AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Or what about this?” In her rush, as she flips through the pages, the manuscript spills from her lap and scatters at her feet. She continues rummaging and finds more offense. “The silvery moonlight on the lake—the way it pulsed with the slight movement of the surface—made me think of sex.” She tosses the page at Lincoln and it drifts down atop the chaos on the floor. “I’d never say anything like that.”
“But it’s not you, it’s Mary Reilly,” Lincoln points out.
“Or the sex stuff.” Amy has moved through her depression and is getting angry. “This, this...” She drops from the chair to her knees and shuffles through the pages, then reads mockingly: “I stood beside the bed and let him undress me, kissing me between my breasts, on my belly button. I wanted to apologize for not losing those four pounds gained over the winter, but I was too turned on to talk.”
She throws this page at Lincoln, too. “ ‘Apologize for not losing four pounds’? No woman would write that.”
“Well, you can change it,” says Lincoln weakly.
“The whole book’s like that now,” says Amy. “I can’t rewrite everything you rewrote.” She gets to her feet and walks across the carpet of pages to the other side of the bed, where she lies down on her back. “It’s hopeless,” she tells the ceiling. “I’m not made for this. I actually finished reading half an hour ago and I’ve just been thinking. I have to go somewhere else with my life, do something else.”
Lincoln considers her lying there, wan, motionless, stretched out like a body laid out for a funeral. “Like what?” he prods gently.
“Social work. I like helping people, so maybe I should go back and get a degree in social work. Or maybe something else. I don’t know.” She trails off in weariness. “I just know that I’m not a writer.”
Something in her tone of voice lingers in the dry air of the motel room, an uncertainty, the hint of a question. She repeats, “I’m not a writer,” and Lincoln realizes: this is going to work. Amy is going to go for it.
21
AMY NEEDS REASSURANCE. Sleep would help, and a shower. But she mainly needs Lincoln to tell her repeatedly and from various angles over the next two hours that she indeed has the talent and sensibility to be a writer. He talks of her gift for storytelling, her skill at sketching character. He reads aloud sections of her book that he particularly likes (her words, not his, of course). He reminds her that some of the greatest writers relie
d on the strong hand of an editor—think of Maxwell Perkins carving the narrative out of Thomas Wolfe’s verbosity. And Lincoln promises that he can make it happen—he can convince Duddleston that Pistakee should publish this terrific first novel.
Still stretched out on the bed, Amy alternates between basking in Lincoln’s praise and worrying that she’s a fraud. “How can I defend it, how can I even talk about it, if whole chunks come from you?” she asks. “I feel like a plagiarist.”
“So make it yours,” he tells her. “Take it from here.”
“Maybe I’ll just fuck it up again.”
Lincoln sits beside her on the bed and takes her two hands in his. He feels for a moment as if he’s stepped into a scene from a Victorian novel, the dashing soldier called home from the front to bid farewell to his dying lover. “You can do it,” he promises. “Put yourself in front of your computer and type.”
They find a Walgreens, miraculously open on New Year’s Day, and buy a flash drive, on which Lincoln copies the first twelve rewritten chapters. Amy retreats with it to her room. Around noon, she appears at his door with her computer. By now she’s showered and changed, but she still hasn’t slept. “I can’t work alone,” she tells him. “I get too discouraged.” So she sets herself up on the bed while Lincoln writes at the desk. After an hour or so, he goes out for sandwiches. They eat on the bed, wrappings and bags of chips and cans of pop spread out picnic-style. Then they work through the afternoon.
She’s accepted the first-person voice, and she warily accedes to most of his changes and additions, usually with small fixes of her own. The interior monologues bother her, even those that Lincoln has lifted almost verbatim from her third-person description. “It loses all its subtlety when Mary says it directly,” Amy argues. “People don’t talk to themselves like that. Third person gives you some distance to round out the observations.”
“It’s the directness that speaks to the reader,” Lincoln tells her. “That’s part of the hook.”
“It seems...loud.”
“You’ve got to believe in your words. Let yourself go.”
Amy’s as eager about the book as I am, Lincoln tells himself, and it occurs to him—he’s surprised that he’s never realized this before—that he finds ambition in women sexy. He watches her working, sitting cross-legged on the bed (how does her back hold up?), staring fiercely into the computer screen, her eyes bright and intense despite a night without sleep. Does he look that alive when he edits?
Their biggest problem comes with the sex. Their sensibilities are simply different. To his ear, her descriptions sound like romance material, all swoons and euphemisms. She thinks he’s channeling porn. They compromise their way through the first sex scene, when Mary Reilly plays out a fantasy in her mind and touches herself in her bed one night. But later they hang up over Mary’s first intimate encounter with Stephen, her boyfriend.
“This is awful!” Amy screams. She reads aloud: “ ‘He nuzzled me in the neck, burrowing under my hair, and I felt myself getting damp.’ Ugh!”
“What’s so awful?” Lincoln asks.
“ ‘Damp’? That’s a terrible word. Completely unsexy.”
“Wet? Moist? Change it,” Lincoln says.
“I’d never say that. I’d never think that.”
“It’s Mary thinking it, not you.”
“No woman would think that to herself. That’s a man’s fantasy. You’re turning my book into an article for Maxim magazine.”
