The Corrections

by Jonathan Franzen

  “Yes. Go, with my blessing. Be foolish. But not in my house. Go.”

  It was unwise to be seen with Don Armour at her house before dark, with observant Roots and curious Dribletts coming and going on the street, so she directed him to the elementary school and led him into the field of grass behind it. They sat amid the electronic menagerie of bug sounds, the genital intensity of certain fragrant shrubs, the fading heat of a nice July day. Don Armour put his arms around her belly, his chin on her shoulder. They listened to the dull pops of small-bore fireworks.

  In her house after dark, in the frost of its air-conditioning, she tried to move him quickly toward the stairs, but he tarried in the kitchen, he lingered in the dining room. She was pierced by the unfairness of the impression that the house was obviously making. Although her parents weren’t wealthy, her mother so yearned for a certain kind of elegance and had worked so hard to achieve it that to Don Armour the house looked like the house of rich people. He seemed reluctant to tread on the carpeting. He stopped and took proper note, as possibly no one else ever had, of the Waterford goblets and candy dishes that Enid kept on display in the breakfront. His eyes fell on each object, the music boxes, the Parisian street scenes, the matching and beautifully upholstered furniture, as they’d fallen on Denise’s body—was it just today? Today at lunch?

  She put her large hand in his larger hand, knitted her fingers into his, and pulled him toward the stairs.

  In her bedroom, on his knees, he planted his thumbs on her hipbones and pressed his mouth to her thighs and then to her whatever; she felt returned to a childhood world of Grimm and C. S. Lewis where a touch could be transformative. His hands made her hips into a woman’s hips, his mouth made her thighs into a woman’s thighs, her whatever into a cunt. These were the advantages of being wanted by someone older—to feel less like an ungendered marionette, to be given a guided tour of the state of her morphology, to have its usefulness elucidated by a person for whom it was just the ticket.

  Boys her own age wanted something, but they didn’t seem to know exactly what. Boys her own age wanted approximately. Her function—the role she’d played on more than one lousy date—was to help them learn more specifically what they wanted, to unbutton her shirt and give them suggestions, to (as it were) flesh out their rather rudimentary ideas.

  Don Armour wanted her minutely, inch by inch. She appeared to make brilliant sense to him. Simply possessing a body had never much helped her, but seeing it as a thing that she herself might want—imagining herself as Don Armour on her knees, desiring the various parts of herself—made her possession of it more forgivable. She had what the man expected to find. There was no anxiety to his location and appreciation of each feature.

  When she unhooked her bra, Don bowed his head and shut his eyes.

  “What is it?”

  “A person could die of how beautiful you are.”

  This she liked, yes.

  Her feeling when she took him in her hands was a preview of her feeling a few years later, as a young cook, when she handled her first truffles, her first foie gras, her first sacs of roe.

  On her eighteenth birthday her theater friends had given her a hollowed-out Bible containing a nip of Seagram’s and three candy-colored condoms, which came in handy now.

  Don Armour’s head, looming above her, was a lion’s head, a jack-o’-lantern. When he came, he roared. His subsiding sighs overtook one another, overlapped almost. Oh, oh, oh, oh. She’d never heard anything like it.

  There was blood in proportion to her pain, which had been fairly bad, and in reverse proportion to her pleasure, which had been mainly in her head.

  In the dark, after she’d grabbed a dirty towel from the laundry basket in the hall closet, she pumped her fist at having achieved non-virginity before she left for college.

  Less wonderful was the presence of a large and somewhat bloody man in her bed. It was a single bed, the only bed she’d ever slept in, and she was very tired. This perhaps explained why she made a fool of herself by standing in the middle of her room, with a towel wrapped around her, and unexpectedly weeping.

  She loved Don Armour for getting up and wrapping his arms around her and not minding that she was a child. He put her to bed, found a pajama top for her, helped her into it. Kneeling by the bed, he drew the sheet up over her shoulder and stroked her head as she had to assume he often stroked his daughters’ heads. He did this until she was nearly asleep. Then the theater of his stroking expanded into regions that she had to assume were off-limits with his daughters. She tried to stay half-asleep, but he came at her more insistently, more scratchily. Everything he did either tickled or hurt, and when she made so bold as to whimper, she had her first experience of a man’s hands pressing on her head, pushing her southward.

