Are You Happy Now? (32 page)

“Good-bye, John,” she says in a way that sounds final.

And then
The Ultimate Position
stages a rally. Sammy happens to talk up the book to Draco DiVergilio, iAgatha’s annoyingly overbearing blogger. He likes it and devotes a posting to
it, calling the novel “a mind tease with more terror and sex than ever shows up in any
Friday the 13
^th
movie.” Draco concludes: “
The Ultimate Position
provides a lesson to all you wannabe thriller writers serving up buckets of blood and heaps of body parts: just as the brain is the greatest aphrodisiac, so is it the best source of thrills.”

Draco’s comments give
The Ultimate Position
a nice boost—34 copies the first day, 112 within a week. A handful of readers complain in comments that the book is too highbrow to count as a real thriller, but the majority of people who weigh in on iAgatha. com seem to like it, and several salute the psychological depth of the characters. One person, commenting under the handle hotpants911, makes the point, “Alice Upshaw shows that sex can be as mysterious and scary as murder!”

Out of curiosity, Lincoln searches out the bona fides of Draco DiVergilio, that condescending asshole and discerning critic. A little work on the Internet yields the secret that he is really Edmund Hermanson, U of C ’82, BA English. God bless the old alma mater, Lincoln thinks.

Around that time, Lincoln visits the iAgatha offices, and Jimmy pulls him aside. “I was getting ready to pay Alice Upshaw her first royalties, and I saw that all the contact information is for you,” he tells Lincoln quietly. “What gives?”

Lincoln has planned for this contingency. As far as he knows, aside from Amy and him, the only people who saw the manuscript of
The Ultimate Position
were Duddleston, Gregor, the elderly copy editor, and Amy’s mother. Mrs. O’Malley would never out her daughter as author. Gregor, the original cover designer, never reads a manuscript; he just works from what the editor tells him. The copy editor has subsequently moved to Arizona. And Duddleston? Even if, through a huge coincidence, he were to come upon the published book, Mr. Personal Discretion would never volunteer the secret—at least not without checking with Amy.

“Alice wanted it all to go through me,” Lincoln explains to Jimmy. “I told you, she’s neurotically private, and she didn’t want to risk any detection.”

“But the checks?”

“You can send them to me, and I will pass them on. I’ll get a receipt from her to prove that I made the payment.”

Jimmy cocks his head and carefully considers Lincoln. Over the course of working at iAgatha, Lincoln has come to realize that for all his mussed hair and youthful enthusiasm, Jimmy is quite shrewd and protective of the tiny publishing empire he has helped build. Plus, he’s the son of a cop.

Lincoln adds, “There’s not that much money at stake, anyway. If there’s any kind of a problem, I’ll make good on it.”

“Whatever,” says Jimmy, and he walks away.

Half an hour later, as Lincoln is leaving, Jimmy follows him into the hall, where they are alone. “So,” he says, suppressing a smirk, “are
you
Alice Upshaw? Did you write that book?”

“God, no,” says Lincoln, who has prepared for this question, too. “It’s all Alice. Well, I gave her editing advice, but it’s her book. Do you think I could write from a woman’s point of view like that?”

“I suppose not,” says Jimmy, amused by the situation. “But you know, there are some pretty weird people in Wicker Park.”

“Not me,” says Lincoln, adding after a silly laugh, “at least, not in
that
way. I’m just honoring the promise I gave Alice.”

“Your secret is safe with me,” Jimmy assures.

Lincoln considers alerting Amy to the uptick in her book’s fortunes but chooses against it. She’d sounded so settled, so confident in her decision to move on in her life that he’s wary of intruding. He feels a bit like an unwanted suitor. Besides, he suspects she’s logged in to see what’s going on, and she hasn’t called to talk about it. He mails her a check for royalties with the simple note attached, “Buy yourself a bottle of good Scotch!”

