Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

“And so, on Labor Day, he said to me,‘It may seem strange to you, but I will never speak of her death again, and I want you to remember that I’m telling you this. Will you remember this, Sylvia? So you don’t think I’m crazy later?’ And I said, ‘I don’t like this, Ted, I don’t accept this.’ And he said he was sorry but he had to do it. And the next night when he got home from work I told him, I think it was, that Withers’s lawyer was claiming his confession was coerced and the real killer was still at large. And Ted sort of grinned at me, in this way when he’s pulling your leg, and he said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ And so I actually said, ‘I’m talking about the person who killed our daughter.’ And he said, ‘No one killed our daughter, I don’t want to hear you say that again.’ And I said, ‘Ted, this is not going to work.’ And he said, ‘What’s not going to work?’ And I said, ‘Your pretending Jordan isn’t dead.’ And he said, ‘We had a daughter and we don’t now and so I guess she’s dead, but I’m warning you, Sylvia, you do not tell me she was killed, do you understand me?’ And ever since then, Enid, no matter how hard I push, he’s never dropped his pose. And I’ll tell you, I’m an inch away from divorcing him. Always. Except he’s so unfailingly dear to me otherwise. He never gets angry when I talk about Withers, he just gets bluff and laughs it off, like it’s some peculiar idée fixe of mine. And I can see that he’s like our cat dragging in a dead warbler. The cat doesn’t know you don’t like dead warblers. Ted wants me to be rational like he is, he thinks he’s doing me a favor, and he takes me on all these trips and cruises, and everything’s fine except that for him the most terrible thing in our life didn’t happen and for me it did.”

“So did it happen?” Enid said.

Sylvia drew her head back, shocked. “Thank you,” she said although Enid had posed the question because she was momentarily confused, not because she wanted to do Sylvia a favor. “Thank you for being honest enough to ask me that. I do feel crazy sometimes. All my work is in my head. I’m moving around a million little pieces of nothing, a million thoughts and feelings and memories inside my head, day after day, for years, there’s this enormous scaffolding and planning, like I’m building a cathedral of toothpicks inside my head. And it doesn’t even help to keep a diary, because I can’t make the words on the page have any effect on my brain. As soon as I write a thing down I leave it behind. It’s like dropping pennies over the side of a boat. And so I’m doing all this mental work without any possibility of external support, except for these slightly dowdy people in my Wednesday and Thursday groups, and meanwhile my own husband is pretending that the whole point of all this huge interior work — namely, that my daughter was murdered — isn’t real. And so, more and more, literally the only beacons I still have in my life, my only north and south and east and west, are my emotions.

“And Ted’s right on top of that, he thinks our culture attaches too much importance to feelings, he says it’s out of control, it’s not computers that are making everything virtual, it’s mental health. Everyone’s trying to correct their thoughts and improve their feelings and work on their relationships and parenting skills instead of just getting married and raising children like they used to, is what Ted says. We’ve bumped up to the next level of abstraction because we have too much time and money, is what he says, and he refuses to be a part of it. He wants to eat ‘real’ food and go to ‘real’ places and talk about ‘real’ things like business and science. So he and I don’t really agree at all anymore on what’s important in life.

“And he foxed my therapist, Enid. I had her to dinner so she could take a look at him, and you know those dinners the magazines say you shouldn’t make for company, where you’re in the kitchen for twenty minutes before every course? I made one of those, a risotto milanese and then pan-fried steaks with a two-stage reduction, and my therapist was out in the dining room the whole time quizzing Ted. And when I saw her the next day she said his condition was very common in men, he appeared to have dealt with his grief enough to function, and she believed he wasn’t going to change and it was up to me now to accept this.

“And you know, I’m not supposed to let myself think magical or religious thoughts, but one thought I can’t escape is that this crazy thirst for revenge I’ve had for all these years isn’t really my own. It’s Ted’s. He won’t deal with it himself, and somebody’s got to deal with it, so I do, like I’m a surrogate mother except I’m not carrying a baby, I’m carrying emotions. Maybe if Ted had taken more responsibility for his feelings, and been less in a hurry to go back to work at Du Pont, I would have stayed just like I always was, and sold my woodcuts at the guild every Christmas. Maybe it was Ted’s being so rational and businesslike that pushed me over the edge. And so maybe the moral of this long story which you’ve been a total dear to listen to, Enid, is that I can’t stop finding a moral to the story no matter how hard I try not to.”

To Enid at this moment came a vision of rain. She saw herself in a house with no walls; to keep the weather out, all she had was tissue. And here came the rain from the east, and she tacked up a tissue version of Chip and his exciting new job as a reporter. Here it came from the west, and the tissue was how handsome and intelligent Gary’s boys were and how much she loved them. Then the wind shifted, and she ran to the north side of the house with such shreds of tissue as Denise afforded: how she’d married too young but was older and wiser now and enjoying great success as a restaurateur and hoping to meet the right young man! And then the rain came blasting up from the south, the tissue disintegrating even as she insisted that Al’s impairments were very mild and he’d be fine if he’d just work on his attitude and get his drugs adjusted, and it rained harder and harder, and she was so tired, and all she had was tissue—

“Sylvia?” she said.

“Yes?”

“I need to tell you something. It’s about my husband.”

Eager, perhaps, to repay the favor of listening, Sylvia nodded with encouragement. But suddenly she reminded Enid of Katharine Hepburn, In Hepburn’s eyes there had been a blank unconsciousness of privilege that made a once-poor woman like Enid want to kick her patrician shins with the hardest-toed pumps at her disposal. It would be a mistake, she felt, to confess anything to this woman.

“Yes?” Sylvia prompted.

“Nothing. I’m sorry.”

“No, say.”

“Nothing, really, just that I must get to bed. There’s certainly lots to do tomorrow!”

She rose unsteadily and let Sylvia sign for the drinks. They rode an elevator in silence. Too-precipitous intimacy had left in its wake a kind of dirty awkwardness. When Sylvia stepped out at the Upper Deck level, however, Enid followed. She couldn’t bear to be seen by Sylvia as a “B” Deck sort of person.

Sylvia stopped by the door of a large outside stateroom. “Where’s your room?”

“Just down the hall here,” Enid said. But this pretense, she saw, was unsustainable. Tomorrow she would have to pretend she’d been confused.

“Good night, then,” Sylvia said. “Thanks again for listening.”

She waited with a gentle smile for Enid to move on. But Enid didn’t move on. She looked around uncertainly. “I’m sorry. What deck is this?”

“This is the Upper.”

“Oh dear, I’m on the wrong deck. I’m sorry.”