to hurt me,” Lincoln says, not kidding.

“Haven’t you read history? The people who built this town were all just like you—Easterners, driven by ambition, mostly to impress the folks they’d left back home. They built the place out of a swamp, and when it burned down, they built it back up again. They were literally mad with ambition. But you know what? We only hear about the ones who made it big. Think of the hundreds of thousands of guys like you who wore themselves down to the bone promoting their great plans and never got anywhere.” She pauses after this outburst, then adds, “That’s the real Chicago. And we never hear about them.”

In the neon brightness of the diner, Lincoln thinks he sees little tracer bullets of light firing on him from Amy’s soft brown eyes. He’s too wounded to say anything, but he feels his face sagging, his whole covering of flesh slipping from his skeleton, puddling at the bones of his feet.

Amy says, “Oh, go ahead, publish the fucking book. I can’t stand to see you this way.”

“Really?” Lincoln is slow to rebound.

“Just don’t use my name.” She glances around the room, as if looking for something. “Use Alice. I always liked that name. Say the book is by Alice Somebody-or-other.”

“Ahhh.” The idea trampolines around Lincoln’s mind. Why
not
use a pseudonym? Many have done it before. Who cares? “OK!”

“But keep me out of it,” she orders.

“I promise.”

She meets his look of flushed excitement with a frown registering somewhere between disgust and resignation. “Then it’s all yours,” Amy tells him.

27

L
INCOLN WORRIES, SLIGHTLY
, about imposing
The Ultimate Position
on his new employers—the book doesn’t exactly fall within the mystery/thriller range, after all—but the iAgatha gang is happy to post it, and they offer to dispense with the upfront fees because the author is Lincoln’s friend. Even before the book goes up, Sammy reads the manuscript and pronounces it outstanding. “I really think this is the best thing we’ve published, literarily,” she says. “It’s so well-written, and so
sexy
. I’d like to meet the author.”

Her name is Alice Upshaw, and she’s not so much Lincoln’s friend as a casual acquaintance, a friend of a friend who came to Lincoln because he’s in publishing. She’s young-ish (Lincoln isn’t sure of her exact age), single (he, too, is impressed at her remarkable sexual fluency), and shy almost to the point of being a recluse. “I promised to do everything in my power to protect her privacy,” Lincoln tells his colleagues. The author blurb he writes says simply, “Alice Upshaw lives in Chicago. This is her first novel.”

Lincoln offers to pay for a designer to create an attractive cover, and Sammy gives the job to a Wicker Park friend. Inspired by the title, the artist comes back with a lovely line drawing of a bell curve that morphs into the shapely silhouette of a woman.
The Ultimate Position
gets posted in late March. On the day it goes up, Lincoln stays away from the office—he’s made such a point of playing the calm, elder statesman of the publishing business that he can’t stand to have his colleagues witness his anxiety. Alone in his apartment, he gets no work done, returning again and again to the iAgatha website to check on sales (the first copy gets bought within an hour!), then taking long, diversionary walks on the slushy streets of the North Side, forcibly removing himself from access to his computer. When Lincoln returns to his apartment at about seven that evening,
The Ultimate Position
has sold a total of three copies.

Over the following days, sales poke along at a slightly elevated iAgatha rate—seven by the end of the first week—but lag most of the outright entertainments that Lincoln has edited, despite enthusiastic promotions on Facebook and Twitter. He tries rewriting the marketing blurb, virtually eliminating any mention of Jennifer’s pursuit of pleasure in favor of hyping the mystery of the sexual predator. Sales drop to two the next week, and one purchaser posts a comment: “This book belongs on an English department curriculum. I quit college to get away from crap like this. Take it off the site!”

“I suppose I should accept that as a compliment,” Amy tells Lincoln when she calls two days later. “I’ve been looking around iAgatha, and I’m not sure that’s the sort of company I like to keep.”

“That’s not you at the party,” Lincoln reminds her. “That’s Alice Upshaw.”

“I feel protective of the poor girl.”

“Did you just see the comment?” Lincoln asks. “Most authors check sales every day, if not every hour.”

“I wasn’t kidding when I told you I was moving on. I never told my parents the book was being published, my friends, anyone. Remember, you promised to keep it a secret.”

“No one will ever know.”

“No one will ever read it,” says Amy with a genuine laugh.

“The book could still get hot,” Lincoln points out, somewhat defensively. But the books that become iAgatha successes inevitably catch fire immediately, following an alchemic law that none of the principals can explain.
Warranty for Torture
, for example, a plotless hodgepodge about an ex-con who inflicts revenge on the savage prison guards who tyrannized him, sold almost a hundred copies the first day on its way to more than two thousand, an iAgatha record that continues to climb. Jimmy, Wade, Sammy, and even Lincoln have pored over the elements of the book’s success—the writing, the title, the blurb, the author’s bio (he’s a middle-aged criminal lawyer from Cleveland whose expertise on the grotesque infliction of pain remains unexplained)—without finding any wisdom. Gorier iAgatha offerings have languished.

Lincoln’s bruised defiance prompts Amy to console him. “I feel bad for you, John. You put so much work into this and had such high hopes. I hope you don’t get too discouraged. You’ll still find your hit; I know you will.”

“Thanks,” he tells her. “I’m doing fine.” In fact, he may not be doing
fine
, but he’s doing
OK
, a close distinction that Lincoln has pointed out to himself over the last few days. The paltry response to
The Ultimate Position
hasn’t devastated him. He’s disappointed, but less so than he once would have imagined. Losing your wife to another man, getting bushwhacked in your job—setbacks like those don’t just temper your moods, Lincoln realizes, they crowd the space you have to dream, to fantasize, to seek pleasure. Too many memories, regrets, fragments of conversation, thoughts left unsaid. It’s a wonder anyone gets anything done. At least he’s doing
OK
. “It’s sweet of you to think of me,” he tells Amy.