The Corrections (51 page)

She never saw Don Armour again either.

On Monday, August 6, after a summer of give and take, Hillard and Chauncy Wroth reached agreement with the principal rail workers’ unions. The unions had made substantial concessions for the promise of less paternalistic, more innovative management, thus sweetening the Wroths’ $26/share tender offer for the Midland Pacific with a potential near-term savings of $200 million. The Midpac’s board of managers wouldn’t vote officially for another two weeks, but the conclusion was foregone. With chaos looming, a letter came down from the president’s office accepting the resignations of all summer employees, effective Friday, August 17.

Since there were no women (besides Denise) in the drafting room, her co-workers prevailed on the Signal Engineer’s secretary to bake a farewell cake. It came out on her last afternoon of work. “I reckon it’s a major victory,” Lamar said, munching, “that we finally made you take a coffee break.”

Laredo Bob dabbed at his eyes with a handkerchief the size of a pillowcase.

Alfred passed along a compliment in the car that night.

“Sam Beuerlein,” he said, “tells me you’re the greatest worker he’s ever seen.”

Denise said nothing.

“You made a deep impression on those men. You opened their eyes to the kind of work a girl can do. I didn’t tell you this before, but I had the feeling the men were dubious about getting a girl for the summer. I think they expected a lot of chattering and not much substance.”

She was glad of her father’s admiration. But his kindness, like the kindness of the draftsmen who weren’t Don Armour, Had become inaccessible to her. It seemed to fall upon her body, to refer to it somehow; and her body rebelled.

Denise
-
uh
-
why
-
you
-
done, what-
you-
did?

“Anyhow,” her father said, “now you’ve had a taste of life in the real world.”

Until she actually got to Philadelphia, she’d looked forward to going to school near Gary and Caroline. Their big house on Seminole Street was like a home without home’s sorrows, and Caroline, whose beauty could make Denise breathless with the sheer privilege of speaking to her, was always good for reassurance that Denise had every right to be driven crazy by her mother. By the end of her first semester of college, though, she found that she was letting Gary leave three messages on her telephone for every message she returned. (Once, just once, there was a message from Don Armour which she likewise did not return.) She found herself declining Gary’s offers to pick her up at her dorm and return her after dinner. She claimed she had to study, and then, instead of studying, she watched TV with Julia Vrais. It was a hat trick of guilt: she felt bad for lying to Gary, worse for blowing off her work, and worst of all for distracting Julia. Denise could always pull an all-nighter, but Julia was useless after ten o’clock. Julia had no motor and no rudder. Julia could not explain why her fall schedule consisted of Intro Italian, Intro Russian, Eastern Religion, and Music Theory; she accused Denise of having had unfair outside help in choosing her balanced academic diet of English, history, philosophy, and biology.

Denise for her part was jealous of the college “men” in Julia’s life. Initially both she and Julia had been
besieged
. An inordinate number of the junior and senior “men” who banged their trays down beside them in the dining hall were from New Jersey. They had middle-aged faces and mega-phonic voices with which they compared math curricula or reminisced about that time they went to Rehoboth Beach and got so wasted. They had only three questions for Julia and Denise: (1)
What’s your name?
(2)
What dorm are you in?
and (3)
Do you want to come to our party on Friday?
Denise was amazed by the rudeness of this summary exam and no less amazed by Julia’s fascination with these Teaneck natives with monster digital wristwatches and merging eyebrows. Julia wore the heads-up look of a squirrel convinced that somebody has stale bread in his pocket. Leaving a party, she would shrug and tell Denise: “He’s got drugs, so I’m going with him.” Denise began to spend Friday nights studying by herself. She acquired a rep as an ice queen and possible lesbian. She lacked Julia’s ability to melt at the windowside chorusing of her name at three in the morning by the entire college soccer team. “I’m so embarrassed,” Julia would moan, in an agony of happiness, as she peered around the lowered blind. The “men” outside the window had no idea how happy they were making her and therefore, in Denise’s strict undergraduate judgment, did not deserve to have her.

Denise spent the next summer in the Hamptons with four of her dissolute college hallmates and lied to her parents about every aspect of her situation. She slept on a living-room floor and made good money as a dishwasher and prep drone at the Inn at Quogue, working elbow to elbow with a pretty girl from Scarsdale named Suzie Sterling and falling in love with the life of a cook. She loved the crazy hours, the intensity of the work, the beauty of the product. She loved the deep stillness that underlay the din. A good crew was like an elective family in which everyone in the little hot world of the kitchen stood on equal footing, and every cook had weirdnesses concealed in her past or in his character, and even in the midst of the most sweaty togetherness each family member enjoyed
privacy
and
autonomy
: she loved this.

