The Corrections (18 page)

Gary Lambert’s
profitable entanglement with the Axon
Corporation had begun three weeks earlier, on a Sunday afternoon that he’d
spent in his new color darkroom, trying to enjoy reprinting two old photographs
of his parents and, by enjoying it, to reassure himself about his mental
health.

Gary had been worrying a lot about his mental health, but on that particular
afternoon, as he left his big schist-sheathed house on Seminole Street and
crossed his big back yard and climbed the outside stairs of his big garage, the
weather in his brain was as warm and bright as the weather in northwest
Philadelphia. A September sun was shining through a mix of haze and smallish,
gray-keeled clouds, and to the extent that Gary was able to understand and track
his neurochemistry (and he was a vice president at CenTrust Bank, not a shrink,
let’s remember) his leading indicators all seemed rather healthy.

Although in general Gary applauded the modern trend toward individual
self-management of retirement funds and long-distance calling plans and
private-schooling options, he was less than thrilled to be given responsibility
for his own personal brain chemistry, especially when certain people in his
life, notably his father, refused to take any such responsibility. But Gary was
nothing if not conscientious. As he entered the darkroom, he estimated that his
levels of Neurofactor 3 (i.e., serotonin: a very, very important factor) were
posting seven-day or even thirty-day highs, that his
Factor 2 and Factor 7 levels were likewise outperforming expectations, and that
his Factor 1 had rebounded from an early-morning slump related to the glass of
Armagnac he’d drunk at bedtime. He had a spring in his step, an agreeable
awareness of his above-average height and his late-summer suntan. His resentment
of his wife, Caroline, was moderate and well contained. Declines led advances in
key indices of paranoia (e.g., his persistent suspicion that Caroline and his
two older sons were mocking him), and his seasonally adjusted assessment of
life’s futility and brevity was consistent with the overall robustness of
his mental economy. He was not the least bit clinically depressed.

He drew the velvet blackout curtains and shut the light-proof shutters, took a
box of 8×10 paper from the big stainless refrigerator, and fed two strips
of celluloid to the motorized negative cleaner—a sexily heavy little
gadget.

He was printing images from his parents’ ill-fated Decade of Connubial
Golf. One showed Enid bending over in deep rough, scowling in her sunglasses in
the obliterative heartland heat, her left hand squeezing the neck of her
long-suffering five-wood, her right arm blurred in the act of underhandedly
throwing her ball (a white smear at the image’s margin) into the fairway.
(She and Alfred had only ever played on flat, straight, short, cheap public
courses.) In the other photo Alfred was wearing tight shorts and a billed
Midland Pacific cap, black socks and prehistoric golf shoes, and was addressing
a white grapefruit-sized tee marker with his prehistoric wooden driver and
grinning at the camera as if to say,
A ball
this big I could hit!

After Gary had given the enlargements their sour baths, he raised the lights and
discovered that both prints were webbed over with peculiar yellow blotches.

He cursed a little, not so much because he cared about the photographs as because
he wanted to preserve his good
spirits, his serotonin-rich
mood, and to do this he needed a modicum of cooperation from the world of
objects.

Outside, the weather was curdling. There was a trickle in the gutters, a rooftop
percussion of drops from overhanging trees. Through the walls of the garage,
while he shot a second pair of enlargements, Gary could hear Caroline and the
boys playing soccer in the back yard. He heard footfalls and punting sounds,
less frequent shouts, the seismic whump of ball colliding with garage.

When the second set of prints emerged from the fixer with the same yellow
blotches, Gary knew he ought to quit. But there came a tapping on the outside
door, and his youngest son, Jonah, slipped through the blackout curtain.

“Are you printing pictures?” Jonah said.

Gary hastily folded the failed prints into quarters and buried them in the trash.
“Just starting,” he said.

He remixed his solutions and opened a fresh box of paper. Jonah sat down by a
safe light and whispered as he turned the pages of one of the Narnia books,
Prince Caspian
, that Gary’s sister, Denise, had given him.
Jonah was in second grade but was already reading at a fifth-grade level. Often
he spoke aloud the written words in an articulate whisper that was of a piece
with his general Narnian dearness as a person. He had shining dark eyes and an
oboe voice and mink-soft hair and could seem, even to Gary, more sentient animal
than little boy.

