Are You Happy Now? (5 page)

John Barleycorn has a brisk business going, but Lincoln slips past the bar and the big, dark dining room and goes out back, where tables have been set up in an open lot. Flam has grabbed a spot in the corner, and he’s already at work on a beer.

“You beat me,” Lincoln tells him.

Flam shrugs. “I live next door.” Flam is a blond, spidery man with long, skinny arms and legs sprouting from a soft, round torso. Another U of C boy, he’s a few years older than Lincoln. They met at the
Tribune
, where they bonded over their Eastern roots—Flam is from Boston—and became friends and confidants despite a lurking edge of competition between them. In fact, Lincoln had been the other finalist for the job of
Tribune
literary editor.

Lincoln orders a beer and a hamburger, and the two gossip about the newspaper for a few minutes. Even before the bankruptcy, the bean counters running the
Tribune
had shrunk book coverage, eliminating a stand-alone section and jamming reviews into a few pages in the anemic Saturday edition. “We’re a dead zone,” Flam laments.

“I still don’t get it,” Lincoln says. “Book readers are the most thoughtful, educated niche of the audience. You’d think
advertisers would want their product nestled in there among the reviews.”

“Book readers are old,” Flam says, shaking his narrow head. Several strands of blond hair drop across his brow like bangs. “Advertisers want young, vacant minds with no brand loyalties. Advertisers want nitwits, they want Facebook.” Flam sighs and uses both hands to balance his beer on his knee, his thin legs twined around each other. Lincoln recalls those awkward days before his marriage, when the two of them would go out drinking and try to pick up girls. After a while, Flam asks, “How are things at Pistakee?”

“Duddleston told me today that I am a brilliant editor,” Lincoln reveals, trying to squeeze a touch of irony into his voice to lighten the boast.

“He’s probably getting ready to fire you,” Flam says evenly.

Lincoln covers his shock with a grunting laugh and a gulp of beer. “What made you say that?” he asks.

“You know, bloated praise, smoothing the skids—that kind of thing. Why in God’s name would you overapplaud an employee if you didn’t want him gone—happily, gently, of course, but gone?”

Lincoln thinks: Flam is the king of the weenies, but he’s also amazingly astute. “Maybe I really am a brilliant editor,” Lincoln suggests.

“I’m sure you are,” says Flam, as if that has nothing to do with it.

The waitress plunks down their hamburger platters, and the conversation is diverted. Over the next hour or so, Lincoln drinks too many beers, and as the two men gab on about publishing and literature, he starts to let slip the frustrations with his job. “I need a hit!” he cries at one point, pounding the steel-mesh table and setting off a brief concerto of clinking empty bottles. “I need a fucking hit! Something to put this fucking midget publishing house on the map.”

Flam, cool as always, tells him, “The problem is there are too many books being published, even today, when kids don’t read and the economy is in free fall. The books pile up outside my office—literally like a wall. I can’t even give them away. Who in the world has the time? With the Internet, movies, TV—who has the time to give a shit?”

“But they’re still books, you fucking asshole! A pinnacle of civilization, of human life itself.” Lincoln pounds the table again. He’s aware that he’s making a small spectacle and drawing stares from the people seated around. “And now you want to throw it all away just because we can fill our free time with
The Real Housewives of Orange County
?”

“I still like
Survivor
,” Flam says. “They always throw in a few babes who walk around half naked.”

“Come on, Flam. Look what’s happening to us. You’re the fucking literary editor of the
Tribune
, still one of the biggest papers in the country.”

“Are you sure you’re not conflating your own situation with the state of the world?” asks Lincoln’s friend.

Even through a haze of beer Lincoln recognizes that Flam has trapped him in a dead end. “I just want a breakthrough book,” repeats Lincoln, relenting.

“You just want to prove something to Mary,” says Flam.