He’s been reluctant to press the book on Flam, but Flam asks about it several times, so—with Draco’s nod bolstering Lincoln’s confidence—he finally prints out a copy and sends it over to his friend at the
Tribune
. Then he hears nothing for a week. Finally, Flam calls: he’s been too busy with book review work to read it, but he’s about to go on a cruise up the Nile and he’ll pack the manuscript.

“A cruise?” Lincoln asks, startled.

“Yes. A deal came up, and I’ve always been interested in Egyptology.”

“You’re going by yourself?”

“Why not?” Flam asks defensively. “I don’t need a companion to certify my pleasure.” Then he pauses and lets his guard down. “Besides, a cruise may not be a bad place to stir some romance—you know, meet a mature single woman traveling with her mother.”

“Maybe in a nineteenth-century novel.”

“You’re too callow,” Flam says. “You miss the transcendent verities.”

“Send me a postcard,” Lincoln tells his friend.

Ten days later, a postcard arrives. On one side is a photograph from 1887 showing two men—they must be English—in khaki traveling suits and pith helmets standing in front of the Great Sphinx at Giza. The men are tall, slender, slightly stooped—in shape and aspect, both are dead ringers for Flam himself. The note on the other side is brief: “Trip a delight. Ship infested with eligible spinster daughters, many trailing fat dowries. You may never see me again. Enjoying
The Ultimate Position
. Strong start. Eager to get to the sex parts. F.”

By then, it’s early May. With Draco’s help, the book has sold 325 copies, but sales have tailed off. It’s been more than a week since anyone has posted a comment. Lincoln understands the dynamic:
The Ultimate Position
has enjoyed a modest, brief run, and now the world has moved on. When he thinks back on the
expectations he once built around the book, he feels slightly chagrined, as if at the end of a play he had stood to applaud noisily, urging the actors to repeat their bows, while the rest of the audience only tapped their palms together politely and shot him sullen stares from their seats, already worrying about getting their cars out of the garage, racing home to tuck in the kids, having a drink before bed. Still, he senses that he’s learned something, even if he can’t put it into words. In a small way, Lincoln’s ordeal has eased. His arm doesn’t ache as often.

28

L
INCOLN TURNS THIRTY-FOUR
on a Saturday by himself. His sister sends a card. His parents call. (His father, not unkindly: “By thirty-four, the die is pretty well cast. If you’re going to change direction, it had better be soon.”) Nothing from Mary. That morning, as usual, he tunes in WBEZ, the local NPR station, while he does the dishes and gets dressed. In the shower, he goes over his plans for the day—he’ll do a few hours of work on an iAgatha manuscript from a lady in Lodi, California, and then take a bike ride up along the lake, past Evanston and on through the bejeweled towns of the North Shore. No real destination, just good exercise.

When Lincoln steps out of the shower, someone he knows is talking in the living room. Startled and anxious, Lincoln wraps himself in a towel and hurries out to see who’s there. It’s Tony Buford, being interviewed on BEZ. Apparently, Pistakee has published Buford’s book of poems after all—Duddleston must have decided that publication was easier and cheaper than dealing with a lawsuit. Now the book is doing well by poetry’s standards—Buford mentions casually that Pistakee already has gone back for a second printing.

How could Lincoln have been so wrong? He’d been embarrassed by the book and dreaded publishing it. Contemplating his monumental misjudgments, Lincoln stands dripping on the hardwood floor and grips the back of the sofa to steady himself.

The unctuous young woman conducting the interview fawns over the poet, lavishing compliments and pressing for the personal details that nursed his genius. “I’ve always been drawn to the masters of the everyday realm,” Buford explains. “That goes back to some of the early Japanese practitioners of the haiku, who found solace in the quotidian life beneath the capricious hands of fate. And then all the way up through the plain-speakers of modern times, Robert Frost, Gwendolyn Brooks, Billy Collins.”

The BEZ interviewer says breathlessly, “One of the fascinating things about this collection, if you don’t mind my saying so, is that here you are, an African-American man from the South Side, this repository of black life and culture, and, really, there’s very little that relates specifically to the African-American experience in any of your poems. Would you care to comment on that?”

