Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

It was characteristic of Brian, who hadn’t mentioned the impending sale to Robin, that on the evening of the day the deal went through he didn’t breathe a word of it until the girls were in bed in their modest yuppie row house near the Art Museum and he and she were watching a Nova show about sunspots.

“Oh, by the way,” Brian said, “neither of us ever has to work again.”

It was characteristic of Robin — her excitability — that on receiving this news she laughed until she got the hiccups.

Alas, there was justice in Billy’s old epithet for Robin: Cow Clueless. Robin was under the impression that she already had a good life with Brian. She lived in her town house, grew vegetables and herbs in her little back yard, taught “language arts” to ten-and eleven-year-olds at an experimental school in West Philly, sent her daughter Sinéad to an excellent private elementary school on Fairmount Avenue and her daughter Erin to the preschool program at Friends Select, bought softshell crabs and Jersey tomatoes at the Reading Terminal Market, took weekends and Augusts at Brian’s family’s house at Cape May, socialized with old friends who had children of their own, and burned off enough sexual energy with Brian (she ideally liked it daily , she told Denise) to keep her halfway calm.

Cow Clueless was therefore shocked by Brian’s next question. He asked her where she thought they should live. He said he was thinking of Northern California. He was also thinking of Provence, New York, and London.

“We’re happy here,” Robin said. “Why go someplace where we don’t know anybody and everybody’s a millionaire?”

“Climate,” Brian said. “Beauty, safety, culture. Style. None of which are Philly’s long suit. I’m not saying let’s move. I’m just saying tell me if there’s anyplace you’d like to go, even for a summer.”

“I like it here.”

“So we’ll stay here,” he said. “Until you feel like going someplace else.”

She was naive enough, she told Denise, to think this ended the discussion. She had a good marriage, stably founded on childrearing, eating, and sex. It was true that she and Brian had different class backgrounds, but High Temp Products wasn’t exactly E. I. Du Pont de Nemours, and Robin, holding degrees from two elite schools, wasn’t your typical proletarian. Their few real differences came down to style, and these differences were mostly invisible to Robin, because Brian was a good husband and a nice guy and because, in her cow innocence, Robin couldn’t imagine that style had anything to do with happiness. Her musical tastes ran to John Prine and Etta James, and so Brian played Prine and James at home and saved his Bartók and Defunkt and Flaming Lips and Mission of Burma for blasting on his boom box at High Temp. That Robin dressed like a grad student in white sneakers and a purple nylon shell and oversized round wireframes of a kind last worn by fashionable people in 1978 didn’t altogether disappoint Brian, because he alone among men got to see her naked. That Robin was high-strung and had a penetrating screechy voice and a kookaburra laugh seemed, likewise, a small price to pay for a heart of gold and an eye-popping streak of lechery and a racing metabolism that kept her movie-actress thin. That Robin never shaved her armpits and too seldom washed her glasses — well, she was the mother of Brian’s children, and as long as he could play his music and tinker with his tensors by himself, he didn’t mind indulging in her the anti-style that liberal women of a certain age wore as a badge of feminist identity. This, at any rate, was how Denise imagined Brian had solved the problem of style until the money from W — came rolling in.

(Denise, though only three years younger than Robin, could not conceive of wearing a purple nylon parka or failing to shave her armpits. She didn’t even own white sneakers.)

Robin’s first concession to her new wealth was to spend the summer house-hunting with Brian. She’d grown up in a big house and she wanted her girls to grow up in one, too. If Brian needed twelve-foot ceilings and four baths and mahogany details throughout, she could live with that. On the sixth of September they signed a contract on a grand brownstone on Panama Street, near Rittenhouse Square.

Two days later, with all the strength in his prison-built shoulders, Billy Passafaro welcomed W—’s corporate-image vice president to Philadelphia.

What Robin needed to know and couldn’t find out, in the weeks following the attack, was whether, by the time he lettered his message on a two-by-four, Billy had learned of Brian’s windfall and knew which company she and Brian owed their sudden wealth to. The answer mattered, mattered, mattered. However, it was pointless to ask Billy. She knew she wouldn’t get the truth from Billy, she’d get whatever answer he believed would hurt her worst. Billy had made it abundantly clear to Robin that he would never stop sneering at her, never address her as a peer, until she could prove to him that her life was as fucked-up and miserable as his. And it was precisely this totemic role she seemed to play for him, precisely the fact that he’d singled her out as the archetypical possessor of the happy normal life he couldn’t have, that made her feel as if hers were the head he’d swung for when he brained Rick Flamburg.

Before the trial she asked her father if he’d told Billy that Brian had sold Eigenmelody to W—. She didn’t want to ask him, but she couldn’t not. Nick, because he gave Billy money, was the only person in the family still in regular communication with him. (Uncle Jimmy had promised to shoot the desecrator of his shrine, the little prick nephew, if he ever showed his little prick Elvis-hating face again, and eventually Billy had stolen once too often from everybody else; even Nick’s parents, Fazio and Carolina, who had long insisted that there was nothing wrong with Billy but, in Fazio’s words, “attentive deficiency disorder,” no longer let their grandson inside their Sea Isle City house.)

Nick unfortunately grasped the import of Robin’s question right away. Choosing his words carefully, he replied that, no, he didn’t recall saying anything to Billy.

“It’s better if you just tell me the truth, Dad,” Robin said.

“Well … I … I don’t think there’s any connection there … uh, Robin.”

“Maybe it wouldn’t make me feel guilty. Maybe it would just piss me off.”

“Well … Robin … those … those feelings often amount to the same thing anyway. Guilt, anger, same thing … right? But don’t you worry about Billy.”

She hung up wondering whether Nick was trying to protect her from her guilt, trying to protect Billy from her anger, or simply spacing out under the strain. She suspected it was a combination of all three. She suspected that during the summer her father had mentioned Brian’s windfall to Billy and that father and son had then traded snidenesses and bitternesses about the W — Corporation and bourgeois Robin and leisure-class Brian. She suspected this, if nothing else, because of how badly Brian and her father got along. Brian was never as outspoken with his wife as he was with Denise (“Nick’s the worst kind of coward,” he remarked to her once), but he made no secret of hating Nick’s bad-boy disquisitions on the uses of violence and his teeth-sucking satisfaction with his so-called socialism. Brian liked Colleen well enough (“She sure got a raw deal in that marriage,” he remarked to Denise) but shook his head and left the room whenever Nick began holding forth. Robin didn’t let herself imagine what her father and Billy had said about her and Brian. But she was pretty sure that things were said and that Rick Flamburg had paid the price. Nick’s response to the trial photographs of Flamburg lent further credence to this view.