The Corrections

by Jonathan Franzen

  In a crisis like this the first order of business was obviously to clear a path for the runoff. Forget about track repair, first you had to have a gradient or you risked a really major washout.

  He noted grimly that he had nothing like a surveyor’s transit, not even a simple plumb line. He’d have to eyeball it.

  How the hell had he got stranded out here, anyway? Probably not even five in the morning yet.

  “Remind me to call the district manager at seven,” he said.

  Somewhere, of course, a dispatcher had to be on duty. But then the problem was to find a telephone, and here a curious reluctance to raise his eyes above the level of the toilet made itself felt. Conditions in these parts were impossible. It could be midmorning by the time he found a telephone. And by that point.

  “Uh! Such a lot of work,” he said.

  There appeared to be a slight depression in the shower stall. Yes, in fact, a preexisting culvert, maybe some old DOT road-building project that never got off the ground, maybe the Army Corps was involved somehow. One of those midnight serendipities: a real culvert. Still, he was looking at a hell of an engineering problem to relocate the operation to take advantage of the culvert.

  “Not much choice, though, I’m afraid.”

  Might as well get at it. He wasn’t getting any less tired. Think of the Dutch with their Delta Project. Forty years of battling the sea. Put things in perspective a little—one bad night. He’d endured worse.

  Try to build some redundancy into the fix, that was the plan. No way he’d trust one little culvert to handle all the runoff. There could be a backup farther down the line.

  “And then we’re in trouble,” he said. “Then we are in real trouble.”

  Could be a hell of a lot worse, in fact. They were lucky an engineer was right on site when the water broke through. Imagine if he hadn’t been here, what a mess.

  “Could have been a real disaster.”

  First order of business was to slap some sort of temporary patch on the leak, then tackle the logistical nightmare of rerouting the whole operation over the culvert, and then hope to hold things together until the sun came up.

  “And see what we got.”

  In the faulty light he saw the liquid running one way across the floor and then reversing itself slowly, as if the horizontal had lost its mind.

  “Enid!” he called with little hope as he commenced the sick-making work of stopping the leakage and getting himself back on track, and the ship sailed on.

  Thanks to Aslan®—and to young Dr. Hibbard, an outstanding, high-caliber young man—Enid was having her first solid night’s sleep in many months.

  There were a thousand things she wanted from life, and since few were available at home with Alfred in St. Jude, she had forcibly channeled all her wanting into the numbered days, the mayfly lifetime, that the luxury cruise would last. For months the cruise had been her mind’s safe parking space, the future that made her present bearable, and after her afternoon in New York had proved deficient in the fun department, she boarded the Gunnar Myrdal with her hungers redoubled.

  Fun was being had buoyantly on every deck by cliques of seniors enjoying their retirement the way she wished Alfred would enjoy his. Although Nordic Pleasurelines was emphatically not a discount line, this cruise had been booked almost entirely by large groups such as the University of Rhode Island Alumni Association, American Hadassah of Chevy Chase (MD), the 85th Airborne (“Sky Devil”) Division Reunion, and the Dade County (FL) Duplicate Bridge League, Senior Flight. Widows in excellent health guided one another by the elbow to special mustering places where name tags and information packets were distributed and the preferred token of mutual recognition was the glass-shattering scream. Already seniors intent on savoring every minute of precious cruise time were drinking the frozen cocktail du jour, a Lingonberry Lapp Frappe, from schooners that took two hands to handle safely. Others crowded the rails of lower decks, the ones sheltered from the rain, and scanned Manhattan for a face to wave goodbye to. A combo in the Abba Show Lounge was playing heavy-metal polka.

  While Alfred had a final pre-dinner session in the bathroom, his third session inside an hour, Enid sat in the “B” Deck lounge and listened to the slow plant-and-drag of someone’s walker-aided progress across the “A” Deck lounge above her.

  Apparently the Duplicate League’s cruise uniform was a T-shirt with the text: OLD BRIDGE PLAYERS NEVER DIE, THEY JUST LOSE THEIR FINESSE. Enid felt the joke did not bear heavy repetition.

  She saw retirees running, actually lifting their feet off the ground, in the direction of the Lingonberry Lapp Frappe.

  “Of course,” she murmured, reflecting on how old everyone was, “I suppose who else could afford a cruise like this?”

