Are You Happy Now? (6 page)

Shortly after he sits at his desk, his phone rings. “Got the date,” Flam tells him from the other end.

“The date?” What’s Flam talking about?

“The date!”

Lincoln’s mind reels. Nothing makes sense anymore. Maybe he should just have the lobotomy and be done with it. Or maybe he’s already had it and the operation has wiped out the memory of itself. Maybe that’s it.

Flam throws a lifeline. “You know, my girlfriend. The girl from Starbucks. We’re going on a date.”

“Jesus Christ,” says Lincoln.

“I got there late today, so the morning rush was over, and we started talking. I finished the entire cup of coffee right there, just gabbing away. She’s really very sweet.”

Lincoln thinks he’s never heard Flam so upbeat, so enthused. “What are you going to do—on your date, I mean?”

“Yet to be determined. She likes the movies, so we might do that. Or maybe just a nice restaurant for dinner. I can afford it, and maybe she’d like that experience—you know, the older suitor, spend some of Daddy Warbucks’s money. What’s a hot spot these days?”

“Let’s see.” Lincoln is ticking down the names of a few popular restaurants, places he and Mary occasionally patronized, when a small, shaggy head peaks around the doorway into Lincoln’s office. The ruffed grouse, clutching a manila file that of course contains her stories. Lincoln forces a smile and waves her in.

“Listen, Flam, I’ve got to run,” Lincoln tells his friend. “Keep me posted.”

Flam can’t let go. He wants to bring flowers. Is that a good idea? “No one brings flowers on a date,” Lincoln warns.

“I need to be different. She’s nineteen.”

“Roses,” Lincoln suggests, and Flam is finally pacified.

Amy O’Malley steps tentatively into the office. She’s discarded the boxy blouse for a snug, white T-shirt and jeans, and her face somehow looks brighter, more vibrant. Lincoln suspects she’s spent time in front of a makeup mirror.

“How are you today?” he asks, trying to summon some enthusiasm.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt your phone call,” Amy says.

“No problem. What can I do for you?”

“Oh, I just brought those stories I mentioned yesterday.” She pads forward and holds out the folder. “If you had a chance to look them over...”

“Of course.” Anything, as long as she tells Duddleston that Lincoln was a prince about it. He reaches across his desk to accept the bundle and leafs casually through the folder. There must be a dozen stories in here, he thinks, two hundred pages. Hours of dreary reading.

“There’s one I kind of like,” she natters, “one that feels a little more like
me
, you know? I wrote it when I was working for the sex survey at school...”

“You worked for the sex survey?” A small tingle starts at the base of Lincoln’s back and moves gently up his spine, a caterpillar’s crawl.

“One summer, and then part-time during the year. Clerical stuff. They paid me by the hour.”

“I see.” Lincoln nods gravely. For more than two decades, a team of U of C sociologists has been conducting the most comprehensive study of human sexuality since Kinsey. Lincoln has always been curious about the project.

Amy cautions, “Of course, everyone gets the wrong idea about the survey. It was very straightforward, very clinical. Nothing erotic at all.”

“What do you expect? It was the U of C.” He plops the folder down on his desk. “I’ll take a look,” he promises.

“Thank you so much,” Amy exclaims, backing to the door. “There’s no rush.” She pauses. “Did Byron tell you about the Cubs game? Are you going?”

Before Lincoln has time to think, instinct takes over. “To watch the dipshit Cubs? Do I have a choice?”

Amy’s face falls, and Lincoln realizes he risks a censorious report to the boss.

“Just kidding.” He forces out another smile. “Wouldn’t miss it!”

