Are You Happy Now? (2 page)

“But, but...” Duddleston starts leafing clumsily through the manuscript. He pulls out a page, crisscrossed by a giant X. In the margin, Lincoln had written in pencil, “Lose it, Bill. Trust me.” Duddleston waves the page at Lincoln. “This is gratuitous.” Then he digs some more. “And this!” he says, pulling out page 211, looking horrified. Beside one long paragraph, Lincoln had written, “I may vomit.”

“That’s the famous line from the great Kaufman and Hart comedy,
The Man Who Came to Dinner
,” Lincoln explains. “I guess I was getting weary by then and trying to be a bit playful.”

“‘Playful?’ What’s playful about a remark like that?” Now Duddleston pulls eight single-spaced pages off the top of the wad
of manuscript. “And your memo on how to fix the book—it’s just way, way too harsh.” He reads, “‘Every page needs a cliché-ectomy.’ You talk to Bill Lemke as if he’s a child or an idiot.”

Lincoln briefly considers pointing out that Lemke got fired from the
Sun-Times
years ago for being an incompetent drunk, and since then he’s scratched out a living by writing about Chicago’s blind love for its sports teams—the book in question, for example,
Wrigley Field: A People’s History
. But that way lies more trouble, so instead Lincoln summons his best defense: “I’ve usually found that good writers—writers who really care about the craft and understand it—appreciate candor. They know I just want to help them bring out the best book possible. That’s why I edit in pencil on paper—so the writer can see exactly what I’m doing. I spent two weeks working on that manuscript. That memo has got to be five thousand words long. I’m just trying to help.”

“Writers are sensitive beings,” Duddleston says, quietly, passionately. “They’re fragile, their egos are fragile. They need to be handled delicately.”

Now, Lincoln thinks, he really may vomit. Duddleston majored in English at the U of C, investing his undergraduate life in the dusty canyons of the old Harper Library—by his account, spending entire weekends in a favorite chair reading nineteenth-century English literature. But after graduation, to make a living, Duddleston took a job as a trader and spent the next twenty years in the wheat pit at the Board of Trade, screaming buy and sell orders at other sweaty, panicky men. He was good at it and parlayed his skill into a small fortune, and to his credit, he had the sense to walk away before an artery burst or he made a bad play and lost it all. In his heart, Duddleston always felt like an English major, so he took a chunk of his wealth and founded Pistakee Press, placing himself at the top. And even though small presses are notorious money pits, and the whole book publishing industry is going through a revolution, Duddleston retained
enough of his financial acuity to turn the company into a nice little business. But because of that CV, he’s never had to deal with writers as workers, as producers of a commodity that has to fight for success in the marketplace. He’s never had to untangle their sentences (and their thinking), he’s never had to convince them that their first, flatulent drafts are only first drafts and that it will take hours of more reporting and writing (and then many more hours of rewriting by the editor) before the tome can rightfully take its place as that underappreciated and overabundant product, a book.

No, Byron Duddleston still imagines that
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
sprang fully formed from Thomas Hardy’s head, and if some snippy editor had jostled old Tom at the wrong moment, the whole classic story would have crumbled and blown away like sand.

“You’re right, you’re right,” Lincoln tells his boss.

“Maybe it’s different at newspapers, where you are working under draconian deadlines, but books!” says Duddleston. “Books are different.”

Lincoln nods very slowly. His right forearm aches where he broke it so many years ago. He’s heard stories of Duddleston’s ruthless tactics as a trader and of his volcanic temper, but around Pistakee Press, the man always seems to be concentrating on talking slowly and deliberately. “What do you think I should do?” he asks Duddleston.

“Oh, call up Bill Lemke,” the editor-in-chief/owner says, brightening. “Take him out to lunch. Flatter him.
Massage
him a little. All writers like that. I’m sure he’ll come around.”

“Righto,” says Lincoln, wondering if Lemke can stay sober enough through lunch to absorb a few suggestions on his book.

