The Corrections

by Jonathan Franzen

  Tonight something unusual was happening in the ferro-acetate gel. His conductivity readings varied wildly, depending on where exactly he stuck the ammeter’s probe. Thinking the probe might be dirty, he switched to a narrow needle with which he again poked the gel. He got a reading of no conductivity at all. Then he stuck the gel in a different place and got a high reading.

  What was going on?

  The question absorbed and comforted him and held the taskmaster at bay until, at ten o’clock, he extinguished the microscope’s illuminator and wrote in his notebook: STAIN BLUE CHROMATE 2%. VERY VERY INTERESTING.

  The moment he stepped from the lab, exhaustion hammered him. He fumbled to secure the lock, his analytic fingers suddenly thick and stupid. He had boundless energy for work, but as soon as he quit he could barely stand up.

  His exhaustion deepened when he went upstairs. The kitchen and dining room were ablaze in light, and there appeared to be a small boy slumped over the dining-room table, his face on his place mat. The scene was so wrong, so sick with Revenge, that for a moment Alfred honestly thought the boy at the table was a ghost from his own childhood.

  He groped for switches as if the light were a poison gas he had to stop the flow of.

  In less hazardous dimness he gathered the boy in his arms and carried him upstairs. The boy had the weave of the place mat engraved on one cheek. He murmured nonsense. He was half–awake but resisting full consciousness, keeping his head down as Alfred undressed him and found pajamas in the closet.

  Once the boy was in bed, in receipt of a kiss and fast asleep, an unguessable amount of time trickled through the legs of the bedside chair in which Alfred sat conscious of little but the misery between his temples. His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.

  Or maybe he did sleep, for suddenly he was standing up and feeling marginally refreshed. He left Chipper’s room and went to check on Gary.

  Just inside Gary’s door, reeking of Elmer’s glue, was a jail of Popsicle sticks. The jail bore no relation to the elaborate house of correction that Alfred had imagined. It was a crude roofless square, crudely bisected. Its floor plan, in fact, was exactly the binomial square he’d evoked before dinner.

  And this, this here in the jail’s largest room, this bollixed knot of semisoft glue and broken Popsicle sticks was a—doll’s wheelbarrow? Miniature step stool?

  Electric chair.

  In a mind-altering haze of exhaustion Alfred knelt and examined it. He found himself susceptible to the poignancy of the chair’s having been made—to the pathos of Gary’s impulse to fashion an object and seek his father’s approval—and more disturbingly to the impossibility of squaring this crude object with the precise mental picture of an electric chair that he had formed at the dinner table. Like an illogical woman in a dream who was both Enid and not Enid, the chair he’d pictured had been at once completely an electric chair and completely Popsicle sticks. It came to him now, more forcefully than ever, that maybe every “real” thing in the world was as shabbily protean, underneath, as this electric chair. Maybe his mind was even now doing to the seemingly real hardwood floor on which he knelt exactly what it had done, hours earlier, to the unseen chair. Maybe a floor became truly a floor only in his mental reconstruction of it. The floor’s nature was to some extent inarguable, of course; the wood definitely existed and had measurable properties. But there was a second floor, the floor as mirrored in his head, and he worried that the beleaguered “reality” that he championed was not the reality of an actual floor in an actual bedroom but the reality of a floor in his head which was idealized and no more worthy, therefore, than one of Enid’s silly fantasies.

  The suspicion that everything was relative. That the “real” and “authentic” might not be simply doomed but fictive to begin with. That his feeling of righteousness, of uniquely championing the real, was just a feeling. These were the suspicions that had lain in ambush in all those motel rooms. These were the deep terrors beneath the flimsy beds.

  And if the world refused to square with his version of reality then it was necessarily an uncaring world, a sour and sickening world, a penal colony, and he was doomed to be violently lonely in it.

  He bowed his head at the thought of how much strength a man would need to survive an entire life so lonely.

