The Corrections

a windborne giggle. It came again, a trilling squeal, a northern lark.
    He edged away from the spheres and cylinders and leaned out past the outer railing. A few yards farther astern was a small “Nordic” sunbathing area, sequestered behind cedar fencing, and a man standing where no passenger was permitted to stand could see right over the fencing and behold Signe Söderblad, her chill-stippled arms and thighs and belly, the plump twin cloudberries into which a suddenly gray winter sky had drawn her nipples, the quaking ginger fur between her legs.
    The day world floated on the night world and the night world tried to swamp the day world and he worked and worked to keep the day world watertight. But there had been a grievous breach.
    Came another cloud then, larger, denser, that turned the gulf below it to a greenish black. Ship and shadow in collision.
    And shame and despair—
    Or was it the wind catching the sail of his raincoat?
    Or was it the ship’s pitching?
    Or the tremor in his legs?
    Or the corresponding tremor of the engines?
    Or a fainting spell?
    Or vertigo’s standing invitation?
    Or the relative warmth of open water’s invitation to someone soaked and freezing in the wind?
    Or was he leaning, deliberately, to glimpse again the gingery mons?

    “How fitting it is,” said internationally noted investment counselor Jim Crolius, “to be talking money on a Nordic Pleasurelines Luxury Fall Color Cruise. Folks, it’s a beautiful sunny morning, isn’t it?”
    Crolius was speaking from a lectern beside an easel on which the title of his talk—“Surviving the Corrections”—was written in purple ink. His question brought murmurs of assent from the first few rows in front of him, the people who’d arrived early for good seats. Someone up there even said: “Yes, Jim !”
    Enid felt ever so much better this morning, but a few atmospheric disturbances still lingered in her head, for example a squall now consisting of (a) resentment of the women who’d come to the Longstocking Ballroom absurdly early, as if the potential lucrativeness of Jim Crolius’s advice might somehow decline with one’s distance from him, and (b) particular resentment of the pushy New York kind of woman who elbowed in ahead of everyone to establish a first-name relationship with a lecturer (she was sure that Jim Crolius could see right through their presumption and hollow flattery, but he might be too polite to ignore them and focus on less pushy and more deserving midwestern women such as Enid), and (c) intense irritation with Alfred for having stopped in a bathroom twice on the way to breakfast, which had prevented her from leaving the Kierkegaard Room early and securing a good front-row seat herself.
    Almost as soon as the squall had gathered it disappeared, however, and the sun shone strongly again.
    “Well, I hate to break it to you folks in the back,” Jim Crolius was saying, “but from where I stand, up here by the windows, I can see some clouds on the horizon. Those could be friendly little white clouds. Or they could be dark rainclouds. Appearances can be deceiving! From where I stand I may think I see a safe course ahead, but I’m no expert. I may be piloting the ship straight into a reef. Now, you wouldn’t want to sail on a ship without a captain, would you? A captain who’s got all the maps and gadgets, all the bells and whistles, the whole nine yards. Right? You got your radar, you got your sonar, you got your Global Positioning System,” Jim Crolius was counting off each instrument on his fingers. “You got your satellites up in outer space! It’s all pretty technical. But somebody’s got to have that information, or we could all be in big trouble. Right? This is a deep ocean. This is your life . So what I’m saying is you may not want to master all that technical stuff personally, all the bells and whistles, the whole nine yards. But you better hope you’ve got a good captain when you go cruising the high seas of high finance.”
    There was applause from the front rows.
    “He must literally think we’re eight years old,” Sylvia Roth whispered to Enid.
    “This is just his introduction,” Enid whispered back.
    “Now, another way this is fitting,” Jim Crolius continued, “is that we’re here to see the changing leaves. The year has its rhythms—winter, spring, summer, fall. The whole thing is cyclical. You got your upswings in the spring, you got your downturns in the fall. It’s just