Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

Through the window of the cab he read GAP ATHLETIC as GAL PATHETIC. He read Empire Realty as Vampire Reality .

He was half in love with a person he could never see again. He’d stolen nine dollars from a hardworking woman who enjoyed college football. Even if he went back later and reimbursed her and apologized, he would always be the man who ripped her off when her back was turned. She was gone from his life forever, he could never run his fingers through her hair, and it was not a good sign that this latest loss was making him hyperventilate. That he was too wrecked by pain to swallow more licorice.

He read Cross Pens as Cross Penises , he read ALTERATIONS as ALTERCATIONS.

An optometrist’s window offered: HEADS EXAMINED.

The problem was money and the indignities of life without it. Every stroller, cell phone, Yankees cap, and SUV he saw was a torment. He wasn’t covetous, he wasn’t envious. But without money he was hardly a man.

How he’d changed since D — College fired him! He no longer wanted to live in a different world; he just wanted to be a man with dignity in this world. And maybe Doug was right, maybe the breastsin his script didn’t matter. But he finally understood — he finally got it — that he could simply cut the opening theoretical monologue in its entirety . He could do this correction in ten minutes at Eden’s office.

In front of her building he gave the cabby all nine stolen dollars. Around the corner, a six-trailer crew was filming on a cobbled street, kliegs ablaze, generators stinking in the rain. Chip knew the security codes to Eden’s building, and the elevator was unlocked. He prayed that Eden hadn’t read the script yet. The newly corrected version in his head was the one true script; but the old opening monologue still unhappily existed on the ivory bond paper of the copy Eden had.

Through the glass outer door on the fifth floor he saw lights in Eden’s office. That his socks were soaked and his jacket smelled like a wet cow at the seashore and he had no way to dry his hands or hair was certainly unpleasant, but he was still enjoying not having two pounds of Norwegian salmon in his pants. By comparison, he felt fairly well put together.

He knocked on the glass until Eden emerged from her office and peered out at him. Eden had high cheekbones and big watery blue eyes and thin translucent skin. Any extra calories she ate at lunch in L.A. or drank as martinis in Manhattan got burned on her home treadmill or at her private swim club or in the general madness of being Eden Procuro. She was ordinarily electric and flaming, a bundle of hot copper wire; but her expression now, as she approached the door, was tentative or flustered. She kept looking back at her office.

Chip gestured that he wanted in.

“She’s not here,” Eden said through the glass.

Chip gestured again. Eden opened the door and put her hand on her heart. “Chip, I’m so sorry about you and Julia—”

“I’m looking for my script. Have you read it?”

“I—? Very hastily. I need to read it again. Need to take some notes!” Eden made a scribbling motion near her temple and laughed.

“That opening monologue,” Chip said. “I’ve cut it.”

“Oh, good, I love a willingness to cut. Love it.” She looked back at her office.

“Do you think, though, that without the monologue—”

“Chip, do you need money?”

Eden smiled up at him with such odd merry frankness that he felt as if he’d caught her drunk or with her pants down.

“Well, I’m not flat broke,” he said.

“No, no, of course. But still.”

“Why?”

“And how are you with the Web?” she said. “Do you know any Java? HTML?”

“God, no.”

“Well, just come back to my office for a second. Do you mind? Come on back.”

Chip followed Eden past Julia’s desk, where the only visible Julian artifact was a stuffed toy frog on the computer monitor.

“Now that you two have broken up,” Eden said, “there’s really no reason you can’t—”

“Eden, it’s not a breakup.”

“No, no, trust me, it’s over,” Eden said. “It is absolutely over. And I’m thinking you might enjoy a little change of scenery, so you can start getting over it—”

“Eden, listen, Julia and I are having a momentary—”

“No, Chip, sorry, not momentary: permanent.” Eden laughed again. “Julia may not be blunt, but I am. And so, when I think about it, there’s really no reason for you not to meet …” She led Chip into her office. “Gitanas? Incredible stroke of luck here. I have, here, the perfect man for the job.”

Reclining in a chair by Eden’s desk was a man about Chip’s age in a red ribbed leather jacket and tight white jeans. His face was broad and baby-cheeked, his hair a sculpted blond shell.

Eden was practically climaxing with enthusiasm. “Here I’ve been racking my brain, Gitanas, I can’t think of anyone to help you, and probably the best-qualified man in New York City is knocking at the door! Chip Lambert, you know my assistant Julia?” She winked at Chip. “Well, this is Julia’s husband , Gitanas Misevičius.”

In almost every respect — coloration, shape of head, height and build, and especially the wary, shame-faced smile that he was wearing — Gitanas looked more like Chip than anybody Chip could remember meeting. He was like Chip with bad posture and crooked teeth. He nodded nervously without standing up or extending a hand. “How’s it going,” he said.

It was safe to say, Chip thought, that Julia had a type.

Eden patted the seat of an unoccupied chair. “Sit sit sit,” she told him.

Her daughter, April, was on the leather sofa by the windows with a mess of crayons and a sheaf of paper.

“April, hey,” Chip said. “How were those desserts?”

The question seemed not to April’s liking.

“She’ll try those tonight,” Eden said. “Somebody was testing limits last night.”

“I was not testing limits,” April said.

The paper on April’s lap was ivory-colored and had text on its reverse.

“Sit! Sit!” Eden exhorted as she retreated to her birch-laminate desk. The big window behind her was lensed with rain. There was fog on the Hudson. Blackish smudges suggestive of New Jersey. Eden’s trophies, on the walls, were movie-ad images of Kevin Kline, Chloë Sevigny, Matt Damon, Winona Ryder.

“Chip Lambert,” she told Gitanas, “is a brilliant writer, with a script in development with me right now, and he’s got a Ph.D. in English, and , for the last two years, he’s been working with my husband doing mergers and acquisitions, and he’s brilliant with all the Internet stuff, we were just now talking about Java and HTML, and, as you see, he cuts a very impressive, uh—” Here Eden for the first time actually gave her attention to Chip’s appearance. Her eyes widened. “It must be raining cats and dogs out there. Chip’s not, well, ordinarily quite so wet. (My dear, you are very wet.) In all honesty, Gitanas, you won’t find a better man. And Chip, I’m just — delighted — that you came by. (Although you are very wet.)”

A man by himself could weather Eden’s enthusiasm, but two men together had to gaze at the floor to preserve their dignity in the face of it.

“I, unfortunately,” Eden said, “am slightly pressed for time. Gitanas having dropped in somewhat unexpectedly. What I would love is if the two of you could go and use my conference room and work things out, and take as long as you like.”

Gitanas crossed his arms in the wound-up European style, his fists jammed in his armpits. He didn’t look at Chip but asked him: “Are you an actor?”