Are You Happy Now? (22 page)

“Maybe I’ll just fuck it up again.”

Lincoln sits beside her on the bed and takes her two hands in his. He feels for a moment as if he’s stepped into a scene from a Victorian novel, the dashing soldier called home from the front
to bid farewell to his dying lover. “You can do it,” he promises. “Put yourself in front of your computer and type.”

They find a Walgreens, miraculously open on New Year’s Day, and buy a flash drive, on which Lincoln copies the first twelve rewritten chapters. Amy retreats with it to her room. Around noon, she appears at his door with her computer. By now she’s showered and changed, but she still hasn’t slept. “I can’t work alone,” she tells him. “I get too discouraged.” So she sets herself up on the bed while Lincoln writes at the desk. After an hour or so, he goes out for sandwiches. They eat on the bed, wrappings and bags of chips and cans of pop spread out picnic-style. Then they work through the afternoon.

She’s accepted the first-person voice, and she warily accedes to most of his changes and additions, usually with small fixes of her own. The interior monologues bother her, even those that Lincoln has lifted almost verbatim from her third-person description. “It loses all its subtlety when Mary says it directly,” Amy argues. “People don’t talk to themselves like that. Third person gives you some distance to round out the observations.”

“It’s the directness that speaks to the reader,” Lincoln tells her. “That’s part of the hook.”

“It seems...loud.”

“You’ve got to believe in your words. Let yourself go.”

Amy’s as eager about the book as I am, Lincoln tells himself, and it occurs to him—he’s surprised that he’s never realized this before—that he finds ambition in women sexy. He watches her working, sitting cross-legged on the bed (how does her back hold up?), staring fiercely into the computer screen, her eyes bright and intense despite a night without sleep. Does he look that alive when he edits?

Their biggest problem comes with the sex. Their sensibilities are simply different. To his ear, her descriptions sound like romance material, all swoons and euphemisms. She thinks he’s channeling porn. They compromise their way through the first
sex scene, when Mary Reilly plays out a fantasy in her mind and touches herself in her bed one night. But later they hang up over Mary’s first intimate encounter with Stephen, her boyfriend.

“This is awful!” Amy screams. She reads aloud: “ ‘He nuzzled me in the neck, burrowing under my hair, and I felt myself getting damp.’ Ugh!”

“What’s so awful?” Lincoln asks.

“ ‘Damp’? That’s a terrible word. Completely unsexy.”

“Wet? Moist? Change it,” Lincoln says.

“I’d never say that. I’d never
think
that.”

“It’s Mary thinking it, not you.”

“No woman would think that to herself. That’s a man’s fantasy. You’re turning my book into an article for
Maxim
magazine.”

“I thought woman were more candid about sex, the physiology of it.”

“But they don’t go through a mental checklist of their bodily reactions.”

“It wouldn’t be strange for a man to notice he had an erection.”

“But he wouldn’t announce it to himself: ‘Hey, waddyaknow! I’m erect!’ ”

It’s late in the afternoon by now, dark outside. Lincoln has heard vehicles pulling up, people talking on the motel’s walkway. Mrs. Lunker warned him that with the weekend, rooms would be filling with ice fishermen.

“Maybe we should call it a day,” Lincoln suggests. “We’ve made a lot of progress. Let’s go have dinner.”

“No, I want to get this right,” Amy insists. “If we can’t get the sex right, nothing is going to work.”

So Lincoln sits next to Amy, and together—building the scene word by word—they describe how Mary Reilly goes from necking with Stephen on the sofa in her apartment to rolling around half-undressed on the soft carpet to having hurried
and clumsy sex on her bed. Though Mary Reilly encourages the encounter, the sex for her is unsatisfying. For Lincoln, looking at the computer screen over Amy’s shoulder, catching whiffs of a fresh, flowery fragrance coming off her hair, tossing back and forth descriptions of states of arousal, brushing hands as he types in a few words himself, creating at last several airy paragraphs they can agree on—it all amounts to one of the most erotic experiences he has ever had. Amy apparently has the same reaction.

