The Corrections: A Novel (31 page)

“Like and if he set the clock for 4:11 he could hear all the late scores
and only have to wake up once. But there’s Davis Cup action in Sydney and
it’s updated hourly. Can’t miss that.”

The young estate planner was short and had a pretty face and hennaed hair. She
smiled up at Gary as if inviting him to speak. She looked midwestern and happy
to be standing next to him.

Gary fixed his gaze on nothing and attempted not to breathe. He was chronically
bothered by the
Τ
erupting in the middle of the word CenTrust He
wanted to push the
Τ
down hard, like a nipple, but when he pushed it
down
he got no satisfaction. He got cent-rust: a corroded
penny.

“Girl, this ain’t replacement faith. This
supplemental
. Isaiah
mention that lion, too. Call it the lion of Judah.”

“A pro-am thing in Malaysia with an early leader in the clubhouse, but that
could change between 2:11 and 3:11. Can’t miss
that
.”

“My faith don’t need no replacing.”

“Sheri, girl, you got a wax deposit in your ear? Listen what I saying.
This. Ain’t. No. Replacement. Faith. This
supplemental
.”

“It guarantees silky vibrant skin plus an eighteen percent reduction in
panic attacks!”

“Like I’m wondering how Samantha feels about the alarm clock going
off next to her pillow eight times a night every night.”

“All I saying is now’s the time to shop is all I saying.”

It occurred to Gary, as the young estate planner leaned into him to let a raft of
sweltering humanity leave the elevator, as she pressed her hennaed head against
his ribs more intimately than seemed strictly necessary, that another reason
he’d remained faithful to Caroline through twenty years of marriage was
his steadily growing aversion to physical contact with other human beings.
Certainly he was in love with fidelity; certainly he got an erotic kick out of
adhering to principle; but somewhere between his brain and his balls a wire was
also perhaps coming loose, because when he mentally undressed and violated this
little red-haired girl his main thought was how stuffy and undisinfected he
would find the site of his infidelity—a coliform-bacterial supply closet,
a Courtyard by Marriott with dried semen on the walls and bedspreads, the
cat-scratch-feverish back seat of whatever adorable VW or Plymouth she no doubt
drove, the spore-laden wall-to-wall of her boxlike starter apartment in
Montgomeryville or Conshohocken, each site overwarm and underventilated and
suggestive of genital warts and
chlamydia in its own
unpleasant way—and what a struggle it would be to breathe, how smothering
her flesh, how squalid and foredoomed his efforts not to condescend …

He bounded out of the elevator on sixteen, taking big cool lungfuls of centrally
processed air.

“Your wife’s been calling,” said his secretary, Maggie.
“She wants you to call her right away.”

Gary retrieved a stack of messages from his box on Maggie’s desk.
“Did she say what it is?”

“No, but she sounds upset. Even when I told her you weren’t here, she
kept calling.”

Gary shut himself inside his office and flipped through the messages. Caroline
had called at 1:35, 1:40, 1:50, 1:55, and 2:10; it was now 2:25. He pumped his
fist in triumph. Finally, finally, some evidence of desperation.

He dialed home and said, “What’s up?”

Caroline’s voice was shaking. “Gary, something’s wrong with
your cell phone. I’ve been trying your cell phone and it doesn’t
answer. What’s wrong with it?”

“I turned it off.”

“How long has it been off? I’ve been trying you for an hour, and now
I’ve got to go get the boys but I don’t want to leave the house! I
don’t know what to do!”

“Caro. Tell me what’s wrong.”

“There’s somebody across the street.”

“Who is it?”

“I don’t know. Somebody in a car, I don’t know. They’ve
been sitting there for an hour.”

The tip of Gary’s dick was melting like the flame end of a candle.
“Well,” he said, “did you go see who it is?”

“I’m afraid to,” Caroline said. “And the cops say
it’s a city street.”

“They’re right. It is a city street.”

“Gary, somebody stole the Neverest sign again!” She was practically
sobbing. “I came home at noon and it was gone.
And
then I looked out and this car was there, and there’s somebody in the
front seat right now.”

“What kind of car?”

“Big station wagon. It’s old. I’ve never seen it
before.”

“Was it there when you came home?”

