Read The Corrections: A Novel Online
Authors: Jonathan Franzen
His problem consisted of a burning wish not to have done the things he’d done. And his body, its chemists, had a clear instinctive understanding of what he had to do to make this burning wish go away. He had to swallow another Mexican A.
He searched the toiletries kit exhaustively. He wouldn’t have thought it possible to feel dependent on a drug with no hedonic kick, a drug that on the evening of his fifth and final dose he hadn’t even craved. He uncapped Melissa’s lipsticks and removed twin tampons from their pink plastic holder and probed with a bobby pin down through her jar of skin cleanser. Nothing.
He took the kit back out to the main room, which was fully light now, and whispered Melissa’s name. Receiving no answer, he dropped to his knees and rifled her canvas travel bag. Paddled his fingers in the empty cups of bras. Squeezed her sock balls. Touched the various private pouches and compartments of the bag. This new and different violation of Melissa was sensationally painful to him. In the orange light of his shame he felt as if he were abusing her internal organs. He felt like a surgeon atrociously fondling her youthful lungs, defiling her kidneys, sticking his finger in her perfect, tender pancreas. The sweetness of her little socks, and the thought of the even littler socks of her all too proximate girlhood, and the image of a hopeful bright romantic sophomore packing clothes for a trip with her esteemed professor—each sentimental association added fuel to his shame, each image recalled him to the unfunny raw comedy of what he’d done
to her. The jismic grunting butt-oink. The jiggling frantic nut-swing.
By now his shame was boiling so furiously it felt liable to burst things in his brain. Nevertheless, while keeping a close eye on Melissa’s sleeping form, he managed to paw her clothing a second time. Only after he’d resqueezed and rehandled each piece of it did he conclude that the Mexican A was in the big zippered outer pocket of her bag. This zipper he eased open tooth by tooth, clenching his own teeth to survive the noise of it. He’d worked the pocket open just far enough to push his hand through it (and the stress of this latest of his penetrations released fresh gusts of flammable memory; he felt mortified by each of the manual liberties he’d taken with Melissa here in Room 23, by the insatiable lewd avidity of his fingers;
he wished he could have
left her alone
) when the cell phone on the nightstand tinkled and with a groan she came awake.
He snatched his hand from the forbidden place, ran to the bathroom, and took a long shower. By the time he came out, Melissa was dressed and had repacked her bag. She looked utterly uncarnal in the morning light. She was whistling a happy tune.
“Darling, a change of plans,” she said. “My father, who really is a lovely man, is coming out to Westport for the day. I want to go be with them.”
Chip wished he could fail to feel the shame that she was failing to feel; but to beg for another pill was acutely embarrassing. “What about our dinner?” he said.
“I’m sorry. It’s just really important that I be there.”
“So it’s not enough to be on the phone with them for a couple of hours every day.”
“Chip, I’m sorry. But we’re talking about my best friends.”
Chip had never liked the sound of Tom Paquette: a dilettante rocker and trust-fund baby who ditched his family
for a roller blader. And in the last few days Clair’s boundless capacity to yak about herself while Melissa listened had turned Chip against her, too.
“Great,” he said. “I’ll take you to Westport.”
Melissa flipped her hair so that it fanned across her back. “Darling? Don’t be mad.”
“If you don’t want to go to the Cape, you don’t want to go to the Cape. I’ll take you to Westport.”
“Good. Are you going to get dressed?”
“It’s just that, Melissa, you know, there’s something a little sick about being so close to your parents.”
She seemed not to have heard him. She went to the mirror and applied mascara. She put on lipstick. Chip stood in the middle of the room with a towel around his waist. He felt warty and egregious. He felt that Melissa was right to be disgusted by him. And yet he wanted to be clear.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Darling. Chip.” She pressed her painted lips together. “Get dressed.”
“I’m saying, Melissa, that children are not supposed to get along with their parents. Your parents are not supposed to be your best friends. There’s supposed to be some element of rebellion. That’s how you define yourself as a person.”
“Maybe it’s how
you
define yourself,” she said. “But then you’re not exactly an advertisement for happy adulthood.”
He grinned and bore this.
“I like myself,” she said. “But you don’t seem to like yourself so much.”
“Your parents seem very fond of themselves, too,” he said. “You seem very fond of yourselves as a family.”
