The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen Page B

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 ofher 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