The Corrections

by Jonathan Franzen

  Even upside down Gary could see that the prices for the equipment in Caleb’s catalogue—items with brushed-aluminum cases, color LCD screens—were three-and four-figure.

  “It’s my new hobby,” Caleb said. “I want to put a room under surveillance. Mom says I can do the kitchen if it’s OK with you.”

  “You want to put the kitchen under surveillance as a hobby?”

  “Yeah!”

  Gary shook his head. He’d had many hobbies when he was a boy, and for a long time it had pained him that his own boys seemed to have none at all. Eventually Caleb had figured out that if he used the word “hobby,” Gary wobby,” Garuld green-light expenditures he otherwise might have forbidden Caroline to make. Thus Caleb’s hobby had been photography until Caroline had bought him an autofocus camera, an SLR with a better zoom telephoto lens than Gary’s own, and a digital point-and-shoot camera. His hobby had been computers until Caroline had bought him a palmtop and a notebook. But now Caleb was nearly twelve, and Gary had been around the block one too many times. His guard was up regarding hobbies. He’d extracted from Caroline a promise not to buy Caleb more equipment of any kind without consulting with him first.

  “Surveillance is not a hobby,” he said.

  “Dad, yes it is! Mom was the one who suggested it. She said I could start with the kitchen.”

  It seemed to Gary another Warning Sign of depression that his thought was: The liquor cabinet is in the kitchen.

  “Better let me talk about this with Mom, all right?”

  “But the store’s only open till six,” Caleb said.

  “You can wait a few days. Don’t tell me you can’t.”

  “But I’ve been waiting all afternoon. You said you’d talk to me, and now it’s almost night.”

  That it was almost night gave Gary clear title to a drink. The liquor cabinet was in the kitchen. He took a step in its direction. “What equipment exactly are we talking about?”

  “Just a camera and a microphone and servo controls.” Caleb thrust the catalogue at Gary. “See, I don’t even need the expensive kind. This one’s just six fifty. Mom said it was OK.”

  Time and again Gary had the feeling that there was something disagreeable that his family wanted to forget, something only he insisted on remembering; something requiring only his nod, his go-ahead, to be forgotten. This feeling, too, was a Warning Sign.

  “Caleb,” he said, “this sounds like something you’re going to get bored with very soon. It sounds expensive and like you won’t stay interested.”

  “No! No!” Caleb said, anguished. “I’m totally interested. Dad, it’s a hobby.”

  “You’ve gotten bored, though, pretty quickly with some of the other things we’ve gotten you. Things you also said you were ‘very interested in’ at the time.”

  “This is different,” Caleb pleaded. “This time I’m really, truly interested.”

  Clearly the boy was prepared to spend any amount of devalued verbal currency to buy his father’s acquiescence.

  “Do you see what I’m saying, though?” Gary said. “Do you see the pattern? That things look one way before you buy them and another way afterward? Your feelings change after you buy things. Do you see that?”

  Caleb opened his mouth, but before he could utter another plea or complaint, a craftiness flickered in his face.

  “I guess,” he said with seeming humility. “I guess I see that.”

  “Well, do you think it’s going to happen with this new equipment?” Gary said.

  Caleb gave every appearance of giving the question serious thought. “I think this is different,” he said finally.

  “Well, OK,” Gary said. “But I want you to remember we had this conversation. I don’t want to see this become just another expensive toy you play with for a week or two and then neglect. You’re going to be a teenager pretty soon, and I want to start seeing a little longer attention span—”

  “Gary, that isn’t fair!” Caroline said hotly. She was hobbling from the doorway of the master bedroom, one shoulder hunched and her hand behind her back, applying pressure to the soothing gelpack.

  “Hello, Caroline. Didn’t realize you were listening.”

  “Caleb is not neglecting things.”

  “Right, I’m not,” Caleb said.

  “What you don’t understand,” Caroline told Gary, “is that everything’s getting used in this new hobby. That’s what’s so brilliant about it. He’s figured out a way to use all that equipment together in one—”

  “Good, well, I’m glad to hear it.”

  “He does something creative and you make him feel guilty.”

