Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

“It guarantees silky vibrant skin plus an eighteen percent reduction in panic attacks!”

“Like I’m wondering how Samantha feels about the alarm clock going off next to her pillow eight times a night every night.”

“All I saying is now’s the time to shop is all I saying.”

It occurred to Gary, as the young estate planner leaned into him to let a raft of sweltering humanity leave the elevator, as she pressed her hennaed head against his ribs more intimately than seemed strictly necessary, that another reason he’d remained faithful to Caroline through twenty years of marriage was his steadily growing aversion to physical contact with other human beings. Certainly he was in love with fidelity; certainly he got an erotic kick out of adhering to principle; but somewhere between his brain and his balls a wire was also perhaps coming loose, because when he mentally undressed and violated this little red-haired girl his main thought was how stuffy and undisinfected he would find the site of his infidelity — a coliform-bacterial supply closet, a Courtyard by Marriott with dried semen on the walls and bedspreads, the cat-scratch-feverish back seat of whatever adorable VW or Plymouth she no doubt drove, the spore-laden wall-to-wall of her boxlike starter apartment in Montgomeryville or Conshohocken, each site overwarm and underventilated and suggestive of genital warts and chlamydia in its own unpleasant way — and what a struggle it would be to breathe, how smothering her flesh, how squalid and foredoomed his efforts not to condescend …

He bounded out of the elevator on sixteen, taking big cool lungfuls of centrally processed air.

“Your wife’s been calling,” said his secretary, Maggie. “She wants you to call her right away.”

Gary retrieved a stack of messages from his box on Maggie’s desk. “Did she say what it is?”

“No, but she sounds upset. Even when I told her you weren’t here, she kept calling.”

Gary shut himself inside his office and flipped through the messages. Caroline had called at 1:35, 1:40, 1:50, 1:55, and 2:10; it was now 2:25. He pumped his fist in triumph. Finally, finally, some evidence of desperation.

He dialed home and said, “What’s up?”

Caroline’s voice was shaking. “Gary, something’s wrong with your cell phone. I’ve been trying your cell phone and it doesn’t answer. What’s wrong with it?”

“I turned it off.”

“How long has it been off? I’ve been trying you for an hour, and now I’ve got to go get the boys but I don’t want to leave the house! I don’t know what to do!”

“Caro. Tell me what’s wrong.”

“There’s somebody across the street.”

“Who is it?”

“I don’t know. Somebody in a car, I don’t know. They’ve been sitting there for an hour.”

The tip of Gary’s dick was melting like the flame end of a candle. “Well,” he said, “did you go see who it is?”

“I’m afraid to,” Caroline said. “And the cops say it’s a city street.”

“They’re right. It is a city street.”

“Gary, somebody stole the Neverest sign again!” She was practically sobbing. “I came home at noon and it was gone. And then I looked out and this car was there, and there’s somebody in the front seat right now.”

“What kind of car?”

“Big station wagon. It’s old. I’ve never seen it before.”

“Was it there when you came home?”

“I don’t know! But now I’ve got to go get Jonah and I don’t want to leave the house, with the sign missing and the car out there—”

“The alarm system is working, though, right?”

“But if I come home and they’re still in the house and I surprise them—”

“Caroline, honey, calm down. You’d hear the alarm—”

“Broken glass, an alarm going off, somebody cornered, these people have guns—”

“Look, look, look. Caroline? Here’s what you do. Caroline?” The fear in her voice and the need the fear suggested were making him so hot that he had to give himself a squeeze through the fabric of his pants, a pinch of reality. “Call me back on your cell phone,” he said. “Keep me on the line, go out and get in the Stomper, and drive down the driveway. You can talk to whoever through the window. I’ll be there with you the whole time. All right?”

“OK. OK. I’m calling you right back.”

As Gary waited, he thought of the heat and the saltiness and the peach-bruise softness of Caroline’s face when she’d been crying, the sound of her swallowing her lachrymal mucus, and the wide-open readiness of her mouth, then, for his. To feel nothing, not the feeblest pulse in the dead mouse from which his urine issued, for three weeks, to believe that she would never again need him and that he would never again want her, and then, on a moment’s notice, to become light-headed with lust: this was marriage as he knew it. His telephone rang.

“I’m in the car,” Caroline said from the cockpit-like aural space of mobile phoning. “I’m backing up.”

“You can get his license number, too. Write it down before you pull up next to him. Let him see you getting it.”

“OK. OK.”

In tinny miniature he heard the big-animal breathing of her SUV, the rising om of its automatic transmission.

“Oh, fuck, Gary,” she wailed, “he’s gone! I don’t see him! He must have seen me coming and driven away!”

“Good, though, that’s good, that’s what you wanted.”

“No, because he’ll circle the block and come back when I’m not here!”

Gary calmed her down and told her how to approach the house safely when she returned with the boys. He promised to keep his cell phone on and come home early. He refrained from comparing her mental health with his.

Depressed? He was not depressed. Vital signs of the rambunctious American economy streamed numerically across his many-windowed television screen. Orfic Midland up a point and three-eighths for the day. The U.S. dollar laughing at the euro, buggering the yen. Virginia Lin dropped in and proposed selling a block of Exxon at 104. Gary could see out across the river to the floodplain landscape of Camden, New Jersey, whose deep ruination, from this height and distance, gave the impression of a kitchen floor with the linoleum scraped off. The sun was proud in the south, a source of relief; Gary couldn’t stand it when his parents came east and the eastern seaboard’s weather stank. The same sun was shining on their cruise ship now, somewhere north of Maine. In a corner of his TV screen was the talking head of Curly Eberle. Gary upsized the picture and raised the sound as Eberle concluded: “A body-building machine for the brain, that’s not a bad image, Cindy.” The all-business-all-the-time anchors, for whom financial risk was merely the boon companion of upside potential, nodded sagely in response. “Body-building machine for the brain, ho- kay ,” the female anchor segued, “and coming up, then, a toy that’s all the rage in Belgium (!) and its maker says this product could be bigger than the Beanie Babies !” Jay Pascoe dropped in to kvetch about the bond market. Jay’s little girls had a new piano teacher now and the same old mother. Gary caught about one word of every three Jay spoke. His nerves were jangling as on the long-ago afternoon before his fifth date with Caroline, when they were so ready to finally be unchaste that each intervening hour was like a granite block to be broken by a shackled prisoner …

He left work at 4:30. In his Swedish sedan he wound his way up Kelly Drive and Lincoln Drive, out of the valley of the Schuylkill and its haze and expressway, its bright flat realities, up through tunnels of shadow and gothic arches of early-autumn leaves along the Wissahickon Creek, and back into the enchanted arboreality of Chestnut Hill.