The Corrections: A Novel (54 page)

“That’s an answer,” Brian said, “but not to my question.”

Sinéad was destroying her sarcophagus slowly from within, toes wriggling into daylight, a knee erupting, pink fingers sprouting from moist sand. Erin flung herself into a slurry of sand and water, picked herself up, and flung herself back down.

I could get to like these girls, Denise thought.

At home that night she called her mother and listened, as she did every Sunday, to Enid’s litany of Alfred’s sins against a healthy attitude, against a healthful lifestyle, against doctors’ orders, against circadian orthodoxies, against established
principles of daytime verticality, against commonsense rules regarding ladders and staircases, against all that was fun-loving and optimistic in Enid’s nature. After fifteen grueling minutes Enid concluded, “Now, and how are you?”

Since her divorce, Denise had resolved to tell her mother fewer lies, and so she made herself come clean about her enviable travel plans. She omitted only the fact that she would travel in France with someone else’s husband; this fact already radiated trouble.

“Oh, I wish I could go with you!” Enid said. “I so love Austria.”

Denise manfully offered: “Why don’t you take a month and come over?”

“Denise, there’s no way could I leave Dad by himself.”

“He can come, too.”

“You know what he says. He’s given up on land tours. He has too much trouble with his legs. So, you just go and have a wonderful time
for
me. Say hello to my favorite city! And be sure and visit Cindy Meisner. She and Klaus have a chalet in Kitzbühel and a huge, elegant apartment in Vienna.”

To Enid, Austria meant “The Blue Danube” and “Edelweiss.” The music boxes in her living room, with their floral and Alpine marquetry, all came from Vienna. Enid was fond of saying that her mother’s mother had been “Viennese,” because this was a synonym, in her mind, for “Austrian,” by which she meant “of or relating to the Austro-Hungarian Empire”—an empire that at the time of her grandmother’s birth had encompassed lands from north of Prague to south of Sarajevo. Denise, who as a girl had had a massive crush on Barbra Streisand in
Yentl
and who as a teenager had steeped herself in I. B. Singer and Sholem Alei-chem, once badgered from Enid an admission that the grandmother in question might in fact have been Jewish. Which, as she pointed out in triumph, would make both her and Enid Jewish by direct matrilineal descent. But Enid,
quickly backpedaling, said that no, no, her grandmother had been
Catholic
.

Denise had a professional interest in certain flavors from her grandmother’s cooking—country ribs and fresh sauerkraut, gooseberries and whortleberries, dumplings, trouts, and sausages. The culinary problem was to make central European heartiness palatable to Size 4 Petites. The Titanium Card crowd didn’t want Wagnerian slabs of Sauerbraten, or softballs of Semmelknödel, or alps of Schlag. This crowd might, however, eat sauerkraut. If ever there was a food for chicks with toothpick legs: low-fat and high-flavor and versatile, ready to fall in bed with pork, with goose, with chicken, with chestnuts, ready to take a raw plunge with mackerel sashimi or smoked bluefish …

Severing her last ties with Mare Scuro, she flew to Frankfurt as a salaried employee of Brian Callahan with a no-limit American Express card. In Germany she drove a hundred miles an hour and was tailgated by cars flashing their high beams. In Vienna she looked for a Vienna that didn’t exist. She ate nothing that she couldn’t have done better herself; one night she had Wiener schnitzel and thought, yes, this is Wiener schnitzel, uh huh. Her idea of Austria was way more vivid than Austria itself. She went to the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Philharmonic; she reproached herself for being a bad tourist. She got so bored and lonely that she finally called Cindy Müller-Karltreu (née Meisner) and accepted an invitation to dinner at her cavernous ‘nouveau penthouse’ overlooking the Michaelertor.

Cindy had gone thick around the middle and looked, Denise thought, far worse than she had to. Her features were lost in foundation, rouge, and lipstick. Her black silk pants were roomy in the hips and tight at the ankles. Brushing cheeks and weathering the tear-gas attack of Cindy’s perfume, Denise was surprised to detect bacterial breath.

Cindy’s husband, Klaus, had yard-wide shoulders, narrow
hips, and a butt of fascinating tininess. The Müller-Karltreu living room was furnished with baroque loveseats and Biedermeier chairs in sociability-killing formations. Softcore Bouguereaus or Bouguereau knockoffs hung on the walls, as did Klaus’s Olympic bronze medal, mounted and framed, beneath the largest chandelier.