  Once, when Gary had wondered aloud if giving Caleb so many gadgets might be stunting his imagination, Caroline had all but accused him of slandering his son. Among her favorite parenting books was The Technological Imagination: What Today’s Children Have to Teach Their Parents, in which Nancy Claymore, Ph.D., contrasting the “tired paradigm” of Gifted Child as Socially Isolated Genius with the “wired paradigm” of Gifted Child as Creatively Connected Consumer, argued that electronic toys would soon be so cheap and widespread that a child’s imagination would no longer be exercised in crayon drawings and made-up stories but in the synthesis and exploitation of existing technologies—an idea that Gary found both persuasive and depressing. When he was a boy not much younger than Caleb, his hobby had been building models with Popsicle sticks.

  “Does this mean we can go to the store now?” Caleb said.

  “No, Caleb, not tonight, it’s almost six,” Caroline said.

  Caleb stamped his foot. “This always happens! I wait and wait, and then it gets too late.”

  “We’ll rent a movie,” Caroline said. “We’ll get whatever movie you want.”

  “I don’t want a movie. I want to do surveillance.”

  “It’s not going to happen,” Gary said. “So start dealing with it.”

  Caleb went to his room and slammed the door. Gary followed and flung it open. “That’s enough now,” he said. “We don’t slam doors in this house.”

  “You slam doors!”

  “I don’t want to hear another word from you.”

  “You slam doors!”

  “Do you want to spend the whole week in your room?”

  Caleb replied by crossing his eyes and sucking his lips into his mouth: not another word.

  Gary let his gaze drift into corners of the boy’s room that he ordinarily took care not to look at. Neglected in piles, like the loot in a thief’s apartment, was new photographic and computer and video equipment with an aggregate retail value possibly exceeding the annual salary of Gary’s secretary at CenTrust. Such a riot of luxury in the lair of an eleven-year-old! Various chemicals that molecular floodgates had been holding back all afternoon burst loose and flooded Gary’s neural pathways. A cascade of reactions initiated by Factor 6 relaxed his tear valves and sent a wave of nausea down his vagus: a “sense” that he survived from day to day by distracting himself from underground truths that day by day grew more compelling and decisive. The truth that he was going to die. That heaping your tomb with treasure wouldn’t save you.

  The light in the windows was failing rapidly.

  “You’re really going to use all this equipment?” he said with a tightness in his chest.

  Caleb, his lips still involuted, gave a shrug.

  “Nobody should be slamming doors,” Gary said. “Me included. All right?”

  “Yeah, Dad. Whatever.”

  Emerging from Caleb’s room into the shadowed hallway, he nearly collided with Caroline, who was hurrying on tiptoe, in her stockinged feet, back in the direction of their bedroom.

  “Again? Again? I say don’t eavesdrop, and what do you do?”

  “I wasn’t eavesdropping. I’ve got to go lie down.” And she hurried, limping, into the bedroom.

  “You can run but you can’t hide,” Gary said, following her. “I want to know why you’re eavesdropping on me.”

  “It is your
paranoia, not my eavesdropping.”

  “My paranoia?”

  Caroline slumped on the oaken king-size bed. After she and Gary were married, she’d undergone five years of twice-weekly therapy which the therapist, at the final session, had declared “an unqualified success” and which had given her a lifelong advantage over Gary in the race for mental health.

  “You seem to think everybody except you has a problem,” she said. “Which is what your mother thinks, too. Without ever—”

  “Caroline. Answer me one question. Look me in the eye and answer me one question. This afternoon, when you were—”

  “God, Gary, not this again. Listen to yourself.”

  “When you were horsing around in the rain, running yourself ragged, trying to keep up with an eleven-year-old and a fourteen-year-old—”

  “You’re obsessed! You’re obsessed with that!”

  “Running and sliding and kicking in the rain—”

  “You talk to your parents and then you take your anger out on us.”

  “Were you limping before you came inside?” Gary shook his finger in his wife’s face. “Look me in the eye, Caroline, look me right in the eye. Come on! Do it! Look me in the eye and tell me you weren’t already limping.”

  Caroline was rocking in pain. “You’re on the phone with them for the better part of an hour—”

  “You can’t do it!” Gary crowed in bitter triumph. “You’re lying to me and you will not admit you’re lying!”

