The Corrections (55 page)

“So wait,” she said. “Brian sold his company to W——, and then Billy attacked one of W——’s vice presidents, and you think there’s a connection?”

“God, yes,” Robin said. “That’s what’s so horrible.”

“Brian didn’t mention that part.”

Shrillness came pouring out of Robin. “I can’t believe it! That’s the whole
point
. God! It is so, so, so like him not to mention that part. Because that part might actually make things hard for him, you know, the way things are hard for me. It might get in the way of his fun time in Paris, or his lunch date with Harvey Keitel, or whatever. I can’t believe he didn’t mention it.”

“Explain to me what the problem is?”

“Rick Flamburg’s disabled for life,” Robin said. “My brother is in jail for the next ten or fifteen years, this horrible company is corrupting the city schools, my father is on anti-psychotics, and Brian is like, hey, look what W——just did for us, let’s move to Mendocino!”

“But you didn’t do anything wrong,” Denise said. “You’re not responsible for any of those other things.”

Robin turned and looked straight into her. “What’s life for?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t either. But I don’t think it’s about winning.”

They marched along in silence. Denise, to whom winning did matter, grimly noted that, on top of all his other luck, Brian had married a woman of principle and spirit.

She further noted, however, that Robin didn’t seem particularly loyal.

Denise’s living room contained little more than it had after Emile had emptied it three years earlier. In their contest of self-denials, on the Weekend of Tears, Denise had had the double advantage of feeling guiltier than Emile and of having already agreed to take the house. In the end she’d succeeded in making Emile take practically every joint possession that she liked or valued and many others that she didn’t like but could have used.

The emptiness of the house had disgusted Becky Hemerling. It was
cold
, it was
self-hating
, it was
a monastery
.

“Nice and spare,” Robin commented.

Denise sat her down at the half Ping-Pong table that served as her kitchen table, opened a fifty-dollar wine, and proceeded to feed her. Denise had seldom had to struggle with her weight, but she would have blimped out in a month if she’d eaten like Robin. She watched in awe as her guest, elbows flying, devoured two kidneys and a homemade sausage, tried each of the kraut salads, and spread butter on her third healthy wedge of artisanal rye bread.

She herself had the butterflies and ate hardly anything.

“St. Jude is one of my favorite saints,” Robin said. “Did Brian tell you I’ve been going to church?”

“He mentioned it, yes.”

“I’m sure he did. I’m sure he was very understanding and patient!” Robin’s voice was loud and her face red with wine. Denise felt a constriction in her chest. “Anyway, one of the great things about being Catholic is you get to have saints, like St. Jude.”

“Patron saint of hopeless causes?”

“Exactly. What’s a church for if not lost causes?”

“I feel this way about sports teams,” Denise said. “That the winners don’t need your help.”

Robin nodded. “
You
know what I mean. But if you live with Brian you start feeling like there’s something wrong with losers. Not that he’ll actually criticize you. He’ll always be very understanding and patient and loving. Brian’s great! Nothing wrong with Brian! It’s just that he’d rather root for a winner. And I’m not really a winner like that. And I don’t really want to be.”

Denise would never have talked about Emile like this. She wouldn’t do it even now.

“See, but you
are
that kind of winner,” Robin said. “That’s why I frankly sort of saw you as my potential replacement. I saw you as next in line.”

“Nope.”

Robin made her self-consciously delighted sounds. She said, “Hee hee hee!”

“In Brian’s defense,” Denise said, “I don’t think he needs you to be Brooke Astor. I think he’d settle for bourgeois.”

“I can live with being bourgeois,” Robin said. “A house like this is what I want. I love that your kitchen table is half a Ping-Pong table.”

“It’s yours for twenty bucks.”

“Brian’s wonderful. He’s the person I wanted to spend my life with, he’s the father of my kids.
I’m
the problem.
I’m
the one who’s not getting with the program.
I’m
the one who’s going to confirmation class. Listen, do you have a jacket? I’m freezing.”

The low candles were spilling wax in the October draft. Denise fetched her favorite jean jacket, a discontinued Levi’s product with a woolen lining, and noticed how large it looked on Robin’s smaller arms, how it engulfed her thinner shoulders, like a letter jacket on a ball-player’s girlfriend.

