Are You Happy Now? (16 page)

T
HREE DAYS BEFORE
Bill Lemke’s big promotion at Wrigley Field, copies of his rushed book arrive in a large carton at the Pistakee office. Duddleston makes a ceremony out of opening the box, calling the staff and Lemke himself into the conference room and serving celebratory champagne and pizza. Holding the book over his head like a trophy, the boss pronounces, “This is what we can accomplish if we put our minds to it. The old patterns are falling away. It’s up to small, agile operations like us to find the new paths.”

Unfortunately, two days later, the Cubs are eliminated from any chance of making the playoffs, and suddenly Wrigley Field Night at the ballpark turns into a meaningless contest against a lackluster team, the Pittsburgh Pirates. Duddleston belatedly discovers that his wife has tickets to the ballet that evening and asks Lincoln to call Lemke with the news that the boss won’t be able to make it to the game, despite the front-row box seats that the team has provided. Lemke correctly reads the diminished interest from his publisher. “But you’re still coming, right?” he asks Lincoln through his disappointment.

“I wouldn’t miss it!” Lincoln assures, though he’d rather do anything else, short of reading another book about the team.

“Before the game, they’re going to introduce me on the pitcher’s mound and plug the book,” the author reminds him. “And then I’ve got a signing scheduled afterward at the 10
^th
Inning, the bar down the street.”

“I’ll be there!” Lincoln trills, already wondering how long he’ll have to hang around.

“You’re my guy!” Lemke crows.

But on the afternoon before the game, Mary calls for the first time in weeks. She wants to have dinner tonight with Lincoln.

“Tonight?” He is completely upended to hear from her.

“I want to see you,” she says in a soft, pleading voice, and Lincoln imagines that his marital torture is over.

So he calls Bill Lemke again and apologetically explains the turn of events. The old sportswriter, whose long bachelorhood remains a mystery to Lincoln, can’t believe that any man would pass up a Cubs game for an attempt to reconcile with his estranged wife. “You sure you don’t want to see her some other time?” he asks. Lincoln is sure. “Well, if you can get away afterward, stop by the 10
^th
Inning,” Lemke graciously offers.

“I’ll try to make it,” Lincoln promises insincerely.

He spends a jittery afternoon anticipating the evening, not sure what to expect. Mary was always hard to predict, hard to categorize—that was one of her attractions. She grew up in Minneapolis, in a big Swedish family that had married outside the tribe enough times to provide her with luxurious dark hair and vibrant brown eyes, color schemes that contrasted dramatically with her pale white skin. They met when he was at the
Tribune
and she was a few years out of Northwestern, working as a paralegal for a downtown firm, trying to decide whether to pursue a graduate degree in literature or go to law school. Mutual friends had organized a
Ulysses
discussion group, and Mary and Lincoln had signed up. She caught his attention immediately. Mary was gorgeous, athletic, lusty, smart, and in love with books. Plus, Lincoln quickly discovered to his glee, she enjoyed
exercising a small strain of cynicism—nothing sour or deflating, just enough to blast through the numbing Midwestern niceness.

But she never went to graduate school. Even before they married, she diverted into real estate. She’d always been interested in houses and décor, and a friend who’d become a broker suggested that Mary try it out, at least until she decided what she wanted to do. And Mary turned out to be quite good at it, her style and intelligence winning the confidence of buyers. She joined a small firm and carved out a specialty in North Side Victorians, and within a few years she’d become a star saleswoman. Since North Side Victorians remained popular even through the housing bust, she was one of the few real-estate professionals who continued to do reasonably well.

Did the fact that her career flourished while his stalled contribute to the troubles in their marriage? No, Lincoln decides that he enjoyed her success, admired her for it. Something else had gone awry. Their marriage was like a promising but flawed manuscript, a work-in-progress for which he couldn’t quite find the editing solution. He loved her, he was sure of that (and he assumed she loved him in return), but love alone didn’t prevent them from drifting. The effort to have a baby had been Mary’s idea. Lincoln would have been content for them to go on as before, unencumbered and slightly unstable.

