The Corrections: A Novel (11 page)

“There was a misunderstanding,” he told Denise dully. “And then it was like they could hardly wait to fire me. And now I’m being denied due process.”

“Frankly,” Denise said, “it’s hard to see being fired as a bad thing. Colleges are nasty.”

“This was the one place in the world I thought I fit in.”

“I’m saying it’s very much to your credit that you don’t. Although what are you surviving on, financially?”

“Who said I was surviving?”

“Do you need a loan?”

“Denise, you don’t have any money.”

“Yes I do. I’m also thinking you should talk to my friend Julia. She’s the one in film development. I told her about that idea you had for an East Village
Troilus and Cressida
. She said you should call her if you’re interested in writing.”

Chip shook his head as if Denise were with him in the kitchen and could see him. They’d talked on the phone, months ago, about modernizing some of Shakespeare’s less famous plays, and he couldn’t bear that Denise had taken
that conversation seriously; that she still believed in him.

“What about Dad, though?” she said. “Did you forget it’s his birthday?”

“I lost track of time here.”

“I wouldn’t push you,” Denise said, “except that I was the person who opened your Christmas box.”

“Christmas was a bad scene, no question.”

“Which package went to whom was pretty much guesswork.”

Outside, a wind from the south had picked up, a thawing wind that quickened the patter of snowmelt on the back patio. The sense that Chip had had when the phone rang—that his misery was optional—had left him again.

“So are you going to call him?” Denise said.

He replaced the receiver in its cradle without answering her, turned off the ringer, and pressed his face into the doorframe. He’d solved the problem of family Christmas gifts on the last possible mailing day, when, in a great rush, he’d pulled old bargains and remainders off his bookshelves and wrapped them in aluminum foil and tied them up with red ribbon and refused to imagine how his nine-year-old nephew Caleb, for example, might react to an Oxford annotated edition of
Ivanhoe
whose main qualification as a gift was that it was still in its original shrink-wrap. The corners of the books had immediately poked through the aluminum foil, and the foil he’d added to cover up the holes hadn’t adhered well to the underlying layers, and the result had been a soft and peely kind of effect, like onion skin or phyllo dough, which he’d tried to mitigate by plastering each package with the National Abortion Rights Action League holiday stickers that he’d received in his annual membership kit. His handiwork had looked so clumsy and childish, so mentally unbalanced really, that he tossed the packages into an old grapefruit carton just to get them out of sight. Then he FedExed the carton down to Gary’s house in
Philadelphia. He felt as if he’d taken an enormous dump, as if, no matter how smeary and disagreeable it had been, he at least was emptied out now and would not be back in this position soon. But three days later, returning home late on Christmas night after a twelve-hour vigil at the Dunkin’ Donuts in Norwalk, Connecticut, he faced the problem of opening the gifts his family had sent him: two boxes from St. Jude, a padded mailer from Denise, and a box from Gary. He decided that he would open the packages in bed and that the way he would get them up to his bedroom would be to kick them up the stairs. Which proved to be a challenge, because oblong objects had a tendency not to roll up a staircase but to catch on the steps and tumble back down. Also, if the contents of a padded mailer were too light to offer inertial resistance, it was difficult to get any lift when you kicked it. But Chip had had such a frustrating and demoralizing Christmas—he’d left a message on Melissa’s college voice mail, asking her to call him at the pay phone at the Dunkin’ Donuts or, better yet, to come over in person from her parents’ house in nearby Westport, and not until midnight had exhaustion compelled him to accept that Melissa probably wasn’t going to call him and certainly wasn’t going to come and see him—that he was now psychically capable neither of breaking the rules of the game he’d invented nor of quitting the game before he’d achieved its object. And it was clear to him that the rules permitted only genuine sharp kicks (prohibited, in particular, working his foot under the padded mailer and advancing it with any sort of pushing or lofting motion), and so he was obliged to kick his Christmas package from Denise with escalating savagery until it tore open and spilled its ground-newsprint stuffing and he succeeded in catching its ripped sheathing with the toe of his boot and launching the gift in a long clean arc that landed it one step shy of the second floor. From there, however, the mailer refused to be budged up over the lip of the final step.
Chip trampled and kicked and shredded the mailer with his heels. Inside was a mess of red paper and green silk. He broke his own rule and scraped the mess up over the last step, kicked it down the hall, and left it by his bed while he went down for the other boxes. These, too, he pretty well destroyed before he developed a method of bouncing them off a low step and then, while they were airborne, punting them all the way upstairs. When he punted the box from Gary it exploded in a cloud of white Styrofoam saucers. A bubble-wrapped bottle fell out and rolled down the stairs. It was a bottle of vintage Californian port. Chip carried it up to his bed and worked out a rhythm whereby he swallowed one large mouthful of port for each gift that he succeeded in unwrapping. From his mother, who was under the impression that he still hung a stocking by his fireplace, he’d received a box marked
Stocking Stuffers
containing small individually wrapped items: a package of cough drops, a miniature second-grade school photo of himself in a tarnished brass frame, plastic bottles of shampoo and conditioner and hand lotion from a Hong Kong hotel where Enid and Alfred had stayed en route to China eleven years earlier, and two carved wooden elves with sentimentally exaggerated smiles and loops of silver string that penetrated their little craniums so they could be hung from a tree. For placement under this presumptive tree, Enid had sent a second box of larger gifts wrapped in Santa-faced red paper: an asparagus steamer, three pairs of white Jockey underwear, a jumbo candy cane, and two calico throw pillows. From Gary and his wife, in addition to the port, Chip received a clever vacuum-pump system for preserving leftover wine from oxidation, as if leftover wine were a problem Chip had ever had. From Denise, to whom he’d given
The Selected
Letters of André Gide
after erasing from the flyleaf the evidence that he’d paid one dollar for this particularly tone-deaf translation, he received a beautiful lime-green silk shirt, and
from his father a hundred-dollar check with the handwritten instruction to buy himself something he liked.

