The Corrections

by Jonathan Franzen

  Brian had placed strong cryptic ads for the Generator in the local weeklies and monthlies and had put the buzz out through his network, but 26 covers on the first day of lunch and 45 that night did not exactly tax Denise’s kitchen. The glassed-in dining room, suspended in a blue Cherenkov glow, sat 140; she was ready for 300-cover evenings. Brian and Robin and the girls came to dinner on a Saturday and stopped briefly in the kitchen. Denise did a good impression of being at ease with the girls, and Robin, looking great in red lipstick and a little black dress, did a good impression of being Brian’s wife.

  Denise fixed things as well as she could with the authorities in her head. She reminded herself that Brian had dropped to his knees in Paris; that she was doing nothing worse than playing by his rules; that she’d waited for Robin to make the first move. But moral hair-splitting could not explain her complete, dead absence of remorse. In conversation with Brian she was distracted and thick-headed. She caught the meaning of his words at the last moment, as if he were speaking French. She had reason to seem strung out, of course—she routinely slept four hours a night, and before long the kitchen was running at full throttle—and Brian, distracted by his film projects, was every bit as easy to deceive as she’d anticipated. But “deceive” wasn’t even the word. “Dissociate” was more like it. Her affair was like a dream life unfolding in that locked and soundproofed chamber of her brain where, growing up in St. Jude, she’d learned to hide desires.

  Reviewers descended on the Generator in late June and came away happy. The Inquirer invoked matrimony: the “wedding” of a “completely unique” setting with “serious and seriously delicious food” from the “perfectionist” Denise Lambert for a “must-have” experience that “single-handedly” put Philadelphia on the “map of cool.” Brian was ecstatic but Denise was not. She thought the language made the place sound crappy and middlebrow. She counted four paragraphs about architecture and decor, three paragraphs about nothing, two about service, one about wine, two about desserts, and only seven about her food.

  “They didn’t mention my sauerkraut,” she said, angry nearly to the point of tears.

  The reservation line rang day and night. She needed to work, to work. But Robin called her at midmorning or midafternoon on the executive chef’s line, her voice pinched with shyness, her cadences syncopated with embarrassment: “So—I was wondering—do you think—could I see you for a minute?” And instead of saying no, Denise kept saying yes. Kept delegating or delaying sensitive inventory work, tricky preroastings, and necessary phone calls to purveyors to slip away and meet Robin in the nearest strip of park along the Schuylkill. Sometimes they just sat on a bench, discreetly held hands, and, although non-work conversations during work hours made Denise extremely impatient, discussed Robin’s guilt and her own dissociated lack of it, and what it meant to be doing what they were doing, how exactly it had come to pass. But soon the talking tapered off. Robin’s voice on the executive chef’s line came to signify tongue. She didn’t say more than a word or two before Denise tuned out. Robin’s tongue and lips continued to form the instructions demanded by the day’s exigencies, but in Denise’s ear they were already speaking that other language of up and down and round and round that her body intuitively understood and autonomously obeyed; sometimes she melted so hard at the sound of this voice that her abdomen caved in and she doubled over; for the next hour-plus there was nothing in the world but tongue, no inventory or buttered pheasants or unpaid purveyors; she left the Generator in a buzzing hypnotized state of poor reflexes, the volume of the world’s noise lowered to near zero, other drivers luckily obeying basic traffic laws. Her car was like a tongue gliding down the melty asphalt streets, her feet like twin tongues licking pavement, the front door of the house on Panama Street like a mouth that swallowed her, the Persian runner in the hall outside the master bedroom like a tongue beckoning, the bed in its cloak of comforter and pillows a big soft tongue begging to be depressed, and then.

