The Corrections

by Jonathan Franzen

  “He gets business-class plane fare, too, of course,” Eden said.

  “Yes, all right.”

  “And first-class accommodations in Vilnius.”

  “There’s a room in the villa, no problem.”

  “Also, who protects him from these criminal warlords?”

  “Maybe I’m a criminal warlord myself, a little bit,” Gitanas said with a wary, shame-faced smile.

  Chip considered the mess of green on Eden’s desk. Something was giving him a hard-on, possibly the cash, possibly the vision of corrupt and sumptuous nineteen-year-olds, or maybe just the prospect of getting on a plane and putting five thousand miles between himself and the nightmare of his life in New York City. What made drugs perpetually so sexy was the opportunity to be other. Years after he’d figured out that pot only made him paranoid and sleepless, he still got hard-ons at the thought of smoking it. Still lusted for that jailbreak.

  He touched the hundreds.

  “Why don’t I get online and make plane reservations for you both,” Eden said. “You can leave right away!”

  “So, you gonna do this thing?” Gitanas asked. “It’s a lot of work, lot of fun. Pretty low risk. No such thing as no risk, though. Not where there’s money.”

  “I understand,” Chip said, touching the hundreds.

  * * *

  In the pageantry of weddings Enid reliably experienced the paroxysmal love of place—of the Midwest in general and suburban St. Jude in particular—that for her was the only true patriotism and the only viable spirituality. Living under presidents as crooked as Nixon and stupid as Reagan and disgusting as Clinton, she’d lost interest in American flag-waving, and not one of the miracles she’d ever prayed to God for had come to pass; but at a Saturday wedding in the lilac season, from a pew of the Paradise Valley Presbyterian Church, she could look around and see two hundred nice people and not a single bad one. All her friends were nice and had nice friends, and since nice people tended to raise nice children, Enid’s world was like a lawn in which the bluegrass grew so thick that evil was simply choked out: a miracle of niceness. If, for example, it was one of Esther and Kirby Root’s girls coming down the Presbyterian aisle on Kirby’s arm, Enid would remember how the little Root had trick-or-treated in a ballerina costume, vended Girl Scout cookies, and baby-sat Denise, and how, even after the Root girls had gone off to good midwestern colleges, they all still made a point, when home on holiday, of tapping on Enid’s back door and filling her in on the doings chez Root, often sitting and visiting for an hour or more (and not, Enid knew, because Esther had told them to come over but just because they were good St. Jude kids who naturally took an interest in other people), and Enid’s heart would swell at the sight of yet another sweetly charitable Root girl now receiving, as her reward, the vows of a young man with a neat haircut of the kind you saw in ads for menswear, a really super young fellow who had an upbeat attitude and was polite to older people and didn’t believe in premarital sex, and who had a job that contributed to society, such as electrical engineer or environmental biologist, and who came from a loving, stable, traditional family and wanted to start a loving, stable, traditional family of his own. Unless Enid was very much deceived by appearances, young men of this caliber continued, even as the twentieth century drew to a close, to be the norm in suburban St. Jude. All the young fellows she’d known as Cub Scouts and users of her downstairs bathroom and shovelers of her snow, the many Driblett boys, the various Persons, the young Schumpert twins, all these clean-cut and handsome young men (whom Denise, as a teenager, to Enid’s quiet rage, had dismissed with her look of “amusement”), had marched or would soon be marching down heartland Protestant aisles and exchanging vows with nice, normal girls and settling down, if not in St. Jude itself, then at least in the same time zone. Now, in her secret heart, where she was less different from her daughter than she liked to admit, Enid knew that tuxes came in better colors than powder blue and that bridesmaids’ dresses could be cut from more interesting fabrics than mauve crepe de chine; and yet, although honesty compelled her to withhold the adjective “elegant” from weddings in this style, there was a louder and happier part of her heart that loved this kind of wedding best of all, because a lack of sophistication assured the assembled guests that for the two families being joined together there were values that mattered more than style. Enid believed in matching and was happiest at a wedding where the bridesmaids suppressed their selfish individual desires and wore dresses that matched the corsages and cocktail napkins, the icing on the cake, and the ribbons on the party favors. She liked a ceremony at Chiltsville Methodist to be followed by a modest reception at the Chiltsville Sheraton. She liked a more elegant wedding at Paradise Valley Presbyterian to culminate in the clubhouse at Deepmire, where even the complimentary matches (Dean & Trish ♦ June 13, 1987) matched the color scheme. Most important of all was that the bride and groom themselves match: have similar backgrounds and ages and educations. Sometimes, at a wedding hosted by less good friends of Enid’s, the bride would be heavier or significantly older than the groom, or the groom’s family would hail from a farm town upstate and be obviously overawed by Deepmire’s elegance. Enid felt sorry for the principals at a reception like that. She just knew the marriage was going to be a struggle from day one. More typically, though, the only discordant note at Deepmire would be an off-color toast offered by some secondary groomsman, often a college buddy of the groom, often mustached or weak-chinned, invariably flushed with liquor, who sounded as if he didn’t come from the Midwest at all but from some more eastern urban place, and who tried to show off by making a “humorous” reference to premarital sex, causing both groom and bride to blush or to laugh with their eyes closed (not, Enid felt, because they were amused but because they were naturally tactful and didn’t want the offender to realize how offensive his remark was) while Alfred inclined his head deafly and Enid cast her eye around the room until she found a friend with whom she could exchange a reassuring frown.

