The Corrections

by Jonathan Franzen

  Through the long afternoon, as the perch-belly white of the sky turned the color of a fish’s flanks and back, Denise folded the thousands of offprints she’d cut in the morning, six copies of each in the prescribed folds that fit in the field engineer’s binder. There were signals at mileposts 16.2 and 17.4 and 20.1 and 20.8 and 22.0 and so on up to the town of New Chartres at 74.35, the end of the line.

  On the way out to the suburbs that night she asked her father if the Wroths were going to merge the railroad with the Arkansas Southern.

  “I don’t know,” Alfred said. “I hope not.”

  Would the company move to Little Rock?

  “That seems to be their intention, if they get control.”

  What would happen to the men in Signals?

  “I’d guess some of the more senior ones would move. The younger ones—probably laid off. But I don’t want you talking about this.”

  “I won’t,” Denise said.

  Enid, as on every other Thursday night for the last thirty-five years, had dinner waiting. She’d stuffed green peppers and was abubble with enthusiasm about the coming weekend.

  “You’ll have to take the bus home tomorrow,” she told Denise as they sat down at the table. “Dad and I are going to Lake Fond du Lac Estates with the Schumperts.”

  “What is Lake Fond du Lac Estates?”

  “It is a boondoggle,” Alfred said, “that I should have known better than to get involved with. However, your mother wore me down.”

  “Al,” Enid said, “there are no strings attached. There is no pressure to go to any of the seminars. We can spend the whole weekend doing anything we want.”

  “There’s bound to be pressure. The developer can’t keep giving away free weekends and not try to sell some lots.”

  “The brochure said no pressure, no expectation, no strings attached.”

  “I am dubious,” Alfred said.

  “Mary Beth says there’s a wonderful winery near Bordentown that we can tour. And we can all swim in Lake Fond du Lac! And the brochure says there are paddleboats and a gourmet restaurant.”

  “I can’t imagine a Missouri winery in mid-July is going to be appealing,” Alfred said.

  “You just have to get in the spirit of things,” Enid said. “The Dribletts went last October and had so much fun. Dale said there was no pressure at all. Very little pressure, he said.”

  “Consider the source.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A man who sells coffins for a living.”

  “Dale’s no different than anybody else.”

  “I said I am dubious. But I will go.” Alfred added, to Denise: “You can take the bus home. We’ll leave a car here for you.”

  “Kenny Kraikmeyer called this morning,” Enid told Denise. “He wondered if you’re free on Saturday night.”

  Denise shut one eye and widened the other. “What did you say?”

  “I said I thought you were.”

  “You what?”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you had plans.”

  Denise laughed. “My only plan at the moment is to not see Kenny Kraikmeyer.”

  “He was very polite,” Enid said. “You know, it doesn’t hurt to go on one date if somebody takes the trouble to ask you. If you don’t have fun, you don’t have to do it again. But you ought to start saying yes to somebody. People will think nobody’s good enough for you.”

  Denise set down her fork. “Kenny Kraikmeyer literally turns my stomach.”

  “Denise,” Alfred said.

  “That’s not right,” Enid said, her voice trembling. “That’s not something I want to hear you saying.”

  “OK, I’m sorry I said that. But I’m not free on Saturday. Not for Kenny Kraikmeyer. Who, if he wants to go out, might consider asking me.”

  It occurred to Denise that Enid would probably enjoy a weekend with Kenny Kraikmeyer at Lake Fond du Lac, and that Kenny would probably have a better time there than Alfred would.

