The Corrections: A Novel (57 page)

“I take it that’s not how things are.”

“Like twice a MONTH,” Robin said through her teeth. “Twice a MONTH.”

“Do you think Brian’s seeing somebody?”

“I don’t know what he does. But it doesn’t involve me. And I just feel like such a freak.”

“You’re not a freak. You’re the opposite.”

“So what’s the other movie?”

“
Something Wild
.”

“OK, whatever. Let’s watch it.”

For the next two hours Denise mainly paid attention to her hand, which she’d laid on the sofa cushion within easy reach of Robin’s. The hand wasn’t comfortable there, it wanted to be retracted, but she didn’t want to give up hard-won territory.

When the movie ended they watched TV, and then they were silent for an impossibly long time, five minutes or a year, and still Robin didn’t take the warm, five-fingered bait. Denise would have welcomed some pushy male sexuality right around now. In hindsight, the week and a half she’d waited before Brian grabbed her had passed like a heartbeat.

At 4 a.m., sick with tiredness and impatience, she stood up to leave. Robin put on her shoes and her purple nylon parka and walked her to her car. Here, at last, she seized Denise’s hand in both of hers. She rubbed Denise’s palm with her dry, grown-woman thumbs. She said she was glad that Denise was her friend.

Stay the course
, Denise enjoined herself.
Be sisterly
.

“I’m glad, too,” she said.

Robin produced the spoken cackle that Denise had come to recognize as pure distilled self-consciousness. She said, “Hee hee hee!” She looked at Denise’s hand, which she was kneading nervously in hers now. “Wouldn’t it be ironic if I was the one who cheated on Brian?”

“Oh God,” Denise said involuntarily.

“Don’t worry.” Robin made a fist around Denise’s index
finger and squeezed it hard, in spasms. “I’m totally joking.”

Denise stared at her.
Are you even listening to what you’re
saying? Are you aware of what you’re doing to my finger?

Robin pressed the hand to her mouth now and bit down on it with lip-cushioned teeth, sort of softly gnawed on it, and then dropped it and skittered away. She bounced from one foot to the other. “So I’ll see you.”

The next day, Brian came back from Michigan and put an end to the house party.

Denise flew to St. Jude for a long Easter weekend, and Enid, like a toy piano with one working note, spoke every day of her old friend Norma Greene and Norma Greene’s tragic involvement with a married man. Denise, to change the subject, observed that Alfred was livelier and sharper than Enid portrayed him in her letters and Sunday calls.

“He pulls himself together when you’re in town,” Enid countered. “When we’re alone, he’s impossible.”

“When you’re alone, maybe you’re too focused on him.”

“Denise, if you lived with a man who slept in his chair all day—”

“Mother, the more you nag, the more he resists.”

“You don’t see it, because you’re only here for a few days. But I know what I’m talking about. And I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

If I lived with a person who was hysterically critical of me, Denise thought, I would sleep in a chair.

Back in Philly, the kitchen at the Generator was finally available. Denise’s life returned to near-normal levels of madness as she assembled and trained her crew, invited her pastry-chef finalists to compete head to head, and solved a thousand problems of delivery, scheduling, production, and pricing. As a piece of architecture, the restaurant was every bit as stunning as she’d feared, but for once in her career she’d prepared a menu properly and had twenty winners on it. The food was a three-way conversation between Paris
and Bologna and Vienna, a Continental conference call with her own trademark emphasis on flavor over flash. Seeing Brian again in person, rather than imagining him through Robin’s eyes, she remembered how much she liked him. She awoke, to an extent, from her dreams of conquest. As she fired up the Garland and drilled her line and sharpened her knives, she thought:
An idle brain is the Devil’s workshop
. If she had been working as hard as God intended her to work, she would never have had time to chase someone’s wife.