  Thankfully, when he was done, he didn’t try to spend the night. He left her room and she lay utterly still, straining to hear what he was doing and whether he was coming back. Finally—she may have dozed—she heard the click of the front door’s latch and the whinny of his big car’s starter.

  She slept until noon and was showering in the downstairs bathroom shower stall, trying to comprehend what she’d done, when she heard the front door again. Heard voices.

  She madly rinsed her hair, madly toweled off, and burst out of the bathroom. Her father was lying down in the den. Her mother was rinsing out the insulated picnic hamper in the kitchen sink.

  “Denise, you didn’t eat any of the dinner I left you!” Enid cried. “It doesn’t look like you’ve touched a single thing.”

  “I thought you guys were coming back tomorrow.”

  “Lake Fond du Lac was not what we expected,” Enid said. “I don’t know what Dale and Honey were thinking. It was a big nothing.”

  At the bottom of the stairs were two overnight bags. Denise ran past them and up to her bedroom, where condom wrappers and bloody linens were visible from the doorway. She closed the door behind her.

  The rest of her summer was ruined. She was absolutely lonely both at work and at home. She hid the bloody sheet and the bloody towel in her closet and despaired of dealing with them. Enid was naturally surveillant and had myriad idle synapses to devote to such tasks as noticing when her daughter had her period. Denise hoped to come forward apologetically with the ruined towel and sheet at the appropriate time, two weeks hence. But Enid had brainpower to spare for the counting of linens.

  “I’m missing one of my good monogrammed bath towels.”

  “Oh, shoot, I left it at the pool.”

  “Denise, why you took a good monogrammed bath towel, when we have so many other towels … And then, of all the towels to lose! Did you call the pool?”

  “I went back and looked.”

  “Those are very expensive towels.”

  Denise never made mistakes like the one she was claiming to have made. The injustice would have rankled less if it had served a greater pleasure—if she could have gone to Don Armour and laughed about it and sought his consolation. But she didn’t love him and he didn’t love her.

  At work now the friendliness of the other draftsmen was suspect; it all seemed liable to lead to fucking. Don Armour was too embarrassed, or discreet, to even meet her eyes. He spent his days in a torpor of unhappiness with the Wroth brothers and unfriendliness to everyone around him. There was nothing left for Denise at work but work, and now its dullness was a burden, now she hated it. By the end of a day, her face and neck hurt from holding back tears and working at speeds that only a person working happily could maintain without discomfort.

  This, she told herself, was what happened when you acted on an impulse. She was amazed that she’d given all of two hours’ thought to her decision. She’d taken a liking to Don Armour’s eyes and mouth, she’d determined that she owed him the thing he wanted—and this was all she remembered thinking. A dirty and appealing possibility had occurred to her (I could lose my virginity tonight), and she’d leaped at the chance.

  She was too proud to admi
t to herself, let alone to Don Armour, that he wasn’t what she wanted. She was too inexperienced to know she simply could have said, “Sorry—big mistake.” She felt a responsibility to give him more of what he wanted. She expected that an affair, if you took the trouble to start it, went on for quite a while.

  She suffered for her reluctance. The first week in particular, while she worked herself up to proposing to Don Armour that they get together again on Friday night, her throat ached steadily for hours on end. But she was a trouper. She saw him on the next three Fridays, telling her parents that she was dating Kenny Kraikmeyer. Don Armour took her to dinner at a strip-mall family restaurant and then back to his flimsy little house in a tornado-alley exurb, one of fifty small towns that St. Jude in its endless sprawl was swallowing. His house embarrassed him to the point of loathing. No houses in Denise’s suburb had ceilings so low or hardware so cheap, or doors too light to slam properly, or window sashes and window tracks made of plastic. To soothe her lover and shut him up on the topic (“your life vs. mine”) that she least enjoyed, and also to fill some hours that would otherwise have passed awkwardly, she pulled him down on the Hide-A-Bed in his junk-swamped basement and brought her perfectionism to bear on a whole new world of skills.

  Don Armour never said how he’d explained to his wife his cancellation of their weekend plans in Indiana. Denise couldn’t stand to ask one question about his wife.

