Page 38 of Are You Happy Now?

“Ooooohhhhh!”

“Naturally,” Lincoln says coolly, “I have some suggestions.”

“What are they?”

“I’ve got a memo. I’ll e-mail it.”

“Fantastic!”

“Drink lots of tea,” Lincoln tells her, quoting the only medical advice his soon-to-be ex-wife ever gave him.

Lincoln sends the memo. Two hours later, Amy calls. Curiously, her voice sounds almost normal now, as if reading the memo has had the cleansing effect of powerful menthol. “There’s a lot of stuff here,” she says gloomily.

“Well, of course. Because the book is so good, it sparked a lot of ideas.” You’ve got to be a salesman with this sort of thing.

“I’m not sure I agree with all of them.”

“You don’t have to. They’re just suggestions.”

“Like adding more sex.”

“Now, that’s important.”

“I don’t want to write a sex book.”

“It won’t be a sex book. It’s a book about people. But you’ve got to get them out of the lab, so to speak. Anyway, in this day and age, lots of literary books have candid sex. Think of Vox. Or Middlesex.”

“Haven’t read them.”

“Or Updike or Roth. The sex isn’t gratuitous, it’s part of the context.”

“I can’t do porn.”

“It won’t be porn. It will be discreet and naturalistic.”

“And you want to cut some of my favorite scenes.”

“This is a work in progress. Nothing in my memo is carved in stone.”

Lincoln waits while Amy goes through a sneezing jag on the other end of the phone. She continues, “I mean, that scene where Professor Hazeltine comes in and orders everybody in the office to drop what they’re doing and join him in a tai chi session on the lawn—that really happened. How can you say it’s like a cartoon?”

Lincoln knows he has to take control of the situation. “Look, consider the memo, sleep on it, then do what you can. Those are only suggestions. But I guarantee that if you don’t take at least some of them into account, the book isn’t publishable.”

Amy says nothing. In the silence, Lincoln worries that he’s been too harsh. Fiction is all so subjective. Who’s to say he’s right about anything he proposed? He adds, “God is in the rewrite.”

“All right,” she says at last. “I’ll see what I can do.” The deathbed voice has returned.

Amy doesn’t come to work for several days, and when she finally appears, she looks pale and frazz

led, and her nose still bears traces of the raw, red battle scars inflicted in her fight with the cold. She volunteers no bulletins, that day or over the course of the next few weeks, though several times when she and Lincoln pass in the office, she makes a face, scrunching her nose, as if she’s caught a whiff of something unpleasant. The one time they find themselves alone together in the elevator, he asks her how it’s going. She rolls her eyes. “I’m trying.”

“I’m available to help,” Lincoln reminds her.

“It’s just hard to change when you’ve got things in your mind one way. I can hardly sleep for thinking about it.” Before Lincoln can respond, the doors open on the twelfth floor to Duddleston and a cadre of his lawyers about to head off to a meeting somewhere.

But in his gradually improving state of mind, Lincoln really does believe that Amy can do it. He’s made some calculations, and if they can get the manuscript in shape by the first of the year, he’ll propose crashing it for the spring list so they’ll be able to publish just in time for the start of beach-reading season. In his head, Lincoln has already started to compose the press release. (“Pistakee Press, Chicago’s premier book publisher, is proud to introduce The Ultimate Position, Amy O’Malley’s stunning first novel of young women coming to grips with the wide-open sexuality of today’s college generation.”) He assumes that the book’s backstory—a pretty young U of C grad drawing on her experience with a sex survey—will grab the attention of the talk shows and newspapers. And in a particularly incautious moment, he imagines Jeff Kessler of Malcolm House opening his New York Times to the Arts section, scanning the story about the surprise, sexy best seller from the small Midwestern publisher, and stopping at the name of the clever editor who spotted and marshaled the book. With a new maturity nurtured in pain, Lincoln quickly stifles the fantasy.

Lincoln doesn’t mention the book to anyone, and he regrets having discussed it months ago with Flam—on something like this, operating beneath the radar is so much easier. Of course, with his nose for angst, Flam hasn’t forgotten. One night, while he and Lincoln are having hamburgers at John Barleycorn, Flam asks out of the blue how the book is coming. “Still being written,” Lincoln dodges.

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