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“Maybe we can find a place for him on the spring list,” Lincoln deadpans. And then arrange a joint reading with Professor Fleace and Bill Lemke, bring together all our stars.
Amy’s tiny brow furrows as she tries to determine whether Lincoln is teasing her. “I hate it that Yale stole him away,” she says.
Lincoln waves a hand. “Ah, well.” He sighs and rudely turns back to his manuscript, but Amy doesn’t leave. It occurs to Lincoln that she exudes the slightly aimless air of a college student who can drop into a pal’s dorm room and chat thoughtlessly for hours since nothing really important is ever going on anyway. “These round windows are so odd,” she says after a moment, running her fingers around the circular copper frame holding the pane of glass. “They really add something distinctive, don’t you think?”
Lincoln doesn’t look up. “Yes.”
“Ahead of its time,” Amy points out. “The square form was so dominant in those days.”
“Mm-hmm.” The building was put up a century ago by a former sea captain who, as legend has it, longed to recall the portholes on his ship. Never mind that the skimpy windows kept the interior shadowed and gloomy.
“And at least you have a window,” Amy says. “I’m in a cubicle in the interior of the building.” She leans forward to look down the alley. The movement hikes up her blouse, and as Lincoln glances over, his practiced eyes spot a delicate line of lace panty peeking above her slacks. Hmmm.
“In our business, all you need is a good fluorescent light,” he tells her. Lovely lace panties? On the grouse? “Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. You have work to do.” She bows and anxiously starts to back out of the room, bumping the edge of the bookshelf. “Oops.” Finally she composes herself for a last exchange: “You know, you asked me earlier if I wanted to write?”
“Yes.”
“Well, before I took the course with Professor Davoodi, I was working on a collection of short stories. One was even published in the new student literary magazine. Would you mind looking at them sometime?”
Lincoln imagines fragile, minimalist prose recalling incidents so evanescent, so utterly uneventful, that only a sensibility with exquisite perception could read their devastating impact.
“Pistakee doesn’t publish fiction anymore,” he tells her coolly.
Amy quickly adds, “I know, I mean, it would just really be helpful to have them read by a real editor.”
How else is Lincoln going to get rid of her? “Just drop them off.”
“Thanks!” she calls out, and scurries out of the office, leaving the door ajar.
A real editor, Lincoln thinks. I wish.
Outside in the alley, the Mexican busboys from the restaurant down the street chatter away in Spanish as they pile up more bags of garbage. Lincoln forces himself to rejoin Professor Fleace on his pedagogical stroll down Clark. A real editor. How can you be a real editor without any real writers?
3
AT ABOUT SIX o’clock that evening, Lincoln puts his pencil down. He locks his desk, carefully folds his New York Times to expose the daily crossword puzzle, and walks into the small central lobby of Pistakee Press. The place is abandoned, utterly lifeless. The receptionist always leaves at 5:00 p.m. sharp, flipping the switchboard to automatic. The front panel of overhead lights has been turned off, leaving the area near the elevator in gloom. The handful of editors, secretaries, and bookkeepers—and Byron Duddleston himself—have all slipped out silently on their own, as always, never bidding good-bye to Lincoln, never, as far as he knows, even acknowledging each other as they leave. It’s as if the place empties in shame, he thinks. He compares it to the rousing daily exits he recalls from his summer at Malcolm House, when he and the other interns and editorial assistants always looked each other up for news of the latest adventures and scandals, usually moving the conversation to a nearby bar. Sometimes some of the younger editors would join them, and often as not the roistering would carry on well into the night.
On the other hand, Lincoln reminds himself, the end of the workday was deadly at the Tribune, too. Maybe it’s a Chicago thing.
Pistakee’s offices are in River North, an old manufacturing neighborhood just north of the Loop that came alive with galleries in the eighties, when the art market was hopping, even in the Midwest. The galleries drew restaurants and shops, and by the late nineties the creaky, low-scale neighborhood was sprouting flesh-toned residential high-rises (lively colors don’t sell) and multi-story parking garages, a building boom that threatened to engulf the original redbrick cityscape—at least until the real-estate collapse. Still, River North retains patches of funkiness, and most blocks remain open enough to feature late afternoon sun in the summer.
Lincoln walks west on Grand, checking the windows of the faux authentic Irish bar on the way; south on LaSalle, past what was once Michael Jordan’s restaurant, shuttered after an unseemly tussle among the principals; west on Illinois; south on Wells; west on Kinzie; and on into the huge fortress of the Merchandise Mart, a commercial building that was long in the hands of the Kennedy family but never acquired any cachet from the association. In the Mart, Lincoln
takes the escalator to the second-floor entrance to the elevated-train station. He dips his fare card into the machine and joins a crowd of mostly young, natty professionals waiting for the Brown Line train headed for revived neighborhoods to the north.
