The Corrections

by Jonathan Franzen

  “Al,” Enid said as the elevator lurched to a halt, “you have to admit that it was a very, very nice party, and that it was very nice of Dean to invite us.”

  Alfred seemed not to have heard her.

  Propped outside Chip’s apartment was a clear-plastic umbrella that Chip recognized, with relief, as Julia Vrais’s. He was herding the parental luggage from the elevator when his apartment door swung open and Julia herself stepped out. “Oh. Oh!” she said, as though flustered. “You’re early!”

  By Chip’s watch it was 11:35. Julia was wearing a shapeless lavender raincoat and holding a Dream Works tote bag. Her hair, which was long and the color of dark chocolate, was big with humidity and rain. In the tone of a person being friendly to large animals she said “Hi” to Alfred and “Hi,” separately, to Enid. Alfred and Enid bayed their names at her and extended hands to shake, driving her back into the apartment, where Enid began to pepper her with questions in which Chip, as he followed with the luggage, could hear subtexts and agendas.

  “Do you live in the city?” Enid said. (You’re not cohabiting with our son, are you?) “And you work in the city, too?” (You are gainfully employed? You’re not from an alien, snobbish, moneyed eastern family?) “Did you grow up here?” (Or do you come from a trans-Appalachian state where people are warmhearted and down-to-earth and unlikely to be Jewish?) “Oh, and do you still have family in Ohio?” (Have your parents perhaps taken the morally dubious modern step of getting divorced?) “Do you have brothers or sisters?” (Are you a spoiled only child or a Catholic with a zillion siblings?)

  Julia having passed this initial examination, Enid turned her attention to the apartment. Chip, in a late crisis of confidence, had tried to make it presentable. He’d bought a stain-removal kit and lifted the big semen stain off the red chaise longue, dismantled the wall of wine-bottle corks with which he’d been bricking in the niche above his fireplace at a rate of half a dozen Merlots and Pinot Grigios a week, taken down from his bathroom wall the close-up photographs of male and female genitalia that were the flower of his art collection, and replaced them with the three diplomas that Enid had long ago insisted on having framed for him.

  This morning, feeling as if he’d surrendered too much of himself, he’d readjusted his presentation by wearing leather to the airport.

  “This room is about the size of Dean Driblett’s bathroom,” Enid said. “Wouldn’t you say, Al?”

  Alfred rotated his bobbing hands and examined their dorsal sides.

  “I’d never seen such an enormous bathroom.”

  “Enid, you have no tact,” Alfred said.

  It might have occurred to Chip that this, too, was a tactless remark, since it implied that his father concurred in his mother’s criticism of the apartment and objected only to her airing of it. But Chip was unable to focus on anything but the hair dryer protruding from Julia’s DreamWorks tote bag. It was the hair dryer that she kept in his bathroom. She seemed, actually, to be heading out the door.

  “Dean and Trish have a whirlpool and a shower stall and a tub, all separate,” Enid went on. “The sinks are his-and-hers.”

  “Chip, I’m sorry,” Julia said.

  He raised a hand to put her on hold. “We’re going to have lunch here as soon as Denise comes,” he announced to his parents. “It’s a very simple lunch. Just make yourselves at home.”

  “It was nice to meet you both,” Julia called to Enid and Alfred. To Chip in a lower voice she said, “Denise will be here. You’ll be fine.”

  She opened the door.

  “Mom, Dad,” Chip said, “just one second.”

  He followed Julia out of the apartment and let the door fall shut behind him.

  “This is really unfortunate timing,” he said. “Just really, really unfortunate.”

  Julia shook her hair back off her temples. “I’m feeling good about the fact that it’s the first time in my life I’ve ever acted self-interestedly in a relationship.”

  “That’s nice. That’s a big step.” Chip made an effort to smile. “But what about the script? Is Eden reading it?”

  “I think maybe this weekend sometime.”

  “What about you?”

  “I read, um.” Julia looked away. “Most of it.”

  “My idea,” Chip said, “was to have this ‘hump’ that the moviegoer has to get over. Putting something offputting at the beginning, it’s a classic modernist strategy. There’s a lot of rich suspense toward the end.”

  Julia turned toward the elevator and didn’t reply.

  “Did you get to the end yet?” Chip asked.

  “Oh, Chip,” she burst out miserably, “your script starts off with a six-page lecture about anxieties of the phallus in Tudor drama!”

  He was aware of this. Indeed, for weeks now, he’d been awakening most nights before dawn, his stomach churning and his teeth clenched, and had wrestled with the nightmarish certainty that a long academic monologue on Tudor drama had no place in Act I of a commercial script. Often it took him hours—took getting out of bed, pacing around, drinking Merlot or Pinot Grigio—to regain his conviction that a theory-driven opening monologue was not only not a mistake but the script’s most powerful selling point; and now, with a single glance at Julia, he could see that he was wrong.

