Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

“Kelsey, you da man!” young Mr. Twelve Thousand Shares of Exxon said loudly.

In the first hours and days following Gary’s big Sunday blowout with Caroline, three weeks ago, both he and she had made overtures of peace. Very late on that Sunday night she’d reached across the demilitarized zone of the mattress and touched his hip. The next night he’d offered an almost-complete apology in which, although he refused to concede the central issue, he conveyed sorrow and regret for the collateral damage he’d caused, the bruised feelings and willful misrepresentations and hurtful imputations, and thus gave Caroline a foretaste of the rush of tenderness that awaited her if she would only admit that, regarding the central issue, he was in the right. On Tuesday morning she’d made an actual breakfast for him — cinnamon toast, sausage links, and a bowl of oatmeal topped with raisins arranged to resemble a face with a comically downturned mouth. On Wednesday morning he’d given her a compliment, a simple statement of fact (“You’re beautiful”) which, although it fell short of an outright avowal of love, did serve as a reminder of an objective basis (physical attraction) on which love could be restored if she would only admit that, regarding the central issue, he was in the right.

But each hopeful overture, each exploratory sally, came to naught. When he squeezed the hand she offered him and he whispered that he was sorry that her back hurt, she was unable to take the next step and allow that possibly (a simple “possibly” would have sufficed!) her two hours of soccer in the rain had contributed to her injury. And when she thanked him for his compliment and asked him how he’d slept, he was powerless to ignore a tendentious critical edge in her voice; he understood her to be saying, Prolonged distur bance of sleep is a common symptom of clinical depression, oh, and, by the way, how did you sleep, dear? and so he didn’t dare admit that, as a matter of fact, he’d slept atrociously; he averred that he’d slept extremely well, thank you, Caroline, extremely well, extremely well.

Each failed overture of peace made the next overture less likely to succeed. Before long, what at first glance had seemed to Gary an absurd possibility — that the till of their marriage no longer contained sufficient funds of love and goodwill to cover the emotional costs that going to St. Jude entailed for Caroline or that not going to St. Jude entailed for him — assumed the contours of something terribly actual. He began to hate Caroline simply for continuing to fight with him. He hated the newfound reserves of independence she tapped in order to resist him. Especially, devastatingly hateful was her hatred of him . He could have ended the crisis in a minute if all he’d had to do was forgive her; but to see mirrored in her eyes how repellent she found him — it made him crazy, it poisoned his hope.

Fortunately, the shadows cast by her accusation of depression, long and dark though they were, did not yet extend to his corner office at CenTrust and to the pleasure he took in managing his managers, analysts, and traders. Gary’s forty hours at the bank had become the only hours he could count on enjoying in a week. He’d even begun to toy with the idea of working a fifty-hour week; but this was easier said than done, because at the end of his eight-hour day there was often literally no work left on his desk, and he was all too aware, besides, that spending long hours at the office to escape unhappiness at home was exactly the trap his father had fallen into; was undoubtedly how Alfred had begun to self-medicate.

When he married Caroline, Gary had silently vowed never to work later than five o’clock and never to bring a briefcase home at night. By signing on with a mid-sized regional bank, he’d chosen one of the least ambitious career paths that a Wharton School M.B.A. could take. At first his intention was simply to avoid his father’s mistakes — to give himself time to enjoy life, cherish his wife, play with his kids — but before long, even as he was proving to be an outstanding portfolio manager, he became more specifically allergic to ambition. Colleagues far less capable than he were moving on to work for mutual funds, to be freelance money managers, or to start their own funds; but they were also working twelve-or fourteen-hour days, and every single one of them had the perspiring manic style of a striver . Gary, cushioned by Caroline’s inheritance, was free to cultivate nonambition and to be, as a boss, the perfect strict and loving father that he could only halfway be at home. He demanded honesty and excellence from his workers. In return he offered patient instruction, absolute loyalty, and the assurance that he would never blame them for his own mistakes. If his large-cap manager, Virginia Lin, recommended upping the percentage of energy stocks in the bank’s boilerplate trust portfolio from six percent to nine percent and Gary (as was his wont) decided to leave the mix alone, and if the energy sector then proceeded to enjoy a couple of banner quarters, he pulled his big ironic I’m-a-jerk grimace and publicly apologized to Lin. Fortunately, for each of his bad decisions he made two or three good ones, and in the history of the universe there had never been a better six years for equities investment than the six years he’d run CenTrust’s Equities Division; only a fool or a crook could have failed. With success guaranteed, Gary could then make a game of being unawed by his boss, Marvin Koster, and by Koster’s boss, Marty Breitenfeld, the chairman of CenTrust. Gary never, ever kowtowed or flattered. Indeed, both Koster and Breitenfeld had begun to defer to him in matters of taste and protocol, Koster all but asking Gary’s permission to enroll his eldest daughter in Abington Friends instead of Friends’ Select, Breitenfeld buttonholing Gary outside the senior-executive pissoir to inquire if he and Caroline were planning to attend the Free Library benefit ball or if Gary had spun off his tickets to a secretary … 3. RELAX–IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD!

Curly Eberle had reappeared in his intracranial desk chair with a plastic model of an electrolyte molecule in each hand. “A remarkable property of ferrocitrate/ferroacetate gels,” he said, “is that under low-level radio stimulation at certain resonant frequencies the molecules may spontaneously polymerize. More remarkably yet, these polymers turn out to be fine conductors of electrical impulses.”

The virtual Eberle looked on with a benign smile as, in the bloody animated moil around him, eager waveforms came squiggling through. As if these waves were the opening strains of a minuet or reel, all the ferrous molecules paired off and arranged themselves in long, twinned lines.

“These transient conductive micro tubules,” Eberle said, “make thinkable the previously unthinkable: direct, quasi-real-time digital-chemical interface.”

“But this is good,” Denise whispered to Gary. “This is what Dad’s always wanted.”

“What, to screw himself out of a fortune?”

“To help other people,” Denise said. “To make a difference.”

Gary could have pointed out that, if the old man really felt like helping somebody, he might start with his wife. But Denise had bizarre and unshakable notions of Alfred. There was no point in rising to her bait. 4. THE RICH GET RICHER!

“Yes, an idle corner of the brain may be the Devil’s workshop,” the pitchman said, “but every idle neural pathway gets ignored by the Corecktall process. Wherever there’s action, though, Corecktall is there to make it stronger! To help the rich get richer! ”

From all over Ballroom Β came laughter and applause and whoops of appreciation. Gary sensed that his grinning, clapping left-hand neighbor, Mr. Twelve Thousand Shares of Exxon, was looking in his direction. Possibly the guy was wondering why Gary wasn’t clapping. Or possibly he was intimidated by the casual elegance of Gary’s clothes.