Except for the shirt, which he’d worn, and the check, which he’d cashed, and the bottle of port, which he’d killed in bed on Christmas night, the gifts from his family were still on the floor of his bedroom. Stuffing from Denise’s mailer had drifted into the kitchen and mixed with splashed dishwater to form a mud that he’d tracked all over. Flocks of sheep-white Styrofoam pebbles had collected in sheltered places.

It was nearly ten-thirty in the Midwest.

Hello, Dad. Happy seventy-fifth. Things are going well here. How are things in St. Jude?

Chip felt he couldn’t make the call without some kind of pick-me-up or treat. Some kind of energizer. But TV caused him such critical and political anguish that he could no longer watch even cartoons without smoking cigarettes, and he now had a lung-sized region of pain in his chest, and there was no intoxicant of any sort in his house, not even cooking sherry, not even cough syrup, and after the labor of taking his pleasure with the chaise his endorphins had gone home to the four corners of his brain like war-weary troops, so spent by the demands he’d made of them in the last five weeks that nothing, except possibly Melissa in the flesh, could marshal them again. He needed a little morale-booster, a little pick-me-up, but he had nothing better than the month-old
Times
, and he felt that he’d circled quite enough uppercase
M
’s for one day, he could circle no more.

He went to his dining table and confirmed the absence of dregs in the wine bottles on it. He’d used the last $220 of credit on his Visa card to buy eight bottles of a rather tasty Fronsac, and on Saturday night he’d thrown one last dinner party to rally his supporters on the faculty. A few years ago, after D——’s drama department had fired a popular young professor, Cali Lopez, for having claimed to have a degree
she didn’t have, outraged students and junior faculty had organized boycotts and candlelight vigils that had forced the college not only to rehire Lopez but to promote her to full professor. Granted, Chip was neither a lesbian nor a Filipina, as Lopez was, but he’d taught Theory of Feminism, and he had a hundred-percent voting record with the Queer Bloc, and he routinely packed his syllabi with non-Western writers, and all he’d really done in Room 23 of the Comfort Valley Lodge was put into practice certain theories (the myth of authorship; the resistant consumerism of transgressive sexual (trans)act(ion)s) that the college had hired him to teach. Unfortunately, the theories sounded somewhat lame when he wasn’t lecturing to impressionable adolescents. Of the eight colleagues who’d accepted his invitation for dinner on Saturday, only four had shown up. And despite his efforts to steer the conversation around to his predicament, the only collective action his friends had taken on his behalf had been to serenade him, as they killed the eighth bottle of wine, with an a capella rendition of “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.”

