Are You Happy Now? (27 page)

For Lincoln, the two-hour meeting passes in moments. When he returns to his office, he’s still too wound up to sit down. He wanders to his porthole window and glances down at the alley below. With its grim layer of gray and flattened snow, its sombrous pyre of black bags of garbage, frozen now in the cold, the view provides a useful antidote to Lincoln’s joy. This is only a tiny first step, he reminds himself. A whole Everest of obstacles stretches between here and the success of which he’s dreamed. Still, still...you’ve got to start somewhere.

Of course, he’s too careful to seek out Amy. But at around three that afternoon, he’s at his desk when she walks by outside his door. She pauses and looks up and down the hall. Certain she is alone, she turns to him, sticks out her tongue, and shakes her head and body violently, her tongue flapping wildly around her lips, her arms flying in all directions. She maintains the bedlam performance for maybe five seconds before stopping abruptly, straightening her skirt, and walking on like a proper young woman.

24

T
HERE IS SO
much to do. The timeline for
The Ultimate Position
has to be telescoped to meet Lincoln’s plan to publish the book for summer. He sends the manuscript out for copyediting to the elderly woman, a
Tribune
vet, who handles Pistakee’s manuscripts, and he orders Gregor to design a cover. (“Maybe something that brings together the sex and the mystery,” Lincoln suggests, and the designer produces a picture of a pair of shapely legs in glittery stilettos marred by drops of blood. Lincoln sends it back.) He scribbles some promotional copy for a last-second addition to the Pistakee catalog, and he prepares a press release to go out with advance copies. The distributor has to be coaxed to crash yet another Pistakee book (with the Cubs’ season ending ignominiously,
Wrigley Field: A People’s History
died on third). All this—on top of all the chores for Lincoln’s other books. He’s working weekends again and staying late at the office, but he appreciates being busy. Locking up one night, the last person to leave the twelfth floor, Lincoln realizes he’s hardly thought about Mary for days, and he hasn’t even been bothered by the soul-crushingly gray February weather.

That night, while Lincoln is eating half a roast chicken from Dominick’s and watching yet more snow decorate the maple branch outside his living-room window, Amy calls. “Are you at home?” she asks in a tight voice.

“Yes.”

“I’m coming over.”

“What—”

The phone clicks off before he can get the question out.

Ten minutes later, she rings the front-door bell. Lincoln buzzes her in and listens as her anxious steps pound the wood stairway up to his floor. He opens the door, and she brushes past and drops onto the sofa, shedding snow as she goes. She doesn’t bother taking off her mittens or cap or even unzipping her ski jacket. “My parents hate the book,” she says, burying her hands between her thighs and rocking up and back. “They hate it, hate it, hate it.”

“Whoa.” Lincoln sits across from her in the nubby chair. “Slow down. What did they say?”

“They hate it. I told you.”

Lincoln recognizes this outburst as an indictment of him. He wants to tell her: Who cares what your parents think? Worry about the
New York Times Book Review
. Instead, he says, “Try to be more specific. What exactly didn’t they like?”

Amy takes a deep breath. She’s wearing a funny little pillbox ski cap that looks incongruously jaunty given her distress. “Mostly the sex,” she says in a slightly calmer voice.

“There’s less sex in your book than in half the novels published these days,” Lincoln reminds her without too much exaggeration. “The copy editor is at least seventy-five, and she’s entirely unfazed.”

“My mom read all the sex scenes as if they were autobiographical,” Amy says glumly.

“Well, there you go. What did your father say?”

Amy smiles sheepishly. “He didn’t actually read it. He said he couldn’t bear to.”

“So what’s the big deal?” Lincoln throws up his arms. “Your parents are reacting exactly like parents. They can’t stand that you’re grown up enough to know about sex.” (Lincoln thinks: of course, if the parents lived in Manhattan, the kid could write a memoir about seducing an entire barnyard and as long as there was a guaranteed first printing of fifteen thousand, Mom and Dad would be thrilled.)