  After dinner she biked over to the oldest house in the suburb, a high-ceilinged cube of antebellum brick across the street from the boarded-up commuter rail station. The house belonged to the high-school drama teacher, Henry Dusinberre, who’d left his campy Abyssinian banana and gaudy crotons and tongue-in-cheek potted palms in his favorite student’s care while he spent a month with his mother in New Orleans. Among the bordelloish antiques in Dusinberre’s parlor were twelve ornate champagne glasses, each with an ascending column of air bubbles captured in its faceted crystal stem, that he allowed only Denise, of all the young thespians and literary types who gravitated to his liquor on Saturday nights, to drink from. (“Let the little beasts use plastic cups,” he would say as he arranged his wasted limbs in his calfskin club chair. He had fought two rounds against a cancer now officially in remission, but his glossy skin and protuberant eyes suggested that all was not well oncologically. “Lambert, extraordinary creature,” he said, “sit here where I can see you in profile. Do you realize the Japanese would worship you for your neck? Worship you.”) It was in Dusinberre’s house that she’d tasted her first raw oyster, her first quail egg, her first grappa. Dusinberre steeled her in her resolve not to succumb to the charms of any (his phrase) “pimpled adolescents.” He bought dresses and jackets on approval in antique stores, and if they fit Denise he let her keep them. Fortunately, Enid, who wished that Denise would dress more like a Schumpert or a Root, held vintage clothing in such low esteem that she actually believed that a spotless embroidered yellow satin party dress with buttons of tiger-eye agate had cost Denise (as she claimed) ten dollars at the Salvation Army. Over Enid’s bitter objections she’d worn this dress to her senior prom with Peter Hicks, the substantially pimpled actor who’d played Tom to her Amanda in The Glass Menagerie. Peter Hicks, on prom night, had been invited to join her and Dusinberre in drinking from the rococo champagne glasses, but Peter was driving and stuck with his plastic cup of Coke.

  After she watered the plants, she sat in Dusinberre’s calfskin chair and listened to New Order. She wished she felt like dating someone, but the boys she respected, like Peter Hicks, didn’t move her romantically, and the rest were in the mold of Kenny Kraikmeyer, who, though bound for the Naval Academy and a career in nuclear science, fancied himself a hipster and collected Cream and Jimi Hendrix “vinyl” (his word) with a passion that God had surely intended him to bring to building model submarines. Denise was a little worried by the degree of her revulsion. She didn’t understand what made her so very mean. She was unhappy to be so mean. There seemed to be something wrong with the way she thought about herself and other people.

  Whenever her mother pointed this out, though, she had no choice but to nuke her.

  The next day she was taking her lunch hour in the park, sunning herself in one of the tiny sleeveless tops that her mother was unaware she wore to work beneath her sweaters, when Don Armour appeared from nowhere and dropped onto the bench beside her.

  “You’re not playing cards,” she said.

  “I’m going crazy,” he said.

  She returned her eyes to her book. She could feel him looking at her body pointedly. The air was hot but not so hot as to account for the heat on his side of her face.

  He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. “This is where you come and sit every day.”

  “Yes.”

  He wasn’t good-looking. His head seemed too large, his hair was thinning, and his face had the dusky nitrite red of a wiener or bologna, except where his beard made it blue. But she recognized an amusement, a brightness, an animal sadness in his expression; and the saddle curves of his lips were inviting.

  He read the spine of her book. “Count Leo Tolstoy,” he said. He shook his head and laughed silently.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “I’m just trying to imagine what it’s like to be you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean beautiful. Smart. Disciplined. Rich. Going to college. What’s it like?”<
br />
  She had a ridiculous impulse to answer him by touching him, to let him feel what it was like. There was no other way, really, to answer.

  She shrugged and said she didn’t know.

  “Your boyfriend must feel very lucky,” Don Armour said.

  “I don’t have a boyfriend.”

  He flinched as if this were difficult news. “I find that puzzling and surprising.”

  Denise shrugged again.

  “I had a summer job when I was seventeen,” Don said. “I worked for an old Mennonite couple that had a big antique store. We used this stuff called Magic Mixture—paint thinner, wood alcohol, acetone, tung oil. It would clean up the furniture without stripping it. I’d breathe it all day and come home flying. Then around midnight I’d get this wicked headache.”

  “Where’d you grow up?”

