The Corrections. Jonathan Franzen

brink of Chapter 11. These were years in America when it was nearly impossible not to make money, years when receptionists wrote MasterCard checks to their brokers at 13.9% APR and still cleared a profit, years of Buy, years of Call, and Chip had missed the boat. In his bones he knew that if he ever did sell “The Academy Purple,” the markets would all have peaked the week before and any money he invested he would lose.

      Judging from Julia’s negative response to his script, the American economy was safe for a while yet.

      Up the street, at the Cedar Tavern, he found a working pay phone. Years seemed to have passed since he’d had two drinks here the night before. He dialed Eden Procuro’s office and hung up when her voice mail kicked in, but the quarter had already dropped. Directory assistance had a residential listing for Doug O’Brien, and Doug actually answered, but he was changing a diaper. Several minutes passed before Chip was able to ask him if Eden had read the script yet.

      “Phenomenal. Phenomenal-sounding project,” Doug said. “I think she had it with her when she went out.”

      “Do you know where she went?”

      “Chip, you know I can’t tell people where she is. You know that.”

      “I think the situation qualifies as urgent.”

      Please deposit—eighty cents—for the next—two minutes—

      “My God, a pay phone,” Doug said. “Is that a pay phone?”

      Chip fed the phone his last two quarters. “I need to get the script back before she reads it. There’s a correction I—”

      “This isn’t about tits, is it? Eden said Julia had a problem with too many tits. I wouldn’t worry about that. Generally there’s no such thing as too many. Julia’s having a really intense week.”

      Please deposit—an additional—thirty cents—now—

      “you what,” Doug said.

      for the next—two minutes—now—

      “most obvious place you—”

      or your call will be terminated—now—

      “Doug?” Chip said. “Doug? I missed that.”

      We’re sorry—

      “Yeah, I’m here. I’m saying, why don’t you—”

      Goodbye, the company voice said, and the phone went dead, the wasted quarters clanking in its gut. The text on its faceplate had Baby Bell coloration, but it read: ORFIC TELECOM, 3 MINUTES 25¢, EACH ADD’L MIN. 40¢.

      The most obvious place to look for Eden was at her office in Tribeca. Chip stepped up to the bar wondering if the new bartender, a streaky blonde who looked like she might front the kind of band that played at proms, remembered him well enough from the night before to take his driver’s license as surety on a twenty-buck loan. She and two unrelated drinkers were watching murky football somewhere, Nittany Lion action, brown squiggling figures in a chalky pond. And near Chip’s arm, oh, not six inches away, was a nest of singles. Just lying there. He considered how a tacit transaction (pocketing the cash, never showing his face in here again, anonymously mailing reimbursement to the woman later) might be safer than asking for a loan: might be, indeed, the transgression that saved his sanity. He crumpled the cash into a ball and moved closer to the really rather pretty bartender, but the struggling brown round-headed men continued to hold her gaze, and so he turned and left the tavern.

      In the back of a cab, watching the wet businesses drift by, he stuffed licorice into his mouth. If he couldn’t get Julia back, he wanted in the worst way to have sex with the bartender. Who looked about thirty-nine herself. He wanted to fill his hands with her smoky hair. He imagined that she lived in a rehabbed tenement on East Fifth, he imagined that she drank a beer at bedtime and slept in faded sleeveless tops and gym shorts, that her posture was weary, her navel unassumingly pierced, her pussy like a seasoned baseball glove, her toenails painted the plainest basic red. He wanted to feel her legs across his back, he wanted to hear the story of her forty-odd years. He wondered if she really might sing rock and roll at weddings and bar mitzvahs.

      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 breasts in 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?”