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Flam, cool as always, tells him, “The problem is there are too many books being published, even today, when kids don’t read and the economy is in free fall. The books pile up outside my office—literally like a wall. I can’t even give them away. Who in the world has the time? With the Internet, movies, TV—who has the time to give a shit?”
“But they’re still books, you fucking asshole! A pinnacle of civilization, of human life itself.” Lincoln pounds the table again. He’s aware that he’s making a small spectacle and drawing stares from the people seated around. “And now you want to throw it all away just because we can fill our free time with The Real Housewives of Orange County?”
“I still like Survivor,” Flam says. “They always throw in a few babes who walk around half naked.”
“Come on, Flam. Look what’s happening to us. You’re the fucking literary editor of the Tribune, still one of the biggest papers in the country.”
“Are you sure you’re not conflating your own situation with the state of the world?” asks Lincoln’s friend.
Even through a haze of beer Lincoln recognizes that Flam has trapped him in a dead end. “I just want a breakthrough book,” repeats Lincoln, relenting.
“You just want to prove something to Mary,” says Flam.
Lincoln smiles through his beer. Where would he be without Flam? When marriages fell apart in the Fitzgerald short stories that Lincoln devoured one college summer, the husbands always seemed to move into the Yale Club in New York, finding refuge in the clubby dining rooms, the dusty library, the moldy halls overseen by vintage portraits of the solemn teams of rowers and ballplayers. When it happened to Lincoln, he moved in with Flam, who fed him steaks and nursed his ego until Lincoln had recovered enough to get his own place.
“How often do you talk?” Flam asks.
“Oh, we talk,” Lincoln says vaguely. In fact, his conversations with Mary—always by phone—have been rare, and then they’ve been cautious, almost scripted. After all, Lincoln tells himself, she said she needed a vacation.
As the two friends settle the bill and get up to leave, Lincoln asks, “How’s your girlfriend these days?”
Flam knows he’s being teased, since he has terrible luck with women. Lately he’s enjoyed talking about his infatuation with the attractive girl who serves him coffee most mornings at the Starbucks around the corner. “I think I’m making progress,” Flam says. “She sees me walk in the door and knows what to get before I have to ask—tall coffee, double lid.”
“You better start shopping for the engagement ring.”
“We’ve actually talked a bit,” Flam goes on, ignoring the joke. “She’s nineteen, a student at Loyola.”
“You are making progress.”
“She lives with her parents up in Avondale—you know, the Northwest Side. Working class.”
Lincoln starts. “She doesn’t even have her own place?”
“Not every girl comes with all the amenities,” Flam points out with a smile.
Lincoln grabs a cab for home, but he gets out several blocks early and detours on foot past Mary’s building, their old building. Flam warned him not to live so close, but Lincoln couldn’t help himself. Was he nearby to protect her? To spy? Mary has insisted there is no one else, but Lincoln can’t help wondering. Now he gazes up to the second-floor window in the stately graystone on this lovely, leafy street where he once lived. Lights off. All dark. Could mean anything.
Back in his apartment, despite too much beer, Lincoln lies in bed awake. In the distance, the passing roar of an L train, white noise for the North Side, rises and falls rhythmically. His arm aches in the broken place from pounding the fucking table at John Barleycorn.
5
IN THE MORNING Lincoln rises with a feverish, unsettled feeling, something between the wages of a night out drinking and an attack of free-floating anxiety. Well, it’s not exactly free-floating—on opening his scratchy eyes, Lincoln remembers that he has specific and justified grounds for being anxious. His marriage. His job. Not to mention the lingering guilt over his lamentable behavior on the L yesterday.
He’s already running late, but he takes the time to paw through the morning’s Tribune. He finds the story he’s looking for among the stacked short items devoted to neighborhood news.
NORTH SIDE—Police arrested two Chicago men yesterday after a knife fight on a Brown Line “L” train during evening rush hour panicked passengers and led to several minor injuries.
Enrique Gonzales, 19, and Ricardo Cabello, 21, were charged with endangerment and carrying concealed weapons. Neither was hurt, but their confrontation in a rear car as the train approached the Belmont Station frightened passengers, who then stampeded the front cars to escape.
“Unfortunately, we’ve seen this happen before,” said Dolores Jordan, spokeswoman for the Chicago Transit Authority. “I think a lot of the people who panicked didn’t even know what was going on. They were just reacting to other people panicking.”
Several passengers were treated at the scene for cuts and bruises. One woman was taken to Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center and later released.
Lincoln reads the story over twice quickly. The woman who was taken to the hospital—could that have been the victim of his shove? He’ll probably never know.
He’s barely settled into his desk at work when Duddleston appears in the doorway, setting off a cherry bomb of bile in Lincoln’s roiling gut. But Duddleston flashes his recently whitened teeth and gleefully announces that he’s had an “epiphany” (what he means is a “good idea”): the Pistakee team will make an outing to the Cubs-Brewers game next Tuesday night! Bill Lemke will come along, so Lincoln can mend fences with the offended author in the low-pressure setting of Wrigley Field!
“Great!” Lincoln exclaims.
