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“Why, for God’s sake?”
“I hate publishing.”
Lincoln senses that the best way to calm this tantrum is to play it out. “So what are you going to do instead?”
“Maybe teach English.”
“But you’ll be dealing with books, and I thought you hated publishing.”
“A waitress. I used to do that, and now I’m old enough to serve liquor.”
“Would you really be happy spending your life as a waitress?”
Click.
Lincoln continues to sit, and Amy doesn’t call back. His disappointment has seeped into his muscles and his bones—it’s not just his aching arm and tired eyes, his entire body feels weighted and dull. Like Amy’s manuscript. Did it actually once hold promise, or was the whole thing just an inflated dream, the absurd escape fantasy of a man imprisoned?
Lincoln’s chin falls to his chest, directing his gaze to the front of the Tribune’s Sunday travel section, discarded on the floor. The top half of the page is taken up by a photograph of a lonely hut in the middle of a frozen lake, a square blot of human scale in a vast frigid landscape. The story is about ice fishing in northern Wisconsin. Why? Who in his right mind? And, yet, the image of cold, stark isolation suggests a purity of purpose that draws Lincoln. Life in the Midwest, reduced to its quintessence. He picks up the paper and reads. The article is full of the usual travel-writing inanities, all celebration, no skepticism, with a half dozen ice-fishing enthusiasts (all enormously fat, judging by the inside pictures) trilling on about the glories of their sport. Still, that bleak photograph calls to Lincoln. He will take his gift week of vacation and check into a motel in northern Wisconsin, away from all distractions, all temptations, and he will dedicate every waking moment to rewriting Amy’s book.
It will be his walkabout, his forty days in the desert, his punishment and his salvation. He will be following the great literary tradition. Like Thoreau at Walden Pond, he will go to the wilderness and return with...well, something that will propel him the fuck out of this place.
WINTER:
Lunker Sex
19
THREE DAYS BEFORE Christmas, Lincoln rents a car and drives eight hours north to Lac du Flam
beau, Wisconsin. A few miles out of town, he stops at the Lunker Motel, which looked clean and relatively comfortable (“Good heat in winter!”) on its simple website. From the sound of the name, Lincoln assumed that the motel was owned by a good Wisconsin German family, but the lady at the reception desk quickly sets him straight. “It means a big fish,” she says, amused at his ignorance. She points outside, and indeed, the motel sign along the quiet road features a huge, curling fish in neon. “You know, like a lunker walleye!”
“Ah.” Lincoln smiles. A new word. The trip is off to a promising start.
“I guess you aren’t a fisherman,” she says as Lincoln fills out a guest card. She’s a hefty woman, middle aged and ruddy faced, with incongruously yellow-blond hair, and she’s wearing a brown crew-neck sweater over a plaid flannel shirt. She ought to be named Lunker, Lincoln thinks.
“No, not a fisherman,” he confirms. He hands her the guest card, which she studies carefully.
“Chicago,” she pronounces. “Passing through on business?”
“You might say.” Only Amy knows his true purpose. He didn’t even tell Flam he was going away.
“A salesman?” the curious woman presses. “It’s pretty quiet up here this time of year.”
“No. Well, in a way, yes,” Lincoln fumbles. Lying makes him feel like a criminal on the lam, hiding out in a cheap motel. He flashes her a broad smile that manages to quell the interrogation.
The motel is one long strip of rooms divided in half by the reception area (and, Lincoln eventually discovers, the owners’ apartment in back). Because business slows around Christmas, the heat has been shut down in the west wing. Lincoln gets room 14 at the far end on the other side. A couple of pickup trucks and a van are parked along the walkway, but several empty units separate him from his closest neighbor. Excellent.
Except for its cable-fed TV, room 14 offers few amenities—thin wood paneling, flimsy dresser, small desk, undulating king-size bed. The dark brown carpeting has an unfortunate texture that feels damp to Lincoln, and the radiator fills the room with such intense, dry heat that he constantly has to turn it down, then push it back up again when the Wisconsin cold seeps in. The place also lacks Wi-Fi, so Lincoln is limited to e-mail on his cell phone. Overall, though, the Lunker is all he had hoped.
He arrived in midafternoon, and right away, he sets up his operation. He puts his laptop on the desk and attaches a small printer, which he places on the floor. He hides the paper copy of the manuscript in the top drawer of the dresser, then on his computer he copies all fourteen chapters of the book separately, labeling them as he goes “Amy/edit/1,” “Amy/edit/2,” and so on, creating a version of her work that he can chew up, discard, and rearrange as he likes.
Finally, he opens up “Amy/edit/1” and contemplates the first sentence. “Mary Reilly considered the slender, attractive young woman...” Lincoln sits on the rickety desk chair, his fingers poised on the keyboard. Nothing. He scrolls down the text, substituting a word here or there, nibbling at an occasional sentence. After an hour of fitfully backing up and going forward, he comes to the end of the chapter. He’s hardly changed a thing.
In a misguided effort to find his muse, he cracks open the fifth of vodka he’s brought along. Still nothing after several glasses. In the crack in the window curtain, he can see snow falling through a shaft of light on the walkway. Glancing up once, he thinks he sees a blurred figure quickly pull away. Mrs. Lunker (as he’s taken to calling her in his head)? Is she spying? His trips up and back to regulate the radiator become a measure of his lack of inspiration: The room’s climate moves from desert heat to tundra cold and back again, with hardly a word altered. Someone with the flu moves in next door and rattles the paneling with thundering coughs. Lincoln realizes he’s getting drunk. Buford said happy people were more creative, and now Lincoln feels so glum he could hardly write his name.
At last, he shuts his computer down. He tells himself that after a long drive, what he needs is dinner and a good night’s sleep. When he checked in, Mrs. Lunker offered a pair of dining options—a supper club a few miles away or a bar with a microwave just down the road. He’s in no condition to drive, so Lincoln bundles up and walks along the slushy shoulder until he comes to Iggy’s Ice House, a wood-shingled structure plopped in the middle of a desolate parking lot.
Iggy’s is empty except for one customer and a jowly bartender. Lincoln sits at the bar four stools down from the other customer and orders a glass of red wine. The bartender, a model of bored efficiency, offers up the dining options—a bratwurst or a hamburger, each heated in a clear plastic bag in the microwave. Lincoln asks for one of each. The sandwiches have a damp, spongy texture and taste faintly of oatmeal, but Lincoln needs the fuel and orders a second round. As he eats, the other patron, an elderly man, glances over occasionally, flashing a wrinkled smile. He waits politely for Lincoln to finish his second bratwurst before leaning over to ask, “You staying down at the Lunker?”
