The Corrections

Gary said. “But if you’d feel more comfortable about putting the house on the market, we would certainly consider—”
    “I would adore it if you came. Adore it.”
    “Mother, though, you have to be realistic.”
    “Let’s get through this year,” Enid said, “let’s think about having Christmas here, like Jonah wants, and then we’ll see!”
    Gary’s anhedonia had worsened when he returned to Chestnut Hill. As a winter project, he’d been distilling hundreds of hours of home videos into a watchable two-hour Greatest Lambert Hits compilation that he could make quality copies of and maybe send out as a “video Christmas card.” In the final edit, as he repeatedly reviewed his favorite family scenes and re-cued his favorite songs (“Wild Horses,” “Time After Time,” etc.), he began to hate these scenes and hate these songs. And when, in the new darkroom, he turned his attention to the All-Time Lambert Two Hundred, he found that he no longer enjoyed looking at still photographs, either. For years he’d mentally tinkered with the All-Time Two Hundred, as with an ideally balanced mutual fund, listing with great satisfaction the images that he was sure belonged in it. Now he wondered whom, besides himself, he was trying to impress with these pictures. Whom was he trying to persuade, and of what? He had a weird impulse to burn his old favorites. But his entire life was set up as a correction of his father’s life, and he and Caroline had long agreed that Alfred was clinically depressed, and clinical depression was known to have genetic bases and to be substantially heritable, and so Gary had no choice but to keep resisting anhedonia, keep gritting his teeth, keep doing his best to have fun …
    He came awake with an itching hard-on and Caroline beside him in the sheets.
    His nightstand light was still burning, but otherwise the room was dark. Caroline lay in sarcophagal posture, her back flat on the mattress and a pillow beneath her knees. Through the screens on the bedroom windows came seeping the coolish, humid air of a summer grown tired. No wind stirred the leaves of the sycamore whose lowest branches hung outside the windows.
    On Caroline’s nightstand was a hardcover copy of Middle Ground: How to Spare Your Child the Adolescence YOU Had (Caren Tamkin, Ph.D., 1998).
    She seemed to be asleep. Her long arm, kept flabless by thrice-weekly swims at the Cricket Club, rested at her side. Gary gazed at her little nose, her wide red mouth, the blond down and the dull sheen of sweat on her upper lip, the tapering strip of exposed blond skin between the hem of her T-shirt and the elastic of her old Swarthmore College gym shorts. Her nearer breast pushed out against the inside of the T-shirt, the carmine definition of its nipple faintly visible through the fabric’s stretched weave …
    When he reached out and smoothed her hair, her entire body jerked as if the hand were a defibrillator paddle.
    “What’s going on here?” he said.
    “My back is killing me.”
    “An hour ago you were laughing and feeling great. Now you’re sore again?”
    “The Motrin’s wearing off.”
    “The mysterious resurgence of the pain.”
    “You haven’t said a sympathetic word since I hurt my back.”
    “Because you’re lying about how you hurt it,” Gary said.
    “My God. Again ?”
    “Two hours of soccer and horseplay in the rain, that’s not the problem. It’s the ringing phone.”
    “Yes,” Caroline said. “Because your mother won’t spend ten cents to leave a message. She has to let it ring three times and then hang up, ring three times and then hang up—”
    “It has nothing to do with anything you did,” Gary said. “It’s my mom! She magically flew here and kicked you in the back because she wants to hurt you!”
    “After listening to it ring and stop and ring and stop all afternoon, I’m a nervous wreck.”
    “Caroline, I saw you limping before you ran inside . I saw the look on your face. Don’t tell me you weren’t in pain already.”
    She shook her head. “You know what this is?”
    “And then the eavesdropping!”
    “Do you know what this is?”
    “You’re listening on the only other free phone in the house, and you have the gall to tell me—”
    “Gary, you’re depressed . Do you realize that?”
    He laughed. “I don’t think so.”
    “You’re brooding, and suspicious, and obsessive. You walk around with a black look on your face. You don’t sleep well. You don’t seem