The Corrections

Denise flew to St. Jude for a long Easter weekend, and Enid, like a toy piano with one working note, spoke every day of her old friend Norma Greene and Norma Greene’s tragic involvement with a married man. Denise, to change the subject, observed that Alfred was livelier and sharper than Enid portrayed him in her letters and Sunday calls.

“He pulls himself together when you’re in town,” Enid countered. “When we’re alone, he’s impossible.”

“When you’re alone, maybe you’re too focused on him.”

“Denise, if you lived with a man who slept in his chair all day —”

“Mother, the more you nag, the more he resists.”

“You don’t see it, because you’re only here for a few days. But I know what I’m talking about. And I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

If I lived with a person who was hysterically critical of me, Denise thought, I would sleep in a chair.

Back in Philly, the kitchen at the Generator was finally available. Denise’s life returned to near-normal levels of madness as she assembled and trained her crew, invited her pastry-chef finalists to compete head to head, and solved a thousand problems of delivery, scheduling, production, and pricing. As a piece of architecture, the restaurant was every bit as stunning as she’d feared, but for once in her career she’d prepared a menu properly and had twenty winners on it. The food was a three-way conversation between Paris and Bologna and Vienna, a Continental conference call with her own trademark emphasis on flavor over flash. Seeing Brian again in person, rather than imagining him through Robin’s eyes, she remembered how much she liked him. She awoke, to an extent, from her dreams of conquest. As she fired up the Garland and drilled her line and sharpened her knives, she thought: An idle brain is the Devil’s workshop. If she had been working as hard as God intended her to work, she would never have had time to chase someone’s wife.

She went into full avoidance mode, working 6 a.m. to midnight. The more days she spent free of the spell that Robin’s body and body heat and hunger cast on her, the more willing she was to admit how little she liked Robin’s nervousness, and Robin’s bad haircut and worse clothes, and Robin’s rusty-hinge voice, and Robin’s forced laughter, her whole profound uncoolness. Brian’s benign neglect of his wife, his hands-off attitude of “Yeah, Robin’s great,” made more sense now to Denise. Robin was great; and yet, if you were married to her, you might need some time away from her incandescent energy, you might enjoy a few days by yourself in New York, and Paris, and Sundance. . .

But the damage had been done. Denise’s case for infidelity had apparently been compelling. With a persistence the more irritating for the shyness and apologies that accompanied it, Robin began to seek her out. She came to the Generator. She took Denise to lunch. She called Denise at midnight and chattered about the mildly interesting things that Denise had long pretended to be extremely interested in. She caught Denise at home on a Sunday afternoon and drank tea at the half Ping-Pong table, blushing and hee-heeing.

And part of Denise was thinking, as the tea went cold: Shit, she’s really into me now. This part of her considered, as if it were an actual threat of harm, the exhausting circumstance: She wants sex every day. This same part of her was thinking also: My God, the way she eats. And: I am not a “lesbian.”

At the same time, another part of her was literally awash in desire. She’d never seen so objectively what an illness sex was, what a collection of bodily symptoms, because she’d never been remotely as sick as Robin made her.

During a lull in the chatter, beneath a corner of the Ping-Pong table, Robin gripped Denise’s tastefully shod foot between her own knobby, white, purple-and-orange-accented sneakers. A moment later she leaned forward and seized Denise’s hand. Her blush looked life-threatening.

“So,” she said. “I’ve been thinking.”