The Corrections (7 page)

“So basically,” he said, “even though you thought my class was bullshit, it now seems like a superior brand of bullshit because you’re taking hers.”

Melissa blushed. “Basically! Except you’re a much better teacher. I mean, I learned a ton from you. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”

“Consider me told.”

“See, my mom and dad split up in April.” Melissa flung herself down on Chip’s college-issue leather sofa and assumed the full therapeutic position. “For a while it was kind of great that you were being so anti-corporate, and then suddenly it really, really irritated me. Like, my parents have a lot of money, and they’re not evil people, although my dad did just move in with this character named Vicki
who’s like four years older than me. But he still loves my mom. I know he does. As soon as I was out of the house, things deteriorated a little, but I know he still loves her.”

“The college has a lot of services,” Chip said, arms folded, “for students going through these things.”

“Thanks. On the whole I’m doing brilliantly, except for having been rude to you in class that time.” Melissa hooked her heels on the arm of the sofa, pried her shoes off, and let them drop to the floor. Soft curves in thermal knitwear spilled out to either side of her overalls’ bib, Chip noticed.

“I had an excellent childhood,” she said. “My parents have always been my best friends. They homeschooled me till seventh grade. My mom was in med school in New Haven and my dad had this punk band, the Nomatics, that was touring, and at my mom’s first ever punk show she went out with my dad and ended up in his hotel room. She quit school, he quit the Nomatics, and they were never apart after that. Totally romantic. See, and my dad had some money from a trust fund, and it was really brilliant what they did then. There were all these new IPOs, and my mom was up on all the biotech and reading
JAMA
, and Tom—my dad—could vet the numbers part of it, and they just made really great investments. Clair—my mom—stayed home with me and we hung out all day, you know, and I learned my times tables, et cetera, and it was always just the three of us. They were so, so in love. And parties every weekend. And finally it occurred to us, we
know
everybody, and we’re really good
investors
, so why not start a mutual fund? Which we did. And it was incredible. It’s still a great fund. It’s called the Westportfolio Biofund Forty? We started some other funds, too, when the climate got more competitive. You kind of have to offer a full array of services. That’s what the institutional investors were telling Tom, at any rate. So he started these other funds, which unfortunately have pretty much tanked. I think that’s the big problem between him
and Clair. Because her fund, the Biofund Forty, where
she
makes the picks, is still doing great. And now she’s heartbroken and depressed. She’s holed up in our house and she never goes out. Meanwhile Tom wants me to meet this Vicki person, who he says is ‘lots of fun’ and a roller blader. The thing is, we all know my mom and dad are
made
for each other. They complement each other perfectly. And I just think if you knew how cool it is to start a company, and how great it is when the money starts coming in, and how romantic it can be, you wouldn’t be so harsh.”

“Possibly,” Chip said.

“Anyway, I thought you’d be somebody I could talk to. On the whole I’m coping brilliantly, but I could kind of use a friend.”

“How’s Chad?” Chip said.

“A sweet boy. Good for about three weekends.” Melissa swung a leg off the sofa and planted a stockinged foot on Chip’s leg, close to his hip. “It’s hard to imagine two people less long-term compatible than him and me.”

Through his jeans Chip could feel the deliberate flexing of her toes. He was trapped against his desk, and so, to escape, he had to take hold of her ankle and swing her leg back onto the sofa. Her pink feet immediately grasped his wrist and pulled him toward her. It was all very playful, but his door was open, and his lights were on, and his blinds were raised, and somebody was in the hall. “Code,” he said, pulling free. “There’s a code.”

Melissa rolled off the sofa, stood up, and came closer. “It’s a stupid code,” she said. “If you care about somebody.”

Chip retreated to the doorway. Up the hall, by the department office, a tiny blue-uniformed woman with a Toltec face was vacuuming. “There are good reasons to have it,” he said.

“So I can’t even give you a hug now.”

“That’s right.”

“It’s stupid.” Melissa stepped into her shoes and joined Chip in the doorway. She kissed him on the cheek, near his ear. “So there.”

