Page 72 of Are You Happy Now?

“This is Jeff Kessler from Malcolm House. You’re a hard guy to contact.”

Lincoln throws off the L.L.Bean blanket. “Yes, well, I’ve changed jobs,” he blurts.

“I know. That’s in part why I wanted to talk. But we didn’t have your phone number or a private e-mail address. Finally, my assistant called the book editor at the Tribune, and fortunately, he had it.”

“Flam?”

“Yes, I think that’s it. Strange fellow, isn’t he?”

“Sort of an acquired taste.”

“Yes, well, here’s the thing. We’re looking to hire an editor, and with your background in online publishing, I thought it made sense for us to talk.”

“Of course.” (Talk? Lincoln thinks: I’ll scream, beg, pray, filibuster.)

“Do you suppose, in the next week or so, you could fly in for a visit? We’ll pay for the ticket, and I’d like you to meet some of the other editors in the office.”

“Of course.”

“Let’s make ourselves clear: This is just talk so far, but I assume you wouldn’t object to relocating? You’d be willing to move to New York?”

Glory Hallelujah!

That Friday, dressed in his lone gray suit and a blue tie he fished from the far reaches of his closet, Lincoln takes an early flight from O’Hare to LaGuardia. It’s an in-and-out trip—leaving just enough time for a round of interviews before Malcolm House, with typical New York efficiency, has booked him on a five-o’clock return flight. Lincoln’s luck holds from the start: the whole of the country east of the Mississippi is basking in a glorious, cloudless high. (He thinks: the heavens have opened for me at last.)

He was tempted to alert his parents—they certainly deserved a spot of promising news—and he wished he had a discreet way to let Mary know, just to prove he wasn’t completely stalled. But he decided not to get ahead of himself, reasoning that a show of optimism could amplify eventual disappointment. So (save for an evasive conversation with Flam, who naturally was curious about the call from Malcolm House) Lincoln has savored his glad tidings alone. On the taxi ride in from LaGuardia, Lincoln worries that his excitement will be too obvious, that he’ll expose himself for the outsider he’s become. But by the time he’s crossing the sinuous Triborough Bridge, with all of Manhattan laid out alongside, a cruise ship ready for boarding, Lincoln accepts his simmering stress. The quickened heartbeat, the surging adrenaline, the elevated metabolism—they soothe, and he wonders if in fact they represent his natural state, given that he’s a New Yorker at heart. When he steps out of

the cab in front of the Malcolm House building, a glassy fifties box on East Forty-Ninth Street, he almost collides with a stunning brunette motoring along the sidewalk in a pair of towering stilettos. “Excuse me!” she snips, glaring. Lincoln can only smile.

In the lobby, Lincoln registers with security and takes the elevator to the twenty-ninth floor. The reception area has been redesigned since Lincoln’s intern days, but the huge blowups of classic Malcolm House book covers and the enormous signage behind the receptionist’s desk signal that this is an enterprise with permanence, with reach. At just after eleven, he is ushered down several meandering corridors and into Jeff Kessler’s large office. None of the cushiony, clubby trappings here—just glass and laminate and sharp angles. Everything gives off a polished shine, as if all fingerprints, indeed, any trace of human physicality, have been scrubbed away that very morning. (Lincoln remembers the eraser bits that drifted through his Pistakee office like sand dunes, somehow always missed by the night cleaning crew).

The publisher is a tall, slender man, still only in his midforties, with an olive complexion and shiny black hair and a breezily elegant manner. (Lincoln recalls that Kessler could enthuse equally about opera and the Knicks). He’s dressed this day in a slim navy suit and red tie. Lincoln takes a seat in a sleek chair—stainless steel tubing interwoven with a kind of rubbery string. For a few comfortable minutes, they catch up and chat about acquaintances from Lincoln’s days as a Malcolm House intern, and then Kessler gets down to it.

“When I heard you’d gone to an online operation, I thought you might be interested in an opportunity here,” the publisher says.

“How did you know I’d moved?” Lincoln asks.

Kessler flatters with a sly smile. “I keep an eye out on promising up-and-comers.”

Lincoln blushes. Imagine—those agonizing hours with Professor Fleace, et al., and Jeff Kessler was watching out, like a guardian angel.

“What sort of talent did you find out there—out there in the Land of Lincoln?” the publisher asks.

“At iAgatha, not much,” Lincoln says carefully. “I’m afraid it was mostly amateurs. I did work on one book that I thought was quite good, though. And it ended up selling pretty well.”

“Was that the one about the sex positions?”

This is getting intimate. Kessler knows Lincoln’s CV line by line. “Well, yes,” says Lincoln. “Though the book was quite a bit more than that.”

“Brilliant marketing,” Kessler says. “The website, changing the author’s name. Brilliant.”

“I, ahh...actually, the website just popped up. I can’t claim it was my idea.”

“I didn’t read the book myself,” Kessler continues, ignoring Lincoln’s disclaimer, “but one of our editors here did. Peter Falcone. I want you to meet him later. He dug it.”

“Great.”

“And how is your former publishing house—Pulaski, is it?—holding up in the downturn?” Kessler asks.

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