  He returned the pitiful, unbalanced electric chair to the floor of the prison’s largest room. As soon as he let go of the chair, it fell on its side. Images of hammering the jail to bits passed through his head, flashes of hiked-up skirts and torn-down underpants, images of shredded bras and outthrust hips, but came to nothing.

  Gary was sleeping in perfect silence, the way his mother did. There was no hope that he’d forgotten his father’s implicit promise to look at the jail after dinner. Gary never forgot anything.

  Still, I am doing my best, Alfred thought.

  Returning to the dining room, he noticed the change in the food on Chipper’s plate. The well-browned margins of the liver had been carefully pared off and eaten, as had every scrap of crust. There was evidence as well that rutabaga had been swallowed; the small speck that remained was scored with tiny tine marks. And several beet greens had been dissected, the softer leaves removed and eaten, the woody reddish stems laid aside. It appeared that Chipper had taken the contractual one bite of each food after all, presumably at great personal cost, and had been put to bed without being given the dessert he’d earned.

  On a November morning thirty-five years earlier Alfred had found a coyote’s bloody foreleg in the teeth of a steel trap, evidence of certain desperate hours in the previous night.

  There came an upwelling of pain so intense that he had to clench his jaw and refer to his philosophy to prevent its turning into tears.

  (Schopenhauer: Only one consideration may serve to explain the sufferings of animals: that the will to live, which underlies the entire world of phenomena, must in their case satisfy its cravings by feeding upon itself.)

  He turned off the last lights downstairs, visited the bathroom, and put on fresh pajamas. He had to open his suitcase to retrieve his toothbrush.

  Into the bed, the museum of antique transports, he slipped beside Enid, settling as close to the far edge as he could. She was asleep in her sleep-feigning way. He looked once at the alarm clock, the radium jewelry on its two pointing hands—closer to twelve now than to eleven—and shut his eyes.

  Came the question in a voice like noon: “What were you talking about with Chuck?”

  His exhaustion redoubled. With his closed eyes he saw beakers and probes and the trembling needle of the ammeter.

  “It sounded like the Erie Belt,” Enid said. “Does Chuck know about that? Did you tell him?”

  “Enid, I am very tired.”

  “I’m just surprised, that’s all. Considering.”

  “It was an accident and I regret it.”

  “I just think it’s interesting,” Enid said, “that Chuck is allowed to make an investment that we’re not allowed to make.”

  “If Chuck chooses to take unfair advantage of other investors, that’s his business.”

  “A lot of Erie Belt shareholders would be happy to get five and three-quarters tomorrow. What’s unfair about that?”

  Her words had the sound of an argument rehearsed for hours, a grievance nursed in darkness.

  “Those shares will be worth nine and a half dollars three weeks from now,” Alfred said. “I know it and most people don’t. That’s unfair.”

  “You’re smarter than other people,” Enid said, “and you did better in school, and now you have a better job. That’s unfair, too, isn’t it? Shouldn’t you make yourself stupid, to be completely fair?”

  Chewing your own leg off was not an act to be undertaken lightly or performed halfway. At what point and by what process did the coyote make the decision to sink its teeth into its own flesh? Presumably there first came a period of waiting and weighing. But after that?

  “I’m not going to argue with you,” Alfred said.
“Since you are awake, however, I want to know why Chip wasn’t put to bed.”

  “You were the one who said he—”

  “You came upstairs long before I did. It was not my intention that he sit there for five hours. You’re using him against me, and I don’t care for it one bit. He should have been put to bed at eight.”

  Enid simmered in her wrongness.

  “Can we agree that this will not happen again?” Alfred said.

  “We can agree.”

  “Well then. Let’s sleep.”

  When it was very, very dark in the house, the unborn child could see as clearly as anyone. She had ears and eyes, fingers and a forebrain and a cerebellum, and she floated in a central place. She already knew the main hungers. Day after day the mother walked around in a stew of desire and guilt, and now the object of the mother’s desire lay three feet away from her. Everything in the mother was poised to melt and shut down at a loving touch anywhere on her body.

  There was a lot of breathing going on. A lot of breathing but no touching.

