The Corrections

by Jonathan Franzen

  “Finally, finally, going to get rid of some of these magazines,” she said, snapping the glossy pages.

  “Mother?”

  “It’s better not to talk about this. Just like the Navy, don’t ask, don’t tell.”

  Denise stood in the kitchen doorway with her arms crossed and a dish towel balled up in her hand. “Where did you get the idea that I’m involved with a married man?”

  Enid snapped another page.

  “Did Gary say something to give you that idea?”

  Enid struggled to shake her head. Denise would be furious if she found out that Gary had betrayed a confidence, and though Enid spent much of her own life furious with Gary about one thing or another, she prided herself on keeping secrets, and she didn’t want to get him in trouble. It was true that she’d been brooding about Denise’s situation for many months and had accumulated large stores of anger. She’d ironed at the ironing board and raked the ivy beds and lain awake at night rehearsing the judgments—That is the kind of grossly selfish behavior that I will never understand and never forgive and I’m ashamed to be the parent of a person who would live like that and In a situation like this, Denise, my sympathies are one thousand percent with the wife, one thousand percent— that she yearned to pronounce on Denise’s immoral lifestyle. And now she had an opportunity to pronounce these judgments. And yet, if Denise denied the charges, then all of Enid’s anger, all of her refining and rehearsal of her judgments, would go wasted. And if, on the other hand, Denise admitted everything, it might still be wiser for Enid to swallow her pent-up judgments than to risk a fight. Enid needed Denise as an ally on the Christmas front, and she didn’t want to set off on a luxury cruise with one son having vanished inexplicably, another son blaming her for betraying his trust, and her daughter perhaps confirming her worst fears.

  With great humbling effort she therefore shook her head. “No, no, no. Gary never said a thing.”

  Denise narrowed her eyes. “Never said a thing about what.”

  “Denise,” Alfred said. “Let her be.”

  And Denise, who obeyed Enid in nothing, promptly turned and went back into the kitchen.

  Enid found a coupon offering sixty cents off I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! with any purchase of Thomas’ English muffins. Her scissors cut the paper and with it the silence that had fallen.

  “If I do one thing on this cruise,” she said, “I’m going to get through all these magazines.”

  “No sign of Chip,” Alfred said.

  Denise brought slices of tart on dessert plates to the dining table. “I’m afraid we may have seen the last of Chip today.”

  “It’s very peculiar,” Enid said. “I don’t understand why he doesn’t at least call.”

  “I’ve endured worse,” Alfred said.

  “Dad, there’s dessert. My pastry chef made a pear tart. Do you want to have it at the table?”

  “Oh, that’s much too big a piece for me,” Enid said.

  “Dad?”

  Alfred didn’t answer. His mouth had gone slack and sour again in the way that made Enid feel that something terrible was going to happen. He turned to the darkening, rain-spotted windows and gazed at them dully, his head hanging low.

  “Dad?”

  “Al? There’s dessert.”

  Something seemed to melt in him. Still looking at the window, he raised his head with a tentative joy, as if he thought he recognized someone outside, someone he loved.

  “Al, what is it?”

  “Dad?”

  “There are children,” he said, sitting up straighter. “Do you see them?” He raised a trembling index finger. “There.” His finger moved laterally, following the motion of the children he saw. “And there. And there.”

  He turned to Enid and Denise as if he expected them to be overjoyed to hear this news, but Enid was not the least bit overjoyed. She was about to embark on a very elegant fall color cruise on which it would be extremely important that Alfred not make mistakes like this.

  “Al, those are sunflowers,” she said, half angry, half beseeching. “You’re seeing reflections in the window.”

  “Well!” He shook his head bluffly. “I thought I saw children.”

  “No, sunflowers,” Enid said. “You saw sunflowers.”

