Are You Happy Now? (11 page)

Lincoln works to gather himself. Never admit, never concede.

“You are involved in a very special enterprise here,” Buford goes on, gesturing to take in the cluttered desk, the manuscripts stacked on the floor against the wall, the overflowing bookshelf. “Literature has interested me from my earliest days. I’d come home from school and lie on my bed, reading. I guess you could say I was kind of a nerd, but I loved books. I majored in English in college.”

A gloomy thought presses on Lincoln. “The U of C?” he asks.

“No, Kenyon.”

Ah. Lincoln feels a slight lift. The curse is broken. “Good school.”

“I went to the U of C for my masters, in psychology.”

So it’s a conspiracy, after all. “You are a psychologist?” Lincoln asks.

“By training.” He takes a business card out of his wallet and passes it to Lincoln. “At the moment, I’m a professor of happiness studies at DePaul. You know the field?”

“Uhh...”

“Rather new. Quite interesting. What makes people happy. You’d be surprised. We’re just starting to quantify, but the results so far are remarkable. I must tell you about it sometime. There might be something there for you.” Buford stands and extends his arm. “But I shouldn’t take any more of your time. This has been most edifying for me. I’m so glad to have made your acquaintance.”

Lincoln rises uneasily and shakes hands. Can his crisis really be passing so quietly? When they stop shaking, however, Buford doesn’t let go. They remain connected, awkwardly, across the messy expanse of Lincoln’s desk. “And now that we are acquainted, maybe you would be so kind as to take a look at something I’ve written,” Buford says. “It’s very modest. Just a small collection of poems.”

In the silence, Lincoln feels acutely the grip of Buford’s hand. “We don’t really publish poetry,” Lincoln says, hedging slightly since once, a year or two before Lincoln arrived at Pistakee, Duddleston unaccountably printed a small anthology of poems by mothers about their sons. Unsold copies used to lie around the office like old telephone books that no one bothered to discard.

“Well, you might just enjoy taking a look,” Buford continues. He drops Lincoln’s hand and pulls a rather thin manila envelope out of his briefcase, then places it directly in front of Lincoln in the middle of his desk. “Of course, my mother is a great fan of my work. I think it would ease her situation enormously if she had the pleasure of seeing it published.” Buford studies Lincoln’s face. “Looking forward to hearing from you,” the visitor says before turning and marching out.

Seconds later Byron Duddleston appears in the office door. “Who was that?” he asks, gesturing down the hall in the direction of Buford’s exit.

Lincoln is still standing behind his desk, asking himself whether he’s being blackmailed. “Uhhh...a writer,” he tells his
boss. He slides Buford’s business card under a pile of papers and casually moves the poet’s package to the side of the desk. (Yes. Blackmail. Definitely.)

“A writer!” Duddleston repeats, pleased, as if he and Lincoln had accidentally spotted a rare and beautiful yellow-throated warbler well north of its typical range. “We need more diversity on our list.”

“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” Lincoln improvises.

As Lincoln sits again, the boss steps into the room and hovers, his maroon bow tie adding a menacing edge. (Why menacing? Lincoln has long wondered. Something about academic smugness, aggressive competence. Lincoln could never tie one.) “Bill Lemke has come to me with what I think is a fantastic idea,” Duddleston says cagily.

Lincoln frowns. “Really?”

“Yes. He’s been talking to the marketing people with the Cubs, and it turns out they’d really like to promote his book. In fact, they’re doing a special night to celebrate the history of Wrigley Field, and they’ve offered to make Bill part of the event.”

“That’s great!”

“Yes. But here’s the thing. They want to do it at the end of September, so we’d need copies of the book by then. Paperback, of course. Oversized.”

Lincoln does a quick mental accounting of their normal production schedule. “That’s impossible,” he points out.

Duddleston’s famous temper flares. “Nothing’s impossible!” he snaps. “That’s the trouble with the book business—everybody’s stuck in the same old pattern. Of course, it’s possible to publish a book in two months—companies do it all the time with annual reports, special issues, that sort of thing. We’ve already speeded our schedule way up. There’s no reason we can’t do it some more. If you can get the manuscript in shape, I’ll take care of production and distribution. Bill’s game, that’s for sure.”

