The Corrections: A Novel (58 page)

“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 Ε. Β. 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.”

“Is it possible you don’t like sauerkraut yourself?”

“It’s an interesting food,” Zito said.

She didn’t hear from Robin and she didn’t call her. She gave the
Times
an interview and let herself be photographed, she stroked the pastry chef’s ego, she stayed late and bagged up the spoiled meats in privacy, she fired the dishwasher who’d tied off in the John, and every lunch and every dinner she dogged the line and troubleshot.

On Labor Day: deadness. She made herself leave her office and went walking in the empty hot city, bending her
steps, in her loneliness, toward Panama Street. She had a liquid Pavlovian response when she saw the house. The brownstone facade was still a face, the door still a tongue. Robin’s car was in the street but Brian’s wasn’t; they’d gone to Cape May. Denise rang the bell, although she could already tell, from a dustiness around the door, that nobody was home. She let herself in with the dead-bolt key on which she’d written “R/B.” She walked up two flights to the parental bedroom. The house’s expensive retrofitted central air conditioner was doing its job, the cool canned-smelling air contending with Labor Day sunbeams. As she lay down on the unmade parental bed, she remembered the smell and the quiet of the St. Judean summer afternoons when she would be left alone in the house and could be, for a couple of hours, as weird as she wanted. She brought herself off. She lay on the snarled sheets, a slice of sunlight falling on her chest. She took a second helping of herself and stretched her arms luxuriantly. Beneath a parental pillow, she scratched her hand on the foil corner of something like a condom wrapper.

It was a condom wrapper. Torn and empty. She actually whimpered as she pictured the penetrative act it attested to. She actually clutched her head.

She scrambled out of the bed and smoothed her dress across her hips. She scanned the sheets for other sickening surprises. Well, of course a married couple had sex. Of course. But Robin had told her that she wasn’t on the Pill, she’d said that she and Brian no longer fooled around enough to bother; and all summer long Denise had seen and tasted and smelled no trace of a husband on her lover’s body, and so she’d let herself forget the obvious.

She knelt at the wastebasket by Brian’s dresser. She stirred Kleenexes, ticket stubs, and segments of floss and found another condom wrapper. Hatred of Robin, hatred and jealousy, were coming on like a migraine. She went into the
master-bedroom bathroom and found two more wrappers and a knotted rubber in the can beneath the sink.

She actually hit her temples with her fists. She heard the breath in her teeth as she ran down the stairs and let herself out into the late afternoon. The temperature was ninety and she was shivering. Weirdness, weirdness. She hiked back to the Generator and let herself in at the loading dock. She inventoried oils and cheeses and flours and spices, drew up meticulous order sheets, left twenty voice-mail messages in a wry and articulate and civilized voice, did her e-mail chores, fried herself a kidney on the Garland, chased it with a single shot of grappa, and called a cab at midnight.

Robin showed up in the kitchen unannounced the next morning. She was wearing a big white shirt that appeared to have been Brian’s. Denise’s stomach flipped at the sight of her. She led her back to the executive chef’s office and shut the door.

“I can’t do this anymore,” Robin said.

“Good, neither can I, so.”

Robin’s face was all blotch. She scratched her head and scrunched up her nose with tic-like incessancy and pushed on the bridge of her glasses. “I haven’t been to church since June,” she said. “Sinéad’s caught me in about ten different lies. She wants to know why you’re never around. I don’t even know half the kids turning up at the Project lately. Everything’s a mess, and I just can’t
do
it anymore.”

Denise choked out a question: “How’s Brian?”

Robin blushed. “He doesn’t know anything. He’s the same as always. You know—he likes you, he likes me.”

“I bet.”

“Things have gotten weird.”

“Well, and I’ve got a lot of work here, so.”

“Brian never did anything bad to me. He didn’t deserve this.”

Denise’s phone rang and she let it ring. Her head felt close
to cracking open. She couldn’t stand to hear Robin say Brian’s name.

Robin raised her face to the ceiling, pearls of tear beading in her lashes. “I don’t know what I came for. I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m just feeling really, really bad and incredibly alone.”

“Get over it,” Denise said. “That’s what I’m going to do.”

“Why are you being so cold?”

“Because I’m a cold person.”

“If you’d call me, or say you loved me—”

“Get over it! For God’s sake! Get over it! Get over it!”

Robin gave her a beseeching look; but really, even if the matter of the condoms were somehow cleared up, what was Denise supposed to do? Quit working at the restaurant that was making her a star? Go live in the ghetto and be one of Sinéad and Erin’s two mommies? Start wearing big sneakers and cooking vegetarian?

She knew she was telling herself lies, but she didn’t know which of the things in her head were the lies and which were the truth. She stared at her desk until Robin yanked open the door and fled.