He’d never seen Melissa really angry. “I love myself,” she said. “What’s wrong with that?”
He was unable to say what was wrong with it. He was unable to say what was wrong with anything about Melissa —her self-adoring parents, her theatricality and confidence,
her infatuation with capitalism, her lack of good friends her own age. The feeling he’d had on the last day of Consuming Narratives, the feeling that he was mistaken about everything, that there was nothing wrong with the world and nothing wrong with being happy in it, that the problem was his and his alone, returned with such force that he had to sit down on the bed.
“What’s our drug situation?”
“We’re out,” Melissa said.
“OK.”
“I got six of them and you’ve had five.”
“What?”
“And it was a big mistake, evidently, not to give you all six.”
“What have you been taking?”
“Advil, darling.” Her tone with this endearment had moved beyond the arch to the outright ironic. “For saddle soreness?”
“I never asked you to get that drug,” he said.
“Not in so many words,” she said.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well, a fat lot of fun we were going to have without it.”
Chip didn’t ask her to explain. He was afraid she meant he’d been a lousy, anxious lover until he took Mexican A. He had, of course, been a lousy, anxious lover; but he’d allowed himself to hope she hadn’t noticed. Under the weight of this fresh shame, and with no drug left in the room to alleviate it, he bowed his head and pressed his hands into his face. Shame was pushing down and rage was boiling up.
“Are you going to drive me to Westport?” Melissa said.
He nodded, but she must not have been looking at him, because he heard her flipping through a phone book. He heard her tell a dispatcher she needed a ride to New London. He heard her say: “The Comfort Valley Lodge. Room twenty-three.”
“I’ll drive you to Westport,” he said.
She shut the phone. “No, this is fine.”
“Melissa. Cancel the cab. I’ll drive you.”
She parted the room’s rear curtains, exposing a vista of Cyclone fencing, stick-straight maples, and the back side of a recycling plant. Eight or ten snowflakes drifted dismally. In the eastern sky was a raw patch where the cloud cover was abraded, the white sun wearing through. Chip dressed quickly while Melissa’s back was turned. If he hadn’t been so strangely full of shame, he might have gone to the window and put his hands on her, and she might have turned and forgiven him. But his hands felt predatory. He imagined her recoiling, and he wasn’t entirely convinced that some dark percentage of his being didn’t really want to rape her, to make her pay for liking herself in a way he couldn’t like himself. How he hated and how he loved the lilt in her voice, the bounce in her step, the serenity of her amour propre! She got to be her and he didn’t. And he could see that he was ruined—that he didn’t like her but would miss her disastrously.
She dialed another number. “Hey, love,” she said into her cell phone. “I’m on my way to New London. I’ll take the first train that comes … NO I just want to be with you guys … Totally … Yes, totally … OK, kiss kiss, I’ll see you when I see you … Yep.”
A car honked outside the door.
“There’s my cab,” she told her mother. “Right, OK. Kiss kiss. Bye.”
She shrugged into her jacket, lifted her bag, and waltzed across the room. At the door she announced in a general way that she was leaving. “I’ll see you later,” she said, almost looking at Chip.
He couldn’t figure out if she was immensely well adjusted or seriously messed up. He heard a cab door slam, an engine rumble. He went to the front window and got a glimpse of
her cherrywood hair through the rear window of a red-and-white cab. He decided, after five years without, that the time had come to buy some cigarettes.
He put on a jacket and crossed expanses of cold asphalt indifferent to pedestrians. He pushed money through a slot in the bulletproof glass of a minimart.
It was the morning of Thanksgiving. The flurries had stopped and the sun was halfway out. A gull’s wings rattled and clacked. The breeze had a ruffly quality, it didn’t quite seem to touch the ground. Chip sat on a freezing guardrail and smoked and took comfort in the sturdy mediocrity of American commerce, the unpretending metal and plastic roadside hardware. The thunk of a gas-pump nozzle halting when a tank was filled, the humility and promptness of its service. And a
99¢ Big Gulp
banner swelling with wind and sailing nowhere, its nylon ropes whipping and pinging on a galvanized standard. And the black sanserif numerals of gasoline prices, the company of so many 9s. And American sedans moving down the access road at nearly stationary speeds like thirty. And orange and yellow plastic pennants shivering overhead on guys.