Duddleston stands. “You’re a brilliant editor,” he tells Lincoln. “A brilliant man of words.”

Lincoln forces out a smile. Duddleston has complained in the past about Lincoln’s “abuse of writers”—Duddleston’s term
Now, something in the boss’s precise delivery of the inflated compliment makes Lincoln wonder if he’s about to be fired.

“We want to bring that book out next March, just in the middle of spring training, and it’s July already,” Duddleston reminds him. “Not much time.”

“We’ll get there,” Lincoln assures his boss.

Duddleston starts to go but pauses at a bookshelf where Lincoln has placed some family photographs—the black-and-white portrait of his father, the Washington lawyer, posed somberly in a lugubrious dark suit; the fading snapshot of mom, dad, sister, and Lincoln himself at twelve, a basketball tucked under his arm; the picture of Lincoln and his wife, Mary, bumping shoulders, touching heads, standing in front of an inviting Tuscan café.

Duddleston turns to Lincoln with an avuncular gaze. “And how’s it going with Mary?” he asks.

Lincoln shifts awkwardly in his chair. Maybe he should put away that picture, at least, for now. It was taken just a year ago, when he and Mary hoped the relaxation and distraction of a trip to Italy would enhance their surprisingly balky efforts to get pregnant. Not long after they returned, and with no success on the pregnancy front, Mary decided to put motherhood on hold until after she got an MBA. Three weeks ago, she announced that they needed “a vacation” from each other while she decided whether she wanted to stay married, and Lincoln moved out. “OK,” he tells Duddleston. “Just trying to sort out our feelings.”

“Seeing a counselor?”

“No, not at the moment. Maybe later.”

“Well, whatever you do, don’t rush into things,” Duddleston says. “You’ve put in—what?—five years on this marriage, and that’s not something you want to discard carelessly. Hold off on making decisions. Give yourselves time to cool off.”

“Right, right.”

Duddleston nods and smiles. “Go to it, Abe,” he says, closing the door carefully behind him.

John Lincoln takes a deep breath. His boss’s idea of an affectionate tic is to call his top employee after the adored president, even though John, as far as he knows, doesn’t carry a trace of the Great Man’s DNA. That’s another unfortunate consequence of landing in Chicago, Lincoln reminds himself constantly. From the moment he set foot in Illinois and introduced himself to his dorm counselor at the U of C, he’s had to explain to new acquaintances that he’s no relation to the state’s favorite son. “Oh, that’s too bad,” people often say. To which Lincoln, if he’s in the mood and the occasion appropriate, enjoys replying, “No, it’s not. Abe Lincoln was a chronic depressive and possible homosexual. Mrs. Lincoln went mad. Three of their four boys died young, and the survivor grew up to be a monumentally crass and greedy lawyer. Those are not the genes I prefer to be carrying, thank you very much.” But the retort is not much solace. He probably wouldn’t have to field the question if he lived in New York.

2

D
ESPERATE TO AVOID
another crisis, John Lincoln spends the next hour and a half going back over the manuscript of
Walking Tours of the Windy City
, erasing about a quarter of his careful pencil edits and laboriously eliminating traces of his most virulent marginal comments. He struggles particularly to remove all evidence of “ZZZZZ!!!” which he’s scrawled in big letters on page 189, opposite a tedious digression into the natural properties of the winding moraine left along the Chicago lakefront twenty thousand years ago by the receding Wisconsin Glacier. Lincoln realizes that he must have been especially annoyed reading this geography lesson because even after he wears down an entire pencil eraser, the lingering imprint of “ZZZZZ!!!” is still clearly visible on the edge of the page, and even the watery eyes of Professor Fleace could probably spot it. Finally, Lincoln resorts to an old dodge and scribbles, “Well put!” in a heavy hand over the shadowy
z
’s, then erases the whole jumbled mess until he’s certain the professor, even with the aid of a sharp-eyed young grad student and a magnifying glass, could never decipher the underlying offense.

