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Later, when she comes to clean, she gives him a sheaf of printouts, with maps to three restaurants that are open. She’s been searching the Internet. “I’ve eaten at the Fireplace Inn,” she says of one of the three. “A little expensive, but very nice.”
“Thank you, thank you,” Lincoln tells her. “Merry Christmas!”
“Merry Christmas!”
In fact, Lincoln is on such a roll that the McDonald’s in neighboring Minocqua will do him just fine. By the afternoon, he’s already up to Amy/edit/5. He’s been virtually alone now for three days with Mary Reilly, and her voice and sensibility have taken over part of his brain. He tells himself it’s as if she’s whispering in his ear. He looks up from his keyboard and knows how she’d respond to the mauve curtains covering the window (“Don’t make me look at them!”), to the Brueghel print of a village scene in winter hanging above the bed (“Are all the Lunker rooms so classically decorated, or did we get lucky?”). She speaks to him through long-ago remarks—things said by his sister, his mother, his ex-girlfriends, his soon-to-be ex-wife, and Amy herself. Lincoln jots them into a notebook he’s keeping and then tunes them and sprinkles them through the text. On his brief forays out of the motel room, he regards the icy, piney landscape through Mary Reilly’s eyes (she sees it as harsh, repressed, male) and turns his car radio to a classical music station out of respect for her aesthetic interests.
Even writing about sex from her point of view starts to come easily. Again, Amy has provided the basics, but Lincoln surprises himself at his gush of articulation as he imagines sensuality from the other side. The descriptions emerge (to his ear) as candid without being clinical—far less self-conscious than they would be if he were speaking through the voice of a man. He even lets Mary Reilly spout on at one point about vaginal contractions when she has her first big orgasm. Is Lincoln out of his mind? Perhaps, he admits to himself. But rereading the scene he’s just written provides an affirmation of sorts: he gets a hard-on.
On the day after Christmas, Lincoln’s cell phone rings. “How’s it coming?” Amy asks without a greeting.
“OK.” He’s startled and slightly annoyed to be pulled out of his Mary Reilly trance. “I’m moving right along.”
“I want to come up there.”
“Here?”
“Yes.”
“But...I’m not done yet. I need a couple more days, then I’ll bring it down.”
“I can’t stand it. I feel like part of me is being raped and ravaged up there, and I’m stuck here. I’m coming up.”
“What about work?”
“I’ll call in sick.”
“But I need solitude. It’s going to be a great book, but I’m at it sixteen or eighteen hours a day. If we start going over the manuscript now, the whole edit will screech to a halt.”
“I can be reading the beginning while you’re finishing the end.”
“But...”
“John, this is my book, my life.”
Amy won’t relent. In the end, Lincoln can only manage to put her off for a few days. She’ll borrow a friend’s car and drive up New Year’s Eve, a Thursday. They have to be back in the office on January 4, a Monday. Lincoln will try to finish most of the rewrite before she gets there.
The mere thought of her arrival slows him. Mary Reilly checks out of the motel (in a pique of jealousy?), and Lincoln has trouble hearing her voice. What’s more, his feverish confidence begins to cool. He rereads the first chapter and finds he’s no longer so certain about the tone he’s imposed on the manuscript. He edits some of Mary’s more intimate thoughts and descriptions, tempers her flights of intellect (she’s still an undergraduate, after all). Moving forward, he bogs down trying to inject some realistic drama into the section where Mary starts to suspect that her new friend is somehow linked to the sexual predator. What does Lincoln know about crime? Looking for inspiration, he wastes part of an afternoon skimming novels by John Grisham and James Patterson that he buys at a Minocqua bookstore.
At one point, Lincoln writes in Mary Reilly’s voice:
I considered the emptied coffee cup Jennifer had left behind, searching for evidence in my own ineffectual way, studying the delicate red half-moon of lipstick stain as if it were a fingerprint.
Looking the sentence over, he realizes he’s borrowed the lunar lipstick image from an Anthony Buford poem, “Dirty Dishes.” Lincoln deletes the line, wondering how that could happen.
Still, he labors over his computer and slowly, slowly, the pages fall away.
On Thursday morning Amy calls to say she’s on her way. The day is cold but clear. She should get in around four. That afternoon, Lincoln prints out copies of the twelve chapters that he’s finished, and then he fitfully keeps working. When Amy hasn’t arrived by six, he calls her cell. She picks up after three rings. “Where are you?” he asks.
“Where the fuck is Lac du Flambeau?”
“You’re lost?”
“Even MapQuest doesn’t know where to find it.”
Lincoln gets out his road map and patiently talks her through the route. Finally, at seven, the phone in his motel room rings for the first time since he arrived. “I’m in eleven,” Amy tells him.
“Welcome to the Lunker,” Lincoln says. “It’s too late to work today—let’s go to dinner.”
