Are You Happy Now? (3 page)

In her own way, Mary was probably saying the same thing. She told Lincoln that she was tired of just playing at marriage, playing at life (as if the failure to conceive in six months of trying meant they were amateurs). Selling houses on the North Side, she made half again what Lincoln did, and in the months before the breakup, she started the practice course for the GMAT. And where did she want to go to school? The U of C.

“Yes, the U of C,” she cried furiously, when Lincoln greeted her announcement with a scornful face. “It’s a great school, and Chicago is a great city. You live here, remember!”

Of course he remembers. In a perverse way, he feels fatally entwined with Chicago, as if he and the city are unspeaking partners in a two-legged race, contemptuous of each other yet forced to collaborate for the sake of the contest. He needs to show his wife, his parents, the publishing business—his own reeling ego—that he can carve out a success here, that he has not spent fifteen years (has it really been that long?) in vain.

Lincoln is blowing a storm of eraser bits from the pages of Professor Fleace’s manuscript when another knock sounds gently on his door. “Yes,” he caws disagreeably, since he knows it won’t be Duddleston again.

The door opens tentatively, and a little ruffed grouse tiptoes in, the editorial assistant who started work just last week.

“What is it?” snaps Lincoln, stopping her in midstep.

“Mr. Duddleston forgot to leave the Wrigley Field manuscript,” the young woman explains. “He asked me to drop it off.” She has shaggy brown hair that frames dark eyes and a beaky
little nose, and the few times Lincoln has noticed her, she was wearing a boxy peasant blouse, a formless bag of khaki that came just over her hips. The tiny face, the forest coloring, the nervous manner—Lincoln can’t help but think of a ruffed grouse. Well, he’s never actually seen one, not even a picture, but she looks like the name describes. She’s draped in the blouse again today, wearing it over black slacks.

“Byron,” Lincoln tells her grumpily.

She stares back, bewildered, and then her face lights up. “The poet?” she asks.

“No. That’s his name. Byron Duddleston. No one calls him Mr. Duddleston. Byron. Or just Duddleston.”

“Oh.” The poor bird looks wounded.

“Just put it there,” he says, nodding toward the far edge of his desk and returning his attention to tour nineteen and the Lincoln statue hiding behind the History Museum. After a moment, he’s aware that she’s hovering.

“What is it?” he asks irritably.

“On top of all these other things?” she asks. With her small, shifty eyes, she indicates the desktop’s clutter, an accumulation that has the abandoned look of an unexcavated ruin. “I think Mr. Duddleston wanted you to get on this right away.”

So the grouse has a bit of spirit, Lincoln thinks. “Byron!” he almost screams.

“Byron,” she repeats meekly, looking thoroughly distressed.

“I’m the executive editor here,” he reminds her. “I’ll get to Wrigley Field when I’m ready. Now just put the manuscript on the desk.”

She steps forward and carefully places the thick wad of pages atop a pile of unread magazines. Lincoln tries to ignore her, but still she lingers. “Oh, you’ve got Professor Fleace’s book,” she exclaims after a moment. “I loved his course on Illinois geography.”

Lincoln puts down his pencil. “So you went to the U of C,” he says drily.

“I just graduated in June.”

“Congratulations.” Lincoln wonders why it seems that everyone he knows in Chicago went to the U of C—six million stories in the naked city, and all of them feature a U of C weenie—everyone except Mary, who went to Northwestern but now wants her U of C dosage too.

“You went there.” A statement, not a question. The grouse has been studying his résumé.

“Yes, yes, I did.” When none of the Ivies took him, and his only other choice was the University of Maryland.

“My name’s Amy O’Malley, by the way.” She offers her hand across his desk, and Lincoln takes it without standing. He feels as if he could crush her fragile, bony fingers in his fist.

“How did you get this job, Amy?” he asks her.

“Mr. Duddleston...Byron...Byron was looking for an assistant, and he asked the U of C recruitment office for the best English major who was about to graduate.”

“And that was you.”

Amy’s pale skin reveals a modest blush. “Well, I was at least the best one who wasn’t going straight on to graduate school. I wanted to get out in the real world for a while, and the idea of working with books and writers...it was a dream come true.”

