Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

“Don’t be sorry. Do you want me to walk you down?”

“No, I got confused, I see now, this is the Upper Deck and I’m supposed to be on a lower deck. A much lower deck. So, I’m sorry.”

She turned away but still she didn’t leave. “My husband …” She shook her head. “No, our son, actually. We didn’t have lunch with him today. That’s what I wanted to tell you. He met us at the airport and we were supposed to have lunch with him and his friend, but they just— left , I don’t understand it, and he never came back, and we still don’t know where he went. So, anyway.”

“That is peculiar,” Sylvia agreed.

“So, I don’t want to bore you—”

“No no no, Enid, shame on you.”

“I just wanted to straighten that out, and now I’m off to bed, so, and I’m so glad we met! There’s a lot to do tomorrow. So. We’ll see you at breakfast!”

Before Sylvia could stop her, Enid sidled up the corridor (she needed surgery on her hip but imagine leaving Al at home alone while she was in the hospital, just imagine) castigating herself for blundering down a hall she didn’t belong on and blurting out shameful nonsense about her son. She veered to a cushioned bench and slumped and did, now, burst into tears. God had given her the imagination to weep for the sad strivers who booked the most el-cheapo “B” Deck inside staterooms on a luxury cruise ship; but a childhood without money had left her unable to stomach, herself, the $300 per person it cost to jump one category up; and so she wept for herself. She felt that she and Al were the only intelligent people of her generation who had managed not to become rich.

Here was a torture that the Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything . And the nights were getting cold now.

She considered returning to Sylvia’s room and fully unburdening herself.

But then, through her tears, she saw a sweet thing beneath the bench beside her.

It was a ten-dollar bill. Folded once. Very sweet.

With a glance up the corridor, she reached down. The texture of engraving was delicious.

Feeling restored, she descended to the “B” Deck. Background music whispered in the lounge, something perky with accordions. She imagined she heard her name bleated, distantly, as she fitted her key card in the lock and pushed on her door.

She encountered resistance and pushed harder.

“Enid,” Alfred bleated from the other side.

“Shh, Al, what on earth?”

Life as she knew it ended with her squeeze through the half-open door. Diurnality yielded to a raw continuum of hours. She found Alfred naked with his back to the door on a layer of bedsheets spread on sections of morning paper from St. Jude. Pants and a sport coat and a tie were laid out on his bed, which he’d stripped to the mattress. The excess bedding he’d piled on the other bed. He continued to call her name even after she’d turned on a light and occupied his field of vision. Her immediate aim was to quiet him and get some pajamas on him, but this took time, for he was terribly agitated and not finishing his sentences, not even making his verbs and nouns agree in number and person. He believed that it was morning and he had to bathe and dress, and that the floor by the door was a bathtub, and that the handle was a faucet, and that nothing worked. Still he insisted on doing everything his way, which led to a pushing and pulling, an actual blow to her shoulder. He raged and she wept and abused him. He managed with his madly flopping hands to unbutton his pajama top as fast she could button it. She’d never heard him use the words “t **d” or “c **p,” and the fluency with which he used them now illuminated years of prior silent usage in his head. He unmade her bed while she tried to remake his. She begged him to sit still. He cried that it was very late and he was very confused. Even now she couldn’t help loving him. Maybe especially now. Maybe she’d known all along, for fifty years, that there was this little boy in him. Maybe all the love she’d given Chipper and Gary, all the love for which in the end she’d got so little in return, had merely been practice for this most demanding of her children. She soothed and berated him and silently cursed his addling medications for an hour or more, and finally he was asleep and her travel clock showed 5:10 and 7:30 and he was running his electric shaver. Not having gone properly under, she felt fine getting up and fine dressing and catastrophically bad going to breakfast, her tongue like a dust mop, her head like something on a spit.