“I know,” Amy says. “But I’ve always been a good girl, a perfect girl—I’m not used to disappointing them.”

“Well, blame me,” Lincoln offers. “Tell them I made you add the sex.”

She smiles sheepishly again. “I did, sort of. My mother suspected it. In fact, she thought you wrote most of the sex stuff.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I said it was more of a collaboration.”

“So?”

“She said that made it like teenage sex—we both get to fool around, but I’m the one who gets stuck with the baby.”

Lincoln makes a mental note not to tangle with Mrs. O’Malley. “It’ll be fine,” he promises. He brews up a pot of cinnamon-apple-spice tea to soothe Amy’s nerves. By the time he walks her out into the cold to catch a cab, she’s excited again about the book, and Lincoln is feeling particularly buoyant—after all, the reaction of her parents has affirmed one of his stereotypes about the provincial attitudes of the Midwest. He’s got a feel for the marketplace, he tells himself. A good sign for the book.

Two weeks later, walking down the narrow interior stairway of his building on his way to work, Lincoln meets the old woman who lives on the first floor. She’s just returning from walking her Chihuahua. “Sun today!” she crows with remarkable vigor while the annoying dog sniffs at Lincoln’s pant leg. “Maybe we’ve put the worst of winter behind us!”

“Let’s hope!” Lincoln rejoins, taking care not to trip over the dog or its leash.

When he opens the front door, the blue sky and mild air hit him with such a rush of liberation that he actually considers playing hooky from his job for the first time in his life. The trouble is, he can’t think of anything to do—at least nothing outdoors that would let him bask in this premature breath of spring. Besides, he’s got things he’s looking forward to at work. Gregor has promised to bring in another idea for the cover of
The Ultimate Position
, and Lincoln has vowed to read the book one more time in galley pages. So instead of taking off on a frolic and detour, he luxuriates in the weather on the walk to the L station, where a nearly empty train is just pulling in and Lincoln gets a seat. His luck holds when he arrives at the office and Mrs. Macintosh calls to tell him that Duddleston wants to see him in the conference room right away. Good thing I came to work, after all, Lincoln tells himself.

The conference room’s narrow, windowless space gets stifling in summer and even in winter carries the musty odor of stale air and old cups of coffee. Aside from editorial meetings, the staff uses the room mostly to go over projects—picture books, for example—that need to be spread out on the long wood table. The moment he opens the door, Lincoln sees that this meeting is something different. Duddleston is seated on one side of the table, between a man Lincoln knows only as a Duddleston lawyer and a woman, Jane Something-or-other, who’s the office manager for a small investment firm in which Duddleston holds an interest and who handles HR issues for Pistakee. Naively, Lincoln thinks: the company is finally adopting the new health-care plan, and they need to bring Pistakee’s executive editor into the loop.

“Please sit down,” says Duddleston, pointing to a chair on the opposite side of the conference table. His voice is chill and flat.

Lincoln sits, and he stares across the table at three unsmiling faces. Behind them on the whiteboard, someone—probably
Hazel, who teaches a class here in writing children’s books—has scrawled and underlined “Connecting to the fantasy reality.”

“You know Jane Hemer,” Duddleston says, nodding toward the woman, “and this is Martin Canon; he’s a lawyer.”

Lincoln nods and reaches over to shake the man’s hand, but the lawyer makes no effort to meet him halfway. It’s only then, with his arm stretching awkwardly while the lawyer sits like a marble statue, that Lincoln realizes: me.

The lawyer speaks in a low, emotionless voice, using words that have clearly been scripted: “On good evidence, we have reason to believe that you have had sexual relations with a lower-level employee at Pistakee Press. Is this true?”

