Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

“So you can’t imagine,” Denise said, “why a woman would want to have an affair with you?”

“I’m not talking about me,” Gary said.

“But you’re married and you have kids.”

“I’m saying I don’t understand what the woman sees in a guy she knows to be a liar and a sneak.”

“Probably she disapproves of liars and sneaks in general,” Denise said. “But she makes an exception for the guy she’s in love with.”

“So it’s a kind of self-deception.”

“No, Gary, it’s the way love works.”

“Well, and I guess there’s always a chance she’ll get lucky and marry into instant money.”

This puncturing of Denise’s liberal innocence with a sharp economic truth seemed to sadden her.

“You see a person with kids,” she said, “and you see how happy they are to be a parent, and you’re attracted to their happiness. Impossibility is attractive. You know, the safety of dead-ended things.”

“You sound like you know something about it,” Gary said.

“Emile is the only man I’ve ever been attracted to who didn’t have kids.”

This interested Gary. Under cover of fraternal obtuseness, he risked asking: “So, and who are you seeing now?”

“Nobody.”

“You’re not into some married guy,” he joked.

Denise’s face went a shade paler and two shades redder as she reached for her water glass. “I’m seeing nobody,” she said. “I’m working very hard.”

“Well, just remember,” Gary said, “there’s more to life than cooking. You’re at a stage now where you need to start thinking about what you really want and how you’re going to get it.”

Denise twisted in her seat and signaled to the waiter for the check. “Maybe I’ll marry into instant money,” she said.

The more Gary thought about his sister’s involvement with married men, the angrier he got. Nevertheless, he should never have mentioned the matter to Enid. The disclosure had come of drinking gin on an empty stomach while listening to his mother sing Denise’s praises at Christmastime, a few hours after the mutilated Austrian reindeer had come to light and Enid’s gift to Caroline had turned up in a trash can like a murdered baby. Enid extolled the generous multimillionaire who was bankrolling Denise’s new restaurant and had sent her on a luxury two-month tasting tour of France and Central Europe, she extolled Denise’s long hours and her dedication and her thrift, and in her backhandedly comparative way she carped about Gary’s “materialism” and “ostentation” and “obsession with money”—as if she herself weren’t dollar-sign-headed! As if she herself, given the opportunity, wouldn’t have bought a house like Gary’s and furnished it very much the same way he had! He wanted to say to her: Of your three children, my life looks by far the most like yours! I have what you taught me to want! And now that I have it, you disapprove of it!

But what he actually said, when the juniper spirits finally boiled over, was: “Why don’t you ask Denise who she’s sleeping with? Ask her if the guy’s married and if he has any kids.”

“I don’t think she’s dating anybody,” Enid said.

“I’m telling you,” the juniper spirits said, “ask her if she’s ever been involved with somebody married. I think honesty compels you to ask that question before you hold her up as a paragon of midwestern values.”

Enid covered her ears. “I don’t want to know about this!”

“Fine, go ahead, stick your head in the sand!” the sloppy spirits raged. “I just don’t want to hear any more crap about what an angel she is.”

Gary knew that he’d broken the sibling code of honor. But he was glad he’d broken it. He was glad Denise was taking heat again from Enid. He felt surrounded, imprisoned, by disapproving women.

There was, of course, one obvious way of breaking free: he could say yes instead of no to one of the dozen secretaries and female pedestrians and sales clerks who in any given week took note of his height and his schist-gray hair, his calfskin jacket and his French mountaineering pants, and looked him in the eye as if to say The key’s under the doormat . But there was still no pussy on earth he’d rather lick, no hair he’d rather gather in his fist like a golden silk bellpull, no gaze with which he’d rather lock his own at climax, than Caroline’s. The only guaranteed result of having an affair would be to add yet another disapproving woman to his life.

In the lobby of the CenTrust Tower, on Market Street, he joined a crowd of human beings by the elevators. Clerical staff and software specialists, auditors and keypunch engineers, returning from late lunches.

“The lion he ascendant now,” said the woman standing closest to Gary. “Very good time to shop now. The lion he often preside over bargains in the store.”

“Where is our Savior in this?” asked the woman to whom the woman had spoken.

“This also a good time to remember the Savior,” the first woman answered calmly. “Time of the lion very good time for that.”

“Lutetium supplements combined with megadoses of partially hydrogenated Vitamin E!” a third person said.

“He’s programmed his clock radio,” a fourth person said, “which it says something about something I don’t know that you can even do this, but he’s programmed it to wake him up to WMIA at eleven past the hour every hour. Whole night through.”

Finally an elevator came. As the mass of humanity moved onto it, Gary considered waiting for a less populated car, a ride less pullulating with mediocrity and body smells. But coming in from Market Street now was a young female estate planner who in recent months had been giving him talk-to-me smiles, touch-me smiles. To avoid contact with her, he darted through the elevator’s closing doors. But the doors bumped his trailing foot and reopened. The young estate planner crowded on next to him.

“The prophet Jeremiah, girl, he speak of the lion. It tell about it in the pamphlet here.”

“Like it’s 3:11 in the morning and the Clippers lead the Grizzlies 146–145 with twelve seconds left in triple overtime.”

Absolutely no reverb on a full elevator. Every sound was deadened by clothes and flesh and hairdos. The air pre-breathed. The crypt overwarm.

“This pamphlet is the Devil’s work.”

“Read it over coffeebreak, girl. What the harm in that?”

“Both last-place teams looking to improve their odds in the college draft lottery by losing this otherwise meaningless late-season game.”

“Lutetium is a rare-earth element, very rare and from the earth, and it’s pure because it’s elemental!”

“Like and if he set the clock for 4:11 he could hear all the late scores and only have to wake up once. But there’s Davis Cup action in Sydney and it’s updated hourly. Can’t miss that.”

The young estate planner was short and had a pretty face and hennaed hair. She smiled up at Gary as if inviting him to speak. She looked midwestern and happy to be standing next to him.

Gary fixed his gaze on nothing and attempted not to breathe. He was chronically bothered by the Τ erupting in the middle of the word CenTrust He wanted to push the Τ down hard, like a nipple, but when he pushed it down he got no satisfaction. He got cent-rust: a corroded penny.

“Girl, this ain’t replacement faith. This supplemental . Isaiah mention that lion, too. Call it the lion of Judah.”

“A pro-am thing in Malaysia with an early leader in the clubhouse, but that could change between 2:11 and 3:11. Can’t miss that .”

“My faith don’t need no replacing.”

“Sheri, girl, you got a wax deposit in your ear? Listen what I saying. This. Ain’t. No. Replacement. Faith. This supplemental .”