  Sleep eluded even Alfred. Each sinusy gasp of Enid’s seemed to pierce his ear the instant he was poised afresh to drop off.

  After an interval that he judged to have lasted twenty minutes, the bed began to shake with poorly reined sobs.

  He broke his silence, almost wailing: “What is it now?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Enid, it is very, very late, and the alarm is set for six, and I am bone-weary.”

  She wept stormily. “You never kissed me goodbye!”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “Well, don’t I have a right? A husband leaves his wife at home alone for two weeks?”

  “This is water under the bridge. And frankly I’ve endured a lot worse.”

  “And then he comes home and doesn’t even say hello? He just attacks me?”

  “Enid, I have had a terrible week.”

  “And leaves the dinner table before dinner’s over?”

  “A terrible week and I am extraordinarily tired—”

  “And locks himself in the basement for five hours? Even though he’s supposedly very tired?”

  “If you had had the week I had—”

  “You didn’t kiss me goodbye.”

  “Grow up! For God’s sake! Grow up!”

  “Keep your voice down!”

  (Keep your voice down or the baby might hear.)

  (Indeed did hear and was soaking up every word.)

  “Do you think I was on a pleasure cruise?” Alfred demanded in a whisper. “Everything I do I do for you and the boys. It’s been two weeks since I had a minute to myself. I believe I’m entitled to a few hours in the laboratory. You would not understand it, and you would not believe me if you did, but I have found something very interesting.”

  “Oh, very interesting,” Enid said. Hardly the first time she’d heard this.

  “Well it is very interesting.”

  “Something with commercial applications?”

  “You never know. Look what happened to Jack Callahan. This could end up paying for the boys’ education.”

  “I thought you said Jack Callahan’s discovery was an accident.”

  “My God, listen to yourself. You tell me I’m negative, but when it’s work that matters to me, who’s negative?”

  “I just don’t understand why you won’t even consider—”

  “Enough.”

  “If the object is to make money—”

  “Enough. Enough! I don’t give a damn what other people do. I am not that kind of person.”

  Twice in church the previous Sunday Enid had turned her head and caught Chuck Meisner staring. She was a little fuller in the bust than usual, probably that was all. But Chuck had blushed both times.

  “What is the reason you’re so cold to me?” she said.

  “There are reasons,” Alfred said, “but I will not tell you.”

  “Why are you so unhappy? Why won’t you tell me?”

  “I will go to the grave before I tell you. To the grave.”

  “Oh, oh, oh!”

  This was a bad husband she had landed, a bad, bad, bad husband who would never give her what she needed. Anything that might have satisfied her he found a reason to withhold.

  And so she lay, a Tantala, beside the inert illusion of a feast. The merest finger anywhere would have. To say nothing of his split-plum lips. But he was useless. A wad of money stashed in a mattress and moldering and devaluing was what he was. A depression in the heartland had shriveled him the way it had shriveled her mother, who didn’t understand that interest-bearing bank accounts were federally insured now, or that blue-chip stocks held for the long term with reinvested dividends might help provide for her old age. He was a bad investor.

  But she was not. She’d even been known, when a room was very dark, to take a real risk or two, and she took one now. Rolled over and tickled his thigh with breasts that a certain neighbor had admired. Rested her cheek on her husband’s ribs. She could feel him waiting for her to go away, but first she had to stroke the plain of his muscled belly, hover-gliding, touching hair but no skin. To her mild surprise she felt his his his coming to life at the approach of her fingers. His groin tried to dodge her but the fingers were more nimble. She could feel him growing to manhood through the fly of his pajamas, and in an access of pent-up hunger she did a thing he’d never let her do before. She bent sideways and took it into her mouth. It: the rapidly growing boy, the faintly urinary dumpling. In the skill of her hands and the swelling of her breasts she felt desirable and capable of anything.

  The man beneath her shook with resistance. She freed her mouth momentarily. “Al? Sweetie?”

  “Enid. What are you—?”

