Читаем The Corrections полностью

But his apartment was empty. His family must have left minutes earlier. Body warmth was hanging in the air, faint smells of Enid’s White Shoulders perfume, and something bathroomy, something old-persony. The kitchen was cleaner than Chip had ever seen it. In the living room all the scrubbing and stowing he’d done was visible now as it hadn’t been the night before. And his bookshelves were denuded. And Julia had taken her shampoos and dryer from the bathroom. And he was drunker than he’d realized. And nobody had left a note for him. There was nothing on the dining table except a slice of tart and a vase of sunflowers. He had to pack his bags, but everything around him and inside him had become so strange that for a moment he could only stand and look. The leaves of the sunflowers had black spots and were rimmed with pale senescences; the heads were meaty and splendid, heavy as brownies, thick as palms. In the center of a sunflower’s Kansan face was a subtly pale button within a subtly darker areola. Nature, Chip thought, could hardly have devised a more inviting bed for a small winged insect to tumble into. He touched the brown velvet, and ecstasy washed over him.

The taxi containing three Lamberts arrived at a midtown pier where a white high-rise of a cruise ship, the Gunnar Myrdal, was blotting out the river and New Jersey and half the sky. A crowd mostly of old people had converged on the gate and reattenuated in the long, bright corridor beyond it. There was something netherworldly in their determined migration, something chilling in the cordiality and white raiment of the Nordic Pleasurelines shore personnel, the rain clouds breaking up too late to save the day—the hush of it all. A throng and twilight by the Styx.

Denise paid the cab fare and got the luggage into the hands of handlers.

“So, now, where do you go from here?” Enid asked her.

“Back to work in Philly.”

“You look darling,” Enid said spontaneously. “I love your hair that length.”

Alfred seized Denise’s hands and thanked her.

“I just wish it had been a better day for Chip,” Denise said.

“Talk to Gary about Christmas,” Enid said. “And do think about coming for a whole week.”

Denise raised a leather cuff and checked the time. “I’ll come for five days. I don’t think Gary will do it, though. And who knows what’s up with Chip.”

“Denise,” Alfred said impatiently, as if she were speaking nonsense, “please talk to Gary.”

“OK, I will. I will.”

Alfred’s hands bounced in the air. “I don’t know how much time I have! You and your mother need to get along. You and Gary need to get along.”

“Al, you have plenty of—”

“We all need to get along!”

Denise had never been a crier, but her face was crumpling up. “Dad, all right,” she said. “I’ll talk to him.”

“Your mother wants a Christmas in St. Jude.”

“I’ll talk to him. I promise.”

“Well.” He turned abruptly. “That’s enough of that.”

His black raincoat was flapping and whipping in the wind, and still Enid managed to hope that the weather would be perfect for cruising, that the water would be calm.

In dry clothes, with a coat bag and a duffel and cigarettes—smooth lethal Murattis, five bucks a box—Chip rode out to Kennedy with Gitanas Misevičius and boarded the Helsinki flight on which, in violation of his oral contract, Gitanas had bought coach-class, not business-class, tickets. “We can drink tonight, sleep tomorrow,” he said.

Their seats were aisle and window. As Chip sat down, he recalled how Julia had ditched Gitanas. He imagined her walking quickly off the plane and then sprinting down the concourse and throwing herself into the back seat of a good old yellow cab. He felt a spasm of homesickness—terror of the other; love of the familiar—but, unlike Julia, he had no desire to bolt. He’d no sooner buckled his seat belt than he fell asleep. He awoke briefly during takeoff and went under again until the entire population of the plane, as one, lit cigarettes.

Gitanas took a computer from its case and booted up. “So Julia,” he said.

For an alarmed, sleep-clouded moment Chip thought that Gitanas was addressing him as Julia.

“My wife?” Gitanas said.

“Oh. Sure.”

“Yeah, she’s on antidepressants. This was Eden’s idea, I think. Eden kind of runs her life now, I think. You could see she didn’t want me in her office today. Didn’t want me in town! I’m inconvenient now. So, but, OK, so Julia started taking the drug, and suddenly she woke up and she didn’t want to be with men with cigargtte burns anymore. That’s what she says. Enough men with cigarette burns. Time to move on. No more men with burns.” Gitanas loaded a CD into the computer’s CD drive. “She wants the flat, though. At least the divorce lawyer wants her to want it. The divorce lawyer that Eden’s paying for. Somebody changed the locks on the flat, I had to pay the super to let me in.”

Chip closed his left hand. “Cigarette burns?”