Are You Happy Now? (34 page)

“Just hold on,” pleads Lincoln.

“You’ve ruined my life,” she cries. “Is this what you wanted?” Her face is so red and pulsating that Lincoln can’t be sure whether her head is going to explode or just start gushing blood. “Are you happy now?”

The question echoes for Lincoln, hooking something, a memory.

When he remains blankly silent, she repeats, turning up the volume, “Are you happy now?”

She stands with her knees slightly bent, one leg in front of the other, her arms tensed at her sides. Amy never played sports seriously, but she’s assumed a classic athletic posture, poised for either offense or defense. Lincoln recalls the tautness of her body, the grace with which she romped across her bed that first night together. Afterward, she’d asked...the echo. We live in circles. “Sit down, take your coat off,” he tells her.

“I don’t want to take my coat off, and I can’t sit. I’m too upset.”

“Suit yourself,” he says soothingly. “But give me a minute to get dressed, and then I’ll read it.”

Lincoln goes to his bedroom and pulls on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. In the bathroom, he takes a pee, splashes water on his face, and brushes his teeth. When he returns to the living room, Amy is standing beside the door, as if she’s about to leave. Her hands are in her coat pockets. Her hair is uncombed, and of course she’s not wearing makeup. He looks to see if she’s been crying, but her eyes are clear and angrily focused on him.

“All right, let’s take a look,” he says in the tone of an examining physician. He picks up the copy of
The Reader
, this week’s
edition, and sits in the easy chair. Cheryl Romano’s latest column carries the headline “Mystery Solved.”

No one ever accused the University of Chicago of being a hotbed of sexual adventure, but it turns out a young female English major has written a book that’s turning on male fantasies around the globe. At least the evidence points to that young literary grad, who has managed to keep her identity secret until now.

The mystery first unfolded two months ago when iAgatha.com, a local online publisher, released
The Ultimate Position
, a book in which two college girls “explore the outer edges of sexual pleasure,” as the promotional blurb put it. The purported author was named Alice Upshaw. No one seemed to pay much attention except some weirdo webbie types (as yet unknown), who built a porn site, JennifersUltimatePosition.com, based on the sexual journey of one of the book’s characters. The site allows viewers to upload their wildest fantasies. Why am I not surprised that all those viewers turn out to be men? Anyway, sales of
The Ultimate Position
suddenly rocketed, which raised the question, Who is this siren of sexual extremes, this pornographer’s muse, this mysterious “Alice Upshaw”? For weeks, Chicago’s literary community has been asking that question.

Now a source tells
The Reader
that a sexy novel titled
The Ultimate Position
was scheduled to be published by the Chicago house Pistakee Press this spring. It was written by an associate editor at Pistakee, Amy O’Malley. The book was suddenly withdrawn when the author abruptly left the company. The reasons are not known, but she left on the same day as a Pistakee editor, John Lincoln, who soon turned up as a writing coach at iAgatha.com. Hmmmm. The source said, “It’s the same book, word for
word.” Lincoln was elusive with me in several e-mails, but my source said, “He was, like, Amy’s mentor.”

And who is Amy O’Malley? She graduated cum laude last year. A classmate recalls, “She was really obsessed by literature, but I don’t remember her being into sex at all. This is really weird.” O’Malley is apparently lying low—she could not be reached.

But, hey, Amy, don’t be shy. Porn is the money engine of the Web, and now you’re a star! All the guys want to get a good look at the temptress who’s stoked their fantasies. Come out and take a bow!

Lincoln is finished reading, but he doesn’t look up. The paper has found a photo of Amy, probably something from an old U of C yearbook. The picture is not much bigger than a postage stamp, but there she is—the mussy, layered hair, the unpainted face, the overserious frown of childish concentration. Lincoln can’t take his eyes away. The Ruffed Grouse.

“Well?” Amy demands. “Well?”

“You could look at it this way,” Lincoln offers weakly. “
The Reader
still has a decent circulation. You’ll sell a lot more copies of the book, make more money.”

