The Corrections

mortified by each of the manual liberties he’d taken with Melissa here in Room 23, by the insatiable lewd avidity of his fingers; he wished he could have left her alone ) when the cell phone on the nightstand tinkled and with a groan she came awake.
    He snatched his hand from the forbidden place, ran to the bathroom, and took a long shower. By the time he came out, Melissa was dressed and had repacked her bag. She looked utterly uncarnal in the morning light. She was whistling a happy tune.
    “Darling, a change of plans,” she said. “My father, who really is a lovely man, is coming out to Westport for the day. I want to go be with them.”
    Chip wished he could fail to feel the shame that she was failing to feel; but to beg for another pill was acutely embarrassing. “What about our dinner?” he said.
    “I’m sorry. It’s just really important that I be there.”
    “So it’s not enough to be on the phone with them for a couple of hours every day.”
    “Chip, I’m sorry. But we’re talking about my best friends.”
    Chip had never liked the sound of Tom Paquette: a dilettante rocker and trust-fund baby who ditched his familyfor a roller blader. And in the last few days Clair’s boundless capacity to yak about herself while Melissa listened had turned Chip against her, too.
    “Great,” he said. “I’ll take you to Westport.”
    Melissa flipped her hair so that it fanned across her back. “Darling? Don’t be mad.”
    “If you don’t want to go to the Cape, you don’t want to go to the Cape. I’ll take you to Westport.”
    “Good. Are you going to get dressed?”
    “It’s just that, Melissa, you know, there’s something a little sick about being so close to your parents.”
    She seemed not to have heard him. She went to the mirror and applied mascara. She put on lipstick. Chip stood in the middle of the room with a towel around his waist. He felt warty and egregious. He felt that Melissa was right to be disgusted by him. And yet he wanted to be clear.
    “Do you understand what I’m saying?”
    “Darling. Chip.” She pressed her painted lips together. “Get dressed.”
    “I’m saying, Melissa, that children are not supposed to get along with their parents. Your parents are not supposed to be your best friends. There’s supposed to be some element of rebellion. That’s how you define yourself as a person.”
    “Maybe it’s how you define yourself,” she said. “But then you’re not exactly an advertisement for happy adulthood.”
    He grinned and bore this.
    “I like myself,” she said. “But you don’t seem to like yourself so much.”
    “Your parents seem very fond of themselves, too,” he said. “You seem very fond of yourselves as a family.”
    He’d never seen Melissa really angry. “I love myself,” she said. “What’s wrong with that?”
    He was unable to say what was wrong with it. He was unable to say what was wrong with 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