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“Yes,” says Lincoln.
The old guy nods happily at the news. He has a neat, grandfatherly style, with a head of carefully combed white hair and a brown sweater-vest pulled over a red-checked shirt.
“From Minneapolis?”
“Chicago.”
Now Gramps throws his head back with a wide smile. These rural Midwesterners are so easy to please, thinks Lincoln.
“You a writer?”
What the fuck? “What makes you think that?” asks Lincoln.
The man’s blue-gray eyes sparkle. “You aren’t an ice-fisherman. Nobody’s making sales calls this close to Christmas. We get writers. They hope the solitude will give them inspiration.”
Lincoln thinks: so even my last desperate gestures are nothing but cliché. “How often?”
“Ohhhh.” The man drags out the moment. It’s hard to figure his age. He could be in his eighties, maybe older. He has the air of someone who takes care of himself. “Not so many in the end. But we had a fellow here last year around this time. He was working on a book about his dead brother.”
“Really?” Lincoln signals for his check. Time to escape. “A biography?”
“No,” says the old man. “His brother’s ghost. How it comes back to visit.”
Lincoln throws some bills on the bar.
The man continues, “He ended up killing hisself. When the thaw came in the spring, he walked out to the edge of the open water and threw hisself in.”
“Who?” asks Lincoln. “The writer or the brother?”
“Why, the writer.”
So the path taken by Thoreau has been trampled by wackos and suicides. “I’m actually editing someone else’s book,” Lincoln explains, as if to forestall an intervention by the old man and the good people of Lac du Flambeau. “I’m just an editor.”
“Ah! That’s good.” The old man smiles. “Giving it your own stamp.”
“Right.” Lincoln waves good night, and the moment he steps outside, the slap of frigid air on his face loosens an idea: his own stamp. Of course. He’ll convert Amy’s novel to first person. Why didn’t he think of it before? There’s energy that way and drive. First novels are almost always first person; the voice is more natural, more intimate. “I” as a verb—someone, somewhere has said that, and it’s true, you build action just following the narrator’s psychic evolution. I, I, I, I. That’s it!
As he hurries back to the motel and flops straight into bed, Lincoln is aware, vaguely, that this inspiriting idea has washed up from his alcohol-sopped imagination and may not survive the harsh morning light. Nonetheless, he sleeps better than he has in weeks.
20
LINCOLN RISES EARLY the next morning. In the chill, gray North Woods dawn, after gobbling aspirin and grabbing coffee and doughnuts from the spread laid out in the Lunker’s reception room, he comes to grips with his idea from the night before. Using first person means Lincoln has to channel Mary Reilly, Amy’s protagonist. As he sits at the little desk in room 14 and starts to work, Lincoln finds it surprisingly easy to drop into the head of a twenty-one-year-old woman, smart and opinionated, emerging from a sheltered life and eager for experience.
He works straight through to noon, almost finishing the first chapter, when there’s a knock on his door. “Mr. Lincoln?” calls out Mrs. Lunker. “Do you want me to clean your room?”
Fresh sheets, new towels. “Sure,” Lincoln answers. He’ll take a break for that.
The proprietress enters pushing a cart. “I usually have an Indian girl do the cleaning, but I let her off this time of year since things are slow,” the woman explains. Talking to Lincoln, she glances past him and around the room, looking for evidence of his mysterious activities. Her nervous manner suggests that she knows he’s a writer and that she hasn’t forgotten last year’s suicide. “Were you able to get your work done this morning?” she asks.
Lincoln realizes he had better clear out while she is there. “Yes, thanks. Now, I think I’ll run and get a bite to eat,” and he’s out the door before she can continue her cross-examination.
The room sparkles when he returns, and he works feverishly through the afternoon. He struggles occasionally to express Mary Reilly’s thoughts, particularly when the subjects turn physical and intimate. But Amy has provided some of that material in the original, and Lincoln can simply jigger the language to bring it around to first person. Besides, having to speak through the voice of a young woman teases out Lincoln’s imagination. He finds he can make observations about colors, appearances, moods with a fluency he hardly expected. Editing a book last year on the costume collection at the History Museum has given him the vocabulary to talk about clothes. And, he reminds himself, he grew up listening to a mother and a sister. After a while, he gets cocky. As a modern man, he holds that the sexes aren’t really that different, but he starts to believe that for purposes of fiction, the differences favor a woman’s voice. Women are more confessional, more honest about themselves. They’re willing to appear vulnerable. Men are guarded, stiff. So much to hide. If Mary Reilly were a man, the book would be a fraction as long, a CliffsNotes version of the story. Every now and then, Lincoln worries about how Amy will react to his changes, but he tells himself he hasn’t really altered the substance of her book, just redirected it slightly. And she can always rewrite his rewrit
e, if it comes to that.
Lincoln works late into the evening, and he pounds away virtually nonstop the next day, Christmas Eve, even waving away Mrs. Lunker when she comes to clean. On Christmas morning, coffee and pastries are laid out as always in the reception room, but the kind woman is concerned about Lincoln’s dinner. The few restaurants in Lac du Flambeau are closed, and even Iggy’s Ice House shuts down for the day. “Everyone spends Christmas with family,” Mrs. Lunker warns.
Lincoln worries that she’s about to invite him to dine with her and her husband, a brooding, silent man who rarely looks up from the newspaper classifieds. “Oh, I’ll find something,” he assures her.
