Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

What she was aware of, that afternoon, were the problems. That Don Armour wanted to put his hands on her but couldn’t was a problem. That through an accident of birth she had everything while the man who wanted her had so much less — this lack of parity — was a big problem. Since she was the one who had everything, the problem was clearly hers to solve. But any word of reassurance she could give him, any gesture of solidarity she could imagine making, felt condescending.

She experienced the problem intensely in her body. Her surfeit of gifts and opportunities, in comparison to Don Armour’s, manifested itself as a physical botheration — a dissatisfaction that pinching the sensitive parts of herself might address but couldn’t fix.

After lunch she went to the tank room, where the originals of all signal tracings were stored in six heavy-lidded steel tanks resembling elegant Dumpsters. Over the years, the big cardboard folders in the tanks had become overloaded, collecting lost tracings in their bulging lower depths, and Denise had been given the satisfying task of restoring order. Draftsmen visiting the tank room worked around her while she relabeled folders and unearthed long-lost vellums. The biggest tank was so deep that she had to lie on her stomach on the tank beside it, her bare legs on cold metal, and dive in with both arms to reach the bottom. She dropped the rescued tracings on the floor and reached in for more. When she surfaced for air she became aware that Don Armour was kneeling by the tank.

His shoulders were muscled like an oarsman’s and stretched his blazer tight. She didn’t know how long he’d been here or what he’d been looking at. Now he was examining an accordion-pleated vellum, a wiring plan for a signal tower at Milepost 101.35 on the McCook line. It had been drawn freehand by Ed Alberding in 1956.

“Ed was a kid when he drew this. It’s a beautiful thing.”

Denise climbed down from the tank, smoothed her skirt, and dusted herself off.

“I shouldn’t be so hard on Ed,” Don said. “He’s got talents I’ll never have.”

He seemed to be thinking less about Denise than she’d been thinking about him. He uncrumpled another tracing, and she stood looking down at a boyish whorl of his pencil-gray hair. She took a step closer and leaned a little closer yet, eclipsing her view of him with her chest.

“You’re kind of in my light,” he said.

“Do you want to have dinner with me?”

He sighed heavily. His shoulders slumped. “I’m supposed to drive to Indiana for the weekend.”

“OK.”

“But let me think about it.”

“Good. Think about it.”

She sounded cool, but her knees were unsteady as she made her way to the women’s room. She locked herself in a stall and sat and worried while, outside, the elevator bell faintly chimed and the afternoon snack cart came and went. Her worrying had no content. Her eyes simply alighted on something, the chrome bolt on the door of the stall or a square of tissue on the floor, and the next thing she knew, she’d been staring at it for five minutes and had thought about nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

She was cleaning up the tank room, five minutes before day’s end, when Don Armour’s broad face loomed up at her shoulder, his eyelids drooping sleepily behind his glasses. “Denise,” he said. “Let me take you to dinner.”

She nodded quickly. “OK.”

In a rough neighborhood, mostly poor and black, just north of downtown was an old-fashioned soda shop and diner that Henry Dusinberre and his student thespians patronized. Denise had appetite for nothing more than iced tea and french fries, but Don Armour ordered a hamburger platter and a milk shake. His posture, she noticed, was a frog’s. His head sank into his shoulders as he bent to the food. He chewed slowly, as if with irony. He cast bland smiles around the room, as if with irony. He pushed his glasses up his nose with fingers whose nails, she noticed, were bitten to the pink.

“I would never come to this neighborhood,” he said.

“These couple of blocks are pretty safe.”

“See, for you, that’s true,” he said. “A place can sense if you understand trouble. If you don’t understand it, you get left alone. My problem is I understand it. If I had come to a street like this when I was your age, something ugly would have happened.”

“I don’t see why.”

“It’s just the way it was. I would look up, and suddenly there would be three strangers who hated my guts. And I hated theirs. This is a world you can’t even see if you’re an effective and happy person. A person like you walks right through it. It’s waiting for someone like me to come along so I can have the shit beat out of me. It’s had me picked out from a mile away.”

Don Armour drove a big American sedan similar to Denise’s mother’s, only older. He piloted it patiently onto an artery and headed west at a low speed, amusing himself by slouching at the wheel (“I’m slow; my car is bad”) while other drivers roared by on the left and right.

Denise directed him to Henry Dusinberre’s house. The sun was still shining, low in the west above the plywood-eyed train station, when they mounted the stairs to Dusinberre’s porch. Don Armour looked up at the surrounding trees as if even the trees were somehow better, more expensive, in this suburb. Denise had her hand on the screen door before she realized that the door behind it was open.

“Lambert? Is that you?” Henry Dusinberre came out of the gloom of his parlor. His skin was waxier than ever, his eyes more protuberant, and his teeth seemed larger in his head. “My mother’s doctor sent me home,” he said. “He wanted to wash his hands of me. I think he’s had enough of death .”

Don Armour was retreating toward his car, head down.

“Who’s the incredible hulk?” Dusinberre said.

“A friend from work,” Denise said.

“Well, you can’t bring him in. I’m sorry. I won’t have hulks in the house. You’ll have to find someplace else.”

“Do you have food? Are you all right here?”

“Yes, run along. I feel better already, being back. That doctor and I were mutually embarrassed by my health. Apparently, child, I’m quite without white blood cells. The man was shaking with fear. He was convinced that I was going to die right there in his office . Lambert, I felt so sorry for him!” A dark hole of mirth opened in the sick man’s face. “I tried to explain to him that my white-blood-cell needs are entirely nugatory. But he seemed intent on regarding me as a medical curiosity. I had lunch with Mother and took a taxi to the airport.”

“You’re sure you’re OK.”

“Yes. Go, with my blessing. Be foolish. But not in my house. Go.”

It was unwise to be seen with Don Armour at her house before dark, with observant Roots and curious Dribletts coming and going on the street, so she directed him to the elementary school and led him into the field of grass behind it. They sat amid the electronic menagerie of bug sounds, the genital intensity of certain fragrant shrubs, the fading heat of a nice July day. Don Armour put his arms around her belly, his chin on her shoulder. They listened to the dull pops of small-bore fireworks.

In her house after dark, in the frost of its air-conditioning, she tried to move him quickly toward the stairs, but he tarried in the kitchen, he lingered in the dining room. She was pierced by the unfairness of the impression that the house was obviously making. Although her parents weren’t wealthy, her mother so yearned for a certain kind of elegance and had worked so hard to achieve it that to Don Armour the house looked like the house of rich people. He seemed reluctant to tread on the carpeting. He stopped and took proper note, as possibly no one else ever had, of the Waterford goblets and candy dishes that Enid kept on display in the breakfront. His eyes fell on each object, the music boxes, the Parisian street scenes, the matching and beautifully upholstered furniture, as they’d fallen on Denise’s body — was it just today? Today at lunch?