Chapter and Verse

My name is Dorothy Suzanne Lincoln and I’m a biographer.  I didn’t start out that way, but I’ll get to that.

I graduated with a degree in Journalism from Boston University - the second most prestigious school of Journalism in the country.  My folks are loaded and although they didn’t approve of my major, they sure jumped on the chance to tell me my choice was second rate.  They did the research you see, and discovered that the University of Southern California had the BEST school, and that’s where I should go.  Me, being me, I bucked the trend and went to Boston.

It’s not that my parents were controlling, they just see me as a child and always will.  I don’t like it, but I’ve learned to live with it.  My sister Melody thrives on it.  She has a different take on the situation.  She seems to believe that if she lets them make all the decisions, then the failures are theirs, not hers.  She happily takes their money and advice and glides down the highway of happiness, secure in her inheritance and credit card with no limit.  Sometimes I wish I could be more like her, but I can’t.  I’m me.

So how did I become a biographer?  I fell into it.  I graduated at the top of my class and moved to New York.  My father, being my father, did the one thing I dreaded but ended up thanking him for.  He used his influence to wrangle me an interview at the Post.  I submitted some of my editorials from the college newspaper and they liked them.  I started work the next week.

I wrote articles about what was going on around town and found myself bored to tears and frustrated beyond belief.  I knew I had to pay my dues, but covering the dog show?  Really?  I walked in with an attitude, not realizing that my future would revolve around a Norwegian Elkhound named Sir Oliver Livingston the Second.  It’s owner, Sean McDowell - yes THE Sean McDowell - liked the way Ollie took to me immediately and began talking to me.  While Ollie drooled and curled up in my lap, I learned two things.  Interviews can take place in the strangest places, and even covered in dog hair and drool, I’ve got something about me that people respond to.  Who knew?

I submitted my piece about the dog show, along with the impromptu interview with Mr. McDowell.  I didn’t change the wording or alter the context in anyway.  I just typed up what we talked about exactly as it occurred.  That’s another thing about me.  I was blessed with total recall.  It drove my parents insane while I was growing up, and for that reason I’m certain they were glad to see me go.  But I digress.

They ran the dog show piece on page nine, but the interview ran on page two.  Was I shocked?  More like astounded.  People that had been writing for the Post for ten years were featured on the first three pages.  My candid and whimsical interview (their words, not mine) made people see Sean McDowell - famous actor and director - in a whole new light.  He was human and he loved his dog.  It gave us both a career boost.  All of a sudden I was the one requested when it came to interviews.  I was somebody other than Brian Lincoln’s daughter.  This is where it gets interesting.

My father took over his father’s corporation when he graduated with his degree in Business.  He doubled the assets, made the whole family proud, and got out before he turned fifty.  My mother use to be a model.  They were old money glamorous.  My sister looks like my mother.  Long, perfectly straight, honey blonde hair and big green eyes.  They’re rail thin and wear a perfect size six.  Don’t hate them because they’re beautiful.  Hate them because they use it to their advantage.  Who am I kidding?  I love them both dearly.  They can’t help it if they’re stunning and approachable, albeit Mel is much more approachable than my mother, Catherine.  My mother has been married to my father for a long time.  They’re two peas in a pod.

Anyway, my father started reading my interviews and he was impressed.  He’d been hounded for years for a biography, but he’d never found anyone worthy of writing it.  Guess what?  He decided that if anyone was worthy, it would be his own progeny.  And that’s how I became a biographer.

It was simple, really.  I’d known him my whole life, I just needed him to fill in the parts regarding his childhood and the early years of his marriage.  After that, I took off and wrote about my dad.  Not so much Brian Andrew Lincoln, Businessman Extraordinaire, but dad.  I included the business end of it, but mostly, I wrote about the man.  He loved it, my mother loved it, and America loved it.  It made number two on the New York Times best seller list for six weeks running and after that, I was in demand as a biographer.

The list of celebrities, businessmen, and convicts (yes convicts need biographies too) that I’ve interviewed and written about is mind boggling.  I’m twenty-six years old and I’ve written twelve biographies so far, all of them bestsellers.  My folks don’t scoff at me anymore and my sister rides my coattails every chance she gets.  It’s hilarious.