The next day, wearing the jacket herself, she found it
softer and lighter than she remembered. She pulled on the collar and hugged herself with it.

No matter how hard she worked that fall, she had more free time and a more flexible schedule than she’d had in many years. She began to drop by the Project with food from her kitchen. She went over to Brian and Robin’s house on Panama Street, found Brian away, and stayed for an evening. A few nights later, when Brian came home and found her baking madeleines with the girls, he acted as if he’d seen her in his kitchen a hundred times.

She had a lifetime of practice at arriving late in a family of four and being loved by all. Her next conquest on Panama Street was Sinéad, the serious reader, the little fashion plate. Denise took her shopping on Saturdays. She bought her costume jewelry, an antique Tuscan jewelry case, mid-seventies disco and proto-disco albums, old illustrated books about costumes, Antarctica, Jackie Kennedy, and shipbuilding. She helped Sinéad select larger, brighter, lesser gifts for Erin. Sinéad, like her father, had impeccable taste. She wore black jeans and corduroy miniskirts and jumpers, silver bangles, and strings of plastic beads even longer than her very long hair. In Denise’s kitchen, after shopping, she peeled potatoes immaculately or rolled out simple doughs while the cook contrived lagniappes for a child’s palate: wedges of pear, strips of homemade mortadella, elderberry sorbet in a doll-size bowl of elderberry soup, lambsmeat ravioli Xed with mint-charged olive oil, cubes of fried polenta.

On the rare occasions, like weddings, when Robin and Brian still went out together, Denise baby-sat the girls at Panama Street. She taught them how to make spinach pasta and how to tango. She listened to Erin recite the U.S. presidents in order. She joined Sinéad in raiding drawers for costumes.

“Denise and I will be ethnologists,” Sinéad said, “and, Erin, you can be a Hmong person.”

As she watched Sinéad work out with Erin how a Hmong woman might comport herself, as she watched her dance to Donna Summer with her lazy half-bored minimalism, barely lifting her heels from the floor, faintly rolling her shoulders and letting her hair slide and sift across her back (Erin all the while throwing epileptic fits), Denise loved not only the girl but the girl’s parents for whatever childrearing magic they’d brought to bear on her.

Robin was less impressed. “Of course they love
you
,” she said. “You’re not trying to comb the tangles out of Sinéad’s hair. You’re not arguing for twenty minutes about what constitutes ‘making the bed.’ You never see Sinéad’s math scores.”

“They’re not good?” the smitten baby-sitter said.

“They’re appalling. We may threaten not to let her see you if they don’t improve.”

“Oh, don’t do that.”

“Maybe you’d like to do some long division with her.”

“I’ll do anything.”

One Sunday in November, while the family of five was walking in Fairmount Park, Brian remarked to Denise, “Robin’s really warmed to you. I wasn’t sure she would.”

“I like Robin a lot,” Denise said.

“I think at first she felt a little intimidated by you.”

“She had good reason to. Didn’t she.”

“I never told her anything.”

“Well, thank you for that.”

It didn’t escape Denise that the qualities that would have enabled Brian to cheat on Robin—his sense of entitlement, his retrieverish conviction that whatever he was doing was the Good Thing We All Want—would also make it easy to cheat on him. Denise could feel herself becoming an extension of “Robin” in Brian’s mind, and since “Robin” had permanent status as “great” in Brian’s estimation, neither she
nor “Denise” required further thought or worry on his part.

Brian seemed to put similarly absolute faith in Denise’s friend Rob Zito to oversee the Generator. Brian kept himself reasonably well informed, but mainly, as the weather got colder, he was absent. Denise briefly wondered if he’d fallen for another female, but the new darling turned out to be an independent filmmaker, Jerry Schwartz, who was noted for his exquisite taste in sound-track music and his skill at repeatedly finding funding for red-ink art-house projects. (“A film best enjoyed,”
Entertainment Weekly
said of Schwartz’s mopey slasher flick
Moody Fruit
, “with both eyes closed.”) A fervent admirer of Schwartz’s sound tracks, Brian had swooped down like an angel with a crucial fifty thou just as Schwartz began principal photography on a modern-dress
Crime and
Punishment
in which Raskolnikov, played by Giovanni Ribisi, was a young anarchist and rabid audiophile living underground in North Philadelphia. While Denise and Rob Zito were making hardware and lighting decisions at the Generator, Brian joined Schwartz and Ribisi et al. on location at soulful ruins in Nicetown, and swapped CDs with Schwartz from identical zippered CD carrying cases, and ate dinner at Pastis in New York with Schwartz and Greil Marcus or Stephen Malkmus.

