Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

“You’re really going to use all this equipment?” he said with a tightness in his chest.

Caleb, his lips still involuted, gave a shrug.

“Nobody should be slamming doors,” Gary said. “Me included. All right?”

“Yeah, Dad. Whatever.”

Emerging from Caleb’s room into the shadowed hallway, he nearly collided with Caroline, who was hurrying on tiptoe, in her stockinged feet, back in the direction of their bedroom.

“Again? Again? I say don’t eavesdrop, and what do you do?”

“I wasn’t eavesdropping. I’ve got to go lie down.” And she hurried, limping, into the bedroom.

“You can run but you can’t hide,” Gary said, following her. “I want to know why you’re eavesdropping on me.”

“It is your paranoia, not my eavesdropping.”

“My paranoia?”

Caroline slumped on the oaken king-size bed. After she and Gary were married, she’d undergone five years of twice-weekly therapy which the therapist, at the final session, had declared “an unqualified success” and which had given her a lifelong advantage over Gary in the race for mental health.

“You seem to think everybody except you has a problem,” she said. “Which is what your mother thinks, too. Without ever—”

“Caroline. Answer me one question. Look me in the eye and answer me one question. This afternoon, when you were—”

“God, Gary, not this again. Listen to yourself.”

“When you were horsing around in the rain, running yourself ragged, trying to keep up with an eleven-year-old and a fourteen-year-old—”

“You’re obsessed! You’re obsessed with that!”

“Running and sliding and kicking in the rain—”

“You talk to your parents and then you take your anger out on us.”

“ Were you limping before you came inside? ” Gary shook his finger in his wife’s face. “Look me in the eye, Caroline, look me right in the eye. Come on! Do it! Look me in the eye and tell me you weren’t already limping. ”

Caroline was rocking in pain. “You’re on the phone with them for the better part of an hour—”

“You can’t do it!” Gary crowed in bitter triumph. “You’re lying to me and you will not admit you’re lying!”

“ Dad! Dad! ” came a cry outside the door. Gary turned and saw Aaron shaking his head wildly, beside himself, his beautiful face twisted and tear-slick. “Stop shouting at her!”

The remorse neurofactor (Factor 26) flooded the sites in Gary’s brain specially tailored by evolution to respond to it.

“Aaron, all right,” he said.

Aaron turned away and turned back and marched in place, taking big steps nowhere, as though trying to force the shameful tears out of his eyes and into his body, down through his legs, and stamp them out. “God, please, Dad, do — not — shout — at her.”

“OK, Aaron,” Gary said. “Shouting’s over.”

He reached to touch his son’s shoulder, but Aaron fled back up the hall. Gary left Caroline and followed him, his sense of isolation deepened by this demonstration that his wife had strong allies in the house. Her sons would protect her from her husband. Her husband who was a shouter. Like his father before him. His father before him who was now depressed. But who, in his prime, as a shouter, had so frightened young Gary that it never occurred to him to intercede on his mother’s behalf.

Aaron was lying face down on his bed. In the tornado aftermath of laundry and magazines on the floor of his room, the two nodes of order were his Bundy trumpet (with mutes and a music stand) and his enormous alphabetized collection of compact discs, including boxed-set complete editions of Dizzy and Satchmo and Miles Davis, plus great miscellaneous quantities of Chet Baker and Wynton Marsalis and Chuck Mangione and Herb Alpert and Al Hirt, all of which Gary had given him to encourage his interest in music.

Gary perched on the edge of the bed. “I’m sorry I upset you,” he said. “As you know, I can be a mean old judgmental bastard. And sometimes your mother has trouble admitting she’s wrong. Especially when—”

“Her. Back. Is. Hurt,” came Aaron’s voice, muffled by a Ralph Lauren duvet. “She is not lying .”

“I know her back hurts, Aaron. I love your mother very much.”

“Then don’t shout at her.”

“OK. Shouting’s over. Let’s have some dinner.” Gary lightly judo-chopped Aaron’s shoulder. “What do you say?”

Aaron didn’t move. Further cheering words appeared to be called for, but Gary couldn’t think of any. He was experiencing a critical shortage of Factors 1 and 3. He’d had the sense, moments earlier, that Caroline was on the verge of accusing him of being “depressed,” and he was afraid that if the idea that he was depressed gained currency, he would forfeit his right to his opinions. He would forfeit his moral certainties; every word he spoke would become a symptom of disease; he would never again win an argument.

It was therefore all the more important now to resist depression — to fight it with the truth.

“Listen,” he said. “You were out there with Mom, playing soccer. Tell me if I’m right about this. Was she limping before she went inside?”

For a moment, as Aaron roused himself from the bed, Gary believed that the truth would prevail. But the face Aaron showed him was a reddish-white raisin of revulsion and disbelief.

“You’re horrible!” he said. “You’re horrible !” And he ran from the room.

Ordinarily Gary wouldn’t have let Aaron get away with this. Ordinarily he would have battled his son all evening if that was what it took to extract an apology from him. But his mental markets — glycemic, endocrine, over-the-synapse — were crashing. He was feeling ugly, and to battle Aaron now would only make him uglier, and the sensation of ugliness was perhaps the leading Warning Sign.

He saw that he’d made two critical mistakes. He should never have promised Caroline that there would be no more Christmases in St. Jude. And today, when she was limping and grimacing in the back yard, he should have snapped at least one picture of her. He mourned the moral advantages these mistakes had cost him.

“I am not clinically depressed,” he told his reflection in the nearly dark bedroom window. With a great, marrow-taxing exertion of will, he stood up from Aaron’s bed and sallied forth to prove himself capable of having an ordinary evening.

Jonah was climbing the dark stairs with Prince Caspian . “I finished the book,” he said.

“Did you like it?”

“I loved it,” Jonah said. “This is outstanding children’s literature. Asian made a door in the air that people walked through and disappeared. They went out of Narnia and back into the real world.”

Gary dropped into a crouch. “Give me a hug.”

Jonah draped his arms on him. Gary could feel the looseness of his youthful joints, the cublike pliancy, the heat radiating through his scalp and cheeks. He would have slit his own throat if the boy had needed blood; his love was immense in that way; and yet he wondered if it was only love he wanted now or whether he was also coalition-building. Securing a tactical ally for his team.

What this stagnating economy needs , thought Federal Reserve Board Chairman Gary R. Lambert, is a massive infusion of Bombay Sapphire gin .

In the kitchen Caroline and Caleb were slouched at the table drinking Coke and eating potato chips. Caroline had her feet up on another chair and pillows beneath her knees.

“What should we do for dinner?” Gary said.

His wife and middle son traded glances as if this were the stick-in-the-mud sort of question he was famous for. From the density of potato-chip crumbs he could see they were well on their way to spoiled appetites.