Wrong argument.

“My mother saw it!” Amy shrieks. “Her friend called to warn her! They’ve both looked at that awful website! I feel...I feel...violated!”

Lincoln scrambles for something to cool her fever. “Look,” he says firmly. “The whole thing is nonsense. In the first place, this article is stupid—calling you a porn muse. You’re a writer. And you wrote a good book that’s not pornographic, it’s literary. In the second place, well, none of us can control our reputations anymore. Anything we do—it’s just out there, for anyone to make of it what they will. Through Google, on Facebook. You can’t control it. You’d go nuts trying to.”

Amy starts to protest, but Lincoln holds up his hand. “And the third thing is,” he hurries on, “nobody cares! A hundred years ago,
ten
years ago, the world would have been horrified. But now everything’s fodder, everything about everybody. We all have our turns at being demeaned. You’ve heard of Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame? Now, everybody gets fifteen minutes of infamy, and afterward no one gives a shit or even remembers.”

Lincoln’s logic seems to calm the scene. Amy purses her lips, thinking. The scarlet on her face eases toward pink. She drops onto the sofa. Lincoln is secretly congratulating himself when she says mournfully, “But you promised you’d keep me out of it.”

“I tried,” he offers helplessly.

“You were always the miserable one,” Amy says vacantly, addressing him but talking to herself, as if he is such a failure as a human being that his presence doesn’t even register; he’s a dust mite, a flyspeck. “You were the one who hated everything, who was too good for everything. Not me. I was fine. Whatever happened, it was an adventure.” She shakes her head slowly. “I don’t want to be like you.”

Lincoln has never seen her this way—hollow, lifeless. “Amy?” he says, worried.

She stands. “I’ve got to go.”

“You don’t want any tea or breakfast? I could cook eggs.”

She hurries to the door.

“Amy, are you all right?” Lincoln asks.

She steps outside quickly, as if she’s suddenly realized that Lincoln and his apartment are scenes of contagion that she must flee. She turns to him and says flatly, “Missionary position.”

“What?”

“I wanted to tell you after I saw that awful website. The girl my freshman year who searched for the Ultimate Position? In the end she decided it was the missionary position. I didn’t tell you before because I thought you’d be disappointed.”

“Jesus,” gasps Lincoln.

“Now you know.” Amy starts down the steps but stops and looks back. “Please leave me alone,” she says, then hurtles off, clasping the banister so she won’t fall. Her footsteps, pounding on the wood stairway, rain down on Lincoln’s head like blows until she is out of the building.

30

L
INCOLN HIDES OUT
in his apartment. Throughout the days following Amy’s visit and well into the anguished, aspirin-glutted nights, he sits at his desk, trying to cocoon himself with work. He often feels chilled, for no good reason other than his frozen spirit, and since he can’t wrap himself in electronic manuscripts, he drapes a scratchy L.L.Bean blanket over his shoulders, looking like FDR in Warm Springs, waiting for death.

Marissa Morgan and other Chicago bloggers follow up on
The Reader
’s report, and even the
Tribune
’s culture blog runs an item. Most accounts summon a gassy tone of moral outrage aimed at Lincoln—the “mentor,” the presumed impresario of the deception—chiding him for his lack of honesty, for supposedly trying to put one over on the world. Somehow, without Lincoln’s realizing it, utter transparency has become the obligatory ethical standard for all behavior that reaches the public, and violators face censure and shame across cyberspace, the digital equivalent of pillories and stocks. Marissa Morgan sniffs that Lincoln, “one of Chicago’s most experienced book editors,” has broken the “publisher’s pledge of intimacy” with readers by lying about the name of the real author. An overheated blogger on a politically lefty
site sees the evil profit motive behind the whole plot and likens Lincoln to the “fat Wall Street leeches who nearly brought down the economy”—as if selling a book by Alice Upshaw instead of Amy O’Malley was the equivalent of peddling worthless financial instruments that no one understood. The
Tribune
’s post pursues the cranky theme introduced by Professor Fieldstone and wonders if the Internet’s “democratization of writing means that book publishing will become as tainted with fakes and fraud as voting in Chicago.”

