The Corrections: A Novel (10 page)

Dear Dr. Lambert:

On behalf of the Axon Corporation, 24 East Industrial Serpentine, Schwenksville, Pennsylvania, I’m writing to offer you a lump sum payment of five thousand dollars ($5000.00) for the full, exclusive, and irrevocable right to United States Patent #4,934,417 (
THERAPEUTIC FERROACETATE-GEL ELECTRO-POLYMERIZATION
), for which you are original and sole holder of license.

The management of Axon regrets that it cannot offer you a larger fee. The company’s own product is in the earliest stages of testing, and there is no guarantee that its investment will bear fruit.

If the terms outlined in the attached Licensing Agreement are acceptable, please sign and have notarized all three copies and return them to me no later than September 30.

When this letter had arrived in the mail in August and Enid had awakened Alfred in the basement, he’d shrugged and said, “Five thousand dollars won’t change the way we live.” Enid had suggested that they write to the Axon Corporation and ask for a larger fee, but Alfred shook his head. “We’ll have soon spent five thousand dollars on a lawyer,” he said, “and then where are we?” It didn’t hurt to ask, though, Enid said. “I will not ask,” Alfred said. But if he just wrote back, Enid said, and asked for ten thousand … She fell silent as Alfred fixed her with a look. She might as well have proposed that they make love.

Denise had taken a bottle of wine from the refrigerator, as if to underline her indifference to a matter of consequence to Enid. Sometimes Enid believed that Denise had disdain for every last thing she cared about. The sexual tightness of Denise’s blue jeans, as she bumped a drawer shut with her hip, sent this message. The assurance with which she drove a corkscrew into the cork sent this message. “Do you want some wine?”

Enid shuddered. “It’s so early in the day.”

Denise drank it like water. “Knowing Gary,” she said, “I’m guessing he said try to gouge them.”

“No, well, see—” Enid reached toward the bottle with both hands. “Just a tiny drop, pour me just a swallow, honestly, I never drink this early in the day, never—you see, but Gary wonders why the company is even bothering with the patent if they’re still so early in their development. I guess the usual thing is just to infringe on the other person’s patent. —That’s too much! Denise, I don’t like so much wine! Because, see, the patent expires in six years, so Gary thinks the company must stand to make a lot of money soon.”

“Did Dad sign the agreement?”

“Oh, yeah. He went over to the Schumperts’ and had Dave notarize it.”

“Then you have to respect his decision.”

“Denise, he’s being stubborn and unreasonable. I can’t—”

“Are you saying this is an issue of competency?”

“No. No. This is fully in character. I just can’t—”

“If he already
signed
the agreement,” Denise said, “what is Gary imagining you’re going to do?”

“Nothing, I guess.”

“So what’s the point here?”

“Nothing. You’re right,” Enid said. “There’s nothing we can do,” although in fact there was. If Denise had been a little less partisan in her support of Alfred, Enid might have confessed that after Alfred had given her the notarized agreement to mail at the post office on her way to the bank, she’d hidden the agreement in the glove compartment of their car, and had let the envelope sit and radiate guilt for several days; and that later, while Alfred was napping, she’d hidden the envelope more securely at the back of a laundry-room cabinet containing jars of undesirable jams and spreads going gray with age (kumquat-raisin, brandy-pumpkin, Korean barfleberry) and vases and baskets and cubes of florist’s clay too good to throw away but not good enough to use; and that, as a result of this dishonest act, she and Alfred could still extract a big licensing fee from Axon, and that it was therefore crucial that she locate the second, Registered letter from Axon and hide it before Alfred found out that she’d deceived and disobeyed him. “Oh, but that reminds me,” she said, emptying her glass, “there’s something else I really need your help with.”

Denise hesitated before replying with a polite and cordial “Yes?” This hesitation confirmed Enid’s long-held belief that she and Alfred had taken a wrong turn somewhere in Denise’s upbringing. Had failed to instill in their youngest child the proper spirit of generosity and cheerful service.

“Well, as you know,” Enid said, “we’ve gone to Philadelphia for the last eight Christmases in a row, and Gary’s
boys are old enough now that they might like to have a memory of Christmas at their grandparents’ house, and so I thought—”

“
Damn!
” came a cry from the living room.

