The Corrections

kept her phone arm free and made supportive filial noises. “Uh-huh … Uh-huh … Sure, sure No, that’s hard, Mom … No, you’re right, that is hard … Sure … Sure … Uh-huh … Sure… That’s really, really hard,” she said, with a twinkle in her voice, as Chip sought leverage for an extra sweet half inch of penetration while he shot. On Monday and Tuesday he dictated large chunks of a term paper on Carol Gilligan which Melissa was too annoyed with Vendla O’Fallon to write by herself. His near-photographic recall of Gilligan’s arguments, his total mastery of theory, got him so excited that he began to tease Melissa’s hair with his erection. He ran the head of it up and down the keyboard of her computer and applied a gleaming smudge to the liquid-crystal screen. “Darling,” she said, “don’t come on my computer.” He nudged her cheeks and ears and tickled her armpits and finally backed her up against the bathroom door while she bathed him in her cherry-red smile.
    Each night around dinnertime, for four nights running, she went to her luggage and got two more golden caplets. Then on Wednesday Chip took her to a cineplex and they sneaked into an extra movie and a half for the price of the original matinee bargain. Back at the Comfort Valley Lodge, after a late pancake dinner, Melissa called her mother and spoke at such length that Chip fell asleep without swallowing a caplet.
    He awoke on Thanksgiving in the gray light of his undrugged self. For a while, as he lay listening to the sparse holiday traffic on Route 2, he couldn’t place what was different. Something about the body beside him was making him uneasy. He considered turning and burying his face in Melissa’s back, but it seemed to him she must be sick of him. He could hardly believe she hadn’t minded his attacks onher, all his pushing and pawing and poking. That she didn’t feel like a piece of meat that he’d been using.
    In a matter of seconds, like a market inundated by a wave of panic selling, he was plunged into shame and self-consciousness. He couldn’t bear to stay in bed a moment longer. He pulled on his shorts and snagged Melissa’s toiletries kit and locked himself in the bathroom.
    His problem consisted of a burning wish not to have done the things he’d done. And his body, its chemists, had a clear instinctive understanding of what he had to do to make this burning wish go away. He had to swallow another Mexican A.
    He searched the toiletries kit exhaustively. He wouldn’t have thought it possible to feel dependent on a drug with no hedonic kick, a drug that on the evening of his fifth and final dose he hadn’t even craved. He uncapped Melissa’s lipsticks and removed twin tampons from their pink plastic holder and probed with a bobby pin down through her jar of skin cleanser. Nothing.
    He took the kit back out to the main room, which was fully light now, and whispered Melissa’s name. Receiving no answer, he dropped to his knees and rifled her canvas travel bag. Paddled his fingers in the empty cups of bras. Squeezed her sock balls. Touched the various private pouches and compartments of the bag. This new and different violation of Melissa was sensationally painful to him. In the orange light of his shame he felt as if he were abusing her internal organs. He felt like a surgeon atrociously fondling her youthful lungs, defiling her kidneys, sticking his finger in her perfect, tender pancreas. The sweetness of her little socks, and the thought of the even littler socks of her all too proximate girlhood, and the image of a hopeful bright romantic sophomore packing clothes for a trip with her esteemed professor—each sentimental association added fuel to his shame, each image recalled him to the unfunny raw comedy of what he’d doneto her. The jismic grunting butt-oink. The jiggling frantic nut-swing.
    By now his shame was boiling so furiously it felt liable to burst things in his brain. Nevertheless, while keeping a close eye on Melissa’s sleeping form, he managed to paw her clothing a second time. Only after he’d resqueezed and rehandled each piece of it did he conclude that the Mexican A was in the big zippered outer pocket of her bag. This zipper he eased open tooth by tooth, clenching his own teeth to survive the noise of it. He’d worked the pocket open just far enough to push his hand through it (and the stress of this latest of his penetrations released fresh gusts of flammable memory; he felt