Are You Happy Now? (21 page)

Still, he labors over his computer and slowly, slowly, the pages fall away.

On Thursday morning Amy calls to say she’s on her way. The day is cold but clear. She should get in around four. That afternoon, Lincoln prints out copies of the twelve chapters that he’s finished, and then he fitfully keeps working. When Amy hasn’t arrived by six, he calls her cell. She picks up after three rings. “Where are you?” he asks.

“Where the fuck is Lac du Flambeau?”

“You’re lost?”

“Even MapQuest doesn’t know where to find it.”

Lincoln gets out his road map and patiently talks her through the route. Finally, at seven, the phone in his motel room rings for the first time since he arrived. “I’m in eleven,” Amy tells him.

“Welcome to the Lunker,” Lincoln says. “It’s too late to work today—let’s go to dinner.”

“I really sort of want to see what you’ve done to my book.”

“It’s New Year’s Eve,” Lincoln presses. “I’ve got a reservation.”

Reluctantly, Amy accedes.

Lincoln spends five minutes warming up his car before he sees Amy emerge from room 11. She’s bundled in a sky-blue ski jacket, with a blue wool cap pulled down on her head. For a moment Lincoln is taken aback. This isn’t Mary Reilly. Days ago, Lincoln had embarked on the rewrite by associating Amy with her protagonist, but in his edit, he’s elaborated on Amy’s terse physical descriptions, and he’s turned Mary into a fragile, spiky creature—a physical manifestation of her delicate, questing sensibility. In contrast, the woman walking toward him looks robust and athletic, the picture of healthy determination. She could be about to slip over the edge of a mountain slope and ski down a double black diamond.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been in your car before,” she says brightly when she slides into the front passenger seat.

“This is a rental,” he tells her.

“You rented a car to come up here?” She looks surprised.

“Why not?”

“What about your own car?”

“My wife—my ex-wife—needs it for work.”

“She got the car?” Amy marvels.

In his head, Lincoln completes her thought: his wife gets to cuckold him, then clean him out—what kind of a wuss is he? “I think you’ll like the restaurant,” he says as they pull out onto the road.

Lincoln has made reservations at Mrs. Lunker’s recommended Fireplace Inn, a cavernous supper club a few miles away. The restaurant has set out a lavish New Year’s Eve buffet, tables lined up along one wall and crowned with a feast: huge platters of herring and other pickled fish, trays of deviled eggs, five kinds of salads, a spread of cheeses, three selections of potatoes, rice, sliced meats, breads, salmon, turkey, some sort of
teriyaki-inflected chicken, and—the climax of the affair—a roast pig. Amy is impressed. “How much did this cost?” she asks as they make their first pass through the buffet, standing in a long line of large, cheerful people dressed, despite the season, as if they are about to play a round of golf. Lincoln shakes his head as if it’s nothing, and in fact, it was cheap by Chicago standards—thirty dollars a person, tip included. “It’s Wisconsin,” he says.

Amy restrains herself through dinner. She passes on gossip from the office, talks about Christmas with her family, avoids references to Lincoln’s personal life. It’s only after they have made their third excursion to the long buffet (this time venturing to the lethally caloric dessert region) and are finishing their second bottle of wine that she brings up her book. “I think it works,” Lincoln tells her. “By now I’m so close to it that I don’t quite trust myself, but it seems to me that you’ve got a voice and a story that are really quite special.”

“You think?” A pink flush roars upstream from Amy’s neck through her cheeks to her forehead.

“Quite special,” he repeats conclusively. “I’m going to recommend it to Byron for publication.”

“Publication.” She turns over the word slowly. “How much editing did you have to do?” she asks after a few seconds.

“Not really so much.” Lincoln is forking apart a pastry thing shaped like a swan and filled with sweet, heavy whipped cream.

“Did you cut a lot?”

“I did some trimming, but I bet you’ll hardly notice.”

“Rewriting?”

“I tried to fill out a few scenes—you know, enrich the descriptions—but nothing that gets in the way of your story.”