Lincoln tries different tacks with the writers, speaking frankly to some, on background to others, refusing to comment to still others. No matter. Nothing draws eyeballs like outrage, and Lincoln represents a plump and easy target. Soon he comes to feel a bonding with James Frey. Several times Lincoln visits the Oprah website to study photos of the author’s woeful face as he undergoes the necessary public debasement at the hands of the talk-show star.

But it’s not simply the bad publicity that torments Lincoln—he realizes now that he can handle the dents in his reputation, that there was actually truth in the little speech he gave Amy about everyone being demeaned and nobody caring. Rather, what pains Lincoln is that he’s dragged Amy down with him, pulled her into his pathetic game. Blindly pursuing his ambition, he’s corrupted an innocent. He can’t stop thinking about her helpless exasperation, the cry of a child: “But you promised...!” Lincoln feels as if the last threads of his honor, his
virtue
, are tearing away.

This, too, shall pass, Lincoln’s father had assured. No, Lincoln thinks. The Chinese may be entering their century, but they got that aphorism wrong. “This” remains and just keeps getting worse.

Tony Buford calls the day Marissa Morgan weighs in. Lincoln hasn’t heard from him in weeks and had come to assume that the poet’s bonhomie was an act that lasted only
as long as Lincoln could be useful. But Buford starts right in with support. “Silliness,” he announces without identifying himself.

“Uhhh.” Lincoln recognizes the voice, but he’s sunk to crippling, perhaps terminal, befuddlement.

“It’s all silliness,” Buford repeats. “I sent Marissa a note saying as much. What’s your crime? Pseudonyms have a great tradition in literature—Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, George Eliot. Hell, even Stephen King sometimes writes under Richard Bachman. The opportunism is astonishing.”

“Opportunism?”

“Beat up on the little guy. The Marissa Morgans of the world would never think of going after Stephen King.”

“I think the Internet has changed the culture,” Lincoln suggests, rallying slightly from his stupor.

“Exactly. The feeding frenzy has become the norm, the ritual. Devour, lest ye be devoured. I keep thinking of Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery.’ ” Buford pauses. “You surviving?” he asks.

“Sort of.”

“That’s not good enough. You’ve got to stay positive.”

“Right.”

“Take this moment as a learning opportunity, a chance to train yourself to keep focused. Think of it like going to the gym for a good workout.”

The exhortations echo others Lincoln has heard—from Mary, from his father—and they only raise the tempo of his constantly pounding headache. To deflect Buford, Lincoln congratulates him on the success of his book.

“I couldn’t have done it without you,” the poet responds.

“Looks like you got some help from Marian Robinson, too.”

Buford snorts a quick laugh. “I see the public stoning hasn’t cured you of your cynicism,” he says. “Well, if you must know, Mrs. Robinson is an acquaintance of my mother’s. Whether that made a difference—who knows the way publicity works? But it
all started with you. And I reminded Marissa of that. The point that everyone misses is that you’re a great editor.”

“Or was.”

“Don’t go there!” Buford admonishes. “Stay positive!”

Lincoln says he’ll try.

Flam worries enough about his friend that he comes one night bearing two steaks and a bottle of 1999 Chateauneuf du Pape. “The whole thing is ridiculous,” Flam says as they eat at the little round wood table in Lincoln’s kitchen. “That
Tribune
blog—it was stupid on about six levels. Talk about making up news.”

Lincoln shrugs. Pep talks can’t reach him these days.

Flam has formulated his own media analysis to explain the suddenly toxic situation. “Sex,” he says. “You add sex to the equation, and the bloggers go nuts—they can spin it any way they want.”

“Sex,” mumbles Lincoln.