  The seeming dachshund that a man was pulling by a leash turned out to be a tank of oxygen mounted on roller-skate wheels and dressed in a pet sweater.

  A very fat man walked by in a T-shirt that said TITANIC: THE BODY.

  You’d spent a lifetime being waited for impatiently and now your impatient husband’s minimum stay in a bathroom was fifteen minutes.

  OLD UROLOGISTS NEVER DIE, THEY JUST PETER OUT.

  Even on nights with a casual dress code, such as tonight, T-shirts were officially discouraged. Enid had put on a wool suit and asked Alfred to wear a tie, although given his handling of a soup spoon lately his neckties were little more than cannon fodder on dinner’s front line. She’d made him pack a dozen. She was acutely conscious that Nordic Pleasurelines was deluxe. She expected—and had paid for, in part with her own money—elegance. Each T-shirt she saw was a specific small trampling of her fantasy and, hence, pleasure.

  It rankled her that people richer than she were so often less worthy and attractive. More slobbish and louty. Comfort could be found in being poorer than people who were smart and beautiful. But to be less affluent than these T-shirted, joke-cracking fatsos—

  “I am ready,” Alfred announced, appearing in the lounge. He took Enid’s hand for the ascent by elevator to the Søren Kierkegaard Dining Room. Holding his hand she felt married and, to that extent, grounded in the universe and reconciled to old age, but she couldn’t help thinking how dearly she would have treasured holding his hand in the decades when he’d stridden everywhere a pace or two ahead of her. His hand was needy and subdued now. Even tremors of his that looked violent proved to be featherweight in feel. She could sense the hand’s readiness to resume its paddling as soon as it was released, however.

  Such travelers as were cruising without affiliation had been assigned to special dining tables for “floaters.” To the delight of Enid, who relished cosmopolitan company provided it wasn’t too snobbish, two of the “floaters” at her and Alfred’s table were from Norway and two were from Sweden. Enid liked European countries small. One could learn an interesting Swedish custom or Norwegian fact without being made sensible of one’s ignorance of German music, French literature, or Italian art. The usage of “skoal” was a good example. Likewise the fact that Norway was Europe’s largest exporter of crude oil, as Mr. and Mrs. Nygren from Oslo were informing the table when the Lamberts claimed the last two seats.

  Enid spoke first to her left-hand neighbor, Mr. Söderblad, a reassuringly ascoted and blue-blazered older Swede. “What’s your impression of the ship so far?” she asked. “Is it really super authentic?”

  “Well, it does seem to be floating,” Mr. Söderblad said with a smile, “in spite of heavy seas.”

  Enid raised her voice to aid his comprehension. “I mean, is it AUTHENTICALLY SCANDINAVIAN?”

  “Well, yes, of course,” Mr. Söderblad said. “At the same time, everything in the world is more and more American, don’t you think?”

  “But you think this captures REALLY SUPER WELL,” Enid said, “the flavor of a REAL SCANDINAVIAN SHIP?”

  “Actually, it is better than most ships in Scandinavia. My wife and I are quite pleased so far.”

  Enid abandoned her inquiry unconvinced tha
t Mr. Söderblad had grasped its import. It mattered to her that Europe be European. She’d visited the Continent five times on vacation and twice on business trips with Alfred, so about a dozen times altogether, and to friends planning tours of Spain or France she now liked to say, with a sigh, that she’d had her fill of the place. It drove her crazy, however, to hear her friend Bea Meisner affect the same indifference: “I’m so sick of flying to Kitzbühel for my grandsons’ birthdays,” et cetera. Bea’s dimwitted and unfairly gorgeous daughter Cindy had married an Austrian sports doctor, a von Somebody who’d garnered Olympic bronze in the giant slalom. That Bea continued to socialize at all with Enid amounted to a triumph of loyalty over divergent fortunes. But Enid never forgot that it was Chuck Meisner’s big investment in Erie Belt stock on the eve of the Midpac buyout that had helped fund their mansion in Paradise Valley. Chuck had become board chairman of his bank while Alfred stalled in the Midpac’s second echelon and put his savings into inflation-prone annuities, so that even now the Lamberts could not afford Nordic Pleasurelines quality unless Enid dipped into private funds, which she did to escape going mad with envy.