He watched her slide-step and pirouette down the hall and out of sight. He heard a fire door bang shut. He carefully examined every word he’d said, and he gave himself an A for correctness. But when he returned to Tilton Ledge, where the last of the utility lights had burned out, he was swamped by loneliness. To erase the tactile memory of Melissa’s kiss, and her lively warm feet, he phoned an old college friend in New York and made a date for lunch the next day. He took
Cent Ans de Cinéma Erotique
from the cabinet where, in expectation of a night like this, he’d stashed it after soaking it. The tape was still playable. The image was snowy, though, and during the first really hot bit, a hotel-room scene with a wanton chambermaid, the snow thickened to a blizzard and the screen went blue. The VCR made a dry, thin choking sound.
Air, need
air
, it seemed to say. Tape had leaked out and wound itself around the machine’s endoskeleton. Chip extracted the cassette and several handfuls of Mylar, but then something broke and the machine spat up a plastic spool. Which, all right, these things happened. But the trip to Scotland had been a financial Waterloo, and he couldn’t afford a new VCR.

Nor was New York City, on a cold rainy Saturday, the treat he needed. Every sidewalk in lower Manhattan was dotted with the metallic squared spirals of antitheft badges. The badges were bonded to the wet pavement with the world’s strongest glue, and after Chip had bought some imported cheeses (he did this every time he visited New York to be sure of accomplishing at least one thing before returning to Connecticut, and yet it felt a little sad to buy the same baby Gruyère and Fourme d’Ambert at the same store; it brought him up against the more general failure of consumerism as an approach to human happiness), and after
he’d lunched with his college friend (who had recently quit teaching anthropology and hired himself out to Silicon Alley as a “marketing psychologist” and who advised Chip, now, to wake up and do the same), he returned to his car and discovered that each of his plastic-wrapped cheeses was protected by its own antitheft badge and that, indeed, a fragment of antitheft badge had stuck to the bottom of his left shoe.

Tilton Ledge was glazed with ice and very dark. In the mail Chip found an envelope containing a short note from Enid lamenting Alfred’s moral failures (“he sits in that chair
all day, every day
”) and a lengthy profile of Denise, clipped from
Philadelphia
magazine, with a slavering review of her restaurant, Mare Scuro, and a full-page glamour photo of the young chef. Denise in the photo was wearing jeans and a tank top and was all muscled shoulders and satiny pecs (“Very young and very good: Lambert in her kitchen,” the caption read), and this was just the kind of girl-as-object horseshit, Chip thought bitterly, that sold magazines. A few years ago Enid’s letters had reliably contained a paragraph of despair about Denise and Denise’s failing marriage, with phrases like
he is too
OLD for her!
double-underlined, and a paragraph festooned with
thrilled
s and
proud
s apropos of Chip’s hiring by D——College, and although he knew that Enid was skilled at playing her children off against each other and that her praise was usually double-edged, he was dismayed that a woman as smart and principled as Denise had used her body for marketing purposes. He threw the clipping in the trash. He opened the Saturday half of the Sunday
Times
and—yes, he was contradicting himself, yes, he was aware of this—paged through the Magazine in search of ads for lingerie or swimwear to rest his weary eyes on. Finding none, he began to read the Book Review, where a memoir called
Daddy’s
Girl
, by Vendla O’Fallon, was declared “astonishing” and “courageous” and “deeply satisfying” on page 11. The name
Vendla O’Fallon was rather unusual, but Chip had been so completely unaware that Vendla was publishing a book that he refused to believe she’d written
Daddy’s Girl
until, near the end of the review, he encountered a sentence that began: “O’Fallon, who teaches at D——College …”

He closed the Book Review and opened a bottle.

In theory both he and Vendla were in line for tenure in Textual Artifacts, but in practice the department was already overtenured. That Vendla commuted to work from New York (thus flouting the college’s informal requirement that faculty live in town), and that she skipped important meetings and taught every gut she could, had been steady sources of comfort to Chip. He still had the edge in scholarly publications, student evaluations, and support from Jim Leviton; but he found that two glasses of wine had no effect on him.

He was pouring himself his fourth when his telephone rang. It was Jim Leviton’s wife, Jackie. “I just wanted you to know,” Jackie said, “that Jim’s going to be OK.”

