Jonathan Franzen: The Corrections

3: bee-stung lips, high round breasts, narrow hips and

3: over the cashmere sweater that snugly hugs her breasts

4: forward raptly, her perfect adolescent breastseagerly

8: (eyeing her breasts)

9: (eyeing her breasts)

9: (his eyes drawn helplessly to her perfect breasts)

11: (eyeing her breasts)

12: (mentally fondling her perfect breasts)

13: (eyeing her breasts)

15: (eyeing and eyeing her perfect adolescent breasts)

23: (clinch, her perfect breastssurging against his

24: the repressive bra to unfetter her subversive breasts.)

28: to pinkly tongue one sweat-sheened breast.)

29: phallically jutting nipple of her sweat-drenched breast

29: I like your breasts.

30: absolutely adore your honeyed, heavy breasts.

33: (hillaire’s breasts, like twin Gestapo bullets, can be

36: barbed glare as if to puncture and deflate her breasts

44: Arcadian breastswith stern puritanical terry cloth and

45: cowering, ashamed, the towel clutched to her breasts.)

76: her guileless breastsshrouded now in militaristic

83: I miss your body, I miss your perfect breasts, I

117: drowned headlights fading like two milk-white breasts

And there were probably even more! More than he could remember! And the only two readers who mattered now were women! It seemed to Chip that Julia was leaving him because “The Academy Purple” had too many breast references and a draggy opening, and that if he could correct these few obvious problems, both on Julia’s copy of the script and, more important, on the copy he’d specially laser-printed on 24-pound ivory bond paper for Eden Procuro, there might be hope not only for his finances but also for his chances of ever again unfettering and fondling Julia’s own guileless, milk-white breasts. Which by this point in the day, as by late morning of almost every day in recent months, was one of the last activities on earth in which he could still reasonably expect to take solace for his failures.

Exiting the stairwell into the lobby, he found the elevator waiting to torment its next rider. Through the open street door he saw a taxi extinguish its roof light and pull away. Zoroaster was mopping up inblown water from the lobby’s checkerboard marble. “Goodbye, Mister Chip!” he quipped, by no means for the first time, as Chip ran outside.

Big raindrops beating on the sidewalk raised a fresh, cold mist of pure humidity. Through the bead-curtain of water coming off the marquee, Chip saw Julia’s cab brake for a yellow light. Directly across the street, another cab had stopped to discharge a passenger, and it occurred to Chip that he could take this other cab and ask the driver to follow Julia. The idea was tempting; but there were difficulties.

One difficulty was that by chasing Julia he would arguably be committing the worst of the offenses for which the general counsel of D — College, in a shrill, moralistic lawyer’s letter, had once upon a time threatened to counter-sue him or have him prosecuted. The alleged offenses had included fraud, breach of contract, kidnap, Title IX sexual harassment, serving liquor to a student under the legal drinking age, and possession and sale of a controlled substance; but it was the accusation of stalking —of making “obscene” and “threatening” and “abusive” telephone calls and trespassing with intent to violate a young woman’s privacy — that had really scared Chip and scared him still.

A more immediate difficulty was that he had four dollars in his wallet, less than ten dollars in his checking account, no credit to speak of on any of his major credit cards, and no prospect of further proofreading work until Monday afternoon. Considering that the last time he’d seen Julia, six days ago, she’d specifically complained that he “always” wanted to stay home and eat pasta and “always” be kissing her and having sex (she’d said that sometimes she almost felt like he used sex as a kind of medication, and that maybe the reason he didn’t just go ahead and self-medicate with crack or heroin instead was that sex was free and he was turning into such a cheapskate; she’d said that now that she was taking an actual prescription medication herself she sometimes felt like she was taking it for both of them and that this seemed doubly unfair, because she was the one who paid for the medication and because the medication made her slightly less interested in sex than she used to be; she’d said that, if it were up to Chip, they probably wouldn’t even go to movies anymore but would spend the whole weekend wallowing in bed with the shades down and then reheating pasta), he suspected that the minimum price of further conversation with her would be an overpriced lunch of mesquite-grilled autumn vegetables and a bottle of Sancerre for which he had no conceivable way of paying.

And so he stood and did nothing as the corner traffic light turned green and Julia’s cab drove out of sight. Rain was lashing the pavement in white, infected-looking drops. Across the street, a long-legged woman in tight jeans and excellent black boots had climbed out of the other cab.

That this woman was Chip’s little sister, Denise — i.e., was the only attractive young woman on the planet whom he was neither permitted nor inclined to feast his eyes on and imagine having sex with — seemed to him just the latest unfairness in a long morning of unfairnesses.

Denise was carrying a black umbrella, a cone of flowers, and a pastry box tied with twine. She picked her way through the pools and rapids on the pavement and joined Chip beneath the marquee.

“Listen,” Chip said with a nervous smile, not looking at her. “I need to ask you a big favor. I need you to hold the fort for me here while I find Eden and get my script back. There’s a major, quick set of corrections I have to make.”

As if he were a caddie or a servant, Denise handed him her umbrella and brushed water and grit from the ankles of her jeans. Denise had her mother’s dark hair and pale complexion and her father’s intimidating air of moral authority. She was the one who’d instructed Chip to invite his parents to stop and have lunch in New York today. She’d sounded like the World Bank dictating terms to a Latin debtor state, because, unfortunately, Chip owed her some money. He owed her whatever ten thousand and fifty-five hundred and four thousand and a thousand dollars added up to.

“See,” he explained, “Eden wants to read the script this afternoon sometime, and financially, obviously, it’s critical that we—”

“You can’t leave now,” Denise said.

“It’ll take me an hour,” Chip said. “An hour and a half at most.”

“Is Julia here?”

“No, she left. She said hello and left.”

“You broke up?”

“I don’t know. She’s gotten herself medicated and I don’t even trust—”

“Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Are you wanting to go to Eden’s, or chasing Julia?”

Chip touched the rivet in his left ear. “Ninety percent going to Eden’s.”

“Oh, Chip.”

“No, but listen,” he said, “she’s using the word ‘health’ like it has some kind of absolute timeless meaning.”

“This is Julia?”

“She takes pills for three months, the pills make her unbelievably obtuse, and the obtuseness then defines itself as mental health! It’s like blindness defining itself as vision. ‘Now that I’m blind, I can see there’s nothing to see.’”