The Corrections

by Jonathan Franzen

  Gray light was in the windows when Gary got up to piss for the fourth or fifth time. The morning’s humidity and warmth felt more like July than October. A haze or fog on Seminole Street confused—or disembodied—or refracted—the cawing of crows as they worked their way up the Hill, over Navajo Road and Shawnee Street, like local teenagers heading to the Wawa Food Market parking lot (“Club Wa” they called it, according to Aaron) to smoke their cigarettes.

  He lay down again and waited for sleep.

  “—day the fifth of October, among the top news stories we’re following this morning, with his execution now less than twenty-four hours away, lawyers for Khellye—” said Caroline’s clock radio before she swatted it silent.

  In the next hour, while he listened to the rising of his sons and the sound of their breakfasts and the blowing of a trumpet line by John Philip Sousa, courtesy of Aaron, a radical new plan took shape in Gary’s brain. He lay fetally on his side, very still, facing the wall, with his Bran’nola-bagged hand against his chest. His radical new plan was to do absolutely nothing.

  “Gary, are you awake?” Caroline said from a medium distance, the doorway presumably. “Gary?”

  He did nothing; didn’t answer.

  “Gary?”

  He wondered if she might be curious about why he was doing nothing, but already her footsteps were receding up the hall and she was calling, “Jonah, come on, you’re going to be late.”

  “Where’s Dad?” Jonah said.

  “He’s still in bed, let’s go.”

  There was a patter of little feet, and now came the first real challenge to Gary’s radical new plan. From somewhere closer than the doorway Jonah spoke. “Dad? We’re leaving now. Dad?” And Gary had to do nothing. He had to pretend he couldn’t hear or wouldn’t hear, he had to inflict his general strike, his clinical depression, on the one creature he wished he could have spared. If Jonah came any closer—if, for example, he came and gave him a hug—Gary doubted he would be able to stay silent and unmoving. But Caroline was calling from downstairs again, and Jonah hurried out.

  Distantly Gary heard the beeping of his anniversary date being entered to arm the perimeter. Then the toast-smelling house was silent and he shaped his face into the expression of bottomless suffering and self-pity that Caroline wore when her back was hurting. He understood, as he never had before, how much comfort this expression yielded.

  He thought about getting up, but he didn’t need anything. He didn’t know when Caroline was coming back; if she was working at the CDF today, she might not return until three. It didn’t matter. He would be here.

  As it happened, Caroline came back in half an hour. The sounds of her departure were reversed. He heard the approaching Stomper, the disarming code, the footsteps on the stairs. He sensed his wife in the doorway, silent, watching him.

  “Gary?” she said in a lower, more tender voice.

  He did nothing. He lay. She came over to him and knelt by the bed. “What is it? Are you sick?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “What is this bag for? My God. What did you do?”

  He said nothing.

  “Gary, say something. Are you depressed?”

  “Yes.”

  She sighed then. Weeks of accumulated tension were draining from the room.

  “I surrender,” Gary said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t have to go to St. Jude,” he said. “Nobody who doesn’t want to go has to go.”

  It cost him a lot to say this, but there was a reward. He felt Caroline’s warmth approaching, its radiance, before she touched him. The sun rising, the first brush of her hair on his neck as she leaned over him, the approach of her breath, the gentle touching-down of her lips on his cheek. She said, “Thank you.”

  “I may have to go for Christmas Eve but I’ll come back for Christmas.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’m extremely depressed.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I surrender,” Gary said.

  An irony, of course, was that as soon as he’d surrendered—possibly as soon as he’d confessed to his depression, almost certainly by the time he showed her his hand and she put a proper bandage on it, and absolutely no later than the moment at which, with a locomotive as long and hard and heavy as an O-gauge model railroad engine, he tunneled up into wet and gently corrugated recesses that even after twenty years of traveling through them still felt unexplored (his approach was spoon-style, from behind, so that Caroline could keep her lower back arched outward and he could harmlessly drape his bandaged hand across her flank; the screwing wounded, the two of them were)—he not only no longer felt depressed, he felt euphoric.

  The thought came to him—inappropriately, perhaps, considering the tender conjugal act that he was now engaged in; but he was who he was, he was Gary Lambert, he had inappropriate thoughts and he was sick of apologizing!—that he could now safely ask Caroline to buy him 4,500 shares of Axon and that she would gladly do it.

  She rose and dipped like a top on a tiny point of contact, her entire, sexual being almost weightless on the moistened tip of his middle finger.

  He spent himself gloriously. Spent and spent and spent.

  They were still lying naked at the hooky-playing hour of nine-thirty on a Tuesday when the phone on Caroline’s nightstand rang. Gary, answering, was shocked to hear his mother’s voice. He was shocked by the reality of her existence.

  “I’m calling from the ship,” Enid said.

  For one guilty instant, before it registered with him that phoning from a ship was expensive and that his mother’s news could therefore not be good, Gary believed that she was calling because she knew that he’d betrayed her.

