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“Go ahead.”
Why not? thinks Lincoln. So he tells Flam about Amy and her background with the sex survey and the idea of ginning up a novel out of the experience. “Think chick lit meets The Kinsey Report,” Lincoln concludes.
“There’s already been a novel like that,” Flam says. “Several, in fact.”
“Of course there have. Every idea has already been used.” Lincoln remains undaunted. Then the vodka speaks: “But this one is mine!” He waits, slightly embarrassed by his ardor while Flam tortures him through a long silence.
“Why don’t you just write it yourself?” Flam asks finally.
“Because what do I know about women’s inner thoughts and sexuality?”
“You’re married, aren’t you?”
Lincoln thinks: if only that sufficed. “I don’t have the experience. I haven’t sat there for hours asking women what they fantasize about while their fat, boring husbands are rooting away on top.”
“You’re right, that’s priceless,” Flam deadpans.
After a few more minutes of diminishing skepticism, even Flam, with his punishing intelligence, concedes that Lincoln may be onto something. “It’s all in the execution,” Flam says.
“That’s where I come in,” says Lincoln. “I can rewrite anything. Just get me the material, and I can make it work.”
“But can you make it a hit?” Flam asks.
“I’ve got to,” Lincoln pronounces, with a ferocity that catches him by surprise.
6
ON MONDAY AT work, Lincoln sees Amy only fleetingly—once when she’s talking to Duddleston in the hall and later across the lobby when he’s going out for lunch. Lincoln decides she’s avoiding him, trying to deflect any appearance that she’s overeager to get his reaction to her stories. That’s fine, he thinks. Let her marinate a bit, soften her up.
In the middle of the afternoon, Duddleston comes around to remind Lincoln of the ballgame the next night. “Bill used his connections to get us great seats, right next to the Cubs’ bullpen,” Duddleston explains.
“Fantastic!” says Lincoln.
“You might not want to get too much into the book yet with Bill,” Duddleston suggests, still worrying over the diplomacy. “You know—bring it up, of course, but mostly use this as the occasion to reestablish the relationship.”
“I’ll be gentle,” Lincoln promises.
“That-a-boy, Abe.”
On leaving the office that evening, Lincoln notices a well-dressed, slender young black man studying the roster of the building’s tenants posted on the wall near the front door. Lincoln is halfway down the block when he thinks he hears the man call after him, “Excuse me! Excuse me!” But Lincoln doesn’t stop or turn around. He’s not sure the man is calling to him, and, besides, Lincoln is tired of being accosted by panhandlers, who come in all colors and wardrobes these days. Still, the encounter is slightly disconcerting and rubs at Lincoln throughout his walk to the L.
The next day, Duddleston has arranged for a van to come at six to ferry the Pistakee team up to Wrigley Field for the Cubs game. Lemke will meet them there. The group waits for its ride outside on the sidewalk. “It’s a perfect night for a ballgame,” Duddleston repeats endlessly, and he’s right—clear skies, high seventies, low humidity, a light breeze coming in off the lake. Chicago has about four days of ideal weather in a year, Lincoln thinks, and his rich boss has managed to land an event on one of them. Amy continues to be elusive, looking away whenever Lincoln glances toward her. He perceives with a small note of pleasure that she continues to elevate her level of stylishness, wearing jeans and a frilly blue blouse, with a blue sweater dangling over her shoulders. As she climbs into the van, he looks for traces of the lace panties, but the tight, thick denim crushes all evidence.
Avoiding his coeditors, Lincoln takes a seat next to Matt Breeson, Pistakee’s dull, extremely competent comptroller. “I know you’re from the East,” Breeson says as the van moves through stagnant evening traffic. “But have you caught Cubs fever here in Chicago?”
“A serious dose,” Lincoln replies, though, of course, he disdains the chronically dreadful Cubs and their bleached, arriviste fans who know nothing about baseball but treat a ballgame as a huge, chattering singles party. Not so long ago—before the Cubs started playing night games at Wrigley—the team was lucky to draw ten thousand fans to a midweek matchup in July, most of them babbling obsessives of the Bill Lemke variety, jabbering on about the sweet flick of Ernie Banks’s bat and the unfairness of life.
“I was wondering,” Breeson says, “did you ever consider publishing any mysteries?” He’s a large, shapeless man of indeterminate age—somewhere in his late thirties or early forties—who has been with Duddleston since the trading days. Breeson has always treated Lincoln with a kind of distanced curiosity, if not awe, never able to grasp the messy, unquantifiable work of literary creation, but earnestly trying to figure it out.
“Not specifically,” says Lincoln. “I’m not really conversant with the genre.”
Breeson whispers conspiratorially, “I love mysteries. I like to try to figure them out before the end.”
“Really. And do you?”
“Sometimes,” Breeson says. “Sometimes.”
The van finally drops them off at the corner of Clark and Addison, and the Pistakee group makes its way through the mob into Wrigley. Lincoln can’t visit the place without thinking of the Roman Colosseum—not just because the entertainment within diverts the restless masses, but because, like its Italian counterpart, the ancient Chicago landmark is falling apart. Crumbling concrete forced the team to install protective netting. The interior walkways are narrow and decrepit. The foul and inevitably overcrowded men’s restrooms feature long, communal troughs, a plumbing innovation Lincoln recalls from the public bathrooms at Pompeii. Still, after a visitor approaches Wrigley on a sea of pavement, passes through the stadium’s gray walls, walks up the concrete steps to the field-level seats, he’s suddenly confronted with an explosion of green—the outfield grass, the ivy walls, the huge, old scoreboard, all so lush and verdant it’s almost dizzying. Lincoln thinks of that scene in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy steps out of the uprooted house and the black-and-white movie turns Technicolor.
