Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

Who would have guessed that such a little mistake on her part could change everything?

In August the Midland Pacific had made Alfred its assistant chief engineer for track and structures, and now he’d been sent east to inspect every mile of the Erie Belt Railroad. Erie Belt district managers shuttled him around in dinky gas-powered motor cars, darting in bug fashion onto sidings while Erie Belt megalosaurs thundered past. The Erie Belt was a regional system whose freight business trucks had damaged and whose passenger business private automobiles had driven into the red. Although its trunk lines were still generally hale, its branches and spurs were rotting like you couldn’t believe. Trains poked along at 10 mph on rails no straighter than limp string. Mile upon mile of hopelessly buckled Belt. Alfred saw crossties better suited to mulching than to gripping spikes. Rail anchors that had lost their heads to rust, bodies wasting inside a crust of corrosion like shrimps in a shell of deep-fry. Ballast so badly washed out that ties were hanging from the rail rather than supporting it. Girders peeling and corrupted like German chocolate cake, the dark shavings, the miscellaneous crumble.

How modest — compared to the furious locomotive — a stretch of weedy track could seem, skirting a field of late sorghum. But without this track a train was ten thousand tons of ungovernable nothing. The will was in the track.

Everywhere Alfred went in the Erie Belt’s hinterland he heard young Erie Belt employees telling one another, “Take it easy!”

“See ya later, Sam. Don’t work too hard, now.”

“Take it easy.”

“You too, pal. Take it easy.”

The phrase seemed to Alfred an eastern blight, a fitting epitaph for a once-great state, Ohio, that parasitic Teamsters had sucked nearly dry. Nobody in St. Jude would dare tell him to take it easy. On the high prairie where he’d grown up, a person who took it easy wasn’t much of a man. Now came a new effeminate generation for whom “easygoing” was a compliment. Alfred heard Erie Belt track gangs yukking it up on company time, he saw flashily dressed clerks taking ten-minute breaks for coffee, he watched callow draftsmen smoke cigarettes with insinuating relish while a once-solid railroad fell to pieces all around them. “Take it easy” was the watchword of these superfriendly young men, the token of their overfamiliarity, the false reassurance that enabled them to ignore the filth they worked in.

The Midland Pacific, by contrast, was clean steel and white concrete. Crossties so new that blue creosote pooled in their grain. The applied science of vibratory tamping and prestressed rebar, motion detectors and welded rail. The Midpac was based in St. Jude and served a harder-working, less eastern region of the country. Unlike the Erie Belt, it took pride in its commitment to maintaining quality service on its branch lines. A thousand towns and small cities across the central tiers of states depended on the Midpac.

The more Alfred saw of the Erie Belt, the more distinctly he felt the Midland Pacific’s superior size, strength, and moral vitality in his own limbs and carriage. In his shirt and tie and wing tips he nimbly took the catwalk over the Maumee River, forty feet above slag barges and turbid water, grabbed the truss’s lower chord and leaned out upside down to whack the span’s principal girder with his favorite whacking hammer, which he carried everywhere in his briefcase; scabs of paint and rust as big as sycamore leaves spiraled down into the river. A yard engine ringing its bell crept onto the span, and Alfred, who had no fear of heights, leaned into a hanger brace and planted his feet in the matchstick ties sticking out over the river. While the ties waggled and jumped he jotted on his clipboard a damning assessment of the bridge’s competence.

Maybe some of the women drivers crossing the Maumee on the neighboring Cherry Street bridge saw him perched there, flat of belly and broad of shoulder, the wind winding his cuffs around his ankles, and maybe they felt, as Enid had felt the first time she’d laid eyes on him, that here was a man . Although he was oblivious to their glances, Alfred experienced from within what they saw from without. By day he felt like a man, and he showed this, you might even say flaunted it, by standing no-handedly on high narrow ledges, and working ten and twelve hours without a break, and cataloguing an eastern railroad’s effeminacies.

Nighttime was a different matter. By night he lay awake on mattresses that felt made of cardboard and catalogued the faults of humanity. It seemed as if, in every motel he stayed in, he had neighbors who fornicated like there was no tomorrow — men of ill-breeding and poor discipline, women who chuckled and screamed. At 1 a.m. in Erie, Pennsylvania, a girl in the next room ranted and panted like a strumpet. Some slick, worthless fellow having his way with her. Alfred blamed the girl for taking it easy. He blamed the man for his easygoing confidence. He blamed both of them for lacking the consideration to keep their voices down. How could they never once stop to think of their neighbor, lying awake in the next room? He blamed God for allowing such people to exist. He blamed democracy for inflicting them on him. He blamed the motel’s architect for trusting a single layer of cinder block to preserve the repose of paying customers. He blamed the motel management for not keeping in reserve a room for guests who suffered. He blamed the frivolous, easygoing townspeople of Washington, Pennsylvania, who had driven 150 miles for a high-school football championship game and filled every motel room in northwest Pennsylvania. He blamed his fellow guests for their indifference to the fornication, he blamed all of humanity for its insensitivity, and it was so unfair. It was unfair that the world could be so inconsiderate to a man who was so considerate to the world. No man worked harder than he, no man made a quieter motel neighbor, no man was more of a man, and yet the phonies of the world were allowed to rob him of sleep with their lewd transactions …

He refused to weep. He believed that if he heard himself weeping, at two in the morning in a smoke-smelling motel room, the world might end. If nothing else, he had discipline. The power to refuse: he had this.

But his exercising of it went unthanked. The bed in the next room thudded against the wall, the man groaning like a ham, the girl gasping in her ululations. And every waitress in every town had spherical mammaries insufficiently buttoned into a monogrammed blouse and made a point of leaning over him.

“More coffee, good-lookin’?”

“Ah, yes, please.”

“You blushin’, sweetheart, or is that the sun comin’ up?”

“I will take the check now, thank you.”

And in the Olmsted Hotel in Cleveland he surprised a porter and a maid lasciviously osculating in a stairwell. And the tracks he saw when he closed his eyes were a zipper that he endlessly unzipped, and the signals behind him turned from forbidding red to willing green the instant he passed them, and in a saggy bed in Fort Wayne awful succubuses descended on him, women whose entire bodies — their very clothes and smiles, the crossings of their legs — exuded invitation like vaginas, and up to the surface of his consciousness (do not soil the bed!) he raced the welling embolus of spunk, his eyes opening to Fort Wayne at sunrise as a scalding nothing drained into his pajamas: a victory, all things considered, for he’d denied the succubuses his satisfaction. But in Buffalo the trainmaster had a pinup of Brigitte Bardot on his office door, and in Youngstown Alfred found a filthy magazine beneath the motel telephone book, and in Hammond, Indiana, he was trapped on a siding while a freight train slid past him and varsity cheerleaders did splits on the ball field directly to his left, the blondest girl actually bouncing a little at the very bottom of her split, as if she had to kiss the cleat-chewed sod with her cotton-clad vulva, and the caboose rocking saucily as the train finally receded up the tracks: how the world seemed bent on torturing a man of virtue.