  AT SEA

  Two hundred hours, darkness, the Gunnar Myrdal: all around the old man, running water sang mysteriously in metal pipes. As the ship sliced open the black sea east of Nova Scotia, the horizontal faintly pitched, bow to stern, as if despite its great steel competence the ship were uneasy and could solve the problem of a liquid hill only by cutting through it quickly; as if its stability depended on such a glossing over of flotation’s terrors. There was another world below—this was the problem. Another world below that had volume but no form. By day the sea was blue surface and whitecaps, a realistic navigational challenge, and the problem could be overlooked. By night, though, the mind went forth and dove down through the yielding—the violently lonely—nothingness on which the heavy steel ship traveled, and in every moving swell you saw a travesty of grids, you saw how truly and forever lost a man would be six fathoms under. Dry land lacked this z-axis. Dry land was like being awake. Even in chartless desert you could drop to your knees and pound land with your fist and land didn’t give. Of course the ocean, too, had a skin of wakefulness. But every point on this skin was a point where you could sink and by sinking disappear.

  As things pitched, so they trembled. There was a shivering in the Gunnar Myrdal’s framework, an endless shudder in the floor and bed and birch-paneled walls. A syncopated tremor so fundamental to the ship, and so similar to Parkinson’s in the way it constantly waxed without seeming ever to wane, that Alfred had located the problem within himself until he overheard younger, healthier passengers remarking on it.

  He lay approximately awake in Stateroom B11. Awake in a metal box that pitched and trembled, a dark metal box moving somewhere in the night.

  There was no porthole. A room with a view would have cost hundreds of dollars more, and Enid had reasoned that since a stateroom was mainly used for sleeping who needed a porthole, at that price? She might look through it six times on the voyage. That was fifty dollars a look.

  She was sleeping now, silently, like a person feigning sleep. Alfred asleep was a symphony of snoring and whistling and choking, an epic of Z’s. Enid was a haiku. She lay still for hours and then blinked awake like a light switched on. Sometimes at dawn in St. Jude, in the long minute it took the clock-radio to flip a digit, the only moving
thing in the house was the eye of Enid.

  On the morning of Chip’s conception she’d merely looked like she was shamming sleep, but on the morning of Denise’s, seven years later, she really was pretending. Alfred in middle age had invited such venial deceptions. A decade-plus of marriage had turned him into one of the overly civilized predators you hear about in zoos, the Bengal tiger that forgets how to kill, the lion lazy with depression. To exert attraction, Enid had to be a still, unbloody carcass. If she actively reached out, actively threw a thigh over his, he braced himself against her and withheld his face; if she so much as stepped from the bathroom naked he averted his eyes, as the Golden Rule enjoined the man who hated to be seen himself. Only early in the morning, waking to the sight of her small white shoulder, did he venture from his lair. Her stillness and self-containment, the slow sips of air she took, her purely vulnerable objecthood, made him pounce. And feeling his padded paw on her ribs and his meat-seeking breath on her neck she went limp, as if with prey’s instinctive resignation (“Let’s get this dying over with”), although in truth her passivity was calculated, because she knew passivity inflamed him. He had her, and to some extent she wanted to be had, like an animal: in a mute mutual privacy of violence. She, too, kept her eyes shut. Often didn’t even roll from the side she’d been lying on but simply flared her hip, brought her knee up in a vaguely proctologic reflex. Then without showing her his face he departed for the bathroom, where he washed and shaved and emerged to see the bed already made and to hear, downstairs, the percolator gulping. From Enid’s perspective in the kitchen maybe a lion, not her husband, had voluptuously mauled her, or maybe one of the men in uniform she ought to have married had slipped into her bed. It wasn’t a wonderful life, but a woman could subsist on self-deceptions like these and on her memories (which also now curiously seemed like self-deceptions) of the early years when he’d been mad for her and had looked into her eyes. The important thing was to keep it all tacit. If the act was never spoken of, there would be no reason to discontinue it until she was definitely pregnant again, and even after pregnancy no reason not to resume it, as long as it was never mentioned.

  She’d always wanted three children. The longer nature denied her a third, the less fulfilled she felt in comparison to her neighbors. Bea Meisner, though fatter and dumber than Enid, publicly smooched with her husband, Chuck; twice a month the Meisners hired a sitter and went dancing. Every October without fail Dale Driblett took his wife, Honey, someplace extravagant and out of state for their anniversary, and the many young Dribletts all had birthdays in July. Even Esther and Kirby Root could be seen at barbecues patting each other’s well-marbled bottoms. It frightened and shamed Enid, the loving-kindness of other couples. She was a bright girl with good business skills who had gone directly from ironing sheets and tablecloths at her mother’s boardinghouse to ironing sheets and shirts chez Lambert. In every neighbor woman’s eyes she saw the tacit question: Did Al at least make her feel super-special in that special way?

  As soon as she was visibly pregnant again, she had a tacit answer. The changes in her body were incontrovertible, and she imagined so vividly the flattering inferences about her love life that Bea and Esther and Honey might draw from these changes that soon enough she drew the inferences herself.