“Dad fell down the basement stairs again,” Enid said while the rain came down in New York City. “He was carrying a big box of pecans to the basement and he didn’t hold the railing and he fell. Well, you can imagine how many pecans are in a twelve-pound box. Those nuts rolled everywhere. Denise, I spent half a day on my hands and knees. And I’m still finding them. They’re the same color as those crickets we can’t get rid of. I reach down to pick up a pecan, and it jumps in my face!”
Denise was trimming the stems of the sunflowers she’d brought. “Why was Dad carrying twelve pounds of pecans down the basement stairs?”
“He wanted a project he could work on in his chair. He
was going to shell them.” Enid hovered at Denise’s shoulder. “Is there something I can do here?”
“You can find me a vase.”
The first cabinet that Enid opened contained a carton of wine-bottle corks and nothing else. “I don’t understand why Chip invited us here if he wasn’t even going to eat lunch with us.”
“Conceivably,” Denise said, “he didn’t plan on getting dumped this morning.”
Denise’s tone of voice was forever informing Enid that she was stupid. Denise was not, Enid felt, a very warm or giving person. However, Denise was a daughter, and a few weeks ago Enid had done a shameful thing that she was now in serious need of confessing to somebody, and she hoped Denise might be that person.
“Gary wants us to sell the house and move to Philadelphia,” she said. “Gary thinks Philadelphia makes sense because he’s there and you’re there and Chip’s in New York. I said to Gary, I love my children, but St. Jude is where I’m comfortable. Denise, I’m a midwesterner. I’d be
lost
in Philadelphia. Gary wants us to sign up for assisted living. He doesn’t understand that it’s already too late. Those places won’t let you in if you have a condition like Dad’s.”
“But if Dad keeps falling down the stairs.”
“Denise, he doesn’t hold the railing! He refuses to accept that he shouldn’t be carrying things on the stairs.”
Underneath the sink Enid found a vase behind a stack of framed photographs, four pictures of pinkish furry things, some sort of kooky art or medical photos. She tried to reach past them quietly, but she knocked over an asparagus steamer that she’d given Chip for Christmas once. As soon as Denise looked down, Enid could not pretend she hadn’t seen the pictures. “What on earth?” she said, scowling. “Denise, what are these?”
“What do you mean,’ what are these?’?”
“Some sort of kooky thing of Chip’s, I guess.”
Denise had an “amused” expression that drove Enid crazy. “Obviously you know what they are, though.”
“No. I don’t.”
“You don’t know what they are?”
Enid took the vase out and closed the cabinet. “I don’t
want
to know,” she said.
“Well, that’s something else entirely.”
In the living room, Alfred was summoning the courage to sit down on Chip’s chaise longue. Not ten minutes ago, he’d sat down on it without incident. But now, instead of simply doing it again, he’d stopped to think. He’d realized only recently that at the center of the act of sitting down was a loss of control, a blind backwards free fall. His excellent blue chair in St. Jude was like a first baseman’s glove that gently gathered in whatever body was flung its way, at whatever glancing angle, with whatever violence; it had big helpful ursine arms to support him while he performed the crucial blind pivot. But Chip’s chaise was a low-riding, impractical antique. Alfred stood facing away from it and hesitated, his knees bent to the rather small degree that his neuropathic lower legs permitted, his hands scooping and groping in the air behind him. He was afraid to take the plunge. And yet there was something obscene about standing half-crouched and quaking, some association with the men’s room, some essential vulnerability which felt to him at once so poignant and degraded that, simply to put an end to it, he shut his eyes and let go. He landed heavily on his bottom and continued on over backwards, coming to rest with his knees in the air above him.
“Al, are you all right?” Enid called.
“I don’t understand this furniture,” he said, struggling to sit up and sound powerful. “Is this meant to be a sofa?”
Denise came out and put a vase of three sunflowers on the spindly table by the chaise. “It’s like a sofa,” she said. “You
can put your legs up and be a French philosophe. You can talk about Schopenhauer.”
Alfred shook his head.
Enid enunciated from the kitchen doorway, “Dr. Hedgpeth says you should only sit in
high, straight-backed
chairs.”
Since Alfred showed no interest in these instructions, Enid repeated them to Denise when she returned to the kitchen. “
High, straight-backed
chairs only,” she said. “But Dad won’t listen. He insists on sitting in his leather chair. Then he shouts for me to come and help him get up. But if I hurt my back, then where are we? I put one of those nice old ladder-back chairs by the TV downstairs and told him
sit here
. But he’d rather sit in his leather chair, and then to get out of it he slides down the cushion until he’s on the floor. Then he crawls on the floor to the Ping-Pong table and uses the Ping-Pong table to hoist himself up.”