  Alfred loved weddings, too. They seemed to him the one kind of party that had a real purpose. Under their spell he authorized purchases (a new dress for Enid, a new suit for himself, a top-quality ten-piece teakwood salad-bowl set for a gift) that he ordinarily would have vetoed as unreasonable.

  Enid had looked forward, some day when Denise was older and had finished college, to hosting a really elegant wedding and reception (though not, alas, at Deepmire, since, almost alone among their better friends, the Lamberts could not afford the astronomical Deepmire fees) for Denise and a tall, broad-shouldered, possibly Scandinavian young man whose flaxen hair would offset the defect of the too-dark and too-curly hair Denise had inherited from Enid but who would otherwise be her match. And so it just about broke Enid’s heart when, one October night, not three weeks after Chuck Meisner had given his daughter Cindy the most lavish reception ever undertaken at Deepmire, with all the men in tails, and a champagne fountain, and a helicopter on the eighteenth fairway, and a brass octet playing fanfares, Denise called home with the news that she and her boss had driven to Atlantic City and gotten married in a courthouse. Enid, who had a very strong stomach (never got sick, never), had to hand the phone to Alfred and go kneel in the bathroom and take deep breaths.

  The previous spring, in Philadelphia, she and Alfred had eaten a late lunch at the noisy restaurant where Denise was ruining her hands and wasting her youth. After their lunch, which was quite good but much too rich, Denise had made a point of introducing them to the “chef” under whom she’d studied and for whom she was now boiling and toiling. This “chef,” Emile Berger, was a short, unsmiling, middle-aged Jew from Montreal whose idea of dressing for work was to wear an old white T-shirt (like a cook, not a chef, Enid thought; no jacket, no toque) and whose idea of shaving was to skip it. Enid would have disliked Emile and snubbed him even if she hadn’t gathered, from Denise’s way of hanging on his words, that he had an unhealthy degree of influence with
her daughter. “Those are such rich crab cakes,” she accused in the kitchen. “One bite and I was stuffed.” To which, instead of apologizing and deprecating himself, as any polite St. Judean would have done, Emile responded by agreeing that, yes, if it could be managed, and the flavor was good, a “lite” crab cake would be a wonderful thing, but the question, Mrs. Lambert, was how to manage it? Eh? How to make crabmeat “lite”? Denise was following this exchange hungrily, as if she’d scripted it or were memorizing it. Outside the restaurant, before she returned to her fourteen-hour shift, Enid made sure to say to her: “He certainly is a short little man! So Jewish-looking.” Her tone was less controlled than she might have wished, a little squeakier and thinner at the edges, and she could tell from the distant look in Denise’s eyes and from a bitterness around her mouth that she’d bruised her daughter’s feelings. Then again, all she’d done was speak the truth. And she never, not for a second, imagined that Denise—who, no matter how immature and romantic she was, and no matter how impractical her career plans, had just turned twenty-three and had a beautiful face and figure and her whole life ahead of her—would actually date a person like Emile. As to what exactly a young woman was supposed to do with her physical charms while she waited for the maturing years to pass, now that girls no longer got married quite so young, Enid was, to be sure, somewhat vague. In a general way she believed in socializing in groups of three or more; believed, in a word, in parties! The one thing she knew categorically, the principle she embraced the more passionately the more it was ridiculed in the media and popular entertainments, was that sex before marriage was immoral.