  Made happy in this way by pregnancy, she got sloppy and talked about the wrong thing to Alfred. Not, needless to say, about sex or fulfillment or fairness. But there were other topics scarcely less forbidden, and Enid in her giddiness one morning overstepped. She suggested he buy shares of a certain stock. Alfred said the stock market was a lot of dangerous nonsense best left to wealthy men and idle speculators. Enid suggested he nonetheless buy shares of a certain stock. Alfred said he remembered Black Tuesday as if it were yesterday. Enid suggested he nonetheless buy shares of a certain stock. Alfred said it would be highly improper to buy that stock. Enid suggested he nonetheless buy it. Alfred said they had no money to spare and now a third child coming. Enid suggested that money could be borrowed. Alfred said no. He said no in a much louder voice and stood up from the breakfast table. He said no so loudly that a decorative copper-plate bowl on the kitchen wall briefly hummed, and without kissing her goodbye he left the house for eleven days and ten nights.

  Who would have guessed that such a little mistake on her part could change everything?

  In August the Midland Pacific had made Alfred its assistant chief engineer for track and structures, and now he’d been sent east to inspect every mile of the Erie Belt Railroad. Erie Belt district managers shuttled him around in dinky gas-powered motor cars, darting in bug fashion onto sidings while Erie Belt megalosaurs thundered past. The Erie Belt was a regional system whose freight business trucks had damaged and whose passenger business private automobiles had driven into the red. Although its trunk lines were still generally hale, its branches and spurs were rotting like you couldn’t believe. Trains poked along at 10 mph on rails no straighter than limp string. Mile upon mile of hopelessly buckled Belt. Alfred saw crossties better suited to mulching than to gripping spikes. Rail anchors that had lost their heads to rust, bodies wasting inside a crust of corrosion like shrimps in a shell of deep-fry. Ballast so badly washed out that ties were hanging from the rail rather than supporting it. Girders peeling and corrupted like German chocolate cake, the dark shavings, the miscellaneous crumble.

  How modest—compared to the furious locomotive—a stretch of weedy track could seem, skirting a field of late sorghum. But without this track a train was ten thousand tons of ungovernable nothing. The will was in the track.

  Everywhere Alfred went in the Erie Belt’s hinterland he heard young Erie Belt employees telling one another, “Take it easy!”

  “See ya later, Sam. Don’t work too hard, now.”

  “Take it easy.”

  “You too, pal. Take it easy.”

  The phrase seemed to Alfred an eastern blight, a fitting epitaph for a once-great state, Ohio, that parasitic Teamsters had sucked nearly dry. Nobody in St. Jude would dare tell him to take it easy. On the high prairie where he’d grown up, a person who took it easy wasn’t much of a man. Now came a new effeminate generation for whom “easygoing” was a compliment. Alfred heard Erie Belt track gangs yukking it up on company time, he saw flashily dressed clerks taking ten-minute breaks for coffee, he watched callow draftsmen smoke cigarettes with insinuating relish while a once-solid railroad fell to pieces all around them. “Take it easy” was the watchword of these superfriendly young men, the token of their overfamiliarity, the false reassurance that enabled them to ignore the filth they worked in.

  The Midland Pacific, by contrast, was clean steel and white concrete. Crossties so new that blue creosote pooled in their grain. The applied science of vibratory tamping and prestressed rebar, motion detectors and welded rail. The Midpac was based in St. Jude and served a harder-working, less eastern region of the country. Unlike the Erie Belt, it took pride in its commitment to maintaining quality service on its branch lines. A thousand towns and small cities across the central tiers of states depended on the Midpac.

  The more Alfred saw of the Erie Belt, the more distinctly he felt the Midland Pacific’s superior size, strength, and moral vitality in his own limbs and carriage. In his shirt and tie and wing tips he nimbly took the catwalk over the Maumee River, forty feet above slag barges and turbid water, grabbed the truss’s lower chord and leaned out upside down to whack the span’s principal girder with his favorite whacking hammer, which he carried everywhere in his briefcase; scabs of paint and rust as big as sycamore leaves spiraled down into the river. A yard engine ringing its bell crept onto the span, and Alfred, who had no fear of heights, leaned into a hanger brace and planted his feet in the matchstick ties sticking out over the river. While the ties waggled and jumped he jotted on his clipboard a damning assessment of the bridge’s competence.

  Maybe some of the women drivers crossing the Maumee on the neighboring Cherry Street bridge saw him perched there, flat of belly a
nd broad of shoulder, the wind winding his cuffs around his ankles, and maybe they felt, as Enid had felt the first time she’d laid eyes on him, that here was a man. Although he was oblivious to their glances, Alfred experienced from within what they saw from without. By day he felt like a man, and he showed this, you might even say flaunted it, by standing no-handedly on high narrow ledges, and working ten and twelve hours without a break, and cataloguing an eastern railroad’s effeminacies.