  Nodding in heartfelt agreement with her criticism, he opened the door of his apartment and called to his parents, “One second, Mom, Dad. Just one second.” As he shut the door again, however, the old arguments came back to him. “You see, though,” he said, “the entire story is prefigured in that monologue. Every single theme is there in capsule form—gender, power, identity, authenticity—and the thing is … Wait. Julia?”

  Bowing her head sheepishly, as though she’d somehow hoped he wouldn’t notice she was leaving, Julia turned away from the elevator and back toward him.

  “The thing is,” he said, “the girl is sitting in the front row of the classroom listening to the lecture. It’s a crucial image. The fact that he is controlling the discourse—”

  “And it’s a little creepy, though,” Julia said, “the way you keep talking about her breasts.”

  This, too, was true. That it was true, however, seemed unfair and cruel to Chip, who would never have had the heart to write the script at all without the lure of imagining the breasts of his young female lead. “You’re probably right,” he said. “Although some of the physicality there is intentional. Because that’s the irony, see, that she’s attracted to his mind while he’s attracted to her—”

  “But for a woman reading it,” Julia said obstinately, “it’s sort of like the poultry department. Breast, breast, breast, thigh, leg.”

  “I can remove some of those references,” Chip said in a low voice. “I can also shorten the opening lecture. The thing is, though, I want there to be a ‘hump’—”

  “Right, for the moviegoer to get over. That’s a neat idea.”

  “Please come and have lunch. Please. Julia?”

  The elevator door had opened at her touch.

  “I’m saying it’s a tiny bit insulting to a person somehow.”

  “But that’s not you. It’s not even based on you.”

  “Oh, great. It’s somebody else’s breasts.”

  “Jesus. Please. One second.” Chip turned back to his apartment door and opened it, and this time he was startled to find himself face to face with his father. Alfred’s big hands were shaking violently.

  “Dad, hi, just another minute here.”

  “Chip,” Alfred said, “ask her to stay! Tell her we want her to stay!”

  Chip nodded and closed the door in the old man’s face; but in the few seconds his back had been turned the elevator had swallowed Julia. He punched the call button, to no avail, and then opened the fire door and ran down the spiral of the service stairwell. After a series of effulgent lectures celebrating the unfet
tered pursuit of pleasure as a strategy of subverting the bureaucracy of rationalism, BILL QUAINTENCE, an attractive young professor of Textual Artifacts, is seduced by his beautiful and adoring student MONA. Their wildly erotic affair has hardly begun, however, when they are discovered by Bill’s estranged wife, HILLAIRE. In a tense confrontation representing the clash of Therapeutic and Transgressive worldviews, Bill and Hillaire struggle for the soul of young Mona, who lies naked between them on tangled sheets. Hillaire succeeds in seducing Mona with her crypto-repressive rhetoric, and Mona publicly denounces Bill. Bill loses his job but soon discovers e-mail records proving that Hillaire has given Mona money to ruin his career. As Bill is driving to see his lawyer with a diskette containing the incriminating evidence, his car is run off the road into the raging D——River, and the diskette floats free of the sunken car and is home by ceaseless, indomitable currents into the raging, erotic/chaotic open sea, and the crash is ruled vehicular suicide, and in the film’s final scenes Hillaire is hired to replace Bill on the faculty and is seen lecturing on the evils of unfettered pleasure to a classroom in which is seated her diabolical lesbian lover Mona: This was the one-page précis that Chip had assembled with the aid of store-bought screenwriting manuals and had faxed, one winter morning, to a Manhattan-based film producer named Eden Procuro. Five minutes later he’d answered his phone to the cool, blank voice of a young woman saying, “Please hold for Eden Procuro,” followed by Eden Procuro herself crying, “I love it, love it, love it, love it, love it!” But now a year and a half had passed. Now the one-page précis had become a 124–page script called “The Academy Purple,” and now Julia Vrais, the chocolate-haired owner of that cool, blank personal-assistant’s voice, was running away from him, and as he raced downstairs to intercept her, planting his feet sideways to take the steps three and four at a time, grabbing the newel at each landing and reversing his trajectory with a jerk, all he could see or think of was a damning entry in his nearly photographic mental concordance of those 124 pages:

  3: bee-stung lips, high round breasts, narrow hips and

  3: over the cashmere sweater that snugly hugs her breasts

  4: forward raptly, her perfect adolescent breasts eagerly

  8: (eyeing her breasts)

  9: (eyeing her breasts)

  9: (his eyes drawn helplessly to her perfect breasts)

  11: (eyeing her breasts)

  12: (mentally fondling her perfect breasts)

  13: (eyeing her breasts)

  15: (eyeing and eyeing her perfect adolescent breasts)

  23: (clinch, her perfect breasts surging against his

  24: the repressive bra to unfetter her subversive breasts.)

  28: to pinkly tongue one sweat-sheened breast.)

  29: phallically jutting nipple of her sweat-drenched breast

  29: I like your breasts.

  30: absolutely adore your honeyed, heavy breasts.

