Page 3 of Are You Happy Now?

“What is it?” snaps Lincoln, stopping her in midstep.

“Mr. Duddleston forgot to leave the Wrigley Field manuscript,” the young woman explains. “He asked me to drop it off.” She has shaggy brown hair that frames dark eyes and a beaky little nose, and the few times Lincoln has noticed her, she was wearing a boxy peasant blouse, a formless bag of khaki that came just over her hips. The tiny face, the forest coloring, the nervous manner—Lincoln can’t help but think of a ruffed grouse. Well, he’s never actually seen one, not even a picture, but she looks like the name describes. She’s draped in the blouse again today, wearing it over black slacks.

“Byron,” Lincoln tells her grumpily.

She stares back, bewildered, and then her face lights up. “The poet?” she asks.

“No. That’s his name. Byron Duddleston. No one calls him Mr. Duddleston. Byron. Or just Duddleston.”

“Oh.” The poor bird looks wounded.

“Just put it there,” he says, nodding toward the far edge of his desk and returning his attention to tour nineteen and the Lincoln statue hiding behind the History Museum. After a moment, he’s aware that she’s hovering.

“What is it?” he asks irritably.

“On top of all these other things?” she asks. With her small, shifty eyes, she indicates the desktop’s clutter, an accumulation that has the abandoned look of an unexcavated ruin. “I think Mr. Duddleston wanted you to get on this right away.”

So the grouse has a bit of spirit, Lincoln thinks. “Byron!” he almost screams.

“Byron,” she repeats meekly, looking thoroughly distressed.

“I’m the executive editor here,” he reminds her. “I’ll get to Wrigley Field when I’m ready. Now just put the manuscript on the desk.”

She steps forward and carefully places the thick wad of pages atop a pile of unread magazines. Lincoln tries to ignore her, but still she lingers. “Oh, you’ve got Professor Fleace’s book,” she exclaims after a moment. “I loved his course on Illinois geography.”

Lincoln puts down his pencil. “So you went to the U of C,” he says drily.

“I just graduated in June.”

“Congratulations.” Lincoln wonders why it seems that everyone he knows in Chicago went to the U of C—six million stories in the naked city, and all of them feat

ure a U of C weenie—everyone except Mary, who went to Northwestern but now wants her U of C dosage too.

“You went there.” A statement, not a question. The grouse has been studying his résumé.

“Yes, yes, I did.” When none of the Ivies took him, and his only other choice was the University of Maryland.

“My name’s Amy O’Malley, by the way.” She offers her hand across his desk, and Lincoln takes it without standing. He feels as if he could crush her fragile, bony fingers in his fist.

“How did you get this job, Amy?” he asks her.

“Mr. Duddleston...Byron...Byron was looking for an assistant, and he asked the U of C recruitment office for the best English major who was about to graduate.”

“And that was you.”

Amy’s pale skin reveals a modest blush. “Well, I was at least the best one who wasn’t going straight on to graduate school. I wanted to get out in the real world for a while, and the idea of working with books and writers...it was a dream come true.”

Lincoln smiles condescendingly. He wonders how long that dream would survive an encounter with Bill Lemke, stinking of cigarettes and bourbon, thick patches of white hair on his neck that his razor has missed for weeks, babbling on about how the sports editor of the Sun-Times, that sniveling cretin, had maliciously envied Lemke’s talent and torpedoed his career. “And I suppose you have the ambition to write a little yourself,” Lincoln posits.

The blush expands from two small circles on her cheeks into a faint mask covering her entire un-made-up face. “Maybe, some time. I used to think so, and then I took a course with Professor Davoodi, and I realized how much I have to learn. It’s one thing to imagine you want to write, but you have to have something to say, you know?”

“You took a course with Professor Davoodi?” Lincoln asks innocently.

“It was fantastic. He’s a genius, don’t you think? Was he there when you went to the U of C?”

“No,” Lincoln muses ambiguously. “No, I think not.” Cyrus Davoodi is a tall, imposing scholar from an ancient Persian family who made a name in academic circles by pioneering the application of postcolonial theory to American romance novels. Yes, he is a genius, everyone says, but a few years ago, he won a worldwide award for the worst writing of the year—a snarky designation, to be sure, but the newspapers paid attention. Out of curiosity, Lincoln had looked up Professor Davoodi’s award-winning paragraph. Only a hundred words long, the paragraph was nonetheless a thicket of inflated phrases and run-on sentences so clogged with clauses—dependent, independent, and unrelated to any apparent earthly thought—that Lincoln had literally dizzied himself trying unsuccessfully to puzzle through it. Randomly stringing together big words from the dictionary would have produced a more readable narrative.

“He’s so full of ideas!” the grouse offers.

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