The Corrections

recover his self-discipline. He weaned himself off alcohol, got better sleep, drank less coffee, and went to the college gym twice a week. He read the damned Heidegger and did his crunches every morning. Other pieces of the self-improvement puzzle fell into place, and for a while, as cool working weather returned to the Carparts Creek valley, he experienced an almost Thoreauvian well-being. Between sets on the tennis court, Jim Leviton assured him that his tenure review would be a mere formality—that he shouldn’t worry about competing with the department’s other young theorist, Vendla O’Fallon. Chip’s fall course load consisted of Renaissance Poetry and Shakespeare, neither of which required him to rethink his critical perspectives. As he girded himself for the last stage of his ascent of Mount Tenure, he was relieved to be traveling light; almost happy, after all, not to have a woman in his life.
    He was at home on a Friday in September, making himself a dinner of broccoli rabe and acorn squash and fresh haddock and looking forward to a night of grading papers, when a pair of legs sashayed past his kitchen window. He knew this sashay. He knew the way Melissa walked. She couldn’t pass a picket fence without trailing her fingertipsagainst it. She stopped in hallways to do dance steps or hopscotch. She went backwards or sideways, or skipped, or loped.
    Her knock on his screen door was not apologetic. Through the screen he saw that she had a plate of cupcakes with pink frosting.
    “Yeah, what’s up?” he said.
    Melissa raised the plate on upturned palms. “Cupcakes,” she said. “Thought you might be needing some cupcakes in your life right around now.”
    Not being theatrical, Chip felt disadvantaged around people who were. “Why are you bringing me cupcakes?” he said.
    Melissa knelt and set the plate on his doormat among the pulverized remains of ivy and dead tulips. “I’ll just leave them here,” she said, “and you can do whatever you want with them. Goodbye!” She spread her arms and pirouetted off the doorstep and ran up the flagstone path on tiptoe.
    Chip went back to wrestling with the haddock filet, through the center of which ran a blood-brown fault of gristle that he was determined to cut out. But the fish had a starchy grain and was hard to get a grip on. “Fuck you, little girl,” he said as he threw the knife into the sink.
    The cupcakes were full of butter and frosted with a butter frosting. After he’d washed his hands and opened a bottle of Chardonnay he ate four of them and put the uncooked fish in the refrigerator. The skins of the overbaked squash were like inner-tube rubber. Cent Ans de Cinéma Erotique , an edifying video that had sat on a shelf for months without making a peep, suddenly demanded his immediate and full attention. He lowered the blinds and drank the wine, and brought himself off again and again, and ate two more cupcakes, detecting peppermint in them, a faint buttery peppermint, before he slept.
    The next morning he was up at seven and did fourhundred crunches. He immersed Cent Ans de Cinéma Erotique in dishwater and rendered it, so to speak, non-combustible. (He’d done this with many a pack of cigarettes while kicking the habit.) He had no idea what he’d meant when he’d thrown the knife into the sink. His voice had sounded nothing like him.
    He went to his office in Wroth Hall and graded papers. He wrote in a margin: Cressida’s character may inform Toyota’s choice of product name; that Toyota’s Cressida informs the Shake spearean text requires more argument than you present here . He added an exclamation point to soften his criticism. Sometimes, when ripping apart especially feeble student work, he drew smiley faces.
    Spell-check! he exhorted a student who’d written “Trolius” for “Troilus” throughout her eight-page paper.
    And the ever-softening question mark. Beside the sentence “Here Shakespeare proves Foucault all too right about the historicity of morals,” Chip wrote: Rephrase? Perhaps: “ Here the Shakespearean text seems almost to anticipate Foucault (better: Nietzsche?) …”?
    He was still grading papers five weeks later, ten or fifteen thousand student errors later, on a windy night just after Halloween, when he heard a scrabbling outside his office door. Opening the door, he found a dime-store trick-or-treat bag hanging from the hall-side doorknob. The leaver of this gift, Melissa Paquette, was backpedaling up the