  33: (hillaire’s breasts, like twin Gestapo bullets, can be

  36: barbed glare as if to puncture and deflate her breasts

  44: Arcadian breasts with stern puritanical terry cloth and

  45: cowering, ashamed, the towel clutched to her breasts.)

  76: her guileless breasts shrouded now in militaristic

  83: I miss your body, I miss your perfect breasts, I

  117: drowned headlights fading like two milk-white breasts

  And there were probably even more! More than he could remember! And the only two readers who mattered now were women! It seemed to Chip that Julia was leaving him because “The Academy Purple” had too many breast references and a draggy opening, and that if he could correct these few obvious problems, both on Julia’s copy of the script and, more important, on the copy he’d specially laser-printed on 24-pound ivory bond paper for Eden Procuro, there might be hope not only for his finances but also for his chances of ever again unfettering and fondling Julia’s own guileless, milk-white breasts. Which by this point in the day, as by late morning of almost every day in recent months, was one of the last activities on earth in which he could still reasonably expect to take solace for his failures.

  Exiting the stairwell into the lobby, he found the elevator waiting to torment its next rider. Through the open street door he saw a taxi extinguish its roof light and pull away. Zoroaster was mopping up inblown water from the lobby’s checkerboard marble. “Goodbye, Mister Chip!” he quipped, by no means for the first time, as Chip ran outside.

  Big raindrops beating on the sidewalk raised a fresh, cold mist of pure humidity. Through the bead-curtain of water coming off the marquee, Chip saw Julia’s cab brake for a yellow light. Directly across the street, another cab had stopped to discharge a passenger, and it occurred to Chip that he could take this other cab and ask the driver to follow Julia. The idea was tempting; but there were difficulties.

  One difficulty was that by chasing Julia he would arguably be committing the worst of the offenses for which the general counsel of D——College, in a shrill, moralistic lawyer’s letter, had once upon a time threatened to counter-sue him or have him prosecuted. The alleged offenses had included fraud, breach of contract, kidnap, Title IX sexual harassment, serving liquor to a student under the legal drinking age, and possession and sale of a controlled substance; but it was the accusation of stalking—of making “obscene” and “threatening” and “abusive” telephone calls and trespassing with intent to violate a young woman’s privacy—that had really scared Chip and scared him still.

  A more immediate difficulty was that he had four dollars in his wallet, less than ten dollars in his checking account, no credit to speak of on any of his major credit cards, and no prospect of further proofreading work until Monday afternoon. Considering that the last time he’d seen Julia, six days ago, she’d specifically complained that he “always” wanted to stay home and eat pasta and “always” be kissing her and having sex (she’d said that sometimes she almost felt like he used sex as a kind of medication, and that maybe the reason he didn’t just go ahead and self-medicate with crack or heroin instead was that sex was free and he was turning into such a cheapskate; she’d said that now that she was taking an actual prescription medication herself she sometimes felt like she was taking it for both of them and that this seemed doubly unfair, because she was the one who paid for the medication and because the medication made her slightly less interested in sex than she used to be; she’d said that, if it were up to Chip, they probably wouldn’t even go to movies anymore but would spend the whole weekend wallowing in bed with the shades down and then reheating pasta), he suspected that the minimum price of further conversation with her would be an overpriced lunch of mesquite-grilled autumn vegetables and a bottle of Sancerre for which he had no conceivable way of paying.

  And so he stood and did nothing as the corner traffic light turned green and Julia’s cab drove out of sight. Rain was lashing the pavement in white, infected-looking drops. Across the street, a long-legged woman in tight jeans and excellent black boots had climbed out of the other cab.

  That this woman was Chip’s little sister, Denise—i.e., was the only attractive young woman on the planet whom he was neither permitted nor inclined to feast his eyes on and imagine having sex with—seemed to him just the latest unfairness in a long morning of unfairnesses.

  Denise was carrying a black umbrella, a cone of flowers, and a pastry box tied with twine. She picked her way through the pools and rapids on the pavement and joined Chip beneath the marquee.

  “Listen,” Chip said with a nervous smile, not looking at her. “I need to ask you a big favor. I need you to hold the fort for me here while I find Eden and get my script back. There’s a major, quick set of corrections I have to make.”

  As if he were a caddie or a servant, Denise handed him her umbrella and brushed water and grit from the ankles of her jeans. Denise had her mother’s dark
hair and pale complexion and her father’s intimidating air of moral authority. She was the one who’d instructed Chip to invite his parents to stop and have lunch in New York today. She’d sounded like the World Bank dictating terms to a Latin debtor state, because, unfortunately, Chip owed her some money. He owed her whatever ten thousand and fifty-five hundred and four thousand and a thousand dollars added up to.

  “See,” he explained, “Eden wants to read the script this afternoon sometime, and financially, obviously, it’s critical that we—”

  “You can’t leave now,” Denise said.

  “It’ll take me an hour,” Chip said. “An hour and a half at most.”

  “Is Julia here?”

  “No, she left. She said hello and left.”

  “You broke up?”

  “I don’t know. She’s gotten herself medicated and I don’t even trust—”