Just moments after Stephen has prematurely climaxed, and Mary, on her back beneath him, is left with nothing but the chapter-ending discovery that cobwebs have gathered in a ceiling corner of her bedroom, Lincoln and Amy fall into a frantic embrace. As they rush to rapturous, thrilling, and emotionally cleansing sex, he has only enough presence of mind to take the most essential precaution: he hits
SAVE
on Amy’s computer.

Afterward, lying together in the motel bed, Amy says, “I suppose that was a mistake.”

“I suppose so,” Lincoln agrees. “But it couldn’t be helped.”

“I’m not going to apologize.”

“Who would you apologize to?” Lincoln asks.

“Good point.” Amy considers for a few seconds. “You’re not married anymore.”

“Well, almost.”

“I suppose I could apologize to Duddleston. He’d be furious.”

“He must never know.”

Amy kisses Lincoln on the shoulder. “I’m not going to feel guilty, and neither should you.” She rests her head on his chest.

They lie that way for several minutes. From her slow breathing, Lincoln thinks she has fallen asleep. But suddenly she says, “John?”

“Hmm?”

“Why are you rubbing your arm?”

Lincoln stops. He didn’t realize he was doing it. “Just a habit,” he says.

Amy sits up on one elbow and looks hard into Lincoln’s face. “John, you must tell me how you broke your arm. Now.”

Lincoln wants to resist. The incident brings up memories and emotions that he’s purposely closed off. He never talks about it. But he can see that Amy’s electric, been-up-for-thirty-six-hours intensity won’t be denied. So as they lie in bed, Amy nestled against him, Lincoln tells her his somewhat less reflective, considerably abbreviated, but nonetheless largely reliable version of the following true story:

H
OW
J
OHN
L
INCOLN
B
ROKE
H
IS
A
RM

The summer before his senior year of high school, John Lincoln spent almost every evening with his best friend, Will Dewey. The Deweys lived near the Lincolns in the comfortable Washington suburb of Bethesda, and both families owned second homes in rural West Virginia, where the moms and kids moved every June when school let out. That summer of 1993 was the last that John and Will spent in the country. Afterward there would be trips to Europe and internships in far-flung cities—the sorts of experiences that would lead the boys permanently out of the nest and pull them apart from each other. But that summer they still lived at home, working for county road crews, earning just above the minimum wage.

Will and John had been friends forever, so inseparable that their classmates ran their names together as if the boys existed only in combination; Will and Johnny became Ouija, as in the mysterious board game. And in fact, the boys felt joined—privileged members of a kind of suburban aristocracy. Their families were prosperous, but more than that, the boys sensed that their parents were special—more sophisticated and creative, more alive. At parties—and their families were always throwing parties when the boys were young—their fathers reigned as the smartest, wittiest men in the room. At school, compared to the
moms of the other kids, the mothers of Will and John seemed younger, prettier, more stylish. While the boys’ classmates trudged home in the afternoons to watch TV or maybe take a tennis or ballet lesson, Ouija’s mothers whisked their children off to cultural experiences—a visit to the Corcoran Gallery, a tour of Ford’s Theater. Dinner-table conversations at both houses featured firsthand anecdotes about some of the most important people in the country. It helped that the boys themselves were bright and athletic, but through their friendship, they nurtured in each other the idea that they stood out—together they were a well-defended team against self-doubt.

Their summers encouraged the notion since in West Virginia their families were more privileged in almost every way than the local people. Will and John got to know some of the children from the nearby towns, mostly through sports, and the two Bethesda boys had occasional playdates with one or another West Virginia child. The boys had been well trained to be thoughtful and generous to others and to hide any sense of superiority. But they couldn’t help seeing how different their lives were.

That feeling of shared status peaked that last summer, and in some ways it no doubt echoed an attitude enjoyed by seventeen-year-old boys everywhere. The combination of near independence, physical prowess, and intense sexual desire creates a lush environment for breeding arrogance. Looking back years later, John Lincoln even came to think that he reached his peak on a particular August Friday night when, once again, he and Will set off together on an adventure. A few weeks before, Will’s father, a doctor with a flamboyant streak, had bought himself a red Porsche convertible, and for the first time, he let Will take it out for the evening. Of course, as on every other evening in the country when the boys borrowed a more modest family car, there was really no place to go. Sometimes they would find a basketball game, sometimes they would drive to the movie theater several towns over. But mostly they just cruised the country roads,
scooping the loop, as they put it, going from one small town to another in a kind of circle, ceaselessly looking for excitement.