Lincoln smiles through his beer. Where would he be without Flam? When marriages fell apart in the Fitzgerald short stories that Lincoln devoured one college summer, the husbands always seemed to move into the Yale Club in New York, finding refuge in the clubby dining rooms, the dusty library, the moldy halls overseen by vintage portraits of the solemn teams of rowers and ballplayers. When it happened to Lincoln, he moved in with Flam, who fed him steaks and nursed his ego until Lincoln had recovered enough to get his own place.

“How often do you talk?” Flam asks.

“Oh, we talk,” Lincoln says vaguely. In fact, his conversations with Mary—always by phone—have been rare, and then they’ve been cautious, almost scripted. After all, Lincoln tells himself, she said she needed a vacation.

As the two friends settle the bill and get up to leave, Lincoln asks, “How’s
your
girlfriend these days?”

Flam knows he’s being teased, since he has terrible luck with women. Lately he’s enjoyed talking about his infatuation with the attractive girl who serves him coffee most mornings at the Starbucks around the corner. “I think I’m making progress,” Flam says. “She sees me walk in the door and knows what to get before I have to ask—tall coffee, double lid.”

“You better start shopping for the engagement ring.”

“We’ve actually talked a bit,” Flam goes on, ignoring the joke. “She’s nineteen, a student at Loyola.”

“You
are
making progress.”

“She lives with her parents up in Avondale—you know, the Northwest Side. Working class.”

Lincoln starts. “She doesn’t even have her own place?”

“Not every girl comes with all the amenities,” Flam points out with a smile.

Lincoln grabs a cab for home, but he gets out several blocks early and detours on foot past Mary’s building, their old building. Flam warned him not to live so close, but Lincoln couldn’t help himself. Was he nearby to protect her? To spy? Mary has insisted there is no one else, but Lincoln can’t help wondering. Now he gazes up to the second-floor window in the stately graystone on this lovely, leafy street where he once lived. Lights off. All dark. Could mean anything.

Back in his apartment, despite too much beer, Lincoln lies in bed awake. In the distance, the passing roar of an L train, white noise for the North Side, rises and falls rhythmically. His arm aches in the broken place from pounding the fucking table at John Barleycorn.

5

I
N THE MORNING
Lincoln rises with a feverish, unsettled feeling, something between the wages of a night out drinking and an attack of free-floating anxiety. Well, it’s not exactly free-floating—on opening his scratchy eyes, Lincoln remembers that he has specific and justified grounds for being anxious. His marriage. His job. Not to mention the lingering guilt over his lamentable behavior on the L yesterday.

He’s already running late, but he takes the time to paw through the morning’s
Tribune
. He finds the story he’s looking for among the stacked short items devoted to neighborhood news.

NORTH SIDE—Police arrested two Chicago men yesterday after a knife fight on a Brown Line “L” train during evening rush hour panicked passengers and led to several minor injuries.

Enrique Gonzales, 19, and Ricardo Cabello, 21, were charged with endangerment and carrying concealed weapons. Neither was hurt, but their confrontation in a rear car as the train approached the Belmont Station frightened passengers, who then stampeded the front cars to escape.

“Unfortunately, we’ve seen this happen before,” said Dolores Jordan, spokeswoman for the Chicago Transit Authority. “I think a lot of the people who panicked didn’t even know what was going on. They were just reacting to other people panicking.”

Several passengers were treated at the scene for cuts and bruises. One woman was taken to Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center and later released.

Lincoln reads the story over twice quickly. The woman who was taken to the hospital—could that have been the victim of his shove? He’ll probably never know.

He’s barely settled into his desk at work when Duddleston appears in the doorway, setting off a cherry bomb of bile in Lincoln’s roiling gut. But Duddleston flashes his recently whitened teeth and gleefully announces that he’s had an “epiphany” (what he means is a “good idea”): the Pistakee team will make an outing to the Cubs-Brewers game next Tuesday night! Bill Lemke will come along, so Lincoln can mend fences with the offended author in the low-pressure setting of Wrigley Field!

“Great!” Lincoln exclaims.

“It’s impossible to stay mad on a night out at Wrigley.”

“You’re right about that!”