No more angry writers. John Lincoln is not by nature a vituperative or even unpleasant fellow, but his caustic side began
building when he landed in Chicago, and lately it’s expanded to fill all corners of his life. And yet, he doesn’t see himself as a bitter person—frustrated, rather, that things haven’t turned out better. Confounded. During times of adversity, his father was fond of quoting what he claimed was an old Chinese proverb: This, too, shall pass. Lincoln has started to wonder: When?

Of course, the adversity that prompted his father was always national or global in scope, never personal. Lincoln may not be descended from the sixteenth president, but on both sides of the family tree, he comes from a long line of high-achieving WASPs whose gene pool hasn’t deteriorated over the generations (perhaps, Lincoln reasons, because they never got rich). His distinguished ancestors feature a few doctors and businessmen, but most practiced law, frequently moving between private work and public service, staying largely true to their liberal principles (Eleanor Roosevelt was a dear family friend). Lincoln’s father has followed the pattern, with two tours of duty in the Department of Justice under Democratic administrations. Growing up, Lincoln assumed that his future promised a similar course—at least, he so assumed to the extent that his thoughts of the future stretched beyond dreams of glory on the basketball court. But then he broke his arm the summer before his senior year of high school, delaying his playing season and diluting the interest of the basketball coaches at Dartmouth and Brown, whose attention might otherwise have overcome those pesky Bs on Lincoln’s transcript. Lincoln’s parents couldn’t quite believe that the best he could do was the U of C, not so much because they had an unrealistic view of his record, but because he was
their
son, and certainly
their
son didn’t default to the Midwest for college. Their disappointment inflated when Lincoln majored in English (not history! not government!) and then threatened briefly to pursue the subject as an academic career. But Lincoln found solace in the study of literature. He was good at it (in four years in Hyde Park, a sea of math and science geniuses, he never once met a student who
could top his 780 on the verbal SATs), and in an odd way, literature offered an outlet for the competitive drive he’d previously exercised in sports. The right word, the best sentence, the most penetrating insight—this was a game Lincoln could play and play well. That summer as an intern at Malcolm House cemented the attraction, and Lincoln concluded he’d found an outlet for his curious personality mix of testosterone and aesthetics.

His parents sounded more baffled than dismayed when he announced he was taking a job as a news clerk at the
Chicago Tribune
. (“But where do you
go
with that?” his father had asked, as if Woodward and Bernstein, after taking down a corrupt president, had put away their childish things and gone on to productive and civic-minded careers.) Though he never discarded his original disdain for Chicago, Lincoln moved up quickly at the newspaper, and when his momentum seemed to stall as assistant metro editor, he made his move to book publishing, buying into Duddleston’s promise that together they could build Pistakee into the premier house west of the Hudson.

But that was three years ago, and scores of flaccid, forgettable manuscripts later, Lincoln realizes that building a publishing house entails hours of tedium with dribble like
Wrigley Field: A People’s History
and the constant hope that somewhere, somehow, he will find a book that makes a splash. He knows what he wants—at least, he thinks he does: get to New York, the publishing Mecca; land a job with one of the big houses, where he will edit
real
writers, the kind whose sentences leave you stunned and humbled; and bring out
real
books, the kind that get reviewed in the
New York Times Book Review
. Lincoln used to be in occasional touch with Jeff Kessler, the boss at Malcolm House (who was just a bright, friendly new editor when Lincoln interned there), and Kessler offered boundless encouragement, but never a job. The same with Angela Morrisroe at Pottersby, William Upswitch at Burling, and a handful of other top editors at New York houses. Even now, with the economy stalled and publishing in turmoil,
several of them remain generous with their time when Lincoln makes his periodic trips to Manhattan. But he reads perfectly the subtext of their compliments about his budding talent: Prove it. If you think you’re so hot out there in the flatlands, publish a book that somebody cares about, somebody besides a handful of ambulatory Midwest grannies and a few addled fans of the dipshit Cubs.