The Corrections

Robin was prêt-à-manger. You didn’t need a recipe, you didn’t need prep, to eat a peach. Here was the peach, boom, here was the payoff. Denise had had intimations of ease like this with Hemerling, but only now, at the age of thirty-two, did she get what all the fuss was about. Once she got it, there was trouble. In August the girls went to camp and Brian went to London, and the executive chef of the hottest new restaurant in the region would get out of a bed only to find herself down on some carpet, would dress only to find herself undressing, would come as close to escape as the entry hall and then find herself coming with her back to the front door; jelly-kneed and slit-eyed, she dragged herself back to a kitchen to which she’d promised to return in forty-five minutes. And this was not good. The restaurant was suffering. There was gridlock on the line, delays on the floor. Twice she had to strike entrées from the menu because the kitchen, doing without her, had run out of prep time. And still she went AWOL in the middle of the second evening rush. She drove through Crack Haven and down Junk Row and past Blunt Alley to the Garden Project, where Robin had a blanket. Most of the garden was mulched and limed and planted now. Tomatoes had grown up inside bald tires outfitted with cylinders of gutter screen. And the searchlights and wing lights of landing jets, and the smog-stunted constellations, and the radium glow from the watch glass of Veterans Stadium, and the heat lightning over Tinicum, and the moon to which filthy Camden had given hepatitis as it rose, all these compromised urban lights were reflected in the skins of adolescent eggplants, young peppers and cukes and sweet corn, pubescent cantaloupes. Denise, naked in the middle of the city, rolled off the blanket into night-cool dirt, a sandy loam, freshly turned. She rested a cheek in it, pushed her Robiny fingers down into it.

“God, stop, stop,” Robin squeaked, “that’s our new lettuce.”

Then Brian was home and they started taking stupid chances. Robin explained to Erin that Denise hadn’t felt well and had needed to lie down in the bedroom. There was a feverish episode in the pantry at Panama Street while Brian read E. B. White aloud not twenty feet away. Finally, a week before Labor Day, there came a morning in the director’s office at the Garden Project when the weight of two bodies on Robin’s antique wooden desk chair snapped its back off. They were laughing when they heard Brian’s voice.

Robin jumped up and unlocked the door and opened it in one motion, to conceal that it had been locked. Brian was holding a basket of speckled green erections. He was surprised—but delighted, as always—to see Denise. “What’s going on in there?”

Denise knelt by Robin’s desk, her shirt untucked. “Robin’s chair broke,” she said. “I’m licking a take at Robin’s chair.”

“I asked Denise if she could fix it!” Robin squeaked.

“What are you doing here?” Brian asked Denise, very curious.

“I had the same thought you had,” she said. “Zucchini.”

“Sara said nobody was here.”

Robin was edging away. “I’ll go talk to her. She should know when I’m here.”

“How did Robin break that?” Brian asked Denise.

“I don’t know,” she said. She had the bad child’s impulse to cry when caught red-handed.

Brian picked up the top half of the chair. He had never specifically reminded Denise of her father, but she was pierced now by the resemblance to Alfred in his intelligent sympathy for the broken object. “This is good oak,” he said. “Weird it should just suddenly break.”

She rose from her knees and wandered into the hall, stuffing shirt into pants as she went. She kept wandering until she was outside and got into her car. She drove up Bainbridge Street to the river. Pulled up to a galvanized guardrail and killed the engine by letting out the clutch, let the car lurch into the guardrail and bounce back dead, and now, finally, she broke down and cried about the broken chair.

Her head was clearer when she returned to the Generator. She saw that she was in the weeds on every front. There were unanswered phone messages from a food writer at the Times, from an editor at Gourmet, and from the latest restaurateur hoping to steal Brian’s chef. A thousand dollars’ worth of unrotated duck breasts and veal chops had gone bad in the walk-in. Everybody in the kitchen knew and nobody had told her that a needle had turned up in the employee bathroom. The pastry chef claimed to have left Denise a pair of handwritten notes, presumably salary-related, that Denise had no memory of seeing.

“Why is nobody ordering country ribs?” Denise asked Rob Zito. “Why are the waiters not pushing my phenomenally delicious and unusual country ribs?”

“Americans don’t like sauerkraut,” Zito said.

“The hell they don’t. I’ve seen my reflection in the plates coming back when people order it. I’ve counted my eyelashes.”

“It’s possible we get some German nationals in here,” Zito said. “German passport-holders may be responsible for those clean plates.”