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“Sure.” Buford doesn’t sound entirely convinced. “Just keep it in mind. I really think this could help.”
“Thanks. Send me the titles. Bye.”
Flam remains heroic in his kindnesses, offering not just Xanax but a continuing patient ear and a willingness to talk Lincoln back from the cliffs of despair and paranoia. They eat together most evenings, usually at John Barleycorn, though occasionally they venture to some other inexpensive spot on the North Side. “I’m not even mad,” Lincoln confesses one night. “It’s as if anger is beside the point. I’m mostly just dazed.”
“It’s probably like grief,” Flam suggests. “There are stages you have to go through, and you’ll get to anger eventually.”
“I can’t believe she was falling in love with someone else while we were living together. It makes me question everything—as if I’ve been wrong from the start. My whole reality is tilted.”
“There is no reality,” Flam says. “You just have to tell yourself a good story and stick to it.”
Flam’s companionship bolsters Lincoln through the first agonizing weeks, but in his misery Lincoln even grows short with his generous friend and frustrated at the awkward bachelorhood they share. Lincoln starts to lose patience with Flam’s amusements, such as his habit over dinner of disgorging the news of the day, particularly items confirming the idiocy of somebody or some institution. Flam has become particularly enthralled by a story embraced by the tabloid Sun-Times about a man in suburban Schaumburg who weighs over nine hundred pounds and can’t get out of bed. He needs hospital care, but the health authorities have decided that the best treatment is to keep him at home on a strict diet until he’s lost enough weight to move. “They’re starving the poor bastard!” Flam cries one evening at Barleycorn as Lincoln hides behind his mug of beer.
The next day, the news turns tragic. The fat man bribed a neighborhood boy to smuggle in several bags of hamburgers, fries, and candy. The man binged, then died, probably of a heart attack. “Murder!” pronounces Flam. “The state killed him.”
Lincoln can’t keep it in. “For God’s sake, the man ate himself to death. The health authorities were doing what they could.”
“Then it’s suicide facilitated by the state. They probably didn’t want to have to pay to get the fat guy to the hospital and take care of him there.”
Lincoln carefully puts down the knife and fork he was using on his open-faced tuna-melt sandwich. He speaks in weary tones. “The man was pathetic. He’s not worth our time. Let’s talk about something else.”
“Suit yourself,” Flam grumbles, and the dinner concludes in monosyllables.
By the time Lincoln is in bed at home, he’s digested the evening sufficiently to know exactly what Flam is now thinking: no wonder Mary left that cold son of a bitch.
The next day, Lincoln gets to work line editing one of Arthur Wendt’s manuscripts, Revolutionizing Business, a book on management principles gleaned from the Founding Fathers, by Mitchell Morgenthau, another beloved U of C professor. Lincoln is trudging through the second chapter when his phone rings. “Your wife,” Kim tells him when he picks up.
Lincoln has a terrible taste of stale coffee in his mouth. He swallows hard, trying to wash it away. “OK.”
“Linc? How are you? I tried to get you earlier on your cell phone, but it was turned off.”
“I’m at work.”
“I know. This was the other day.”
“You didn’t leave a message.”
“I know. I didn’t feel right just being a disembodied voice. I wanted to talk to you for real, and I figured you’d see it was me on your ‘Missed Calls’ function.”
“I don’t ever use that.”
“Well, no matter, here we are. How are you?”
In the moment while Lincoln considers what to say, he reflects that her voice sounds different—a little higher, slightly tinny, something being held back. She’s not calling to beg forgiveness. “I’m OK.”
“Really? I worry about you. Are you hanging out with Flam?”
Flam. His friend. Lincoln flashes back to dinner yesterday and thinks: How could I be so ungrateful? “Yes.”
Mary natters on for a minute or so about applying to business school. “Then I spent the whole weekend studying for the goddamned GMAT,” she goes on. “Morning to night. I’ve never done anything so boring. I hope business school isn’t like this.”
The precise ease with which she describes this annoyance makes Lincoln assume that she spent the weekend in romps from the kitchen floor to the dining-room sofa to the bed in Jerry Cirone’s expensive downtown condo.
“Have you hired a lawyer yet?” she asks abruptly.
“Not yet.”
“Well, you probably should, so we can try to sell our apartment. It’ll be tough, but I think the quicker we get it out on the market the better.”