Amy takes another sip of wine. “John, you’ve been up here for a week. What have you been doing?”

Might as well unload it, thinks Lincoln, finishing off the swan. So he launches his carefully rehearsed speech about the advantages of the first-person narrative—the energy it provides,
the chance to explore character, to play with American vernacular. The great tradition it follows.

Amy turns pale. “You’ve changed my book to first person?” she gasps.

“It’s not that big a thing.”

“Not that big a thing!” she cries. “It’s the whole thing!”

Around them, several tables of large Wisconsin families look over to see what the commotion is about.

“Just read it with an open mind,” Lincoln tells her. “If you don’t like it, you can change it back.”

Amy leans forward and clutches at the table. “I can’t believe you eviscerated my novel without even asking me.”

“I didn’t...”

“What am I? Just some researcher?” she interrupts. “Some notetaker for the great artist?” Her face has immediately gone red again, and her eyes are firing BBs at him.

“Give it a chance...”

“I want to read it right now! Tonight.”

“It’s New Year’s Eve. You’ve already drunk a bottle of wine.”

“Tonight!”

Lincoln settles the bill and follows Amy out of the restaurant. She rides in silence back to the motel, her arms folded across her chest, ignoring Lincoln’s efforts to soothe her. At the Lunker, several pickup trucks are clustered around room 8, where there seems to be a small party going on. Amy waits outside Lincoln’s room while he retrieves the twelve chapters that he’s finished. “I really think you should get some sleep and start reading in the morning,” he advises as he hands her the manuscript.

In the harsh light of the motel walkway, Amy glances at the top sheet. “You’ve changed everything!” she cries.

“It’s all negotiable.”

“
Everything!
” Amy’s fury suddenly dissolves into despair. Tears spray from her eyes. Lincoln watches as the outpouring
floods her cheeks and spreads huge dark patches over her ski jacket. She wheels and runs to her room.

He follows, but she’s inside behind a door slammed shut before he can catch her. He’s standing alone, considering whether to knock, when Mrs. Lunker wanders out of room 8, a plastic cup in her hand. “I hope we’re not making too much noise for you,” she says.

Lincoln shakes his head.

“Just a few old friends from town.” She lifts her cup. “Would you like to join us?”

“No, no thanks,” says Lincoln backing away. “I think I’ll just turn in.” Quickly, he heads toward his room.

She calls to his back, “Happy New Year!”

The cold yellow light of the walkway, the soggy whelps of delight coming from room 8, Amy’s heartbreaking expression of betrayal—the scene has opened a crushing epiphany: Lincoln is a delusional fool. Of course Amy will hate what he’s done. It’s her book, and he’s treated her thoughtful words as if they were just a starting point for his brilliance. What was he thinking? He knows how writers feel about their work. How could he be so clumsy, so selfish, trampling on a good-hearted innocent? He imagines Amy sitting at the desk in room 11, her tears splashing on the pages.

Lincoln gets in bed with Grisham. Before, Lincoln had disdained the simple prose as obvious; now, it seems smart, dramatic, economical. At midnight, Mr. and Mrs. Lunker and their townie fraternity pour into the parking lot and whoop up the New Year. Lincoln waits for them to quiet before turning off the light, but it takes him another hour to drop off, and even then he sleeps fitfully.

A rap on his door awakens him. It’s still dark outside. The garish red numbers on the digital clock by the bed say 6:02. Lincoln turns on the light and mopes his way to the door. He opens it just a crack, and Amy pushes past with the manuscript
in her arms and drops onto the desk chair. She balances the book in her lap and buries her hands in the pockets of her ski jacket, staring blankly toward the ugly mauve curtains. She’s still wearing the print skirt and tan sweater she wore to dinner last night.

“Well?” Lincoln asks. He feels exposed, standing in the chill room in his underwear.

“I can’t say it’s terrible, and in fact it’s probably better, but it’s not me.”

Her tone is depressive yet resigned, better than Lincoln could possibly have hoped for. “Were you up all night reading it?” he asks, pulling on a pair of jeans.

