Are You Happy Now? by Richard Babcock

Author:Richard Babcock
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: AmazonEncore
Published: 2012-11-05T20:00:00+00:00

20

LINCOLN RISES EARLY the next morning. In the chill, gray North Woods dawn, after gobbling aspirin and grabbing coffee and doughnuts from the spread laid out in the Lunker’s reception room, he comes to grips with his idea from the night before. Using first person means Lincoln has to channel Mary Reilly, Amy’s protagonist. As he sits at the little desk in room 14 and starts to work, Lincoln finds it surprisingly easy to drop into the head of a twenty-one-year-old woman, smart and opinionated, emerging from a sheltered life and eager for experience.

He works straight through to noon, almost finishing the first chapter, when there’s a knock on his door. “Mr. Lincoln?” calls out Mrs. Lunker. “Do you want me to clean your room?”

Fresh sheets, new towels. “Sure,” Lincoln answers. He’ll take a break for that.

The proprietress enters pushing a cart. “I usually have an Indian girl do the cleaning, but I let her off this time of year since things are slow,” the woman explains. Talking to Lincoln, she glances past him and around the room, looking for evidence of his mysterious activities. Her nervous manner suggests that she knows he’s a writer and that she hasn’t forgotten last year’s suicide. “Were you able to get your work done this morning?” she asks.

Lincoln realizes he had better clear out while she is there. “Yes, thanks. Now, I think I’ll run and get a bite to eat,” and he’s out the door before she can continue her cross-examination.

The room sparkles when he returns, and he works feverishly through the afternoon. He struggles occasionally to express Mary Reilly’s thoughts, particularly when the subjects turn physical and intimate. But Amy has provided some of that material in the original, and Lincoln can simply jigger the language to bring it around to first person. Besides, having to speak through the voice of a young woman teases out Lincoln’s imagination. He finds he can make observations about colors, appearances, moods with a fluency he hardly expected. Editing a book last year on the costume collection at the History Museum has given him the vocabulary to talk about clothes. And, he reminds himself, he grew up listening to a mother and a sister. After a while, he gets cocky. As a modern man, he holds that the sexes aren’t really that different, but he starts to believe that for purposes of fiction, the differences favor a woman’s voice. Women are more confessional, more honest about themselves. They’re willing to appear vulnerable. Men are guarded, stiff. So much to hide. If Mary Reilly were a man, the book would be a fraction as long, a CliffsNotes version of the story. Every now and then, Lincoln worries about how Amy will react to his changes, but he tells himself he hasn’t really altered the substance of her book, just redirected it slightly. And she can always rewrite his rewrite, if it comes to that.

Lincoln works late into the evening, and he pounds away virtually nonstop the next day, Christmas Eve, even waving away Mrs.

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