Enid set down her glass and hurried from the kitchen. Alfred was sitting on the edge of the chaise in a somehow penal posture, his knees high and his back a little hunched, and was surveying the crash site of his third hors d’oeuvre. The gondola of bread had slipped from his fingers on its approach to his mouth and plunged to his knee, scattering wreckage and tumbling to the floor and finally coming to rest beneath the chaise. A wet pelt of roasted red pepper had adhered to the chaise’s flank. Shadows of oil-soak were forming around each clump of olive morsels on the upholstery. The emptied gondola lay on its side with its yellow-soaked, brown-stained white interior showing.

Denise squeezed past Enid with a damp sponge and went and knelt by Alfred. “Oh, Dad,” she said, “these are hard to handle, I should have realized.”

“Just get me a rag and I’ll clean it up.”

“No, here,” Denise said. Cupping one hand for a receptacle, she brushed the bits of olive from his knees and thighs. His hands shook in the air near her head as if he might have to push her away, but she did her work quickly, and soon she’d sponged the bits of olive up from the floor and was carrying the dirtied food back to the kitchen, where Enid had wanted a tiny extra splash of wine and in her hurry not to be conspicuous had poured a rather substantial tiny splash and downed it quickly.

“Anyway,” she said, “I thought that if you and Chip were interested, we could all have one last Christmas in St. Jude. What do you think of that idea?”

“I’ll be wherever you and Dad want to be,” Denise said.

“No, I’m asking
you
, though. I want to know if it’s something you’re especially interested in doing. If you’d
especially like to have one last Christmas in the house you grew up in. Does it sound like it might be fun for you?”

“I can tell you right now,” Denise said, “there’s no way Caroline’s leaving Philly. It’s a fantasy to think otherwise. So if you want to see your grandkids, you’ll have to come east.”

“Denise, I’m asking what
you
want. Gary says he and Caroline haven’t ruled it out. I need to know if a Christmas in St. Jude is something that you really, really want for
your
self
. Because if all the rest of us are agreed that it’s important to be together as a family in St. Jude one last time—”

“Mother, it’s fine with me, if you think you can handle it.”

“I’ll need a little help in the kitchen is all.”

“I can help you in the kitchen. But I can only come for a few days.”

“You can’t take a week?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Mother.”

“
Damn!
” Alfred cried again from the living room as something vitreous, maybe a vase containing sunflowers, hit the floor with a cracking-open sound, a gulp of breakage. “
Damn! Damn!
”

Enid’s own nerves were so splintery she almost dropped her wineglass, and yet a part of her was grateful for this second mishap, whatever it was, because it gave Denise a small taste of what she had to put up with every day, around the clock, at home in St. Jude.

The night of Alfred’s seventy-fifth birthday had found Chip alone at Tilton Ledge pursuing sexual congress with his red chaise longue.

It was early January and the woods around Carparts Creek were soggy with melting snow. Only the shopping-center sky above central Connecticut and the digital readouts of his
home electronics cast light on his carnal labors. He was kneeling at the feet of his chaise and sniffing its plush minutely, inch by inch, in hopes that some vaginal tang might still be lingering eight weeks after Melissa Paquette had lain here. Ordinarily distinct and identifiable smells—dust, sweat, urine, the dayroom reek of cigarette smoke, the fugitive afterscent of quim—became abstract and indistinguishable from oversmelling, and so he had to pause again and again to refresh his nostrils. He worked his lips down into the chaise’s buttoned navels and kissed the lint and grit and crumbs and hairs that had collected in them. None of the three spots where he thought he smelled Melissa was unambiguously tangy, but after exhaustive comparison he was able to settle on the least questionable of the three spots, near a button just south of the backrest, and give it his full nasal attention. He fingered other buttons with both hands, the cool plush chafing his nether parts in a poor approximation of Melissa’s skin, until finally he achieved sufficient belief in the smell’s reality—sufficient faith that he still possessed some relic of Melissa—to consummate the act. Then he rolled off his compliant antique and slumped on the floor with his pants undone and his head on the cushion, an hour closer to having failed to call his father on his birthday.

