Are You Happy Now? (36 page)

Falcone emits a snort. “I hardly bother anymore. Acquisitions are what count. Who can you sign up?” He leans across the small table. “As for line editing, I’ll let you in on a secret. Readers don’t notice.”

“I know things are changing,” Lincoln says.

Falcone sits back. “Don’t get me wrong. I love books. I love authors, too—at least some of them. But the publishing business has to face facts. The game’s new. Now, it’s all names and marketing.”

The rest of the lunch goes well. Lincoln and Falcone chatter through dessert and several rounds of espresso, talking about books, writers, sports, wives, marriages. (Falcone, too, has come through a divorce and for financial reasons has retreated to a studio sublet on the Upper West Side.) They don’t finish until after three o’clock, and Lincoln has to rush to catch a cab to the airport. In front of the restaurant, Falcone shakes Lincoln’s hand. “You’re not what I expected,” he says. “I’ll put in a good word.”

A little over an hour later, Lincoln is in line at his gate at LaGuardia when his cell phone rings. It’s Jeff Kessler. “Good. Got you before you got away,” he says.

“Just waiting to board.”

“Listen. You made a strong impression here. I’m not going to beat around the bush. We’d like to offer you the job.”

Lincoln can only burble, “Wow.” The line at the gate starts forward.

Kessler runs through a few rudiments, including salary, which generously eclipses what Lincoln is currently making, though his instant calculations suggest he’ll be exiled out of Manhattan or closeted in a studio sublet, like Falcone. “Well, what do you think?” Kessler asks.

“Ahhh.” Lincoln is so awash with surprise and joy that he can’t even blurt out a simple “yes.” He’s broken the tape at the end of his grueling marathon, and he’s too exhausted to think. And just then a gate announcement blasts through the intercom, and Lincoln can’t find the pocket where he stashed his boarding pass.

Kessler rescues. “I understand. It’s a big move. You should think about it. Just let me know on Monday.”

“I’m so flattered. Thank you.”

“Have a good flight back,” Kessler says.

As soon as the plane lifts off, Lincoln realizes how tense he’s been. He feels limp and drained, almost as if he’s recovering from a fever. He sits back and closes his eyes. A phrase from an Anthony Buford poem, “Falling Asleep,” floats into his head: “Nature’s gift of oblivion.” He got that right, thinks Lincoln, just as he drifts off. He awakens as they are crossing Lake Michigan. His first thought is that he’s blown it. He should have said yes to the job immediately. Now Kessler will doubt his enthusiasm. But maybe not, maybe Lincoln lucked out. Maybe a touch of hesitation shows worldliness, sophistication. His father, the fierce negotiator, always said never jump at the first offer. Maybe on Monday Kessler will even dangle a slightly higher salary, allowing Lincoln to upgrade from a studio to a small one-bedroom.

From Lincoln’s window seat, the spires of Chicago come into view. The plane takes a northern route, swooping past the city before circling and pointing toward O’Hare. The angled sun casts
a sepia light on the cityscape. Lincoln looks down. Chicago’s cluster of big buildings looks so...contained, so
knowable
from three thousand feet. For all the third-biggest-American-city hoopla, the famous downtown stands like an outpost, a small redoubt on the vast, flat surface. Lincoln has a sudden flash of the pride those early Chicagoans must have felt in setting their flag here, in this swampy, windswept, unwelcoming prairie. The thought leads him back to his conversation with Kessler, then his lunch with Falcone. Something nags.

Did he fuck Amy? No! Well, yes, but he would never put it that way, never treat it as if it were the natural, transactional outcome of his work. He feels sullied now for having responded to the question at all. If Amy knew...Lincoln vows to himself that he will never, ever, get drawn again into an exchange like that. Half an hour later, coming home in a taxi, stalled in traffic, Lincoln wonders if it’s that misstep with Falcone that has slightly deflated his joy at being offered the job.

When he gets to his apartment, Lincoln doesn’t have the energy to go out for dinner, so he toasts himself with a large vodka on ice and calls out for a pizza. Checking the iAgatha website, he finds that three new manuscripts have come in for him, including Vijay Sharma’s latest. “I have been writing feverishly and can’t wait for you to work your magic,” says Vijay in a note sent at 2:00 a.m. Jaipur time.

