Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

The temperature in Julia’s extra bedroom was about ninety. She gave Denise a foot-thick down comforter and asked if she wanted a blanket, too.

“Thanks, this looks like plenty,” Denise said.

Julia gave her flannel sheets and four pillows with flannel cases. She asked how Chip was doing in Vilnius.

“It sounds like he and Gitanas are the best of friends.”

“I hate to think what the two of them are saying about me,” Julia mused happily.

Denise said that it wouldn’t surprise her if Chip and Gitanas avoided the topic altogether.

Julia frowned. “Why wouldn’t they talk about me?”

“Well, you did painfully dump both of them.”

“But they could talk about how much they hate me!”

“I don’t think anybody could hate you.”

“Actually,” Julia said, “I was afraid you’d hate me for breaking up with Chip.”

“No, I never had anything at stake there.”

Clearly relieved to hear this, Julia confided to Denise that she was now being dated by a lawyer, nice but bald, with whom Eden Procuro had set her up. “I feel safe with him,” she said. “He’s so confident in restaurants. And he’s got tons of work, so he’s not always after me for, you know, favors.”

“Really,” Denise said, “the less you tell me about things with you and Chip, the happier I’ll be.”

When Julia then asked if Denise was seeing anybody, it shouldn’t have been so hard to tell her about Robin Passafaro, but it was very hard. Denise didn’t want to make her friend uncomfortable, didn’t want to hear her voice go small and soft with sympathy. She wanted to soak up Julia’s company in its familiar innocence, and so she said, “I’m seeing nobody.”

Nobody except, the next night, at a sapphic pasha’s den two hundred steps from Julia’s apartment, a seventeen-year-old just off the bus from Plattsburgh, New York, with a drastic hairstyle and twin 800s on her recent SATs (she carried the official ETS printout like a certificate of sanity or possibly of madness) and then, the night after that, a religious-studies major at Columbia whose father (she said) operated the largest sperm bank in Southern California.

This accomplished, Denise went to a midtown studio and taped her guest appearance on Pop Food for Now People , making lambsmeat ravioli and other Mare Scuro standards. She met with some of the New Yorkers who’d tried to hire her away from Brian — a couple of Central Park West trillion-aires seeking a feudal relationship with her, a Munich banker who believed she was the Weißwurst Messiah who could restore German cooking to its former glory in Manhattan, and a young restaurateur, Nick Razza, who impressed her by itemizing and breaking down each of the meals he’d eaten at Mare Scuro and the Generator. Razza came from a family of purveyors in New Jersey and already owned a popular mid-range seafood grill on the Upper East Side. Now he wanted to jump into the Smith Street culinary scene in Brooklyn with a restaurant that starred, if possible, Denise. She asked him for a week to think it over.

On a sunny fall Sunday afternoon she took the subway out to Brooklyn. The borough seemed to her a Philadelphia rescued by adjacency to Manhattan. In half an hour she saw more beautiful, interesting-looking women than she saw in half a year in South Philly. She saw their brownstones and their nifty boots.

Returning home by Amtrak, she regretted having hidden for so long in Philadelphia. The little subway station under City Hall was as empty and echoing as a battleship in mothballs; every floor and wall and beam and railing was painted gray. Heartbreaking the little train that finally pulled up, after fifteen minutes, with a population of riders who in their patience and isolation were less like commuters than like emergency-room supplicants. Denise surfaced from the Federal Street station among sycamore leaves and burger wrappers racing in waves down the Broad Street sidewalk, swirling up against the pissy façades and barred windows and scattering among the Bondo-fendered cars that were parked at the curb. The urban vacancy of Philadelphia, the hegemony of wind and sky here, struck her as enchanted. As Narnian. She loved Philadelphia the way she loved Robin Passafaro. Her heart was full and her senses were sharp, but her head felt liable to burst in the vacuum of her solitude.

She unlocked the door of her brick penitentiary and collected her mail from the floor. Among the twenty people who’d left messages on her machine were Robin Passafaro, breaking her silence to ask if Denise might like to have a “little chat,” and Emile Berger, politely informing her that he’d accepted Brian Callahan’s offer of the job of executive chef at the Generator and was moving back to Philadelphia.

At this news from Emile, Denise kicked the tiled south wall of her kitchen until she was afraid she’d broken her toe. She said, “I’ve got to get out of here!”

But getting out was not so easy. Robin had had a month to cool off and conclude that if sleeping with Brian was a sin then she was guilty of it also. Brian had rented a loft for himself in Olde City, and Robin, as Denise had suspected, was dead set on keeping custody of Sinéad and Erin. To strengthen her case, she stayed put in the big house on Panama Street and rededicated herself to motherhood. But she was free during school hours and all day on Saturday when Brian took the girls out, and on mature reflection she decided that these free hours might best be spent in Denise’s bed.

Denise still couldn’t say no to the drug of Robin. She still wanted Robin’s hands on her and at her and around her and inside her, that prepositional smorgasbord. But there was something in Robin, probably her propensity to blame herself for harms that other people inflicted on her, that invited betrayal and abuse. Denise went out of her way to smoke in bed now, because cigarette smoke irritated Robin’s eyes. She dressed to the hilt when she met Robin for lunch, she did her best to highlight Robin’s dowdihess, and she held the gaze of anyone, female or male, who turned to look at her. She visibly winced at the volume of Robin’s voice. She behaved like an adolescent with a parent except that an adolescent couldn’t help rolling her eyes whereas Denise’s contempt was a deliberate, calculated form of cruelty. She shushed Robin angrily when they were in bed and Robin began to hoot self-consciously. She said, “Keep your voice down. Please. Please .” Exhilarated by her own cruelty, she stared at Robin’s Gore-Tex raingear until Robin was provoked to ask why. Denise said, “I’m just wondering if you’re ever tempted to be slightly less uncool.” Robin replied that she was never going to be cool and so she might as well be comfortable. Denise allowed her lip to curl.

Robin was eager to bring her lover back into contact with Sinéad and Erin, but Denise, for reasons that she herself could only halfway fathom, refused to see the girls. She couldn’t imagine looking them in the eye; the very thought of four-girl domesticity sickened her.

“They adore you,” Robin said.

“I can’t do it.”

“Why not? ”

“Because I don’t feel like it. That’s why.”

“All right. Whatever.”

“How long is ‘whatever’ going to be your word? Are you ever going to retire it? Or is it your word for life?”

“Denise, they adore you,” Robin squeaked. “They miss you. And you used to love to see them.”

“Well, I’m not in a kid kind of mood. I don’t know if I’ll ever be, frankly. So please stop asking me.”

By now most people would have got the message; most people would have cleared out and never come back. But Robin, it transpired, had a taste for cruel treatment. Robin said, and Denise believed her, that she would never have left Brian if Brian hadn’t left her. Robin liked to be licked and stroked within a micron of coming and then abandoned and made to beg. And Denise liked to do this to her. Denise liked to get out of bed and get dressed and go downstairs while Robin waited for sexual release, because she wouldn’t cheat and touch herself. Denise sat in the kitchen and read a book and smoked until Robin, humiliated, trembling, came down and begged. Denise’s contempt then was so pure and so strong, it was almost better than sex.