On the long, awful Saturday afternoon when she announced that she needed time apart to figure out her feelings, Lincoln was caught entirely unprepared. Through her sobs, however, he sensed that she was leaving him a small opening: that if he would seize her, whisper his love, demand she love him in return, she would wake from this madness. By then, though, he was so wounded by her desire for a break in their marriage that he couldn’t bring himself to do anything but pack his things in an L.L.Bean duffel bag and leave. It took a day or so for Lincoln—lying on the air mattress in Flam’s dusty spare bedroom—to realize that he’d missed his chance, that if he loved Mary, he should have fought for her.

But now, is she giving him a second chance? He entertains a fragile optimism: in their brief phone conversation, Mary had sounded confiding, intimate—as if they’d never been apart. He vows not to let this moment pass. Tell her what he should have told her before.

They’ve arranged the date for the restaurant Erwin, a slightly pricey, artisanal-tilted favorite from their marriage. Lincoln gets there first and sits at the bar, sipping a club soda with lime (better to take it easy until he gets a feel for the flow of the occasion). Within a few minutes, he sees her approaching on the sidewalk. On this pleasant fall evening, she’s wearing a light gray sweater and a silky dark skirt that clings to her thighs as she walks. When she enters, he impulsively jumps up and takes her in his arms, giving her the sort of exuberant squeeze that dropped out of their marriage after a year or two. “Wow!” she says, gently breaking away. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

A waiter leads them to their table. The light, coppery color on Mary’s cheekbones—probably a souvenir of Sedona—reminds Lincoln of sexy excursions they made together to the Caribbean, and the dark hair curtaining her shoulders seems even more vibrant than he remembered.

The talk is awkward at first, but Lincoln orders a bottle of pinot noir, and soon the conversation eases and circles on subjects that are practiced and familiar. “I’ve been so busy!” Mary sighs, half exasperated, half pleased. “We keep signing up these corporate clients, mostly from New York, and the companies keep transferring executives out here.” She looks up from her salad. “Frankly, I think a lot of nonfinancial businesses are nervous about New York these days.”

“They don’t like the association with Wall Street?”

She nods. “It should be good for us—at least, Jerry thinks so.”

That would be Jerry Cirone, the owner of Mary’s firm, a dour, middle-aged health-food nut who can’t stop complaining about how his wife took him to the cleaners in their divorce.

“I could use some time off,” Mary continues. “But in business you’ve got to seize the moment. With the economy as it is, you can’t leave money on the table.”

There was a time, Lincoln recalls, when conversations with his wife focused often on literary matters. Now he wonders if she misses those days.

“And how are things at Pistakee?” she asks as the waiter brings their entrees.

“Good!” says Lincoln, and in the glow of the wine (not to speak of Duddleston’s acknowledgement of his hard work and the settlement of
l’affaire Buford
), he means it, at least momentarily.

They chatter on through dinner, finish the wine, order another bottle to go with dessert. Lincoln keeps looking for the opening to confess his continuing love, but for all the good cheer, their conversation remains solidly
informational
—a practical accompaniment to dinner. Let the moment arrive, he tells himself, channeling Zen. Yet as they continue through dessert—a shared helping of sour cherry pie, an Erwin specialty—still more information flows: Mary’s sister’s wedding last month; Lincoln’s update on Flam’s romantic ventures; Mary’s plans to get an MBA.

“I love real estate, but I’d like to be smarter about it,” she says at one point. “You know, really understand the way the economy works, the markets, the financing. I mean, I’m fascinated the way Jerry can explain how a tiny move by the Fed affects the banks, then the mortgage rates, and then the whole housing market.”

At this second mention of the pinched, owly boss, the name falling so easily from Mary’s lips, Lincoln suddenly gets a shivery image of the container of Tucks Hemorrhoidal Ointment he found in her medicine cabinet. In an instant, he’s constructed an entire, terrible world of betrayal and secret love all squeezed from that skinny tube.

