The Corrections: A Novel (12 page)

“My recollection is that you are due for tenure soon.”

“Right. In April.”

“It seems to me that a person hoping to be offered tenure would be advised to stay and teach.”

“Right.”

“If they see you working hard, they will have no reason not to offer you tenure.”

“Right. Right.” Chip nodded. “At the same time, I have to prepare for the possibility that I won’t get it. And I’ve got a, uh. A very attractive offer from a Hollywood producer. A college friend of Denise’s who produces movies. Potentially very lucrative.”

“A great worker is almost impossible to fire,” Alfred said.

“The process can get very political, though. I have to have alternatives.”

“As you wish,” Alfred said. “However, I’ve found that it’s usually best to choose one plan and stick with it. If you don’t succeed here, you can always do something else. But you’ve worked many years to reach this point. One more semester’s hard work won’t hurt you.”

“Right.”

“You can relax when you have tenure. Then you’re safe.”

“Right.”

“Well, thank you for the call.”

“Right. Happy birthday, Dad.”

Chip dropped the phone, left the kitchen, and took a Fronsac bottle by the neck and brought its body down hard on the edge of his dining table. He broke a second bottle. The remaining six he smashed two at a time, a neck in each fist.

Anger carried him through the difficult weeks that followed. He borrowed ten thousand dollars from Denise and hired a lawyer to threaten to sue D——College for wrongful termination of his contract. This was a waste of money,
but it felt good. He went to New York and ponied up four thousand dollars in fees and deposits for a sublet on Ninth Street. He bought leather clothes and had his ears pierced. He borrowed more money from Denise and reconnected with a college friend who edited the
Warren Street Journal
. He conceived revenge in the form of a screenplay that would expose the narcissism and treachery of Melissa Paquette and the hypocrisy of his colleagues; he wanted the people who’d hurt him to see the movie, recognize themselves, and suffer. He flirted with Julia Vrais and asked her on a date, and soon he was spending two or three hundred dollars a week to feed and entertain her. He borrowed more money from Denise. He hung cigarettes on his lower lip and banged out a draft of a script. Julia in the back seat of cabs pressed her face against his chest and clutched his collar. He tipped waiters and cabbies thirty and forty percent. He quoted Shakespeare and Byron in funny contexts. He borrowed more money from Denise and decided that she was right, that getting fired was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

He wasn’t so naïve, of course, as to take Eden Procuro’s professional effusions at face value. But the more he saw of Eden socially, the more confident he became that his script would get a sympathetic reading. For one thing, Eden was like a mother to Julia. She was only five years older, but she’d undertaken a wholesale recalibration and improvement of her personal assistant. Although Chip never quite shook the feeling that Eden was hoping to cast someone else in the role of Julia’s love interest (she habitually referred to Chip as Julia’s “escort,” not her “boyfriend,” and when she talked about Julia’s “untapped potential” and her “lack of confidence” he suspected that mate selection was one area in which she hoped to see improvement in Julia), Julia assured him that Eden thought he was “really dear” and “extremely smart.” Certainly Eden’s husband, Doug O’Brien, was on his side. Doug was a mergers-and-acquisitions specialist at Bragg
Knuter & Speigh. He’d set Chip up with a flextime proofreading job and had seen to it that Chip was paid the top hourly wage. Whenever Chip tried to thank him for this favor, Doug made pshawing motions with his hand. “You’re the man with the Ph.D.,” he said. “That book of yours is scary smart stuff.” Chip had soon become a frequent guest at the O’Brien-Procuros’ dinner parties in Tribeca and their weekend house parties in Quogue. Drinking their liquor and eating their catered food, he had a foretaste of a success a hundred times sweeter than tenure. He felt that he was really living.

Then one night Julia sat him down and said there was an important fact that she hadn’t mentioned earlier, and would he promise not to be too mad at her? The important fact was that she sort of had a husband. The deputy prime minister of Lithuania—a small Baltic country—was a man named Gitanas Misevičius? Well, the fact was that Julia had married him a couple of years ago, and she hoped Chip wouldn’t be too mad at her.

