The Corrections (21 page)

The light in the windows was failing rapidly.

“You’re really going to use all this equipment?” he said with a
tightness in his chest.

Caleb, his lips still involuted, gave a shrug.

“Nobody should be slamming doors,” Gary said. “Me included. All
right?”

“Yeah, Dad. Whatever.”

Emerging from Caleb’s room into the shadowed hallway, he nearly collided
with Caroline, who was hurrying on tiptoe, in her stockinged feet, back in the
direction of their bedroom.

“Again? Again? I say don’t eavesdrop, and what do you do?”

“I wasn’t eavesdropping. I’ve got to go lie down.” And
she hurried, limping, into the bedroom.

“You can run but you can’t hide,” Gary said, following her.
“I want to know why you’re eavesdropping on me.”

“It is your paranoia, not my eavesdropping.”

“My paranoia?”

Caroline slumped on the oaken king-size bed. After she and Gary were married,
she’d undergone five years of twice-weekly therapy which the therapist, at
the final session, had declared “an unqualified success” and which
had given her a lifelong advantage over Gary in the race for mental health.

“You seem to think everybody
except
you has a
problem,” she said. “Which is what your mother thinks, too. Without
ever—”

“Caroline. Answer me one question. Look me in the eye and answer me one
question. This afternoon, when you were—”

“God, Gary, not this again. Listen to yourself.”

“When you were horsing around in the rain, running yourself ragged, trying
to keep up with an eleven-year-old and a fourteen-year-old—”

“You’re obsessed! You’re obsessed with that!”

“Running and sliding and kicking in the rain—”

“You talk to your parents and then you take your anger out on
us.”

“
Were you limping before you came inside?
” Gary shook his
finger in his wife’s face. “Look me in the eye, Caroline, look me
right in the eye. Come on! Do it! Look me in the eye and tell me you
weren’t
already limping.
”

Caroline was rocking in pain. “You’re on the phone with them for the
better part of an hour—”

“You can’t do it!” Gary crowed in bitter triumph.
“You’re lying to me and you will not admit you’re
lying!”

“
Dad! Dad!
” came a cry outside the door. Gary turned and saw
Aaron shaking his head wildly, beside himself, his beautiful face twisted and
tear-slick. “Stop shouting at her!”

The remorse neurofactor (Factor 26) flooded the sites in Gary’s brain
specially tailored by evolution to respond to it.

“Aaron, all right,” he said.

Aaron turned away and turned back and marched in place, taking big steps nowhere,
as though trying to force the shameful tears out of his eyes and into his body,
down through his legs, and stamp them out. “God, please, Dad,
do—not—shout—at her.”

“OK, Aaron,” Gary said. “Shouting’s over.”

He reached to touch his son’s shoulder, but Aaron fled
back up the hall. Gary left Caroline and followed him, his sense of
isolation deepened by this demonstration that his wife had strong allies in the
house. Her sons would protect her from her husband. Her husband who was a
shouter. Like his father before him. His father before him who was now
depressed. But who, in his prime, as a shouter, had so frightened young Gary
that it never occurred to him to intercede on his mother’s behalf.

Aaron was lying face down on his bed. In the tornado aftermath of laundry and
magazines on the floor of his room, the two nodes of order were his Bundy
trumpet (with mutes and a music stand) and his enormous alphabetized collection
of compact discs, including boxed-set complete editions of Dizzy and Satchmo and
Miles Davis, plus great miscellaneous quantities of Chet Baker and Wynton
Marsalis and Chuck Mangione and Herb Alpert and Al Hirt, all of which Gary had
given him to encourage his interest in music.

Gary perched on the edge of the bed. “I’m sorry I upset you,”
he said. “As you know, I can be a mean old judgmental bastard. And
sometimes your mother has trouble admitting she’s wrong. Especially
when—”

“Her. Back. Is. Hurt,” came Aaron’s voice, muffled by a Ralph
Lauren duvet. “She is
not lying
.”

“I know her back hurts, Aaron. I love your mother very much.”

“Then don’t
shout
at her.”

“OK. Shouting’s over. Let’s have some dinner.” Gary
lightly judo-chopped Aaron’s shoulder. “What do you say?”