  After his party was voted out of power and the Russian currency crisis had finished off the Lithuanian economy, Gitanas said, he’d passed his days alone in the old offices of the VIPPPAKJRIINPB17, devoting his idle hours to constructing a Web site whose domain name, lithuania. com, he’d purchased from an East Prussian speculator for a truckload of mimeograph machines, daisy-wheel printers, 64-kilobyte Commodore computers, and other Gorbachev-era office equipment—the party’s last physical vestiges. To publicize the plight of small debtor nations, Gitanas had created a satiric Web page offering DEMOCRACY FOR PROFIT: BUY A PIECE OF EUROPEAN HISTORY and had seeded links and references in American news groups and chat rooms for investors. Visitors to the site were invited to send cash to the erstwhile VIPPPAKJRIINPB17—“one of Lithuania’s most venerable political parties,” the “cornerstone” of the country’s governing coalition for “three of the last seven years,” the leading vote-getter in the April 1993 general election, and now a “Western-leaning pro-business party” reorganized as the “Free Market Party Company.” Gitanas’s Web site promised that, as soon as the Free Market Party Company had bought enough votes to win a national election, its foreign investors would not only become “equity shareholders” in Lithuania Incorporated (a “for-profit nation state”) but would also be rewarded, in proportion to the size of their investment, with personalized memorials to their “heroic contribution” to the “market liberation” of the country. By sending just $100, for example, an American investor could have a street in Vilnius (“no less than two hundred meters in length”) named after him; for $5,000 the Free Market Party Company would hang a portrait of the investor (“minimum size 60 cm × 80 cm; includes ornate gilt frame”) in the Gallery of National Heroes at the historic Šlapeliai House; for $25,000 the investor would be awarded perpetual title to an eponymous town “of no fewer than 5,000 souls” and be granted a “modern, hygienic form of droit du seigneur” that met “most of” the guidelines established by the Third International Conference on Human Rights.

  “It was a nasty little joke,” Gitanas said from the corner of the taxicab into which he’d wedged himself. “But who laughed? Nobody laughed. They just sent money. I gave an address and the cashier checks started coming in. E-mail queries by the hundred. What products would Lithuania Inc. make? Who were the officers in the Free Market Party Company and did they have a strong track record as managers? Did I have records of past earnings? Could the investor alternatively have a Lithuanian street or village named after his children or his children’s favorite Pokémon character? Everybody wanted more information. Everybody wanted brochures. And prospectuses! And stock certificates! And brokerage information! And are we listed on such and such exchange and so forth? People want to come and visit! And nobody is laughing.”

  Chip was tapping on the window with a knuckle and checking out the women on Sixth Avenue. The rain was letting up, umbrellas coming down. “Are the proceeds going to you or to the Party?”

  “OK, so my philosophy about that is in transition,” Gitanas said. From his briefcase he took a bottle of akvavit from which he’d already poured deal-sealing shots in Eden’s office. He rolled sideways and handed it to Chip, who took a healthy pull and gave it back.

  “You were an English teacher,” Gitanas said.

  “I taught college, yeah.”

  “And where your people from? Scandinavia?”

  “My dad’s Scandinavian,” Chip said. “My mom’s sort of mongrel Eastern European.”

  “People in Vilnius will look at you and think you’re one of us.”

  Chip was in a hurry to get to his
apartment before his parents left. Now that he had cash in his pocket, a roll of thirty hundreds, he didn’t care so much what his parents thought of him. In fact, he seemed to recall that a few hours earlier he’d seen his father trembling and pleading in a doorway. As he drank the akvavit and checked out the women on the sidewalk, he could no longer fathom why the old man had seemed like such a killer.