So Lemke, that mothy and odorous fossil, is ready to march with Duddleston into the fast-moving future, while Lincoln, the brilliant young executive editor, is stuck in the sluggish routines of the past. “Wow,” says Lincoln, trying to save his job, “We’ll give it a try!”

“Good.”

Lincoln pours it on: “What a great idea!”

“Maybe. It’ll be expensive and risky.” Despite the hedge, Duddleston’s pleasure with himself dances around his face. “And this could even be the Cubs’ year. They’re hanging in there, despite the injuries. Wouldn’t it be something if they made it to the World Series? Do you know how long it’s been?”

Everyone who lives in Chicago and has avoided dementia can answer that question: “1945.”

Duddleston stands, apparently satisfied that his top deputy has got with the program. “Why don’t you give Bill a call and get it started.”

“Sure thing,” Lincoln says.

And lest there be any lingering question, the owner/editor-in-chief adds on the way out: “Today.”

11

L
INCOLN HAS PLANS
to join Flam in the evening at an advance press screening of the Coen brothers’
A Serious Man
, but throughout the afternoon, even through a long, somewhat disjointed conversation with Bill Lemke (had he been drinking? would the new production rush be Lemke’s excuse to ignore all of Lincoln’s editorial suggestions?), Tony Buford’s trim package silently nags, forcing itself into Lincoln’s attention, like a cell phone left on vibration. Finally, toward the end of the day, Lincoln surrenders and retrieves the envelope from the far corner of his desk, where he’d hoped he could forget it among other unread manuscripts. He opens it and pulls out a rather thin sheath of thick, expensive paper, the kind used for letters from rich people or executives.
L
, says the title on the top sheet. “
Poetry by Antonio Buford
. Copyright 2009.” (Is that title a reference to the unfortunate incident?)

Lincoln skims through the pages. The poems are numbered, and most are contained on a single sheet. The titles are short descriptors of objects, places, or simple activities: “The Brown Easy Chair,” “Shaving in the Shower,” “Masking Tape,” “North Wells Between Grand and Illinois.” Fifty poems in all. Lincoln flips to the end, then returns to one called “The Remote,”
attracted by the possibly clever use of an adjective as a noun. No. It’s about the author’s Emancipation Day, when the family got a remote control device for the television and the father could change channels from the sofa instead of repeatedly ordering the son to schlep to the console.

Several pages on, Lincoln dips into “The Morning Paper,” a sixty-word salute to the 6:00 a.m. delivery of the
Tribune
:

It pounds on the door, rude, oblivious

Reviving the household

Like that first rough CPR stroke

on the chest of a sprawled heart-attack victim
.

Lincoln considers several others, “Sharpening a Pencil,” “The DustBuster,” “Maple Leaf.” All the same—short, modestly thoughtful celebrations of the utterly ordinary. The collection could have been called
Ode to the Mundane
.

Finally Lincoln turns to the front and burrows his way through all fifty poems. He finds the language clean and accessible, and every now and then Buford summons an image that’s mildly catchy. In a couple of instances, Lincoln realizes that he’s been prodded to a fresh regard for an element of everyday life (the “calming” paper clip that “tames clutter, the unruly mind”). Overall, the quality is several grade levels above greeting-card verse. Still, the poems are palliative, thin. Unimportant. Given Buford’s aggressiveness in pushing his work, Lincoln had been expecting something raw that drew on the African-American experience. But nothing in the collection even hints at the poet’s racial identity. Sitting at his desk, holding the overweight pages in his hands, Lincoln thinks the work could easily be the creation of a widow from suburban Milwaukee, writing by the window in her sunset years.

Lincoln is late for the movie, and Flam is cross—he’s finally had his big date, and he’s eager to dish the details. Instead, they
have to rush to claim the last two empty seats in the small screening room buried in a nondescript Loop office building. “Last-minute crisis,” Lincoln whispers in apology as the lights go down.