“What you see here is merely a replica,” Klaus told Denise. “The original medal is in safe storage.”

On a vaguely
Jugendstil
sideboard was a plate of bread disks, a mangled smoked fish with the consistency of chunk canned tuna, and a not-large piece of Emmentaler.

Klaus took a bottle from a silver bucket and poured Sekt with a flourish. “To our culinary pilgrim,” he said, raising a glass. “Welcome to the holy city of Wien.”

The Sekt was sweet and overcarbonated and remarkably much like Sprite.

“It’s so neat you’re here!” Cindy cried. She snapped her fingers frantically, and a maid hurried in through a side door. “Mirjana, hun,” Cindy said in a more babyish voice, “remember I said use the rye bread, not the white bread?”

“Yis, madam,” the middle-aged Mirjana said.

“So it’s sort of too late now, because I meant this white bread for later, but I really wish you’d take this back and bring us the rye bread instead! And then maybe send someone out for more white bread for later!” Cindy explained to Denise: “She’s so so sweet, but so so silly. Aren’t you, Mirjana? Aren’t you a silly thing?”

“Yis, madam.”

“Well, you know what it’s like, you’re a chef,” Cindy told Denise as Mirjana exited. “It’s probably even worse for you, the stupidity of people.”

“The
anogance
and stupidity,” Klaus said.

“Tell somebody what to do,” Cindy said, “and they just go do something else, it’s so frustrating! So frustrating!”

“My mother sends her greetings,” Denise said.

“Your mom is so neat. She was always so nice to me. Klaus, you know the tiny, tiny little house my family used to live in (a long time ago, when I was a tiny, tiny little girl), well, Denise’s parents were our neighbors. My mom and her mom are still good friends. I guess your folks are still in their little old house, right?”

Klaus gave a harsh laugh and turned to Denise. “Do you know what I rilly
hate
about St. Jude?”

“No,” Denise said. “What do you really hate about St. Jude?”

“I rilly hate the phony democracy. The people in St. Jude pretend they’re all alike. It’s all very
nice
. Nice, nice, nice. But the people are not all alike. Not at all. There are class differences, there are race differences, there are enormous and decisive economic differences, and yet nobody’s honest in this case. Everybody pretends! Have you noticed this?”

“Do you mean,” Denise said, “like the differences between my mom and Cindy’s mom?”

“No, I don’t know your mother.”

“Klaus, actually!” Cindy said. “Actually you did meet her. Three Thanksgivings ago, at the open house. Remember?”

“Well, you see, everybody’s the same,” Klaus explained. “That’s what I’m telling you. How can you distinguish the people when everybody pretends to be the same?”

Mirjana came back with the dismal plate and different bread.

“Here, try some of this fish,” Cindy urged Denise. “Isn’t this champagne wonderful? Really different! Klaus and I used to drink it drier, but then we found this, and we love it.”

“There’s a
snob appeal
to the dry,” Klaus said. “But those who rilly know their Sekt know this emperor, this
Extra-
Trocken
, is quite naked.”

Denise crossed her legs and said, “My mother tells me you’re a doctor.”

“Yah, sports medicine,” Klaus said.

“All the best skiers come to Klaus!” Cindy said.

“This is how I repay my debt to society,” Klaus said.

Though Cindy begged her to stay, Denise escaped from the Müller-Karltreus before nine and escaped from Vienna the next morning, heading east across the haze-white valley of the middle Danube. Conscious of spending Brian’s money, she worked long days, walking Budapest sector by sector, taking notes at every meal, checking out bakeries and tiny stalls and cavernous restaurants rescued from the brink of terminal neglect. She traveled as far east as Ruthenia, the birthplace of Enid’s father’s parents, now a trans-Carpathian smidgen of the Ukraine. In the landscapes she traversed there was no trace of shtetl. No Jews to speak of in any but the largest cities. Everything as durably, drably Gentile as she’d reconciled herself to being. The food, by and large, was coarse. The Carpathian highlands, everywhere scarred with the stab wounds of coal and pitchblende mining, looked suitable for burying lime-sprinkled bodies in mass graves. Denise saw faces that resembled her own, but they were closed and prematurely weathered, not a word of English in their eyes. She had no roots. This was not her country.