She went into full avoidance mode, working 6 a.m. to midnight. The more days she spent free of the spell that Robin’s body and body heat and hunger cast on her, the more willing she was to admit how little she liked Robin’s nervousness, and Robin’s bad haircut and worse clothes, and Robin’s rusty-hinge voice, and Robin’s forced laughter, her whole profound
uncoolness
. Brian’s benign neglect of his wife, his hands-off attitude of “Yeah, Robin’s great,” made more sense now to Denise. Robin
was
great; and yet, if you were married to her, you might need some time away from her incandescent energy, you might enjoy a few days by yourself in New York, and Paris, and Sundance …

But the damage had been done. Denise’s case for infidelity had apparently been compelling. With a persistence the more irritating for the shyness and apologies that accompanied it, Robin began to seek her out. She came to the Generator. She took Denise to lunch. She called Denise at midnight and chattered about the mildly interesting things that Denise had long pretended to be extremely interested in. She caught Denise at home on a Sunday afternoon and drank tea at the half Ping-Pong table, blushing and hee-heeing.

And part of Denise was thinking, as the tea went cold:
Shit, she’s really into me now
. This part of her considered, as if it were an actual threat of harm, the exhausting circumstance:
She wants sex every day
. This same part of her was thinking also:
My God, the way she eats
. And:
I am not a “lesbian
.”

At the same time, another part of her was literally awash in desire. She’d never seen so objectively what an illness sex was, what a collection of bodily symptoms, because she’d never been remotely as sick as Robin made her.

During a lull in the chatter, beneath a corner of the Ping-Pong table, Robin gripped Denise’s tastefully shod foot between her own knobby, white, purple-and-orange-accented sneakers. A moment later she leaned forward and seized Denise’s hand. Her blush looked life-threatening.

“So,” she said. “I’ve been thinking.”

The Generator opened on May 23, exactly a year after Brian began paying Denise her inflated salary. The opening was delayed a final week so that Brian and Jerry Schwartz could attend the festival at Cannes. Every night, while he was away, Denise repaid his generosity and his faith in her by going to Panama Street and sleeping with his wife. Her brain might feel like the brain of a questionable calf’s head at a Ninth Street “discount” butcher, but she was never as tired as she initially believed. One kiss, one hand on the knee, awakened her body to itself. She felt haunted, animated, revved, by the ghost of every coital encounter she’d ever nixed in her marriage. She shut her eyes against Robin’s back and pillowed her cheek between her shoulder blades, her hands supporting Robin’s breasts, which were round and flat and strangely light; she felt like a kitten with two powder puffs. She dozed for a couple of hours and then scraped herself out of the sheets, opened the door that Robin had locked against surprise visits from Erin or Sinéad, and crept down and out into the damp Philly dawn and shivered violently.

Brian had placed strong cryptic ads for the Generator in the local weeklies and monthlies and had put the buzz out through his network, but 26 covers on the first day of lunch and 45 that night did not exactly tax Denise’s kitchen. The
glassed-in dining room, suspended in a blue Cherenkov glow, sat 140; she was ready for 300-cover evenings. Brian and Robin and the girls came to dinner on a Saturday and stopped briefly in the kitchen. Denise did a good impression of being at ease with the girls, and Robin, looking great in red lipstick and a little black dress, did a good impression of being Brian’s wife.

Denise fixed things as well as she could with the authorities in her head. She reminded herself that Brian had dropped to his knees in Paris; that she was doing nothing worse than playing by his rules; that she’d waited for Robin to make the first move. But moral hair-splitting could not explain her complete, dead absence of remorse. In conversation with Brian she was distracted and thick-headed. She caught the meaning of his words at the last moment, as if he were speaking French. She had reason to seem strung out, of course—she routinely slept four hours a night, and before long the kitchen was running at full throttle—and Brian, distracted by his film projects, was every bit as easy to deceive as she’d anticipated. But “deceive” wasn’t even the word. “Dissociate” was more like it. Her affair was like a dream life unfolding in that locked and soundproofed chamber of her brain where, growing up in St. Jude, she’d learned to hide desires.