Lincoln smiles condescendingly. He wonders how long that dream would survive an encounter with Bill Lemke, stinking of cigarettes and bourbon, thick patches of white hair on his neck that his razor has missed for weeks, babbling on about how the sports editor of the
Sun-Times
, that sniveling cretin, had maliciously envied Lemke’s talent and torpedoed his career. “And I suppose you have the ambition to write a little yourself,” Lincoln posits.

The blush expands from two small circles on her cheeks into a faint mask covering her entire un-made-up face. “Maybe, some time. I used to think so, and then I took a course with Professor Davoodi, and I realized how much I have to learn. It’s one thing
to imagine you want to write, but you have to have something to
say
, you know?”

“You took a course with Professor Davoodi?” Lincoln asks innocently.

“It was fantastic. He’s a genius, don’t you think? Was he there when you went to the U of C?”

“No,” Lincoln muses ambiguously. “No, I think not.” Cyrus Davoodi is a tall, imposing scholar from an ancient Persian family who made a name in academic circles by pioneering the application of postcolonial theory to American romance novels. Yes, he is a genius, everyone says, but a few years ago, he won a worldwide award for the worst writing of the year—a snarky designation, to be sure, but the newspapers paid attention. Out of curiosity, Lincoln had looked up Professor Davoodi’s award-winning paragraph. Only a hundred words long, the paragraph was nonetheless a thicket of inflated phrases and run-on sentences so clogged with clauses—dependent, independent, and unrelated to any apparent earthly thought—that Lincoln had literally dizzied himself trying unsuccessfully to puzzle through it. Randomly stringing together big words from the dictionary would have produced a more readable narrative.

“He’s so full of
ideas
!” the grouse offers.

“Maybe we can find a place for him on the spring list,” Lincoln deadpans. And then arrange a joint reading with Professor Fleace and Bill Lemke, bring together all our stars.

Amy’s tiny brow furrows as she tries to determine whether Lincoln is teasing her. “I hate it that Yale stole him away,” she says.

Lincoln waves a hand. “Ah, well.” He sighs and rudely turns back to his manuscript, but Amy doesn’t leave. It occurs to Lincoln that she exudes the slightly aimless air of a college student who can drop into a pal’s dorm room and chat thoughtlessly for hours since nothing really important is ever going on anyway. “These round windows are so odd,” she says after a moment,
running her fingers around the circular copper frame holding the pane of glass. “They really add something distinctive, don’t you think?”

Lincoln doesn’t look up. “Yes.”

“Ahead of its time,” Amy points out. “The square form was so dominant in those days.”

“Mm-hmm.” The building was put up a century ago by a former sea captain who, as legend has it, longed to recall the portholes on his ship. Never mind that the skimpy windows kept the interior shadowed and gloomy.

“And at least you have a window,” Amy says. “I’m in a cubicle in the interior of the building.” She leans forward to look down the alley. The movement hikes up her blouse, and as Lincoln glances over, his practiced eyes spot a delicate line of lace panty peeking above her slacks. Hmmm.

“In our business, all you need is a good fluorescent light,” he tells her. Lovely lace panties? On the grouse? “Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. You have work to do.” She bows and anxiously starts to back out of the room, bumping the edge of the bookshelf. “Oops.” Finally she composes herself for a last exchange: “You know, you asked me earlier if I wanted to write?”

“Yes.”

“Well, before I took the course with Professor Davoodi, I was working on a collection of short stories. One was even published in the new student literary magazine. Would you mind looking at them sometime?”

Lincoln imagines fragile, minimalist prose recalling incidents so evanescent, so utterly uneventful, that only a sensibility with exquisite perception could read their devastating impact.

“Pistakee doesn’t publish fiction anymore,” he tells her coolly.

Amy quickly adds, “I know, I mean, it would just really be helpful to have them read by a
real
editor.”

How else is Lincoln going to get rid of her? “Just drop them off.”

“Thanks!” she calls out, and scurries out of the office, leaving the door ajar.

A real editor, Lincoln thinks. I wish.

Outside in the alley, the Mexican busboys from the restaurant down the street chatter away in Spanish as they pile up more bags of garbage. Lincoln forces himself to rejoin Professor Fleace on his pedagogical stroll down Clark. A real editor. How can you be a real editor without any real writers?