“Yes.”

“You didn’t sleep at all?”

“I didn’t move from the desk.”

“Jeez, you must be exhausted.” Lincoln sits on the bed across from her.

For the first time since she entered the room, she looks at him. “It isn’t me, John. It’s you. Or some awful hybrid of the two of us. I don’t talk like that. I don’t
think
like that.”

“But it
is
you,” Lincoln pleads. “It’s all you. I just tried to fill out some of the spaces and follow your blueprint.”

“I don’t
sound
like this.” She fumbles with the manuscript, and Lincoln notices that she’s folded down corners, marking things she wants to recall. From a few feet a way, it looks as if half the pages have a dog-ear. “Listen.” She reads: “‘He put his hand over mine, but I insisted that I had to go. I knew I was starting to sound like a nag, and I knew Stephen had a way of doing that, drawing out my shrill, anxious side, a manner of behaving that would only come from a woman. It was a tendency that I hated and that Stephen seemed to enjoy nursing in me.’ ” Amy stares at Lincoln. “
I
would never write something like that.”

Secretly, Lincoln is relieved. He’d been afraid she would enter into evidence a passage so outrageous that the verdict would be inevitable. The one she chose actually sounds reasonable to him.
“But you can change it,” he tells her. “Rewrite it. Get comfortable with it. I just wanted to give the book an injection of energy.”

“Or what about this?” In her rush, as she flips through the pages, the manuscript spills from her lap and scatters at her feet. She continues rummaging and finds more offense. “The silvery moonlight on the lake—the way it pulsed with the slight movement of the surface—made me think of sex.” She tosses the page at Lincoln and it drifts down atop the chaos on the floor. “I’d never say anything like that.”

“But it’s not you, it’s Mary Reilly,” Lincoln points out.

“Or the sex stuff.” Amy has moved through her depression and is getting angry. “This, this...” She drops from the chair to her knees and shuffles through the pages, then reads mockingly: “I stood beside the bed and let him undress me, kissing me between my breasts, on my belly button. I wanted to apologize for not losing those four pounds gained over the winter, but I was too turned on to talk.”

She throws this page at Lincoln, too. “ ‘Apologize for not losing four pounds’? No woman would write that.”

“Well, you can change it,” says Lincoln weakly.

“The whole book’s like that now,” says Amy. “I can’t rewrite everything you rewrote.” She gets to her feet and walks across the carpet of pages to the other side of the bed, where she lies down on her back. “It’s hopeless,” she tells the ceiling. “I’m not made for this. I actually finished reading half an hour ago and I’ve just been thinking. I have to go somewhere else with my life, do something else.”

Lincoln considers her lying there, wan, motionless, stretched out like a body laid out for a funeral. “Like what?” he prods gently.

“Social work. I like helping people, so maybe I should go back and get a degree in social work. Or maybe something else. I don’t know.” She trails off in weariness. “I just know that I’m not a writer.”

Something in her tone of voice lingers in the dry air of the motel room, an uncertainty, the hint of a question. She repeats, “I’m not a writer,” and Lincoln realizes: this is going to work. Amy is going to go for it.

21

A
MY NEEDS REASSURANCE
. Sleep would help, and a shower. But she mainly needs Lincoln to tell her repeatedly and from various angles over the next two hours that she indeed has the talent and sensibility to be a writer. He talks of her gift for storytelling, her skill at sketching character. He reads aloud sections of her book that he particularly likes (her words, not his, of course). He reminds her that some of the greatest writers relied on the strong hand of an editor—think of Maxwell Perkins carving the narrative out of Thomas Wolfe’s verbosity. And Lincoln promises that he can make it happen—he can convince Duddleston that Pistakee should publish this terrific first novel.

Still stretched out on the bed, Amy alternates between basking in Lincoln’s praise and worrying that she’s a fraud. “How can I defend it, how can I even talk about it, if whole chunks come from you?” she asks. “I feel like a plagiarist.”

“So make it yours,” he tells her. “Take it from here.”