The Corrections: A Novel (30 page)

Gary didn’t know what was wrong with it. But he could
already hear Enid’s invidious descants on the topic of Denise’s
wonderfulness. And since it was impossible to imagine Caroline and Enid amicably
sharing a house for six days (never mind six weeks, never mind six months), Gary
could not, even ceremonially, offer to put his parents up himself.

He raised his eyes to the intensity of whiteness that marked the sun’s
proximity to a corner of the office tower. The beds of mums and begonias and
liriope all around him were like bikinied extras in a music video, planted in
full blush of perfection and fated to be yanked again before they had a chance
to lose petals, acquire brown spots, drop leaves. Gary had always enjoyed
corporate gardens as backdrops for the pageant of privilege, as metonymies of
pamperment, but it was vital not to ask too much of them. It was vital not to
come to them in need.

“You know, I don’t even care,” he said. “It’s a
great plan. And if you want to do the legwork, that would be great.”

“OK, I’ll do the ‘legwork,’” Denise said quickly.
“Now what about Christmas? Dad really wants you guys to come.”

Gary laughed. “So he’s involved now, too.”

“He wants it for Mom’s sake. And she really, really wants
it.”

“Of course she wants it. She’s Enid Lambert. What does Enid Lambert
want if not Christmas in St. Jude?”

“Well, I’m going to go there,” Denise said, “and
I’m going to try to get Chip to go, and I think the five of you should go.
I think we should all just get together and do that for them.”

The faint tremor of virtue in her voice set Gary’s teeth on edge. A lecture
about Christmas was the last thing he needed on this October afternoon, with the
needle of his Factor 3 gauge bumping on the bright red
E
.

“Dad said a strange thing on Saturday,” Denise continued.
“He said, ‘I don’t know how much time I
have.’ Both of them were talking like this was their last chance for a
Christmas. It was kind of intense.”

“Well, count on Mom,” Gary said a little wildly, “to phrase the
thing for maximum emotional coercion!”

“Right. But I also think she means it.”

“I’m sure she means it!” Gary said. “And I will give it
some thought! But, Denise, it is
not so easy
getting all five of us out
there. It is not so easy! Not when it makes so much sense for us all to be here!
Right? Right?”

“I know, I agree,” Denise persisted quietly. “But remember,
this would be a strictly one-time-only thing.”

“I said I’d think about it. That’s all I can do, right?
I’ll think about it! I’ll think about it! All right?”

Denise seemed puzzled by his outburst. “OK. Good. Thank you. But the thing
is—”

“Yeah, what’s the thing,” Gary said, taking three steps away
from her and suddenly turning back. “Tell me what the thing is.”

“Well, I was just thinking—”

“You know, I’m half an hour late already. I really need to get back
to the office.”

Denise rolled her eyes up at him and let her mouth hang open in mid-sentence.

“Let’s just
finish
this conversation,” Gary said.

“OK, well, not to sound like Mom, but—”

“A little too late for that! Huh? Huh?” he found himself shouting
with crazy joviality, his hands in the air.

“Not to sound like Mom, but—you don’t want to wait too long
before you decide to buy tickets. There, I said it.”

Gary began to laugh but checked the laugh before it got away from him.
“Good plan!” he said. “You’re right! Gotta decide soon!
Gotta buy those tickets! Good plan!” He clapped his hands like a
coach.

“Is something wrong?”

“No, you’re right. We should all go to St. Jude
for one last Christmas before they sell the house or Dad falls apart or somebody
dies. It’s a no-brainer. We should all be there. It is so obvious.
You’re absolutely right.”

“Then I don’t understand what you’re upset about.”

“Nothing! Not upset about anything!”

“OK. Good.” Denise gazed up at him levelly. “Then let me ask
you one other thing. I want to know why Mom is under the impression that
I’m having an affair with a married man.”

A pulse of guilt, a shock wave, passed through Gary. “No idea,” he
said.

“Did you tell her I’m involved with a married man?”

“How could I tell her that? I don’t know the first thing about your
private life.”

“Well, did you suggest it to her? Did you drop a hint?”