Her problem with men, she said, was that she’d grown up without. Her father was a manic-depressive boat salesman whom she remembered meeting once and wished she’d never met at all. Her mother, a cosmetics-company executive, had fobbed Julia off on her own mother, who’d enrolled her in a Catholic girls’ school. Julia’s first significant experience with men was at college. Then she moved to New York and embarked on the long process of sleeping with every dishonest, casually sadistic, terminally uncommitted really gorgeous guy in the borough of Manhattan. By the age of twenty-eight, she had little to feel good about except her looks, her apartment, and her steady job (which mainly consisted, however, of answering the phone). So when she met Gitanas at a club and Gitanas took her seriously, and by and by produced an actual not-small diamond in a white-gold setting, and seemed to love her (and the guy was, after all, an
honest-to-God ambassador to the United Nations; she’d gone and heard him do his Baltic thundering at the General Assembly), she did her level best to repay his kindness. She was As Agreeable As Humanly Possible. She refused to disappoint Gitanas even though, in hindsight, it probably would have been better to disappoint him. Gitanas was quite a bit older and fairly attentive in bed (not like Chip, Julia hastened to say, but not, you know, terrible), and he seemed to know what he was doing with the marriage thing, and so one day she went to City Hall with him. She might even have gone by “Mrs. Misevičius” if it had sounded less idiotic. Once she was married, she realized that the marble floors and black lacquer furniture and heavy modern smoked-glass fixtures of the ambassador’s apartment on the East River weren’t as entertainingly campy as she’d thought. They were more like unbearably depressing. She made Gitanas sell the place (the chief of the Paraguayan delegation was delighted to get it) and buy a smaller, nicer place on Hudson Street near some good clubs. She found a competent hairstylist for Gitanas and taught him how to pick out clothes with natural fibers. Things seemed to be going great. But somewhere she and Gitanas must have misunderstood each other, because when his party (the VIPPPAKJRIINPB17: the One True Party Unswervingly Dedicated to the Revanchist Ideals of Kazimieras Jaramaitis and the “Independent” Plebiscite of April Seventeen) lost a September election and recalled him to Vilnius to join the parliamentary opposition, he took it for granted that Julia would come along with him. And Julia understood the concept of one flesh, wife cleaving to husband, and so forth; but Gitanas in his descriptions of post-Soviet Vilnius had painted a picture of chronic coal and electricity shortages, freezing drizzles, drive-by shootings, and heavy dietary reliance on horsemeat. And so she did a really terrible thing to Gitanas, definitely the worst thing she’d ever done to anybody. She agreed to go and live in
Vilnius, and she sort of got on the plane with Gitanas and sat down in first class and then sneaked off the plane and sort of changed their home phone number and had Eden tell Gitanas, when he called, that she had disappeared. Six months later Gitanas returned to New York for a weekend and made Julia feel really, really guilty. And, yes, no argument, she’d disgraced herself. But Gitanas proceeded to call her certain rough names and he slapped her pretty hard. The upshot of which was that they couldn’t be together anymore, but she continued to use their apartment on Hudson Street in exchange for staying married in case Gitanas needed quick asylum in the United States, because apparently things were going from bad to worse in Lithuania.

Anyway, that was the story of her and Gitanas, and she hoped that Chip wouldn’t be too mad at her.

And Chip was not. Indeed, at first he not only didn’t mind that Julia was married, he adored the fact. He was fascinated by her rings; he talked her into wearing them in bed. Down at the offices of the
Warren Street Journal
, where he sometimes felt insufficiently transgressive, as if his innermost self were still a nice midwestern boy, he took pleasure in alluding to the European statesman he was “cuckolding.” In his doctoral thesis (“Doubtful It Stood: Anxieties of the Phallus in Tudor Drama”) he’d written extensively about cuckolds, and under the cloak of his reproving modern scholarship he’d been excited by the idea of marriage as a property right, of adultery as theft.

Before long, though, the thrill of poaching on the diplomat’s preserve gave way to bourgeois fantasies in which Chip himself was Julia’s husband—her lord, her liege. He became spasmodically jealous of Gitanas Misevičius, who, though Lithuanian, and a slapper, was a successful politician whose name Julia now pronounced with guilt and wistful-ness. On New Year’s Eve Chip asked her point-blank if she ever thought about divorce. She replied that she liked her
apartment (“Can’t beat the rent!”) and she didn’t want to look for another one right now.