For the next two days, Amy’s folder sits untouched on Lincoln’s desk. No need to hurry into anything, Lincoln thinks. Better to give the impression that the work has been carefully considered. On Friday, Lincoln packs the folder into his briefcase and takes it home. Maybe this weekend, he tells himself, without really expecting that his days will be that empty. But a surprise rainfall washes out his bike ride the next afternoon, and none of the new movies look promising. So Lincoln figures he might as well get it out of the way and starts to browse through Amy’s stories. He sees immediately that she shows flashes of talent. She’s got a light touch and a good eye for detail. Still, the work is far from polished, and Lincoln can’t imagine anything she’s written being published, outside of perhaps a student literary magazine. He searches out the story about the sex survey—she’s buried it toward the bottom of the folder—and finds it comes with a good title,
Standard Deviation
(for laymen, a somewhat familiar though uncertain phrase, with hints of kinkiness). But the treatment disappoints. The protagonist is a young woman interviewing other women about their sex lives, and early on, the story showcases some tantalizing scenes of anonymous subjects recounting the most intimate details of their lives. But the plot quickly detours into a cul-de-sac about the interviewer’s relationship with her boyfriend (sexless in the story—Lincoln wonders if it’s drawn from real life) and then dead ends in an ambiguous childhood anecdote about a little girl who gets stung by a sea urchin at a beach at a fancy Caribbean resort (does Amy come from money?).

After a rainy Sunday, Lincoln has read about half the stories in the folder, and that evening he considers the conversation he’ll have with Amy, letting her down ever so gently. He rehearses the assorted kiss-offs that he got from editors back in the days when he was sending his own short stories to magazines. “Suggests a deeper literary intelligence that simply needs to be exercised.” “Promising, but lacks felt detail. Keep working at it!”

Amy’s stories are back in their folder, and Lincoln is sitting on the sofa, vacantly watching a familiar episode of
Curb Your Enthusiasm
, when something remarkable happens. The caterpillar Lincoln felt on his spine the other day suddenly molts its cocoon and a butterfly of an idea takes wing: Why not have Amy turn her experience as a sex researcher into a novel? Her months with the survey have no doubt given her reams of authentic experience, not to speak of endless insights into the secret sex lives of women. Hell, thinks Lincoln, if she can just put down on paper some of the elemental information and sketch out the personalities of some of the key players, he can rewrite it into something smart and sexy. And the book doesn’t have to be long—a novel like that could come in at 150, maybe 175 pages, and everyone would go home satisfied.

Lincoln hops up from the sofa and pours a vodka on the rocks. Slow down, he warns himself—don’t get too excited, you’re getting way ahead of the game. He gulps a slug of vodka and waits for the alcohol to calm him. Way ahead of the game. Still, imagine the possibilities. Amy O’Malley is bright, verbal, and obviously ambitious. One encouraging word from him and she’ll be spitting out copy like an old AP terminal. Plus, she’s a promoter’s dream—a petite, pretty U of C alum who spills about the cloistered world of sex research. Every talk show in the country would sign her up. Pistakee Press will have its first big hit, its first national best seller. And Lincoln...well, as the impresario of this cultural triumph, as the resourceful editor who spotted
and nursed the talent, he will bathe at last in the recognition he deserves.

Lincoln pours himself another vodka. He’d like to talk out the idea, but he can’t call Amy, even if he knew her number. Lincoln knows he’s got to work up to this carefully—hint, suggest, let the book seem to germinate between them. Lincoln has been around enough to know that a writer has to feel proprietary about an idea for it to take hold. If you suggest a potential story line to an author, he or she will turn defensive, invent reasons that prove the idea is utterly idiotic.

There’s only one person Lincoln can possibly talk to about the project, so he dials up Flam. “Yeah,” says a morose voice on the other end.

“Flam?”

“Yeah.”

“Did I wake you? You sound groggy.”

“No. Just counting how many times the writers in Sunday’s
Tribune
used variants of the verb
engage
. Three so far—a TV show ‘never really
engages
viewers,’ a modern dance comes off as ‘provocative and
engaging
,’ and a gallery exhibit of outsider art demonstrates the painter’s ‘fierce
engagement
with his subject.’”

Flam’s sour mood has a specific cause: his Starbucks girlfriend postponed the Big Date—a teacher scheduled a makeup class, and the young woman doesn’t have an evening free again for at least another week. (Lincoln thinks: the poor dear is trying to put off the unhappy event for as long as she can, maybe forever.) Lincoln doesn’t want to jeopardize his excitement by having his aggrieved friend piss all over the book project, so after a few words of romantic encouragement, Lincoln tries to sign off.