With his heart pumping blood at a furious pace, Lincoln’s mind spins. He thinks first: Shouldn’t they read me a Miranda warning? Don’t I get a lawyer? Then he wonders if he can call his father. No, Lincoln’s on his own. How did they find out? Can he bluff? He frantically tries to play out in his head the chess game of lies and obfuscations that would follow from a denial. How far could he take it? Or could he just deny and refuse to say more—be like one of those fundamentalists who reject evolution against all evidence? But the precise, inelegant language of the accusation (“sexual relations”) brings Lincoln back to memories of the humiliating falsehoods practiced by Bill Clinton under duress.

“Well, what do you say? Is it true?” demands Duddleston after Lincoln has sat mute for almost half a minute.

Lincoln has been a cad and a cheat; his moral compass is skewed by ambition, and he holds an arrogant disregard for great masses of perfectly decent, well-meaning people. He will fib to get his way and dodge the truth to avoid confrontations. As much as anyone, he practices the blinding self-justification that seems to have become a defining element in the character of Americans born after World War II. But pressed to the core, when it comes to taking responsibility for an action that involves himself and others in a crucial way, Lincoln will not lie. “Yes,” he says.

Duddleston shakes his head in disgust. Jane Hemer, who seems to draw an intense pleasure from this fast-moving drama, emits a small, vaguely sexual sigh. Canon, the lawyer, stays on mark. “You have broken a fundamental rule of this company,” he says, “and your employment is immediately terminated.” He turns over a sheet of paper that is sitting in front of him and pushes it across the table. “This letter waives any future right of recourse against Pistakee and promises that you will never disclose anything material about the company or say anything in any way disparaging about it or its principals. If you sign the waiver, Pistakee will give you six weeks severance and agree to make neutral acknowledgements of your employment here. We will tell people you resigned.” He waits while Lincoln stares blankly at the sheet, its lines of type blurred to his eyes. The lawyer continues: “Otherwise, you will get nothing. You’re out, and you’re fired.”

Lincoln hesitates, then lifts a corner of the document and fingers its thick, rich texture, built to last. He’s far too stunned to think, to reason. Instinct alone remains. “No,” he says, flicking the sheet back across the table. He signed a waiver before he wrestled the bear. One is enough for a lifetime.

The lawyer lets slip a hint of emotion, a slight, almost immeasurable elevation of the eyebrows. Surprise? Admiration? It passes in an instant. The eyebrows slam down like a steel gate. “You will be escorted to your office and allowed to take your personal belongings only,” he says. “You will not take anything that belongs to the company. You have ten minutes.”

As if answering a bell, the three people on the other side of the table stand in unison. Jane Hemer hands Lincoln a packet of material about health care and his 401(k). Duddleston opens the conference room door, and the three antagonists watch Lincoln rise unsteadily and step out of the room. In the hall, the paunchy building guard waits, holding several empty boxes. He nods in the direction of Lincoln’s office and follows while Lincoln
scuffles in a fog through the corridors. His legs are rubbery. He feels as if his clothes are propping him up. He and the guard pass no one, see no one. Lincoln wonders: Is everyone hiding? Do they all know? When he enters his office, he pauses briefly in the middle of the room, trying to get his bearings. This place where he’s spent so many hours reading, editing, daydreaming, where he’s breathed the air and left untold traces of his DNA—already it seems changed. He thought it was his, but it belongs to the countless ghosts of people who occupied this building before and the countless who will follow.

Lincoln senses the guard at his back. The man used to tease Lincoln, telling him he worked too hard since he was always the last to leave Pistakee’s offices at night. Now, Lincoln can feel the man’s stony efficiency. Walking around the desk, Lincoln opens several drawers and stares at the files. He considers the clutter of books and manuscripts on his desk. Then he gestures for a box from the guard, and he carefully packs the family pictures sitting atop his bookshelf, including the shot of Mary and him in Tuscany. Why hadn’t he put that photo away earlier?

“Let’s go,” he says.

“That’s it?” the guard asks. “You don’t want any of them books?” He points to the volumes lining the shelves.

“Let’s go,” Lincoln repeats, leading the way out of his office.