Are You Happy Now? (10 page)

Still high on the fragrance of Mary’s perfume, Lincoln enters the sparkling bathroom and bravely opens the mirrored medicine cabinet. A colorful array of makeup jars, emollients, and aspirin containers line the shelves. Lincoln allows himself only a quick peek. All looks in order. Just as he’s closing the door, though, he notices on the bottom shelf a thin, squeezed tube with a plainness that seems out of place. He takes it out and inspects: Tucks Hemorrhoidal Ointment.

My God, Lincoln thinks. Poor Mary. She needs me.

10

A
WEEK OR
so passes with no further word from Detective Evinrude. Meantime, with the arrival of August, a heat wave washes over the Midwest, smothering Chicago with a dense blanket of air. Daytime temperatures venture deep into the nineties four days running. The remorseless sun punishes anyone who strays beyond a shadow. Walking around outside, breathing the thick air streaked with faint, swampy odors, Lincoln has the odd sensation of being trapped in his high school locker room. At home, the air conditioning can’t keep up. One evening, Lincoln rides his bike to the lakefront, hoping to find a spot of relief in a breeze coming off the water. All of Chicago has the same idea. The bike path along the lake is a mob of cyclers, skaters, defiant joggers gushing sweat, fast walkers, wanderers, oblivious children, glistening shirtless musclemen, overheated dogs, exhausted young parents pushing strollers, Indians in damp and clingy saris—people of every shape, color, and style except the old, who’ve been warned constantly by Mayor Daley not to move around in the heat.

Thwarted by the crowd, Lincoln dismounts and walks his bike north, but a group of Mexicans has colonized his rock for a picnic, and the entire park up here is a throbbing, multi-culti
refugee camp of tents and grills and screaming children, families fleeing the torturous heat inside their tenements. Soaked with sweat, Lincoln turns and walks his bike back the other way. A cluster of gasping joggers—a running club, perhaps—staggers past, and Lincoln sees something familiar in the contorted rictus of their faces, their mouths like raw gashes as they suck for air. The group is well beyond him before he makes the connection: those are the faces on the human casts he saw on his visit to Pompeii.

And, yet, circling back to his apartment, he passes a popular Greek restaurant at the busy corner of Halsted and Webster. The proprietor has lined up tables outside along the narrow sidewalk, and each is filled with diners—Chicagoans gobbling their moussaka in the unbearable heat while a string of cars stopped at the intersection blasts hot and filthy exhaust at their feet.

“It’s alfresco hysteria,” Lincoln tells Amy the next day when he runs into her on the elevator. His blue linen shirt is stained with sweat. “It’s as if these people are so crazed by the winter cold that they can’t bear to miss a single moment to eat outside.”

“You sound as if you need to get away for a weekend,” she tells him.

Lincoln thinks: I’d have to warn Detective Evinrude.

When the elevator opens on the twelfth floor, Amy says, “Can I stop down for a moment? I’d like to talk.”

Lincoln glances sideways at Kim the receptionist, who sits just feet away and whose Iowa goodwill acts as radar for subtle changes within the Pistakee family. She guessed the regular UPS deliverywoman was pregnant several weeks before the lady in brown announced it. “Give me a few minutes to settle in,” Lincoln tells Amy coolly.

Ten minutes later Amy appears at his office door. She’s wearing slacks and a silky print blouse, and she looks untouched by a drop of perspiration. Lincoln warns, “We need to be more discreet.”

“What’s the harm in talking?” asks Amy as she plops into the chair facing Lincoln’s desk. Still, she lowers her voice to a whisper. “Listen: I think I’ve had a breakthrough on the novel.”

“Really?” Lincoln perks up. “What happened?”

“I took a walk the other evening. I couldn’t get any momentum; every sentence was a struggle. So I stepped outside. It was awful in this heat. I felt as if I were melting, literally, turning into a puddle. And I suddenly realized—that’s it: that’s the opening scene. Mary is in this sterile office asking these clinical sex questions, and then she steps outside onto a busy sidewalk in the middle of a heat wave, and she feels as if she’s falling into a kind of tropical spell.”