After New Year’s, Chip returned to his rough draft of “The Academy Purple,” which he’d completed in a euphoric twenty-page blaze of keyboard-pounding, and discovered that it had a lot of problems. It looked, in fact, like incoherent hackwork. During the month that he’d spent expensively celebrating its completion, he’d imagined that he could remove certain hackneyed plot elements—the conspiracy, the car crash, the evil lesbians—and still tell a good story. Without these hackneyed plot elements, however, he seemed to have no story at all.

In order to salvage his artistic and intellectual ambitions, he added a long theoretical opening monologue. But this monologue was so unreadable that every time he turned on his computer he had to go and tinker with it. Soon he was spending the bulk of each work session compulsively honing the monologue. And when he despaired of shortening it any further without sacrificing important thematic material, he started fussing with the margins and hyphenation to make the monologue end at the bottom of page 6 rather than the top of page 7. He replaced the word “continue” with “go on” to save three spaces, thus allowing the word “(trans) act(ion)s” to be hyphenated after the second
t
, which triggered a whole cascade of longer lines and more efficient hyphenations. Then he decided that “go on” had the wrong rhythm and that “(trans)act(ion)s” should not be hyphenated under any circumstances, and so he scoured the text for other longish words to replace with shorter synonyms, all the while struggling to believe that stars and producers in Prada jackets would enjoy reading six pages (but not seven!) of turgid academic theorizing.

Once, when he was a boy, there was a total eclipse of the sun in the Midwest, and a girl in one of the poky towns across the river from St. Jude had sat outside and, in defiance
of myriad warnings, studied the dwindling crescent of the sun until her retinas combusted.

“It didn’t hurt at all,” the blinded girl had told the
St. Jude
Chronicle
. “It felt like nothing.”

Each day that Chip spent grooming the corpse of a dramatically dead monologue was a day in which his rent and food and entertainment expenses were paid for, in large part, with his little sister’s money. And yet as long as the money lasted, his pain was not acute. One day led to another. He rarely got out of bed before noon. He enjoyed his food and his wine, he dressed well enough to persuade himself that he was not a quivering gelatinous mess, and he managed, on four out of five evenings, to hide the worst of his anxiety and foreboding and enjoy himself with Julia. Because the sum he owed Denise was large in comparison to his proofreading wage but small by Hollywood standards, he worked less and less at Bragg Knuter & Speigh. His only real complaint was with his health. On a summer day when his work session consisted of rereading Act I, being struck afresh by its irredeemable badness, and hurrying outside to get some air, he might walk down Broadway and sit on a bench at Battery Park City and let the breeze off the Hudson flow under his collar, and listen to the ceaseless fut-fut of copter traffic and the distant shouts of millionaire Tribeca toddlers, and be overcome with guilt. To be so vigorous and healthy and yet so
nothing
: neither taking advantage of his good night’s sleep and his successful avoidance of a cold to get some work done, nor yet fully entering into the vacation spirit and flirting with strangers and knocking back margaritas. It would have been better, he thought, to do his getting sick and dying now, while he was failing, and save his health and vitality for some later date when, unimaginable though the prospect was, he would perhaps no longer be failing. Of all the things he was wasting—Denise’s money, Julia’s goodwill, his own abilities and education, the opportunities
afforded by the longest sustained economic boom in American history—his sheer physical well-being, there in the sunlight by the river, hurt the worst.

He ran out of money on a Friday in July. Facing a weekend with Julia, who could cost him fifteen dollars at a cinema refreshments counter, he purged the Marxists from his bookshelves and took them to the Strand in two extremely heavy bags. The books were in their original jackets and had an aggregate list price of $3,900. A buyer at the Strand appraised them casually and delivered his verdict: “Sixty-five.”

Chip laughed in a breathy way, willing himself not to argue; but his U.K. edition of Jürgen Habermas’s
Reason and
the Rationalization of Society
, which he’d found too difficult to read, let alone annotate, was in mint condition and had cost him
£
95.00. He couldn’t help pointing this out by way of example.

“Try somewhere else, if you like,” the buyer said, his hand hesitating above the cash register.

“No, no, you’re right,” Chip said. “Sixty-five is great.”