Caroline did not entirely approve of Narnia—C. S. Lewis was a known
Catholic propagandist, and the Narnian hero, Aslan, was a furry, four-pawed
Christ figure—but Gary had enjoyed reading
The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe
as a boy, and he had not, it was safe to say, grown up to be a
religious nut. (In fact he was a strict materialist.)

“So they kill a bear,” Jonah reported, “but it’s not a
talking bear, and Asian comes back, but only Lucy sees him and the others
don’t believe her.”

Gary tweezed the prints into the stop bath. “Why
don’t they believe her?”

“Because she’s the
youngest
,” Jonah said.

Outside, in the rain, Caroline laughed and shouted. She had a habit of running
herself ragged to keep up with the boys. In the early years of their marriage
she’d worked full-time as a lawyer, but after Caleb was born she’d
come into family money and now she worked half days only, at a
phil-anthropically low salary, for the Children’s Defense Fund. Her real
life centered on the boys. She called them her best friends.

Six months ago, on the eve of Gary’s forty-third birthday, while he and
Jonah were visiting his parents in St. Jude, a pair of local contractors had
come and rewired, replumbed, and re-outfitted the second floor of the garage as
a surprise birthday gift from Caroline. Gary had occasionally spoken of
reprinting his favorite old family photos and collecting them in a leather-bound
album, an All-Time Lambert Two Hundred. But commercial printing would have
sufficed for that, and meanwhile the boys were teaching him computer
pixel-processing, and if he’d still needed a lab he could have rented one
by the hour. His impulse on his birthday, therefore—after Caroline had led
him out to the garage and presented him with a darkroom that he didn’t
need or want—was to weep. From certain pop-psychology books on
Caroline’s nightstand, however, he’d learned to recognize the
Warning Signs of clinical depression, and one of these Warning Signs, the
authorities all agreed, was a proclivity to inappropriate weeping, and so
he’d swallowed the lump in his throat and bounded around the expensive new
darkroom and exclaimed to Caroline (who was experiencing both buyer’s
remorse and gift-giver’s anxiety) that he was utterly delighted with the
gift! And then, to reassure himself that he wasn’t clinically depressed
and to make sure that Caroline never suspected
anything of
the kind, he’d resolved to work in the darkroom twice a week until the
All-Time Lambert Two Hundred album was complete.

The suspicion that Caroline, consciously or not, had tried to exile him from the
house by putting the darkroom in the garage was another key index of
paranoia.

When the timer pealed, he transferred the third set of prints to the fixer bath
and raised the lights again.

“What are those white blobs?” Jonah said, peering into the tray.

“Jonah, I don’t know!”

“They look like clouds,” Jonah said.

The soccer ball slammed into the side of the garage.

Gary left Enid scowling and Alfred grinning in the fixative and opened shutters.
His monkey puzzle tree and the bamboo thicket next to it were glossy with rain.
In the middle of the back yard, in soaked soiled jerseys that stuck to their
shoulder blades, Caroline and Aaron were gulping air while Caleb tied a shoe.
Caroline at forty-five had the legs of a college girl. Her hair was nearly as
blond as when Gary had first met her, twenty years earlier, at a Bob Seger
concert at the Spectrum. Gary was still substantially attracted to his wife,
still excited by her effortless good looks and by her Quaker bloodlines. By
ancient reflex, he reached for a camera and trained the zoom telephoto on
her.

The look on Caroline’s face dismayed him. There was a pinch in her brow, a
groove of distress around her mouth. She was limping as she pursued the ball
again.

Gary turned the camera on his oldest son, Aaron, who was best photographed
unawares, before he could position his head at the self-conscious angle that he
believed most flattered him. Aaron’s face was flushed and mud-flecked in
the drizzle, and Gary worked the zoom to frame a handsome shot. But resentment
of Caroline was overwhelming his neurochemical defenses.

The soccer had stopped now and she was running and limping
toward the house.