Lincoln interrupts: “Your protagonist’s name is Mary?”

“Yes. I like using a classic name—you know, the biblical overtones. I thought about calling her Eve, but I decided that was maybe too much.”

“Hmm.” Lincoln nods carefully. (Does Amy know his wife’s name? He’s assiduously avoided mentioning it around her—there seemed to be something profane about it.)

“You don’t like ‘Mary’?” Amy asks.

“No, fine, just thinking.”

“Anyway, I ran home and wrote the scene, and after that, the story just started flowing. Now, every day after work, I write until very late, midnight or later.”

“That’s great,” Lincoln tells her.

“And I think I’ve got a story line. I’ve figured out the other main character, Jennifer, she’s sort of based on a girl who lived in my dorm. She was a senior when I was a freshman, and she liked to scandalize us by saying she was on a mission to find the Ultimate Position.”

“Huh?”

“You know—the perfect sexual position. The position that provides maximum pleasure for both partners.”

In his mind, Lincoln starts running through pornographic flip cards.

“The story revolves around the interplay between the two women,” Amy continues.

Lincoln is still enjoying the pornography. “The Ultimate Position,” he says, nodding. “That’s good.”

“Maybe that’s the title.”

“So what was it?” Lincoln asks innocently.

“What?”

“The Ultimate Position. What did it turn out to be?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Amy is annoyed that he’d ask. “I never checked in with her at the end of the year.”

“Probably something from the Kama Sutra,” Lincoln muses.

Amy hesitates, then asks, “John, do you really think I can do this?” She has a way of swinging between steely and vulnerable that Lincoln finds endearing; either quality alone might get on his nerves.

“Of course you can,” he assures. He sends her off with lines borrowed from warmed-over motivational speeches given at halftime by his old basketball coach, and Amy seems bolstered.

At around eleven that morning, Kim calls from up front. “John, there’s a man here to see you,” she whispers into the phone.

“Who is he?” Lincoln asks.

“He says his name is Mr. Buford.”

“What’s he want?”

“He says it’s personal.”

Lincoln assumes immediately there’s trouble. “Why did you let him up?” he growls. Their building has an annoying buzzer system—you can’t even get in the locked front door without announcing your intentions.

“He sounded
important
,” says the flustered young woman, as if that alone justified her breach of responsibility. When Lincoln doesn’t respond immediately, she adds, “He’s not going to go away, John.”

“All right, tell him I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

Lincoln prepares himself. Maybe it’s just an aspiring author. Every now and then, people see the sign for Pistakee Press on the building and wander in off the street. Or perhaps it’s a particularly aggressive cold caller trying to sell him penny stocks. Someone’s got to warn that receptionist to take her gatekeeper role more seriously.

Lincoln wastes a few minutes, hoping the visitor will get discouraged and leave, then plods out to the reception area and finds Kim chatting amiably with a nice-looking young African American wearing a white shirt, red tie, and a tropical blue blazer that hangs loosely on his slight frame. Lincoln has seen him somewhere before.

“John Lincoln, this is Antonio Buford,” says Kim triumphantly, as if the two men had been clamoring to meet for months.

“Call me Tony,” says the visitor, thrusting his hand.

For an anxious moment, Lincoln resists the gesture. The man appears to be about Lincoln’s age, maybe a few years younger. His face, the color of light chocolate, is round and unlined, and he wears his hair trimmed close to the scalp. He’s carrying an extraordinarily thin canvas briefcase, hardly big enough to hold the folded-up
New York Times
. Standing there dumbly, Lincoln suddenly recalls where he’s seen Tony Buford before: this is the man who tried to talk to him on the sidewalk in front of the building not long ago.

After a quick handshake, Lincoln asks, “How can I help you?”

“Ah, could we speak privately?” Buford glances at Kim, then locks a friendly yet intense gaze on Lincoln, who senses immediately that there’s something practiced about the manner: maybe he’s just a therapist, coming around to hawk the idea for a book on a new self-help regimen.

Ordinarily, Lincoln would maneuver to keep any questionable visitors away from the sanctum sanctorum of his office,
but with Kim sopping up every nuance, Lincoln decides to risk privacy. “Follow me,” he says.

