Page 74 of Are You Happy Now?

Falcone emits a snort. “I hardly bother anymore. Acquisitions are what count. Who can you sign up?” He leans across the small table. “As for line editing, I’ll let you in on a secret. Readers don’t notice.”

“I know things are changing,” Lincoln says.

Falcone sits back. “Don’t get me wrong. I love books. I love authors, too—at least some of them. But the publishing business has to face facts. The game’s new. Now, it’s all names and marketing.”

The rest of the lunch goes well. Lincoln and Falcone chatter through dessert and several rounds of espresso, talking about books, writers, sports, wives, marriages. (Falcone, too, has come through a divorce and for financial reasons has retreated to a studio sublet on the Upper West Side.) They don’t finish until after three o’clock, and Lincoln has to rush to catch a cab to the airport. In front of the restaurant, Falcone shakes Lincoln’s hand. “You’re not what I expected,” he says. “I’ll put in a good word.”

A little over an hour later, Lincoln is in line at his gate at LaGuardia when his cell phone rings. It’s Jeff Kessler. “Good. Got you before you got away,” he says.

“Just waiting to board.”

“Listen. You made a strong impression here. I’m not going to beat around the bush. We’d like to offer you the job.”

Lincoln can only burble, “Wow.” The line at the gate starts forward.

Kessler runs through a few rudiments, including salary, which generously eclipses what Lincoln is currently making, though his instant calculations suggest he’ll be exiled out of Manhattan or closeted in a studio sublet, like Falcone. “Well, what do you think?” Kessler asks.

“Ahhh.” Lincoln is so awash with surprise and joy that he can’t even blurt out a simple “yes.” He’s broken the tape at the end of his grueling marathon, and he’s too exhausted to think. And just then a gate announcement blasts through the intercom, and Lincoln can’t find the pocket where he stashed his boarding pass.

Kessler rescues. “I understand. It’s a big move. You should think about it. Just let me know on Monday.”

“I’m so flattered. Thank you.”

“Have a good flight back,” Kessler says.

As soon as the plane lifts off, Lincoln realizes how tense he’s been. He feels limp and drained, almost as if he’s recovering from a fever. He sits back and closes his eyes. A phrase from an Anthony Buford poem, “Falling Asleep,” floats into his head: “Nature’s gift of oblivion.” He got that right, thinks Lincoln, just as he drifts off. He awakens as they are crossing Lake Michigan. His first thought is that he’s blown it. He should have said yes to the job immediately. Now Kessler will doubt his enthusiasm. But maybe not, maybe Lincoln lucked out. Maybe a touch of hesitation shows worldliness, sophistication. His father, the fierce negotiator, always said never jump at the first offer. Maybe on Monday Kessler will even dangle a slightly higher salary, allowing Lincoln to upgrade from a studio to a small one-bedroom.

From Lincoln’s window seat, the spires of Chicago come into view. The plane takes a northern route, swooping past the city before circling and pointing toward O’Hare. The angled sun casts a sepia light on the cityscape. Lincoln looks down. Chicago’s cluster of big buildings looks so...contained, so knowable from three thousand feet. For all the third-biggest-American-city hoopla, the famous downtown stands like an outpost, a small redoubt on the vast, flat surface. Lincoln has a sudden flash of the pride those early Chicagoans must have felt in setting their flag here, in this swampy, windswept, unwelcoming prairie. The thought leads him back to his conversation with Kessler, then his lunch with Falcone. Something nags.

Did he fuck Amy? No! Well, yes, but he would never put it that way, never treat it as if it were the natural, transactional outcome of his work. He feels sullied now for having responded to the question at all. If Amy knew...Lincoln vows to himself that he will never, ever, get drawn again into an exchange like that. Half an hour later, coming home in a taxi, stalled in traffic, Lincoln wonders if it’s that misstep with Falcone that has slightly deflated his joy at being offered the job.

When he gets to his apartment, Lincoln doesn’t have the energy to go out for dinner, so he toasts himself with a large vodka on ice and calls out for a pizza. Checking the iAgatha website, he finds that three new manuscripts have come in for him, including Vijay Sharma’s latest. “I have been writing feverishly and can’t wait for you to work your magic,” says Vijay in a note sent at 2:00 a.m. Jaipur time.

In bed that night, Lincoln churns dreams until about five in the morning, when he awakens with one of those sleep-induced moments of utter clarity: he will go to New York—that is of course what he wants, but he will take Amy with him.

32

AMY HAS MOVED to Pilsen, a slightly sketchy, largely Mexican neighborhood south of the Loop that’s enjoyed an influx of offbeat galleries and promising restaurants. Her plain, rectangular three-flat—subdivided into at least six apartments—sits in the middle of an unshaded block of similar buildings that crowd the sidewalk and provide a feeling of density missing from much of the North Side.

A taxi drops off Lincoln at nine thirty in the morning. The block is quiet. As he stands on the sidewalk, an older, overweight Hispanic woman carrying a cloth bag walks by, considering him warily. Lincoln smiles. He waits for the woman to reach the corner, then marches directly to the entrance of Amy’s building. The intercom shows Hispanic names in every apartment but one, 2B: A. O’Malley. Lincoln rings the buzzer. He can hear it sounding distantly, deep within the structure. No answer. He waits, then thumbs the buzzer again. Thirty seconds pass, a minute. Suddenly, a scratchy bleat of static erupts from the inept intercom.

“Amy, it’s John,” says Lincoln into the speaker, enunciating clearly.

“Kxxxkkkxxx.”

“What? I can’t hear.”

“Kxxxkkkxxx.”

“Let me in! We have to talk.”

“Kxxxkkkxxx.” By now, with his excellent language skills, Lincoln has translated the static: “Go away!”

“Please!” he begs.

But the intercom is silent, offering not even the closure of a click.

Lincoln could stand at the building entrance and try to slip in when someone leaves, but then he’d be left pounding on Amy’s apartment door. Or he could wait for her to come out and accost her on the street. He decides to reappraise over coffee at a diner a few blocks away on Halsted, but as he heads in that direction, he thinks of the alley. (Ah, those Chicago alleys.) He walks down the potholed and littered passageway and comes to the back of the three-flat. Looking up through the rusty filigree of a fire escape, he can see what must be a window to Amy’s apartment. If he could get up to that window—if Amy could see him, she’d read his sincerity. He’d get his chance to plead his case.

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