The Corrections

Distantly Gary heard the beeping of his anniversary date being entered to arm the perimeter. Then the toast-smelling house was silent and he shaped his face into the expression of bottomless suffering and self-pity that Caroline wore when her back was hurting. He understood, as he never had before, how much comfort this expression yielded.

He thought about getting up, but he didn’t need anything. He didn’t know when Caroline was coming back; if she was working at the CDF today, she might not return until three. It didn’t matter. He would be here.

As it happened, Caroline came back in half an hour. The sounds of her departure were reversed. He heard the approaching Stomper, the disarming code, the footsteps on the stairs. He sensed his wife in the doorway, silent, watching him.

“Gary?” she said in a lower, more tender voice.

He did nothing. He lay. She came over to him and knelt by the bed. “What is it? Are you sick?”

He didn’t answer.

“What is this bag for? My God. What did you do?”

He said nothing.

“Gary, say something. Are you depressed?”

“Yes.”

She sighed then. Weeks of accumulated tension were draining from the room.

“I surrender,” Gary said.

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t have to go to St. Jude,” he said. “Nobody who doesn’t want to go has to go.”

It cost him a lot to say this, but there was a reward. He felt Caroline’s warmth approaching, its radiance, before she touched him. The sun rising, the first brush of her hair on his neck as she leaned over him, the approach of her breath, the gentle touching-down of her lips on his cheek. She said, “Thank you.”

“I may have to go for Christmas Eve but I’ll come back for Christmas.”

“Thank you.”

“I’m extremely depressed.”

“Thank you.”

“I surrender,” Gary said.

An irony, of course, was that as soon as he’d surrendered—possibly as soon as he’d confessed to his depression, almost certainly by the time he showed her his hand and she put a proper bandage on it, and absolutely no later than the moment at which, with a locomotive as long and hard and heavy as an O-gauge model railroad engine, he tunneled up into wet and gently corrugated recesses that even after twenty years of traveling through them still felt unexplored (his approach was spoon-style, from behind, so that Caroline could keep her lower back arched outward and he could harmlessly drape his bandaged hand across her flank; the screwing wounded, the two of them were)—he not only no longer felt depressed, he felt euphoric.

The thought came to him—inappropriately, perhaps, considering the tender conjugal act that he was now engaged in; but he was who he was, he was Gary Lambert, he had inappropriate thoughts and he was sick of apologizing!—that he could now safely ask Caroline to buy him 4,500 shares of Axon and that she would gladly do it.

She rose and dipped like a top on a tiny point of contact, her entire, sexual being almost weightless on the moistened tip of his middle finger.

He spent himself gloriously. Spent and spent and spent.

They were still lying naked at the hooky-playing hour of nine-thirty on a Tuesday when the phone on Caroline’s nightstand rang. Gary, answering, was shocked to hear his mother’s voice. He was shocked by the reality of her existence.

“I’m calling from the ship,” Enid said.

For one guilty instant, before it registered with him that phoning from a ship was expensive and that his mother’s news could therefore not be good, Gary believed that she was calling because she knew that he’d betrayed her.

TWO HUNDRED HOURS, darkness, the Gunnar Myrdal: all around the old man, running water sang mysteriously in metal pipes. As the ship sliced open the black sea east of Nova Scotia, the horizontal faintly pitched, bow to stern, as if despite its great steel competence the ship were uneasy and could solve the problem of a liquid hill only by cutting through it quickly; as if its stability depended on such a glossing over of flotation’s terrors. There was another world below—this was the problem. Another world below that had volume but no form. By day the sea was blue surface and whitecaps, a realistic navigational challenge, and the problem could be overlooked. By night, though, the mind went forth and dove down through the yielding—the violently lonely—nothingness on which the heavy steel ship traveled, and in every moving swell you saw a travesty of grids, you saw how truly and forever lost a man would be six fathoms under. Dry land lacked this z-axis. Dry land was like being awake. Even in chartless desert you could drop to your knees and pound land with your fist and land didn’t give. Of course the ocean, too, had a skin of wakefulness. But every point on this skin was a point where you could sink and by sinking disappear.