In bed that night, Lincoln churns dreams until about five in the morning, when he awakens with one of those sleep-induced moments of utter clarity: he will go to New York—that is of course what he wants, but he will take Amy with him.

32

A
MY HAS MOVED
to Pilsen, a slightly sketchy, largely Mexican neighborhood south of the Loop that’s enjoyed an influx of offbeat galleries and promising restaurants. Her plain, rectangular three-flat—subdivided into at least six apartments—sits in the middle of an unshaded block of similar buildings that crowd the sidewalk and provide a feeling of density missing from much of the North Side.

A taxi drops off Lincoln at nine thirty in the morning. The block is quiet. As he stands on the sidewalk, an older, overweight Hispanic woman carrying a cloth bag walks by, considering him warily. Lincoln smiles. He waits for the woman to reach the corner, then marches directly to the entrance of Amy’s building. The intercom shows Hispanic names in every apartment but one, 2B: A. O’Malley. Lincoln rings the buzzer. He can hear it sounding distantly, deep within the structure. No answer. He waits, then thumbs the buzzer again. Thirty seconds pass, a minute. Suddenly, a scratchy bleat of static erupts from the inept intercom.

“Amy, it’s John,” says Lincoln into the speaker, enunciating clearly.

“Kxxxkkkxxx.”

“What? I can’t hear.”

“Kxxxkkkxxx.”

“Let me in! We have to talk.”

“Kxxxkkkxxx.” By now, with his excellent language skills, Lincoln has translated the static: “Go away!”

“Please!” he begs.

But the intercom is silent, offering not even the closure of a click.

Lincoln could stand at the building entrance and try to slip in when someone leaves, but then he’d be left pounding on Amy’s apartment door. Or he could wait for her to come out and accost her on the street. He decides to reappraise over coffee at a diner a few blocks away on Halsted, but as he heads in that direction, he thinks of the alley. (Ah, those Chicago alleys.) He walks down the potholed and littered passageway and comes to the back of the three-flat. Looking up through the rusty filigree of a fire escape, he can see what must be a window to Amy’s apartment. If he could get up to that window—if Amy could see him, she’d read his sincerity. He’d get his chance to plead his case.

The first-floor windows are boarded up, no doubt to prevent burglaries, so there’s nothing but a blank wall of siding for the bottom fifteen or so feet. But a concrete ledge juts out about ten feet up, presumably marking the support between floors. If he could get to the ledge, he could use his athleticism to hoist himself and grab a bottom rung of the fire escape. He’d be like a monkey hanging there, but his devotion would be on full display.

The alley is lined with the city’s black garbage containers, hard plastic boxes about four feet high with two large wheels on one side of the bottom. Lincoln rolls one over just beneath Amy’s window. He steps back and vaults onto the top, balancing on his knees. So far, so good. Bracing himself against the wall, he carefully stands. Because of the wheels on the bottom, the container lacks stability, but Lincoln keeps his legs apart and stays on the balls of his feet. Then he reaches up with his left hand to grip the
concrete ledge. He’s just poised to make his move to the fire escape when the hard plastic top of the container collapses like a trapdoor, dropping Lincoln into a loose pile of garbage and toppling the fragile contraption. He lets out a shout as he falls and lands on his back, fortunately cushioned by the garbage that is spilling into the alley. (So many banana peels—or are those plantains?)

Before he can scramble to his feet, a man leans out of a building across the alley and yells something in Spanish. Then another head appears in another window. More Spanish screams.

Above him, Amy opens her window and looks down on the pitiful scene. She yells something in Spanish to the heads across the street. Lincoln catches the word
amigo
. Then she tells him sourly, “Clean up that crap and then come around to the front. I’ll let you in.”

