The Corrections. Jonathan Franzen
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Here was a suitcase in front of him, an important confirmation. He’d betrayed nothing.
But Enid had spoken again. The audiologist had said that he was mildly impaired. He frowned at her, not following.
“It’s Thursday,” she said, louder. “We’re not leaving until Saturday.”
“Saturday!” he echoed.
She berated him then, and for a while the crepuscular birds retreated, but outside the wind had blown the sun out, and it was getting very cold.
THE FAILURE
DOWN THE LONG CONCOURSE they came unsteadily, Enid favoring her damaged hip, Alfred paddling at the air with loose-hinged hands and slapping the airport carpeting with poorly controlled feet, both of them carrying Nordic Pleasurelines shoulder bags and concentrating on the floor in front of them, measuring out the hazardous distance three paces at a time. To anyone who saw them averting their eyes from the dark-haired New Yorkers careering past them, to anyone who caught a glimpse of Alfred’s straw fedora looming at the height of Iowa corn on Labor Day, or the yellow wool of the slacks stretching over Enid’s out-slung hip, it was obvious that they were midwestern and intimidated. But to Chip Lambert, who was waiting for them just beyond the security checkpoint, they were killers.
Chip had crossed his arms defensively and raised one hand to pull on the wrought-iron rivet in his ear. He worried that he might tear the rivet right out of his earlobe—that the maximum pain his ear’s nerves could generate was less pain than he needed now to steady himself. From his station by the metal detectors he watched an azure-haired girl overtake his parents, an azure-haired girl of college age, a very wantable stranger with pierced lips and eyebrows. It struck him that if he could have sex with this girl for one second he could face his parents confidently, and that if he could keep on having sex with this girl once every minute for as long as his parents were in town he could survive their entire visit. Chip was a tall, gym-built man with crow’s-feet and sparse butter-yellow hair; if the girl had noticed him, she might have thought he was a little too old for the leather he was wearing. As she hurried past him, he pulled harder on his rivet to offset the pain of her departure from his life forever and to focus his attention on his father, whose face was brightening at the discovery of a son among so many strangers. In the lunging manner of a man floundering in water, Alfred fell upon Chip and grabbed Chip’s hand and wrist as if they were a rope he’d been thrown. “Well!” he said. “Well!”
Enid came limping up behind him. “Chip,” she cried, “what have you done to your ears?”
“Dad, Mom,” Chip murmured through his teeth, hoping the azure-haired girl was out of earshot. “Good to see you.”
He had time for one subversive thought about his parents’ Nordic Pleasurelines shoulder bags—either Nordic Pleasurelines sent bags like these to every booker of its cruises as a cynical means of getting inexpensive walk-about publicity or as a practical means of tagging the cruise participants for greater ease of handling at embarkation points or as a benign means of building esprit de corps; or else Enid and Alfred had deliberately saved the bags from some previous Nordic Pleasurelines cruise and, out of a misguided sense of loyalty, had chosen to carry them on their upcoming cruise as well; and in either case Chip was appalled by his parents’ willingness to make themselves vectors of corporate advertising—before he shouldered the bags himself and assumed the burden of seeing LaGuardia Airport and New York City and his life and clothes and body through the disappointed eyes of his parents.
He noticed, as if for the first time, the dirty linoleum, the assassin-like chauffeurs holding up signs with other people’s names on them, the snarl of wires dangling from a hole in the ceiling. He distinctly heard the word “motherfucker.” Outside the big windows on the baggage level, two Bangladeshi men were pushing a disabled cab through rain and angry honking.
“We have to be at the pier by four,” Enid said to Chip. “And I think Dad was hoping to see your desk at the Wall Street Journal.” She raised her voice. “Al? Al?”
Though stooped in the neck now, Alfred was still an imposing figure. His hair was white and thick and sleek, like a polar bear’s, and the powerful long muscles of his shoulders, which Chip remembered laboring in the spanking of a child, usually Chip himself, still filled the gray tweed shoulders of his sport coat.
“Al, didn’t you say you wanted to see where Chip worked?” Enid shouted.
Alfred shook his head. “There’s no time.”
The baggage carousel circulated nothing.
“Did you take your pill?” Enid said.
“Yes,” Alfred said. He closed his eyes and repeated slowly, “I took my pill. I took my pill. I took my pill.”
“Dr. Hedgpeth has him on a new medication,” Enid explained to Chip, who was quite certain that his father had not, in fact, expressed interest in seeing his office. And since Chip had no association with the Wall Street Journal—the publication to which he made unpaid contributions was the Warren Street Journal: A Monthly of the Transgressive Arts; he’d also very recently completed a screenplay, and he’d been working part-time as a legal proofreader at Bragg Knuter & Speigh for the nearly two years since he’d lost his assistant professorship in Textual Artifacts at D—— College, in Connecticut, as a result of an offense involving a female undergraduate which had fallen just short of the legally actionable and which, though his parents never learned of it, had interrupted the parade of accomplishments that his mother could brag about, back home in St. Jude; he’d told his parents that he’d quit teaching in order to pursue a career in writing, and when, more recently, his mother had pressed him for details, he’d mentioned the Warren Street Journal, the name of which his mother had misheard and instantly begun to trumpet to her friends Esther Root and Bea Meisner and Mary Beth Schumpert, and though Chip in his monthly phone calls home had had many opportunities to disabuse her he’d instead actively fostered the misunderstanding; and here things became rather complex, not only because the Wall Street Journal was available in St. Jude and his mother had never mentioned looking for his work and failing to find it (meaning that some part of her knew perfectly well that he didn’t write for the paper) but also because the author of articles like “Creative Adultery” and “Let Us Now Praise Scuzzy Motels” was conspiring to preserve, in his mother, precisely the kind of illusion that the Warren Street Journal was dedicated to exploding, and he was thirty-nine years old, and he blamed his parents for the person he had become—he was happy when his mother let the subject drop.
“His tremor’s much better,” Enid added in a voice inaudible to Alfred. “The only side effect is that he may hallucinate.”
“That’s quite a side effect,” Chip said.
“Dr. Hedgpeth says that what he has is very mild and almost completely controllable with medication.”
Alfred was surveying the baggage-claim cavern while pale travelers angled for position at the carousel. There was a confusion of tread patterns on the linoleum, gray with the pollutants that the rain had brought down. The light was the color of car sickness. “New York City!” Alfred said.
Enid frowned at Chip’s pants. “Those aren’t leather, are they?”
“Yes.”
“How do you wash them?”
“They’re leather. They’re like a second skin.”
“We have to be at the pier no later than four o’clock,” Enid said.
The carousel coughed up some suitcases.
“Chip, help me,” his father said.
Soon Chip was staggering out into the wind-blown rain with all four of his parents’ bags. Alfred shuffled forward with the jerking momentum of a man who knew there would be trouble if he had to stop and start again. Enid lagged behind, intent on the pain in her hip. She’d put on weight and maybe lost a little height since Chip had last seen her. She’d always been a pretty woman, but to Chip she was so much a personality and