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“Ahh.” Lincoln is wholly unprepared to argue on behalf of their romance, and anyway, how much rejection can one man take in a day, a half day?
Amy pauses to smooth her hair in the reflection of a framed photograph of the Chicago skyline at night, a wall hanging that came with the apartment. Then she hurries to the door. She glances back at Lincoln, standing listlessly in the middle of the room. “Stop rubbing your arm!” she orders. He obeys. And then she is gone.
25
TELLING HIS PARENTS is the worst. After two hermetic days and nearly sleepless nights, Lincoln slugs back a shot of vodka and calls home. By then, the weather has returned to the winter norm, and as he waits on the phone for someone to pick up, Lincoln stares out his living room window at a world with the color and hospitality of concrete. His father’s first reaction, after a long, heartbreaking silence, is to ask if Lincoln wants to sue. For a moment, Lincoln is cheered—his father believes in his essential innocence! But as they talk, Lincoln realizes that no, that’s not it—in his father’s eyes, Lincoln has finally sunk to the bottom. Now he’s just another blundering client who needs to be rescued from his own stupidity.
Beyond that, his father’s clipped advice turns practical: hurry up and get another job, anything, anywhere, so you can close this embarrassing gap in your résumé and avoid questions by future employers.
His mother wants to know about the young woman who was Lincoln’s partner in this disaster. Was it a serious relationship? So soon after his break-up? (Lincoln sees past the questions: Before, his mother only worried about his career. Now, with the divorce and this colossal misjudgment, she has to worry about his personal life. Where did she fail?) Her ultimate advice is practical, too: squelch the romantic activities until you get the rest of your life in order.
Afterward, Lincoln sits in near catatonia in the nubby chair. He’s thirty-three years old, fifteen years out of the house, and still ravaged by the unspoken disappointment in the voices of his parents. Shouldn’t he have anticipated this years ago? Couldn’t he have arranged some kind of psychological inoculation?
Two days later, Mary calls. She’s heard. (How? From her parents, via his. Tracing back the game of telephone makes Lincoln feel even more desperate—like a hospital patient, someone who’s lost control of his life.) “What’ll you do now?” she asks.
“Find something else. I’ve got to have a job.”
“But what? What’s your strategy, your plan?”
“My strategy?”
“You should use this as an opportunity, Linc—take the time to assess your career, evaluate your strengths and your weaknesses. Turn this to your advantage.”
Lincoln knows she means well, but he feels so beaten down he can’t fight petulance. “You’re going to fit right in at business school,” he says sullenly. “You’re already talking like a careerist.”
“Don’t be like that. You’ve got to fight this.”
“Right.”
“Look.” Mary’s tone is clipped, impatient. She asks nothing about the details of his offense, doesn’t seem to care whether he was carrying on an affair while they were still together. “Why don’t you move to New York? That’s where you’ve always wanted to be. You hate Chicago. Why not just pick up and go? What better time?”
So it’s not enough to divorce him; she wants him to leave town, too. “Maybe I will,” Lincoln tells her. But how? With no place to live, no job, thousands of journalists and editors out looking for work, and now, a badly stained résumé. Plus, no money, at least, until they sell the apartment—and given the economy, that’s not going to happen soon. Mary still lives there in exchange for paying the hefty mortgage, and recently she warned him that sales are dead in the immediate neighborhood. Even Lincoln’s divorce lawyer has advised him to stick around until all the papers are signed. “So what are your plans?” he asks Mary, dodging.
“You know, the same,” she says elusively. “Business has been slow.” She pauses. “I’m taking an interesting macroeconomics course in the general studies program at the U of C.”
Lincoln meant what are her plans with that dickhead Jerry Cirone, but never mind. While he wants to know, sort of, he doesn’t want to learn that they are planning marriage or swanning off on an exotic trip or still fucking. He and Mary talk listlessly for a few more minutes before she signs off with an admonition: “Don’t slide into depression, Linc.”
The petulance, at least, rouses him out of his lethargy. He spends hours a day on the Internet, first fruitlessly checking the job sites and then wandering aimlessly, following links, pursuing odd facts, Googling everyone he’s ever known. Lincoln decides that depression isn’t really a problem when you’ve got the Internet as a constant distraction. The greater risk is that you’d just sit there, occupied but accomplishing nothing, oblivious to the demands of life until you waste away. Lincoln imagines the Comcast man coming to reclaim equipment after the bill goes unpaid for several months and finding Lincoln at his computer, a desiccated skeleton in a decaying bathrobe, one rigid claw of a hand still resting on the touchpad.
Sometimes, toward the end of the day, Lincoln returns to the constantly updated media job sites and after again seeing nothing suitable, he casually explores sites featuring other categories of work—the law, for instance. Maybe he should go to law school after all. It’s probably not too late. But then Lincoln thinks of the law students he knew at the U of C—pasty drones forever testing each other in tedious arguments. Where’s the pleasure of creation in that? (Besides, he’s Googled his old pal Will Dewey, now a litigation partner at Mannheim, Rogers & Baer in Washington, and the smug, ageless face that pops up on the firm’s website makes Lincoln shiver.) Or maybe he should make a complete right turn and go into health care. Administrators, nurses, even medical PR positions—despite the recession, openings are all over the job sites. But who’s he kidding? He hates hospitals.
After several fruitless days, Lincoln decides to test the water and applies for a research position with a small financial empire based in the northwest suburb of Arlington Heights. The company responds with some interest, and in a phone conversation with the recruiter, Lincoln makes plans to go for an interview. He asks if the headquarters is near the train station.
“What?” croaks the recruiter, a man whose voice until that moment had been soothing and pliant.
“No problem, I can rent a car,” says Lincoln, clumsily trying to recover.
“You don’t own a
car?”
Lincoln slides around the issue and finishes the conversation, but an hour later he calls back to cancel, saving himself what would certainly be a wasted trip. He thinks: In Manhattan, not owning a car is a sign of practical intelligence, not to mention evidence of your concern for the environment; here, they treat you like a homeless person.
Lincoln seriously considers teaching—maybe he can turn his knowledge of books into a gig. One afternoon, he e-mails a résumé to a private school in Indiana that’s looking for an English teacher. But Dean Thornburgh at Foster Prep responds almost immediately with a note, thanking Lincoln for his interest, while explaining that the school insists on at least three years of teaching experience.
Sitting at his computer on this early evening, the rest of Chicago returning in darkness from a day at the office, Lincoln realizes that he’s relieved at the dean’s message. The harsh alchemy of his trauma combined with the deluge of Internet trivia has brought forth an insight, a small clarity that’s bracing to his fragile confidence: being an editor is the perfect job for him. Coaxing, nitpicking, spotting holes, cutting excess, sharpening logic, recognizing talent, turning cynicism into something productive, acting like a know-it-all. Editing is what he was born to do.
And then he gets a lead. Flam puts him in touch with the young proprietors of a Chicago-based Internet outfit that publishes mysteries and thrillers through its website, iAgatha.com. Flam says their operation is coming along well enough that they are looking to add an experienced editorial hand.