Several more heads appear in windows across the street. It’s as if they have skybox seating to observe his little fiasco of a show. All watch silently as Lincoln pushes the garbage—dark, smelly, semiliquid, much of it pouring out of paper grocery bags—back into the container. His pants are wet in patches and his hands are foul, but he carefully picks up the last stray pieces before waving cheerfully to his unsmiling audience and walking around front again. Amy buzzes him in and greets him at her door on the second floor. She’s wrapped in a white robe, and it looks as if she’s hastily run a comb through her hair. “You smell like shit,” she tells him. “Go wash up.”

The apartment is a railroad flat, one long hall with rooms off the sides. Amy directs him to a tiny bathroom, spotlessly clean but crammed with jars of makeup, tubes of shampoo, and assorted cosmetics. Lincoln goes to work with a ball of scented soap and finishes by squirting some perfume onto the dark stain in the back of his pants. He emerges smelling like a nineteenth-century fop.

“In here,” Amy calls out from a room down the hall. Lincoln follows her voice and finds her sitting on a worn, blue sofa, her
legs crossed and her arms folded across her chest. Standing a few feet away, also wearing a bathrobe and with his arms folded, is Tony Buford.

“What?” gasps Lincoln. The facts of the situation are too terrible for his mind to grasp at once—he has to absorb their implications slowly, let the awfulness seep in. Amy and Buford are seminaked together early in the morning. They were unconnected, in separate compartments of Lincoln’s life, but they were his friends. Doesn’t this count as a hideous betrayal? How long have they been carrying on together behind his back? Is he always, in all ways, a cuckold?

Amy doesn’t offer any solace. “Well, what is it you wanted?” she demands.

“I...ah...” Lincoln stares at Buford, who appears to be as peeved as Amy.

“You’ve interrupted my yoga lesson,” Amy says impatiently.

Lincoln looks from her to Buford. For the first time, he notices two mats open on the floor. “Yoga?” he says. “I thought...”

Amy rolls her eyes. “Jesus Christ,” she grouses.

“I’m a professional!” Buford exclaims, furious. “An academic and a yoga teacher. You never took me seriously.”

Trying to compose himself, Lincoln notices the man’s pencil-thin bare legs, the way his maroon U of C bathrobe can almost wrap two times around his slight torso. “We got off on the wrong foot,” Lincoln says.

Amy doesn’t want to see this confrontation escalate. “Maybe we should cancel the lesson for today,” she tells Buford.

He starts rolling up his mat. “I practically handed you success,” he mutters at Lincoln, “and you were too pigheaded to recognize it.”

Amy motions Lincoln not to respond. Buford tucks his mat under his arm and marches down the hall to another room. When he’s gone, Lincoln tells Amy, “I didn’t realize.”

“I found his card in your apartment—in the bowl by the door where you drop your keys,” she explains. “He’s an excellent
yoga teacher, and he’s giving me a break on the price because I’m your friend. Do you know how expensive a private yoga lesson is otherwise?”

“What about the poetry part?”

“I told him we could skip that.”

“I hope I haven’t spoiled it for you.”

“He’ll recover.” Amy softens. “He really does like you. And he thinks you’re a brilliant editor.”

Buford emerges a few seconds later, dressed now in a polo shirt and blue jeans and carrying his mat and a small athletic bag. “For a guy as smart as you are, you can really be a jerk,” he tells Lincoln.

“Right,” says Lincoln.

“Your problem is you think too much. You’re doing all this thinking, and you don’t see what’s right in front of you.”

“I’m sorry,” Amy tells Buford. “I’ll come to your class Monday.”

Buford sighs and disappears down the hall. Amy and Lincoln hear the door close behind him.

With her yoga lesson canceled, Amy gets back to business. “Well, what was it you wanted?” she asks coolly.

Lincoln looks around. Amy has enlivened the room with several hanging pictures and a bookcase of her bottle collection, but the narrow space only admits light from that one window in back. The mood is funereal. “Can I sit?” he asks. He’s feeling shaky, both from the weight of his cause and the blundering way it’s played out so far. He gestures to a wood chair, where there’d be no risk of transmitting the stain on his pants.

Amy nods grudgingly.

Lincoln sits, takes a deep breath. First he says, “I’ve been offered a job in New York, with Malcolm House.”