“I don’t know! But now I’ve got to go get Jonah and I
don’t want to leave the house, with the sign missing and the car out
there—”

“The alarm system is working, though, right?”

“But if I come home and they’re still in the house and I surprise
them—”

“Caroline, honey, calm down. You’d hear the alarm—”

“Broken glass, an alarm going off, somebody cornered, these people have
guns—”

“Look, look, look. Caroline? Here’s what you do. Caroline?” The
fear in her voice and the need the fear suggested were making him so hot that he
had to give himself a squeeze through the fabric of his pants, a pinch of
reality. “Call me back on your cell phone,” he said. “Keep me
on the line, go out and get in the Stomper, and drive down the driveway. You can
talk to whoever through the window. I’ll be there with you the whole time.
All right?”

“OK. OK. I’m calling you right back.”

As Gary waited, he thought of the heat and the saltiness and the peach-bruise
softness of Caroline’s face when she’d been crying, the sound of her
swallowing her lachrymal mucus, and the wide-open readiness of her mouth, then,
for his. To feel nothing, not the feeblest pulse in the dead mouse from which
his urine issued, for three weeks, to believe that she would never again need
him and that he would never again want her, and then, on a moment’s
notice, to become light-headed with lust: this was marriage as he knew it. His
telephone rang.

“I’m in the car,” Caroline said from the cockpit-like aural
space of mobile phoning. “I’m backing up.”

“You can get his license number, too. Write it down
before you pull up next to him. Let him see you getting it.”

“OK. OK.”

In tinny miniature he heard the big-animal breathing of her SUV, the rising
om
of its automatic transmission.

“Oh, fuck, Gary,” she wailed, “he’s gone! I don’t
see him! He must have seen me coming and driven away!”

“Good, though, that’s good, that’s what you wanted.”

“No, because he’ll circle the block and come back when I’m not
here!”

Gary calmed her down and told her how to approach the house safely when she
returned with the boys. He promised to keep his cell phone on and come home
early. He refrained from comparing her mental health with his.

Depressed? He was not depressed. Vital signs of the rambunctious American economy
streamed numerically across his many-windowed television screen. Orfic Midland
up a point and three-eighths for the day. The U.S. dollar laughing at the euro,
buggering the yen. Virginia Lin dropped in and proposed selling a block of Exxon
at 104. Gary could see out across the river to the floodplain landscape of
Camden, New Jersey, whose deep ruination, from this height and distance, gave
the impression of a kitchen floor with the linoleum scraped off. The sun was
proud in the south, a source of relief; Gary couldn’t stand it when his
parents came east and the eastern seaboard’s weather stank. The same sun
was shining on their cruise ship now, somewhere north of Maine. In a corner of
his TV screen was the talking head of Curly Eberle. Gary upsized the picture and
raised the sound as Eberle concluded: “A body-building machine for the
brain, that’s not a bad image, Cindy.” The all-business-all-the-time
anchors, for whom financial risk was merely the boon companion of upside
potential, nodded sagely in response. “Body-building machine for the
brain, ho-
kay
,” the female anchor segued, “and coming up,
then, a toy that’s all the rage
in Belgium (!) and
its maker says
this
product could be bigger than the
Beanie
Babies
!” Jay Pascoe dropped in to kvetch about the bond market.
Jay’s little girls had a new piano teacher now and the same old mother.
Gary caught about one word of every three Jay spoke. His nerves were jangling as
on the long-ago afternoon before his fifth date with Caroline, when they were so
ready to finally be unchaste that each intervening hour was like a granite block
to be broken by a shackled prisoner …

He left work at 4:30. In his Swedish sedan he wound his way up Kelly Drive and
Lincoln Drive, out of the valley of the Schuylkill and its haze and expressway,
its bright flat realities, up through tunnels of shadow and gothic arches of
early-autumn leaves along the Wissahickon Creek, and back into the enchanted
arboreality of Chestnut Hill.

