The Corrections: A Novel (23 page)

The previous March, in St. Jude, Enid had observed that, for a bank vice
president married to a woman who worked only part-time, pro bono, for the
Children’s Defense Fund, Gary seemed to do an
awful
lot of cooking.
Gary had shut his mother up easily enough; she was married to a man who
couldn’t boil an egg, and obviously she was jealous. But on Gary’s
birthday, after he’d flown back from St. Jude with Jonah and received the
expensive surprise of a color photo lab, after he’d mustered the will to
exclaim,
A darkroom
,
fantastic, I love it, I love it
, Caroline
handed him a platter of raw prawns and brutal swordfish steaks to grill, and he
wondered if his mother had a point. On the deck, in the radiant heat, as he
blackened the prawns and seared the swordfish, a weariness overtook him. The
aspects of his life not related to grilling now seemed like mere blips of
extraneity between the poundingly recurrent moments when he ignited the mesquite
and paced the deck, avoiding smoke. Shutting his eyes, he saw twisted boogers of
browning meats on a grille of chrome and hellish coals. The eternal broiling,
broiling of the damned. The parching torments of compulsive repetition. On the
inner walls of the grill a deep-pile carpet of phenolic black greases had
accumulated. The ground behind the garage where he dumped the ashes resembled a
moonscape or the yard of a cement plant. He was very, very, very sick of mixed
grill, and the next morning he told Caroline: “I’m doing too much
cooking.”

“So do less,” she said. “We’ll eat out.”

“I want to eat at home
and
I want to do less cooking.”

“So order in,” she said.

“It’s not the same.”

“You’re the one who’s bent on having these sit-down dinners.
The boys couldn’t care less.”

“
I
care about it. It’s important to
me
.”

“Fine, but, Gary: it’s not important to me,
it’s not important to the boys, and we’re supposed to cook for
you?”

He couldn’t entirely blame Caroline. In the years when she’d worked
full-time, he’d never complained about frozen or takeout or pre-prepared
dinners. To Caroline it probably seemed that he was changing the rules on her.
But to Gary it seemed that the nature of family life itself was
changing—that togetherness and filiality and fraternity weren’t
valued the way they were when he was young.

And so here he was, still grilling. Through the kitchen windows he could see
Caroline thumb-wrestling Jonah. He could see her taking Aaron’s headphones
to listen to music, could see her nodding to the beat. It sure
looked
like family life. Was there really anything amiss here but the clinical
depression of the man peering in?

Caroline seemed to have forgotten how much her back hurt, but she remembered as
soon as he went inside with the steaming, smoking platter of vulcanized animal
protein. She seated herself sideways at the table, nudged her food with a fork,
and whimpered softly. Caleb and Aaron regarded her with grave concern.

“Doesn’t anyone else want to know how
Prince Caspian
ends?” Jonah said. “Isn’t anyone curious at all?”

Caroline’s eyelids were fluttering, her mouth hanging open miserably to let
air trickle in and out. Gary struggled to think of something undepressed to say,
something reasonably unhostile, but he was rather drunk.

“Jesus, Caroline,” he said, “we know your back hurts, we know
you’re miserable, but if you can’t even sit up straight at the
table—”

Without a word she slid off her chair, hobbled to the sink with her plate,
scraped her dinner into the garbage grinder, and hobbled upstairs. Caleb and
Aaron excused themselves and ground up their own dinners and followed her.
Altogether maybe thirty dollars’ worth of meat went into the
sewer, but Gary, trying to keep his Factor 3 levels off
the floor, succeeded pretty well in forgetting about the animals that had died
for this purpose. He sat in the leaden twilight of his buzz, ate without
tasting, and listened to Jonah’s impervious bright chatter.

“This is an excellent skirt steak, Dad, and I would love another piece of
that grilled zucchini, please.”

From the entertainment room upstairs came the woofing of prime time. Gary felt
briefly sorry for Aaron and Caleb. It was a burden to have a mother need you so
extremely, to be responsible for her bliss, Gary knew this. He also understood
that Caroline was more alone in the world than he was. Her father had been a
handsome, charismatic anthropologist who died in a plane crash in Mali when she
was eleven. Her father’s parents, old Quakers who intermittently said
“thee,” had left her half of their estate, including a well-regarded
Andrew Wyeth, three Winslow Homer watercolors, and forty sylvan acres near
Kennett Square for which a developer had paid an incredible sum.
Caroline’s mother, now seventy-six and in scarily good health, lived with
her second husband in Laguna Beach and was a major benefactor of the California
Democratic Party; she came east every April and bragged about not being
“one of those old women” who were obsessed with their grandkids.
Caroline’s only sibling, a brother named Philip, was a patronizing,
pocket-protected bachelor and solid-state physicist on whom her mother doted
somewhat creepily. Gary hadn’t known this kind of family in St. Jude. From
the start, he’d loved and pitied Caroline for the misfortune and neglect
she’d suffered growing up. He’d undertaken to provide a better
family for her.

But after dinner, while he and Jonah were loading the dishwasher, he began to
hear female laughter upstairs, actual loud laughter, and he decided that
Caroline was doing something very bad to him. He was tempted to go up and crash
the party. As the buzzing of the gin faded from his
head,
however, the clanging of an earlier anxiety was becoming audible. An
Axon-related anxiety.

