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She’s so, so far ahead of him. The world is ahead of him. “You should know,” he says sullenly.
“Linc, I wish you wouldn’t be that way.”
For a moment Lincoln wonders: Would it really be possible to be any other way—wounded, confused, self-doubting, depressed, angry, and, finally, petulant as a teenager when confronting the source of the pain? “I’ve got to get back to work,” he tells her. “I’m in the middle of editing something.”
“Good-bye, Linc,” she says simply and hangs up.
Lincoln gets up and walks slowly to the men’s room, trying to recover some equilibrium. When he returns to his desk, first thing he calls Flam and apologizes for being a prick last night.
“You think last night was out of character?” Flam asks with a laugh. “No apology necessary. Does a barracuda apologize for its teeth?”
Then Lincoln works straight through the day, snacking on a tin of Starbucks mints in his desk, using the wandering sentences of Revolutionizing Business as the koan in which to lose himself and seek enlightenment.
He thinks often that he should just pack up and leave—abandon Chicago at last and move to New York. But that would defy another piece of advice from his father: don’t quit your job until you have a new one. Lincoln has already sent out more than a dozen inquiries, some to the familiar New York editors, some to a new ro
und. Like every other business, however, publishing is feeling squeezed. Most of the editors he contacted haven’t even responded.
So rather than indulging in Poetry Therapy or Xanax, Lincoln devises his own prescription for coping: he jogs. Every evening after work, he heads east from his building to the lake. It’s dark, but the streets and the lakefront path are mostly well lit and usually populated by other runners. Lincoln enters the park through the Waveland underpass and each time faces a critical choice: Should he turn left, away from the city, toward the lonely, quiet regions to the north, the path edging between the shadowy trees and the black oblivion of the lake? Or go right, running toward the jagged explosion of buildings and lights of downtown Chicago, the illuminated Ferris wheel on Navy Pier a kind of lighthouse to mark the shoals of inflated promises and manufactured joys? Lincoln never knows which way he’ll turn, but lets impulse take over. And then he runs, pounding, gasping, sweating, punishing his body, exhausting his brain, driving out all thoughts but the deep, total awareness of physical discomfort. He runs for an hour, longer on some nights, stopping finally when he’s circled back, walking the last few blocks to his building, soaking wet now, cooling in the fall night air, feeling for the first time all day a measure of relief. And sometimes walking back, the question drifts into his emptied head: Am I going to die in exile in Chicago?
18
BY THANKSGIVING, LINCOLN’S life has eased back toward homeostasis. He has adjusted to his furnished apartment and come to know the neighbors he’d hoped he could avoid (two young couples, a trader, and the elderly widow on the first floor who has lived in the building since long before the neighborhood gentrified); gently curtailed his evenings out with Flam; and hired a lawyer, who is now working out the details of the divorce. She is an attractive young mother of twins who assumes the attitude—presumably to bolster spirits—that getting a divorce is one of life’s special pleasures: “That day when it becomes final, you’ll experience a rush of emotion that will bowl you over,” she promises. “That’s what I call the Freedom High.”
At the office, Lincoln’s various projects are moving forward, though Duddleston has wisely decided to hold Professor Fleace’s Walking Tours of the Windy City until spring, when someone in Chicago might actually dare to face the weather and walk around outside. The owner has also hired a replacement for Arthur Wendt: Warren Sternberg, who made a name bringing out Deep Dish, a history of Chicago pizza.
Through a bolt of serendipity, Lincoln and Tony Buford have found a suitable title for the collection of poetry. Lincoln had given the manuscript to Pistakee’s multi-tattooed young designer, Gregor (just Gregor—he’s also an artist, intent on becoming his own brand), and appended the title Still Life with DustBuster as a placeholder until they came up with something better. Either Gregor didn’t understand or Lincoln failed to explain adequately; in any case, Gregor took the faux title as inspiration and designed a handsome cover, featuring his own photograph of a utility-closet corner with a DustBuster bedded among an old pair of shoes, a shopping bag of wire hangers, a used tennis ball, and a roll of heavy-duty extension cord. In his enthusiasm for his composition, Gregor neglected to leave sufficient room for all the words of the stand-in title, so he shortened it simply to Still Life. Perfect, thinks Lincoln when he sees the mock-up. Seldom has a title so exactly expressed a book’s content. With a minimum of persuasion, Buford goes for it, too.
By then, Lincoln has also repaired his relationship with Amy. For several weeks after she hung up on him, they steered clear of each other, going beyond even the cool discretion they’d exercised previously. The Pistakee offices are too intimate for that to last, however, and eventually their grudging nods give way to terse greetings. Finally, one day after work, Amy calls on his cell phone. “I’m not mad at you anymore,” she announces. “But I’ll get mad again if you’re not careful.”
“Don’t worry. What I said was stupid. I was just a little out of my mind because of what was going on.”
“I know. I was ready to give you the benefit of the doubt, but then you never called back to apologize.”
“I should have,” Lincoln confesses. “I’m sorry.” After Mary’s deception, Flam’s sarcasm, Duddleston’s reticent management style, and Buford’s manipulation, Lincoln feels as if he’s been dealing with people who operate on several levels at once, and he appreciates Amy’s candor. Turning upbeat, he asks, “How’s the book coming?”
“I should have something to show you after Thanksgiving.”
“Really? So soon?”
“Do you think it’s too soon?”
“All depends. How many pages do you have?”
“Around two hundred.”
Lincoln does a quick calculation in his head. That’s around a hundred seventy-five or so pages in a book, depending on the design.
Amy asks, “What are you thinking? Is that too short? I’m used to writing short stories, so this seems enormous.”
“No, that’s probably fine. Some of the classics are short. Gatsby, Billy Budd.”
Through the cell, Amy’s voice softens a notch, loses its hint of office efficiency. “I missed our discussions,” she confides. “You pushed me. I wrote the last third of the book on my own, and I’m afraid it’s not so good.”
“I’m sure it’s fine,” Lincoln tells her. Fighting the nippy wind blowing from the north, he’s struck suddenly by a mild melancholy. Just a few months ago, on those steamy summer evenings, his cell-phone conversations with Amy about her novel always gave him a shot of encouragement. Now, Amy’s venture seems like a mere diversion. “I’m eager to read it,” he adds.
For the first time since before he was married, Lincoln spends Thanksgiving with his family, joining his mother, father, sister, and her two kids at the family’s weekend place in rural West Virginia. Lincoln had hesitated to accept the standing invitation, worried that he’d be repeatedly cross-examined about the end of his marriage. But it turns out that a newer crisis has inserted itself into the family circle. His sister’s husband, an investment banker from Boston, has failed to make the trip, citing pressure from a mysterious deal. Lincoln’s sister, Lillian, is elusive about the situation, and the husband, Brad, doesn’t call on Thanksgiving Day. Rather than pushing to dissect this latest worrisome marital development, Lincoln’s parents choose to avoid probing questions almost entirely. Just once, after the Thanksgiving dinner, on a walk along the country road in front of their house, Lincoln’s father brings up the matter, asking if Lincoln is happy with his lawyer.
“She seems fine,” Lincoln says.
