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“You know Jane Hemer,” Duddleston says, nodding toward the woman, “and this is Martin Canon; he’s a lawyer.”
Lincoln nods and reaches over to shake the man’s hand, but the lawyer makes no effort to meet him halfway. It’s only then, with his arm stretching awkwardly while the lawyer sits like a marble statue, that Lincoln realizes: me.
The lawyer speaks in a low, emotionless voice, using words that have clearly been scripted: “On good evidence, we have reason to believe that you have had sexual relations with a lower-level employee at Pistakee Press. Is this true?”
With his heart pumping blood at a furious pace, Lincoln’s mind spins. He thinks first: Shouldn’t they read me a Miranda warning? Don’t I get a lawyer? Then he wonders if he can call his father. No, Lincoln’s on his own. How did they find out? Can he bluff? He frantically tries to play out in his head the chess game of lies and obfuscations that would follow from a denial. How far could he take it? Or could he just deny and refuse to say more—be like one of those fundamentalists who reject evolution against all evidence? But the precise, inelegant language of the accusation (“sexual relations”) brings Lincoln back to memories of the humiliating falsehoods practiced by Bill Clinton under duress.
“Well, what do you say? Is it true?” demands Duddleston after Lincoln has sat mute for almost half a minute.
Lincoln has been a cad and a cheat; his moral compass is skewed by ambition, and he holds an arrogant disregard for great masses of perfectly decent, well-meaning people. He will fib to get his way and dodge the truth to avoid confrontations. As much as anyone, he practices the blinding self-justification that seems to have become a defining element in the character of Americans born after World War II. But pressed to the core, when it comes to taking responsibility for an action that involves himself and others in a crucial way, Lincoln will not lie. “Yes,” he says.
Duddleston shakes his head in disgust. Jane Hemer, who seems to draw an intense pleasure from this fast-moving drama, emits a small, vaguely sexual sigh. Canon, the lawyer, stays on mark. “You have broken a fundamental rule of this company,” he says, “and your employment is immediately terminated.” He turns over a sheet of paper that is sitting in front of him and pushes it across the table. “This letter waives any future right of recourse against Pistakee and promises that you will never disclose anything material about the company or say anything in any way disparaging about it or its principals. If you sign the waiver, Pistakee will give you six weeks severance and agree to make neutral acknowledgements of your employment here. We will tell people you resigned.” He waits while Lincoln stares blankly at the sheet, its lines of type blurred to his eyes. The lawyer continues: “Otherwise, you will get nothing. You’re out, and you’re fired.”
Lincoln hesitates, then lifts a corner of the document and fingers its thick, rich texture, built to last. He’s far too stunned to think, to reason. Instinct alone remains. “No,” he says, flicking the sheet back across the table. He signed a waiver before he wr
estled the bear. One is enough for a lifetime.
The lawyer lets slip a hint of emotion, a slight, almost immeasurable elevation of the eyebrows. Surprise? Admiration? It passes in an instant. The eyebrows slam down like a steel gate. “You will be escorted to your office and allowed to take your personal belongings only,” he says. “You will not take anything that belongs to the company. You have ten minutes.”
As if answering a bell, the three people on the other side of the table stand in unison. Jane Hemer hands Lincoln a packet of material about health care and his 401(k). Duddleston opens the conference room door, and the three antagonists watch Lincoln rise unsteadily and step out of the room. In the hall, the paunchy building guard waits, holding several empty boxes. He nods in the direction of Lincoln’s office and follows while Lincoln scuffles in a fog through the corridors. His legs are rubbery. He feels as if his clothes are propping him up. He and the guard pass no one, see no one. Lincoln wonders: Is everyone hiding? Do they all know? When he enters his office, he pauses briefly in the middle of the room, trying to get his bearings. This place where he’s spent so many hours reading, editing, daydreaming, where he’s breathed the air and left untold traces of his DNA—already it seems changed. He thought it was his, but it belongs to the countless ghosts of people who occupied this building before and the countless who will follow.