  This was all, safe to say, new territory. Denise had never wanted anything, certainly not sex, like this. Simply coming, when she was married, had come to seem like a laborious but occasionally necessary kitchen chore. She cooked for fourteen hours and routinely fell asleep in street clothes. The last thing she wanted late at night was to follow a complicated and increasingly time-consuming recipe for a dish she was too tired to enjoy in any case. Prep time a minimum fifteen minutes. Even after that, the cooking was seldom straightforward. The pan overheated, the heat was too high, the heat was too low, the onions refused to caramelize or burned immediately and stuck; you had to set the pan aside to cool off, you had to start over after painful discussion with the now angry and anguished sous-chef, and inevitably the meat got tough and stringy, the sauce lost its complexity in the repeated dilutions and deglazings, and it was so fucking late, and your eyes were burning, and OK, with enough time and effort you could fairly reliably get the sucker plated, but by then it was something you might hesitate to serve your floor personnel; you simply bolted it (“OK, there,” you thought, “I came”) and fell asleep with an ache. And it was so not worth the effort. But she’d made the effort every week or two because her coming mattered to Emile and she felt guilty. Him she could please as adroitly and unfailingly (and, before long, as unthinkingly) as she clarified consommé; and what pride, what pleasure, she took in the exercise of her skills! Emile, however, seemed to believe that without a few shudders and semi-willed sighs on her part the marriage would be in trouble, and although later events proved him one-hundred-percent correct, she couldn’t help feeling, in the years before she clapped eyes on Becky Hemerling, enormous guilt and pressure and resentment on the Ο front.

  Robin was prêt-à-manger. You didn’t need a recipe, you didn’t need prep, to eat a peach. Here was the peach, boom, here was the payoff. Denise had had intimations of ease like this with Hemerling, but only now, at the age of thirty-two, did she get what all the fuss was about. Once she got it, there was trouble. In August the girls went to camp and Brian went to London, and the executive chef of the hottest new restaurant in the region would get out of a bed only to find herself down on some carpet, would dress only to find herself undressing, would come as close to escape as the entry hall and then find herself coming with her back to the front door; jelly-kneed and slit-eyed, she dragged herself back to a kitchen to which she’d promised to return in forty-five minutes. And this was not good. The restaurant was suffering. There was gridlock on the line, delays on the floor. Twice she had to strike entrées from the menu because the kitchen, doing without her, had run out of prep time. And still she went AWOL in the middle of the second evening rush. She drove through Crack Haven and down Junk Row and past Blunt Alley to the Garden Project, where Robin had a blanket. Most of the garden was mulched and limed and planted now. Tomatoes had grown up inside bald tires outfitted with cylinders of gutter screen. And the searchlights and wing lights of landing jets, and the smog-stunted constellations, and the radium glow from the watch glass of Veterans Stadium, and the heat lightning over Tinicum, and the moon to which filthy Camden had given hepatitis as it rose, all these compromised urban lights were reflected in the skins of adolescent eggplants, young peppers and cukes and sweet corn, pubescent cantaloupes. Denise, naked in the middle of the city, rolled off the blanket into night-cool dirt, a sandy loam, freshly turned. She rested a cheek in it, pushed her Robiny fingers down into it.

  “God, stop, stop,” Robin squeaked, “that’s our new lettuce.”

  Then Brian was home and they started taking stupid chances. Robin explained to Erin that Denise hadn’t felt well and had needed to lie down in the bedroom. There was a feverish episode in the pantry at Panama Street while Brian read Ε. Β. White aloud not twenty feet away. Finally, a week before Labor Day, there came a morning in the director’s office at the Garden Project when the weight of two bodies on Robin’s antique wooden desk chair snapped its back off. They were laughing when they heard Brian’s voice.

  Robin jumped u
p and unlocked the door and opened it in one motion, to conceal that it had been locked. Brian was holding a basket of speckled green erections. He was surprised—but delighted, as always—to see Denise. “What’s going on in there?”

  Denise knelt by Robin’s desk, her shirt untucked. “Robin’s chair broke,” she said. “I’m licking a take at Robin’s chair.”

  “I asked Denise if she could fix it!” Robin squeaked.

  “What are you doing here?” Brian asked Denise, very curious.

  “I had the same thought you had,” she said. “Zucchini.”

  “Sara said nobody was here.”

  Robin was edging away. “I’ll go talk to her. She should know when I’m here.”

  “How did Robin break that?” Brian asked Denise.

  “I don’t know,” she said. She had the bad child’s impulse to cry when caught red-handed.