For several tedious minutes, the boss goes over the diplomacy of the encounter—the seating at the game, Lincoln’s opening gambit, benign topics of conversation. (Lincoln has mused sometimes that Duddleston may have a touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder—precisely the neurosis that made him a rich trader: he knew how a flood in Kansas would affect September wheat prices before the first raindrop fell.) Lincoln nods robotically, his brain banging against the inside of his skull. The boss concludes with a gentle admonition: “We need to be supportive of our writers. That’s the Pistakee Way.”

When Duddleston finally leaves, Lincoln gulps two Bufferin, slogging them down with the last inch of cold coffee left over from yesterday’s Starbucks.

Lincoln spends the remainder of the morning on
Walking Tours of the Windy City
. After a couple of hours, his father calls, out of the blue, ostensibly to remind Lincoln to drop a card to his mother, whose birthday is coming up, but probably, Lincoln suspects, to make inquiries about the status of Lincoln’s marriage. “Any developments?” asks the old man. “Mary’s mom told your mom that there were still some issues to deal with.”

“They talked?” Lincoln feels as if his privacy has been violated.

“They’re worried mothers. Nobody’s happy about this.”

“Well, neither are we, and we’re working on it.” (Issues to deal with? What did Mary mean?)

After Lincoln sullenly rebuffs a few more careful probes, his father gives up on the marriage and turns to another sore spot. “How’s the job going? Working on any good books?”

“Let’s see,” Lincoln scrambles. He’d like to escape this conversation with at least a modest show of accomplishment or even just forward motion. “A history of Wrigley Field. A book about walking tours of Chicago.” His father’s silence on the other end leads Lincoln to embellish. “Quite a thoughtful book, actually, the walking book. There’s nothing quite like it on the market now, and the pictures are fantastic.”

“Those sound like little books,” the father points out.

“Well, you know, those Cubs fans—there are millions of them out there, and they’ll go for anything about the team...Wrigley Field. A landmark...”

After they bid farewell, Lincoln is too distracted to return immediately to
Walking Tours
, so he absently leafs through the latest issue of
Publisher’s Weekly
, the book-business trade magazine. Arthur Wendt, a prunish Pistakee senior editor and occasional rival of Lincoln’s, has pasted a Post-it on a page featuring a
favorable review of one of his books,
Chicago’s Richard M. Daley: The Mayor Who Works
, by Marcus DeBasio, hagiography from an ancient political hack. That makes four good
PW
s for Arthur so far this year. Pistakee’s other senior editor, fidgety Hazel Lanier, who handles mostly children’s books, has collected three. Lincoln has two—plus two pans and three other books that were entirely ignored by the magazine. Could Duddleston be keeping score?

Glancing through the front of the publication, Lincoln stops at the headline: “Malcolm House Taps
Time
Vet.” Another cherry bomb goes off in Lincoln’s stomach. He thinks: so this is how you get an ulcer. The brief story explains that Jeff Kessler has just hired Elizabeth Warner, a low-ranking editor at
Time
magazine.
PW
calls her a “vet,” yet Lincoln reads that she’s thirty-one, two years younger than he. Kessler didn’t even call Lincoln for an interview.

He goes out alone for lunch and orders an Italian beef sandwich at a little joint on Wells, eating outside at a metal table on a concrete plaza. A handful of taxicabs idle nearby, coughing out noxious fumes. The garbage strike has finally ended, and now a monstrous truck parked in the alley grinds up bulging, black plastic bags of refuse. Something in the truck’s racket, the stained air, the unintelligible chatter of Indian cabbies at a neighboring table, the sweet, brown gravy leaking from Lincoln’s sandwich, messing his hands—the combination brings some solace, calms Lincoln’s troubled insides. The world is foul, confused, cruelly indifferent. Think Don DeLillo, J. M. Coetzee, Cormac McCarthy. Fate only mocks our dreams, our efforts. Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace. Why should Lincoln’s life be any other way? He trudges back to his office, feeling slightly narcotized.