Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

Brian’s voice was in her ear. He was asking the protection question. He’d mistaken her discomfort for transports, her squirming for an invitation. She clarified by rolling out of bed and crouching in a corner of the hotel room. She said she couldn’t.

Brian sat up on the bed and made no reply. She stole a glance and confirmed that his endowment was per expectation for the man who had everything. She suspected that she wouldn’t soon forget the sight of this dick. Would be seeing it when she closed her eyes, at inconvenient times, in far-fetched contexts.

She apologized to him.

“No, you’re right,” Brian said, deferring to her judgment. “I feel terrible. I’ve never done anything like this.”

“See, I have,” she said, lest he think her merely timid. “More than once. And I don’t want to anymore.”

“No, of course, you’re right.”

“If you weren’t married — If I weren’t your employee—”

“Listen, I’m dealing with it. I’m going in the bathroom now. I’m dealing with it.”

“Thank you.”

Part of her thought: What is my problem?

Another part of her thought: For once in my life, I’m doing the right thing .

She spent four nights by herself in Alsace and flew home from Frankfurt. She was shocked when she went to see the progress that Brian’s team had made at the Generator in her absence. The building-within-a-building was already framed out, the concrete subfloors poured. She could see what the effect would be: a bright bubble of modernity in a twilight of monumental industry. Although she had faith in her cooking, the grandness of the space made her nervous. She wished that she’d insisted on an ordinary plain space in which her food could shine alone. She felt seduced and suckered somehow — as if, unbeknownst to her, Brian had been competing with her for the world’s attention. As if, all along, in his affable way, he’d been angling to make the restaurant his, not hers.

She was haunted, just as she’d feared, by the afterimage of his dick. She felt gladder and gladder that she hadn’t let him put it in her. Brian had every advantage that she had, plus many of his own. He was male, he was rich, he was a born insider; he wasn’t hampered by Lambert weirdnesses or strong opinions; he was an amateur with nothing to lose but throwaway money, and to succeed all he needed was a good idea and somebody else (namely her) to do the hard work. How lucky she’d been, in that hotel room, to recognize him as her adversary! Two more minutes and she would have disappeared. She would have become another facet of his really fun life, her beauty reflecting on his irresistibility, her talents redounding to his restaurant’s glory. How lucky she’d been, how lucky.

She believed that if, when the Generator opened, reviewers paid more attention to the space than to the food, she would lose and Brian would win . And so she worked her ass off. She convection-roasted country ribs to brownness and cut them thin, along the grain, for presentation, reduced and darkened the kraut gravy to bring out its nutty, earthy, cabbagy, porky flavor, and arted up the plate with twin testicular new potatoes, a cluster of Brussels sprouts, and a spoon of stewed white beans that she lightly spiked with roasted garlic. She invented luxurious new white sausages. She matched a fennel relish, roasted potatoes, and good bitter wholesome rapini with fabulous pork chops that she bought direct from a sixties holdover organic farmer who did his own butchering and made his own deliveries. She took the guy to lunch and visited his farm in Lancaster County and met the hogs in question, examined their eclectic diet (boiled yams and chicken wings, acorns and chestnuts) and toured the soundproofed room where they were slaughtered. She extracted commitments from her old crew at Mare Scuro. She took former colleagues out on Brian’s AmEx and sized up the local competition (most of it reassuringly undistinguished) and sampled desserts to see if anybody’s pastry chef was worth stealing. She staged one-woman late-night forcemeat festivals. She made sauerkraut in five-gallon buckets in her basement. She made it with red cabbage and with shredded kale in cabbage juice, with juniper berries and black peppercorns. She hurried along the fermentation with hundred-watt bulbs.

Brian still called her every day, but he didn’t take her driving in his Volvo anymore, he didn’t play her music. Behind his polite questions she sensed a waning interest. She recommended an old friend of hers, Rob Zito, to manage the Generator, and when Brian took the two of them to lunch, he stayed for half an hour. He had an appointment in New York.

One night Denise called him at home and instead got Robin Passafaro. Robin’s clipped phrases—“OK,” “Whatever,” “Yes,” “I’ll tell him,” “OK”—so irritated Denise that she deliberately kept her on the line. She asked how the Garden Project was going.

“Fine,” Robin said. “I’ll tell Brian you called.”

“Could I come over sometime and see it?”

Robin replied with naked rudeness: “Why?”

“Well,” Denise said, “it’s something Brian talks about” (this was a lie; he rarely mentioned it), “it’s an interesting project” (in fact, it sounded Utopian and crackpot), “and, you know, I love vegetables.”

“Uh huh.”

“So maybe some Saturday afternoon or something.”

“Whenever.”

A moment later Denise slammed the phone down in its cradle. She was angry, among other things, at how fake she’d sounded to herself. “I could have fucked your husband!” she said. “And I chose not to! So how about a little friendliness?”

Maybe, if she’d been a better person, she would have left Robin alone. Maybe she wanted to make Robin like her simply to deny her the satisfaction of disliking her — to win that contest of esteem. Maybe she was just picking up the gauntlet. But the desire to be liked was real. She was haunted by the feeling that Robin had been in the hotel room with her and Brian; by that bursting sensation of Robin’s presence inside her body.

On the last Saturday of baseball season she cooked at home for eight hours, shrink-wrapping trout, juggling half a dozen kraut salads, and pairing the pan juices of sautéed kidneys with interesting spirits. Late in the day she went for a walk and, finding herself going west, crossed Broad Street into the ghetto of Point Breeze, where Robin had her Project.

The weather was fine. Early autumn in Philadelphia brought smells of fresh seawater and tidewater, gradual abatements in temperature, a quiet abdication of control by the humid air masses that had held the onshore breeze at bay all summer. Denise passed an old woman in a housecoat standing watch while two dusty men unloaded Acme groceries from a corroded Pinto’s hatchback. Cinderblock was the material of choice over here for blinding windows. There were fire-gutted lunc onettes and p zer as. Friable houses with bedsheet curtains. Expanses of fresh asphalt that seemed to seal the neighborhood’s fate more than promise renewal.

Denise didn’t care if she saw Robin. Almost better, in a way, to score the point subtly — to let Robin find out from Brian that she’d taken the trouble to walk by the Project.

She came to a block within whose chain-link confines were small hills of mulch and large piles of wilted vegetation. At the far corner of the block, behind the only house left standing on it, somebody was working rocky soil with a shovel.

The front door of the solitary house was open. A black girl of college age was sitting at a desk that also contained a vastly ghastly plaid sofa and a wheeled blackboard on which a column of names (Lateesha, Latoya, Tyrell) was followed by columns of HOURS TO DATE and DOLLARS TO DATE.