  Again her open mouth descended on the cylinder of flesh. She held still for a moment, long enough to feel the flesh harden pulse by pulse against her palate. Then she raised her head. “We could have a little extra money in the bank—you think? Take the boys to Disneyland. You think?”

  Back under she went. Tongue and penis were approaching an understanding, and he tasted like the inside of her mouth now. Like a chore and all the word implied. Perhaps involuntarily he kneed her in the ribs and she shifted, still feeling desirable. She stuffed her mouth and the top of her throat. Surfaced for air and took another big gulp.

  “Even just to invest two thousand,” she murmured. “With a four-dollar differential—ack!”

  Alfred had come to his senses and forced the succubus away from him.

  (Schopenhauer: The people who make money are men, not women; and from this it follows that women are neither justified in having unconditional possession of it, nor fit persons to be entrusted with its administration.)

  The succubus reached for him again but he grabbed her wrist and with his other hand pulled her nightgown up.

  Maybe the pleasures of a swing set, likewise of sky-and scuba-diving, were tastes from a time when the uterus held you harmless from the claims of up and down. A time when you hadn’t acquired the mechanics, even, to experience vertigo. Still luxuriated safely in a warm inland sea.

  Only this tumble was scary, this tumble came accompanied by a rush of bloodborne adrenaline, as the mother appeared to be in some distress—

  “Al, not sure it’s a good idea, isn’t, I don’t think—”

  “The book says there is nothing wrong—”

  “Uneasy about this, though. Ooo. Really. Al?”

  He was a man having lawful sexual intercourse with his lawful wife.

  “Al, though, maybe not. So.”

  Fighting the image of the leotarded teenaged ΤWAT. And all the other CUNTS with their TITS and their ASSES that a man might want to FUCK, fighting it although the room was very dark and much was allowed in the dark.

  “Oh, I’m so unhappy about this!” Enid quietly wailed.

  Worst was the image of the little girl curled up inside her, a girl not much larger than a large bug but already a witness to such harm. Witness to a tautly e
ngorged little brain that dipped in and out beyond the cervix and then, with a quick double spasm that could hardly be considered adequate warning, spat thick alkaline webs of spunk into her private room. Not even born and already drenched in sticky knowledge.

  Alfred lay catching his breath and repenting his defiling of the baby. A last child was a last opportunity to learn from one’s mistakes and make corrections, and he resolved to seize this opportunity. From the day she was born he would treat her more gently than he’d treated Gary or Chipper. Relax the law for her, indulge her outright, even, and never once force her to sit at the table after everyone was gone.

  But he’d squirted such filth on her when she was helpless. She’d witnessed such scenes of marriage, and so of course, when she was older, she betrayed him.

  What made correction possible also doomed it.

  The sensitive probe that had given him readings at the top end of the red zone now read zero. He pulled away and squared his shoulders to his wife. Under the spell of the sexual instinct (as Arthur Schopenhauer called it) he’d lost sight of how cruelly soon he had to shave and catch the train, but now the instinct was discharged and consciousness of the remaining night’s brevity weighed on his chest like #140 rail stock, and Enid had begun to cry again, as wives did when the hour was psychotically late and tampering with the alarm clock was not an option. Years ago, when they were first married, she’d sometimes cried in the wee hours, but then Alfred had felt such gratitude for the pleasure he’d stolen and the stabbing she’d endured that he never failed to ask why she was crying.

  Tonight, notably, he felt neither gratitude nor the remotest obligation to quiz her. He felt sleepy.

  Why did wives choose night to cry in? Crying at night was all very well if you didn’t have to catch a train to work in four hours and if you hadn’t, moments ago, committed a defilement in pursuit of a satisfaction whose importance now entirely escaped you.

  Maybe it took all this—ten nights of wakefulness in bad motels followed by an evening on the emotional roller coaster and finally the run-outside-and-put-a-bullet-through-the-roof-of-your-mouth sucking and mewling noises of a wife trying to cry herself to sleep at two in the goddamned morning—to open his eyes to the fact that (a) sleep was a woman and (b) hers were comforts that he was under no obligation to refuse.