The Corrections

was that as soon as he’d surrendered—possibly as soon as he’d confessed to his depression, almost certainly by the time he showed her his hand and she put a proper bandage on it, and absolutely no later than the moment at which, with a locomotive as long and hard and heavy as an O-gauge model railroad engine, he tunneled up into wet and gently corrugated recesses that even after twenty years of traveling through them still felt unexplored (his approach was spoon-style, from behind, so that Caroline could keep her lower back arched outward and he could harmlessly drape his bandaged hand across her flank; the screwing wounded, the two of them were)—he not only no longer felt depressed, he felt euphoric.
    The thought came to him—inappropriately, perhaps, considering the tender conjugal act that he was now engaged in; but he was who he was, he was Gary Lambert, he had inappropriate thoughts and he was sick of apologizing!—that he could now safely ask Caroline to buy him 4,500 shares of Axon and that she would gladly do it.
    She rose and dipped like a top on a tiny point of contact, her entire, sexual being almost weightless on the moistened tip of his middle finger.
    He spent himself gloriously. Spent and spent and spent.
    They were still lying naked at the hooky-playing hour ofnine-thirty on a Tuesday when the phone on Caroline’s nightstand rang. Gary, answering, was shocked to hear his mother’s voice. He was shocked by the reality of her existence.
    “I’m calling from the ship,” Enid said.
    For one guilty instant, before it registered with him that phoning from a ship was expensive and that his mother’s news could therefore not be good, Gary believed that she was calling because she knew that he’d betrayed her.

Two hundred hours , darkness, the Gunnar Myrdal : all around the old man, running water sang mysteriously in metal pipes. As the ship sliced open the black sea east of Nova Scotia, the horizontal faintly pitched, bow to stern, as if despite its great steel competence the ship were uneasy and could solve the problem of a liquid hill only by cutting through it quickly; as if its stability depended on such a glossing over of flotation’s terrors. There was another world below—this was the problem. Another world below that had volume but no form. By day the sea was blue surface and whitecaps, a realistic navigational challenge, and the problem could be overlooked. By night, though, the mind went forth and dove down through the yielding—the violently lonely—nothingness on which the heavy steel ship traveled, and in every moving swell you saw a travesty of grids, you saw how truly and forever lost a man would be six fathoms under. Dry land lacked this z-axis. Dry land was like being awake. Even in chartless desert you could drop to your knees and pound land with your fist and land didn’t give. Of course the ocean, too, had a skin of wakefulness. But every point on this skin was a point where you could sink and by sinking disappear.
    As things pitched, so they trembled. There was a shivering in the Gunnar Myrdal ’s framework, an endless shudder in the floor and bed and birch-paneled walls. A syncopated tremor so fundamental to the ship, and so similar to Parkinson’s in the way it constantly waxed without seeming everto wane, that Alfred had located the problem within himself until he overheard younger, healthier passengers remarking on it.
    He lay approximately awake in Stateroom B11. Awake in a metal box that pitched and trembled, a dark metal box moving somewhere in the night.
    There was no porthole. A room with a view would have cost hundreds of dollars more, and Enid had reasoned that since a stateroom was mainly used for sleeping who needed a porthole, at that price? She might look through it six times on the voyage. That was fifty dollars a look.
    She was sleeping now, silently, like a person feigning sleep. Alfred asleep was a symphony of snoring and whistling and choking, an epic of Z’s. Enid was a haiku. She lay still for hours and then blinked awake like a light switched on. Sometimes at dawn in St. Jude, in the long minute it took the clock-radio to flip a digit, the only moving thing in the house was the eye of Enid.
    On the morning of Chip’s conception she’d merely looked like she was shamming sleep, but on the morning of Denise’s, seven years later, she really was pretending. Alfred in middle age had invited such venial deceptions. A decade-plus of marriage