  It was true that Alfred believed the only thing wrong with the death penalty was that it wasn’t used often enough; true as well that the men whose gassing or electrocution he’d called for, over dinner in Chip’s childhood, were usually black men from the slums on St. Jude’s north side. (“Oh, Al,” Enid would say, because dinner was “the family meal,” and she couldn’t understand why they had to spend it talking about gas chambers and slaughter in the streets.) And one Sunday morning, after he’d stood at a window counting squirrels and assessing the damage to his oak trees and zoysia the way white men in marginal neighborhoods took stock of how many houses had been lost to “the blacks,” Alfred had performed an experiment in genocide. Incensed that the squirrels in his not-large front yard lacked the discipline to stop reproducing or pick up after themselves, he went to the basement and found a rat trap over which Enid, as he came upstairs with it, shook her head and made small negative noises. “Nineteen of them!” Alfred said. “Nineteen of them!” Emotional appeals were no match for the discipline of such an exact and scientific figure. He baited the trap with a piece of the same whole wheat bread that Chip had eaten, toasted, for breakfast. Then all five Lamberts went to church, and between the Gloria Patri and the Doxology a young male squirrel, engaging in the high-risk behavior of the economically desperate, helped itself to the bread and had its skull crushed. The family came home to find green flies feasting on the blood and brain matter and chewed wholewheat bread that had erupted through the young squirrel’s shattered jaws. Alfred’s own mouth and chin were sewn up in the distaste that special exertions of discipline—the spanking of a child, the eating of rutabaga—always caused him. (He was quite unconscious of this distaste he betrayed for discipline.) He fetched a shovel from the garage and loaded both the trap and the squirrel corpse into the paper grocery bag that Enid had half filled with pulled crabgrass the day before. Chip was following all this from about twenty steps behind him, and so he saw how, when Alfred entered the basement from the garage, his legs buckled a little, sideways, and he pitched into the washing machine, and then he ran past the Ping-Pong table (it had always scared Chip to see his father run, he seemed too old for it, too disciplined) and disappeared into the basement bathroom; and henceforth the squirrels did whatever they wanted.

  The cab was approaching University Place. Chip considered returning to the Cedar Tavern and reimbursing the bartender, maybe giving her an even hundred to make everything OK, maybe getting her name and address and writing to her from Lithuania. He was leaning forward to direct the driver to the Tavern when a radical new thought arrested him: I stole nine bucks, that’s what I did, that’s who I am, tough luck for her.

  He sat back and extended his hand for the bottle.

  Outside his building the cabby waved away his hundred—too big, too big. Gitanas dug something smaller out of his red motocross jacket.

  “Why don’t I meet you at your hotel?” Chip said.

  Gitanas was amused. “You’re joking, right? I mean, I trust you a lot. But maybe I’ll wait down here. Pack your bag, take your time. Bring a warm coat and hat. Suits and ties. Think financial.”

  The doorman Zoroaster was nowhere to be seen. Chip had to use his key to get inside. On the elevator he took deep breaths to quell his excitement. He didn’t feel afraid, he felt generous, he felt ready to embrace his father.

  But his apartment was empty. His family must have left minutes earlier. Body warmth was hanging in the air, faint smells of Enid’s White Shoulders perfume, and something bathroomy, something old-persony. The kitchen was cleaner than Chip had ever seen it. In the living room all the scrubbing and stowing he’d done was visible now as it hadn’t been the night before. And his bookshelves were denuded. And Julia had taken her shampoos and dryer from the bathroom. And he was drunker than he’d realized. And nobody had left a note for him. There was nothing on the dining table except a slice of tart and a vase of sunflowers. He had to pack his bags, but everything around him and inside him had become so strange that for a moment he could only stand and look. The leaves of the sunflowers had black spots and were rimmed with pale senescences; the heads were meaty and splendid, heavy as brownies, thick as palms. In the center of a sunflower’s Kansan face was a subtly pale button within a subtly darker areola. Nature, Chip thought, could hardly have devised a more inviting bed for a small winged insect to tumble into. He touched the brown velvet, and ecstasy washed over him.

  The taxi containing three Lamberts arrived at a midtown pier where a white high-rise of a cruise ship, the Gunnar Myrdal, was blotting out the river and New Jersey and half the sky. A crowd mostly of old people had converged on the gate and reattenuated in the long, bright corridor beyond it. There was something netherworldly in their determined migration, something chilling in the cordiality and white raiment of the Nordic Pleasurelines shore personnel, the rain clouds breaking up too late to save the day—the hush of it all. A throng and twilight by the Styx.

  Denise paid the cab fare and got the luggage into the hands of handlers.

  “So, now, where do you go from here?” Enid asked her.

  “Back to work in Philly.”

  “You look darling,” Enid said spontaneously. “I love your hair that length.”

  Alfred seized Denise’s hands and thanked her.

  “I just wish it had been a better day for Chip,” Denise said.

