The Corrections

close-up photographs of male and female genitalia that were the flower of his art collection, and replaced them with the three diplomas that Enid had long ago insisted on having framed for him.
    This morning, feeling as if he’d surrendered too much of himself, he’d readjusted his presentation by wearing leather to the airport.
    “This room is about the size of Dean Driblett’s bathroom,” Enid said. “Wouldn’t you say, Al?”
    Alfred rotated his bobbing hands and examined their dorsal sides.
    “I’d never seen such an enormous bathroom.”
    “Enid, you have no tact,” Alfred said.
    It might have occurred to Chip that this, too, was a tactless remark, since it implied that his father concurred in his mother’s criticism of the apartment and objected only to her airing of it. But Chip was unable to focus on anything but the hair dryer protruding from Julia’s DreamWorks tote bag. It was the hair dryer that she kept in his bathroom. She seemed, actually, to be heading out the door.
    “Dean and Trish have a whirlpool and a shower stall and a tub, all separate,” Enid went on. “The sinks are his-and-hers.”
    “Chip, I’m sorry,” Julia said.
    He raised a hand to put her on hold. “We’re going to have lunch here as soon as Denise comes,” he announced to his parents. “It’s a very simple lunch. Just make yourselves at home.”
    “It was nice to meet you both,” Julia called to Enid and Alfred. To Chip in a lower voice she said, “Denise will be here. You’ll be fine.”
    She opened the door.
    “Mom, Dad,” Chip said, “just one second.”
    He followed Julia out of the apartment and let the door fall shut behind him.
    “This is really unfortunate timing,” he said. “Just really, really unfortunate.”
    Julia shook her hair back off her temples. “I’m feeling good about the fact that it’s the first time in my life I’ve ever acted self-interestedly in a relationship.”
    “That’s nice. That’s a big step.” Chip made an effort to smile. “But what about the script? Is Eden reading it?”
    “I think maybe this weekend sometime.”
    “What about you?”
    “I read, um.” Julia looked away. “Most of it.”
    “My idea,” Chip said, “was to have this ‘hump’ that the moviegoer has to get over. Putting something offputting at the beginning, it’s a classic modernist strategy. There’s a lot of rich suspense toward the end.”
    Julia turned toward the elevator and didn’t reply.
    “ Did you get to the end yet?” Chip asked.
    “Oh, Chip,” she burst out miserably, “your script starts off with a six-page lecture about anxieties of the phallus in Tudor drama!”
    He was aware of this. Indeed, for weeks now, he’d beenawakening most nights before dawn, his stomach churning and his teeth clenched, and had wrestled with the nightmarish certainty that a long academic monologue on Tudor drama had no place in Act I of a commercial script. Often it took him hours—took getting out of bed, pacing around, drinking Merlot or Pinot Grigio—to regain his conviction that a theory-driven opening monologue was not only not a mistake but the script’s most powerful selling point; and now, with a single glance at Julia, he could see that he was wrong.
    Nodding in heartfelt agreement with her criticism, he opened the door of his apartment and called to his parents, “One second, Mom, Dad. Just one second.” As he shut the door again, however, the old arguments came back to him. “You see, though,” he said, “the entire story is prefigured in that monologue. Every single theme is there in capsule form—gender, power, identity, authenticity—and the thing is … Wait. Julia?”
    Bowing her head sheepishly, as though she’d somehow hoped he wouldn’t notice she was leaving, Julia turned away from the elevator and back toward him.
    “The thing is,” he said, “the girl is sitting in the front row of the classroom listening to the lecture. It’s a crucial image. The fact that he is controlling the discourse—”
    “And it’s a little creepy, though,” Julia said, “the way you keep talking about her breasts.”
    This, too, was true. That it was true, however, seemed unfair and cruel to Chip, who would never have had the heart to write the script at all without the lure of imagining the breasts of his young female lead. “You’re probably right,” he said. “Although some of the physicality there is intentional. Because that’s the irony, see, that she’s