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She nods. “It should be good for us—at least, Jerry thinks so.”
That would be Jerry Cirone, the owner of Mary’s firm, a dour, middle-aged health-food nut who can’t stop complaining about how his wife took him to the cleaners in their divorce.
“I could use some time off,” Mary continues. “But in business you’ve got to seize the moment. With the economy as it is, you can’t leave money on the table.”
There was a time, Lincoln recalls, when conversations with his wife focused often on literary matters. Now he wonders if she misses those days.
“And how are things at Pistakee?” she asks as the waiter brings their entrees.
“Good!” says Lincoln, and in the glow of the wine (not to speak of Duddleston’s acknowledgement of his hard work and the settlement of l’affaire Buford), he means it, at least momentarily.
They chatter on through dinner, finish the wine, order another bottle to go with dessert. Lincoln keeps looking for the opening to confess his continuing love, but for all the good cheer, their conversation remains solidly informational—a practical accompaniment to dinner. Let the moment arrive, he tells himself, channeling Zen. Yet as they continue through dessert—a shared helping of sour cherry pie, an Erwin specialty—still more information flows: Mary’s sister’s wedding last month; Lincoln’s update on Flam’s romantic ventures; Mary’s plans to get an MBA.
“I love real estate, but I’d like to be smarter about it,” she says at one point. “You know, really understand the way the economy works, the markets, the financing. I mean, I’m fascinated the way Jerry can explain how a tiny move by the Fed affects the banks, then the mortgage rates, and then the whole housing market.”
At this second mention of the pinched, owly boss, the name falling so easily from Mary’s lips, Lincoln suddenly gets a shivery image of the container of Tucks Hemorrhoidal Ointment he found in her medicine cabinet. In an instant, he’s constructed an entire, terrible world of betrayal and secret love all squeezed from that skinny tube.
“You all right, Linc?” Mary asks. “You look funny all of a sudden.”
“Just a little gas.” Lincoln pats his stomach.
By the time they’ve finished the pie, Lincoln has given up on saying anything about his love. Mary gets up to use t
he restroom, and when she returns and says with a sigh, “Linc, we’ve got to talk,” he has almost steeled himself for what is to come. She wants a divorce. The time apart has helped her realize that they weren’t really serious about each other, about marriage, that they would be stuck forever in the feckless patterns of post-grad existence, the place they’d been when they met. She says that she wants to take her life to the next level. She’ll always be fond of Lincoln, of course, but in the end this will be better for both of them.
Is there someone else?
“No. Well, yes, but he’s not the cause. It would have happened anyway.”
Jerry?
“Did you know?” Mary’s surprise passes quickly, and she explains that her boss courted her for months. She resisted, succumbed, broke it off, then took it up again. She doesn’t say, but Lincoln realizes, that this was all going on while he and Mary were still together.
At least Jerry’s got hemorrhoids, Lincoln thinks. The plague would be better, but hemorrhoids help, if only a little.
Lincoln has drunk almost an entire bottle of wine, but he doesn’t feel high so much as he feels hungover, as if he’s skipped the fun part and gone straight to the consequences. He’s limp, wasted, achy. A hole has opened in the top of his head, and a million thoughts and memories are crowding, shoving, struggling to get out, like the passengers trapped on the panicked L train. Every now and then one breaks free: The otherworldly silkiness of the hair on the ears of Cal, the family mutt when Lincoln was growing up. He can feel the sweetness now in the tips of his fingers. Or that time, a couple of years ago, when he accidentally ran into Mary at Macy’s downtown, and when she saw him, as she glanced past a rack of dresses, her face opened up like a flower.
“You want some more wine?” Mary asks genially.
No, he tells her. No more wine. He’ll take care of the bill.
She doesn’t object, and with startling swiftness, they are on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. There are so many issues, logistics, details to discuss. But Mary seems to feel they can wait. Lincoln rouses himself to say cavalierly, “Well, my lawyer will call your lawyer.”
“Oh, Linc,” says Mary, offering that bright face from the surprise encounter at Macy’s. She puts her hand on his forearm, the one he broke so many years ago. For an instant, he feels connected. But then she pulls away.
Lincoln wanders the North Side for two hours. It’s not so much that he can’t bear to go home alone—though he does have the hazy premonition that if he enters his apartment now, he’ll never emerge—it’s more that he can’t focus on any direction, any ending place. Even his eyes can’t focus. The streetlights are harsh, glowing suns. Neon ads become rainbows of red and yellow, blue and green. After a while, he finds himself swimming against clumps of fans leaving the Cubs game. From snippets of conversation, Lincoln gathers that the team has lost again. The subdued traffic, the air of communal misery—it offers a kind of relief. Perhaps by subconscious design, Lincoln comes to the 10th Inning, the scene of Bill Lemke’s book-signing party, and after a moment’s pause, he plunges in. Lincoln has been here before, and the place is typically mobbed after games. Tonight, though, the bar is almost empty, just a few knots of people drinking beer from steins.
Lemke sits in the back corner on a folding chair in front of a card table adorned with a stack of his books. He’s alone. There’s not even any sign of the Pistakee intern who was supposed to handle credit card transactions. The author is slumped in his chair. His shoulders sag, his Cubs hat sits low over his forehead. With his faded green shirt, the enormous, flat collar like bat wings circling his throat, and his brown pants scarred with ancient stains, he looks like nothing so much as a pile of dirty laundry carelessly tossed by a Midwest golfer on the basement floor in front of the washing machine in the summer of 1956 and miraculously preserved in the decades since.
“How’d it go?” Lincoln asks.
Lemke looks up without interest. “They forgot to introduce me,” he says.
17
“YOU WANT SOME Xanax?” Flam offers the next day when Lincoln calls to give him the news.
“I’ll tough it out.”