I live in a nice apartment in Manhattan.  It’s not a penthouse, but it’s not a closet either.  I live on the fourteenth floor of a building with fifteen floors, so I’m just below the penthouse.  There are two apartments on my floor.  Is it overkill?  Definitely.  I don’t need three bedrooms with a dining room separate from the kitchen, but hey.  One of those bedrooms is now my office and my sister stays with me when she’s in town.  I save my money because I bought the place in a city where rent is outrageous and going up all the time.  I have no mortgage and I invest almost every penny I make.  I’ve learned many things from my father and my frugality is just one of them.  I buy my clothes off the rack and only shop boutiques when the circumstance requires it.  I recycle and run for exercise.  The building has it’s own gym and I save money by using it religiously, instead of paying crazy gym fees.  My weakness is Starbucks and I refuse to apologize for it.  Coffee is my drug of choice.  Sue me.

I’d just finished up my latest project, a biography about a well known director, and was basking in the afterglow.  Yes, I said basking in the afterglow.  What, now you wanna know about my sex life?  Fine.  There is none.  There.  I said it.  If I’m going to be perfectly candid in the telling of my story, then some parts will be painful and self-deprecating.  This will be one of those parts.

While I was in college, I dated a guy my parents were thrilled with.  That should have been my first clue that I’d lost my mind.  His name was Henry Hamilton Greenlee the Third.  I called him Hamm.  I mean, who names their kids that?  I had two theories that I never investigated.  The first was simple.  They wanted their kid to grow up able to protect himself either verbally or physically, probably both.  Second, and most obviously, was money.  People with money they didn’t make on their own, tended to name their kids after the people that DID make the money.  The people whose good graces they wanted to remain in.  I suspected that the second theory was the case.

I have to admit, Hamm was fun.  Too many times, I’d been asked on a date because of the family name.  Business majors wanted an “in” with my father or to ogle my mother.  It grated on me to the point of refusing to be part of the dating scene.  I hunkered down and improved my grades.  I was never much of a drinker or partier anyway, so the dwindling of invites didn’t phase me in the least.  Hamm was different.

Hamm had money of his own and a guaranteed place near the top of the corporate ladder when he graduated.  He had nothing to prove, which as it turned out, was probably a good thing.  Hamm wasn’t the swiftest sheep in the herd, if you know what I mean.  He was playful and outgoing, which helped bring me out to play as well.  We enjoyed each other and like I said, my folks loved him.  His folks loved me.  We were a magnate match made in heaven from the parental viewpoint.

Two years and twenty-seven days in, I noticed something.  Actually, Melody pointed it out.  She was on break from her own college studies in Fashion Design, and came to pay me a visit.  It was her first chance to meet Hamm.  It was also his first actual sighting of my beautiful sister.

Before you think that all I do is rag on myself, let me make myself perfectly plain.  I’m perfectly plain.  I’m not ugly, or so I’m told, I’m just not my sister or my mother.  I have curly blonde hair that falls to my waist.  I was blessed with their pretty green eyes, but not with their runway model’s grace.  I could trip on a level surface wearing ballet flats.  I have to concentrate on where I’m going.  That changes when I run, but I have a theory on that.  I have a lot of theories.  That one involves speed.  I’m fast and when I’m running, I don’t think about anything but the burn and the adrenaline rush.  I almost fly and it’s hard to trip when you’re flying.  That’s my theory anyway, take it for what it’s worth.  Back to my description.

Where they live in a perfect size six, I’m more of a size ten.  It feels so good, I usually buy a twelve.  My mother and sister say they envy my bust size, but they lie.  I will say that I’m a tad top heavy, but not excessively so.  I have a decent shape, but I don’t fool myself.  I work hard for it.  If I gave up running or the elliptical, I’d balloon in no time because I like to eat and I’m not shy about it.  I’m not shy about anything.  But that’s another story.

