Are You Happy Now? (19 page)

On Sunday morning, he calls her at home. “It works,” he says when she picks up. On the other end, he hears what sounds like someone being gagged or strangled. “Amy?” he asks, alarmed.

Heavy breathing, then, in a voice Lincoln hardly recognizes: “It’s me, celebrating. I’ve got the world’s worst cold.”

“It sounds like it.”

“But you liked the book?”

“Yes. Quite a nice job.” Here, Lincoln dials back, going into his practiced editor mode. Much work remains to be done, and it’s important that the author not come to believe the original draft is an untouchable masterpiece. “Good characters. Strong story. Really quite enjoyable.”

“Ooooohhhhh!”

“Naturally,” Lincoln says coolly, “I have some suggestions.”

“What are they?”

“I’ve got a memo. I’ll e-mail it.”

“Fantastic!”

“Drink lots of tea,” Lincoln tells her, quoting the only medical advice his soon-to-be ex-wife ever gave him.

Lincoln sends the memo. Two hours later, Amy calls. Curiously, her voice sounds almost normal now, as if reading the memo has had the cleansing effect of powerful menthol. “There’s a lot of stuff here,” she says gloomily.

“Well, of course. Because the book is so good, it sparked a lot of ideas.” You’ve got to be a salesman with this sort of thing.

“I’m not sure I agree with all of them.”

“You don’t have to. They’re just suggestions.”

“Like adding more sex.”

“Now, that’s important.”

“I don’t want to write a sex book.”

“It won’t be a sex book. It’s a book about people. But you’ve got to get them out of the lab, so to speak. Anyway, in this day and age, lots of literary books have candid sex. Think of
Vox
. Or
Middlesex
.”

“Haven’t read them.”

“Or Updike or Roth. The sex isn’t gratuitous, it’s part of the context.”

“I can’t do porn.”

“It won’t be porn. It will be discreet and naturalistic.”

“And you want to cut some of my favorite scenes.”

“This is a work in progress. Nothing in my memo is carved in stone.”

Lincoln waits while Amy goes through a sneezing jag on the other end of the phone. She continues, “I mean, that scene where Professor Hazeltine comes in and orders everybody in the office to drop what they’re doing and join him in a tai chi session on the lawn—that really happened. How can you say it’s like a cartoon?”

Lincoln knows he has to take control of the situation. “Look, consider the memo, sleep on it, then do what you can. Those are only suggestions. But I guarantee that if you don’t take at least some of them into account, the book isn’t publishable.”

Amy says nothing. In the silence, Lincoln worries that he’s been too harsh. Fiction is all so subjective. Who’s to say he’s right about anything he proposed? He adds, “God is in the rewrite.”

“All right,” she says at last. “I’ll see what I can do.” The deathbed voice has returned.

Amy doesn’t come to work for several days, and when she finally appears, she looks pale and frazzled, and her nose still bears traces of the raw, red battle scars inflicted in her fight with the cold. She volunteers no bulletins, that day or over the course of the next few weeks, though several times when she and Lincoln pass in the office, she makes a face, scrunching her nose, as if she’s caught a whiff of something unpleasant. The one time they find themselves alone together in the elevator, he asks her how it’s going. She rolls her eyes. “I’m trying.”

“I’m available to help,” Lincoln reminds her.

“It’s just hard to change when you’ve got things in your mind one way. I can hardly sleep for thinking about it.” Before Lincoln can respond, the doors open on the twelfth floor to Duddleston and a cadre of his lawyers about to head off to a meeting somewhere.

But in his gradually improving state of mind, Lincoln really does believe that Amy can do it. He’s made some calculations, and if they can get the manuscript in shape by the first of the year, he’ll propose crashing it for the spring list so they’ll be able to publish just in time for the start of beach-reading season. In his head, Lincoln has already started to compose the press release. (“Pistakee Press, Chicago’s premier book publisher, is proud to introduce
The Ultimate Position
, Amy O’Malley’s stunning first novel of young women coming to grips with the wide-open sexuality of today’s college generation.”) He assumes that the book’s backstory—a pretty young U of C grad drawing on her experience with a sex survey—will grab the attention of the talk shows and newspapers. And in a particularly incautious moment, he imagines Jeff Kessler of Malcolm House opening his
New York Times
to the Arts section, scanning the story about the surprise, sexy best seller from the small Midwestern publisher, and stopping at the name of the clever editor who spotted and marshaled the book. With a new maturity nurtured in pain, Lincoln quickly stifles the fantasy.