  She endured criticism from her mother for another mistake that she would never have made: failing to soak a bloody sheet immediately in cold water.

  On the first Friday of August, moments after Don Armour’s two-week vacation started, he and Denise doubled back into the office and locked themselves in the tank room. She kissed him and put his hands on her tits and tried to work his fingers for him, but his hands wanted to be on her shoulders; they wanted to press her to her knees.

  His stuff got up into her nasal passages.

  “Are you coming down with a cold?” her father asked her a few minutes later, while they were driving past the city limits.

  At home, Enid gave her the news that Henry Dusinberre (“your friend”) had died at St. Luke’s on Wednesday night.

  Denise would have felt even guiltier if she hadn’t visited Dusinberre in his house as recently as Sunday. She’d found him in the grip of an intense irritation with his next-door neighbor’s baby. “I’m doing without white blood cells,” he said. “You’d think they could shut their goddamn windows. My God, that infant has lungs! I suspect they’re proud of those lungs. I suspect it’s like those bikers who disconnect their mufflers. Some spurious, savage token of manhood.” Dusinberre’s skull and bones were pushing ever closer to his skin. He discussed the cost of mailing a three-ounce package. He told Denise a meandering, incorrect story about an “octoroon” to whom he’d briefly been engaged. (“If I was surprised that she was only seventh-eighths white, imagine her surprise that I was only one-eighth straight.”) He spoke of his lifelong crusade on behalf of fifty-watt lightbulbs. (“Sixty’s too bright,” he said, “and forty is too dim.”) For years, he’d lived with death and kept it in its place by making it trivial. He still managed a reasonably wicked laugh, but in the end the struggle to hold fast to the trivial proved as desperate as any other. When Denise said goodbye and kissed him, he seemed not to apprehend her personally. He smiled with downcast eyes, as if he were a special child whose beauty was to be admired and whose tragic situation pitied.

  She never saw Don Armour again either.

  On Monday, August 6, after a summer of give and take, Hillard and Chauncy Wroth reached agreement with the principal rail workers’ unions. The unions had made substantial concessions for the promise of less paternalistic, more innovative management, thus sweetening the Wroths’ $26/share tender offer for the Midland Pacific with a potential near-term savings of $200 million. The Midpac’s board of managers wouldn’t vote officially for another two weeks, but the conclusion was foregone. With chaos looming, a letter came down from the president’s office accepting the resignations of all summer employees, effective Friday, August 17.

  Since there were no women (besides Denise) in the drafting room, her co-workers prevailed on the Signal Engineer’s secretary to bake a farewell cake. It came out on her last afternoon of work. “I reckon it’s a major victory,” Lamar said, munching, “that we finally made you take a coffee break.”

  Laredo Bob dabbed at his eyes with a handkerchief the size of a pillowcase.

  Alfred passed along a compliment in the car that night.

  “Sam Beuerlein,” he said, “tells me you’re the greatest worker he’s ever seen.”

  Denise said nothing.

  “You made a deep impression on those men. You opened their eyes to the kind of work a girl can do. I didn’t tell you this before, but I had the feeling the men were dubious about getting a girl for the summer. I think they expected a lot of chattering and not much substance.”

  She was glad of her father’s admiration. But his kindness, like the kindness of the draftsmen who weren’t Don Armour, Had become inaccessible to her. It seemed to fall upon her body, to refer to it somehow; and her body rebelled.

  Denise-uh-why-you-done, what-you-did?

  “Anyhow,” her father said, “now you’ve had a taste of life in the real world.”

  Until she actually got to Philadelphia, she’d looked forward to going to school near Gary and Caroline. Their big house on Seminole Street was like a home without home’s sorrows, and Caroline, whose beauty could make Denise breathless with the sheer privilege of speaking to her, was always good for reassurance that Denise had every right to be driven crazy by her mother. By the end of her first semester of college, though, she found that she was letting Gary leave three messages on her telephone for every message she returned. (Once, just once, there was a message from Don Armour which she likewise did not return.) She found herself declining Gary’s offers to pick her up at her dorm and return her after dinner. She claimed she had to study, and then, instead of studying, she watched TV with Julia Vrais. It was a hat trick of guilt: she felt bad for lying to Gary, worse for blowing off her work, and worst of all for distracting Julia. Denise could always pull an all-nighter, but Julia was useless after ten o’clock. Julia had no motor and no rudder. Julia could not explain why her fall schedule consisted of Intro Italian, Intro Russian, Eastern Religion, and Music Theory; she accused Denise of having had unfair outside help in choosing her balanced academic diet of English, history, philosophy, and biology.