  “Dad! Dad!” came a cry outside the door. Gary turned and saw Aaron shaking his head wildly, beside himself, his beautiful face twisted and tear-slick. “Stop shouting at her!”

  The remorse neurofactor (Factor 26) flooded the sites in Gary’s brain specially tailored by evolution to respond to it.

  “Aaron, all right,” he said.

  Aaron turned away and turned back and marched in place, taking big steps nowhere, as though trying to force the shameful tears out of his eyes and into his body, down through his legs, and stamp them out. “God, please, Dad, do—not—shout—at her.”

  “OK, Aaron,” Gary said. “Shouting’s over.”

  He reached to touch his son’s shoulder, but Aaron fled back up the hall. Gary left Caroline and followed him, his sense of isolation deepened by this demonstration that his wife had strong allies in the house. Her sons would protect her from her husband. Her husband who was a shouter. Like his father before him. His father before him who was now depressed. But who, in his prime, as a shouter, had so frightened young Gary that it never occurred to him to intercede on his mother’s behalf.

  Aaron was lying face down on his bed. In the tornado aftermath of laundry and magazines on the floor of his room, the two nodes of order were his Bundy trumpet (with mutes and a music stand) and his enormous alphabetized collection of compact discs, including boxed-set complete editions of Dizzy and Satchmo and Miles Davis, plus great miscellaneous quantities of Chet Baker and Wynton Marsalis and Chuck Mangione and Herb Alpert and Al Hirt, all of which Gary had given him to encourage his interest in music.

  Gary perched on the edge of the bed. “I’m sorry I upset you,” he said. “As you know, I can be a mean old judgmental bastard. And sometimes your mother has trouble admitting she’s wrong. Especially when—”

  “Her. Back. Is. Hurt,” came Aaron’s voice, muffled by a Ralph Lauren duvet. “She is not lying.”

  “I know her back hurts, Aaron. I love your mother very much.”

  “Then don’t shout at her.”

  “OK. Shouting’s over. Let’s have some dinner.” Gary lightly judo-chopped Aaron’s shoulder. “What do you say?”

  Aaron didn’t move. Further cheering words appeared to be called for, but Gary couldn’t think of any. He was experiencing a critical shortage of Factors 1 and 3. He’d had the sense, moments earlier, that Caroline was on the verge of accusing him of being “depressed,” and he was afraid that if the idea that he was depressed gained currency, he would forfeit his right to his opinions. He would forfeit his moral certainties; every word he spoke would become a symptom of disease; he would never again win an argument.

  It was therefore all the more important now to resist depression—to fight it with the truth.

  “Listen,” he said. “You were out there with Mom, playing soccer. Tell me if I’m right about this. Was she limping before she went inside?”

  For a moment, as Aaron roused himself from the bed, Gary believed that the truth would prevail. But the face Aaron showed him was a reddish-white raisin of revulsion and disbelief.

  “You’re horrible!” he said. “You’re horrible!” And he ran from the room.

  Ordinarily Gary wouldn’t have let Aaron get away with this. Ordinarily he would have battled his son all evening if that was what it took to extract an apology from him. But his mental markets—glycemic, endocrine, over-the-synapse—were crashing. He was feeling ugly, and to battle Aaron now would only make him uglier, and the sensation of ugliness was perhaps the leading Warning Sign.

  He saw that he’d made two critical mistakes. He should never have promised Caroline that there would be no more Christmases in St. Jude. And today, when she was limping and grimacing in the back yard, he should have snapped at least one picture of her. He mourned the moral advantages these mistakes had cost him.

  “I am not clinically depressed,” he told his reflection in the nearly dark bedroom window. With a great, marrow-taxing exertion of will, he stood up from Aaron’s bed and sallied forth to prove himself capable of having an ordinary evening.

  Jonah was climbing the dark stairs with Prince Caspian. “I finished the book,” he said.

  “Did you like it?”

  “I loved it,” Jonah said. “This is outstanding children’s literature. Asian made a door in the air that people walked through and disappeared. They went out of Narnia and back into the real world.”

  Gary dropped into a crouch. “Give me a hug.”

  Jonah draped his arms on him. Gary could feel the looseness of his youthful joints, the cublike pliancy, the heat radiating through his scalp and cheeks. He would have slit his own throat if the boy had needed blood; his love was immense in that way; and yet he wondered if it was only love he wanted now or whether he was also coalition-building. Securing a tactical ally for his team.