“Denise. Really.” Gary was regaining his parental composure, his aura
of big-brotherly indulgence. “You’re the most reticent person I
know. On the basis of what could I say anything?”

“Did you drop a hint?” she said. “Because
somebody
did.
Somebody
put that idea in her head. And it occurs to me that I said
one little thing to you, once, which you might have misinterpreted and passed on
to her. And, Gary, she and I have enough problems without your giving her
ideas.”

“You know, if you weren’t so mysterious—”

“I’m not ‘mysterious.’”

“If you weren’t so secretive,” Gary said, “maybe you
wouldn’t have this problem. It’s almost like you
want
people
whispering about you.”

“It’s pretty interesting that you’re not answering my
question.”

He exhaled slowly through his teeth. “I have no idea where Mom got that
idea. I didn’t tell her anything.”

“All right,” Denise said, standing up. “So I’ll do that
‘legwork.’ You think about Christmas. And
we’ll get together when Mom and Dad are in town. I’ll see you
later.”

With breathtaking decision she headed toward the nearest exit, not moving so fast
as to betray anger but fast enough that Gary couldn’t have caught up with
her without running. He waited for a minute to see if she would return. When she
didn’t, he left the courtyard and bent his steps toward his office.

Gary had been flattered when his little sister had chosen a college in the very
city where he and Caroline had lately bought their dream house. He’d
looked forward to introducing Denise (showing her off, really) to all his
friends and colleagues. He’d imagined that she would come to Seminole
Street for dinner every month and that she and Caroline would be like sisters.
He’d imagined that his whole family, even Chip, would eventually settle in
Philadelphia. He’d imagined nieces and nephews, house parties and parlor
games, long snowy Christmases on Seminole Street. And now he and Denise had
lived in the same city for fifteen years, and he felt as if he hardly knew her.
She never asked him for anything. No matter how tired she was, she never came to
Seminole Street without flowers or dessert for Caroline, sharks’ teeth or
comic books for the boys, a lawyer joke or a lightbulb joke for Gary. There was
no way around her properness, no way to convey to her the depth of his
disappointment that, of the rich family-filled future that he’d imagined,
almost
nothing
had come to pass.

A year ago, over lunch, Gary had told her about a married “friend” of
his (actually a colleague, Jay Pascoe) who was having an affair with his
daughters’ piano teacher. Gary said that he could understand his
friend’s recreational interest in the affair (Pascoe had no intention of
leaving his wife) but that he didn’t see why the piano teacher was
bothering.

“So you can’t imagine,” Denise said, “why a woman would
want to have an affair with you?”

“I’m not talking about me,” Gary
said.

“But you’re married and you have kids.”

“I’m saying I don’t understand what the woman sees in a guy she
knows to be a liar and a sneak.”

“Probably she disapproves of liars and sneaks in general,” Denise
said. “But she makes an exception for the guy she’s in love
with.”

“So it’s a kind of self-deception.”

“No, Gary, it’s the way love works.”

“Well, and I guess there’s always a chance she’ll get lucky and
marry into instant money.”

This puncturing of Denise’s liberal innocence with a sharp economic truth
seemed to sadden her.

“You see a person with kids,” she said, “and you see how happy
they are to be a parent, and you’re attracted to their happiness.
Impossibility is attractive. You know, the safety of dead-ended
things.”

“You sound like you know something about it,” Gary said.

“Emile is the only man I’ve ever been attracted to who
didn’t
have kids.”

This interested Gary. Under cover of fraternal obtuseness, he risked asking:
“So, and who are you seeing now?”

“Nobody.”

“You’re not into some married guy,” he joked.

Denise’s face went a shade paler and two shades redder as she reached for
her water glass. “I’m seeing nobody,” she said.
“I’m working very hard.”

“Well, just remember,” Gary said, “there’s more to life
than cooking. You’re at a stage now where you need to start thinking about
what you really want and how you’re going to get it.”

Denise twisted in her seat and signaled to the waiter for the check. “Maybe
I’ll marry into instant money,” she said.

