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Amy O’Malley steps tentatively into the office. She’s discarded the boxy blouse for a snug, white T-shirt and jeans, and her face somehow looks brighter, more vibrant. Lincoln suspects she’s spent time in front of a makeup mirror.
“How are you today?” he asks, trying to summon some enthusiasm.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt your phone call,” Amy says.
“No problem. What can I do for you?”
“Oh, I just brought those stories I mentioned yesterday.” She pads forward and holds out the folder. “If you had a chance to look them over...”
“Of course.” Anything, as long as she tells Duddleston that Lincoln was a prince about it. He reaches across his desk to accept the bundle and leafs casually through the folder. There must be a dozen stories in here, he thinks, two hundred pages. Hours of dreary reading.
“There’s one I kind of like,” she natters, “one that feels a little more like me, you know? I wrote it when I was working for the sex survey at school...”
“You worked for the sex survey?” A small tingle starts at the base of Lincoln’s back and moves gently up his spine, a caterpillar’s crawl.
“One summer, and then part-time during the year. Clerical stuff. They paid me by the hour.”
“I see.” Lincoln nods gravely. For more than two decades, a team of U of C sociologists has been conducting the most comprehensive study of human sexuality since Kinsey. Lincoln has always been curious about the project.
Amy cautions, “Of course, everyone gets the wrong idea about the survey. It was very straightforward, very clinical. Nothing erotic at all.”
“What do you expect? It was the U of C.” He plops the folder down on his desk. “I’ll take a look,” he promises.
“Thank you so much,” Amy exclaims, backing to the door. “There’s no rush.” She pauses. “Did Byron tell you about the Cubs game? Are you going?”
Before Lincoln has time to think, instinct takes over. “To watch the dipshit Cubs? Do I have a choice?”
Amy’s face falls, and Lincoln realizes he risks a censorious report to the boss.
“Just kidding.” He forces out another smile. “Wouldn’t miss it!”
For the next two days, Amy’s folder sits untouched on Lincoln’s desk. No need to hurry into anything, Lincoln thinks. Better to give the impression that the work has been carefully considered. On Friday, Lincoln packs the folder into his briefcase and takes it home. Maybe this weekend, he tells himself, without really expecting that his days will be that empty. But a surprise rainfall washes out his bike ride the next afternoon, and none of the new movies look promising. So Lincoln figures he might as well get it out of the way and starts to browse through Amy’s stories. He sees immediately that she shows flashes of talent. She’s got a light touch and a good eye for detail. Still, the work is far from polished, and Lincoln can’t imagine anything she’s written being published, outside of perhaps a student literary magazine. He searches out the story about the sex survey—she’s buried it toward the bottom of the folder—and finds it comes with a good title, Standard Deviation (for laymen, a somewhat familiar though uncertain phrase, with hints of kinkiness). But the treatment disappoints. The protagonist is a young woman interviewing other women about their sex lives, and early on, the story showcases some tantalizing scenes of anonymous subjects recounting the most intimate details of their lives. But the plot quickly detours into a cul-de-sac about the interviewer’s relationship with her boyfriend (sexless in the story—Lincoln wonders if it’s drawn from real life) and then dead ends in an ambiguous childhood anecdote about a little girl who gets stung by a sea urchin at a beach at a fancy Caribbean resort (does Amy come from money?).
After a rainy Sunday, Lincoln has read about half the stories in the folder, and that evening he considers the conversation he’ll have with Amy, letting her down ever so gently. He rehearses the assorted kiss-offs that he got from editors back in the days when he was sending his own short stories to magazines. “Suggests a deeper literary intelligence that simply needs to be exercised.” “Promising, but lacks felt detail. Keep working at it!”
Amy’s stories are back in their folder, and Lincoln is sitting on the sofa, vacantly watching a familiar episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, when something remarkable happens. The caterpillar Lincoln felt on his spine the other day suddenly molts its cocoon and a butterfly of an idea takes wing: Why not have Amy turn her experience as a sex researcher into a novel? Her months with the survey have no doubt given her reams of authentic experience, not to speak of endless insights into the secret sex lives of women. Hell, thinks Lincoln, if she can just put down on paper some of the elemental information and sketch out the personalities of some of the key players, he can rewrite it into something smart and sexy. And the book doesn’t have to
be long—a novel like that could come in at 150, maybe 175 pages, and everyone would go home satisfied.
Lincoln hops up from the sofa and pours a vodka on the rocks. Slow down, he warns himself—don’t get too excited, you’re getting way ahead of the game. He gulps a slug of vodka and waits for the alcohol to calm him. Way ahead of the game. Still, imagine the possibilities. Amy O’Malley is bright, verbal, and obviously ambitious. One encouraging word from him and she’ll be spitting out copy like an old AP terminal. Plus, she’s a promoter’s dream—a petite, pretty U of C alum who spills about the cloistered world of sex research. Every talk show in the country would sign her up. Pistakee Press will have its first big hit, its first national best seller. And Lincoln...well, as the impresario of this cultural triumph, as the resourceful editor who spotted and nursed the talent, he will bathe at last in the recognition he deserves.
Lincoln pours himself another vodka. He’d like to talk out the idea, but he can’t call Amy, even if he knew her number. Lincoln knows he’s got to work up to this carefully—hint, suggest, let the book seem to germinate between them. Lincoln has been around enough to know that a writer has to feel proprietary about an idea for it to take hold. If you suggest a potential story line to an author, he or she will turn defensive, invent reasons that prove the idea is utterly idiotic.
There’s only one person Lincoln can possibly talk to about the project, so he dials up Flam. “Yeah,” says a morose voice on the other end.
“Flam?”
“Yeah.”
“Did I wake you? You sound groggy.”
“No. Just counting how many times the writers in Sunday’s Tribune used variants of the verb engage. Three so far—a TV show ‘never really engages viewers,’ a modern dance comes off as ‘provocative and engaging,’ and a gallery exhibit of outsider art demonstrates the painter’s ‘fierce engagement with his subject.’”
Flam’s sour mood has a specific cause: his Starbucks girlfriend postponed the Big Date—a teacher scheduled a makeup class, and the young woman doesn’t have an evening free again for at least another week. (Lincoln thinks: the poor dear is trying to put off the unhappy event for as long as she can, maybe forever.) Lincoln doesn’t want to jeopardize his excitement by having his aggrieved friend piss all over the book project, so after a few words of romantic encouragement, Lincoln tries to sign off.
“Hey, what did you want?” Flam asks. “You called me, remember.”
“It was nothing. Just a book idea I wanted to run by you.”