Lincoln doesn’t mention the book to anyone, and he regrets having discussed it months ago with Flam—on something like this, operating beneath the radar is so much easier. Of course, with his nose for angst, Flam hasn’t forgotten. One night, while he and Lincoln are having hamburgers at John Barleycorn, Flam asks out of the blue how the book is coming. “Still being written,” Lincoln dodges.

“Wasn’t that going to be your ticket out of here?” Flam presses.

“That was a long time ago.”

“Just last summer.”

“I meant metaphorically.”

Flam takes a bite of hamburger and considers. Barleycorn is quiet on this chilly December night, and the strings of Christmas lights and holiday ribbons look as if they’ve been hanging for decades. “I sort of liked that project,” Flam says finally. “I thought it was one of your better ideas.”

The semicompliment emboldens Lincoln. “What do you think of the title
The Ultimate Position
?” he asks.

Flam abruptly halts a bundle of fries on its way to his mouth. “You’re going to call the book
The Ultimate Position
?”

“Maybe,” says Lincoln, retreating. “One of the characters claims to be searching for it.”

“The ultimate position for sex.”

“Yes.”

“Perfect.”

“You like?”

“It’s perfect!”

Lincoln feels an easing in his upper back, between his shoulders. A steel rod that had somehow been implanted there for the last six months flexes, bends.

Flam continues eagerly: “That’s it, that’s modern man—you know, his senseless, hopeless quest: sweating and wrestling and testing out all these uncomfortable arrangements, trying to figure out how to maneuver things just right. The Ultimate Position.”

Something occurs to Lincoln: Is Flam talking about me?

The next morning, Amy sends the rewrite. “I’m finished,” her note says simply. Attached are all fourteen chapters.

Lincoln immediately prints the manuscript. At 213 pages, it has a pleasant heft. He makes himself a cup of coffee, then sits down to read. Within the first few pages, he feels his excitement draining. His stomach turns raw, and he abandons the coffee half-finished. He skims some pages, reads, then skims some more. Amy has hardly changed a thing. She’s rewritten an occasional sentence, added a brief scene here or there, overexplained a few elements that were elusive in the original. If anything, the book has deteriorated.

Her efforts to inject real sex into the pages have an awkward, even prophylactic quality. “He placed her naked across the large, firm pillow, laying her on her back, as if carefully draping an expensive fur coat. Then he dropped to his knees in front, entering only the first two inches of her vagina, so he could directly massage her G-spot with his erect penis.” The book’s sluggish midsection has practically stalled with the addition of background information on Mary’s annoying boyfriend. By evening, Lincoln can’t push himself to finish and instead goes out alone to a movie.

He reads to the end Sunday morning, after he’s been through the
Times
and the
Tribune
. He’s sitting in the nubby chair, Amy’s manuscript plopped atop a scattering of newspaper sections, when his cell phone rings.

“Well?” asks Amy.

“How do you know I’ve finished it?”

“I know you, John.”

He wonders at the implications of the remark, then decides to ignore it. “Well, I think the book’s still got a lot of promise,” he says.

“I don’t like the sound of that.”

“To be candid, there’s more to be done.”

“Like what?”

“Like...most of the things we talked about before.”

“I can’t. I’m exhausted.” Click. She’s gone.

Lincoln sits. His arm aches, and now his eyes hurt. Maybe he needs to see an optometrist, get a prescription for glasses. In five minutes, Amy calls back. “I’m going to quit my job,” she says.

“Why, for God’s sake?”

“I hate publishing.”

Lincoln senses that the best way to calm this tantrum is to play it out. “So what are you going to do instead?”