“You all right, Linc?” Mary asks. “You look funny all of a sudden.”

“Just a little gas.” Lincoln pats his stomach.

By the time they’ve finished the pie, Lincoln has given up on saying anything about his love. Mary gets up to use the restroom, and when she returns and says with a sigh, “Linc, we’ve got to talk,” he has almost steeled himself for what is to come. She wants a divorce. The time apart has helped her realize that they weren’t really serious about each other, about marriage, that they would be stuck forever in the feckless patterns of post-grad existence, the place they’d been when they met. She says that she wants to take her life to the next level. She’ll always be fond of Lincoln, of course, but in the end this will be better for both of them.

Is there someone else?

“No. Well, yes, but he’s not the cause. It would have happened anyway.”

Jerry?

“Did you know?” Mary’s surprise passes quickly, and she explains that her boss courted her for months. She resisted, succumbed, broke it off, then took it up again. She doesn’t say, but Lincoln realizes, that this was all going on while he and Mary were still together.

At least Jerry’s got hemorrhoids, Lincoln thinks. The plague would be better, but hemorrhoids help, if only a little.

Lincoln has drunk almost an entire bottle of wine, but he doesn’t feel high so much as he feels hungover, as if he’s skipped the fun part and gone straight to the consequences. He’s limp, wasted, achy. A hole has opened in the top of his head, and a million thoughts and memories are crowding, shoving, struggling to get out, like the passengers trapped on the panicked L train. Every now and then one breaks free: The otherworldly silkiness of the hair on the ears of Cal, the family mutt when Lincoln was growing up. He can feel the sweetness now in the tips of his fingers. Or that time, a couple of years ago, when he accidentally ran into Mary at Macy’s downtown, and when she saw him, as she glanced past a rack of dresses, her face opened up like a flower.

“You want some more wine?” Mary asks genially.

No, he tells her. No more wine. He’ll take care of the bill.

She doesn’t object, and with startling swiftness, they are on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. There are so many issues, logistics,
details
to discuss. But Mary seems to feel they can wait. Lincoln rouses himself to say cavalierly, “Well, my lawyer will call your lawyer.”

“Oh, Linc,” says Mary, offering that bright face from the surprise encounter at Macy’s. She puts her hand on his forearm, the one he broke so many years ago. For an instant, he feels connected. But then she pulls away.

Lincoln wanders the North Side for two hours. It’s not so much that he can’t bear to go home alone—though he does have the hazy premonition that if he enters his apartment now, he’ll never emerge—it’s more that he can’t focus on any direction, any ending place. Even his eyes can’t focus. The streetlights are harsh, glowing suns. Neon ads become rainbows of red and yellow, blue and green. After a while, he finds himself swimming against clumps of fans leaving the Cubs game. From snippets of conversation, Lincoln gathers that the team has lost again. The subdued traffic, the air of communal misery—it offers a kind of relief. Perhaps by subconscious design, Lincoln comes to the 10
^th
Inning, the scene of Bill Lemke’s book-signing party, and after a moment’s pause, he plunges in. Lincoln has been here before, and the place is typically mobbed after games. Tonight, though, the bar is almost empty, just a few knots of people drinking beer from steins.

Lemke sits in the back corner on a folding chair in front of a card table adorned with a stack of his books. He’s alone. There’s not even any sign of the Pistakee intern who was supposed to handle credit card transactions. The author is slumped in his chair. His shoulders sag, his Cubs hat sits low over his forehead. With his faded green shirt, the enormous, flat collar like bat wings circling his throat, and his brown pants scarred with
ancient stains, he looks like nothing so much as a pile of dirty laundry carelessly tossed by a Midwest golfer on the basement floor in front of the washing machine in the summer of 1956 and miraculously preserved in the decades since.

“How’d it go?” Lincoln asks.

Lemke looks up without interest. “They forgot to introduce me,” he says.

17