The Corrections

Sinéad to an excellent private elementary school on Fairmount Avenue and her daughter Erin to the preschool program at Friends Select, bought softshell crabs and Jersey tomatoes at the Reading Terminal Market, took weekends and Augusts at Brian’s family’s house at Cape May, socialized with old friends who had children of their own, and burned off enough sexual energy with Brian (she ideally liked it daily , she told Denise) to keep her halfway calm.
    Cow Clueless was therefore shocked by Brian’s next question. He asked her where she thought they should live. He said he was thinking of Northern California. He was also thinking of Provence, New York, and London.
    “We’re happy here,” Robin said. “Why go someplace where we don’t know anybody and everybody’s a millionaire?”
    “Climate,” Brian said. “Beauty, safety, culture. Style. None of which are Philly’s long suit. I’m not saying let’s move. I’m just saying tell me if there’s anyplace you’d like to go, even for a summer.”
    “I like it here.”
    “So we’ll stay here,” he said. “Until you feel like going someplace else.”
    She was naive enough, she told Denise, to think this ended the discussion. She had a good marriage, stably founded on childrearing, eating, and sex. It was true that she and Brian had different class backgrounds, but High Temp Products wasn’t exactly E. I. Du Pont de Nemours, and Robin, holding degrees from two elite schools, wasn’t yourtypical proletarian. Their few real differences came down to style, and these differences were mostly invisible to Robin, because Brian was a good husband and a nice guy and because, in her cow innocence, Robin couldn’t imagine that style had anything to do with happiness. Her musical tastes ran to John Prine and Etta James, and so Brian played Prine and James at home and saved his Bartók and Defunkt and Flaming Lips and Mission of Burma for blasting on his boom box at High Temp. That Robin dressed like a grad student in white sneakers and a purple nylon shell and oversized round wireframes of a kind last worn by fashionable people in 1978 didn’t altogether disappoint Brian, because he alone among men got to see her naked. That Robin was high-strung and had a penetrating screechy voice and a kookaburra laugh seemed, likewise, a small price to pay for a heart of gold and an eye-popping streak of lechery and a racing metabolism that kept her movie-actress thin. That Robin never shaved her armpits and too seldom washed her glasses—well, she was the mother of Brian’s children, and as long as he could play his music and tinker with his tensors by himself, he didn’t mind indulging in her the anti-style that liberal women of a certain age wore as a badge of feminist identity. This, at any rate, was how Denise imagined Brian had solved the problem of style until the money from W——came rolling in.
    (Denise, though only three years younger than Robin, could not conceive of wearing a purple nylon parka or failing to shave her armpits. She didn’t even own white sneakers.)
    Robin’s first concession to her new wealth was to spend the summer house-hunting with Brian. She’d grown up in a big house and she wanted her girls to grow up in one, too. If Brian needed twelve-foot ceilings and four baths and mahogany details throughout, she could live with that. On the sixth of September they signed a contract on a grand brownstone on Panama Street, near Rittenhouse Square.
    Two days later, with all the strength in his prison-built shoulders, Billy Passafaro welcomed W——’s corporate-image vice president to Philadelphia.
    What Robin needed to know and couldn’t find out, in the weeks following the attack, was whether, by the time he lettered his message on a two-by-four, Billy had learned of Brian’s windfall and knew which company she and Brian owed their sudden wealth to. The answer mattered, mattered, mattered. However, it was pointless to ask Billy. She knew she wouldn’t get the truth from Billy, she’d get whatever answer he believed would hurt her worst. Billy had made it abundantly clear to Robin that he would never stop sneering at her, never address her as a peer, until she could prove to him that her life was as fucked-up and miserable as his. And it was precisely this totemic role she seemed to play for him, precisely the fact that he’d singled her out as the archetypical possessor of the happy normal life he couldn’t have, that made her feel as