He wondered why a small company with a highly experimental process was bothering
to offer his father money.

That the letter to Alfred had come from Bragg Knuter & Speigh, a firm that
often worked closely with investment bankers, suggested
due
diligence
—a dotting of
i’s
and crossing of
t’s
on the eve of something big.

“Do you want to go and be with your brothers?” Gary said to Jonah.
“It sounds like fun up there.”

“No, thank you,” Jonah said. “I’m going to read the next
Narnia book, and I thought I might go to the basement, where it’s quiet.
Will you come with me?”

The old playroom in the basement, still dehumidified and carpeted and
pine-paneled, still
nice
, was afflicted with the necrosis of clutter that
sooner or later kills a living space: stereo boxes, geometric Styrofoam packing
solids, outdated ski and beach gear in random drifts. Aaron and Caleb’s
old toys were in five big bins and a dozen smaller bins. Nobody but Jonah ever
touched them, and in the face of such a glut even Jonah, alone or with a
play-date pal, took an essentially archaeological approach. He might devote an
afternoon to unpacking half of one large bin, patiently sorting action figures
and related props, vehicles, and model buildings by scale and manufacturer (toys
that matched nothing he flung behind the sofa), but he rarely reached the bottom
of even one bin before his play date ended or dinner was served and he reburied
everything he’d excavated, and so the toys whose profusion ought to have
been a seven-year-old’s heaven went basically unplayed with, another
lesson in
ANHEDONIA
for Gary to ignore as well as he
could.

While Jonah settled down to read, Gary booted up Caleb’s “old”
laptop and went online. He typed the words axon and schwenksville in the
Search
field. One of the two resulting site matches was the Axon
Corporation Home Page, but
this site, when Gary tried to
reach it, turned out to be UNDER RENOVATION. The other match led him to a deeply
nested page in the Web site of Westportfolio Biofunds, whose listing of
Privately Held Corporations to Watch was a cyberbackwater of drab graphics and
misspellings. The Axon page had last been updated a year earlier. 

Gary’s hopes of extracting quick megabucks from Axon were
withering in the absence of online hype. Feeling a bit e-weary, fighting an
e-headache, he ran a word search for earl eberle. The several hundred matches
included articles with titles like
NEW HOPE FOR
NEUROBLASTOMA
and
A GIANT LEAP FORWARD AND THIS CURE
REALLY MAY BE A MIRACLE
. Eberle and collaborators were also
represented in professional journals with “Remote Computer-Aided
Stimulation of Receptor Sites 14, 16A and 21: A Practical Demonstration,”
“Four Low-Toxicity Ferroacetate Complexes That Cross the BBB,”
“In-Vitro RF Stimulation of Colloidal Microtubules,” and a dozen
other papers. The reference that most interested Gary, however, had appeared in
Forbes ASAP
six months earlier: 

Forty million dollars annually
was more like it.
Forty
million
dollars annually
restored Gary’s hopes and pissed him off all over
again. Earl Eberle earned
forty million dollars annually
while Alfred
Lambert, also an inventor but (let’s face it) a loser by
temperament—one of the meek of the earth—was offered five thousand
for his trouble. And planned to split this pea with Orfic Midland!

“I’m loving this book,” Jonah reported. “This may be my
favorite book yet.”

So why, Gary wondered, why the rush-rush to get Dad’s patent, eh, Curly?
Why the big push-push? Financial intuition, a warm tingling in his loins, told
him that perhaps, after all, a piece of inside information had fallen into his
lap. A piece of inside information from an accidental (and therefore perfectly
lawful) source. A juicy piece of private meat.

“It’s like they’re on a luxury cruise,” Jonah said,
“except they’re trying to sail to the end of the world. See,
that’s where Asian lives, at the end of the world.”

In the SEC’s Edgar Database Gary found an unapproved prospectus, a
so-called red-herring prospectus, for an initial public offering of Axon stock.
The offering was scheduled for December 15, three-plus months away. The lead
underwriter was Hevy & Hodapp, one of the elite investment banks. Gary
checked certain vital signs—cash flow, size of issue, size of
float—and, loins tingling, hit the
Download
Later
button.

“Jonah, nine o’clock,” he said. “Run up and take your
bath.”

“I would love to go on a luxury cruise, Dad,”
Jonah said, climbing the stairs, “if that could ever be
arranged.”

In a different
Search
field, his hands a little parkinsonian, Gary entered
the words beautiful, nude, and blond.

“Shut the door, please, Jonah.”

On the screen an image of a beautiful nude blonde appeared. Gary pointed and
clicked, and a nude tan man, photographed mainly from the rear but also in
close-up from his knees to his navel, could be seen giving his fully tumid
attention to the beautiful nude blonde. There was something of the assembly line
in these images. The beautiful nude blonde was like fresh raw material that the
nude tan man was extremely keen to process with his tool. First the
material’s colorful fabric casing was removed, then the material was
placed on its knees and the semiskilled worker fitted his tool into its mouth,
then the material was placed on its back while the worker orally calibrated it,
then the worker clamped the material into a series of horizontal and vertical
positions, crimping and bending the material as necessary, and very vigorously
processed it with his tool …