Page 43 of Are You Happy Now?

“I really sort of want to see what you’ve done to my book.”

“It’s New Year’s Eve,” Lincoln presses. “I’ve got a reservation.”

Reluctantly, Amy accedes.

Lincoln spends five minutes warming up his car before he sees Amy emerge from room 11. She’s bundled in a sky-blue ski jacket, with a blue wool cap pulled down on her head. For a moment Lincoln is taken aback. This isn’t Mary Reilly. Days ago, Lincoln had embarked on the rewrite by associating Amy with her protagonist, but in his edit, he’s elaborated on Amy’s terse physical descriptions, and he’s turned Mary into a fragile, spiky creature—a physical manifestation of her delicate, questing sensibility. In contrast, the woman walking toward him looks robust and athletic, the picture of healthy determination. She could be about to slip over the edge of a mountain slope and ski down a double black diamond.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been in your car before,” she says brightly when she slides into the front passenger seat.

“This is a rental,” he tells her.

“You rented a car to come up here?” She looks surprised.

“Why not?”

“What about your own car?”

“My wife—my ex-wife—needs it for work.”

“She got the car?” Amy marvels.

In his head, Lincoln completes her thought: his wife gets to cuckold him, then clean him out—what kind of a wuss is he? “I think you’ll like the restaurant,” he says as they pull out onto the road.

Lincoln has made reservations at Mrs. Lunker’s recommended Fireplace Inn, a cavernous supper club a few miles away. The restaurant has set out a lavish New Year’s Eve buffet, tables lined up along one wall and crowned with a feast: huge platters of herring and other pickled fish, trays of deviled eggs, five kinds of salads, a spread of cheeses, three selections of potatoes, rice, sliced meats, breads, salmon, turkey, some sort of teriyaki-inflected chicken, and—the climax of the affair—a roast pig. Amy is impressed. “How much did this cost?” she asks as they make their first

pass through the buffet, standing in a long line of large, cheerful people dressed, despite the season, as if they are about to play a round of golf. Lincoln shakes his head as if it’s nothing, and in fact, it was cheap by Chicago standards—thirty dollars a person, tip included. “It’s Wisconsin,” he says.

Amy restrains herself through dinner. She passes on gossip from the office, talks about Christmas with her family, avoids references to Lincoln’s personal life. It’s only after they have made their third excursion to the long buffet (this time venturing to the lethally caloric dessert region) and are finishing their second bottle of wine that she brings up her book. “I think it works,” Lincoln tells her. “By now I’m so close to it that I don’t quite trust myself, but it seems to me that you’ve got a voice and a story that are really quite special.”

“You think?” A pink flush roars upstream from Amy’s neck through her cheeks to her forehead.

“Quite special,” he repeats conclusively. “I’m going to recommend it to Byron for publication.”

“Publication.” She turns over the word slowly. “How much editing did you have to do?” she asks after a few seconds.

“Not really so much.” Lincoln is forking apart a pastry thing shaped like a swan and filled with sweet, heavy whipped cream.

“Did you cut a lot?”

“I did some trimming, but I bet you’ll hardly notice.”

“Rewriting?”

“I tried to fill out a few scenes—you know, enrich the descriptions—but nothing that gets in the way of your story.”

Amy takes another sip of wine. “John, you’ve been up here for a week. What have you been doing?”

Might as well unload it, thinks Lincoln, finishing off the swan. So he launches his carefully rehearsed speech about the advantages of the first-person narrative—the energy it provides, the chance to explore character, to play with American vernacular. The great tradition it follows.

Amy turns pale. “You’ve changed my book to first person?” she gasps.

“It’s not that big a thing.”

“Not that big a thing!” she cries. “It’s the whole thing!”

Around them, several tables of large Wisconsin families look over to see what the commotion is about.

“Just read it with an open mind,” Lincoln tells her. “If you don’t like it, you can change it back.”

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