“That’s actually pretty resourceful,” Denise said as she took an armload of food from the refrigerator.
“Denise, he’s
crawling across the floor
. Rather than sit in a nice, comfortable straight-backed chair which the doctor says it’s important that he sit in,
he crawls across the floor
. He shouldn’t be sitting so much to begin with. Dr. Hedgpeth says his condition is not at all severe if he would just get out and
do
a little. Use it or lose it, that’s what every doctor says. Dave Schumpert has had ten times more health problems than Dad, he’s had a colostomy for fifteen years, he’s got one lung and a pacemaker, and look at all the things that he and Mary Beth are doing. They just got back from snorkeling in Fiji! And Dave
never
complains,
never
complains. You probably don’t remember Gene Grillo, Dad’s old friend from Hephaestus, but he has bad Parkinson’s—much, much worse than Dad’s. He’s still at home in Fort Wayne but in a wheelchair now. He’s really in awful shape, but, Denise, he’s
interested
in things. He can’t write anymore but he sent us an
’audio letter’ on a cassette tape, really thoughtful, where he talks about each of his grandchildren in detail, because he knows his grandkids and takes an interest in them, and about how he’s started to teach himself Cambodian, which he calls Khmer, from listening to a tape and watching the Cambodian (or Khmer, I guess) TV channel in Fort Wayne, because their youngest son is married to a Cambodian woman, or Khmer, I guess, and her parents don’t speak any English and Gene wants to be able to talk to them a little. Can you believe? Here Gene is in a wheelchair, completely crippled, and he’s still thinking about what he can do for somebody else! While Dad, who can walk, and write, and dress himself, does nothing all day but sit in his chair.”
“Mother, he’s depressed,” Denise said in a low voice, slicing bread.
“That’s what Gary and Caroline say, too. They say he’s depressed and he should take a medication. They say he was a workaholic and that work was a drug which when he couldn’t have it anymore he got depressed.”
“So drug him and forget him. A convenient theory.”
“That’s not fair to Gary.”
“Don’t get me started on Gary and Caroline.”
“
Golly
, Denise, the way you throw that knife around I don’t see how you haven’t lost a finger.”
From the end of a French loaf Denise had made three little crust-bottomed vehicles. On one she set shavings of butter curved like sails full of wind, into another she loaded Parmesan shards packed in an excelsior of shredded arugula, and the third she paved with minced olive meat and olive oil and covered with a thick red tarp of pepper.
Enid spoke—“Mm, don’t those look nice”—as she reached, cat-quick, for the plate on which Denise had arranged the snacks. But the plate eluded Enid.
“These are for Dad.”
“Just a corner of one.”
“I’ll make some more for you.”
“No, I just want one corner of his.”
But Denise left the kitchen and took the plate to Alfred, for whom the problem of existence was this: that, in the manner of a wheat seedling thrusting itself up out of the earth, the world moved forward in time by adding cell after cell to its leading edge, piling moment on moment, and that to grasp the world even in its freshest, youngest moment provided no guarantee that you’d be able to grasp it again a moment later. By the time he’d established that his daughter, Denise, was handing him a plate of snacks in his son Chip’s living room, the next moment in time was already budding itself into a pristinely ungrasped existence in which he couldn’t absolutely rule out the possibility, for example, that his wife, Enid, was handing him a plate of feces in the parlor of a brothel; and no sooner had he reconfirmed Denise and the snacks and Chip’s living room than the leading edge of time added yet another layer of new cells, so that he again faced a new and ungrasped world; which was why, rather than exhaust himself playing catch-up, he preferred more and more to spend his days down among the unchanging historical roots of things.
“Something to tide you while I get lunch,” Denise said.
Alfred gazed with gratitude at the snacks, which were holding about ninety percent steady as food, flickering only occasionally into objects of similar size and shape.
“Maybe you’d like a glass of wine?”
