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“You could look at it this way,” Lincoln offers weakly. “The Reader still has a decent circulation. You’ll sell a lot more copies of the book, make more money.”
Wrong argument.
“My mother saw it!” Amy shrieks. “Her friend called to warn her! They’ve both looked at that awful website! I feel...I feel...violated!”
Lincoln scrambles for something to cool her fever. “Look,” he says firmly. “The whole thing is nonsense. In the first place, this article is stupid—calling you a porn muse. You’re a writer. And you wrote a good book that’s not pornographic, it’s literary. In the second place, well, none of us can control our reputations anymore. Anything we do—it’s just out there, for anyone to make of it what they will. Through Google, on Facebook. You can’t control it. You’d go nuts trying to.”
Amy starts to protest, but Lincoln holds up his hand. “And the third thing is,” he hurries on, “nobody cares! A hundred years ago, ten years ago, the world would have been horrified. But now everything’s fodder, everything about everybody. We all have our turns at being demeaned. You’ve heard of Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame? Now, everybody gets fifteen minutes of infamy, and afterward no one gives a shit or even remembers.”
Lincoln’s logic seems to calm the scene. Amy purses her lips, thinking. The scarlet on her face eases toward pink. She drops onto the sofa. Lincoln is secretly congratulating himself when she says mournfully, “But you promised you’d keep me out of it.”
“I tried,” he offers helplessly.
“You were always the miserable one,” Amy says vacantly, addressing him but talking to herself, as if he is such a failure as a human being that his presence doesn’t even register; he’s a dust mite, a flyspeck. “You were the one who hated everything, who was too good for everything. Not me. I was fine. Whatever happened, it was an adventure.” She shakes her head slowly. “I don’t want to be like you.”
Lincoln has never seen her this way—hollow, lifeless. “Amy?” he says, worried.
She stands. “I’ve got to go.”
“You don’t want any tea or breakfast? I could cook eggs.”
She hurries to the door.
“Amy, are you all right?” Lincoln asks.
She steps outside quickly, as if she’s suddenly realized that Lincoln and his apartment are scenes of contagion that she must flee. She turns to him and says flatly, “Missionary position.”
“What?”
“I wanted to tell you after I saw that awful website. The girl my freshman year who searched for the Ultimate Position? In the end she decided it was the missionary position. I didn’t tell you before because I thought you’d be disappointed.”
“Jesus,” gasps Lincoln.
“Now you know.” Amy starts down the steps but stops and looks back. “Please leave me alone,” she says, then hurtles off, clasping the banister so she won’t fall. Her footsteps, pounding on the wood stairway, rain down on Lincoln’s head like blows until she is out of the building.
30
LINCOLN HIDES OUT in his apartment. Throughout the days following Amy’s visit and well into the anguished, aspirin-glutted nights, he sits at his desk, trying to cocoon himself with work. He often feels chilled, for no good reason other than his frozen spirit, and since he can’t wrap himself in electronic manuscripts, he drapes a scratchy L.L.Bean blanket over his shoulders, looking like FDR in Warm Springs, waiting for death.
Marissa Morgan and other Chicago bloggers follow up on The Reader’s report, and even the Tribune’s culture blog runs an item. Most accounts summon a
gassy tone of moral outrage aimed at Lincoln—the “mentor,” the presumed impresario of the deception—chiding him for his lack of honesty, for supposedly trying to put one over on the world. Somehow, without Lincoln’s realizing it, utter transparency has become the obligatory ethical standard for all behavior that reaches the public, and violators face censure and shame across cyberspace, the digital equivalent of pillories and stocks. Marissa Morgan sniffs that Lincoln, “one of Chicago’s most experienced book editors,” has broken the “publisher’s pledge of intimacy” with readers by lying about the name of the real author. An overheated blogger on a politically lefty site sees the evil profit motive behind the whole plot and likens Lincoln to the “fat Wall Street leeches who nearly brought down the economy”—as if selling a book by Alice Upshaw instead of Amy O’Malley was the equivalent of peddling worthless financial instruments that no one understood. The Tribune’s post pursues the cranky theme introduced by Professor Fieldstone and wonders if the Internet’s “democratization of writing means that book publishing will become as tainted with fakes and fraud as voting in Chicago.”
Lincoln tries different tacks with the writers, speaking frankly to some, on background to others, refusing to comment to still others. No matter. Nothing draws eyeballs like outrage, and Lincoln represents a plump and easy target. Soon he comes to feel a bonding with James Frey. Several times Lincoln visits the Oprah website to study photos of the author’s woeful face as he undergoes the necessary public debasement at the hands of the talk-show star.
But it’s not simply the bad publicity that torments Lincoln—he realizes now that he can handle the dents in his reputation, that there was actually truth in the little speech he gave Amy about everyone being demeaned and nobody caring. Rather, what pains Lincoln is that he’s dragged Amy down with him, pulled her into his pathetic game. Blindly pursuing his ambition, he’s corrupted an innocent. He can’t stop thinking about her helpless exasperation, the cry of a child: “But you promised...!” Lincoln feels as if the last threads of his honor, his virtue, are tearing away.
This, too, shall pass, Lincoln’s father had assured. No, Lincoln thinks. The Chinese may be entering their century, but they got that aphorism wrong. “This” remains and just keeps getting worse.
Tony Buford calls the day Marissa Morgan weighs in. Lincoln hasn’t heard from him in weeks and had come to assume that the poet’s bonhomie was an act that lasted only as long as Lincoln could be useful. But Buford starts right in with support. “Silliness,” he announces without identifying himself.
“Uhhh.” Lincoln recognizes the voice, but he’s sunk to crippling, perhaps terminal, befuddlement.
“It’s all silliness,” Buford repeats. “I sent Marissa a note saying as much. What’s your crime? Pseudonyms have a great tradition in literature—Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, George Eliot. Hell, even Stephen King sometimes writes under Richard Bachman. The opportunism is astonishing.”
“Opportunism?”
“Beat up on the little guy. The Marissa Morgans of the world would never think of going after Stephen King.”