Lincoln senses the guard at his back. The man used to tease Lincoln, telling him he worked too hard since he was always the last to leave Pistakee’s offices at night. Now, Lincoln can feel the man’s stony efficiency. Walking around the desk, Lincoln opens several drawers and stares at the files. He considers the clutter of books and manuscripts on his desk. Then he gestures for a box from the guard, and he carefully packs the family pictures sitting atop his bookshelf, including the shot of Mary and him in Tuscany. Why hadn’t he put that photo away earlier?
“Let’s go,” he says.
“That’s it?” the guard asks. “You don’t want any of them books?” He points to the volumes lining the shelves.
“Let’s go,” Lincoln repeats, leading the way out of his office.
Kim is off today and a temp, another young woman, watches from the reception desk as Lincoln and the guard wait for the elevator. They ride down in silence. Out on the street, the guard shows a surprising burst of energy, pushing past Lincoln to hail a cab that happens to be passing. Lincoln puts his box of photographs in the backseat, then slides in beside it. The guard pulls a twenty-dollar bill out of his pocket and hands it to Lincoln. “Mr. Duddleston gave me this for your cab ride home,” the guard says. “I think he thought you’d have more stuff.”
Later, Lincoln wishes he’d refused the money. But his mind is stuck in slow motion, and by the time he thinks of handing the bill back, the guard has disappeared into the building.
What do you do at ten in the morning on the first mild, sunny day in weeks, when everyone else in Chicago is at work and you have just been fired? For an hour or so, Lincoln lies on the sofa in his apartment, holding his right arm. He’s not exactly thinking, although his mind is bombarded by thoughts. It’s as if his head has tuned to an awkward wavelength that, amid static, pulls in fragments of sentences, glancing ideas, memory pictures from throughout his life: Missing a free throw at the end of the Chevy Chase game. “A brilliant editor.” His mom asking, Why don’t you go to work for the Washington Post? as if it were that easy. George C. Scott as Patton talking about the monumental triviality of the latest infraction for which he is being punished (why does Lincoln love that old movie? Nixon loved it, for fuck’s sake). “That sounds like a small book,” his father had said. The ultimate position. Duddleston’s cold, gray eyes this morning, as dead as pasteboard. “Connecting to the fantasy reality.”
Finally, Lincoln gets up. He changes into his jogging gear and goes for a long run north along the lake, dodging patches of ice and puddles, exhausting himself. Returning, he walks the last two blocks to recover his breath and finds Amy standing in a splash of sunlight, leaning against the railing on the steps to his building. “I thought you might be jogging,” she says.
Lincoln is soaked in sweat. “What are you doing here?” he asks.
“I came to see how you were doing.”
“I don’t know,” he admits. But then the endorphins from his run kick in, and he regains a touch of bravado. “Oh, I’ll be all right. I’m just pissed.”
Amy ratchets her face into a twisted frown. “Duddleston is a fool. We’ve always known it, and this just proves it.”
In fact, Lincoln doesn’t quite agree. Duddleston’s standards, on everything from business to hanky-panky, have been open and consistent from the start. That’s not the manner of a fool. “I’m mostly pissed at myself,” Lincoln says. “I feel as if I made some basic mistakes early on and they’ve been compounded over the years. This is just the logical culmination. Bad luck, dumb choices, take them step-by-step, and they lead exactly to this point. In Chicago.”
“That’s stupid, John,” Amy says with real anger in her voice.
For a moment, Lincoln considers arguing with her. Isn’t he at least entitled to cultivate bitter self-pity at a time like this? But the February breeze is starting to chill his damp body, and after all, Amy cared enough to come up here to check on him. “Do you want to come in?” he asks. “I can make you a cup of tea.”
Amy hesitates, then shrugs. “Sure.”
She follows him up the flight of stairs, Lincoln leaving little drops of sweat on the wood steps. In the apartment, he directs her to the living room sofa and heads to the kitchen to put on water. “Cinnamon apple spice?” he calls out.
“OK.”
The run has cleared his head somewhat, but he senses a huge, smothering depression hovering just beyond the edges of his consciousness. Worse, somehow, than the cloud that descended after Mary asked for the divorce. Everyone fails at romance. This was his career. “Does all of Pistakee know?” he asks. Keep talking. Use Amy as a diversion.
