Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

“Mixed grill, I guess,” said Caroline.

“Oh, yeah, Dad, do a mixed grill!” Caleb said in a tone mistakable for either irony or enthusiasm.

Gary asked if there was meat.

Caroline stuffed chips into her mouth and shrugged.

Jonah asked permission to build a fire.

Gary, taking ice from the freezer, granted it.

Ordinary evening. Ordinary evening.

“If I put the camera over the table,” Caleb said, “I’ll get part of the dining room, too.”

“You miss the whole nook, though,” Caroline said. “If it’s over the back door, you can sweep both ways.”

Gary shielded himself with the door of the liquor cabinet while he poured four ounces of gin onto ice.

“‘Alt. eighty-five’?” Caleb read from his catalogue.

“That means the camera can look almost straight down.”

Still shielded by the cabinet door, Gary took a hefty warmish gulp. Then, closing the cabinet, he held up the glass in case anyone cared to see what a relatively modest drink he’d poured himself.

“Hate to break it to you,” he said, “but surveillance is out. It’s not appropriate as a hobby.”

“Dad, you said it was OK as long as I stayed interested.”

“I said I would think about it.”

Caleb shook his head vehemently. “No! You didn’t! You said I could do it as long as I didn’t get bored.”

“That is exactly what you said,” Caroline confirmed with an unpleasant smile.

“Yes, Caroline, I’m sure you heard every word. But we’re not putting this kitchen under surveillance. Caleb, you do not have my permission to make those purchases.”

“Dad!”

“That’s my decision, it’s final.”

“Caleb, it doesn’t matter, though,” Caroline said. “Gary, it doesn’t matter, because he’s got his own money. He can spend it however he wants. Right, Caleb?”

Out of Gary’s sight, below the level of the table, she gave Caleb some kind of hand signal.

“Right, I’ve got my own savings!” Caleb’s tone again ironic or enthusiastic or, somehow, both.

“You and I will talk about this later, Caro,” Gary said. Warmth and perversion and stupidity, all deriving from the gin, were descending from behind his ears and down his arms and torso.

Jonah came back inside smelling like mesquite.

Caroline had opened a second large bag of potato chips.

“Don’t spoil your appetite, guys,” Gary said in a strained voice, taking food from plastic compartments.

Again mother and son traded glances.

“Yeah, right,” Caleb said. “Gotta save room for mixed grill!”

Gary energetically sliced meats and skewered vegetables. Jonah set the table, spacing the flatware with the precision that he liked. The rain had stopped, but the deck was still slippery when Gary went outside.

It had started as a family joke: Dad always orders the mixed grill in restaurants, Dad only wants to go to restaurants with mixed grill on the menu. To Gary there was indeed something endlessly delicious, something irresistibly luxurious , about a bit of lamb, a bit of pork, a bit of veal, and a lean and tender modern-style sausage or two — a classic mixed grill, in short. It was such a treat that he began to do his own mixed grills at home. Along with pizza and Chinese takeout and one-pot pasta meals, mixed grill became a family staple. Caroline helped out by bringing home multiple heavy blood-damp bags of meat and sausage every Saturday, and before long Gary was doing mixed grill two or even three times a week, braving all but the foulest weather on the deck, and loving it. He did partridge breasts, chicken livers, filets mignons, and Mexican-flavored turkey sausage. He did zucchini and red peppers. He did eggplant, yellow peppers, baby lamb chops, Italian sausage. He came up with a wonderful bratwurst — rib eye — bok choy combo. He loved it and loved it and loved it and then all at once he didn’t.

The clinical term, anhedonia, had introduced itself to him in a nightstand book of Caroline’s called Feeling GREAT! (Ashley Tralpis, M.D., Ph.D.). He’d read the dictionary entry for anhedonia with a shiver of recognition, a kind of malignant yes, yes : “a psychological condition characterized by inability to experience pleasure in normally pleasurable acts.” anhedonia was more than a Warning Sign, it was an out-and-out symptom. A dry rot spreading from pleasure to pleasure, a fungus spoiling the delight in luxury and joy in leisure which for so many years had fueled Gary’s resistance to the poorthink of his parents.

The previous March, in St. Jude, Enid had observed that, for a bank vice president married to a woman who worked only part-time, pro bono, for the Children’s Defense Fund, Gary seemed to do an awful lot of cooking. Gary had shut his mother up easily enough; she was married to a man who couldn’t boil an egg, and obviously she was jealous. But on Gary’s birthday, after he’d flown back from St. Jude with Jonah and received the expensive surprise of a color photo lab, after he’d mustered the will to exclaim, A darkroom, fantastic, I love it, I love it , Caroline handed him a platter of raw prawns and brutal swordfish steaks to grill, and he wondered if his mother had a point. On the deck, in the radiant heat, as he blackened the prawns and seared the swordfish, a weariness overtook him. The aspects of his life not related to grilling now seemed like mere blips of extraneity between the poundingly recurrent moments when he ignited the mesquite and paced the deck, avoiding smoke. Shutting his eyes, he saw twisted boogers of browning meats on a grille of chrome and hellish coals. The eternal broiling, broiling of the damned. The parching torments of compulsive repetition. On the inner walls of the grill a deep-pile carpet of phenolic black greases had accumulated. The ground behind the garage where he dumped the ashes resembled a moonscape or the yard of a cement plant. He was very, very, very sick of mixed grill, and the next morning he told Caroline: “I’m doing too much cooking.”

“So do less,” she said. “We’ll eat out.”

“I want to eat at home and I want to do less cooking.”

“So order in,” she said.

“It’s not the same.”

“You’re the one who’s bent on having these sit-down dinners. The boys couldn’t care less.”

“ I care about it. It’s important to me .”

“Fine, but, Gary: it’s not important to me, it’s not important to the boys, and we’re supposed to cook for you?”

He couldn’t entirely blame Caroline. In the years when she’d worked full-time, he’d never complained about frozen or takeout or pre-prepared dinners. To Caroline it probably seemed that he was changing the rules on her. But to Gary it seemed that the nature of family life itself was changing — that togetherness and filiality and fraternity weren’t valued the way they were when he was young.

And so here he was, still grilling. Through the kitchen windows he could see Caroline thumb-wrestling Jonah. He could see her taking Aaron’s headphones to listen to music, could see her nodding to the beat. It sure looked like family life. Was there really anything amiss here but the clinical depression of the man peering in?

Caroline seemed to have forgotten how much her back hurt, but she remembered as soon as he went inside with the steaming, smoking platter of vulcanized animal protein. She seated herself sideways at the table, nudged her food with a fork, and whimpered softly. Caleb and Aaron regarded her with grave concern.

“Doesn’t anyone else want to know how Prince Caspian ends?” Jonah said. “Isn’t anyone curious at all?”

Caroline’s eyelids were fluttering, her mouth hanging open miserably to let air trickle in and out. Gary struggled to think of something undepressed to say, something reasonably unhostile, but he was rather drunk.