Page 39 of Are You Happy Now?

“Wasn’t that going to be your ticket out of here?” Flam presses.

“That was a long time ago.”

“Just last summer.”

“I meant metaphorically.”

Flam takes a bite of hamburger and considers. Barleycorn is quiet on this chilly December night, and the strings of Christmas lights and holiday ribbons look as if they’ve been hanging for decades. “I sort of liked that project,” Flam says finally. “I thought it was one of your better ideas.”

The semicompliment emboldens Lincoln. “What do you think of the title The Ultimate Position?” he asks.

Flam abruptly halts a bundle of fries on its way to his mouth. “You’re going to call the book The Ultimate Position?”

“Maybe,” says Lincoln, retreating. “One of the characters claims to be searching for it.”

“The ultimate position for sex.”

“Yes.”

“Perfect.”

“You like?”

“It’s perfect!”

Lincoln feels an easing in his upper back, between his shoulders. A steel rod that had somehow been implanted there for the last six months flexes, bends.

Flam continues eagerly: “That’s it, that’s modern man—you know, his senseless, hopeless quest: sweating and wrestling and testing out all these uncomfortable arrangements, trying to figure out how to maneuver things just right. The Ultimate Position.”

Something occurs to Lincoln: Is Flam talking about me?

The next morning, Amy sends the rewrite. “I’m finished,” her note says simply. Attached are all fourteen chapters.

Lincoln immediately prints the manuscript. At 213 pages, it has a pleasant heft. He makes himself a cup of coffee, then sits down to read. Within the first few pages, he feels his excitement draining. His stomach turns raw, and he abandons the coffee half-finished. He skims some pages, reads, then skims some more. Amy has hardly changed a thing. She’s rewritten an occasional sentence, added a brief scene here or there, overexplained a few elements that were elusive in the original. If anything, the book has deteriorated.

Her efforts to inject real sex into the pages have an awkward, even prophylactic quality. “He placed her naked across the large, firm pillow, laying her on her back, as if carefully draping an expensive fur coat. Then he dropped to his knees in front, entering only the first two inches of her vagina, so he could directly massage her G-spot with his erect penis.” The book’s sluggish midsection has practically stalled with the addition of background information on Mary’s annoying boyfriend. By evening, Lincoln can’t push himself to finish and instead goes out alone to a movie.

He reads to the end Sunday morning, after he’s been through the Times and the Tribune. He’s sitting in the nubby chair, Amy’s manuscript plopped atop a scattering of newspaper sections, when his cell phone rings.

“Well?” asks Amy.

“How do you know I’ve finished it?”

“I know you, John.”

He wonders at the implications of the remark, then decides to ignore it. “Well, I think the book’s still got a lot of promise,” he says.

“I don’t like the sound of that.”

“To be candid, there’s more to be done.”

“Like what?”

“Like...most of the things we talked about before.”

“I can’t. I’m exhausted.” Click. She’s gone.

Lincoln sits. His arm aches, and now his eyes hurt. Maybe he needs to see an optometrist, get a prescription for glasses. In five minutes, Amy calls back. “I’m going to quit my job,” she says.

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