The more Gary thought about his sister’s involvement
with married men, the angrier he got. Nevertheless, he should never have
mentioned the matter to Enid. The disclosure had come of drinking gin on an
empty stomach while listening to his mother sing Denise’s praises at
Christmastime, a few hours after the mutilated Austrian reindeer had come to
light and Enid’s gift to Caroline had turned up in a trash can like a
murdered baby. Enid extolled the generous multimillionaire who was bankrolling
Denise’s new restaurant and had sent her on a luxury two-month tasting
tour of France and Central Europe, she extolled Denise’s long hours and
her dedication and her thrift, and in her backhandedly comparative way she
carped about Gary’s “materialism” and
“ostentation” and “obsession with money”—as if she
herself weren’t dollar-sign-headed! As if she herself, given the
opportunity, wouldn’t have bought a house like Gary’s and furnished
it very much the same way he had! He wanted to say to her:
Of your three
children, my life looks by far the most like
yours! I have what you taught me to want! And now that I have it,
you disapprove of it!

But what he actually said, when the juniper spirits finally boiled over, was:
“Why don’t you ask Denise who she’s sleeping with? Ask her if
the guy’s married and if he has any kids.”

“I don’t think she’s dating anybody,” Enid said.

“I’m telling you,” the juniper spirits said, “ask her if
she’s ever been involved with somebody married. I think honesty compels
you to ask that question before you hold her up as a paragon of midwestern
values.”

Enid covered her ears. “I don’t want to know about this!”

“Fine, go ahead, stick your head in the sand!” the sloppy spirits
raged. “I just don’t want to hear any more crap about what an angel
she is.”

Gary knew that he’d broken the sibling code of honor.
But he was glad he’d broken it. He was glad Denise was taking heat
again from Enid. He felt surrounded, imprisoned, by disapproving women.

There was, of course, one obvious way of breaking free: he could say
yes
instead of
no
to one of the dozen secretaries and female pedestrians and
sales clerks who in any given week took note of his height and his schist-gray
hair, his calfskin jacket and his French mountaineering pants, and looked him in
the eye as if to say
The key’s under the doormat
. But there was
still no pussy on earth he’d rather lick, no hair he’d rather gather
in his fist like a golden silk bellpull, no gaze with which he’d rather
lock his own at climax, than Caroline’s. The only guaranteed result of
having an affair would be to add yet another disapproving woman to his life.

In the lobby of the CenTrust Tower, on Market Street, he joined a crowd of human
beings by the elevators. Clerical staff and software specialists, auditors and
keypunch engineers, returning from late lunches.

“The lion he ascendant now,” said the woman standing closest to Gary.
“Very good time to shop now. The lion he often preside over bargains in
the store.”

“Where is our Savior in this?” asked the woman to whom the woman had
spoken.

“This also a good time to remember the Savior,” the first woman
answered calmly. “Time of the lion very good time for that.”

“Lutetium supplements combined with megadoses of partially hydrogenated
Vitamin E!” a third person said.

“He’s programmed his clock radio,” a fourth person said,
“which it says something about something I don’t know that you can
even do this, but he’s programmed it to wake him up to WMIA at eleven past
the hour every hour. Whole night through.”

Finally an elevator came. As the mass of humanity moved
onto it, Gary considered waiting for a less populated car, a ride less
pullulating with mediocrity and body smells. But coming in from Market Street
now was a young female estate planner who in recent months had been giving him
talk-to-me smiles, touch-me smiles. To avoid contact with her, he darted through
the elevator’s closing doors. But the doors bumped his trailing foot and
reopened. The young estate planner crowded on next to him.

“The prophet Jeremiah, girl,
he
speak of the lion. It tell about it
in the pamphlet here.”

“Like it’s 3:11 in the morning and the Clippers lead the Grizzlies
146–145 with twelve seconds left in triple overtime.”

Absolutely no reverb on a full elevator. Every sound was deadened by clothes and
flesh and hairdos. The air pre-breathed. The crypt overwarm.

“This pamphlet is the Devil’s work.”

“Read it over coffeebreak, girl. What the harm in that?”

“Both last-place teams looking to improve their odds in the college draft
lottery by losing this otherwise meaningless late-season game.”

“Lutetium is a rare-earth element, very rare and from the earth, and
it’s pure because it’s elemental!”