Even during
A Serious Man
, which Lincoln likes, he can’t stop brooding about Buford’s poetry collection—or, more to the point, Lincoln can’t stop worrying about how to get rid of the guy. Detective Evinrude must have been right: the criminal complaint was just a prelude to a civil suit (and the homeowner’s policy won’t be any help—the snippy insurance agent confirmed that). Buford seems to be offering a way out through blackmail, but Pistakee obviously can’t publish him. The house has been working hard to build a reputation for quality, and
L
would deflate that in seconds. Lincoln can imagine the look on the faces of the Pistakee sales reps as he holds up the galleys and explains in feigned seriousness that this white-bread verse by a black man touches the pop-culture zeitgeist.

Maybe he can send Buford off to another small publishing house. Or a vanity press—for a few thousand dollars, Buford can pay to get his book printed. Lincoln slouches in his seat as the Serious Man watches his lush neighbor sunbathe in the nude. Whatever, Lincoln suspects darkly, Buford is unlikely to go for it.

After the movie, Lincoln and Flam walk north across the river to Harry Caray’s, the noisy Italian steak joint founded by the late broadcaster for the Cubs. Their waitress is young and blond and offers a faint recollection of Scarlett Johansson. She wants them to order steaks, the expensive entree. Lincoln has been trying to ration his meals of red meat, so he goes with the linguine with clam sauce. Flam is happy to engage the young woman in several minutes of flirtatious discussion before finally settling on a New York strip, medium rare.

“You’re not worried about your arteries?” Lincoln asks after the waitress has tripped off.

Flam smiles. “She was working hard,” he says.

Lincoln considers his tall friend—curled in his chair, legs tangled and arms wrapped around his soft torso, his high, intelligent brow as smooth and white as an egg. No man has ever been less sexy, Lincoln thinks. “So tell me about the big date.”

“I drove up to Avondale to pick her up. Met Mom and Dad. Very solid. Polish. Born over there. Both still have heavy accents.”

“What did they think of you?” Lincoln tries to imagine this effete, thirty-six-year-old suitor making small talk with the Old World parents of a nineteen-year-old babe.

“They seemed fine with me,” Flam says crisply, as if slightly put off by the question. “Editor at the
Tribune
, college degree, settled—I think they appreciated that I was interested in their daughter.”

“Of course. So then?”

“First we went down to see
Whatever Works
, the new Woody Allen movie, then I took her to dinner at Brasserie Jo. I like that place. Very French, sort of romantic. The waiter even let us speak a little French to him. We stayed late, talking. Karolina—that’s her name—Karolina really is bright and eager to learn, in the way that working-class kids embrace education without any of the quibbles and hang-ups of the rest of us.”

“What’s she studying?”

“Accounting, but she’s talking about going to law school.”

“So, what was the denouement?”

“After dinner, I drove her home. It was a beautiful evening, and we sat on the stoop and chatted. Very 1950s. Every now and then a neighbor would walk by and call out hello. It was late, but people were still out, walking their dogs. Finally, it was time to go.” Flam sits back, his eyes drifting, as if he were recalling a moment from long, long ago. “I said good night—no kiss or anything, just a sweet
au revoir
.”

“And that’s it?” Lincoln asks. “That was the whole date?”

Flam stiffens. “Then I went back to my apartment, took out my collection of old
Playboy
s, and whacked off. Twice.”

Lincoln hoots. Heads turn at neighboring tables. “Jesus Christ, Flam,” he says, lowering his voice, but still laughing.

“It was the most sensually satisfying evening I’d had in years.” Flam’s narrow face barely cracks a smile.

“Why
old Playboy
s?”

“I don’t like shaving.”

Lincoln cracks up again. He thinks: Flam knows exactly what he wants and never reaches beyond—maybe that accounts for his unchanging demeanor of calm authority (the quality that won him the job of literary editor, Lincoln has always suspected). Or maybe (less charitably) he’s calm because he lives a kind of meta-life, essential experiences several degrees removed from perilous reality. “Are you going to see her again?”