Caroline’s fevered imaginings notwithstanding, the house appeared to be
intact. Gary eased the car up the driveway past the bed of hostas and euonymus
from which, just as she’d said, another
SECURITY BY
NEVEREST
sign had been stolen. Since the beginning of the year, Gary
had planted and lost five
SECURITY BY NEVEREST
signs. It
galled him to be flooding the market with worthless signage, thereby diluting
the value of
SECURITY BY NEVEREST
as a burglary
deterrent. Here in the heart of Chestnut Hill, needless to say, the sheet-metal
currency of the Neverest and Western Civil Defense and ProPhilaTex signs in
every front yard was backed by the full faith and credit of floodlights and
retinal scanners, emergency batteries, buried hot lines, and remotely securable
doors; but elsewhere in northwest Philly, down through Mount Airy into
Germantown and Nicetown where the sociopaths had their dealings and their
dwellings, there existed a class of bleeding-heart homeowners who hated what it
might say about their “values” to buy their own home-security
systems but whose liberal “values” did not preclude stealing
Gary’s
SECURITY BY NEVEREST
signs
on an almost weekly basis and planting them in their own
front yards …

In the garage he was overcome by an Alfred-like urge to recline in the car seat
and shut his eyes. Turning off the engine, he seemed to switch off something in
his brain as well. Where had his lust and energy disappeared to? This, too, was
marriage as he knew it.

He made himself leave the car. A constrictive band of tiredness ran from his eyes
and sinuses to his brain stem. Even if Caroline was ready to forgive him, even
if he and she could somehow slip away from the kids and fool around (and,
realistically, there was no way that they could do this), he was probably too
tired to perform now anyway. Stretching out ahead of him were five kid-filled
hours before he could be alone with her in bed. Simply to regain the energy
he’d had until five minutes ago would require sleep—eight hours of
it, maybe ten.

The back door was locked and chained. He gave it the firmest, merriest knock he
could manage. Through the window he saw Jonah come trotting over in flip-flops
and a swimsuit, enter security code, and unbolt and unchain the door.

“Hello there, Dad, I’m making a sauna in the bathroom,” Jonah
said as he trotted away again.

The object of Gary’s desire, the tear-softened blond female whom he’d
reassured on the phone, was sitting next to Caleb and watching a galactic rerun
on the kitchen TV. Earnest humanoids in unisex pajamas.

“Hello!” Gary said. “Looks like everything’s OK
here.”

Caroline and Caleb nodded, their eyes on a different planet.

“I guess I’ll go put another sign out,” Gary said.

“You should nail it to a tree,” Caroline said. “Take it off its
stick and nail it to a tree.”

Nearly unmanned by disappointed expectation, Gary
filled
his chest with air and coughed. “The idea, Caroline, is that there be a
certain classiness and subtlety to the message we’re projecting? A certain
word-to-the-wise quality? When you have to
chain
your sign to a tree to
keep it from getting stolen—”

“I said nail.”

“It’s like announcing to the sociopaths: We’re whipped! Come
and get us! Come and get us!”

“I didn’t say chain. I said nail.”

Caleb reached for the remote and raised the TV volume.

Gary went to the basement and from a flat cardboard carton took the last of the
six signs that a Neverest representative had sold to him in bulk. Considering
the cost of a Neverest home-security system, the signs were unbelievably shoddy.
The placards were unevenly painted and attached by fragile aluminum rivets to
posts of rolled sheet metal too thin to be hammered into the ground (you had to
dig a hole).

Caroline didn’t look up when he returned to the kitchen. He might have
wondered if he’d hallucinated her panicked calls to him if there were not
a lingering humidity in his boxer shorts and if, during his thirty seconds in
the basement, she hadn’t thrown the dead bolt on the back door, engaged
the chain, and reset the alarm.

He, of course, was mentally ill, whereas she! She!

“Good Christ,” he said as he punched their wedding date into the
numeric keypad.

Leaving the door wide open, he went to the front yard and planted the new
Neverest sign in the old sterile hole. When he came back a minute later, the
door was locked again. He took his keys out and turned the dead bolt and pushed
the door open to the extent the chain permitted, triggering the excuse-me-please
alarm inside. He shoved on the door, stressing its hinges. He considered putting
his shoulder to it and ripping out the chain. With a grimace and a shout
Caroline jumped up and clutched her back and
stumbled over
to enter code within the thirty-second limit. “Gary,” she said,
“just knock.”

“I was in the front yard,” he said. “I was fifty feet away. Why
are you setting the alarm?”