Suzie Sterling’s father, Ed, had given Suzie and Denise several lifts into Manhattan before the night in August when Denise was biking home and almost rode right into him where he stood, by his BMW, smoking a Dunhill and hoping that she might come by alone. Ed Sterling was an
entertainment lawyer. He pleaded inability to live without Denise. She hid her (borrowed) bike in some bushes by the road. That the bike was stolen by the time she came back for it the next day, and that she swore to its owner that she’d chained it to the usual post, ought to have given her fair warning of the territory she was entering. But she was excited by what she did to Sterling, by the dramatic hydraulic physiology of his desire, and when she returned to school in September she decided that a liberal-arts college did not compare well to a kitchen. She didn’t see the point of working hard on papers that only a professor ever saw; she wanted an audience. She also resented that the college was making her feel guilty about her privileges while granting certain lucky identity groups plenary indulgences from guilt. She felt guilty enough already, thank you. Almost every Sunday she took the cheap slow proletarian combo of SEPTA and New Jersey Transit to New York. She put up with Ed Sterling’s paranoid one-way telephone communications and his last-minute postponements and his chronic distraction and his jaw-taxing performance anxieties and her own shame at being taken to cheap ethnic restaurants in Woodside and Elmhurst and Jackson Heights so as not to be seen by anyone Sterling knew (because, as he told her often—running both hands through his mink-thick hair—he knew
everybody
in Manhattan). While her lover teetered closer to utter freakout and inability to see her anymore, Denise ate Uruguayan T-bones, Sino-Colombian tamales, thumbnail crayfish in red Thai curry, and alder-smoked Russian eels. Beauty or excellence, as typified for her by memorable food, could redeem almost any humiliation. But she never stopped feeling guilty about the bike. Her insistence that she’d chained it to the usual post.

The third time she got involved with a man twice her age, she married him. She was determined not to be a squishy liberal. She’d quit school and worked to save money for a
year, had taken six months in France and Italy, and had returned to Philly to cook at a thronged fish-and-pasta place off Catharine Street. As soon as she’d picked up some skills, she offered her services at Café Louche, which was then the most exciting place in town. Emile Berger hired her on the spot, on the basis of her knife work and her looks. Within a week, he was complaining to her about the borderline competence of every person in his kitchen except her and him.

Arrogant, ironic, devoted Emile became her asylum. She felt infinitely adult with him. He said he’d had enough of marriage his first time around, but he obligingly took Denise to Atlantic City and (in the words of the Barbera D’Alba she’d been drunk on when she proposed to him)
made an hon
est woman of her
. At Café Louche they worked like partners, experience flowing from his head into hers. They sneered at their pretentious old rival, Le Bec-Fin. They impulse-bought a three-story town house on Federal Street, in a mixed black and white and Vietnamese neighborhood near the Italian Market. They talked about flavor the way Marxists talked about revolution.

When Emile had finally taught her everything he would ever teach her, she tried to teach
him
a thing or two—like, let’s freshen up the menu, how about, let’s maybe try that with a vegetable stock and a little bit of cumin, how about—and ran smack into that wall of irony and ironclad opinion that she’d loved as long as she was on the happy side of it. She felt more skilled and ambitious and
hungry
than her white-haired husband. She felt as if, while working and sleeping and working and sleeping, she’d aged so rapidly that she’d passed Emile and caught up with her parents. Her circumscribed world of round-the-clock domestic and workplace togetherness seemed to her identical to her parents’ universe of two. She had old-person aches in her young hips and knees and feet. She had scarred old-person hands, she had a dry old-person vagina, she had old-person prejudices and old-person
politics, she had an old-person dislike of young people and their consumer electronics and their diction. She said to herself: “I’m too young to be so old.” Whereupon her banished guilt came screaming back up out of its cave on vengeful wings, because Emile was as devoted to her as ever, as faithful to his unchanging self, and she was the one who’d insisted they get married.

By amicable agreement she left his kitchen and signed on with a competitor, Ardennes, which needed a sous-chef and which, in her opinion, was superior to Café Louche in all things except the art of being excellent without seeming to try. (Unperspiring virtuosity was undeniably Emile’s great gift.)

