The Corrections

city for fifteen years, and he felt as if he hardly knew her. She never asked him for anything. No matter how tired she was, she never came to Seminole Street without flowers or dessert for Caroline, sharks’ teeth or comic books for the boys, a lawyer joke or a lightbulb joke for Gary. There was no way around her properness, no way to convey to her the depth of his disappointment that, of the rich family-filled future that he’d imagined, almost nothing had come to pass.
    A year ago, over lunch, Gary had told her about a married “friend” of his (actually a colleague, Jay Pascoe) who was having an affair with his daughters’ piano teacher. Gary said that he could understand his friend’s recreational interest in the affair (Pascoe had no intention of leaving his wife) but that he didn’t see why the piano teacher was bothering.
    “So you can’t imagine,” Denise said, “why a woman would want to have an affair with you?”
    “I’m not talking about me,” Gary said.
    “But you’re married and you have kids.”
    “I’m saying I don’t understand what the woman sees in a guy she knows to be a liar and a sneak.”
    “Probably she disapproves of liars and sneaks in general,” Denise said. “But she makes an exception for the guy she’s in love with.”
    “So it’s a kind of self-deception.”
    “No, Gary, it’s the way love works.”
    “Well, and I guess there’s always a chance she’ll get lucky and marry into instant money.”
    This puncturing of Denise’s liberal innocence with a sharp economic truth seemed to sadden her.
    “You see a person with kids,” she said, “and you see how happy they are to be a parent, and you’re attracted to their happiness. Impossibility is attractive. You know, the safety of dead-ended things.”
    “You sound like you know something about it,” Gary said.
    “Emile is the only man I’ve ever been attracted to who didn’t have kids.”
    This interested Gary. Under cover of fraternal obtuseness, he risked asking: “So, and who are you seeing now?”
    “Nobody.”
    “You’re not into some married guy,” he joked.
    Denise’s face went a shade paler and two shades redder as she reached for her water glass. “I’m seeing nobody,” she said. “I’m working very hard.”
    “Well, just remember,” Gary said, “there’s more to life than cooking. You’re at a stage now where you need to start thinking about what you really want and how you’re going to get it.”
    Denise twisted in her seat and signaled to the waiter for the check. “Maybe I’ll marry into instant money,” she said.
    The more Gary thought about his sister’s involvement with married men, the angrier he got. Nevertheless, he should never have mentioned the matter to Enid. The disclosure had come of drinking gin on an empty stomach while listening to his mother sing Denise’s praises at Christmastime, a few hours after the mutilated Austrian reindeer had come to light and Enid’s gift to Caroline had turned up in a trash can like a murdered baby. Enid extolled the generous multimillionaire who was bankrolling Denise’s new restaurant and had sent her on a luxury two-month tasting tour of France and Central Europe, she extolled Denise’s long hours and her dedication and her thrift, and in her backhandedly comparative way she carped about Gary’s “materialism” and “ostentation” and “obsession with money”—as if she herself weren’t dollar-sign-headed! As if she herself, given the opportunity, wouldn’t have bought a house like Gary’s and furnished it very much the same way he had! He wanted to say to her: Of your three children, my life looks by far the most like yours! I have what you taught me to want! And now that I have it, you disapprove of it!
    But what he actually said, when the juniper spirits finally boiled over, was: “Why don’t you ask Denise who she’s sleeping with? Ask her if the guy’s married and if he has any kids.”
    “I don’t think she’s dating anybody,” Enid said.
    “I’m telling you,” the juniper spirits said, “ask her if she’s ever been involved with somebody married. I think honesty compels you to ask that question before you hold her up as a paragon of midwestern values.”
    Enid covered her ears. “I don’t want to know about this!”
    “Fine, go ahead, stick your head in the sand!” the sloppy spirits raged. “I just don’t want to hear any more crap about what an angel she is.”
    Gary knew that