The Corrections (50 page)

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?

She put her large hand in his larger hand, knitted her fingers into his, and pulled him toward the stairs.

In her bedroom, on his knees, he planted his thumbs on her hipbones and pressed his mouth to her thighs and then to her whatever; she felt returned to a childhood world of Grimm and C. S. Lewis where a touch could be transformative. His hands made her hips into a woman’s hips, his mouth made her thighs into a woman’s thighs, her whatever into a cunt. These were the advantages of being wanted by someone older—to feel less like an ungendered marionette, to be given a guided tour of the state of her morphology, to have its usefulness elucidated by a person for whom it was just the ticket.

Boys her own age wanted
something
, but they didn’t seem to know exactly what. Boys her own age wanted approximately. Her function—the role she’d played on more than one lousy date—was to help them learn more specifically what they wanted, to unbutton her shirt and give them suggestions, to (as it were) flesh out their rather rudimentary ideas.

Don Armour wanted her minutely, inch by inch. She appeared to make brilliant sense to him. Simply possessing a body had never much helped her, but seeing it as a thing that she herself might want—imagining herself as Don
Armour on her knees, desiring the various parts of herself—made her possession of it more forgivable. She had what the man expected to find. There was no anxiety to his location and appreciation of each feature.

When she unhooked her bra, Don bowed his head and shut his eyes.

“What is it?”

“A person could die of how beautiful you are.”

This she liked, yes.

Her feeling when she took him in her hands was a preview of her feeling a few years later, as a young cook, when she handled her first truffles, her first foie gras, her first sacs of roe.

On her eighteenth birthday her theater friends had given her a hollowed-out Bible containing a nip of Seagram’s and three candy-colored condoms, which came in handy now.

Don Armour’s head, looming above her, was a lion’s head, a jack-o’-lantern. When he came, he roared. His subsiding sighs overtook one another, overlapped almost. Oh, oh, oh, oh. She’d never heard anything like it.

There was blood in proportion to her pain, which had been fairly bad, and in reverse proportion to her pleasure, which had been mainly in her head.

In the dark, after she’d grabbed a dirty towel from the laundry basket in the hall closet, she pumped her fist at having achieved non-virginity before she left for college.

Less wonderful was the presence of a large and somewhat bloody man in her bed. It was a single bed, the only bed she’d ever slept in, and she was very tired. This perhaps explained why she made a fool of herself by standing in the middle of her room, with a towel wrapped around her, and unexpectedly weeping.

She loved Don Armour for getting up and wrapping his arms around her and not minding that she was a child. He put her to bed, found a pajama top for her, helped her into it.
Kneeling by the bed, he drew the sheet up over her shoulder and stroked her head as she had to assume he often stroked his daughters’ heads. He did this until she was nearly asleep. Then the theater of his stroking expanded into regions that she had to assume were off-limits with his daughters. She tried to stay half-asleep, but he came at her more insistently, more scratchily. Everything he did either tickled or hurt, and when she made so bold as to whimper, she had her first experience of a man’s hands pressing on her head, pushing her southward.

Thankfully, when he was done, he didn’t try to spend the night. He left her room and she lay utterly still, straining to hear what he was doing and whether he was coming back. Finally—she may have dozed—she heard the click of the front door’s latch and the whinny of his big car’s starter.

She slept until noon and was showering in the downstairs bathroom shower stall, trying to comprehend what she’d done, when she heard the front door again. Heard voices.

She madly rinsed her hair, madly toweled off, and burst out of the bathroom. Her father was lying down in the den. Her mother was rinsing out the insulated picnic hamper in the kitchen sink.

“Denise, you didn’t eat
any
of the dinner I left you!” Enid cried. “It doesn’t look like you’ve touched a single thing.”

“I thought you guys were coming back tomorrow.”

“Lake Fond du Lac was not what we expected,” Enid said. “I don’t know what Dale and Honey were thinking. It was a big nothing.”

At the bottom of the stairs were two overnight bags. Denise ran past them and up to her bedroom, where condom wrappers and bloody linens were visible from the doorway. She closed the door behind her.

The rest of her summer was ruined. She was absolutely lonely both at work and at home. She hid the bloody sheet
and the bloody towel in her closet and despaired of dealing with them. Enid was naturally surveillant and had myriad idle synapses to devote to such tasks as noticing when her daughter had her period. Denise hoped to come forward apologetically with the ruined towel and sheet at the appropriate time, two weeks hence. But Enid had brainpower to spare for the counting of linens.