At Ardennes she conceived a desire to strangle the young woman who prepped and held down
garde manger
. The woman, Becky Hemerling, was a culinary-institute grad with wavy blond hair and a petite flat body and fair skin that turned scarlet in the kitchen heat. Everything about Becky Hemerling sickened Denise—her C.I.A. education (Denise was an autodidact snob), her overfamiliarity with more senior cooks (especially with Denise), her vocal adoration of Jodie Foster, the stupid fish-and-bicycle texts on her T-shirts, her overuse of the word “fucking” as an intensifier, her self-conscious lesbian “solidarity” with the “latinos” and “Asians” in the kitchen, her generalizations about “right-wingers” and “Kansas” and “Peoria,” her facility with phrases like “men and women of color,” the whole bright aura of entitlement that came of basking in the approval of educators who wished that they could be as marginalized and victimized and free of guilt as she was.
What is this person doing in my kitchen?
Denise wondered. Cooks were not supposed to be political. Cooks were the mitochondria of humanity; they had their own separate DNA, they floated in a cell and powered it but were not really
of
it. Denise suspected that Becky Hemerling had chosen the cooking life to make a political point: to be one
tough chick, to hold her own with the guys. Denise loathed this motivation all the more for harboring a speck of it herself. Hemerling had a way of looking at her that suggested that she (Hemerling) knew her better than she knew herself—an insinuation at once infuriating and impossible to refute. Lying awake beside Emile at night, Denise imagined squeezing Hemerling’s neck until her blue, blue eyes bugged out. She imagined pressing her thumbs into Hemerling’s windpipe until it cracked.

Then one night she fell asleep and dreamed that she was strangling Becky and that Becky didn’t mind. Becky’s blue eyes, in fact, invited further liberties. The strangler’s hands relaxed and traveled up along Becky’s jawline and past her ears to the soft skin of her temples. Becky’s lips parted and her eyes fell shut, as if in bliss, as the strangler stretched her legs out on her legs and her arms out on her arms …

Denise couldn’t remember being sorrier to wake from a dream.

“If you can have this feeling in a dream,” she said to herself, “it must be possible to have it in reality.”

As her marriage foundered—as she became for Emile one more flashy trend-chasing crowd-pleaser from Ardennes, and as he became for her the parent she betrayed with every word she spoke or swallowed—she took comfort in the idea that her trouble with Emile was his gender. This idea dulled the edge of her guilt. It got her through the terrible Announcement she had to make, it got Emile out the door, it propelled her through an incredibly awkward first date with Becky Hemerling. She glommed on to the belief that she was gay, she held it close and thereby spared herself just enough guilt that she could let Emile be the one to leave the house, she could live with buying him out and staying, she could allow him that moral advantage.

Unfortunately, as soon as he was gone, Denise had second thoughts. She and Becky enjoyed a lovely and instructive
honeymoon and then began to fight. And fight, and fight. Their fighting life, like the sex life that so briefly preceded it, was a thing of ritual. They fought about why they were fighting so much, whose fault it was. They fought in bed late at night, they drew on unguessed reservoirs of something like libido, they were hungover from fighting in the morning. They fought their little brains out. Fought fought fought. Fought on the stairway, fought in public, fought on car seats. And although they got off regularly—climaxed in red-faced screaming fits, slammed doors, kicked walls, collapsed in wet-faced paroxysms—the lust for combat was never gone for long. It bound them together, overcame their mutual dislike. As a lover’s voice or hair or curving hip keeps triggering the need to stop everything and fuck, so Becky had a score of provocations that reliably sent Denise’s heart rate through the roof. The worst was her contention that Denise, at heart, was a liberal collectivist pure lesbian and was simply unaware of it.

“You’re so unbelievably alienated from yourself,” Becky said. “You are
obviously
a dyke. You
obviously
always were.”

“I’m not anything,” Denise said. “I’m just me.”

She wanted above all to be a private person, an independent individual. She didn’t want to belong to any group, let alone a group with bad haircuts and strange resentful clothing issues. She didn’t want a label, she didn’t want a lifestyle, and so she ended where she’d started: wanting to strangle Becky Hemerling.

She was lucky (from a guilt-management perspective) that her divorce was in the works before she and Becky had their last, unsatisfying fight. Emile had moved to Washington to run the kitchen at the Hotel Belinger for a ton of money. The Weekend of Tears, when he returned to Philly with a truck and they divided their worldly goods and packed up his share of them, was long past by the time Denise decided, in reaction to Becky, that she wasn’t a lesbian after all.

She left Ardennes and became chef at Mare Scuro, a new Adriatic seafood place. For a year she turned down every guy who asked her for a date, not just because she wasn’t interested (they were waiters, purveyors, neighbors) but because she dreaded being seen in public with a man. She dreaded the day Emile found out (or the day she had to tell him, lest he find out accidentally) that she’d fallen for another man. It was better to work hard and see nobody. Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal. She believed she couldn’t hurt anybody as long as she was only working.