Lincoln enjoys the L and considers it one of Chicago’s small wonders. When he was a student with more time in the middle of the day, he sometimes traveled the train just for the sport of it. The view from the L offers an unusual perspective on a city, Lincoln thinks—the track snakes through neighborhoods at about the level of a second-story window, and the train frequently thrusts with astonishing impudence past the living rooms and bedrooms in the buildings along the way. Twice he has spotted people fucking, and once, riding the Red Line just beyond Diversey Parkway, traveling through a gentrified old German neighborhood, he saw a girl, stark naked, with lovely, buoyant breasts and a small wedge of dark pubic hair, standing at a window, facing the tracks. Their eyes met in the split second it took the train to pass, and Lincoln was certain she gestured to him, beckoning, as the train rumbled on. How many years ago was that? Eight, maybe—well before he was married, before he’d even met his wife. In all the years since, he’s never passed that building without looking and imagining.
Today, the Brown Line is running behind, as usual, and by the time a train arrives at the Merchandise Mart station, the cars are already full. Lincoln lets that train pass. The next arrives five minutes later, crowded also, but not hopelessly packed. Lincoln enters the rear door of the third car from the front. He shoulders his way through the cluster of passengers thoughtlessly gathered at the door and finds a spot of standing room in the aisle. Most of his fellow passengers are young and white, but because the train traverses a variety of neighborhoods, it occasionally provides a somewhat intimate mixing of race and class, one of the few places where that happens in Chicago despite the city’s proud role as the hometown of President Obama. Lincoln is standing behind an older, rather heavyset black woman wearing a wide-brimmed, old-fashioned white hat and a ruffled, patterned dress with a stiff, white, crocheted collar. Standing a few feet away, Lincoln sniffs the dull fragrance of starch. He wonders for a moment why she’s there—this hardly seems like the means or route for her to get to church—and then he privately notes with disapproval that none of the men sitting in the car has given her his seat.
Quickly, Lincoln turns to the Times crossword, which he typically completes in the fifteen minutes or so before the train arrives at his home station, Southport. He makes a good start, filling in the doglegged top left quadrangle, before his mind drifts back to his conversation that afternoon with Duddleston. Was his boss really preparing to fire him? There was something about Duddleston’s tone—the soft suggestion of a simmering frustration, the hint that his patience has been pushed so far and would go no further. In glancing over a local book blog this morning, Lincoln had noticed a worrisome blind item: “Are changes coming to the editorial lineup of one of Chicago’s top publishers?” The blog, Big Shoulders Books, is written by Marissa Morgan, a spacey, middle-aged North Shore housewife whose wide-eyed fascination with literature gets underwritten by her rich lawyer husband. She mostly carries cheerleading appraisals of local authors, but she’s oddly well-connected and every now and then lands a surprising scoop. Did she know about something impending at Pistakee?
Lincoln realizes that he’s in a precarious spot. He can’t afford to lose this job—not if he has any hope of rallying his fortunes. Yet the harsh little secret of the business is that Pistakee could probably make the same modest profit publishing dreck that spilled straight from the computers of writers directly onto the pages of a Pistakee book without a touch from a seasoned editor. The public doesn’t seem to care. Consumers will buy a book, or not, depending on the subject, the cover, the title, the fame of the author—and, increasingly, depending on the buzz stirred up by social media. Lincoln’s injection of editorial professionalism probably doesn’t make a whit of difference.
After several quick stops, the train pulls into the Wellington station and unloads some passengers, but then it sits there, doors open. Annoyed at the delay, Lincoln returns to the crossword puzzle. He scratches the answers out in pen, writing almost as quickly as he reads the clues. The car doors finally close and the train moves out, and after a bit Lincoln becomes vaguely aware of a commotion behind him. At about the same time, someone suddenly clamps a hand hard on his shoulder. The grip—like that of a stern father grabbing a child—is so out of place that Lincoln reacts almost nonchalantly. He stares at the hand—male, fully grown, with the trace of an inked stamp from a nightclub discoloring the pale skin—as if it were a familiar and harmless bug that had crawled onto his shoulder. Then he follows the arm back to its owner. Lincoln sees a young, short-haired man in a yellow polo shirt, his body awkwardly stiff, his gaze turned away from Lincoln and focused intently on the back of the car. Now Lincoln recognizes the source of the percolating commotion: a mob of stricken people is jammed in the narrow doorway between Lincoln’s car and the one behind. As the first man and woman break through, they bolt down the aisle toward Lincoln, knocking aside standing passengers. Quickly a flood of panicked humanity is pouring into the car, escaping something, fleeing to the front of the train.
The young man in the polo shirt is still several reaction moments ahead of the other riders around Lincoln, and he abruptly uses Lincoln’s shoulder for leverage to vault himself forward, past Lincoln and the black woman dressed for church. Shouts and pleas break out—“What is it?” “Slow down!” “Don’t panic!”—and the car rapidly fills with a huge, shoving, pushing scrum of frantic passengers.