  “My best friend in St. Jude vacations at Kitzbühel, in the Austrian Alps,” she shouted, apropos essentially of nothing, in the direction of Mr. Söderblad’s pretty wife. “Her Austrian son-in-law is tremendously successful and owns a chalet there!”

  Mrs. Söderblad was like a precious-metal accessory somewhat scuffed and tarnished by Mr. Söderblad’s use. Her lip gloss, hair color, eye shadow, and nail polish rang changes on a theme of platinum; her dinner dress was of silver lamé and afforded good views of sun-toasted shoulder and silicone augmentation. “Kitzbühel is quite beautiful,” she said. “I have performed many times in Kitzbühel.”

  “YOU’RE A PERFORMER?” Enid shouted.

  “Signe was a special entertainer,” Mr. Söderblad said hastily.

  “Those Alpine resorts can be terribly overpriced,” the Norwegian woman, Mrs. Nygren, observed with a shiver. She had large round eyeglasses and a radial distribution of face wrinkles which together gave a mantislike impression. Visually she and the burnished Söderblad were mutual affronts. “On the other hand,” she continued, “it is easy for us in Norway to be choosy. Even in certain of our city parks the skiing can be ‘top-notch.’ There is really nothing like it anywhere.”

  “Of course a distinction must be made,” said Mr. Nygren, who was very tall and had ears like raw veal chops, “between the Alpine type of skiing and the cross-country, or Nordic, variety. Norway has produced outstanding Alpine skiers—I mention the name Kjetil Andre Aamodt with some confidence that it will ‘ring a bell’—but it must be admitted that we have not always competed at the top level in this area. However, the cross-country, or Nordic, variety is quite a different story. There it is safe to say that we continue to gain more than our fair share of distinctions.”

  “Norwegians are fantastically boring,” Mr. Söderblad said hoarsely in Enid’s ear.

  The other two “floaters” at the table, a handsome older couple named Roth from Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, had done Enid the instinctive favor of engaging Alfred in conversation. Alfred’s face was flushed with soup heat, the drama of a spoon, and also perhaps the effort of refusing to glance even once at the dazzling Söderbladian décolletage, while he explained to the Roths the mechanics of stabilizing an ocean liner. Mr. Roth, a brainy-looking man in a bow tie and eye-bloating horn-rims, was peppering him with discerning questions and assimilating the answers so raptly he appeared almost shocked.

  Mrs. Roth was paying less attention to Alfred than to Enid. Mrs. Roth was a small woman, a handsome child in her mid-sixties. Her elbows barely cleared the tabletop. She had a white-flecked black pageboy and rosy cheeks and big blue eyes with which she was staring at Enid unabashedly, in the way of someone very smart or very stupid. Such a crushlike intensity of looking suggested hunger. Enid sensed immediately that Mrs. Roth would become her great friend on the cruise, or else her great rival, and so with something like coquetry she declined to speak to her or otherwise acknowledge her attention. As steaks were brought to the table and devastated lobsters taken away she repeatedly thrust and Mr. Söderblad repeatedly parried questions concerning his occupation, which appeared to involve the arms trade. She soaked up Mrs. Roth’s blue-eyed gaze along with the envy that she imagined the “floaters” were provoking at other tables. She supposed that to the hoi polloi in their T-shirts the “floaters” looked extremely Continental. A touch of distinction here. Beauty, neckties, an ascot. A certain cachet.

  “Sometimes I get so excited thinking about my morning coffee,” Mr. Söderblad said, “I can’t fall asleep at night.”

  Enid’s hopes that Alfred might take her dancing in the Pippi Longstocking Ballroom were dashed when he stood up and announced that he was going to bed. It wasn’t even seven o’clock yet. Who ever heard of a grownup going to bed at seven in the evening?

  “Sit down and wait for dessert,” she said. “The desserts are supposed to be divine.”

  Alfred’s unsightly napkin fell from his thighs to the floor. He seemed without inkling of how much he was embarrassing and disappointing her. “You stay,” he said. “I’ve had enough.”

  And away across the Søren Kierkegaard broadloom he lurched, battling shifts in the horizontal which had grown more pronounced since the ship left New York Harbor.

  Familiar waves of sorrow for all the fun she couldn’t have with such a husband dampened Enid’s spirits until it occurred to her that she now had a long evening to herself and no Alfred to spoil her fun.

