Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

He returned to St. Jude in an executive car appended to an intercity freight run, and from Union Station he took the commuter local to the suburbs. In the blocks between the station and his house the last leaves were coming down. It was the season of hurtling, hurtling toward winter. Cavalries of leaf wheeled across the bitten lawns. He stopped in the street and looked at the house that he and a bank owned. The gutters were plugged with twigs and acorns, the mum beds were blasted. It occurred to him that his wife was pregnant again. Months were rushing him forward on their rigid track, carrying him closer to the day he’d be the father of three, the year he’d pay off his mortgage, the season of his death.

“I like your suitcase,” Chuck Meisner said through the window of his commuter Fairlane, braking in the street alongside him. “For a second I thought you were the Fuller Brush man.”

“Chuck,” said Alfred, startled. “Hello.”

“Planning a conquest. The husband’s out of town forever.”

Alfred laughed because there was nothing else for it. He and Chuck met in the street often, the engineer standing at attention, the banker relaxing at the wheel. Alfred in a suit and Chuck in golfwear. Alfred lean and flattopped. Chuck shiny-pated, saggy-breasted. Chuck worked easy hours at the branch he managed, but Alfred nonetheless considered him a friend. Chuck actually listened to what he said, seemed impressed with the work he did, and recognized him as a person of singular abilities.

“Saw Enid in church on Sunday,” Chuck said. “She told me you’d been gone a week already.”

“Eleven days I was on the road.”

“Emergency somewhere?”

“Not exactly.” Alfred spoke with pride. “I was inspecting every mile of track on the Erie Belt Railroad.”

“Erie Belt. Huh.” Chuck hooked his thumbs over the steering wheel, resting his hands on his lap. He was the most easygoing driver Alfred knew, yet also the most alert. “You do your job well, Al,” he said. “You’re a fantastic engineer. So there’s got to be a reason why the Erie Belt.”

“There is indeed,” Alfred said. “Midpac’s buying it.”

The Fairlane’s engine sneezed once in a canine way. Chuck had grown up on a farm near Cedar Rapids, and the optimism of his nature was rooted in the deep, well-watered topsoil of eastern Iowa. Farmers in eastern Iowa never learned not to trust the world. Whereas any soil that might have nurtured hope in Alfred had blown away in one or another west Kansan drought.

“So,” Chuck said. “I imagine there’s been a public announcement.”

“No. No announcement.”

Chuck nodded, looking past Alfred at the Lambert house. “Enid’ll be happy to see you. I think she’s had a hard week. The boys have been sick.”

“You’ll keep that information quiet.”

“Al, Al, Al.”

“I wouldn’t mention it to anyone but you.”

“Appreciate it. You’re a good friend and a good Christian. And I’ve got about four holes’ worth of daylight if I’m going to get that hedge pruned back.”

The Fairlane inched into motion, Chuck steering it into his driveway with one index finger, as if dialing his broker.

Alfred picked up his suitcase and briefcase. It had been both spontaneous and the opposite of spontaneous, his disclosure. A spasm of goodwill and gratitude to Chuck, a calculated emission of the fury that had been building inside him for eleven days. A man travels two thousand miles but he can’t take the last twenty steps without doing something —

And it did seem unlikely that Chuck would actually use the information—

Entering the house through the kitchen door, Alfred saw chunks of raw rutabaga in a pot of water, a rubber-banded bunch of beet greens, and some mystery meat in brown butcher paper. Also a casual onion that looked destined to be fried and served with — liver?

On the floor by the basement stairs was a nest of magazines and jelly glasses.

“Al?” Enid called from the basement.

He set down his suitcase and briefcase, gathered the magazines and jelly glasses in his arms, and carried them down the steps.

Enid parked her iron on the ironing board and emerged from the laundry room with butterflies in her stomach — whether from lust or from fear of Al’s rage or from fear that she might become enraged herself she didn’t know.

He set her straight in a hurry. “What did I ask you to do before I left?”

“You’re home early,” she said. “The boys are still at the Y.”

“What is the one thing I asked you to do while I was gone?”

“I’m catching up on laundry. The boys have been sick.”

“Do you remember,” he said, “that I asked you to take care of the mess at the top of the stairs? That that was the one thing— the one thing —I asked you to do while I was gone?”

Without waiting for an answer, he went into his metallurgy lab and dumped the magazines and jelly glasses into a heavy-duty trash can. From the hammer shelf he took a badly balanced hammer, a crudely forged Neanderthal club that he hated and kept only for purposes of demolition, and methodically broke each jelly glass. A splinter hit his cheek and he swung more furiously, smashing the shards into smaller shards, but nothing could eradicate his transgression with Chuck Meisner, or the grass-damp triangles of cheerleading leotard, no matter how he hammered.

Enid listened from her station at the ironing board. She didn’t care much for the reality of this moment. That her husband had left town eleven days ago without kissing her goodbye was a thing she’d halfway succeeded in forgetting. With the living Al absent, she’d alchemically transmuted her base resentments into the gold of longing and remorse. Her swelling womb, the pleasures of the fourth month, the time alone with her handsome boys, the envy of her neighbors all were colorful philtres over which she’d waved the wand of her imagination. Even as Al had come down the stairs she’d still imagined apologies, homecoming kisses, a bouquet of flowers maybe. Now she heard the ricochet of broken glass and glancing hammer blows on heavy-gauge galvanized iron, the frustrated shrieks of hard materials in conflict. The philtres may have been colorful but unfortunately (she saw now) they were chemically inert. Nothing had really changed.

It was true that Al had asked her to move the jars and magazines, and there was probably a word for the way she’d stepped around those jars and magazines for the last eleven days, often nearly stumbling on them; maybe a psychiatric word with many syllables or maybe a simple word like “spite.” But it seemed to her that he’d asked her to do more than “one thing” while he was gone. He’d also asked her to make the boys three meals a day, and clothe them and read to them and nurse them in sickness, and scrub the kitchen floor and wash the sheets and iron his shirts, and do it all without a husband’s kisses or kind words. If she tried to get credit for these labors of hers, however, Al simply asked her whose labors had paid for the house and food and linens? Never mind that his work so satisfied him that he didn’t need her love, while her chores so bored her that she needed his love doubly. In any rational accounting, his work canceled her work.

Perhaps, in strict fairness, since he’d asked her to do “one thing” extra, she might have asked him to do “one thing” extra, too. She might have asked him to telephone her once from the road, for example. But he could argue that “someone’s going to trip on those magazines and hurt themselves,” whereas no one was going to trip over his not calling her from the road, no one was going to hurt themselves over that. And charging long-distance calls to the company was an abuse of his expense account (”You have my office number if there’s an emergency”), and so a phone call cost the household quite a bit of money, whereas carrying junk into the basement cost it no money, and so she was always wrong, and it was demoralizing to dwell perpetually in the cellar of your wrongness, to wait perpetually for someone to take pity on you in your wrongness, and so it was no wonder, really, that she’d shopped for the Dinner of Revenge.