Are You Happy Now? by Richard Babcock Page B

Burberry blanket adds a streak of color draped over the back of the dark blue convertible sofa, just as he remembers.
    Emboldened, Lincoln inspects the kitchen (spotless and barren, as if she’s stopped eating), and then he makes a daring tour of the master bedroom. It’s here—and in the connected bathroom—where he’ll find the evidence if Mary has taken a lover. But the graceful wrought-iron bed with its lacy white covering looks innocent. She’s moved the alarm clock from his bedtable to hers, but otherwise the setting is unchanged. He checks the two books stacked on her table: The Lazarus Project , the acclaimed new novel by the Chicagoan Aleksandar Hemon, and a paperback called Your Successful Real Estate Career . He opens the closet and reels for a moment under a wave of air fragrant with Mary’s perfume, Blue Agava by Jo Malone. His old corner of the closet remains unpopulated save for a few jackets and shirts he never bothered to retrieve. OK so far.
    Still high on the fragrance of Mary’s perfume, Lincoln enters the sparkling bathroom and bravely opens the mirrored medicine cabinet. A colorful array of makeup jars, emollients, and aspirin containers line the shelves. Lincoln allows himself only a quick peek. All looks in order. Just as he’s closing the door, though, he notices on the bottom shelf a thin, squeezed tube with a plainness that seems out of place. He takes it out and inspects: Tucks Hemorrhoidal Ointment.
    My God, Lincoln thinks. Poor Mary. She needs me.

10

    A WEEK OR so passes with no further word from Detective Evinrude. Meantime, with the arrival of August, a heat wave washes over the Midwest, smothering Chicago with a dense blanket of air. Daytime temperatures venture deep into the nineties four days running. The remorseless sun punishes anyone who strays beyond a shadow. Walking around outside, breathing the thick air streaked with faint, swampy odors, Lincoln has the odd sensation of being trapped in his high school locker room. At home, the air conditioning can’t keep up. One evening, Lincoln rides his bike to the lakefront, hoping to find a spot of relief in a breeze coming off the water. All of Chicago has the same idea. The bike path along the lake is a mob of cyclers, skaters, defiant joggers gushing sweat, fast walkers, wanderers, oblivious children, glistening shirtless musclemen, overheated dogs, exhausted young parents pushing strollers, Indians in damp and clingy saris—people of every shape, color, and style except the old, who’ve been warned constantly by Mayor Daley not to move around in the heat.
    Thwarted by the crowd, Lincoln dismounts and walks his bike north, but a group of Mexicans has colonized his rock for a picnic, and the entire park up here is a throbbing, multi-cultirefugee camp of tents and grills and screaming children, families fleeing the torturous heat inside their tenements. Soaked with sweat, Lincoln turns and walks his bike back the other way. A cluster of gasping joggers—a running club, perhaps—staggers past, and Lincoln sees something familiar in the contorted rictus of their faces, their mouths like raw gashes as they suck for air. The group is well beyond him before he makes the connection: those are the faces on the human casts he saw on his visit to Pompeii.
    And, yet, circling back to his apartment, he passes a popular Greek restaurant at the busy corner of Halsted and Webster. The proprietor has lined up tables outside along the narrow sidewalk, and each is filled with diners—Chicagoans gobbling their moussaka in the unbearable heat while a string of cars stopped at the intersection blasts hot and filthy exhaust at their feet.
    “It’s alfresco hysteria,” Lincoln tells Amy the next day when he runs into her on the elevator. His blue linen shirt is stained with sweat. “It’s as if these people are so crazed by the winter cold that they can’t bear to miss a single moment to eat outside.”
    “You sound as if you need to get away