The Corrections

The next day she was taking her lunch hour in the park, sunning herself in one of the tiny sleeveless tops that her mother was unaware she wore to work beneath her sweaters, when Don Armour appeared from nowhere and dropped onto the bench beside her.

“You’re not playing cards,” she said.

“I’m going crazy,” he said.

She returned her eyes to her book. She could feel him looking at her body pointedly. The air was hot but not so hot as to account for the heat on his side of her face.

He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. “This is where you come and sit every day.”

“Yes.”

He wasn’t good-looking. His head seemed too large, his hair was thinning, and his face had the dusky nitrite red of a wiener or bologna, except where his beard made it blue. But she recognized an amusement, a brightness, an animal sadness in his expression; and the saddle curves of his lips were inviting.

He read the spine of her book. “Count Leo Tolstoy,” he said. He shook his head and laughed silently.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I’m just trying to imagine what it’s like to be you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean beautiful. Smart. Disciplined. Rich. Going to college. What’s it like?”

She had a ridiculous impulse to answer him by touching him, to let him feel what it was like. There was no other way, really, to answer.

She shrugged and said she didn’t know.

“Your boyfriend must feel very lucky,” Don Armour said.

“I don’t have a boyfriend.”

He flinched as if this were difficult news. “I find that puzzling and surprising.”

Denise shrugged again.

“I had a summer job when I was seventeen,” Don said. “I worked for an old Mennonite couple that had a big antique store. We used this stuff called Magic Mixture—paint thinner, wood alcohol, acetone, tung oil. It would clean up the furniture without stripping it. I’d breathe it all day and come home flying. Then around midnight I’d get this wicked headache.”

“Where’d you grow up?”

“Carbondale. Illinois. I had this idea that the Mennonites were underpaying me, in spite of the free highs. So I started borrowing their pickup at night. I had a girlfriend who needed rides. I crashed the pickup, which was how the Mennonites found out I’d been using it, and my then-stepdad said if I enlisted in the Marines he would deal with the Mennonites and their insurance company, otherwise I was on my own with the cops. So I joined the Marines in the middle of the sixties. It just seemed like the thing to do. I’ve got a real knack for timing.”

“You were in Vietnam.”

Don Armour nodded. “If this merger goes through, I’m back to where I was when I was discharged. Plus three kids and another set of skills that no one wants.”

“How old are your kids?”

“Ten, eight, and four.”

“Does your wife work?”

“She’s a school nurse. She’s at her parents’ in Indiana. They’ve got five acres and a pond. Nice for the girls.”

“Are you taking some vacation?”

“Two weeks next month.”

Denise had run out of questions. Don Armour sat bent over with his hands pressed flat between his knees. He sat like this for a long time. From the side, she could see his trademark smirk wearing through his impassivity; he seemed like a person who would always make you pay for taking him seriously or showing concern. Finally Denise stood up and said she was going inside, and he nodded as if this were a blow he’d been expecting.

It didn’t occur to her that Don Armour was smiling in embarrassment at the obviousness of his play for her sympathies, the staleness of his pickup lines. It didn’t occur to her that his performance at the pinochle table the day before had been staged for her benefit. It didn’t occur to her that he’d guessed she was eavesdropping in the bathroom and had let himself be overheard. It didn’t occur to her that Don Armour’s fundamental mode was self-pity and that he might, in his self-pity, have hit on many girls before her. It didn’t occur to her that he was already plotting—had been plotting since he first shook hands with her—how to get into her skirt. It didn’t occur to her that he averted his eyes not simply because her beauty caused him pain but because Rule # 1 in every manual advertised at the back of men’s magazines (“How to Make Her WILD for You—Every Time!”) was Ignore Her. It didn’t occur to her that the differences of class and circumstance that were causing her discomfort might be, for Don Armour, a provocation: that she might be an object he desired for its luxury, or that a fundamentally self-pitying man whose job was in jeopardy might take a variety of satisfactions in bedding the daughter of his boss’s boss’s boss. None of this occurred to Denise then or after. She was still feeling responsible ten years later.