“Was something wrong?” Chip said.

“Well, he’s resting fine. We’re over at St. Mary’s.”

“What happened?”

“Chip, I asked him if he thought he could play tennis, and do you know what? He nodded! I said I was going to call you, and he nodded, yes, he was good for tennis. His motor skills appear to be fully normal. Fully—normal. And he’s lucid, that is the important thing. That is the really good news here, Chip. His eyes are bright. He’s the same old Jim.”

“Jackie, did he have a stroke?”

“There’ll be some rehabilitation,” Jackie said. “Obviously today will be his effective retirement date, which, Chip, as far as I’m concerned, is an absolute blessing. We can make some changes now, and in three years—well, it’s not going to take any three years for him to rehabilitate. When all is said and done, we’re going to be ahead of this game. His eyes are so bright, Chip. He’s the same old Jim!”

Chip rested his forehead against his kitchen window and turned his head so that he could open one eye directly against the cold, damp glass. He knew what he was going to do.

“The same old lovable Jim!” Jackie said.

The following Thursday, Chip made dinner for Melissa and had sex with her on his red chaise longue. He’d taken a fancy to the chaise back in the days when dropping eight hundred dollars on an antique-store impulse was somewhat less suicidal financially. The chaise’s backrest was angled in erotic invitation, its padded shoulders thrown back, its spine arching; the plush of its chest and belly looked ready to burst the fabric buttons that crisscrossed it. Breaking his initial clinch with Melissa, Chip excused himself for one second to turn off lights in the kitchen and stop in the bathroom. When he returned to the living room, he found her stretched out on the chaise wearing only the pants half of her plaid polyester leisure suit. In the dim light she could have been a hairless, heavy-titted man. Chip, who much preferred queer theory to queer practice, basically hated the suit and wished she hadn’t worn it. Even after she’d taken off the pants there was a residue of gender confusion on her body, not to mention the rank b.o. that was the bane of synthetic fabrics. But from her underpants, which to his relief were delicate and sheer—distinctly gendered—an affectionate warm rabbit came springing, a kicking wet autonomous warm animal. It was almost more than he could handle. He hadn’t slept two hours in the previous two nights, and he had a head full of wine and a gut full of gas (he couldn’t remember why he’d made a cassoulet for dinner; possibly for no good reason), and he worried that he hadn’t locked the front door—that there was a gap in the blinds somewhere, that one of his neighbors would drop by and try the door and find it unlocked or peer in through the window and see him flagrantly violating Sections I, II, and VI of a code that he himself had helped draft. Altogether for him it was a night of anxiety and effortful
concentration, punctuated by little stabs of throttled pleasure, but at least Melissa seemed to find it exciting and romantic. Hour after hour, she wore a big crinkled U of a smile.

It was Chip’s proposal, after a second extremely stressful tryst at Tilton Ledge, that he and Melissa leave campus for the week-long Thanksgiving break and find a cottage on Cape Cod where they wouldn’t feel observed and judged; and it was Melissa’s proposal, as they departed through D——’s little-used eastern gate under cover of darkness, that they stop in Middletown and buy drugs from a high-school friend of hers at Wesleyan. Chip waited in front of Wesleyan’s impressively weatherproofed Ecology House and drummed on the steering wheel of his Nissan, drummed so hard his fingers throbbed, because it was important not to think about what he was doing. He’d left behind mountains of ungraded papers and exams, and he had not yet managed to visit Jim Leviton in the rehab unit. That Jim had lost his powers of speech and now impotently strained his jaw and lips to form words—that he’d become, according to reports from colleagues who’d visited him, an angry man—made Chip all the more reluctant to visit. He was in the mode now of avoiding anything that might make him experience an emotion. He beat on the steering wheel until his fingers were stiff and burning and Melissa came out of the Ecology House. She brought into the car a smell of woodsmoke and frozen flower beds, the smell of an affair in late autumn. She put into Chip’s palm a golden caplet marked with what appeared to be the old Midland Pacific Railroad logo—without the text. “Take this,” she told him, closing the door.