Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

Size, oh, did it matter. Short of promising to buy some arrant turkeys with CenTrust money at a later date (and he could lose his job for this), Gary had no further leverage with Pudge Portleigh. However, he still had moral leverage in the form of Axon’s underpayment for Alfred’s patent. Lying awake last night, he’d honed the wording of the clear, measured lecture that he intended to deliver to Axon’s brass this afternoon: I want you to look me in the eye and tell me that your offer to my father was reasonable and fair. My father had personal reasons for accepting that offer; but I know what you did to him. Do you understand me? I’m not an old man in the Midwest. I know what you did. And I think you realize that it is not an option for me to leave this room without a firm commitment for five thousand shares. I could also insist on an apology. But I’m simply proposing a straightforward transaction between adults. Which, by the way, costs you n o t h i n g. Zero. Nada. Niente .

“Synaptogenesis!” Axon’s video pitchman exulted.

7. NO, ITS NOT A BOOK OF THE BIBLE!

The professional investors in Ballroom Β laughed and laughed.

“Could this possibly be a hoax?” Denise asked Gary.

“Why license Dad’s patent for a hoax?” Gary said.

She shook her head. “This makes me want to, like, go back to bed.”

Gary understood the feeling. He hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in three weeks. His circadian schedule was 180 degrees out of phase, he was revved all night and sandy-eyed all day, and he found it ever more arduous to believe that his problem wasn’t neurochemical but personal.

How right he’d been, all those months, to conceal the many Warning Signs from Caroline! How accurate his intuition that a putative deficit of Neurofactor 3 would sap the legitimacy of his moral arguments! Caroline was now able to camouflage her animosity toward him as “concern” about his “health.” His lumbering forces of conventional domestic warfare were no match for this biological weaponry. He cruelly attacked her person ; she heroically attacked his disease .

Building on this strategic advantage, Caroline had then made a series of brilliant tactical moves. When Gary drew up his battle plans for the first full weekend of hostilities, he assumed that Caroline would circle the wagons as she’d done on the previous weekend — would adolescently pal around with Aaron and Caleb and incite them to make fun of Clueless Old Dad. Therefore on Thursday night he ambushed her. He proposed, out of the blue, that he and Aaron and Caleb go mountain-biking in the Poconos on Sunday, leaving at dawn for a long day of older-male bonding in which Caroline could not participate because her back hurt .

Caroline’s countermove was to endorse his proposal enthusiastically. She urged Caleb and Aaron to go and enjoy the time with their father . She laid curious stress on this phrase, causing Aaron and Caleb to pipe up, as if on cue, “Mountain-biking, yeah, Dad, great!” And all at once Gary realized what was going on. He realized why, on Monday night, Aaron had come and unilaterally apologized for having called him “horrible,” and why Caleb on Tuesday, for the first time in months, had invited him to play foosball, and why Jonah, on Wednesday, had brought him, unbidden, on a cork-lined tray, a second martini that Caroline had poured. He saw why his children had turned agreeable and solicitous: because Caroline had told them that their father was struggling with clinical depression . What a brilliant gambit! And not for a second did he doubt that a gambit was what it was — that Caroline’s “concern” was purely bogus, a wartime tactic, a way to avoid spending Christmas in St. Jude — because there continued to be no warmth or fondness for him, not the faintest ember, in her eyes.

“Did you tell the boys that I’m depressed?” Gary asked her in the darkness, from the far margin of their quarter— acre bed. “Caroline? Did you lie to them about my mental state? Is that why everybody’s suddenly being so agreeable?”

“Gary,” she said. “They’re being agreeable because they want you to take them mountain-biking in the Poconos.”

“Something about this doesn’t smell right.”

“You know, you are getting seriously paranoid.”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

“Gary, this is frightening.”

“You’re fucking with my head! And there is no lower trick than that. There’s no meaner trick in the book.”

“Please, please, listen to yourself.”

“Answer my question,” he said. “Did you tell them I’m ‘depressed’? ‘Having a hard time’?”

“Well — aren’t you?”

“Answer my question!”

She didn’t answer his question. She said nothing more at all that night, although he repeated his question for half an hour, pausing for a minute or two each time so that she could answer, but she didn’t answer.

By the morning of the bike trip, he was so destroyed by lack of sleep that his ambition was simply to function physically. He loaded three bikes onto Caroline’s extremely large and safe Ford Stomper vehicle and drove for two hours, unloaded the bikes, and pedaled mile after mile on rutted trails. The boys raced on far ahead. By the time he caught up with them, they’d taken their rest and were ready to move again. They volunteered nothing but wore expressions of friendly expectation, as if Gary might have a confession to make. His situation was neurochemically somewhat dire, however; he had nothing to say except “Let’s eat our sandwiches” and “One more ridge and then we turn around.” At dusk he loaded the bikes back onto the Stomper, drove two hours, and unloaded them in an access of anhedonia.

Caroline came out of the house and told the older boys what great fun she and Jonah had had. She declared herself a convert to the Narnia books. All evening, then, she and

Jonah chattered about “Aslan” and “Cair Paravel” and “Reepicheep,” and the online kids-only Narnia chat room that she’d located on the Internet, and the C. S. Lewis Web site that had cool online games to play and tons of cool Narnian products to order.

“There’s a Prince Caspian CD-ROM,” Jonah told Gary, “that I’m very much looking forward to playing with.”

“It looks like a really interesting and well-designed game,” Caroline said. “I showed Jonah how to order it.”

“There’s a Wardrobe?” Jonah said. “And you point and click and go through the Wardrobe into Narnia? And then there’s all this cool stuff inside?”

Profound was Gary’s relief the next morning as he bumped and glided, like a storm-battered yacht, into the safe harbor of his work week. There was nothing to do but patch himself up as well as he could, stay the course, not be depressed . Despite serious losses, he remained confident of victory. Since his very first fight with Caroline, twenty years earlier, when he’d sat alone in his apartment and watched an eleven-inning Phillies game and listened to his phone ring every ten minutes, every five minutes, every two minutes, he’d understood that at the ticking heart of Caroline was a desperate insecurity. Sooner or later, if he withheld his love, she came knocking on his chest with her little fist and let him have his way.

Caroline showed no sign of weakening, however. Late at night, when Gary was too freaked out and angry to shut his eyes, let alone sleep, she politely but firmly declined to fight with him. She was particularly adamant in her refusal to discuss Christmas; she said that listening to Gary on the topic was like watching an alcoholic drink.

“What do you need from me?” Gary asked her. “Tell me what you need to hear from me.”