Aaron didn’t move. Further cheering words appeared to be called for, but
Gary couldn’t think of any. He was experiencing a critical shortage of
Factors 1 and 3. He’d had the sense, moments earlier, that Caroline was on
the verge of accusing him of being “depressed,” and he was afraid
that if the idea that he was depressed gained currency, he would forfeit his
right to his opinions. He would forfeit his moral
certainties; every word he spoke would become a symptom of disease; he
would never again win an argument.

It was therefore all the more important now to resist depression—to fight
it with the truth.

“Listen,” he said. “You were out there with Mom, playing
soccer. Tell me if I’m right about this. Was she limping before she went
inside?”

For a moment, as Aaron roused himself from the bed, Gary believed that the truth
would prevail. But the face Aaron showed him was a reddish-white raisin of
revulsion and disbelief.

“You’re horrible!” he said. “You’re
horrible
!” And he ran from the room.

Ordinarily Gary wouldn’t have let Aaron get away with this. Ordinarily he
would have battled his son all evening if that was what it took to extract an
apology from him. But his mental markets—glycemic, endocrine,
over-the-synapse—were crashing. He was feeling ugly, and to battle Aaron
now would only make him uglier, and the sensation of ugliness was perhaps the
leading Warning Sign.

He saw that he’d made two critical mistakes. He should never have promised
Caroline that there would be no more Christmases in St. Jude. And today, when
she was limping and grimacing in the back yard, he should have snapped at least
one picture of her. He mourned the moral advantages these mistakes had cost
him.

“I am not clinically depressed,” he told his reflection in the nearly
dark bedroom window. With a great, marrow-taxing exertion of will, he stood up
from Aaron’s bed and sallied forth to prove himself capable of having an
ordinary evening.

Jonah was climbing the dark stairs with
Prince Caspian
. “I finished
the book,” he said.

“Did you like it?”

“I loved it,” Jonah said. “This is outstanding children’s
literature. Asian made a door in the air that people walked
through and disappeared. They went out of Narnia and back into the real
world.”

Gary dropped into a crouch. “Give me a hug.”

Jonah draped his arms on him. Gary could feel the looseness of his youthful
joints, the cublike pliancy, the heat radiating through his scalp and cheeks. He
would have slit his own throat if the boy had needed blood; his love was immense
in that way; and yet he wondered if it was only love he wanted now or whether he
was also coalition-building. Securing a tactical ally for his team.

What this stagnating economy needs
, thought Federal Reserve Board Chairman
Gary R. Lambert,
is a massive infusion of
Bombay Sapphire gin
.

In the kitchen Caroline and Caleb were slouched at the table drinking Coke and
eating potato chips. Caroline had her feet up on another chair and pillows
beneath her knees.

“What should we do for dinner?” Gary said.

His wife and middle son traded glances as if this were the stick-in-the-mud sort
of question he was famous for. From the density of potato-chip crumbs he could
see they were well on their way to spoiled appetites.

“Mixed grill, I guess,” said Caroline.

“Oh, yeah, Dad, do a mixed grill!” Caleb said in a tone mistakable
for either irony or enthusiasm.

Gary asked if there was meat.

Caroline stuffed chips into her mouth and shrugged.

Jonah asked permission to build a fire.

Gary, taking ice from the freezer, granted it.

Ordinary evening. Ordinary evening.

“If I put the camera over the table,” Caleb said, “I’ll
get part of the dining room, too.”

“You miss the whole nook, though,” Caroline said. “If
it’s over the back door, you can sweep both ways.”

Gary shielded himself with the door of the liquor cabinet while he poured four
ounces of gin onto ice.

“‘Alt. eighty-five’?” Caleb read
from his catalogue.

“That means the camera can look almost straight down.”

Still shielded by the cabinet door, Gary took a hefty warmish gulp. Then, closing
the cabinet, he held up the glass in case anyone cared to see what a relatively
modest drink he’d poured himself.

“Hate to break it to you,” he said, “but surveillance is out.
It’s not appropriate as a hobby.”

“Dad, you said it was OK as long as I stayed interested.”

“I said I would think about it.”

Caleb shook his head vehemently. “No! You didn’t! You said I could do
it as long as I didn’t get bored.”

“That is exactly what you said,” Caroline confirmed with an
unpleasant smile.