Melody arrived and Hamm was already present.  You know how in the cartoons when the main character sees the curvy character walk in, their eyes pop out like little hearts?  Yeah.  It was like that.  Funny, I’d never seen that look on Hamm’s face when I walked into a room.  Yet, there it was.  Clear as day.  He was smitten with my sister and she hated him immediately.  Later on when he left to go home, she said something interesting.

“
Did you notice that he never takes his eyes off your chest?”

We were eating pizza and drinking wine and when I’m eating pizza, which is rare, my concentration doesn’t waiver.

“
What?”

“
Hamm.  Your boyfriend.  He never takes his eyes off your chest.  You never noticed?”

I stopped in mid chew and thought about what she said.  I can honestly say that I’d never noticed.  Once she pointed it out though, I was obsessed with the thought.  Did I not notice because I didn’t notice much about him period?  Did I not care enough to notice?  And if either of those things were true, what did that say about the state of our relationship in general?  Yes, sometimes I think too much.  I have a theory about that.  I think I think too much because my sister is the “pretty one” and I’m the “smart one”.  I feel like I have to think a lot to hold on to the title.  I think that theory is solid by the way.

“
Mel’, no offense, but you’re full of shit.  Hamm may notice my chest in certain blouses or shirts, but it’s not his center of focus.”

“
The hell it’s not.  You’re delusional if you believe that.  It’s downright creepy, is what it is.  Pay attention next time.  You’ll see.”

Well there it was.  The gauntlet was thrown, by the pretty one no less.  How could I not notice now?  “Next time” just happened to be the following evening.  Hamm and I were taking my sister to dinner at a trendy sushi place that had just opened the month before.  Hamm had dropped a name or two and we had reservations at eight.

Dressed to the nines, we were ready when the buzzer sounded, announcing his arrival.  I pressed to answer while Melody grabbed her purse.

“
We’ll be right down.”

I wore a midnight blue silk blouse and my favorite navy pencil skirt.  Silver studs dotted my ears and a silver chain hung seductively around my neck, accentuating my cleavage.  The blouse wasn’t low-cut, but it wasn’t amish by any stretch of the imagination.  My sister wore a red jersey dress and I probably looked like a Smurf standing next to her.  At five-seven she topped me by a good three inches and she was all legs and tiny waist.  I wanted to trip her on the way to the elevator.  If she wasn’t the sweetest person I knew, I might have, but she was so I didn’t.  It didn’t stop me from thinking about it though.

Hamm was waiting by the curb next to his Mercedes.  It had been a “Going Away to College” present from his folks.  A brand new Mercedes.  I didn’t hold it against him, but something about people flaunting their money bothered me.  I didn’t begrudge them wealth, hell, my family was right up there with the best of them.  But I drove a four year old Honda Accord.  Not a cheap car, but it was reasonable and safe.  My folks weren’t stupid.  They understood what college was about and they knew the value of a dollar.  My father had made over a million of them.  I’d bet he still knows where every single one of them is too.  Anyway...

Hamm kissed my cheek and opened the passenger door for me.  I smiled and slid in before I remembered to notice where his eyes fell.  Damn it.  I’d have to be quicker in the restaurant.  Melody slipped into the back and cleared her throat.  I knew she was smiling at me behind my back, but what could I say?

I’m not dense.  Let me say that again.  I am not dense.  I wasn’t dense in college either.  I could size up a room, group, or class in a heartbeat and know how to act or approach.  I think that’s one of the things that makes me good at what I do.  I’m not blowing my own horn, I’m just stating a simple fact.  Knowing that, how had I not known my own boyfriend as well as my sister did after one meeting?  It bothered me.  I can admit that now, because I could admit it then.  The thing is, by the time I figured it out, I was in a predicament that could not be exited gracefully.

The restaurant was modern, yet elegant.  Hamm wore a three-piece suit and looked like he owned it.  It was dark grey and with his blonde hair and blue eyes, he rocked that suit.  I’m a sucker for suit porn anyway, and a man that can wear it like a second skin has my attention for sure.  Call it degrading or a double standard, I don’t care.  Guys in three-piece suits make me grin.