“I’m missing one of my
good
monogrammed bath towels.”

“Oh, shoot, I left it at the pool.”

“Denise, why you took a
good
monogrammed bath towel, when we have so many other towels … And then, of all the towels to lose! Did you call the pool?”

“I went back and looked.”

“Those are very expensive towels.”

Denise never made mistakes like the one she was claiming to have made. The injustice would have rankled less if it had served a greater pleasure—if she could have gone to Don Armour and laughed about it and sought his consolation. But she didn’t love him and he didn’t love her.

At work now the friendliness of the other draftsmen was suspect; it all seemed liable to lead to fucking. Don Armour was too embarrassed, or discreet, to even meet her eyes. He spent his days in a torpor of unhappiness with the Wroth brothers and unfriendliness to everyone around him. There was nothing left for Denise at work but work, and now its dullness was a burden, now she hated it. By the end of a day, her face and neck hurt from holding back tears and working at speeds that only a person working happily could maintain without discomfort.

This, she told herself, was what happened when you acted on an impulse. She was amazed that she’d given all of two hours’ thought to her decision. She’d taken a liking to Don Armour’s eyes and mouth, she’d determined that she owed him the thing he wanted—and this was all she remembered thinking. A dirty and appealing possibility had occurred to
her (I could lose my virginity
tonight
), and she’d leaped at the chance.

She was too proud to admit to herself, let alone to Don Armour, that he wasn’t what she wanted. She was too inexperienced to know she simply could have said, “Sorry—big mistake.” She felt a responsibility to give him more of what he wanted. She expected that an affair, if you took the trouble to start it, went on for quite a while.

She suffered for her reluctance. The first week in particular, while she worked herself up to proposing to Don Armour that they get together again on Friday night, her throat ached steadily for hours on end. But she was a trouper. She saw him on the next three Fridays, telling her parents that she was dating Kenny Kraikmeyer. Don Armour took her to dinner at a strip-mall family restaurant and then back to his flimsy little house in a tornado-alley exurb, one of fifty small towns that St. Jude in its endless sprawl was swallowing. His house embarrassed him to the point of loathing. No houses in Denise’s suburb had ceilings so low or hardware so cheap, or doors too light to slam properly, or window sashes and window tracks made of plastic. To soothe her lover and shut him up on the topic (“your life vs. mine”) that she least enjoyed, and also to fill some hours that would otherwise have passed awkwardly, she pulled him down on the Hide-A-Bed in his junk-swamped basement and brought her perfectionism to bear on a whole new world of skills.

Don Armour never said how he’d explained to his wife his cancellation of their weekend plans in Indiana. Denise couldn’t stand to ask one question about his wife.

She endured criticism from her mother for another mistake that she would never have made: failing to soak a bloody sheet immediately in cold water.

On the first Friday of August, moments after Don Armour’s two-week vacation started, he and Denise doubled
back into the office and locked themselves in the tank room. She kissed him and put his hands on her tits and tried to work his fingers for him, but his hands wanted to be on her shoulders; they wanted to press her to her knees.

His stuff got up into her nasal passages.

“Are you coming down with a cold?” her father asked her a few minutes later, while they were driving past the city limits.

At home, Enid gave her the news that Henry Dusinberre (“your friend”) had died at St. Luke’s on Wednesday night.

Denise would have felt even guiltier if she hadn’t visited Dusinberre in his house as recently as Sunday. She’d found him in the grip of an intense irritation with his next-door neighbor’s baby. “I’m doing without white blood cells,” he said. “You’d think they could shut their goddamn windows. My God, that infant has lungs! I suspect they’re proud of those lungs. I suspect it’s like those bikers who disconnect their mufflers. Some spurious, savage token of manhood.” Dusinberre’s skull and bones were pushing ever closer to his skin. He discussed the cost of mailing a three-ounce package. He told Denise a meandering, incorrect story about an “octoroon” to whom he’d briefly been engaged. (“If I was surprised that she was only seventh-eighths white, imagine her surprise that I was only one-eighth straight.”) He spoke of his lifelong crusade on behalf of fifty-watt lightbulbs. (“Sixty’s too bright,” he said, “and forty is too dim.”) For years, he’d lived with death and kept it in its place by making it trivial. He still managed a reasonably wicked laugh, but in the end the struggle to hold fast to the trivial proved as desperate as any other. When Denise said goodbye and kissed him, he seemed not to apprehend her personally. He smiled with downcast eyes, as if he were a special child whose beauty was to be admired and whose tragic situation pitied.