“Yes, Caroline, I’m sure you heard every word. But we’re not
putting this kitchen under surveillance. Caleb, you do not have my permission to
make those purchases.”

“Dad!”

“That’s my decision, it’s final.”

“Caleb, it doesn’t matter, though,” Caroline said. “Gary,
it doesn’t matter, because he’s got his own money. He can spend it
however he wants. Right, Caleb?”

Out of Gary’s sight, below the level of the table, she gave Caleb some kind
of hand signal.

“Right, I’ve got my own savings!” Caleb’s tone again
ironic or enthusiastic or, somehow, both.

“You and I will talk about this later, Caro,” Gary said. Warmth and
perversion and stupidity, all deriving from the gin, were descending from behind
his ears and down his arms and torso.

Jonah came back inside smelling like mesquite.

Caroline had opened a second large bag of potato chips.

“Don’t spoil your appetite, guys,” Gary said in a strained
voice, taking food from plastic compartments.

Again mother and son traded glances.

“Yeah, right,” Caleb said. “Gotta save
room for mixed grill!”

Gary energetically sliced meats and skewered vegetables. Jonah set the table,
spacing the flatware with the precision that he liked. The rain had stopped, but
the deck was still slippery when Gary went outside.

It had started as a family joke: Dad always orders the mixed grill in
restaurants, Dad only wants to go to restaurants with mixed grill on the menu.
To Gary there was indeed something endlessly delicious, something irresistibly
luxurious
, about a bit of lamb, a bit of pork, a bit of veal, and a
lean and tender modern-style sausage or two—a classic mixed grill, in
short. It was such a treat that he began to do his own mixed grills at home.
Along with pizza and Chinese takeout and one-pot pasta meals, mixed grill became
a family staple. Caroline helped out by bringing home multiple heavy blood-damp
bags of meat and sausage every Saturday, and before long Gary was doing mixed
grill two or even three times a week, braving all but the foulest weather on the
deck, and loving it. He did partridge breasts, chicken livers, filets mignons,
and Mexican-flavored turkey sausage. He did zucchini and red peppers. He did
eggplant, yellow peppers, baby lamb chops, Italian sausage. He came up with a
wonderful bratwurst—rib eye–bok choy combo. He loved it and loved it
and loved it and then all at once he didn’t.

The clinical term, anhedonia, had introduced itself to him in a nightstand book
of Caroline’s called
Feeling
GREAT!
(Ashley Tralpis, M.D., Ph.D.). He’d read the dictionary
entry for anhedonia with a shiver of recognition, a kind of malignant
yes,
yes
: “a psychological condition characterized by inability to
experience pleasure in normally pleasurable acts.” anhedonia was more than
a Warning Sign, it was an out-and-out symptom. A dry rot spreading from pleasure
to pleasure, a fungus spoiling the delight
in luxury and
joy in leisure which for so many years had fueled Gary’s resistance to the
poorthink of his parents.

The previous March, in St. Jude, Enid had observed that, for a bank vice
president married to a woman who worked only part-time, pro bono, for the
Children’s Defense Fund, Gary seemed to do an
awful
lot of cooking.
Gary had shut his mother up easily enough; she was married to a man who
couldn’t boil an egg, and obviously she was jealous. But on Gary’s
birthday, after he’d flown back from St. Jude with Jonah and received the
expensive surprise of a color photo lab, after he’d mustered the will to
exclaim,
A darkroom
,
fantastic, I love it, I love it
, Caroline
handed him a platter of raw prawns and brutal swordfish steaks to grill, and he
wondered if his mother had a point. On the deck, in the radiant heat, as he
blackened the prawns and seared the swordfish, a weariness overtook him. The
aspects of his life not related to grilling now seemed like mere blips of
extraneity between the poundingly recurrent moments when he ignited the mesquite
and paced the deck, avoiding smoke. Shutting his eyes, he saw twisted boogers of
browning meats on a grille of chrome and hellish coals. The eternal broiling,
broiling of the damned. The parching torments of compulsive repetition. On the
inner walls of the grill a deep-pile carpet of phenolic black greases had
accumulated. The ground behind the garage where he dumped the ashes resembled a
moonscape or the yard of a cement plant. He was very, very, very sick of mixed
grill, and the next morning he told Caroline: “I’m doing too much
cooking.”