  “Carbondale. Illinois. I had this idea that the Mennonites were underpaying me, in spite of the free highs. So I started borrowing their pickup at night. I had a girlfriend who needed rides. I crashed the pickup, which was how the Mennonites found out I’d been using it, and my then-stepdad said if I enlisted in the Marines he would deal with the Mennonites and their insurance company, otherwise I was on my own with the cops. So I joined the Marines in the middle of the sixties. It just seemed like the thing to do. I’ve got a real knack for timing.”

  “You were in Vietnam.”

  Don Armour nodded. “If this merger goes through, I’m back to where I was when I was discharged. Plus three kids and another set of skills that no one wants.”

  “How old are your kids?”

  “Ten, eight, and four.”

  “Does your wife work?”

  “She’s a school nurse. She’s at her parents’ in Indiana. They’ve got five acres and a pond. Nice for the girls.”

  “Are you taking some vacation?”

  “Two weeks next month.”

  Denise had run out of questions. Don Armour sat bent over with his hands pressed flat between his knees. He sat like this for a long time. From the side, she could see his trademark smirk wearing through his impassivity; he seemed like a person who would always make you pay for taking him seriously or showing concern. Finally Denise stood up and said she was going inside, and he nodded as if this were a blow he’d been expecting.

  It didn’t occur to her that Don Armour was smiling in embarrassment at the obviousness of his play for her sympathies, the staleness of his pickup lines. It didn’t occur to her that his performance at the pinochle table the day before had been staged for her benefit. It didn’t occur to her that he’d guessed she was eavesdropping in the bathroom and had let himself be overheard. It didn’t occur to her that Don Armour’s fundamental mode was self-pity and that he might, in his self-pity, have hit on many girls before her. It didn’t occur to her that he was already plotting—had been plotting since he first shook hands with her—how to get into her skirt. It didn’t occur to her that he averted his eyes not simply because her beauty caused him pain but because Rule #1 in every manual advertised at the back of men’s magazines (“How to Make Her WILD for You—Every Time!”) was Ignore Her. It didn’t occur to her that the differences of class and circumstance that were causing her discomfort might be, for Don Armour, a provocation: that she might be an object he desired for its luxury, or that a fundamentally self-pitying man whose job was in jeopardy might take a variety of satisfactions in bedding the daughter of his boss’s boss’s boss. None of this occurred to Denise then or after. She was still feeling responsible ten years later.

  What she was aware of, that afternoon, were the problems. That Don Armour wanted to put his hands on her but couldn’t was a problem. That through an accident of birth she had everything while the man who wanted her had so much less—this lack of parity—was a big problem. Since she was the one who had everything, the problem was clearly hers to solve. But any word of reassurance she could give him, any gesture of solidarity she could imagine making, felt condescending.

  She experienced the problem intensely in her body. Her surfeit of gifts and opportunities, in comparison to Don Armour’s, manifested itself as a physical botheration—a dissatisfaction that pinching the sensitive parts of herself might address but couldn’t fix.

  After lunch she went to the tank room, where the originals of all signal tracings were stored in six heavy-lidded steel tanks resembling elegant Dumpsters. Over the years, the big cardboard folders in the tanks had become overloaded, collecting lost tracings in their bulging lower depths, and Denise had been given the satisfying task of restoring order. Draftsmen visiting the tank room worked around her while she relabeled folders and unearthed long-lost vellums. The biggest tank was so deep that she had to lie on her stomach on the tank beside it, her bare legs on cold metal, and dive in with both arms to reach the bottom. She dropped the rescued tracings on the floor and reached in for more. When she surfaced for air she became aware that Don Armour was kneeling by the tank.

  His shoulders were muscled like an oarsman’s and stretched his blazer tight. She didn’t know how long he’d been here or what he’d been looking at. Now he was examining an accordion-pleated vellum, a wiring plan for a signal tower at Milepost 101.35 on the McCook line. It had been drawn freehand by Ed Alberding in 1956.

  “Ed was a kid when he drew this. It’s a beautiful thing.”

  Denise climbed down from the tank, smoothed her skirt, and dusted herself off.

  “I shouldn’t be so hard on Ed,” Don said. “He’s got talents I’ll never have.”