“Maybe teach English.”

“But you’ll be dealing with books, and I thought you hated publishing.”

“A waitress. I used to do that, and now I’m old enough to serve liquor.”

“Would you really be happy spending your life as a waitress?”

Click.

Lincoln continues to sit, and Amy doesn’t call back. His disappointment has seeped into his muscles and his bones—it’s not just his aching arm and tired eyes, his entire body feels weighted and dull. Like Amy’s manuscript. Did it actually once hold promise, or was the whole thing just an inflated dream, the absurd escape fantasy of a man imprisoned?

Lincoln’s chin falls to his chest, directing his gaze to the front of the
Tribune
’s Sunday travel section, discarded on the floor. The top half of the page is taken up by a photograph of a lonely hut in the middle of a frozen lake, a square blot of human
scale in a vast frigid landscape. The story is about ice fishing in northern Wisconsin. Why? Who in his right mind? And, yet, the image of cold, stark isolation suggests a purity of purpose that draws Lincoln. Life in the Midwest, reduced to its quintessence. He picks up the paper and reads. The article is full of the usual travel-writing inanities, all celebration, no skepticism, with a half dozen ice-fishing enthusiasts (all enormously fat, judging by the inside pictures) trilling on about the glories of their sport. Still, that bleak photograph calls to Lincoln. He will take his gift week of vacation and check into a motel in northern Wisconsin, away from all distractions, all temptations, and he will dedicate every waking moment to rewriting Amy’s book.

It will be his walkabout, his forty days in the desert, his punishment and his salvation. He will be following the great literary tradition. Like Thoreau at Walden Pond, he will go to the wilderness and return with...well, something that will propel him the fuck out of this place.

WINTER:

Lunker Sex

19

T
HREE DAYS BEFORE
Christmas, Lincoln rents a car and drives eight hours north to Lac du Flambeau, Wisconsin. A few miles out of town, he stops at the Lunker Motel, which looked clean and relatively comfortable (“Good heat in winter!”) on its simple website. From the sound of the name, Lincoln assumed that the motel was owned by a good Wisconsin German family, but the lady at the reception desk quickly sets him straight. “It means a big fish,” she says, amused at his ignorance. She points outside, and indeed, the motel sign along the quiet road features a huge, curling fish in neon. “You know, like a
lunker
walleye!”

“Ah.” Lincoln smiles. A new word. The trip is off to a promising start.

“I guess you aren’t a fisherman,” she says as Lincoln fills out a guest card. She’s a hefty woman, middle aged and ruddy faced, with incongruously yellow-blond hair, and she’s wearing a brown crew-neck sweater over a plaid flannel shirt. She ought to be named Lunker, Lincoln thinks.

“No, not a fisherman,” he confirms. He hands her the guest card, which she studies carefully.

“Chicago,” she pronounces. “Passing through on business?”

“You might say.” Only Amy knows his true purpose. He didn’t even tell Flam he was going away.

“A salesman?” the curious woman presses. “It’s pretty quiet up here this time of year.”

“No. Well, in a way, yes,” Lincoln fumbles. Lying makes him feel like a criminal on the lam, hiding out in a cheap motel. He flashes her a broad smile that manages to quell the interrogation.

The motel is one long strip of rooms divided in half by the reception area (and, Lincoln eventually discovers, the owners’ apartment in back). Because business slows around Christmas, the heat has been shut down in the west wing. Lincoln gets room 14 at the far end on the other side. A couple of pickup trucks and a van are parked along the walkway, but several empty units separate him from his closest neighbor. Excellent.

Except for its cable-fed TV, room 14 offers few amenities—thin wood paneling, flimsy dresser, small desk, undulating king-size bed. The dark brown carpeting has an unfortunate texture that feels damp to Lincoln, and the radiator fills the room with such intense, dry heat that he constantly has to turn it down, then push it back up again when the Wisconsin cold seeps in. The place also lacks Wi-Fi, so Lincoln is limited to e-mail on his cell phone. Overall, though, the Lunker is all he had hoped.