  What this stagnating economy needs, thought Federal Reserve Board Chairman Gary R. Lambert, is a massive infusion of Bombay Sapphire gin.

  In the kitchen Caroline and Caleb were slouched at the table drinking Coke and eating potato chips. Caroline had her feet up on another chair and pillows beneath her knees.

  “What should we do for dinner?” Gary said.

  His wife and middle son traded glances as if this were the stick-in-the-mud sort of question he was famous for. From the density of potato-chip crumbs he could see they were well on their way to spoiled appetites.

  “Mixed grill, I guess,” said Caroline.

  “Oh, yeah, Dad, do a mixed grill!” Caleb said in a tone mistakable for either irony or enthusiasm.

  Gary asked if there was meat.

  Caroline stuffed chips into her mouth and shrugged.

  Jonah asked permission to build a fire.

  Gary, taking ice from the freezer, granted it.

  Ordinary evening. Ordinary evening.

  “If I put the camera over the table,” Caleb said, “I’ll get part of the dining room, too.”

  “You miss the whole nook, though,” Caroline said. “If it’s over the back door, you can sweep both ways.”

  Gary shielded himself with the door of the liquor cabinet while he poured four ounces of gin onto ice.

  “‘Alt. eighty-five’?” Caleb read from his catalogue.

  “That means the camera can look almost straight down.”

  Still shielded by the cabinet door, Gary took a hefty warmish gulp. Then, closing the cabinet, he held up the glass in case anyone cared to see what a relatively modest drink he’d poured himself.

  “Ha
te to break it to you,” he said, “but surveillance is out. It’s not appropriate as a hobby.”

  “Dad, you said it was OK as long as I stayed interested.”

  “I said I would think about it.”

  Caleb shook his head vehemently. “No! You didn’t! You said I could do it as long as I didn’t get bored.”

  “That is exactly what you said,” Caroline confirmed with an unpleasant smile.

  “Yes, Caroline, I’m sure you heard every word. But we’re not putting this kitchen under surveillance. Caleb, you do not have my permission to make those purchases.”

  “Dad!”

  “That’s my decision, it’s final.”

  “Caleb, it doesn’t matter, though,” Caroline said. “Gary, it doesn’t matter, because he’s got his own money. He can spend it however he wants. Right, Caleb?”

  Out of Gary’s sight, below the level of the table, she gave Caleb some kind of hand signal.

  “Right, I’ve got my own savings!” Caleb’s tone again ironic or enthusiastic or, somehow, both.

  “You and I will talk about this later, Caro,” Gary said. Warmth and perversion and stupidity, all deriving from the gin, were descending from behind his ears and down his arms and torso.

  Jonah came back inside smelling like mesquite.

  Caroline had opened a second large bag of potato chips.

  “Don’t spoil your appetite, guys,” Gary said in a strained voice, taking food from plastic compartments.

  Again mother and son traded glances.

  “Yeah, right,” Caleb said. “Gotta save room for mixed grill!”

  Gary energetically sliced meats and skewered vegetables. Jonah set the table, spacing the flatware with the precision that he liked. The rain had stopped, but the deck was still slippery when Gary went outside.

  It had started as a family joke: Dad always orders the mixed grill in restaurants, Dad only wants to go to restaurants with mixed grill on the menu. To Gary there was indeed something endlessly delicious, something irresistibly luxurious, about a bit of lamb, a bit of pork, a bit of veal, and a lean and tender modern-style sausage or two—a classic mixed grill, in short. It was such a treat that he began to do his own mixed grills at home. Along with pizza and Chinese takeout and one-pot pasta meals, mixed grill became a family staple. Caroline helped out by bringing home multiple heavy blood-damp bags of meat and sausage every Saturday, and before long Gary was doing mixed grill two or even three times a week, braving all but the foulest weather on the deck, and loving it. He did partridge breasts, chicken livers, filets mignons, and Mexican-flavored turkey sausage. He did zucchini and red peppers. He did eggplant, yellow peppers, baby lamb chops, Italian sausage. He came up with a wonderful bratwurst—rib eye–bok choy combo. He loved it and loved it and loved it and then all at once he didn’t.