Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

Caroline’s fevered imaginings notwithstanding, the house appeared to be intact. Gary eased the car up the driveway past the bed of hostas and euonymus from which, just as she’d said, another SECURITY BY NEVEREST sign had been stolen. Since the beginning of the year, Gary had planted and lost five SECURITY BY NEVEREST signs. It galled him to be flooding the market with worthless signage, thereby diluting the value of SECURITY BY NEVEREST as a burglary deterrent. Here in the heart of Chestnut Hill, needless to say, the sheet-metal currency of the Neverest and Western Civil Defense and ProPhilaTex signs in every front yard was backed by the full faith and credit of floodlights and retinal scanners, emergency batteries, buried hot lines, and remotely securable doors; but elsewhere in northwest Philly, down through Mount Airy into Germantown and Nicetown where the sociopaths had their dealings and their dwellings, there existed a class of bleeding-heart homeowners who hated what it might say about their “values” to buy their own home-security systems but whose liberal “values” did not preclude stealing Gary’s SECURITY BY NEVEREST signs on an almost weekly basis and planting them in their own front yards …

In the garage he was overcome by an Alfred-like urge to recline in the car seat and shut his eyes. Turning off the engine, he seemed to switch off something in his brain as well. Where had his lust and energy disappeared to? This, too, was marriage as he knew it.

He made himself leave the car. A constrictive band of tiredness ran from his eyes and sinuses to his brain stem. Even if Caroline was ready to forgive him, even if he and she could somehow slip away from the kids and fool around (and, realistically, there was no way that they could do this), he was probably too tired to perform now anyway. Stretching out ahead of him were five kid-filled hours before he could be alone with her in bed. Simply to regain the energy he’d had until five minutes ago would require sleep — eight hours of it, maybe ten.

The back door was locked and chained. He gave it the firmest, merriest knock he could manage. Through the window he saw Jonah come trotting over in flip-flops and a swimsuit, enter security code, and unbolt and unchain the door.

“Hello there, Dad, I’m making a sauna in the bathroom,” Jonah said as he trotted away again.

The object of Gary’s desire, the tear-softened blond female whom he’d reassured on the phone, was sitting next to Caleb and watching a galactic rerun on the kitchen TV. Earnest humanoids in unisex pajamas.

“Hello!” Gary said. “Looks like everything’s OK here.”

Caroline and Caleb nodded, their eyes on a different planet.

“I guess I’ll go put another sign out,” Gary said.

“You should nail it to a tree,” Caroline said. “Take it off its stick and nail it to a tree.”

Nearly unmanned by disappointed expectation, Gary filled his chest with air and coughed. “The idea, Caroline, is that there be a certain classiness and subtlety to the message we’re projecting? A certain word-to-the-wise quality? When you have to chain your sign to a tree to keep it from getting stolen—”

“I said nail.”

“It’s like announcing to the sociopaths: We’re whipped! Come and get us! Come and get us!”

“I didn’t say chain. I said nail.”

Caleb reached for the remote and raised the TV volume.

Gary went to the basement and from a flat cardboard carton took the last of the six signs that a Neverest representative had sold to him in bulk. Considering the cost of a Neverest home-security system, the signs were unbelievably shoddy. The placards were unevenly painted and attached by fragile aluminum rivets to posts of rolled sheet metal too thin to be hammered into the ground (you had to dig a hole).

Caroline didn’t look up when he returned to the kitchen. He might have wondered if he’d hallucinated her panicked calls to him if there were not a lingering humidity in his boxer shorts and if, during his thirty seconds in the basement, she hadn’t thrown the dead bolt on the back door, engaged the chain, and reset the alarm.

He, of course, was mentally ill, whereas she! She!

“Good Christ,” he said as he punched their wedding date into the numeric keypad.

Leaving the door wide open, he went to the front yard and planted the new Neverest sign in the old sterile hole. When he came back a minute later, the door was locked again. He took his keys out and turned the dead bolt and pushed the door open to the extent the chain permitted, triggering the excuse-me-please alarm inside. He shoved on the door, stressing its hinges. He considered putting his shoulder to it and ripping out the chain. With a grimace and a shout Caroline jumped up and clutched her back and stumbled over to enter code within the thirty-second limit. “Gary,” she said, “just knock.”

“I was in the front yard,” he said. “I was fifty feet away. Why are you setting the alarm?”

“You don’t understand what it was like here today,” she muttered as, limping, she returned to interstellar space. “I’m feeling pretty alone here, Gary. Pretty alone.”

“Here I am, though. Right? I’m home now.”

“Yes. You’re home.”

“Hey, Dad, what’s for dinner?” Caleb said. “Can we have mixed grill?”

“Yes,” Gary said. “I will make dinner and I will do the dishes and I may also trim the hedge, because I, for one, am feeling good! All right, Caroline? Does that sound OK to you?”

“Yes, please, sure, make dinner,” she murmured, staring at the TV.

“Good. I will make dinner.” Gary clapped his hands and coughed. He felt as if, in his chest and his head, worn-out gears were falling off their axles, chewing into other parts of his internal machinery, as he demanded of his body a bravado, an undepressed energy, that it was simply not equipped to give.

He needed to sleep well tonight for at least six hours. To accomplish this, he planned to drink two vodka martinis and hit the sack before ten. He upended the vodka bottle over a shaker of ice and brazenly let it glug and glug, because he, a veep at CenTrust, had nothing to be ashamed of in relaxing after a hard day’s work. He started a mesquite fire and drank the martini down. Like a thrown coin in a wide, teetering orbit of decay, he circled back into the kitchen and managed to get the meat ready, but he felt too tired to cook it. Because Caroline and Caleb had paid no attention to him when he made the first martini, he now made a second, for energy and general bolsterment, and officially considered it his first. Battling the vitreous lensing effects of a vodka buzz, he went out and threw meat on the grill. Again the weariness, again the deficit of every friendly neurofactor overtook him. In plain view of his entire family he made a third (officially: a second) martini and drank it down. Through the window he observed that the grill was in flames.

He filled a Teflon skillet with water and spilled only some of it as he rushed out to pour it on the fire. A cloud of steam and smoke and aerosol grease went up. He flipped all the meat scraps, exposing their charred, glossy undersides. There was a smell of wet burnedness such as firemen leave behind. Not enough life remained in the coals to do more than faintly color the raw sides of the meat scraps, though he left them on for another ten minutes.

His miraculously considerate son Jonah had meanwhile set the table and put out bread and butter. Gary served the less burned and less raw bits of meat to his wife and children. Wielding his knife and fork clumsily, he filled his mouth with cinders and bloody chicken that he was too tired to chew and swallow and also too tired to get up and spit out. He sat with the unchewed bird-flesh in his mouth until he realized that saliva was trickling down his chin — a poor way indeed to demonstrate good mental health. He swallowed the bolus whole. It felt like a tennis ball going down. His family was looking at him.