That night, with Will driving the open car, they embarked on the usual round. After checking out the A&W drive-in in Concord—nothing but a handful of families with small children sitting at picnic tables on the concrete patio—the boys headed for the hamburger stand in Granite City. Soon the Porsche’s speedometer was hitting seventy-five on a straight stretch of road.

“One of the guys in my crew wrecked a mower this morning,” Will said, shouting, his words swept away by the wind roaring over the convertible. “Drove it right over a big rock. Snapped the blade.”

“What happened?”

“We all stood around and looked at it.”

“The crew chief didn’t get pissed?”

“The chief was out, so an old guy was in charge, and he always expects everything to go wrong. He used to be a miner. He’s from Hungary, and he hardly speaks English. ‘Sumbubbabitch.’ ”

          “What?” John could barely hear.

“That’s all he ever says: ‘
SUMBUBBABITCH
!’ ”

John laughed. The leathery new-car smell of the Porsche’s interior made him feel giddy.

Bill’s Burgers in Granite City was squeezed between an abandoned tire store and a Shell station that had closed for the night. A single pickup sat in the mocking brightness of the parking lot. The boys bought their hamburgers at the stand’s small, screened window, then used the Porsche’s hood as a table to avoid the risk of sullying the sparkling new interior. After a while, the short-order cook, a young man wrapped in a dirtied white apron, stepped outside to smoke a cigarette. He recognized the boys and walked over.

“Hey, nice wheels, Ouija,” he said. His name was Theron, and he knew Will and John from basketball games. Once they’d brought along a friend from Bethesda who’d used their joint
nickname, and Theron had been alert enough to pick it up, wielding it afterward with a slight edge of mockery.

“My old man’s,” said Will.

“That’s some old man,” Theron reflected.

“The only one I got.”

Theron inspected the car, and Will did an adequate job of parrying questions, though Theron clearly knew far more about the workings of an automobile than either Will or John did.

“You boys just cruising?” Theron asked.

“Looking for action,” John said.

Theron grinned. He was a few years older than the boys, and smoking had already started to stain his teeth. “I heard there’s a hot stripper at a carnival at Gunther,” he said.

“No shit.” John worked to contain his excitement.

“You ought to check her out.”

“Maybe we will.”

Theron dropped his cigarette on the pavement and crushed it with his sneaker. “Well,” he said, sighing, “I better get back behind the grill. I hope you enjoyed the hamburgers.”

“Needs more pickle,” Will called after him.

Gunther lay thirty miles or so deeper into the Blue Ridge, well beyond the boys’ normal loop. But the prospect of seeing a stripper was too good to pass up. The road climbed in curves up the side of a gentle mountain, then cut through a pass and wound down a wooded valley. The sky overhead was a bedsheet of stars. John slouched in the bucket seat, sliding closer to his friend so they could talk without fighting the wind. The trip took nearly an hour, and their conversation covered girls, sex, college prospects,
Basic Instinct
, politics, sports, Nirvana, the LA riots, and much, much more. Reflecting on it years later, John sometimes wondered—where did all the opinions, the ideas, the
vitality
come from?

In Gunther, they parked diagonally in front of the bank and walked to the edge of town. The carnival had colonized a rubbly
vacant lot. Strings of colored lights enclosed a dusty encampment of booths, tents, and rides. The boys bought Cokes and wandered the grounds. Crowds filled the paths, and speakers on lampposts layered the place with blasts of tinny rock music. Will and John passed up countless games of skill—a noisy rifle range where cork bullets bounced off flat, metal ducks; a pitching contest that invited contestants to throw baseballs covered in black tape at stacks of bottles; a small basketball court. “Gyps,” Will said knowingly. “Rigged to make you lose.” In the lot’s far corner, the boys came upon a tent with a sign out front announcing Boris The Wrestling Bear and promising twenty-five dollars to anyone who could pin the creature within five minutes. But there was no sign of a stripper.

The boys sidled up to the man running the Tilt-a-Whirl. “Say,” John said politely, “we heard there was a strip show here.”