The two silently wend their way through the corridors of Pistakee, Buford pausing on the way to consider the wall of framed Pistakee book covers. In his office, Lincoln leaves the door open. Buford lingers at the porthole window. “I’ve never been in this building before,” he says.

Lincoln starts to recount the story of the nostalgic sea-captain/builder, but Buford interrupts. “I know the history. I’ve just never been inside.”

Lincoln forces a smile, settles into his chair. “What can I do for you?” he asks.

The visitor sits on the other side of the desk. He glances over the manuscripts and other effluvium cluttering the surface. “Working on something interesting?” Buford asks, as if he were an old friend dropping by for a casual conversation.

Lincoln considers briefly how far to play along. “A book about walking tours of Chicago.”

“Ah, exploring the city on foot. I bet that will sell!”

He must be a cold caller, Lincoln thinks. In this economy guys like him are desperate. Any second now he’s going to pull out a brochure about his nifty portfolio of horribly undervalued Midwest stocks. “What can I do for you?” Lincoln repeats.

The man is impervious. “I imagine book editing is one of the most satisfying jobs possible,” he muses. “Working with words and ideas, collaborating with others. It’s sort of like the theater in that way.”

Maybe he’s just out of his mind. “Yes. Now, what was it you wanted to see me about?”

“I really just wanted to make your acquaintance.” That locked-in gaze again.

“Well, here I am. But I’m afraid I’m kind of busy.” Lincoln sits up and tidies some loose pages of Professor Fleace’s manuscript.

“I mustn’t steal your time,” says Buford. He reaches in his briefcase and pulls out a small snapshot, then hands it to Lincoln. The photo shows a hefty, well-dressed, elderly black woman, standing in front of a blank interior wall. The woman from the L. In the picture, she is wearing a large, white medical collar around her neck and looking profoundly mournful. “My mother.”

Lincoln says nothing but simply stares at the picture. After a moment, Buford reaches across the desk and retrieves the snapshot from Lincoln’s hand. “Ever since, she’s had terrible neck pain and terrible headaches,” Buford continues. “She can’t get comfortable, standing, sitting, lying down. We’ve been to several doctors and a chiropractor. No relief. She may have to have surgery. You forget sometimes the fragility of our skeletal structure. Your head is like a big pumpkin sitting up there on a thin stalk.” Buford places his hands on both sides of his face as if to brace his pumpkin.

In addition to his roiling stomach and the short blasts of pain shooting from the long-ago break in his arm, Lincoln’s neck immediately begins to ache. “The detective said we aren’t supposed to talk to each other,” he says weakly.

“Achh, the Chicago Police Department.” Buford shakes his head and returns the photo to his briefcase.

Lincoln quietly takes several deep breaths. He clears his throat. “I’m sorry about your mother,” he says, trying to mirror the cordial demeanor of his visitor. “But what do you want?”

“Let’s just say I’m exploring options. My mother is in a bad way, and we, the family, we need to make some accommodations. I’m pinpointing the responsibility for her condition, then looking at opportunities up to and through the courts.”

“Why me?” Lincoln croaks. It’s all he can think to say.

“You were the direct cause,” Buford explains in the solemn tone a health official might have used in breaking the news to Typhoid Mary.

This is too much. “You can’t be serious,” Lincoln tells him. “The police aren’t going to bother with this. Maybe, maybe you’d have a civil case against the CTA or the gangbangers who started the panic, but me—I was a victim too! It was an accident! You can’t sue somebody for something like that.” Before he’s finished, Lincoln already regrets his self-defeating outburst—exposing anger, blurting presumptions.

Buford assumes the advantage gracefully. “Now, Mr. Lincoln,” he says, sitting back in his chair, “my father, God rest his soul, practiced law in Chicago for forty years, and one thing he taught me was that you can sue anyone for anything. You might not always win, but you can always sue.” Buford washes Lincoln in a warm smile. “But we are getting ahead of ourselves,” he continues. “I just wanted to meet you, let you know about my mom, and test your sympathy, so to speak.”