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Lincoln goes directly to the little-used office in the second bedroom and riffles through a file cabinet until he finds the homeowner’s policy. It’s dense and legalistic—the definitions alone take up several pages. Better just h
ang onto it for later study. He closes the file drawer and glances around the room. The sleek, white desk is piled high with books, magazines, and bills, just as before. Mary’s laptop is missing, but she probably took it to Sedona. Lincoln’s small collection of workout weights, idle since before his marriage, sits against a wall. The light brown Burberry blanket adds a streak of color draped over the back of the dark blue convertible sofa, just as he remembers.
Emboldened, Lincoln inspects the kitchen (spotless and barren, as if she’s stopped eating), and then he makes a daring tour of the master bedroom. It’s here—and in the connected bathroom—where he’ll find the evidence if Mary has taken a lover. But the graceful wrought-iron bed with its lacy white covering looks innocent. She’s moved the alarm clock from his bed table to hers, but otherwise the setting is unchanged. He checks the two books stacked on her table: The Lazarus Project, the acclaimed new novel by the Chicagoan Aleksandar Hemon, and a paperback called Your Successful Real Estate Career. He opens the closet and reels for a moment under a wave of air fragrant with Mary’s perfume, Blue Agava by Jo Malone. His old corner of the closet remains unpopulated save for a few jackets and shirts he never bothered to retrieve. OK so far.
Still high on the fragrance of Mary’s perfume, Lincoln enters the sparkling bathroom and bravely opens the mirrored medicine cabinet. A colorful array of makeup jars, emollients, and aspirin containers line the shelves. Lincoln allows himself only a quick peek. All looks in order. Just as he’s closing the door, though, he notices on the bottom shelf a thin, squeezed tube with a plainness that seems out of place. He takes it out and inspects: Tucks Hemorrhoidal Ointment.
My God, Lincoln thinks. Poor Mary. She needs me.
10
A WEEK OR so passes with no further word from Detective Evinrude. Meantime, with the arrival of August, a heat wave washes over the Midwest, smothering Chicago with a dense blanket of air. Daytime temperatures venture deep into the nineties four days running. The remorseless sun punishes anyone who strays beyond a shadow. Walking around outside, breathing the thick air streaked with faint, swampy odors, Lincoln has the odd sensation of being trapped in his high school locker room. At home, the air conditioning can’t keep up. One evening, Lincoln rides his bike to the lakefront, hoping to find a spot of relief in a breeze coming off the water. All of Chicago has the same idea. The bike path along the lake is a mob of cyclers, skaters, defiant joggers gushing sweat, fast walkers, wanderers, oblivious children, glistening shirtless musclemen, overheated dogs, exhausted young parents pushing strollers, Indians in damp and clingy saris—people of every shape, color, and style except the old, who’ve been warned constantly by Mayor Daley not to move around in the heat.
Thwarted by the crowd, Lincoln dismounts and walks his bike north, but a group of Mexicans has colonized his rock for a picnic, and the entire park up here is a throbbing, multi-culti refugee camp of tents and grills and screaming children, families fleeing the torturous heat inside their tenements. Soaked with sweat, Lincoln turns and walks his bike back the other way. A cluster of gasping joggers—a running club, perhaps—staggers past, and Lincoln sees something familiar in the contorted rictus of their faces, their mouths like raw gashes as they suck for air. The group is well beyond him before he makes the connection: those are the faces on the human casts he saw on his visit to Pompeii.
And, yet, circling back to his apartment, he passes a popular Greek restaurant at the busy corner of Halsted and Webster. The proprietor has lined up tables outside along the narrow sidewalk, and each is filled with diners—Chicagoans gobbling their moussaka in the unbearable heat while a string of cars stopped at the intersection blasts hot and filthy exhaust at their feet.
“It’s alfresco hysteria,” Lincoln tells Amy the next day when he runs into her on the elevator. His blue linen shirt is stained with sweat. “It’s as if these people are so crazed by the winter cold that they can’t bear to miss a single moment to eat outside.”
“You sound as if you need to get away for a weekend,” she tells him.
Lincoln thinks: I’d have to warn Detective Evinrude.
When the elevator opens on the twelfth floor, Amy says, “Can I stop down for a moment? I’d like to talk.”
Lincoln glances sideways at Kim the receptionist, who sits just feet away and whose Iowa goodwill acts as radar for subtle changes within the Pistakee family. She guessed the regular UPS deliverywoman was pregnant several weeks before the lady in brown announced it. “Give me a few minutes to settle in,” Lincoln tells Amy coolly.
Ten minutes later Amy appears at his office door. She’s wearing slacks and a silky print blouse, and she looks untouched by a drop of perspiration. Lincoln warns, “We need to be more discreet.”
“What’s the harm in talking?” asks Amy as she plops into the chair facing Lincoln’s desk. Still, she lowers her voice to a whisper. “Listen: I think I’ve had a breakthrough on the novel.”
“Really?” Lincoln perks up. “What happened?”
“I took a walk the other evening. I couldn’t get any momentum; every sentence was a struggle. So I stepped outside. It was awful in this heat. I felt as if I were melting, literally, turning into a puddle. And I suddenly realized—that’s it: that’s the opening scene. Mary is in this sterile office asking these clinical sex questions, and then she steps outside onto a busy sidewalk in the middle of a heat wave, and she feels as if she’s falling into a kind of tropical spell.”
Lincoln interrupts: “Your protagonist’s name is Mary?”
“Yes. I like using a classic name—you know, the biblical overtones. I thought about calling her Eve, but I decided that was maybe too much.”
“Hmm.” Lincoln nods carefully. (Does Amy know his wife’s name? He’s assiduously avoided mentioning it around her—there seemed to be something profane about it.)
“You don’t like ‘Mary’?” Amy asks.
“No, fine, just thinking.”
“Anyway, I ran home and wrote the scene, and after that, the story just started flowing. Now, every day after work, I write until very late, midnight or later.”
“That’s great,” Lincoln tells her.
“And I think I’ve got a story line. I’ve figured out the other main character, Jennifer, she’s sort of based on a girl who lived in my dorm. She was a senior when I was a freshman, and she liked to scandalize us by saying she was on a mission to find the Ultimate Position.”
“Huh?”
“You know—the perfect sexual position. The position that provides maximum pleasure for both partners.”
In his mind, Lincoln starts running through pornographic flip cards.
“The story revolves around the interplay between the two women,” Amy continues.