3

A
T ABOUT SIX o’clock that evening, Lincoln puts his pencil down. He locks his desk, carefully folds his
New York Times
to expose the daily crossword puzzle, and walks into the small central lobby of Pistakee Press. The place is abandoned, utterly lifeless. The receptionist always leaves at 5:00 p.m. sharp, flipping the switchboard to automatic. The front panel of overhead lights has been turned off, leaving the area near the elevator in gloom. The handful of editors, secretaries, and bookkeepers—and Byron Duddleston himself—have all slipped out silently on their own, as always, never bidding good-bye to Lincoln, never, as far as he knows, even acknowledging each other as they leave. It’s as if the place empties in shame, he thinks. He compares it to the rousing daily exits he recalls from his summer at Malcolm House, when he and the other interns and editorial assistants always looked each other up for news of the latest adventures and scandals, usually moving the conversation to a nearby bar. Sometimes some of the younger editors would join them, and often as not the roistering would carry on well into the night.

On the other hand, Lincoln reminds himself, the end of the workday was deadly at the
Tribune
, too. Maybe it’s a Chicago thing.

Pistakee’s offices are in River North, an old manufacturing neighborhood just north of the Loop that came alive with galleries in the eighties, when the art market was hopping, even in the Midwest. The galleries drew restaurants and shops, and by the late nineties the creaky, low-scale neighborhood was sprouting flesh-toned residential high-rises (lively colors don’t sell) and multi-story parking garages, a building boom that threatened to engulf the original redbrick cityscape—at least until the real-estate collapse. Still, River North retains patches of funkiness, and most blocks remain open enough to feature late afternoon sun in the summer.

Lincoln walks west on Grand, checking the windows of the faux authentic Irish bar on the way; south on LaSalle, past what was once Michael Jordan’s restaurant, shuttered after an unseemly tussle among the principals; west on Illinois; south on Wells; west on Kinzie; and on into the huge fortress of the Merchandise Mart, a commercial building that was long in the hands of the Kennedy family but never acquired any cachet from the association. In the Mart, Lincoln takes the escalator to the second-floor entrance to the elevated-train station. He dips his fare card into the machine and joins a crowd of mostly young, natty professionals waiting for the Brown Line train headed for revived neighborhoods to the north.

Lincoln enjoys the L and considers it one of Chicago’s small wonders. When he was a student with more time in the middle of the day, he sometimes traveled the train just for the sport of it. The view from the L offers an unusual perspective on a city, Lincoln thinks—the track snakes through neighborhoods at about the level of a second-story window, and the train frequently thrusts with astonishing impudence past the living rooms and bedrooms in the buildings along the way. Twice he has spotted people fucking, and once, riding the Red Line just beyond Diversey Parkway, traveling through a gentrified old German neighborhood, he saw a girl, stark naked, with lovely,
buoyant breasts and a small wedge of dark pubic hair, standing at a window, facing the tracks. Their eyes met in the split second it took the train to pass, and Lincoln was certain she gestured to him, beckoning, as the train rumbled on. How many years ago was that? Eight, maybe—well before he was married, before he’d even met his wife. In all the years since, he’s never passed that building without looking and imagining.

Today, the Brown Line is running behind, as usual, and by the time a train arrives at the Merchandise Mart station, the cars are already full. Lincoln lets that train pass. The next arrives five minutes later, crowded also, but not hopelessly packed. Lincoln enters the rear door of the third car from the front. He shoulders his way through the cluster of passengers thoughtlessly gathered at the door and finds a spot of standing room in the aisle. Most of his fellow passengers are young and white, but because the train traverses a variety of neighborhoods, it occasionally provides a somewhat intimate mixing of race and class, one of the few places where that happens in Chicago despite the city’s proud role as the hometown of President Obama. Lincoln is standing behind an older, rather heavyset black woman wearing a wide-brimmed, old-fashioned white hat and a ruffled, patterned dress with a stiff, white, crocheted collar. Standing a few feet away, Lincoln sniffs the dull fragrance of starch. He wonders for a moment why she’s there—this hardly seems like the means or route for her to get to church—and then he privately notes with disapproval that none of the men sitting in the car has given her his seat.