The Corrections

Caroline, who was hurrying on tiptoe, in her stockinged feet, back in the direction of their bedroom.
    “Again? Again? I say don’t eavesdrop, and what do you do?”
    “I wasn’t eavesdropping. I’ve got to go lie down.” And she hurried, limping, into the bedroom.
    “You can run but you can’t hide,” Gary said, following her. “I want to know why you’re eavesdropping on me.”
    “It is your paranoia, not my eavesdropping.”
    “My paranoia?”
    Caroline slumped on the oaken king-size bed. After she and Gary were married, she’d undergone five years of twice-weekly therapy which the therapist, at the final session, had declared “an unqualified success” and which had given her a lifelong advantage over Gary in the race for mental health.
    “You seem to think everybody except you has a problem,” she said. “Which is what your mother thinks, too. Without ever—”
    “Caroline. Answer me one question. Look me in the eye and answer me one question. This afternoon, when you were—”
    “God, Gary, not this again. Listen to yourself.”
    “When you were horsing around in the rain, running yourself ragged, trying to keep up with an eleven-year-old and a fourteen-year-old—”
    “You’re obsessed! You’re obsessed with that!”
    “Running and sliding and kicking in the rain—”
    “You talk to your parents and then you take your anger out on us.”
    “ Were you limping before you came inside? ” Gary shook his finger in his wife’s face. “Look me in the eye, Caroline, look me right in the eye. Come on! Do it! Look me in the eye and tell me you weren’t already limping. ”
    Caroline was rocking in pain. “You’re on the phone with them for the better part of an hour—”
    “You can’t do it!” Gary crowed in bitter triumph. “You’re lying to me and you will not admit you’re lying!”
    “ Dad! Dad! ” came a cry outside the door. Gary turned and saw Aaron shaking his head wildly, beside himself, his beautiful face twisted and tear-slick. “Stop shouting at her!”
    The remorse neurofactor (Factor 26) flooded the sites in Gary’s brain specially tailored by evolution to respond to it.
    “Aaron, all right,” he said.
    Aaron turned away and turned back and marched in place, taking big steps nowhere, as though trying to force the shameful tears out of his eyes and into his body, down through his legs, and stamp them out. “God, please, Dad, do—not—shout—at her.”
    “OK, Aaron,” Gary said. “Shouting’s over.”
    He reached to touch his son’s shoulder, but Aaron fledback up the hall. Gary left Caroline and followed him, his sense of isolation deepened by this demonstration that his wife had strong allies in the house. Her sons would protect her from her husband. Her husband who was a shouter. Like his father before him. His father before him who was now depressed. But who, in his prime, as a shouter, had so frightened young Gary that it never occurred to him to intercede on his mother’s behalf.
    Aaron was lying face down on his bed. In the tornado aftermath of laundry and magazines on the floor of his room, the two nodes of order were his Bundy trumpet (with mutes and a music stand) and his enormous alphabetized collection of compact discs, including boxed-set complete editions of Dizzy and Satchmo and Miles Davis, plus great miscellaneous quantities of Chet Baker and Wynton Marsalis and Chuck Mangione and Herb Alpert and Al Hirt, all of which Gary had given him to encourage his interest in music.
    Gary perched on the edge of the bed. “I’m sorry I upset you,” he said. “As you know, I can be a mean old judgmental bastard. And sometimes your mother has trouble admitting she’s wrong. Especially when—”
    “Her. Back. Is. Hurt,” came Aaron’s voice, muffled by a Ralph Lauren duvet. “She is not lying .”
    “I know her back hurts, Aaron. I love your mother very much.”
    “Then don’t shout at her.”
    “OK. Shouting’s over. Let’s have some dinner.” Gary lightly judo-chopped Aaron’s shoulder. “What do you say?”
    Aaron didn’t move. Further cheering words appeared to be called for, but Gary couldn’t think of any. He was experiencing a critical shortage of Factors 1 and 3. He’d had the sense, moments earlier, that Caroline was on the verge of accusing him of being “depressed,” and he was afraid that if the idea that he was depressed gained currency, he would forfeit his right to his opinions. He would forfeit his