The Corrections. Jonathan Franzen

there is intentional. Because that’s the irony, see, that she’s attracted to his mind while he’s attracted to her—”

      “But for a woman reading it,” Julia said obstinately, “it’s sort of like the poultry department. Breast, breast, breast, thigh, leg.”

      “I can remove some of those references,” Chip said in a low voice. “I can also shorten the opening lecture. The thing is, though, I want there to be a ‘hump’—”

      “Right, for the moviegoer to get over. That’s a neat idea.”

      “Please come and have lunch. Please. Julia?”

      The elevator door had opened at her touch.

      “I’m saying it’s a tiny bit insulting to a person somehow.”

      “But that’s not you. It’s not even based on you.”

      “Oh, great. It’s somebody else’s breasts.”

      “Jesus. Please. One second.” Chip turned back to his apartment door and opened it, and this time he was startled to find himself face to face with his father. Alfred’s big hands were shaking violently.

      “Dad, hi, just another minute here.”

      “Chip,” Alfred said, “ask her to stay! Tell her we want her to stay!”

      Chip nodded and closed the door in the old man’s face; but in the few seconds his back had been turned the elevator had swallowed Julia. He punched the call button, to no avail, and then opened the fire door and ran down the spiral of the service stairwell. After a series of effulgent lectures celebrating the unfettered pursuit of pleasure as a strategy of subverting the bureaucracy of rationalism, BILL QUAINTENCE, an attractive young professor of Textual Artifacts, is seduced by his beautiful and adoring student MONA. Their wildly erotic affair has hardly begun, however, when they are discovered by Bill’s estranged wife, HILLAIRE. In a tense confrontation representing the clash of Therapeutic and Transgressive worldviews, Bill and Hillaire struggle for the soul of young Mona, who lies naked between them on tangled sheets. Hillaire succeeds in seducing Mona with her crypto-repressive rhetoric, and Mona publicly denounces Bill. Bill loses his job but soon discovers e-mail records proving that Hillaire has given Mona money to ruin his career. As Bill is driving to see his lawyer with a diskette containing the incriminating evidence, his car is run off the road into the raging D—— River, and the diskette floats free of the sunken car and is borne by ceaseless, indomitable currents into the raging, erotic/chaotic open sea, and the crash is ruled vehicular suicide, and in the film’s final scenes Hillaire is hired to replace Bill on the faculty and is seen lecturing on the evils of unfettered pleasure to a classroom in which is seated her diabolical lesbian lover Mona: This was the one-page précis that Chip had assembled with the aid of store-bought screenwriting manuals and had faxed, one winter morning, to a Manhattan-based film producer named Eden Procuro. Five minutes later he’d answered his phone to the cool, blank voice of a young woman saying, “Please hold for Eden Procuro,” followed by Eden Procuro herself crying, “I love it, love it, love it, love it, love it!” But now a year and a half had passed. Now the one-page précis had become a 124-page script called “The Academy Purple,” and now Julia Vrais, the chocolate-haired owner of that cool, blank personal-assistant’s voice, was running away from him, and as he raced downstairs to intercept her, planting his feet sideways to take the steps three and four at a time, grabbing the newel at each landing and reversing his trajectory with a jerk, all he could see or think of was a damning entry in his nearly photographic mental concordance of those 124 pages:

      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 breasts eagerly

      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 breasts surging 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 breasts with stern puritanical terry cloth and

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

      76: her guileless breasts shrouded 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 countersue 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