  Brian picked up the top half of the chair. He had never specifically reminded Denise of her father, but she was pierced now by the resemblance to Alfred in his intelligent sympathy for the broken object. “This is good oak,” he said. “Weird it should just suddenly break.”

  She rose from her knees and wandered into the hall, stuffing shirt into pants as she went. She kept wandering until she was outside and got into her car. She drove up Bainbridge Street to the river. Pulled up to a galvanized guardrail and killed the engine by letting out the clutch, let the car lurch into the guardrail and bounce back dead, and now, finally, she broke down and cried about the broken chair.

  Her head was clearer when she returned to the Generator. She saw that she was in the weeds on every front. There were unanswered phone messages from a food writer at the Times, from an editor at Gourmet, and from the latest restaurateur hoping to steal Brian’s chef. A thousand dollars’ worth of unrotated duck breasts and veal chops had gone bad in the walk-in. Everybody in the kitchen knew and nobody had told her that a needle had turned up in the employee bathroom. The pastry chef claimed to have left Denise a pair of handwritten notes, presumably salary-related, that Denise had no memory of seeing.

  “Why is nobody ordering country ribs?” Denise asked Rob Zito. “Why are the waiters not pushing my phenomenally delicious and unusual country ribs?”

  “Americans don’t like sauerkraut,” Zito said.

  “The hell they don’t. I’ve seen my reflection in the plates coming back when people order it. I’ve counted my eyelashes.”

  “It’s possible we get some German nationals in here,” Zito said. “German passport-holders may be responsible for those clean plates.”

  “Is it possible you don’t like sauerkraut yourself?”

  “It’s an interesting food,” Zito said.

  She didn’t hear from Robin and she didn’t call her. She gave the Times an interview and let herself be photographed, she stroked the pastry chef’s ego, she stayed late and bagged up the spoiled meats in privacy, she fired the dishwasher who’d tied off in the John, and every lunch and every dinner she dogged the line and troubleshot.

  On Labor Day: deadness. She made herself leave her office and went walking in the empty hot city, bending her steps, in her loneliness, toward Panama Street. She had a liquid Pavlovian response when she saw the house. The brownstone facade was still a face, the door still a tongue. Robin’s car was in the street but Brian’s wasn’t; they’d gone to Cape May. Denise rang the bell, although she could already tell, from a dustiness around the door, that nobody was home. She let herself in with the dead-bolt key on which she’d written “R/B.” She walked up two flights to the parental bedroom. The house’s expensive retrofitted central air conditioner was doing its job, the cool canned-smelling air contending with Labor Day sunbeams. As she lay down on the unmade parental bed, she remembered the smell and the quiet of the St. Judean summer afternoons when she would be left alone in the house and could be, for a couple of hours, as weird as she wanted. She brought herself off. She lay on the snarled sheets, a slice of sunlight falling on her chest. She took a second helping of herself and stretched her arms luxuriantly. Beneath a parental pillow, she scratched her hand on the foil corner of something like a condom wrapper.

  It was a condom wrapper. Torn and empty. She actually whimpered as she pictured the penetrative act it attested to. She actually clutched her head.

  She scrambled out of the bed and smoothed her dress across her hips. She scanned the sheets for other sickening surprises. Well, of course a married couple had sex. Of course. But Robin had told her that she wasn’t on the Pill, she’d said that she and Brian no longer fooled around enough to bother; and all summer long Denise had seen and tasted and smelled no trace of a husband on her lover’s body, and so she’d let herself forget the obvious.

  She knelt at the wastebasket by Brian’s dresser. She stirred Kleenexes, ticket stubs, and segments of floss and found another condom wrapper. Hatred of Robin, hatred and jealousy, were coming on like a migraine. She went into the master-bedroom bathroom and found two more wrappers and a knotted rubber in the can beneath the sink.