  “Talk to Gary about Christmas,” Enid said. “And do think about coming for a whole week.”

  Denise raised a leather cuff and checked the time. “I’ll come for five days. I don’t think Gary will do it, though. And who knows what’s up with Chip.”

  “Denise,” Alfred said impatiently, as if she were speaking nonsense, “please talk to Gary.”

  “OK, I will. I will.”

  Alfred’s hands bounced in the air. “I don’t know how much time I have! You and your mother need to get along. You and Gary need to get along.”

  “Al, you have plenty of—”

  “We all need to get along!”

  Denise had never been a crier, but her face was crumpling up. “Dad, all right,” she said. “I’ll talk to him.”

  “Your mother wants a Christmas in St. Jude.”

  “I’ll talk to him. I promise.”

  “Well.” He turned abruptly. “That’s enough of that.”

  His black raincoat was flapping and whipping in the wind, and still Enid managed to hope that the weather would be perfect for cruising, that the water would be calm.

  In dry clothes, with a coat bag and a duffel and cigarettes—smooth lethal Murattis, five bucks a box—Chip rode out to Kennedy with Gitanas Misevičius and boarded the Helsinki flight on which, in violation of his oral contract, Gitanas had bought coach-class, not business-class, tickets. “We can drink tonight, sleep tomorrow,” he said.

  Their seats were aisle and window. As Chip sat down, he recalled how Julia had ditched Gitanas. He imagined her walking quickly off the plane and then sprinting down the concourse and throwing herself into the back seat of a good old yellow cab. He felt a spasm of homesickness—terror of the other; love of the familiar—but, unlike Julia, he had no desire to bolt. He’d no sooner buckled his seat belt than he fell asleep. He awoke briefly during takeoff and went under again until the entire population of the plane, as one, lit cigarettes.

  Gitanas took a computer from its case and booted up. “So Julia,” he said.

  For an alarmed, sleep-clouded moment Chip thought that Gitanas was addressing him as Julia.

  “My wife?” Gitanas
said.

  “Oh. Sure.”

  “Yeah, she’s on antidepressants. This was Eden’s idea, I think. Eden kind of runs her life now, I think. You could see she didn’t want me in her office today. Didn’t want me in town! I’m inconvenient now. So, but, OK, so Julia started taking the drug, and suddenly she woke up and she didn’t want to be with men with cigarette burns anymore. That’s what she says. Enough men with cigarette burns. Time to move on. No more men with burns.” Gitanas loaded a CD into the computer’s CD drive. “She wants the flat, though. At least the divorce lawyer wants her to want it. The divorce lawyer that Eden’s paying for. Somebody changed the locks on the flat, I had to pay the super to let me in.”

  Chip closed his left hand. “Cigarette burns?”

  “Yeah. Oh, yeah, I got a few.” Gitanas craned his neck to see if any neighbors were listening, but all the passengers around them, except for two children with their eyes shut tight, were busy smoking. “Soviet military prison,” he said. “I’ll show you my memento of a pleasant stay there.” He peeled his red leather jacket off one arm and rolled up the sleeve of the yellow T-shirt he was wearing underneath. A poxy interlocking constellation of scar tissue extended from his armpit down the inside of his arm to his elbow. “This was my 1990,” he said. “Eight months in a Red Army barracks in the sovereign state of Lithuania.”

  “You were a dissident,” Chip said.

  “Yeah! Yeah! Dissident!” He worked his arm back into its sleeve. “It was horrible, great. Very tiring, but it didn’t feel tiring. The tiredness came later.”

  Chip’s memories of 1990 were of Tudor dramas, interminable futile fights with Tori Timmelman, a secret unhealthy involvement with certain texts of Tori’s that illustrated the dehumanizing objectifications of pornography, and little else.

  “So, I’m kind of scared to look at this,” Gitanas said. On his computer screen was a dusky monochrome image of a bed, viewed from above, with a body beneath the blankets. “The super says she’s got a boyfriend, and I retrieved some data. I had my surveillance in there from the previous owner. Motion detector, infrared, digital stills. You can look if you want. Might be interesting. Might be hot.”