Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

The chief of draftsmen, Sam Beuerlein, told Denise that next summer they would have to pay her not to come to work, since she was doing the work of two this summer.

A grinning Arkansan, Lamar Parker, who wore enormous thick glasses and had precancers on his forehead, asked her if her daddy had told her what a rascally, worthless crew the men of Signals were.

“Just worthless,” Denise said. “He never said rascally.”

Lamar cackled and puffed on his Tareyton and repeated her remark in case the men around him hadn’t heard it.

“Heh-heh-heh,” the draftsman named Don Armour muttered with unpleasant sarcasm.

Don Armour was the only man in Signals who seemed not to love Denise. He was a solidly built, short-legged Vietnam vet whose cheeks, close-shaved, were nearly as blue and glaucous as a plum. His blazers were tight around his massive upper arms; drafting tools seemed toy-sized in his hand; he looked like a teenager stuck at a first-grader’s desk. Instead of resting his feet on the ring of his high wheeled chair, like everyone else, he let his feet dangle, his toe-tips dragging on the floor. He draped his upper body across the drafting surface, bringing his eyes to within inches of his Rapidograph pen. After working for an hour like this, he went limp and pressed his nose into Mylar or buried his face in his hands and moaned. His coffee breaks he often passed pitched forward like a murder victim, his forehead on his table, his plastic aviator glasses in his fist.

When Denise was first introduced to Don Armour, he looked away and gave her a dead-fish handshake. When she worked at the far end of the drafting room, she could hear him murmuring things while the men around him chuckled; when she was close to him he kept silent and smirked fiercely at his tabletop. He reminded her of the smartasses who haunted the back rows of classrooms.

She was in the women’s room one morning in July when she heard Armour and Lamar outside the bathroom door by the drinking fountain where Lamar rinsed out his coffee mugs. She stood by the door and strained to hear.

“Remember we thought old Alan was a crazy worker?” Lamar said.

“I’ll say this for Jamborets,” Don Armour said. “He was a hell of a lot easier on the eyes.”

“Hee hee.”

“Hard to get much work done with somebody as good-looking as Alan Jamborets walking around all day in little skirts.”

“Alan was a pretty boy, all right.”

There was a groan. “I swear to God, Lamar,” Don Armour said, “I’m this close to filing a complaint with OSHA. This is cruel and unusual. Did you see that skirt?”

“I seen it. But shush now.”

“I’m going crazy.”

“This is a seasonal problem, Donald. It’s like to take care of itself in two months.”

“If the Wroths don’t fire me first.”

“Say, what makes you so sure this merger’s going through?”

“I sweated eight years in the field to get to this office. It’s about time something else came along and fucked things up.”

Denise was wearing a short electric-blue thrift-store skirt that in truth she was surprised was in compliance with her mother’s Islamic female dress code. To the extent that she accepted the idea that Lamar and Don Armour had been talking about her —and the idea did have an undeniable strange headache-like residency status in her brain — she felt all the more keenly snubbed by Don. She felt as if he were having a party in her own house without inviting her.

When she returned to the drafting room, he cast a skeptical eye around the room, sizing up everyone but her. As his gaze skipped past her, she felt a curious need to push her fingernails into the quick or to pinch her own nipples.

It was the season of thunder in St. Jude. The air had a smell of Mexican violence, of hurricanes or coups. There could be morning thunder from unreadably churning skies, ominous dull reports from south-county municipalities that nobody you knew had ever been to. And lunch-hour thunder from a solitary anvil wandering through otherwise semi-fair skies. And the more serious thunder of midafternoon, as solid sea-green waves of cloud rolled up in the southwest, the sun shining all the brighter locally and the heat bearing down more urgently, as if aware that time was short. And the great theater of a good dinnertime blowout, storms crowded into the fifty-mile radius of the radar’s sweep like big spiders in a little jar, clouds booming at each other from the sky’s four corners, and wave upon wave of dime-sized raindrops arriving like plagues, the picture in your window going black-and-white and fuzzy, trees and houses lurching in the flashes of lightning, small kids with swimsuits and drenched towels running home headlong, like refugees. And the drumming late at night, the rolling caissons of summer on the march.

And every day the St. Jude press carried rumblings of an impending merger. The Midpac’s importunate twin-brother suitors, Hillard and Chauncy Wroth, were in town talking to three unions. The Wroths were in Washington countering Midpac testimony before a Senate subcommittee. The Midpac had reportedly asked the Union Pacific to be its white knight. The Wroths defended their postacquisitional restructuring of the Arkansas Southern. The Midpac’s spokesman begged all concerned St. Judeans to write or call their congressmen …

Denise was leaving the building for lunch under partly cloudy skies when the top of a utility pole a block away from her exploded. She saw bright pink and felt the blast of thunder on her skin. Secretaries ran screaming through the little park. Denise turned on her heel and took her book and her sandwich and her plum back up to the twelfth floor, where every day two tables of pinochle formed. She sat down by the windows, but it seemed pretentious or unfriendly to be reading War and Peace . She divided her attention between the crazy skies outside and the card game nearest her.

Don Armour unwrapped a sandwich and opened it to a slice of bologna on which the texture of bread was lithographed in yellow mustard. His shoulders slumped. He wrapped the sandwich up again loosely in its foil and looked at Denise as if she were the latest torment of his day.

“Meld sixteen.”

“Who made this mess?”

“Ed,” Don Armour said, fanning cards, “you gotta be careful with those bananas.”

Ed Alberding, the most senior draftsman, had a body shaped like a bowling pin and curly gray hair like an old lady’s perm. He was blinking rapidly as he chewed banana and studied his cards. The banana, peeled, lay on the table in front of him. He broke off another dainty bite.

“Awful lot of potassium in a banana,” Don Armour said.

“Potassium’s good for you,” Lamar said from across the table.

Don Armour set his cards down and regarded Lamar gravely. “Are you joking? Doctors use potassium to induce cardiac arrest.”

“Οl’ Eddie eats two, three bananas every day,” Lamar said. “How’s that heart of yours feelin’, Mr. Ed?”

“Let’s just play the hand here, boys,” Ed said.

“But I’m terribly concerned about your health,” Don Armour said.

“You tell too many lies, mister.”

“Day after day I see you ingesting toxic potassium. It’s my duty as a friend to warn you.”

“Your trick, Don.”

“Put a card down, Don.”

“And in return all I get,” Armour said in an injured tone, “is suspicion and denial.”

“Donald, you in this game or just keepin’ that seat warm?”

“Of course, if Ed were to keel over dead of cardiac arrest, due to acute long-term potassium poisoning, that would make me fourth highest in seniority and secure me a place in Little Rock with the Arkansas Southern slash Midland Pacific, so why am I even mentioning this? Please, Ed, eat my banana, too.”