Even for a big ship the sea this morning was poor footing. The regurgitative splats outside the Kierkegaard Room were almost rhythmic, a kind of music of chance, and Mrs. Nygren informatively brayed about the evils of caffeine and the quasi-bicamerality of the Storting, and the Söderblads arrived damp from intimate Swedish exertions, and somehow Al proved equal to conversation with Ted Roth. Enid and Sylvia resumed relations stiffly, their emotional muscles pulled and aching from last night’s overuse. They talked about the weather. An activities coordinator named Suzy Ghosh came by with orientative tidings and registration forms for the afternoon’s outings in Newport, Rhode Island. With a bright smile and anticipatory noises Enid signed up for a tour of the town’s historic homes, and then watched in dismay as everyone else but the Norwegian social lepers passed along the clipboard without registering. “Sylvia!” she chid, her voice shaking, “you’re not going on the tour?” Sylvia glanced at her bespectacled husband, who nodded like McGeorge Bundy green-lighting ground troops for Vietnam, and for a moment her blue eyes seemed to look inward; apparently she had that ability of the enviable, of the non-midwestern, of the moneyed, to assess her desires without regard to social expectations or moral imperatives. “OK, yes, good,” she said, “maybe I will.” Ordinarily Enid would have squirmed at the hint of charity here, but she was waiving the oral exam for gift horses today. She needed all the charity she could get. And so on up the day’s steep incline she labored, availing herself of a complimentary half-session of Swedish massage, watching coastal leaves senesce from the Ibsen Promenade, and downing six ibuprofens and a quart of coffee to prepare for her afternoon in charming and historic Newport! In which freshly rain-laundered port of call Alfred announced that his feet hurt too much to venture ashore, and Enid made him promise not to nap or he wouldn’t sleep at night, and she laughingly (for how could she admit that it was life and death?) implored Ted Roth to keep him awake, and Ted replied that getting the Nygrens off the ship ought to help with that.

Smells of sun-warmed creosote and cold mussels, of boat fuel and football fields and drying kelp, an almost genetic nostalgia for things maritime and things autumnal, beset Enid as she limped from the gangway toward the tour bus. The day was dangerously beautiful. Big gusts and related clouds and a fierce lion of a sun blew the gaze around, agitating Newport’s white clapboard and mown greens, making them unseeable straight on. “Folks,” the tour guide urged, “just sit back and drink it in.” But that which can be drunk can also drown. Enid had slept for six of the previous fifty-five hours, and even as Sylvia thanked her for inviting her along she found she had no energy for touring. The Astors and the Vanderbilts, their pleasure domes and money: she was sick of it. Sick of envying, sick of herself. She didn’t understand antiques or architecture, she couldn’t draw like Sylvia, she didn’t read like Ted, she had few interests and no expertise. A capacity for love was the only true thing she’d ever had. And so she tuned out the tour guide and heeded the October angle of the yellow light, the heart-mangling intensities of the season. In the wind pushing waves across the bay she could smell night’s approach. It was coming at her fast: mystery and pain and a strange yearning sense of possibility , as though heartbreak were a thing to be sought and moved toward. On the bus between Rosecliff and the lighthouse, Sylvia offered Enid a cell phone so she could give Chip a call. Enid declined, since cell phones ate dollars and she thought a person might incur charges simply by touching one, but she made this statement: “It’s been years, Sylvia, since we had a relationship with him. I don’t think he tells us the truth about what he’s doing with his life. He said once he was working for the Wall Street Journal . Maybe I misheard him, but I think that’s what he said, but I don’t think that’s really where he’s working. I don’t know what he does for a living really. You must think it’s awful of me to complain about this, when you’ve had things so much worse.” In Sylvia’s insistence that it wasn’t awful, not at all, Enid glimpsed how she might confess an even more shameful thing or two, and how this exposure to the public elements might, while painful, offer solace. But like so many phenomena that were beautiful at a distance — thunderheads, volcanic eruptions, the stars and planets — this alluring pain proved, at closer range, to be inhuman in its scale. From Newport the Gunnar Myrdal sailed east into sapphire vapors. The ship felt stifling to Enid after an afternoon’s exposure to big skies and the tanker-size playpens of the superwealthy, and though she won sixty more dollars in the Stringbird Room she felt like a lab animal caged with other lever-yanking animals amid the mechanized blink and burble, and bedtime came early, and when Alfred began to stir she was already awake listening to the anxiety bell ringing with such force that her bed frame vibrated and her sheets were abrasive, and here was Alfred turning on lights and shouting, and a next-door neighbor banging on the wall and shouting back, and Alfred stock-still listening with his face twisted in paranoid psychosis and then whispering conspiratorially that he’d seen a t **d run between the beds, and then the making and unmaking of said beds, the application of a diaper, the application of a second diaper to address some hallucinated exigency, and the balking of his nerve-damaged legs, and the bleating of the word “Enid” until he nearly wore it out, and the woman with the rawly abraded name sobbing in the dark with the worst despair and anxiety she’d ever felt until finally — like an overnight traveler arriving at a train station differing from the dismal ones before it only in the morning twilight, the small miracles of restored visibility: a chalky puddle in a gravel parking lot, the steam twisting from a sheet-metal chimney — she was brought to a decision.