The Corrections

. At Café Louche they worked like partners, experience flowing from his head into hers. They sneered at their pretentious old rival, Le Bec-Fin. They impulse-bought a three-story town house on Federal Street, in a mixed black and white and Vietnamese neighborhood near the Italian Market. They talked about flavor the way Marxists talked about revolution.
    When Emile had finally taught her everything he would ever teach her, she tried to teach him a thing or two—like, let’s freshen up the menu, how about, let’s maybe try that with a vegetable stock and a little bit of cumin, how about—and ran smack into that wall of irony and ironclad opinion that she’d loved as long as she was on the happy side of it. She felt more skilled and ambitious and hungry than her white-haired husband. She felt as if, while working and sleeping and working and sleeping, she’d aged so rapidly that she’d passed Emile and caught up with her parents. Her circumscribed world of round-the-clock domestic and workplace togetherness seemed to her identical to her parents’ universe of two. She had old-person aches in her young hips and knees and feet. She had scarred old-person hands, she had a dry old-person vagina, she had old-person prejudices and old-personpolitics, she had an old-person dislike of young people and their consumer electronics and their diction. She said to herself: “I’m too young to be so old.” Whereupon her banished guilt came screaming back up out of its cave on vengeful wings, because Emile was as devoted to her as ever, as faithful to his unchanging self, and she was the one who’d insisted they get married.
    By amicable agreement she left his kitchen and signed on with a competitor, Ardennes, which needed a sous-chef and which, in her opinion, was superior to Café Louche in all things except the art of being excellent without seeming to try. (Unperspiring virtuosity was undeniably Emile’s great gift.)
    At Ardennes she conceived a desire to strangle the young woman who prepped and held down garde manger . The woman, Becky Hemerling, was a culinary-institute grad with wavy blond hair and a petite flat body and fair skin that turned scarlet in the kitchen heat. Everything about Becky Hemerling sickened Denise—her C.I.A. education (Denise was an autodidact snob), her overfamiliarity with more senior cooks (especially with Denise), her vocal adoration of Jodie Foster, the stupid fish-and-bicycle texts on her T-shirts, her overuse of the word “fucking” as an intensifier, her self-conscious lesbian “solidarity” with the “latinos” and “Asians” in the kitchen, her generalizations about “right-wingers” and “Kansas” and “Peoria,” her facility with phrases like “men and women of color,” the whole bright aura of entitlement that came of basking in the approval of educators who wished that they could be as marginalized and victimized and free of guilt as she was. What is this person doing in my kitchen? Denise wondered. Cooks were not supposed to be political. Cooks were the mitochondria of humanity; they had their own separate DNA, they floated in a cell and powered it but were not really of it. Denise suspected that Becky Hemerling had chosen the cooking life to make a political point: to be onetough chick, to hold her own with the guys. Denise loathed this motivation all the more for harboring a speck of it herself. Hemerling had a way of looking at her that suggested that she (Hemerling) knew her better than she knew herself—an insinuation at once infuriating and impossible to refute. Lying awake beside Emile at night, Denise imagined squeezing Hemerling’s neck until her blue, blue eyes bugged out. She imagined pressing her thumbs into Hemerling’s windpipe until it cracked.
    Then one night she fell asleep and dreamed that she was strangling Becky and that Becky didn’t mind. Becky’s blue eyes, in fact, invited further liberties. The strangler’s hands relaxed and traveled up along Becky’s jawline and past her ears to the soft skin of her temples. Becky’s lips parted and her eyes fell shut, as if in bliss, as the strangler stretched her legs out on her legs and her arms out on her arms …
    Denise couldn’t remember being sorrier to wake from a dream.
    “If you can have this feeling in a dream,” she said to herself, “it must be possible to have it in reality.”
    As her marriage foundered—as she became for Emile one more flashy trend-chasing crowd-pleaser