Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

He was at home on a Friday in September, making himself a dinner of broccoli rabe and acorn squash and fresh haddock and looking forward to a night of grading papers, when a pair of legs sashayed past his kitchen window. He knew this sashay. He knew the way Melissa walked. She couldn’t pass a picket fence without trailing her fingertips against it. She stopped in hallways to do dance steps or hopscotch. She went backwards or sideways, or skipped, or loped.

Her knock on his screen door was not apologetic. Through the screen he saw that she had a plate of cupcakes with pink frosting.

“Yeah, what’s up?” he said.

Melissa raised the plate on upturned palms. “Cupcakes,” she said. “Thought you might be needing some cupcakes in your life right around now.”

Not being theatrical, Chip felt disadvantaged around people who were. “Why are you bringing me cupcakes?” he said.

Melissa knelt and set the plate on his doormat among the pulverized remains of ivy and dead tulips. “I’ll just leave them here,” she said, “and you can do whatever you want with them. Goodbye!” She spread her arms and pirouetted off the doorstep and ran up the flagstone path on tiptoe.

Chip went back to wrestling with the haddock filet, through the center of which ran a blood-brown fault of gristle that he was determined to cut out. But the fish had a starchy grain and was hard to get a grip on. “Fuck you, little girl,” he said as he threw the knife into the sink.

The cupcakes were full of butter and frosted with a butter frosting. After he’d washed his hands and opened a bottle of Chardonnay he ate four of them and put the uncooked fish in the refrigerator. The skins of the overbaked squash were like inner-tube rubber. Cent Ans de Cinéma Erotique , an edifying video that had sat on a shelf for months without making a peep, suddenly demanded his immediate and full attention. He lowered the blinds and drank the wine, and brought himself off again and again, and ate two more cupcakes, detecting peppermint in them, a faint buttery peppermint, before he slept.

The next morning he was up at seven and did four hundred crunches. He immersed Cent Ans de Cinéma Erotique in dishwater and rendered it, so to speak, non-combustible. (He’d done this with many a pack of cigarettes while kicking the habit.) He had no idea what he’d meant when he’d thrown the knife into the sink. His voice had sounded nothing like him.

He went to his office in Wroth Hall and graded papers. He wrote in a margin: Cressida’s character may inform Toyota’s choice of product name; that Toyota’s Cressida informs the Shakespearean text requires more argument than you present here . He added an exclamation point to soften his criticism. Sometimes, when ripping apart especially feeble student work, he drew smiley faces.

Spell-check! he exhorted a student who’d written “Trolius” for “Troilus” throughout her eight-page paper.

And the ever-softening question mark. Beside the sentence “Here Shakespeare proves Foucault all too right about the historicity of morals,” Chip wrote: Rephrase? Perhaps: “ Here the Shakespearean text seems almost to anticipate Foucault (better: Nietzsche?) …”?

He was still grading papers five weeks later, ten or fifteen thousand student errors later, on a windy night just after Halloween, when he heard a scrabbling outside his office door. Opening the door, he found a dime-store trick-or-treat bag hanging from the hall-side doorknob. The leaver of this gift, Melissa Paquette, was backpedaling up the hall.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“Just trying to be friends,” she said.

“Well, thanks,” he said. “I don’t get it.”

Melissa came back down the hall. She was wearing white painter’s overalls, a long-sleeve thermal undershirt, and hot-pink socks. “I went trick-or-treating,” she said. “This was like one-fifth of my haul.”

She stepped closer to Chip and he backed away. She followed him into his office and circled it on tiptoe, reading titles on his shelves. Chip leaned against his desk and folded his arms tightly.

“So I’m taking Theory of Feminism with Vendla,” Melissa said.

“That would be the logical next step. Now that you’ve rejected the nostalgic patriarchal tradition of critical theory.”

“Exactly my thinking,” Melissa said. “Unfortunately, her class is so bad . People who took it with you last year said it was great. But Vendla’s idea is that we should sit around and talk about our feelings. Because the Old Theory was about the head, see. And therefore the New True Theory has to be about the heart. I’m not convinced she’s even read all the stuff she assigns us.”

Through his open door Chip could see the door of Vendla O’Fallon’s office. It was papered with healthful images and adages — Betty Friedan in 1965, beaming Guatemalan peasant women, a triumphant female soccer star, a Bass Ale poster of Virginia Woolf, SUBVERT THE DOMINANT PARADIGM — that reminded him, in a dreary way, of his old girlfriend Tori Timmelman. His feeling about decorating doors was: What are we, high-school kids? Are these our bedrooms?

“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.”