“Hey, what did you want?” Flam asks. “You called me, remember.”

“It was nothing. Just a book idea I wanted to run by you.”

“Go ahead.”

Why not? thinks Lincoln. So he tells Flam about Amy and her background with the sex survey and the idea of ginning up a novel out of the experience. “Think chick lit meets
The Kinsey Report
,” Lincoln concludes.

“There’s already been a novel like that,” Flam says. “Several, in fact.”

“Of course there have. Every idea has already been used.” Lincoln remains undaunted. Then the vodka speaks: “But this one is mine!” He waits, slightly embarrassed by his ardor while Flam tortures him through a long silence.

“Why don’t you just write it yourself?” Flam asks finally.

“Because what do I know about women’s inner thoughts and sexuality?”

“You’re married, aren’t you?”

Lincoln thinks: if only that sufficed. “I don’t have the experience. I haven’t sat there for hours asking women what they fantasize about while their fat, boring husbands are rooting away on top.”

“You’re right, that’s priceless,” Flam deadpans.

After a few more minutes of diminishing skepticism, even Flam, with his punishing intelligence, concedes that Lincoln may be onto something. “It’s all in the execution,” Flam says.

“That’s where I come in,” says Lincoln. “I can rewrite anything. Just get me the material, and I can make it work.”

“But can you make it a hit?” Flam asks.

“I’ve got to,” Lincoln pronounces, with a ferocity that catches him by surprise.

6

O
N
M
ONDAY AT
work, Lincoln sees Amy only fleetingly—once when she’s talking to Duddleston in the hall and later across the lobby when he’s going out for lunch. Lincoln decides she’s avoiding him, trying to deflect any appearance that she’s overeager to get his reaction to her stories. That’s fine, he thinks. Let her marinate a bit, soften her up.

In the middle of the afternoon, Duddleston comes around to remind Lincoln of the ballgame the next night. “Bill used his connections to get us great seats, right next to the Cubs’ bullpen,” Duddleston explains.

“Fantastic!” says Lincoln.

“You might not want to get too much into the book yet with Bill,” Duddleston suggests, still worrying over the diplomacy. “You know—bring it up, of course, but mostly use this as the occasion to reestablish the relationship.”

“I’ll be gentle,” Lincoln promises.

“That-a-boy, Abe.”

On leaving the office that evening, Lincoln notices a well-dressed, slender young black man studying the roster of the building’s tenants posted on the wall near the front door. Lincoln is halfway down the block when he thinks he hears the man call
after him, “Excuse me! Excuse me!” But Lincoln doesn’t stop or turn around. He’s not sure the man is calling to him, and, besides, Lincoln is tired of being accosted by panhandlers, who come in all colors and wardrobes these days. Still, the encounter is slightly disconcerting and rubs at Lincoln throughout his walk to the L.

The next day, Duddleston has arranged for a van to come at six to ferry the Pistakee team up to Wrigley Field for the Cubs game. Lemke will meet them there. The group waits for its ride outside on the sidewalk. “It’s a perfect night for a ballgame,” Duddleston repeats endlessly, and he’s right—clear skies, high seventies, low humidity, a light breeze coming in off the lake. Chicago has about four days of ideal weather in a year, Lincoln thinks, and his rich boss has managed to land an event on one of them. Amy continues to be elusive, looking away whenever Lincoln glances toward her. He perceives with a small note of pleasure that she continues to elevate her level of stylishness, wearing jeans and a frilly blue blouse, with a blue sweater dangling over her shoulders. As she climbs into the van, he looks for traces of the lace panties, but the tight, thick denim crushes all evidence.

Avoiding his coeditors, Lincoln takes a seat next to Matt Breeson, Pistakee’s dull, extremely competent comptroller. “I know you’re from the East,” Breeson says as the van moves through stagnant evening traffic. “But have you caught Cubs fever here in Chicago?”