“See,” says Buford, “with the leaps in education, in mobility, and of course, with the advent of the Internet providing the democratization of information, we as a country are moving beyond simple classifications. Our common experience today is without hyphens, just American.”

When the young woman asks Buford to read from
Still Life
, Lincoln discovers that Buford has amped up his presentation since the disastrous poetry slam. Now the poet declaims with the exaggerated excitement and wonder of a kindergarten teacher trying to interest a squirming class. After a minute or so, Lincoln turns off the radio in the middle of a poem about radishes. With Buford’s voice still looping inside his skull, Lincoln hurries to dress and get onto his bike. He spends the whole day pedaling along the lakeshore, doing all he can to wear himself down to an exhausted nub.

That evening Lincoln stretches out on his sofa to soothe his aching muscles. Sipping vodka, he drifts through the day’s
Tribune
. Several years ago, the paper moved the truncated books section to Saturday, and Lincoln sees that there’s a page devoted to online publishing, just as Flam mentioned a few months ago. Glancing over the columns, Lincoln stops short and takes a slug of vodka. The
Tribune
has reviewed
The Ultimate Position
.

He recognizes the byline: Alden Fieldstone, an English professor at Beloit College.

The professor begins by worrying that online and digital publishing is too easy—too many careless books are being produced. “A good case in point is
The Ultimate Position
, a bildungsroman cum thriller cum sociological treatise cum sex manual written by a Chicagoan, Alice Upshaw.” Fieldstone proceeds to obliterate the book, calling it “banal” and “tedious,” crammed with “internal monologues that sound like Samantha from
Sex and the City
babbling to herself on the way home, alone, in a taxi after she’s drunk too much and failed to pick up a man.” Fieldstone concludes:

Ms. Upshaw has glommed together the beginnings of some fresh ideas about women’s sexual exploration in the postfeminist era; she shows flashes of inventive language. None of her budding talent mattered, however. I suspect that it was too simple to publish the manuscript without a serious editor adding the slow layering of thought provided by the old-style book business. On my optimistic days, I hope that the new world of publishing will come to appreciate the value of strong editing. But for now, I fear we will be saddled with more techno-facilitated books like
The Ultimate Position
, which in its carelessness proves to be badly misnamed—
The Awkward Position
would be more like it.

Lincoln looks up. He has trouble focusing his eyes, and he hears a low buzzing in his ears. He feels as if he’s been pummeled, although there’s no overt pain.

He lies that way for more than an hour, getting up only once, to replenish his glass of vodka. His cell phone rings at about ten.

“Have you read it?” Amy asks.

“An hour ago.”

“Just
an hour ago
?”

“It’s been a long day. I was out.”

“Well, what do you think?”

Lincoln knows he has to play this carefully. He can’t read her voice—is she devastated? Furious? He says weakly, “Actually, there are a couple of phrases we could cull from here for an ad: ‘fresh ideas about women’s sexual exploration;’ ‘inventive language.’ ”

“John, that’s one of the worst reviews I’ve ever seen,” Amy cries, but she’s laughing.

“Yeah, you’re right, it is pretty bad.”

“Thank god my name isn’t on it.” Another laugh.

“Yeah, you lucked out.”

“And the
Tribune
doesn’t usually run critical reviews.”

“No, not very often.”

“Aren’t you friends with the editor of the book review? Isn’t he your best friend?”

Lincoln lets go of a deep breath. He knows how easy it would be for suspicions to start swirling in Amy’s mind, conspiracy theories. “It doesn’t work like that,” he explains. “The editor can assign the book, but he’s pretty much got to take what comes in. Flam can’t just impose his opinions.” He pauses. “Besides, he’s been away for a couple of weeks.”

Yes, Flam has been away, but in bits of Professor Fieldstone’s observations, Lincoln detects echoes of his friend. Is Flam trying to tell him something?