Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

The suspicion that everything was relative. That the “real” and “authentic” might not be simply doomed but fictive to begin with. That his feeling of righteousness, of uniquely championing the real, was just a feeling. These were the suspicions that had lain in ambush in all those motel rooms. These were the deep terrors beneath the flimsy beds.

And if the world refused to square with his version of reality then it was necessarily an uncaring world, a sour and sickening world, a penal colony, and he was doomed to be violently lonely in it.

He bowed his head at the thought of how much strength a man would need to survive an entire life so lonely.

He returned the pitiful, unbalanced electric chair to the floor of the prison’s largest room. As soon as he let go of the chair, it fell on its side. Images of hammering the jail to bits passed through his head, flashes of hiked-up skirts and torn-down underpants, images of shredded bras and outthrust hips, but came to nothing.

Gary was sleeping in perfect silence, the way his mother did. There was no hope that he’d forgotten his father’s implicit promise to look at the jail after dinner. Gary never forgot anything.

Still, I am doing my best, Alfred thought.

Returning to the dining room, he noticed the change in the food on Chipper’s plate. The well-browned margins of the liver had been carefully pared off and eaten, as had every scrap of crust. There was evidence as well that rutabaga had been swallowed; the small speck that remained was scored with tiny tine marks. And several beet greens had been dissected, the softer leaves removed and eaten, the woody reddish stems laid aside. It appeared that Chipper had taken the contractual one bite of each food after all, presumably at great personal cost, and had been put to bed without being given the dessert he’d earned.

On a November morning thirty-five years earlier Alfred had found a coyote’s bloody foreleg in the teeth of a steel trap, evidence of certain desperate hours in the previous night.

There came an upwelling of pain so intense that he had to clench his jaw and refer to his philosophy to prevent its turning into tears.

(Schopenhauer: Only one consideration may serve to explain the sufferings of animals: that the will to live, which underlies the entire world of phenomena, must in their case satisfy its cravings by feeding upon itself .)

He turned off the last lights downstairs, visited the bathroom, and put on fresh pajamas. He had to open his suitcase to retrieve his toothbrush.

Into the bed, the museum of antique transports, he slipped beside Enid, settling as close to the far edge as he could. She was asleep in her sleep-feigning way. He looked once at the alarm clock, the radium jewelry on its two pointing hands — closer to twelve now than to eleven — and shut his eyes.

Came the question in a voice like noon: “What were you talking about with Chuck?”

His exhaustion redoubled. With his closed eyes he saw beakers and probes and the trembling needle of the ammeter.

“It sounded like the Erie Belt,” Enid said. “Does Chuck know about that? Did you tell him?”

“Enid, I am very tired.”

“I’m just surprised, that’s all. Considering.”

“It was an accident and I regret it.”

“I just think it’s interesting,” Enid said, “that Chuck is allowed to make an investment that we’re not allowed to make.”

“If Chuck chooses to take unfair advantage of other investors, that’s his business.”

“A lot of Erie Belt shareholders would be happy to get five and three-quarters tomorrow. What’s unfair about that?”

Her words had the sound of an argument rehearsed for hours, a grievance nursed in darkness.

“Those shares will be worth nine and a half dollars three weeks from now,” Alfred said. “I know it and most people don’t. That’s unfair.”

“You’re smarter than other people,” Enid said, “and you did better in school, and now you have a better job. That’s unfair, too, isn’t it? Shouldn’t you make yourself stupid, to be completely fair?”

Chewing your own leg off was not an act to be undertaken lightly or performed halfway. At what point and by what process did the coyote make the decision to sink its teeth into its own flesh? Presumably there first came a period of waiting and weighing. But after that?

“I’m not going to argue with you,” Alfred said. “Since you are awake, however, I want to know why Chip wasn’t put to bed.”

“You were the one who said he—”

“You came upstairs long before I did. It was not my intention that he sit there for five hours. You’re using him against me, and I don’t care for it one bit. He should have been put to bed at eight.”

Enid simmered in her wrongness.

“Can we agree that this will not happen again?” Alfred said.

“We can agree.”

“Well then. Let’s sleep.”

When it was very, very dark in the house, the unborn child could see as clearly as anyone. She had ears and eyes, fingers and a forebrain and a cerebellum, and she floated in a central place. She already knew the main hungers. Day after day the mother walked around in a stew of desire and guilt, and now the object of the mother’s desire lay three feet away from her. Everything in the mother was poised to melt and shut down at a loving touch anywhere on her body.

There was a lot of breathing going on. A lot of breathing but no touching.

Sleep eluded even Alfred. Each sinusy gasp of Enid’s seemed to pierce his ear the instant he was poised afresh to drop off.

After an interval that he judged to have lasted twenty minutes, the bed began to shake with poorly reined sobs.

He broke his silence, almost wailing: “What is it now?”

“Nothing.”

“Enid, it is very, very late, and the alarm is set for six, and I am bone-weary.”

She wept stormily. “You never kissed me goodbye!”

“I’m aware of that.”

“Well, don’t I have a right? A husband leaves his wife at home alone for two weeks?”

“This is water under the bridge. And frankly I’ve endured a lot worse.”

“And then he comes home and doesn’t even say hello? He just attacks me?”

“Enid, I have had a terrible week.”

“And leaves the dinner table before dinner’s over?”

“A terrible week and I am extraordinarily tired—”

“And locks himself in the basement for five hours? Even though he’s supposedly very tired?”

“If you had had the week I had—”

“ You didn’t kiss me goodbye .”

“Grow up! For God’s sake! Grow up!”

“Keep your voice down!”

(Keep your voice down or the baby might hear.)

(Indeed did hear and was soaking up every word.)

“Do you think I was on a pleasure cruise?” Alfred demanded in a whisper. “Everything I do I do for you and the boys. It’s been two weeks since I had a minute to myself. I believe I’m entitled to a few hours in the laboratory. You would not understand it, and you would not believe me if you did, but I have found something very interesting.”

“Oh, very interesting,” Enid said. Hardly the first time she’d heard this.

“Well it is very interesting.”

“Something with commercial applications?”

“You never know. Look what happened to Jack Callahan. This could end up paying for the boys’ education.”

“I thought you said Jack Callahan’s discovery was an accident.”

“My God, listen to yourself. You tell me I’m negative, but when it’s work that matters to me , who’s negative?”

“I just don’t understand why you won’t even consider—”

“Enough.”

“If the object is to make money—”