Reviewers descended on the Generator in late June and came away happy. The
Inquirer
invoked matrimony: the “wedding” of a “completely unique” setting with “serious and seriously delicious food” from the “perfectionist” Denise Lambert for a “must-have” experience that “single-handedly” put Philadelphia on the “map of cool.” Brian was ecstatic but Denise was not. She thought the language made the place sound crappy and middlebrow. She counted four paragraphs about architecture and decor, three paragraphs about nothing, two about service, one about wine, two about desserts, and only seven about her food.

“They didn’t mention my sauerkraut,” she said, angry nearly to the point of tears.

The reservation line rang day and night. She needed to
work
, to
work
. But Robin called her at midmorning or midafternoon on the executive chef’s line, her voice pinched with shyness, her cadences syncopated with embarrassment: “So—I was wondering—do you think—could I see you for a minute?” And instead of saying no, Denise kept saying yes. Kept delegating or delaying sensitive inventory work, tricky preroastings, and necessary phone calls to purveyors to slip away and meet Robin in the nearest strip of park along the Schuylkill. Sometimes they just sat on a bench, discreetly held hands, and, although non-work conversations during work hours made Denise
extremely impatient
, discussed Robin’s guilt and her own dissociated lack of it, and what it meant to be doing what they were doing, how exactly it had come to pass. But soon the talking tapered off. Robin’s voice on the executive chef’s line came to signify
tongue
. She didn’t say more than a word or two before Denise tuned out. Robin’s tongue and lips continued to form the instructions demanded by the day’s exigencies, but in Denise’s ear they were already speaking that other language of up and down and round and round that her body intuitively understood and autonomously obeyed; sometimes she melted so hard at the sound of this voice that her abdomen caved in and she doubled over; for the next hour-plus there was nothing in the world but tongue, no inventory or buttered pheasants or unpaid purveyors; she left the Generator in a buzzing hypnotized state of poor reflexes, the volume of the world’s noise lowered to near zero, other drivers luckily obeying basic traffic laws. Her car was like a tongue gliding down the melty asphalt streets, her feet like twin tongues licking pavement, the front door of the house on Panama Street like a mouth that swallowed her, the Persian runner in the hall outside the master bedroom like a tongue beckoning, the bed
in its cloak of comforter and pillows a big soft tongue begging to be depressed, and then.

This was all, safe to say, new territory. Denise had never wanted anything, certainly not sex, like this. Simply coming, when she was married, had come to seem like a laborious but occasionally necessary kitchen chore. She cooked for fourteen hours and routinely fell asleep in street clothes. The last thing she wanted late at night was to follow a complicated and increasingly time-consuming recipe for a dish she was too tired to enjoy in any case. Prep time a minimum fifteen minutes. Even after that, the cooking was seldom straightforward. The pan overheated, the heat was too high, the heat was too low, the onions refused to caramelize or burned immediately and stuck; you had to set the pan aside to cool off, you had to start over after painful discussion with the now angry and anguished sous-chef, and inevitably the meat got tough and stringy, the sauce lost its complexity in the repeated dilutions and deglazings, and it was
so fucking late
, and your eyes were burning, and OK, with enough time and effort you could fairly reliably get the sucker plated, but by then it was something you might hesitate to serve your floor personnel; you simply bolted it (“OK, there,” you thought, “I came”) and fell asleep with an ache. And it was
so
not worth the effort. But she’d made the effort every week or two because her coming mattered to Emile and she felt guilty. Him she could please as adroitly and unfailingly (and, before long, as unthinkingly) as she clarified consommé; and what pride, what pleasure, she took in the exercise of her skills! Emile, however, seemed to believe that without a few shudders and semi-willed sighs on her part the marriage would be in trouble, and although later events proved him one-hundred-percent correct, she couldn’t help feeling, in the years before she clapped eyes on Becky Hemerling, enormous guilt and pressure and resentment on the Ο front.

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.