Lucy buried her head in his mane to hide from his face
, Jonah
whispered.

There came a screaming from the house.

Caleb and Aaron reacted instantly, galloping across the yard like action-picture
heroes and disappearing inside. A moment later Aaron reemerged and shouted, in
his newly crack-prone voice, “Dad! Dad! Dad! Dad!”

The hysteria of others made Gary methodical and calm. He left the darkroom and
descended the rain-slick stairway slowly. In the open space above the
commuter-rail tracks, behind the garage, a kind of spring-shower
self-improvement of the light was working through the humid air.

“Dad, Grandma’s on the phone!”

Gary ambled across the yard, pausing to examine and regret the injuries that the
soccer had visited on the grass. The surrounding neighborhood, Chestnut Hill,
was not un-Narnian. Century-old maples and ginkgos and sycamores, many of them
mutilated to accommodate power lines, grew in giant riot over patched and
repatched city streets bearing the names of decimated tribes. Seminole and
Cherokee, Navajo and Shawnee. For miles in every direction, despite high
population densities and large household incomes, there were no fast roads and
few useful stores. The Land That Time Forgot, Gary called it. Most of the houses
here, including his own, were made of a schist that resembled raw tin and was
exactly the color of his hair.

“
Dad!
”

“Thank you, Aaron, I heard you the first time.”

“Grandma’s on the phone!”

“I know that, Aaron. You just told me.”

In the slate-floored kitchen he found Caroline slumped in a chair with both hands
pressed to her lower back.

“She called this morning,” Caroline said. “I forgot to tell
you. The phone’s been ringing every five minutes,
and finally I was running—”

“Thank you, Caroline.”

“I was running—”

“Thank you.” Gary snagged the cordless and held it at arm’s
length, as if to keep his mother at bay, while he proceeded into the dining
room. Here he was waylaid by Caleb, who had a finger buried in the slick leaves
of a catalogue. “Dad, can I talk to you for a second?”

“Not now, Caleb, your grandmother is on the phone.”

“I just want——”

“Not now, I said.”

Caleb shook his head and smiled in disbelief, like a much-televised athlete
who’d failed to draw a penalty.

Gary crossed the marble-floored main hall into his very large living room and
said hello into the little phone.

“I
told
Caroline,” Enid said, “that I would call you
back if you weren’t near the phone.”

“Your calls cost seven cents a minute,” Gary said.

“Or you could have called me back.”

“Mother, we’re talking about twenty-five cents.”

“I’ve been trying to reach you all day,” she said. “The
travel agent needs an answer by tomorrow morning at the latest. And, you know,
we’re still hoping you’ll come for one last Christmas, like I
promised Jonah, so—”

“Hang on a second,” Gary said. “I’ll check with
Caroline.”

“Gary, you’ve had
months
to discuss this. I’m not going
to sit here and wait while you—”

“One second.”

He blocked the perforations in the phone’s mouthpiece with his thumb and
returned to the kitchen, where Jonah was standing on a chair with a package of
Oreos. Caroline, still slumped at the table, was breathing shallowly. “I
did something terrible,” she said, “when I ran to catch the
phone.”

“You were out there slipping around in the rain for
two hours,” Gary said.

“No, I was fine until I ran to get the phone.”

“Caroline, I saw you limping before you—”

“I was
fine
,” she said, “until I ran to get the
phone
, which was ringing for the
fiftieth
time
—”

“Good, all right,” Gary said, “it’s my mother’s
fault. Now tell me what you want me to say about Christmas.”

“Well, whatever. They’re welcome to come here.”

“We’d talked about the possibility of going
there
.”

Caroline shook her head thoroughly, as if erasing something. “No. You
talked about it. I never talked about it.”

“Caroline—”

“I can’t discuss this when she’s on the phone. Have her call
back next week.”

Jonah was realizing that he could take as many cookies as he wanted and neither
parent would notice.

“She needs to make arrangements now,” Gary said. “They’re
trying to decide if they should stop here next month, after their cruise. It
depends on Christmas.”

“It’s like I slipped a disk.”