  And yet, on that October night, as she knelt on the bathroom floor, Enid had the heretical thought that it might after all have been wiser, in her maternal homilies, to have laid less stress on marriage. It occurred to her that Denise’s rash act might even have been prompted, in some tiny part, by her wish to do the moral thing and please her mother. Like a toothbrush in the toilet bowl, like a dead cricket in a salad, like a diaper on the dinner table, this sickening conundrum confronted Enid: that it might actually have been preferable for Denise to go ahead and commit adultery, better to sully herself with a momentary selfish pleasure, better to waste a purity that every decent young man had the right to expect from a prospective bride, than to marry Emile. Except that Denise should never have been attracted to Emile in the first place! It was the same problem Enid had with Chip and even Gary: her children didn’t match. They didn’t want the things that she and all her friends and all her friends’ children wanted. Her children wanted radically, shamefully other things.

  While observing peripherally that the bathroom carpet was more spotted than she’d realized and ought to be replaced before the holidays, Enid listened to Alfred offering to send Denise a pair of plane tickets. She was struck by the seeming calm with which Alfred took the news that his only daughter had made the biggest decision of her life without consulting him. But after he’d hung up the phone and she’d come out of the bathroom and he’d commented, simply, that life was full of surprises, she noticed how strangely his hands were shaking. The tremor was at once looser and more intense than the one he sometimes got from drinking coffee. And during the week that followed, while Enid made the best of the mortifying position in which Denise had placed her by (1) calling her best friends and sounding thrilled to announce that Denise was getting married soon! to a very nice Canadian man, yes, but she wanted immediate family only at the ceremony, so, and she was introducing her new husband at a simple, informal open house at Christmastime (none of Enid’s friends believed that she was thrilled, but they gave her full credit for trying to hide her suffering; some were even sensitive enough not to ask where Denise had registered for gifts) and (2) ordering, without Denise’s permission, two hundred engraved announcements, not only to make the wedding appear more conventional but also to shake the gift tree a little in hopes of receiving compensation for the dozens and dozens of teakwood salad sets that she and Alfred had given in the last twenty years: during this long week, Enid was so continually aware of Alfred’s strange new tremor that when, by and by, he agreed to see his doctor and was referred to Dr. Hedgpeth and diagnosed with Parkinson’s, an underground branch of her intelligence persisted in connecting his disease with Denise’s announcement and so in blaming her daughter for the subsequent plummeting of her own quality of life, even though Dr. Hedgpeth had stressed that Parkinson’s was somatic in origin and gradual in its onset. By the time the holidays rolled around, and Dr. Hedgpeth had provided her and Alfred with pamphlets and booklets whose drab doctor’s-office color schemes, dismal line drawings, and frightening medical photos presaged a drab and dismal and frightening future, Enid was pretty well convinced that Denise and Emile had ruined her life. She was under strict orders from Alfred, however, to make Emile feel welcome in the family. So at the open house for the newlyweds she painted a smile on her face and accepted, over and over, the sincere congratulations of old family friends who loved Denise and thought she was darling (because Enid in raising her had emphasized the importance of being kind to her elders) (although what was her marriage if not an instance of excessive kindness to an elder?) where she would have much preferred condolences. The effort she made to be a good sport and cheerleader, to obey Alfred and receive her middle-aged son-in-law cordially and not say one single word about his religion, only added to the shame and anger she felt five years later when Denise and Emile were divorced and Enid had to give this news, too, to all her friends. Having attached so much meaning to the marriage, having struggled so hard to accept it, she felt that the least Denise could have done was stay married.