  He seemed to be thinking less about Denise than she’d been thinking about him. He uncrumpled another tracing, and she stood looking down at a boyish whorl of his pencil-gray hair. She took a step closer and leaned a little closer yet, eclipsing her view of him with her chest.

  “You’re kind of in my light,” he said.

  “Do you want to have dinner with me?”

  He sighed heavily. His shoulders slumped. “I’m supposed to drive to Indiana for the weekend.”

  “OK.”

  “But let me think about it.”

  “Good. Think about it.”

  She sounded cool, but her knees were unsteady as she made her way to the women’s room. She locked herself in a stall and sat and worried while, outside, the elevator bell faintly chimed and the afternoon snack cart came and went. Her worrying had no content. Her eyes simply alighted on something, the chrome bolt on the door of the stall or a square of tissue on the floor, and the next thing she knew, she’d been staring at it for five minutes and had thought about nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

  She was cleaning up the tank room, five minutes before day’s end, when Don Armour’s broad face loomed up at her shoulder, his eyelids drooping sleepily behind his glasses. “Denise,” he said. “Let me take you to dinner.”

  She nodded quickly. “OK.”

  In a rough neighborhood, mostly poor and black, just north of downtown was an old-fashioned soda shop and diner that Henry Dusinberre and his student thespians patronized. Denise had appetite for nothing more than iced tea and french fries, but Don Armour ordered a hamburger platter and a milk shake. His posture, she noticed, was a frog’s. His head sank into his shoulders as he bent to the food. He chewed slowly, as if with irony. He cast bland smiles around the room, as if with irony. He pushed his glasses up his nose with fingers whose nails, she noticed, were bitten to the pink.

  “I would never come to this neighborhood,” he said.

  “These couple of blocks are pretty safe.”

  “See, for you, that’s true,” he said. “A place can sense if you understand trouble. If you don’t understand it, you get left alone. My problem is I understand it. If I had come to a street like this when I was your age, something ugly would have happened.”

  “I don’t see why.”

  “It’s just the way it was. I would look up, and suddenly there would be three strangers who hated my guts. And I hated theirs. This is a world you can’t even see if you’re an effective an
d happy person. A person like you walks right through it. It’s waiting for someone like me to come along so I can have the shit beat out of me. It’s had me picked out from a mile away.”

  Don Armour drove a big American sedan similar to Denise’s mother’s, only older. He piloted it patiently onto an artery and headed west at a low speed, amusing himself by slouching at the wheel (“I’m slow; my car is bad”) while other drivers roared by on the left and right.

  Denise directed him to Henry Dusinberre’s house. The sun was still shining, low in the west above the plywood-eyed train station, when they mounted the stairs to Dusinberre’s porch. Don Armour looked up at the surrounding trees as if even the trees were somehow better, more expensive, in this suburb. Denise had her hand on the screen door before she realized that the door behind it was open.

  “Lambert? Is that you?” Henry Dusinberre came out of the gloom of his parlor. His skin was waxier than ever, his eyes more protuberant, and his teeth seemed larger in his head. “My mother’s doctor sent me home,” he said. “He wanted to wash his hands of me. I think he’s had enough of death.”

  Don Armour was retreating toward his car, head down.

  “Who’s the incredible hulk?” Dusinberre said.

  “A friend from work,” Denise said.

  “Well, you can’t bring him in. I’m sorry. I won’t have hulks in the house. You’ll have to find someplace else.”

  “Do you have food? Are you all right here?”

  “Yes, run along. I feel better already, being back. That doctor and I were mutually embarrassed by my health. Apparently, child, I’m quite without white blood cells. The man was shaking with fear. He was convinced that I was going to die right there in his office. Lambert, I felt so sorry for him!” A dark hole of mirth opened in the sick man’s face. “I tried to explain to him that my white-blood-cell needs are entirely nugatory. But he seemed intent on regarding me as a medical curiosity. I had lunch with Mother and took a taxi to the airport.”

  “You’re sure you’re OK.”