She flew to Paris and met Brian in the lobby of the Hôtel des Deux Îles. In June he’d spoken of bringing his whole family, but he’d come alone. He was wearing American khakis and a very wrinkled white shirt. Denise was so lonely she almost jumped into his arms.

What kind of idiot
, she wondered,
lets her husband go to Paris
with a person like me?

They ate dinner at La Cuillère Curieuse, a Michelin two-star establishment that in Denise’s opinion was trying too hard. She didn’t want raw yellowtail or papaya confit when she came to France. On the other hand, she was plenty sick of goulash.

Brian, deferring to her judgment absolutely, made her
choose the wine and order both dinners. Over coffee she asked him why Robin hadn’t come along to Paris.

“It’s the first zucchini harvest at the Garden Project,” he said with uncharacteristic bitterness.

“Travel is a chore for some people,” Denise said.

“It didn’t use to be for Robin,” Brian said. “We used to take great trips, all over the West. And now that we can really afford it, she doesn’t want to go. It’s like she’s on strike against money.”

“It must be a shock, suddenly having so much.”

“Look, I just want to have fun with it,” Brian said. “I don’t want to be a different person. But I’m not going to wear sackcloth, either.”

“Is that what Robin is doing?”

“She hasn’t been happy since the day I sold the company.”

Let’s get an egg timer, Denise thought, and see how long this marriage lasts.

She waited in vain, as they walked the length of the quai after dinner, for Brian to brush her hand with his. He kept looking at her hopefully, as if to be sure she had no objection to his stopping at this store window or veering down that side street. He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure. He described his plans for the Generator as if it were a party that he was almost certain she would enjoy. Clearly convinced, in the same way, that he was doing a Good Thing that she wanted, he backed away from her hygienically when they parted for the night in the lobby of the Deux Îles.

She endured ten days of his affability. Toward the end she couldn’t stand to see herself in mirrors, her face seemed to her so ravaged, her tits so droopy, her hair such a frizzball, her clothes so traveled-out. She was, basically,
shocked
that this unhappy husband was resisting her. Even though he had good reason to resist her! He being the father of two lovely
girls! And she being, after all, his paid employee! She respected his resistance, she believed that this was how adults should behave; and she was extremely unhappy about it.

She bent her will to the task of not feeling overweight and starving herself. It didn’t help that she was sick of lunch and dinner and wanted only picnics. Wanted baguettes, white peaches, dry chèvre, and coffee. She was sick of watching Brian enjoy a meal. She hated Robin for having a husband she could trust. She hated Robin for her rudeness at Cape May. She cursed Robin in her head, called Robin a cunt and threatened to fuck her husband. Several nights, after dinner, she considered violating her own twisted ethics and putting the moves on Brian (because surely he would defer to her judgment; surely, given permission, he would jump up on her bed and pant and grin and lick her hand), but she was finally too demoralized by her hair and clothes. She was ready to go home.

Two nights before they left, she knocked on Brian’s door before dinner and he pulled her into his room and kissed her.

He’d given no warning of his change of heart. She visited the confessor in her head and was able to say, “Nothing! I did nothing! I knocked on the door, and next thing I know, he’s on his knees.”

On his knees, he pressed her hands to his face. She looked at him as she’d looked at Don Armour long ago. His desire brought cool topical relief to the dryness and crackedness, the bodywide distress, of her person. She followed him to bed.

Naturally, being good at everything, Brian knew how to kiss. He had the oblique style she liked. She murmured ambiguously: “I love your taste.” He put his hands everywhere she’d expected him to put them. She unbuttoned his shirt as the woman does at a certain point. She licked his nipple in the nodding, firm way of a grooming cat. She put a
practiced, curled hand on the lump in his pants. She was beautifully, avidly adulterous and she knew it. She embarked on buckle work, on hook and button projects, on elastic-band labors, until there began to swell inside her, hardly noticeable and then suddenly distinct, and then not merely distinct but increasingly painful in its pressure on her peritoneum and eyeballs and arteries and meninges, a body-sized, Robin-faced balloon of
wrongness
.

Brian’s voice was in her ear. He was asking the protection question. He’d mistaken her discomfort for transports, her squirming for an invitation. She clarified by rolling out of bed and crouching in a corner of the hotel room. She said she couldn’t.