THE OTHER BIOGRAPHY OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

I am an animal in pain.

I don't think my wife understands this. Last night we went to a party after a gallery opening. The work on display had been, I thought , substandard. I had desperately wanted something I could sink into, something that I could absorb myself in, but I quickly tired of the abstract sculptures and the paintings of Georgia O'Keefe paintings and the minimalist installations with a paragraph of text shelaqued to the canvas pretending to explain the composition. The longer I looked the more I began to see my reflection in the glass protecting the works from the general public. The longer this went on the more my wife wished she had left me home that night. In my lust for inspiration I had fallen into loathing, and loathing produced a thin, acidic stream of cynicism and sarcasm that issued from my lips like water from a cold spring.

Not that I was putting off the art crowd. In fact, the blacker my mood got, the more a prized companion I became. Soon I had a flock of artists and intellectuals at my elbow, awaiting the next acid issuance from my lips, delighting in discussing the flaccid and pathetic state of the art. The flock virtually followed me to the party, and once there our generous host augmented my sarcasm with vodka tonics, pressing a fresh one into my hand at the earliest moment. Although he didn't actually, physically pour the alcohol down my throat, I reckoned he hadn't dismissed such an action out of hand and might actually make use of such a tactic had it seemed necessary. After a while the vodka got the better of me, and I lapsed into a stony silence. At this point my wife decided I had had enough fun for one evening. She poured me into the car, reminding me, somewhat unkindly, that I would only have myself to blame for how I felt in the morning, and drove us home.

This morning she regards me with a mixture of sympathy and smug self-satisfaction. She veritably sneers at me as I sip my coffee, as if to say in silence that my mood is entirely my own fault. She is right, of course. It's just that this morning I feel like my mood is none of her damned business.

The first time Abe met Mary Todd, he remarked that she had hands like butter knives. History doesn't report it, but I'd wager that he actually said that shaking hands with her was like shaking hands with a dull butter knife. History, by force of habit, would have ommitted the redundancy.

Mary had thin, cool, triangular hands. She didn't like Abe much. She was forced into the marriage by political forces; Abe was a noted lawyer, and her family was bent on social redemption. Not that they had done anything particularly bad; they just had never done anything particularly good.

My wife's hands are thin and triangualr. When I first took her hand, it brought to mind an Isosceles triangle, the kind I had used in my first year drafting class. They used it to tease us, before letting on that the right triangle and t-square were the right and left hands of the God of Architecture. My wife's hands are more like plastic than like pewter. They are small and cool, and their heels press together as they scissor against the muscles of my neck. "Are you still tired?" she asks. I nod, and the hands are encouraged. They dig deeper into my muscles, finding pools of tension that I had not known were there. "You should take some aspirin and go back to bed," she says, I say "Okay," although I know the notion of going back to bed now is wholly fanciful. I've never been good at napping. I've always envied my wife that. She can bundle up in bedclothes at almost any time of day or night and find slumber within minutes. "It's not the hangover," I tell her, "it's the bridgework. My teeth hurt."

She runs a hand across the line of my jaw. She says "I'm sure last night has something to do with it as well."

"Something," I concede.

Lincoln didn't like people. He saw them as essentially petty and stupid. This is what made him such a great lawyer: he didn't see people, he saw mistakes. How best to represent those mistakes was the only question that needed answering. As when he referred to himself and Mary as the Long and the Short of it. As when he demontrated that she could stand beneath his outstretched arm. Simple: rather than find the answer, change the question. People, being petty and stupid, would rather be amused by trivia than enlightened by wisdom, and would just as often mistake one for the other. Mary hated that about Abe, but she knew how much appearences mattered.

My wife sits on the edge of our bed, strokes my hair, and asks "Feeling better?" I nod, although I am not. I have been lying still for the better part of two hours, pretending that I will sleep if I simply lie still. My father taught me that, growing up, when I would complain that I couldn't sleep. "Just lie still, and after a while you'll fall asleep," he'd say. I tried, but it never worked.

I am an amimal in pain. I strike out with my claws in pain. My head hurts. This woman-thing is touching my head. This woman-thing must be making my head hurt. After a while I am asleep, and the pain and the woman-thing are just memories. I do not dream.

Abe signed the Emancipation Declaration under duress. He never saw the point in it, because, as a lawyer, he knew that most men treat their property with greater kindness than they do their families. But he knew he had to hurt the Confederacy. As President, he had to mark the Confederacy as the absolute enemy of everything good and right. As a lawyer, he knew that good and right are seldom matters of fact and most often matters of interpretation. He could not stop at declaring the slaves free; he had to declare them human. And, really, it was no skin off his nose. As he understood it, the real future of industry was not in flesh and bone but in steel and machinery. The South would starve if there was a war, but if that were the price of progress, so be it. He never discussed this with Mary, but she knew how he thought, and always assumed that he was up to no good. Her one consolation was that he would never take a mistress. He thought women were unclean and embarassing, and he was so consumed with ambition that he wouldn't trouble himself to make any more time for them than he had to.

They must be coerced.

I go to the window and watch my wife work in the garden. She is a good nurturer. She is skilled at knifing potash and topsoil together to form the perfect growing environment. She is an expert at making herbs flourish and weeds perish.

I go to my study and sit at the drafting table. Normally this is where I turn my back on the world. Today it is my listening post. From here I can look out on the world as it expands from our back yard. I can see over fences into neighbors' yards. Our grass is greener and fuller than theirs, and I learned why not long ago: rabbits. We have no children to chase the rabbits away, and our dog, although absolutely mad to chase squirrels, gives the rabbits free reign. So the rodential beasts are free to leave behind nitrogen-rich pellets of fertilizer. I am hungy and I am thirsty and my jaw hurts and there is no good art left in the world, but my lawn is bitchin'.

I go downstairs and meet my wife in the kitchen. She is washing loam from her hands, and I can see from the basket she brought in we will be having squash for dinner tonight, flavored with rosemary. Whether she was thinking of me or this is just what she was in the mood for I know not, and neither do I ask. I kiss her on the back of the neck, for which she gives me a pleased little murmur. I fetch a bottle of crisp, sweet white wine from the rack beside the fridge, open it, and sit at the kitchen table, sipping the wine and staring out at the dimming orange of the world outside our windows. I instantly begin to feel better.

My wife is standing behind me now, stroking my head. I can hear water beginning to heat towards a boil.

Abraham Linclon was a houshold tyrant, and Mary was glad of it when he died. She suddenly felt the freedom rushing over her, the freedom to do anything she wanted to do, and just as suddenly she discovered that there wasn't anything she particularly wanted to do, and it was as if the air had been sucked out of her world. She died a short time later, not of heartache, but of boredom. It is often the case that when great men fall they crush what had lain beneath them. When Abe fell, he sucked all of the oxygen out of the world, leaving a vacuum in his wake.

I pick up the Isosceles triangle I had absently brought from the drafting table and spin in on its point. "Sic Semper Tyranis," I say, appropos of nothing.

"What?" asks my wife.

"Nothing."

"Your teeth still hurt?" she asks, returning to cooking.

"Not so much."

"You should sue that dentist," she says, chopping what is very evidently an onion. "Hey, why don't you take the day off tomorrow? You can, you know?"