AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Seconds later Byron Duddleston appears in the office door. “Who was that?” he asks, gesturing down the hall in the direction of Buford’s exit.
Lincoln is still standing behind his desk, asking himself whether he’s being blackmailed. “Uhhh...a writer,” he tells his boss. He slides Buford’s business card under a pile of papers and casually moves the poet’s package to the side of the desk. (Yes. Blackmail. Definitely.)
“A writer!” Duddleston repeats, pleased, as if he and Lincoln had accidentally spotted a rare and beautiful yellow-throated warbler well north of its typical range. “We need more diversity on our list.”
“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” Lincoln improvises.
As Lincoln sits again, the boss steps into the ro
om and hovers, his maroon bow tie adding a menacing edge. (Why menacing? Lincoln has long wondered. Something about academic smugness, aggressive competence. Lincoln could never tie one.) “Bill Lemke has come to me with what I think is a fantastic idea,” Duddleston says cagily.
Lincoln frowns. “Really?”
“Yes. He’s been talking to the marketing people with the Cubs, and it turns out they’d really like to promote his book. In fact, they’re doing a special night to celebrate the history of Wrigley Field, and they’ve offered to make Bill part of the event.”
“That’s great!”
“Yes. But here’s the thing. They want to do it at the end of September, so we’d need copies of the book by then. Paperback, of course. Oversized.”
Lincoln does a quick mental accounting of their normal production schedule. “That’s impossible,” he points out.
Duddleston’s famous temper flares. “Nothing’s impossible!” he snaps. “That’s the trouble with the book business—everybody’s stuck in the same old pattern. Of course, it’s possible to publish a book in two months—companies do it all the time with annual reports, special issues, that sort of thing. We’ve already speeded our schedule way up. There’s no reason we can’t do it some more. If you can get the manuscript in shape, I’ll take care of production and distribution. Bill’s game, that’s for sure.”
So Lemke, that mothy and odorous fossil, is ready to march with Duddleston into the fast-moving future, while Lincoln, the brilliant young executive editor, is stuck in the sluggish routines of the past. “Wow,” says Lincoln, trying to save his job, “We’ll give it a try!”
“Good.”
Lincoln pours it on: “What a great idea!”
“Maybe. It’ll be expensive and risky.” Despite the hedge, Duddleston’s pleasure with himself dances around his face. “And this could even be the Cubs’ year. They’re hanging in there, despite the injuries. Wouldn’t it be something if they made it to the World Series? Do you know how long it’s been?”
Everyone who lives in Chicago and has avoided dementia can answer that question: “1945.”
Duddleston stands, apparently satisfied that his top deputy has got with the program. “Why don’t you give Bill a call and get it started.”
“Sure thing,” Lincoln says.
And lest there be any lingering question, the owner/editor-in-chief adds on the way out: “Today.”
11
LINCOLN HAS PLANS to join Flam in the evening at an advance press screening of the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man, but throughout the afternoon, even through a long, somewhat disjointed conversation with Bill Lemke (had he been drinking? would the new production rush be Lemke’s excuse to ignore all of Lincoln’s editorial suggestions?), Tony Buford’s trim package silently nags, forcing itself into Lincoln’s attention, like a cell phone left on vibration. Finally, toward the end of the day, Lincoln surrenders and retrieves the envelope from the far corner of his desk, where he’d hoped he could forget it among other unread manuscripts. He opens it and pulls out a rather thin sheath of thick, expensive paper, the kind used for letters from rich people or executives. L, says the title on the top sheet. “Poetry by Antonio Buford. Copyright 2009.” (Is that title a reference to the unfortunate incident?)
Lincoln skims through the pages. The poems are numbered, and most are contained on a single sheet. The titles are short descriptors of objects, places, or simple activities: “The Brown Easy Chair,” “Shaving in the Shower,” “Masking Tape,” “North Wells Between Grand and Illinois.” Fifty poems in all. Lincoln flips to the end, then returns to one called “The Remote,” attracted by the possibly clever use of an adjective as a noun. No. It’s about the author’s Emancipation Day, when the family got a remote control device for the television and the father could change channels from the sofa instead of repeatedly ordering the son to schlep to the console.
Several pages on, Lincoln dips into “The Morning Paper,” a sixty-word salute to the 6:00 a.m. delivery of the Tribune:
It pounds on the door, rude, oblivious
Reviving the household
Like that first rough CPR stroke
on the chest of a sprawled heart-attack victim.
Lincoln considers several others, “Sharpening a Pencil,” “The DustBuster,” “Maple Leaf.” All the same—short, modestly thoughtful celebrations of the utterly ordinary. The collection could have been called Ode to the Mundane.
Finally Lincoln turns to the front and burrows his way through all fifty poems. He finds the language clean and accessible, and every now and then Buford summons an image that’s mildly catchy. In a couple of instances, Lincoln realizes that he’s been prodded to a fresh regard for an element of everyday life (the “calming” paper clip that “tames clutter, the unruly mind”). Overall, the quality is several grade levels above greeting-card verse. Still, the poems are palliative, thin. Unimportant. Given Buford’s aggressiveness in pushing his work, Lincoln had been expecting something raw that drew on the African-American experience. But nothing in the collection even hints at the poet’s racial identity. Sitting at his desk, holding the overweight pages in his hands, Lincoln thinks the work could easily be the creation of a widow from suburban Milwaukee, writing by the window in her sunset years.