He hadn’t had the strength to clear the table in the intervening days. He considered the blackened red leaf lettuce, the skin of congealed grease on an uneaten lamb chop, the mess of corks and ashes. The shame and disorder in his house were like the shame and disorder in his head. Cali Lopez was now the college’s acting provost, Jim Leviton’s replacement.

Tell me about your relationship with your student Melissa
Paquette
.

My former student?

Your former student
.

I’m friendly with her. We’ve had dinner. I spent some time with
her at the beginning of Thanksgiving break. She’s a brilliant student
.

Did you give Melissa any help with a paper she wrote last week
for Vendla O’Fallon?

We talked about the paper in a general way. She had some areas
of confusion that I was able to help her clear up
.

Is your relationship with her sexual?

No
.

Chip, what I think we’ll do is suspend you with pay until we
can have a full hearing. That’s what we’ll do. We’ll have a hearing
early next week, and in the meantime you should probably get a
lawyer and talk to your union rep. I also have to insist that you not
speak to Melissa Paquette
.

What does she say? That I wrote that paper?

Melissa violated the honor code by handing in work that was
not her own. She’s facing a one-semester suspension, but we under
stand that there are mitigating factors. For example, your grossly
inappropriate sexual relationship with her
.

That’s what she says?

My personal advice, Chip, is resign now
.

That’s what she says?

You have no chance
.

The snowmelt was raining down harder on his patio. He lit a cigarette on the front burner of his stove, took two painful drags, and pressed the coal into the palm of his hand. He groaned through clenched teeth and opened his freezer and put his palm to its floor and stood for a minute smelling flesh smoke. Then, holding an ice cube, he went to the phone and dialed the ancient area code, the ancient number.

While the phone rang in St. Jude, he planted a foot on the section of
Times
in his trash and mashed it down deeper, got it out of sight.

“Oh, Chip,” Enid cried, “he’s already gone to bed!”

“Don’t wake him,” Chip said. “Just tell him—”

But Enid set the phone down and shouted
Al! Al!
at volumes that diminished as she moved farther from the phone and up the stairs toward the bedrooms. Chip heard her shout,
It’s Chip!
He heard their upstairs extension click into action. He heard Enid instructing Alfred, “Don’t just say hello and hang up.
Visit
with him a little.”

There was a rustling transfer of the receiver.

“Yes,” Alfred said.

“Hey, Dad, happy birthday,” Chip said.

“Yes,” Alfred said again in exactly the same flat voice.

“I’m sorry to call so late.”

“I was not asleep,” Alfred said.

“I was afraid I woke you up.”

“Yes.”

“Well, so happy seventy-fifth.”

“Yes.”

Chip hoped that Enid was motoring back down to the kitchen as fast as she could, ailing hip and all, to bail him out. “I guess you’re tired and it’s late,” he said. “We don’t have to talk.”

“Thank you for the call,” Alfred said.

Enid was back on the line. “I’m going to finish these dishes,” she said. “We had a party here tonight! Al, tell Chip about the party we had! I’m getting off the phone now.”

She hung up. Chip said, “You had a party.”

“Yes. The Roots were here for dinner and bridge.”

“Did you have a cake?”

“Your mother made a cake.”

The cigarette had made a hole in Chip’s body through which, he felt, painful harms could enter and vital factors painfully escape. Melting ice was leaking through his fingers. “How was the bridge?”

“My typical terrible cards.”

“That doesn’t seem fair on your birthday.”

“I imagine,” Alfred said, “that you are gearing up for another semester.”

“Right. Right. Although actually not. Actually I’m deciding not to teach at all this semester.”

“I didn’t hear.”

Chip raised his voice. “I said I’ve decided not to teach this semester. I’m going to take the semester off and work on my writing.”