The next morning the Generator made the front page of the
New York Times
food section, below the fold. Beneath the headline (“Generating Buzz by the Megawatt”) was
a
photograph of Denise
, the interior and exterior architectural shots having been relegated to page 6, where
her country ribs
and sauerkraut
could also be seen. This was better. This was more like it. By noon she’d been offered a guest appearance on the Food Channel and a permanent monthly column in
Philadelphia
. She bypassed Rob Zito and instructed the reservation girl to start overbooking by forty seats an evening. Gary and Caroline called separately with congratulations. She dressed down Zito for refusing a weekend reservation to the local NBC-affiliate anchorwoman, she let herself abuse him a little bit, it felt good.

Expensive people of a sort formerly scarce in Philadelphia were three-deep at the bar when Brian came by with a dozen roses. He hugged Denise and she lingered in his arms. She gave him a little bit of what men liked.

“We need more tables,” she said. “Three fours and a six at a minimum. We need a full-time reservationist who knows how to screen. We need better parking-lot security. We need a pastry chef with more imagination and less attitude. Also think about replacing Rob with somebody from New York who can handle the kind of customer profile we’re going to get.”

Brian was surprised. “You want to do that to Rob?”

“He wouldn’t push my ribs and sauerkraut,” Denise said. “The
Times
liked my ribs and sauerkraut. I say fuck him if he can’t do the job.”

The hardness in her voice brought a glow to Brian’s eyes. He seemed to like her like this.

“Whatever you think,” he said.

Late Saturday night she joined Brian and Jerry Schwartz and two cheekboned blondes and the lead singer and the lead guitarist from one of her favorite bands for drinks on the little railed-in aerie that Brian had rigged on the roof of the Generator. The night was warm and the bugs along the river were nearly as loud as the Schuylkill Expressway. Both blondes were talking on their phones. Denise accepted a cigarette from the guitarist, who was hoarse from a gig, and let him examine her scars.

“Holy shit, your hands are worse than mine.”

“The job,” she said, “consists of tolerating pain.”

“Cooks do notoriously abuse their substances.”

“I like a drink at midnight,” she said. “Two Tylenols when I get up at six.”

“Nobody’s tougher than Denise,” Brian bragged unattractively over the antennae of the blondes.

The guitarist responded by sticking his tongue out,
holding his cigarette like an eyedropper, and lowering the coal into the glistening cleft. The sizzle was loud enough to distract the blondes from their phoning. The taller one squealed and spoke the guitarist’s name and said he was insane.

“Well, but I’m wondering what substances you’ve ingested,” Denise said.

The guitarist applied cold vodka directly to the burn. The taller blonde, unhappy with his performance, answered, “Klonopin and Jameson’s and whatever that is now.”

“Well, and a tongue is wet,” Denise said, extinguishing her own cigarette on the tender skin behind her ear. She felt like she’d taken a bullet in the head, but she flicked the dead cigarette toward the river casually.

The aerie got very quiet. Her weirdness was showing as she didn’t use to let it show. Because she didn’t have to—because she could have trimmed a rack of lamb now or had a conversation with her mother—she produced a strangled scream, a comical sound, to reassure her audience.

“Are you OK?” Brian asked her later in the parking lot.

“I’ve burned myself worse by accident.”

“No, I mean are you
OK
? That was a little scary to watch.”

“You’re the one who bragged about my toughness, thanks.”

“I’m trying to say I feel bad about that.”

She was awake in pain all night.

A week later she and Brian hired the former manager of the Union Square Café and fired Rob Zito.

A week after that the mayor of Philadelphia, the junior senator from New Jersey, the CEO of the W——Corporation, and Jodie Foster were in the restaurant.

A week after that, Brian took Denise home after work and she invited him inside. Over the same fifty-dollar wine she’d
once served his wife, he asked if she and Robin had had a falling-out.

Denise pursed her lips and shook her head. “I’ve just gotten very busy.”

“That’s what I thought. I figured it didn’t have anything to do with you. Robin’s pissed off with everything lately. Especially with anything that has to do with me.”

“I miss hanging out with the girls,” Denise said.

“Believe me, they miss you,” Brian said. He added, with a slight stammer, “I’m—thinking of moving out.”

Denise said she was sorry to hear it.

“The sackcloth business is out of control,” he said, pouring. “She’s been going to
nightly
mass for the last three weeks. I didn’t even know there was such a thing. And I literally can’t say a word about the Generator without setting off an explosion. She, meanwhile, is talking about home-schooling the girls. She’s decided our house is too big. She wants to move into the Project house and home-school the girls and maybe a couple of the Project kids. ‘Rasheed’? ‘Marilou’? Which, what a great place for Sinéad and Erin to grow up, a brownfield in Point Breeze. We’re verging over into the loony, a little bit. I mean, Robin is great. She believes in better things than I believe in. I’m just not sure I love her anymore. I feel like I’m arguing with Nicky Passafaro. It’s Class Hatred II, the Sequel.”

“Robin is full of guilt,” Denise said.

“She’s verging on being an irresponsible parent.”