AllFreeNovel
Share Us
That night, while Lincoln is eating half a roast chicken from Dominick’s and watching yet more snow decorate the maple branch outside his living-room window, Amy calls. “Are you at home?” she asks in a tight voice.
“Yes.”
“I’m coming over.”
“What—”
The phone clicks off before he can get the question out.
Ten minutes later, she rings the front-door bell. Lincoln buzzes her in and listens as her anxious steps pound the wood stairway up to his floor. He opens the door, and she brushes past and drops onto the sofa, shedding snow as she goes. She doesn’t bother taking off her mittens or cap or even unzipping her ski jacket. “My parents hate the book
,” she says, burying her hands between her thighs and rocking up and back. “They hate it, hate it, hate it.”
“Whoa.” Lincoln sits across from her in the nubby chair. “Slow down. What did they say?”
“They hate it. I told you.”
Lincoln recognizes this outburst as an indictment of him. He wants to tell her: Who cares what your parents think? Worry about the New York Times Book Review. Instead, he says, “Try to be more specific. What exactly didn’t they like?”
Amy takes a deep breath. She’s wearing a funny little pillbox ski cap that looks incongruously jaunty given her distress. “Mostly the sex,” she says in a slightly calmer voice.
“There’s less sex in your book than in half the novels published these days,” Lincoln reminds her without too much exaggeration. “The copy editor is at least seventy-five, and she’s entirely unfazed.”
“My mom read all the sex scenes as if they were autobiographical,” Amy says glumly.
“Well, there you go. What did your father say?”
Amy smiles sheepishly. “He didn’t actually read it. He said he couldn’t bear to.”
“So what’s the big deal?” Lincoln throws up his arms. “Your parents are reacting exactly like parents. They can’t stand that you’re grown up enough to know about sex.” (Lincoln thinks: of course, if the parents lived in Manhattan, the kid could write a memoir about seducing an entire barnyard and as long as there was a guaranteed first printing of fifteen thousand, Mom and Dad would be thrilled.)
“I know,” Amy says. “But I’ve always been a good girl, a perfect girl—I’m not used to disappointing them.”
“Well, blame me,” Lincoln offers. “Tell them I made you add the sex.”
She smiles sheepishly again. “I did, sort of. My mother suspected it. In fact, she thought you wrote most of the sex stuff.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I said it was more of a collaboration.”
“So?”
“She said that made it like teenage sex—we both get to fool around, but I’m the one who gets stuck with the baby.”
Lincoln makes a mental note not to tangle with Mrs. O’Malley. “It’ll be fine,” he promises. He brews up a pot of cinnamon-apple-spice tea to soothe Amy’s nerves. By the time he walks her out into the cold to catch a cab, she’s excited again about the book, and Lincoln is feeling particularly buoyant—after all, the reaction of her parents has affirmed one of his stereotypes about the provincial attitudes of the Midwest. He’s got a feel for the marketplace, he tells himself. A good sign for the book.
Two weeks later, walking down the narrow interior stairway of his building on his way to work, Lincoln meets the old woman who lives on the first floor. She’s just returning from walking her Chihuahua. “Sun today!” she crows with remarkable vigor while the annoying dog sniffs at Lincoln’s pant leg. “Maybe we’ve put the worst of winter behind us!”
“Let’s hope!” Lincoln rejoins, taking care not to trip over the dog or its leash.
When he opens the front door, the blue sky and mild air hit him with such a rush of liberation that he actually considers playing hooky from his job for the first time in his life. The trouble is, he can’t think of anything to do—at least nothing outdoors that would let him bask in this premature breath of spring. Besides, he’s got things he’s looking forward to at work. Gregor has promised to bring in another idea for the cover of The Ultimate Position, and Lincoln has vowed to read the book one more time in galley pages. So instead of taking off on a frolic and detour, he luxuriates in the weather on the walk to the L station, where a nearly empty train is just pulling in and Lincoln gets a seat. His luck holds when he arrives at the office and Mrs. Macintosh calls to tell him that Duddleston wants to see him in the conference room right away. Good thing I came to work, after all, Lincoln tells himself.
The conference room’s narrow, windowless space gets stifling in summer and even in winter carries the musty odor of stale air and old cups of coffee. Aside from editorial meetings, the staff uses the room mostly to go over projects—picture books, for example—that need to be spread out on the long wood table. The moment he opens the door, Lincoln sees that this meeting is something different. Duddleston is seated on one side of the table, between a man Lincoln knows only as a Duddleston lawyer and a woman, Jane Something-or-other, who’s the office manager for a small investment firm in which Duddleston holds an interest and who handles HR issues for Pistakee. Naively, Lincoln thinks: the company is finally adopting the new health-care plan, and they need to bring Pistakee’s executive editor into the loop.
“Please sit down,” says Duddleston, pointing to a chair on the opposite side of the conference table. His voice is chill and flat.
Lincoln sits, and he stares across the table at three unsmiling faces. Behind them on the whiteboard, someone—probably Hazel, who teaches a class here in writing children’s books—has scrawled and underlined “Connecting to the fantasy reality.”