He smoked two cigarettes, lighting the second off the first. He turned on his television to a cable channel that was running a marathon of old Warner Bros, cartoons. At the edge of the pool of tubal glow he could see the mail that for nearly a week he’d been dropping, unopened, on the floor. Three letters from the college’s new acting provost were in the pile, also something ominous from the teachers’ retirement fund, also a letter from the college housing office with the words
NOTICE OF EVICTION
on the front of the envelope.

Earlier in the day, while killing some hours by circling in
blue ballpoint ink every uppercase
M
in the front section of a month-old
New York Times
, Chip had concluded that he was behaving like a depressed person. Now, as his telephone began to ring, it occurred to him that a depressed person ought to continue staring at the TV and ignore the ringing—ought to light another cigarette and, with no trace of emotional affect, watch another cartoon while his machine took whoever’s message.

That his impulse, instead, was to jump to his feet and answer the phone—that he could so casually betray the arduous wasting of a day—cast doubt on the authenticity of his suffering. He felt as if he lacked the ability to lose all volition and connection with reality the way depressed people did in books and movies. It seemed to him, as he silenced the TV and hurried into his kitchen, that he was failing even at the miserable task of falling properly apart.

He zipped up his pants, turned on a light, and lifted the receiver. “Hello?”

“What’s going on there, Chip?” Denise said without preliminaries. “I just talked to Dad and he said he hadn’t heard from you.”

“Denise. Denise. Why are you shouting?”

“I’m shouting,” she said, “because I’m upset because it’s Dad’s seventy-fifth birthday and you haven’t called him and you didn’t send him a card. I’m upset because I’ve been working for twelve hours and I just called Dad and he’s worried about you. What’s going on there?”

Chip surprised himself by laughing. “What’s going on is that I’ve lost my job.”

“You didn’t get tenure?”

“No, I was fired,” he said. “They didn’t even let me teach the last two weeks of classes. Somebody else had to give my exams. And I can’t appeal the decision without calling a witness. And if I try to talk to my witness it’s just further evidence of my crime.”

“Who’s the witness? Witness to what?”

Chip took a bottle from the recycling bin, double-checked its emptiness, and returned it to the bin. “A former student of mine says I’m obsessed with her. She says I had a relationship with her and wrote her a term paper in a motel room. And unless I get a lawyer, which I can’t afford to do because they’ve cut my pay off, I’m not allowed to speak to this student. If I try to see her, it’s considered stalking.”

“Is she lying?” Denise said.

“Not that this is anything Mom and Dad need to know about.”

“Chip, is she lying?”

Spread open on Chip’s kitchen counter was the section of the
Times
in which he’d circled all the uppercase
M’s
. Rediscovering this artifact now, hours later, would have been like remembering a dream except that a remembered dream didn’t have the power to pull a waking person back into it, whereas the sight of a heavily marked story about severe new curtailments in
M
edicare and
M
edicaid benefits induced in Chip the same feeling of unease and unrealized lust, the same longing for unconsciousness, that had sent him to the chaise to sniff and grope. He had to struggle now to remind himself that he’d already
gone
to the chaise, he’d already
taken
that route to comfort and forgetfulness.

He folded the
Times
and dropped it on top of his heaping trash can.

“‘I never had sexual relations with that woman,’” he said.

“You know I’m judgmental about a lot of things,” Denise said, “but not about things like this.”

“I said I didn’t sleep with her.”

“I’m stressing, though,” Denise said, “that this is one area where absolutely anything you say to me will fall on sympathetic ears.” And she cleared her throat pointedly.

If Chip had wanted to come clean to someone in his family, his little sister would have been the obvious choice.
Having dropped out of college and having married badly, Denise at least had some acquaintance with darkness and disappointment. Nobody but Enid, however, had ever mistaken Denise for a failure. The college she’d dropped out of was better than the one that Chip had graduated from, and her early marriage and more recent divorce had given her an emotional maturity that Chip was all too aware of lacking himself, and he suspected that even though Denise was working eighty hours a week she still managed to read more books than he did. In the last month, since he’d embarked on projects like digitally scanning Melissa Paquette’s face from a freshman facebook and suturing her head to obscene downloaded images and tinkering with these images pixel by pixel (and the hours did fly by when you were tinkering with pixels), he’d read no books at all.