  She brightened, and brightened further when Mr. Roth departed for the Knut Hamsun Reading Room, leaving his wife at the table. Mrs. Roth switched seats to be closer to Enid.

  “We Norwegians are great readers,” Mrs. Nygren took the opportunity to remark.

  “And great yakkers,” Mr. Söderblad muttered.

  “Public libraries and bookstores in Oslo are thriving,” Mrs. Nygren informed the table. “I think it is not the same elsewhere. Reading is mostly in decline around the world. But not in Norway, hm. My Per is reading the complete works of John Galsworthy for the second time this autumn. In English.”

  “Nooo, Inga, nooo,” Per Nygren whinnied. “Third time!”

  “My God,” said Mr. Söderblad.

  “It’s true.” Mrs. Nygren looked at Enid and Mrs. Roth as though anticipating awe. “Each year Per reads one work by every winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and also the complete works of his favorite winner from his previous year’s reading. And you see, each year the task becomes a bit more difficult, because there has been another winner, you see.”

  “It is a bit like raising the bar in a high jump,” Per explained. “Every year a bit more challenging.”

  Mr. Söderblad, who by Enid’s count was drinking his eighth cup of coffee, leaned close to her and said, “My God these people are boring!”

  “It is safe to say that I have read more deeply into Henrik Pontoppidan than most,” Per Nygren said.

  Mrs. Söderblad tilted her head, smiling dreamily. “Do you know,” she said, perhaps to Enid or to Mrs. Roth, “that until one hundred years ago Norway was a colony of Sweden?”

  The Norwegians erupted like a batted hive.

  “Colony!? Colony??”

  “Oh, oh,” Inga Nygren hissed, “I think there is a history here that our American friends deserve to—”

  “This is a story of strategic alliances!” Per declared.

  “By ‘colony’ what is the exact word in Swedish that you are groping for, Mrs. Söderblad? Since my English is obviously much stronger than yours, perhaps I can offer our American friends a more accurate translation, such as ‘equal partner in a unified peninsular kingdom’?”

  “Signe,” Mr. Söderblad observed wickedly to his wife, “I do believe you’ve hit a nerve.” He raised a hand. “Waiter, refill.”

  “If one chooses as a vantage point the late ninth century,” Per Nygren said, �
�and I suspect that even our Swedish friends will concede that the ascension of Harald the Blond is quite a reasonable ‘hopping-off place’ for our examination of the seesaw relationship of two great rival powers, or should I perhaps say three great powers, since Denmark as well plays a rather fascinating role in our story—”

  “We’d love to hear it, but maybe another time,” Mrs. Roth interrupted, leaning over to touch Enid’s hand. “Remember we said seven o’clock?”

  Enid was only briefly bewildered. She excused herself and followed Mrs. Roth into the main hall, where they encountered a crush of seniors and gastric aromas, disinfectant aromas.

  “Enid, I’m Sylvia,” said Mrs. Roth. “How do you feel about slot machines? I’ve had a physical craving all day.”

  “Oh, me too!” Enid said. “I think they’re in the Stringbird Room.”

  “Strindberg, yes.”

  Enid admired quickness of mind but seldom credited herself with possessing it. “Thanks for the—you know,” she said as she followed Sylvia Roth through the crush.

  “Rescue. Don’t mention it.”

  The Strindberg Room was packed with kibitzers, low-stakes blackjack players, and lovers of the slot. Enid couldn’t remember when she’d had so much fun. The fifth quarter she dropped brought her three plums; as if so much fruit upset the bowels of her machine, specie gushed from its nether parts. She shoveled her take into a plastic bucket. Eleven quarters later it happened again: three cherries, a silver dump. White-haired players losing steadily at neighboring machines gave her dirty looks. I’m embarrassed, she told herself, although she wasn’t.

  Decades of insufficient affluence had made her a disciplined investor. From her winnings she set aside the amount of her initial investment. Half of every payoff she also salted away.

  Her playing fund showed no sign of exhaustion, however.

  “So, I’ve had my fix,” Sylvia Roth said after nearly an hour, tapping Enid on the shoulder. “Shall we go hear the string quartet?”

  “Yes! Yes! It’s in the Greed Room.”