Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

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.

“Holy shit, your hands are worse than mine.”

“The job,” she said, “consists of tolerating pain.”

“Cooks do notoriously abuse their substances.”

“I like a drink at midnight,” she said. “Two Tylenols when I get up at six.”

“Nobody’s tougher than Denise,” Brian bragged unattractively over the antennae of the blondes.

The guitarist responded by sticking his tongue out, holding his cigarette like an eyedropper, and lowering the coal into the glistening cleft. The sizzle was loud enough to distract the blondes from their phoning. The taller one squealed and spoke the guitarist’s name and said he was insane.

“Well, but I’m wondering what substances you’ve ingested,” Denise said.

The guitarist applied cold vodka directly to the burn. The taller blonde, unhappy with his performance, answered, “Klonopin and Jameson’s and whatever that is now.”

“Well, and a tongue is wet,” Denise said, extinguishing her own cigarette on the tender skin behind her ear. She felt like she’d taken a bullet in the head, but she flicked the dead cigarette toward the river casually.

The aerie got very quiet. Her weirdness was showing as she didn’t use to let it show. Because she didn’t have to — because she could have trimmed a rack of lamb now or had a conversation with her mother — she produced a strangled scream, a comical sound, to reassure her audience.

“Are you OK?” Brian asked her later in the parking lot.

“I’ve burned myself worse by accident.”

“No, I mean are you OK ? That was a little scary to watch.”

“You’re the one who bragged about my toughness, thanks.”

“I’m trying to say I feel bad about that.”

She was awake in pain all night.

A week later she and Brian hired the former manager of the Union Square Café and fired Rob Zito.

A week after that the mayor of Philadelphia, the junior senator from New Jersey, the CEO of the W — Corporation, and Jodie Foster were in the restaurant.

A week after that, Brian took Denise home after work and she invited him inside. Over the same fifty-dollar wine she’d once served his wife, he asked if she and Robin had had a falling-out.

Denise pursed her lips and shook her head. “I’ve just gotten very busy.”

“That’s what I thought. I figured it didn’t have anything to do with you. Robin’s pissed off with everything lately. Especially with anything that has to do with me.”

“I miss hanging out with the girls,” Denise said.

“Believe me, they miss you,” Brian said. He added, with a slight stammer, “I’m — thinking of moving out.”

Denise said she was sorry to hear it.

“The sackcloth business is out of control,” he said, pouring. “She’s been going to nightly mass for the last three weeks. I didn’t even know there was such a thing. And I literally can’t say a word about the Generator without setting off an explosion. She, meanwhile, is talking about home-schooling the girls. She’s decided our house is too big. She wants to move into the Project house and home-school the girls and maybe a couple of the Project kids. ‘Rasheed’? ‘Marilou’? Which, what a great place for Sinéad and Erin to grow up, a brownfield in Point Breeze. We’re verging over into the loony, a little bit. I mean, Robin is great. She believes in better things than I believe in. I’m just not sure I love her anymore. I feel like I’m arguing with Nicky Passafaro. It’s Class Hatred II, the Sequel.”

“Robin is full of guilt,” Denise said.

“She’s verging on being an irresponsible parent.”

Denise found breath to ask: “Would you want to take the girls, if it came to that?”

Brian shook his head. “I’m not sure, if it came to that, that Robin would actually want custody. I could see her giving up everything.”

“Don’t bet on it.”

Denise thought of Robin brushing Sinéad’s hair and suddenly — keenly, terribly — missed her crazy yearnings, her excesses and accesses, her innocence. A switch was flipped and Denise’s brain became a passive screen on which was projected a highlight reel of all that was excellent in the person she’d driven away. She reappreciated the least of Robin’s habits and gestures and distinguishing marks, her preference for scalded milk in her coffee, and the off-color cap on the front tooth that her brother had broken with a rock, and the way she put her head down like a goat and butted Denise with love.

Denise, pleading exhaustion, made Brian leave. Early the next morning a tropical depression slid up the seaboard, a humid hurricane-like disturbance that set trees thrashing moodily and water spilling over curbs. Denise left the Generator in the hands of her sous and took the train to New York to bail out her feckless brother and entertain her parents. In the stress of lunch, as Enid repeated verbatim her narrative of Norma Greene, Denise didn’t notice any change in herself. She had a still-working old self, a Version 3.2 or a Version 4.0, that deplored the deplorable in Enid and loved the lovable in Alfred. Not until she was at the pier and her mother kissed her and a quite different Denise, a Version 5.0, nearly put her tongue in the pretty old woman’s mouth, nearly ran her hands down Enid’s hips and thighs, nearly caved in and promised to come at Christmas for as long as Enid wanted, did the extent of the correction she was undergoing reveal itself.

She sat on a southbound train while rain-glazed local platforms flashed by at intercity speed. Her father at the lunch table had looked insane. And if he was losing his mind, it was possible that Enid had not been exaggerating her difficulties with him, possible that Alfred really was a mess who pulled himself together for his children, possible that Enid wasn’t entirely the embarrassing nag and pestilence that Denise for twenty years had made her out to be, possible that Alfred’s problems went deeper than having the wrong wife, possible that Enid’s problems did not go much deeper than having the wrong husband, possible that Denise was more like Enid than she had ever dreamed. She listened to the pa-thum-pa-thum-pa-thump of wheels on track and watched the October sky darken. There might have been hope for her if she could have stayed on the train, but it was a short ride to Philly, and then she was back at work and had no time to think about anything until she went to the Axon road show with Gary and surprised herself by defending not only Alfred but Enid as well in the arguments that followed.

She could not remember a time when she had loved her mother.

She was soaking in her bathtub around nine o’clock that night when Brian called and invited her to dinner with him and Jerry Schwartz, Mira Sorvino, Stanley Tucci, a Famous American Director, a Famous British Author, and other luminaries. The Famous Director had just finished shooting a film in Camden, and Brian and Schwartz had roped him into a private screening of Crime and Punishment and Rock and Roll .