  “Do you ever hear from Emile anymore?” Enid asked.

  Denise was drying dishes in Chip’s kitchen. “Occasionally.”

  Enid had parked herself at the dining table to clip coupons from magazines she’d taken from her Nordic Pleasurelines shoulder bag. Rain was coming down erratically in gusts that slapped and fogged the windows. Alfred was sitting on Chip’s chaise with his eyes closed.

  “I was just thinking,” Enid said, “that even if things had worked out, and you’d stayed married, you know, Denise, Emile’s going to be an old man in not too many years. And that’s so much work. You can’t imagine what a huge responsibility.”

  “In twenty-five years he’ll be younger than Dad is now,” Denise said.

  “I don’t know if I ever told you,” Enid said, “about my high-school friend Norma Greene.”

  “You tell me about Norma Greene literally every time I see you.”

  “Well, you know the story, then. Norma met this man, Floyd Voinovich, who was a perfect gentleman, quite a number of years older, with a high-paying job, and he swept her off her feet! He was always taking her to Morelli’s, and the Steamer, and the Bazelon Room, and the only problem—”

  “Mother.”

  “The only problem,” Enid insisted, “was that he was married. But Norma wasn’t supposed to worry about that. Floyd said the whole arrangement was temporary. He said he’d made a bad mistake, he had a terrible marriage, he’d never loved his wife—”

  “Mother.”

  “And he was going to divorce her.” Enid let her eyes fall shut in raconteurial pleasure. She was aware that Denise didn’t like this story, but there were plenty of things about Denise’s life that were disagreeable to Enid, too, so. “Well, this went on for years. Floyd was very smooth and charming, and he could afford to do things for Norma that a man closer to her own age couldn’t have. Norma developed a real taste for luxuries, and then, too, she’d met Floyd at an age when a girl falls head over heels in love, and Floyd had sworn up and down that he was going to divorce his wife and marry Norma. Well, by then Dad and I were married and had Gary. I remember Norma came over once when Gary was a baby, and she just wanted to hold him and hold him. She loved little children, oh, she just loved holding Gary, and I felt terrible for her, because by then she’d been seeing Floyd f
or years, and he was still not divorced. I said, Norma, you can’t wait forever. She said she’d tried to stop seeing Floyd. She’d gone on dates with other men, but they were younger and they didn’t seem matoor to her—Floyd was fifteen years older and very matoor, and I do understand how an older man has a matoority that can make him attractive to a younger woman—”

  “Mother.”

  “And, of course, these younger men couldn’t always afford to be taking Norma to fancy places or buying her flowers and gifts like Floyd did (because, see, he could really turn on the charm when she got impatient with him), and then, too, a lot of those younger men were interested in starting families, and Norma—”

  “Wasn’t so young anymore,” Denise said. “I brought some dessert. Are you ready for dessert?”

  “Well, you know what happened.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a heartbreaking story, because Norma—”

  “Yes. I know the story.”

  “Norma found herself—”

  “Mother: I know the story. You seem to think it has some bearing on my own situation.”

  “Denise, I don’t. You’ve never even told me what your ’situation’ is.”

  “Then why do you keep telling me the story of Norma Greene?”

  “I don’t see why it upsets you if it has nothing to do with your own situation.”

  “What upsets me is that you seem to think it does. Are you under the impression that I’m involved with a married man?”

  Enid was not only under this impression but was suddenly so angry about it, so clotted with disapproval, that she had difficulty breathing.