Without realizing it, Denise had let herself imagine that Brian and Robin had no sex life anymore. So on New Year’s Eve, when she and four couples and a mob of children gathered at the house on Panama Street and she saw Brian and Robin necking in the kitchen after midnight, she pulled her coat from the bottom of the coat pile and ran from the house. For more than a week she was too ripped up to call Robin or see the girls. She had a thing for a straight woman who was married to a man whom she herself might have liked to marry. It was a reasonably hopeless case. And St. Jude gave and St. Jude took away.

Robin ended Denise’s moratorium with a phone call. She was screeching mad. “
Do you know what Jerry Schwartz’s movie
is about?
”

“Uh, Dostoevsky in Germantown?”

“
You
know it. How come
I
didn’t know it? Because he
kept
it from me, because he knew what I would think!”

“We’re talking about a Giovanni-Ribisi-as-wispily-bearded-Raskolnikov type of thing,” Denise said.

“My husband,” Robin said, “has put fifty thousand dollars,
which he got from the W
——
Corporation
, into a movie about a North Philly anarchist who splits two women’s skulls and goes to jail for it! He’s getting off on how
cool
it is to hang out with Giovanni Ribisi, and Jerry Schwartz, and Ian What’s His Face, and Stephen Whoever, while my North Philly anarchist
brother
, who really
did
split somebody’s skull—”

“No, I get it,” Denise said. “There’s a definite want of sensitivity there.”

“I don’t even think so,” Robin said. “I think he’s deeply pissed off with me and he doesn’t even know it.”

From that day forward, Denise became a stealthy advocate of infidelity. She learned that by defending Brian’s minor insensitivities she could spur Robin to more serious accusations with which she then reluctantly concurred. She listened and she listened. She took care to understand Robin better than anyone else ever had. She plied Robin with the questions Brian wasn’t asking: about Billy, about her dad, about church, about her Garden Project plans, about the half-dozen teenagers who’d caught the gardening bug and were coming back next summer, about the romantic and academic travails of her young assistants. She attended Seed Catalogue Night at the Project and put faces to the names of Robin’s favorite kids. She did long division with Sinéad. She nudged conversations in the direction of movie stars or popular music or high fashion, the sorest topics in Robin’s marriage. To the untrained ear, she sounded as if she were merely advocating
closer friendship; but she had seen Robin eat, she knew this woman’s hunger.

When a sewer-line problem delayed the opening of the Generator, Brian took the opportunity to attend the Kalama-zoo Film Festival with Jerry Schwartz, and Denise took the opportunity to hang out with Robin and the girls for five nights running. The last of these nights found her agonizing in the video store. She finally settled on
Wait Until Dark
(disgusting male menaces resourceful Audrey Hepburn, whose coloration happens to resemble Denise Lambert’s) and
Something Wild
(kinky, gorgeous Melanie Griffith liberates Jeff Daniels from a dead marriage). The very titles, when she arrived at Panama Street, made Robin blush.

Between movies, after midnight, they drank whiskey on the living-room sofa, and in a voice that even for her was unusually squeaky Robin asked permission to ask Denise a personal question. “How often, in, like, a week,” she said, “did you and Emile fool around?”

“I’m not the person to ask about what’s normal,” Denise answered. “I’ve mainly seen normal in the rearview mirror.”

“I know. I know.” Robin stared intensely at the blue TV screen. “But, what did you
think
was normal?”

“I guess, at the time, I had the sense,” Denise said, telling herself
large number, say a large number
, “that maybe three times a week might be normal.”

Robin sighed loudly. A square inch or two of her left knee rested against Denise’s right knee. “Just tell me what you think is normal,” she said.

“I think for some people, once a day feels right.”

Robin spoke in a voice like an ice cube compressed between molars. “I might like that. That doesn’t sound bad to me.”

A numbing and prickling and burning broke out on the engaged portion of Denise’s knee.