Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

He snatched his hand from the forbidden place, ran to the bathroom, and took a long shower. By the time he came out, Melissa was dressed and had repacked her bag. She looked utterly uncarnal in the morning light. She was whistling a happy tune.

“Darling, a change of plans,” she said. “My father, who really is a lovely man, is coming out to Westport for the day. I want to go be with them.”

Chip wished he could fail to feel the shame that she was failing to feel; but to beg for another pill was acutely embarrassing. “What about our dinner?” he said.

“I’m sorry. It’s just really important that I be there.”

“So it’s not enough to be on the phone with them for a couple of hours every day.”

“Chip, I’m sorry. But we’re talking about my best friends.”

Chip had never liked the sound of Tom Paquette: a dilettante rocker and trust-fund baby who ditched his family for a roller blader. And in the last few days Clair’s boundless capacity to yak about herself while Melissa listened had turned Chip against her, too.

“Great,” he said. “I’ll take you to Westport.”

Melissa flipped her hair so that it fanned across her back. “Darling? Don’t be mad.”

“If you don’t want to go to the Cape, you don’t want to go to the Cape. I’ll take you to Westport.”

“Good. Are you going to get dressed?”

“It’s just that, Melissa, you know, there’s something a little sick about being so close to your parents.”

She seemed not to have heard him. She went to the mirror and applied mascara. She put on lipstick. Chip stood in the middle of the room with a towel around his waist. He felt warty and egregious. He felt that Melissa was right to be disgusted by him. And yet he wanted to be clear.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Darling. Chip.” She pressed her painted lips together. “Get dressed.”

“I’m saying, Melissa, that children are not supposed to get along with their parents. Your parents are not supposed to be your best friends. There’s supposed to be some element of rebellion. That’s how you define yourself as a person.”

“Maybe it’s how you define yourself,” she said. “But then you’re not exactly an advertisement for happy adulthood.”

He grinned and bore this.

“I like myself,” she said. “But you don’t seem to like yourself so much.”

“Your parents seem very fond of themselves, too,” he said. “You seem very fond of yourselves as a family.”

He’d never seen Melissa really angry. “I love myself,” she said. “What’s wrong with that?”

He was unable to say what was wrong with it. He was unable to say what was wrong with anything about Melissa — her self-adoring parents, her theatricality and confidence, her infatuation with capitalism, her lack of good friends her own age. The feeling he’d had on the last day of Consuming Narratives, the feeling that he was mistaken about everything, that there was nothing wrong with the world and nothing wrong with being happy in it, that the problem was his and his alone, returned with such force that he had to sit down on the bed.

“What’s our drug situation?”

“We’re out,” Melissa said.

“OK.”

“I got six of them and you’ve had five.”

“What?”

“And it was a big mistake, evidently, not to give you all six.”

“What have you been taking?”

“Advil, darling.” Her tone with this endearment had moved beyond the arch to the outright ironic. “For saddle soreness?”

“I never asked you to get that drug,” he said.

“Not in so many words,” she said.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, a fat lot of fun we were going to have without it.”

Chip didn’t ask her to explain. He was afraid she meant he’d been a lousy, anxious lover until he took Mexican A. He had, of course, been a lousy, anxious lover; but he’d allowed himself to hope she hadn’t noticed. Under the weight of this fresh shame, and with no drug left in the room to alleviate it, he bowed his head and pressed his hands into his face. Shame was pushing down and rage was boiling up.

“Are you going to drive me to Westport?” Melissa said.

He nodded, but she must not have been looking at him, because he heard her flipping through a phone book. He heard her tell a dispatcher she needed a ride to New London. He heard her say: “The Comfort Valley Lodge. Room twenty-three.”

“I’ll drive you to Westport,” he said.

She shut the phone. “No, this is fine.”

“Melissa. Cancel the cab. I’ll drive you.”

She parted the room’s rear curtains, exposing a vista of Cyclone fencing, stick-straight maples, and the back side of a recycling plant. Eight or ten snowflakes drifted dismally. In the eastern sky was a raw patch where the cloud cover was abraded, the white sun wearing through. Chip dressed quickly while Melissa’s back was turned. If he hadn’t been so strangely full of shame, he might have gone to the window and put his hands on her, and she might have turned and forgiven him. But his hands felt predatory. He imagined her recoiling, and he wasn’t entirely convinced that some dark percentage of his being didn’t really want to rape her, to make her pay for liking herself in a way he couldn’t like himself. How he hated and how he loved the lilt in her voice, the bounce in her step, the serenity of her amour propre! She got to be her and he didn’t. And he could see that he was ruined — that he didn’t like her but would miss her disastrously.

She dialed another number. “Hey, love,” she said into her cell phone. “I’m on my way to New London. I’ll take the first train that comes … NO I just want to be with you guys … Totally … Yes, totally … OK, kiss kiss, I’ll see you when I see you … Yep.”

A car honked outside the door.

“There’s my cab,” she told her mother. “Right, OK. Kiss kiss. Bye.”

She shrugged into her jacket, lifted her bag, and waltzed across the room. At the door she announced in a general way that she was leaving. “I’ll see you later,” she said, almost looking at Chip.

He couldn’t figure out if she was immensely well adjusted or seriously messed up. He heard a cab door slam, an engine rumble. He went to the front window and got a glimpse of her cherrywood hair through the rear window of a red-and-white cab. He decided, after five years without, that the time had come to buy some cigarettes.

He put on a jacket and crossed expanses of cold asphalt indifferent to pedestrians. He pushed money through a slot in the bulletproof glass of a minimart.

It was the morning of Thanksgiving. The flurries had stopped and the sun was halfway out. A gull’s wings rattled and clacked. The breeze had a ruffly quality, it didn’t quite seem to touch the ground. Chip sat on a freezing guardrail and smoked and took comfort in the sturdy mediocrity of American commerce, the unpretending metal and plastic roadside hardware. The thunk of a gas-pump nozzle halting when a tank was filled, the humility and promptness of its service. And a 99¢ Big Gulp banner swelling with wind and sailing nowhere, its nylon ropes whipping and pinging on a galvanized standard. And the black sanserif numerals of gasoline prices, the company of so many 9s. And American sedans moving down the access road at nearly stationary speeds like thirty. And orange and yellow plastic pennants shivering overhead on guys.

“Dad fell down the basement stairs again,” Enid said while the rain came down in New York City. “He was carrying a big box of pecans to the basement and he didn’t hold the railing and he fell. Well, you can imagine how many pecans are in a twelve-pound box. Those nuts rolled everywhere. Denise, I spent half a day on my hands and knees. And I’m still finding them. They’re the same color as those crickets we can’t get rid of. I reach down to pick up a pecan, and it jumps in my face!”