  She actually hit her temples with her fists. She heard the breath in her teeth as she ran down the stairs and let herself out into the late afternoon. The temperature was ninety and she was shivering. Weirdness, weirdness. She hiked back to the Generator and let herself in at the loading dock. She inventoried oils and cheeses and flours and spices, drew up meticulous order sheets, left twenty voice-mail messages in a wry and articulate and civilized voice, did her e-mail chores, fried herself a kidney on the Garland, chased it with a single shot of grappa, and called a cab at midnight.

  Robin showed up in the kitchen unannounced the next morning. She was wearing a big white shirt that appeared to have been Brian’s. Denise’s stomach flipped at the sight of her. She led her back to the executive chef’s office and shut the door.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” Robin said.

  “Good, neither can I, so.”

  Robin’s face was all blotch. She scratched her head and scrunched up her nose with tic-like incessancy and pushed on the bridge of her glasses. “I haven’t been to church since June,” she said. “Sinéad’s caught me in about ten different lies. She wants to know why you’re never around. I don’t even know half the kids turning up at the Project lately. Everything’s a mess, and I just can’t do it anymore.”

  Denise choked out a question: “How’s Brian?”

  Robin blushed. “He doesn’t know anything. He’s the same as always. You know—he likes you, he likes me.”

  “I bet.”

  “Things have gotten weird.”

  “Well, and I’ve got a lot of work here, so.”

  “Brian never did anything bad to me. He didn’t deserve this.”

  Denise’s phone rang and she let it ring. Her head felt close to cracking open. She couldn’t stand to hear Robin say Brian’s name.

  Robin raised her face to the ceiling, pearls of tear beading in her lashes. “I don’t know what I came for. I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m just feeling really, really bad and incredibly alone.”

  “Get over it,” Denise said. “That’s what I’m going to do.”

  “Why are you being so cold?”

  “Because I’m a cold person.”

  “If you’d call me, or say you loved me—”

  “Get over it! For God’s sake! Get over it! Get over it!”

  Robin gave her a beseeching look; but really, even if the matter of the condoms were somehow cleared up, what was Denise supposed to do? Quit working at the restaurant that was making her a star? Go live in the ghetto and be one of Sinéad and Erin’s two mommies? Start wearing big sneakers and cooking vegetarian?

  She knew she was telling herself lies, but she didn’t know which of the things in her head were the lies and which were the truth. She stared at her desk until Robin yanked open the door and fled.

  The next morning the Generator made the front page of the New York Times food section, below the fold. Beneath the headline (“Generating Buzz by
the Megawatt”) was a photograph of Denise, the interior and exterior architectural shots having been relegated to page 6, where her country ribs and sauerkraut could also be seen. This was better. This was more like it. By noon she’d been offered a guest appearance on the Food Channel and a permanent monthly column in Philadelphia. She bypassed Rob Zito and instructed the reservation girl to start overbooking by forty seats an evening. Gary and Caroline called separately with congratulations. She dressed down Zito for refusing a weekend reservation to the local NBC-affiliate anchorwoman, she let herself abuse him a little bit, it felt good.

  Expensive people of a sort formerly scarce in Philadelphia were three-deep at the bar when Brian came by with a dozen roses. He hugged Denise and she lingered in his arms. She gave him a little bit of what men liked.

  “We need more tables,” she said. “Three fours and a six at a minimum. We need a full-time reservationist who knows how to screen. We need better parking-lot security. We need a pastry chef with more imagination and less attitude. Also think about replacing Rob with somebody from New York who can handle the kind of customer profile we’re going to get.”

  Brian was surprised. “You want to do that to Rob?”

  “He wouldn’t push my ribs and sauerkraut,” Denise said. “The Times liked my ribs and sauerkraut. I say fuck him if he can’t do the job.”

  The hardness in her voice brought a glow to Brian’s eyes. He seemed to like her like this.

  “Whatever you think,” he said.

  Late Saturday night she joined Brian and Jerry Schwartz and two cheekboned blondes and the lead singer and the lead guitarist from one of her favorite bands for drinks on the little railed-in aerie that Brian had rigged on the roof of the Generator. The night was warm and the bugs along the river were nearly as loud as the Schuylkill Expressway. Both blondes were talking on their phones. Denise accepted a cigarette from the guitarist, who was hoarse from a gig, and let him examine her scars.