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“I called a few acquaintances, and they gave her high marks,” his father continues. “The divorce bar can be a snake pit, you know. Very few scruples. But she worked at Mercer, Epstein before starting her family. Quite a good firm.”
“I know, Dad,” says Lincoln, slightly disconcerted to learn his father secretly vetted Lincoln’s choice. When he was a child and got invited on a playdate with a new friend, Lincoln’s mother would quietly call around to check the reliability of the friend’s family.
For the most part, his parents also avoid pressing Lincoln about the progress of his career, though on that same walk, his father casually asks how the job search in New York is going. “Got some letters out,” Lincoln says briskly. “Waiting to hear.”
In the silence that follows, Lincoln feels a grudging admiration for his father’s restraint, given that the worthy Democrat so desperately wants to welcome his only son to the pantheon of civic accomplishment. It was bad luck for both of them that the old man is utterly uninterested in sports, considers games a frivolous waste of time, so Lincoln never even got credit at home for his achievements on the basketball court.
They scuff along the road for a few more yards before his father says almost wistfully, “Probably not too late for law school.”
The family’s West Virginia property features a lovely, square, two-story, nineteenth-century farmhouse with a porch around two sides and the original wood f
loors and trim. (A shame Mary never saw the place, Lincoln thinks—she might have stayed if she’d realized this thing of beauty was in the family.) Lincoln’s room sits in one corner of the second floor, and he spends much of the holiday lying on his familiar old bed, reading books. Going back as far as Lincoln can remember, he and his mother and sister came out for the summer, his father joining them on weekends. Because of those summers, the contents of the room are like a core sample of his childhood, the layered detritus of assorted ages. The stuffed dog and stuffed bunny. A gorgeous wood train carved by a former hippie who moved to the area in the sixties and created a thriving cottage business. Swimming ribbons. Several generations of baseball gloves. Posters of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. Trophies from a summer basketball league.
Sometimes when he wearies of his book, Lincoln lies back with a Proustian regard. After the order and calm of his suburban neighborhood, West Virginia came off as untamed and alluring—the river swimming hole with the rope swing over the water; the general store, with its unfamiliar offerings; the overweight natives with their twangy accents. Lincoln recalls those summers fondly, but his memories aren’t entirely heartening. He’s not far enough removed from his childhood to find comfort in nostalgia, and he has the nagging sense that he’ll never quite get to that happy station until he accomplishes something—until he’s tasted some success as an adult. Relishing his past would be so much more rewarding if it lay back beyond the Golden Era of his life, his Heroic Period. Instead, the divorce has returned him to a kind of adolescent limbo in which he’s waiting to be let out of the house to get going again.
Back in Chicago, Amy strides into Lincoln’s office on Monday morning and drops a heavy Kinko’s box on his desk. “All yours,” she says. She plops down in a chair.
“You finished!”
“I nearly got disowned. I spent the holiday holed up in my apartment, except for Thanksgiving dinner. My parents were pissed.”
Amy’s face is pale and lacks highlights, and her hair carelessly falls over her ears. She’s wearing an old, bulky purple sweater with jeans. “You still haven’t told them what you’re working on?” Lincoln asks.
“I had to tell them I’m writing a book, but I wouldn’t tell them what it’s about. You’re the only one who knows.”
When she’s gone, Lincoln removes the top of the Kinko’s box to consider the first page of the manuscript:
THE ULTIMATE POSITION
By Amy O’Malley
(draft)
So she went with that title. Quickly he closes the box and places it with other manuscripts on the side table in his office. He anticipates the book with such a mixture of longing and dread that he knows he has to approach it at the right time and in the right frame of mind.
That moment arrives approximately three minutes later. He closes his office door and starts to read. He shudders when he sees the first word—“Mary”—but he plows on and rather likes the first sentence. “Mary Reilly considered the slender, attractive young woman sitting in the hard plastic chair, and something candid in the visitor’s aspect—her willingness to ignore the tiny beads of perspiration forming on her upper lip, a condition brought on by the overworked and failing office air-conditioner—told Mary that this would not be the ordinary sex interview.” The rest of the opening chapter has problems, but Lincoln’s optimism builds through the day. With only a pause to get a sandwich for lunch, he reads the manuscript straight through.
He finishes about six that evening, and after coming home, he pours himself a vodka on the rocks. He sits in his nubby easy chair and gazes out the window, staring absently through the jagged tree branches to the darkened houses across the street. Jesus Christ, he thinks, this might work. The main character, Mary Reilly, has a quirky inner life. The narrative flows. The dialogue’s fresh.
And the book is all about sex.
Lincoln savors his vodka. Jesus Christ.
The story follows the outline that he and Amy had discussed. Mary Reilly, a young researcher for a sex study at a fictitious university in a Midwestern city, becomes fascinated with one of her subjects, a slightly older, somewhat mysterious graduate student in theology named Jennifer Blythe. Over the course of several weeks of interviews—and then over lunch and dinner as the two women fall into a friendship—Jennifer recounts a series of sexual escapades that turn increasingly bizarre (there’s that search for the Ultimate Position). At first, Mary is intrigued, but soon she grows alarmed. There’s something needy and finally degrading in Jennifer’s obsessive drive to test the limits of her experience. Meantime, as Mary tries to investigate the background of her new friend, a sexual predator starts attacking women in the university town, and Mary comes to wonder if Jennifer knows something about the perpetrator—she seems to be engaging in the same sexual acts that later get unleashed on the victims. The book is too cerebral to qualify as a thriller—Amy cares most about exploring the growing relationship between the two women—but the ending holds Lincoln’s interest, even though he knew what was coming: Jennifer turns out to be an unhinged fabulist who picked up hidden details from a cop acquaintance, then invented her lurid encounters to capture and hold Mary’s friendship.
Lincoln rises and pours himself another vodka, then returns to his post in front of the window. Of course, the manuscript needs work. For one thing, the sex has to get better. Amy’s renditions have such a mechanical quality that she could be describing how to vacuum the living room. Though Amy sets the story in the Midwest, the book offers no sense of place—the plot could be unfolding in Honolulu. Several of the secondary characters come off as one-dimensional buffoons. Even with the predator stalking the city, the pace slackens in the middle section.
Still, all that can be fixed. Lincoln wishes he had someone to high-five or bump chests with. He briefly considers calling Amy at home but decides no, it’s better to approach her in the clarifying light of day. So he sits down at his computer and types out some suggestions. By eleven that night, he has written a dense, five-page memo. He prints it out and reads it over with yet more vodka. With the late hour and his alcohol-fueled energy, he drifts for a moment into an odd misperception: he imagines that he has written the novel and some brilliant editor has grasped his vision perfectly, exactly understanding his meaning and purposes and making brilliant strategic suggestions to realize the novel’s greatness. No, Lincoln scolds himself. Mustn’t get proprietary, that’s the worst thing an editor can do. It’s Amy’s book. And so he goes to bed and lies awake for most of the rest of the night, reworking her sentences in his head.
On Sunday morning, he calls her at home. “It works,” he says when she picks up. On the other end, he hears what sounds like someone being gagged or strangled. “Amy?” he asks, alarmed.
Heavy breathing, then, in a voice Lincoln hardly recognizes: “It’s me, celebrating. I’ve got the world’s worst cold.”
“It sounds like it.”
“But you liked the book?”
“Yes. Quite a nice job.” Here, Lincoln dials back, going into his practiced editor mode. Much work remains to be done, and it’s important that the author not come to believe the original draft is an untouchable masterpiece. “Good characters. Strong story. Really quite enjoyable.”