  Denise for her part was jealous of the college “men” in Julia’s life. Initially both she and Julia had been besieged. An inordinate number of the junior and senior “men” who banged their trays down beside them in the dining hall were from New Jersey. They had middle-aged faces and mega-phonic voices with which they compared math curricula or reminisced about that time they went to Rehoboth Beach and got so wasted. They had only three questions for Julia and Denise: (1) What’s your name? (2) What dorm are you in? and (3) Do you want to come to our party on Friday? Denise was amazed by the rudeness of this summary exam and no less amazed by Julia’s fascination with these Teaneck natives with monster digital wristwatches and merging eyebrows. Julia wore the heads-up look of a squirrel convinced that somebody has stale bread in his pocket. Leaving a party, she would shrug and tell Denise: “He’s got drugs, so I’m going with him.” Denise began to spend Friday nights studying by herself. She acquired a rep as an ice queen and possible lesbian. She lacked Julia’s ability to melt at the windowside chorusing of her name at three in the morning by the entire college soccer team. “I’m so embarrassed,” Julia would moan, in an agony of happiness, as she peered around the lowered blind. The “men” outside the window had no idea how happy they were making her and therefore, in Denise’s strict undergraduate judgment, did not deserve to have her.

  Denise spent the next summer in the Hamptons with four of her dissolute college hallmates and lied to her parents about every aspect of her situati
on. She slept on a living-room floor and made good money as a dishwasher and prep drone at the Inn at Quogue, working elbow to elbow with a pretty girl from Scarsdale named Suzie Sterling and falling in love with the life of a cook. She loved the crazy hours, the intensity of the work, the beauty of the product. She loved the deep stillness that underlay the din. A good crew was like an elective family in which everyone in the little hot world of the kitchen stood on equal footing, and every cook had weirdnesses concealed in her past or in his character, and even in the midst of the most sweaty togetherness each family member enjoyed privacy and autonomy: she loved this.

  Suzie Sterling’s father, Ed, had given Suzie and Denise several lifts into Manhattan before the night in August when Denise was biking home and almost rode right into him where he stood, by his BMW, smoking a Dunhill and hoping that she might come by alone. Ed Sterling was an entertainment lawyer. He pleaded inability to live without Denise. She hid her (borrowed) bike in some bushes by the road. That the bike was stolen by the time she came back for it the next day, and that she swore to its owner that she’d chained it to the usual post, ought to have given her fair warning of the territory she was entering. But she was excited by what she did to Sterling, by the dramatic hydraulic physiology of his desire, and when she returned to school in September she decided that a liberal-arts college did not compare well to a kitchen. She didn’t see the point of working hard on papers that only a professor ever saw; she wanted an audience. She also resented that the college was making her feel guilty about her privileges while granting certain lucky identity groups plenary indulgences from guilt. She felt guilty enough already, thank you. Almost every Sunday she took the cheap slow proletarian combo of SEPTA and New Jersey Transit to New York. She put up with Ed Sterling’s paranoid one-way telephone communications and his last-minute postponements and his chronic distraction and his jaw-taxing performance anxieties and her own shame at being taken to cheap ethnic restaurants in Woodside and Elmhurst and Jackson Heights so as not to be seen by anyone Sterling knew (because, as he told her often—running both hands through his mink-thick hair—he knew everybody in Manhattan). While her lover teetered closer to utter freakout and inability to see her anymore, Denise ate Uruguayan T-bones, Sino-Colombian tamales, thumbnail crayfish in red Thai curry, and alder-smoked Russian eels. Beauty or excellence, as typified for her by memorable food, could redeem almost any humiliation. But she never stopped feeling guilty about the bike. Her insistence that she’d chained it to the usual post.