“Not necessary,” he said. As the gratitude spread outward from his heart—as he was moved—his clasped hands and lower arms began to bounce more freely on his lap. He tried to find something in the room that didn’t move him, something he could rest his eyes on safely; but because the room was Chip’s and because Denise was standing in it, every fixture and every surface—even a radiator knob, even a thigh-level expanse of faintly scuffed wall—was a reminder
of the separate, eastern worlds in which his children led their lives and hence of the various vast distances that separated him from them; which made his hands shake all the more.
That the daughter whose attentions most aggravated his affliction was the person he least wanted to be seen by in the grip of this affliction was the sort of Devil’s logic that confirmed a man’s pessimism.
“I’ll leave you alone for a minute,” Denise said, “while I get the lunch going.”
He closed his eyes and thanked her. As if waiting for a break in a downpour so that he could run from his car into a grocery store, he waited for a lull in his tremor so that he could reach out and safely eat what she’d brought him.
His affliction offended his sense of ownership. These shaking hands belonged to nobody but him, and yet they refused to obey him. They were like bad children. Unreasoning two-year-olds in a tantrum of selfish misery. The more sternly he gave orders, the less they listened and the more miserable and out of control they got. He’d always been vulnerable to a child’s recalcitrance and refusal to behave like an adult. Irresponsibility and undiscipline were the bane of his existence, and it was another instance of that Devil’s logic that his own untimely affliction should consist of his body’s refusal to obey him.
If thy right hand offend thee, Jesus said, cut it off.
As he waited for the tremor to abate—as he watched his hands’ jerking rowing motions impotently, as if he were in a nursery with screaming misbehaving infants and had lost his voice and couldn’t make them quiet down—Alfred took pleasure in the imagination of chopping his hand off with a hatchet: of letting the transgressing limb know how deeply he was angry with it, how little he loved it if it insisted on disobeying him. It brought a kind of ecstasy to imagine the first deep bite of the hatchet’s blade in the bone and muscle of his offending wrist; but along with the ecstasy, right
beside it, was an inclination to weep for this hand that was his, that he loved and wished the best for, that he’d known all its life.
He was thinking about Chip again without noticing it.
He wondered where Chip had gone. How he’d driven Chip away again.
Denise’s voice and Enid’s voice in the kitchen were like a larger bee and a smaller bee trapped behind a window screen. And his moment came, the lull that he’d been waiting for. Leaning forward and steadying his taking hand with his supporting hand, he grasped the butter-sailed schooner and got it off the plate, bore it aloft without capsizing it, and then, as it floated and bobbed, he opened his mouth and chased it down and got it. Got it. Got it. The crust cut his gums, but he kept the whole thing in his mouth and chewed carefully, giving his sluggish tongue wide berth. The sweet butter melting, the feminine softness of baked leavened wheat. There were chapters in Hedgpeth’s booklets that even Alfred, fatalist and man of discipline that he was, couldn’t bring himself to read. Chapters devoted to the problems of swallowing; to the late torments of the tongue; to the final breakdown of the signal system …
The betrayal had begun in Signals.
The Midland Pacific Railroad, where for the last decade of his career he’d run the Engineering Department (and where, when he’d given an order, it was carried out, Mr. Lambert, right away, sir), had served hundreds of one-elevator towns in west Kansas and west and central Nebraska, towns of the kind that Alfred and his fellow executives had grown up in or near, towns that in their old age seemed the sicker for the excellent health of the Midpac tracks running through them. Although the railroad’s first responsibility was to its stockholders, its Kansan and Missourian officers (including Mark Jamborets, the corporation counsel) had persuaded the Board of Managers that because a railroad was a pure monopoly in
many hinterland towns, it had a civic duty to maintain service on its branches and spurs. Alfred personally had no illusions about the economic future of prairie towns where the median age was fifty-plus, but he believed in rail and he hated trucks, and he knew firsthand what scheduled service meant to a town’s civic pride, how the whistle of a train could raise the spirits on a February morning at 41°N 101°W; and in his battles with the EPA and various DOTs he’d learned to appreciate rural state legislators who could intercede on your behalf when you needed more time to clean up your waste-oil tanks in the Kansas City yards, or when some goddamned bureaucrat was insisting that you pay for forty percent of a needless grade-separation project at Country Road H. Years after the Soo Line and Great Northern and Rock Island had stranded dead and dying towns all across the northern Plains, then, the Midpac had persisted in running short semiweekly or even biweekly trains through places like Alvin and Pisgah Creek, New Chartres and West Centerville.