The Corrections

something ominous from the teachers’ retirement fund, also a letter from the college housing office with the words NOTICE OF EVICTION on the front of the envelope.
    Earlier in the day, while killing some hours by circling inblue ballpoint ink every uppercase M in the front section of a month-old New York Times , Chip had concluded that he was behaving like a depressed person. Now, as his telephone began to ring, it occurred to him that a depressed person ought to continue staring at the TV and ignore the ringing—ought to light another cigarette and, with no trace of emotional affect, watch another cartoon while his machine took whoever’s message.
    That his impulse, instead, was to jump to his feet and answer the phone—that he could so casually betray the arduous wasting of a day—cast doubt on the authenticity of his suffering. He felt as if he lacked the ability to lose all volition and connection with reality the way depressed people did in books and movies. It seemed to him, as he silenced the TV and hurried into his kitchen, that he was failing even at the miserable task of falling properly apart.
    He zipped up his pants, turned on a light, and lifted the receiver. “Hello?”
    “What’s going on there, Chip?” Denise said without preliminaries. “I just talked to Dad and he said he hadn’t heard from you.”
    “Denise. Denise. Why are you shouting?”
    “I’m shouting,” she said, “because I’m upset because it’s Dad’s seventy-fifth birthday and you haven’t called him and you didn’t send him a card. I’m upset because I’ve been working for twelve hours and I just called Dad and he’s worried about you. What’s going on there?”
    Chip surprised himself by laughing. “What’s going on is that I’ve lost my job.”
    “You didn’t get tenure?”
    “No, I was fired,” he said. “They didn’t even let me teach the last two weeks of classes. Somebody else had to give my exams. And I can’t appeal the decision without calling a witness. And if I try to talk to my witness it’s just further evidence of my crime.”
    “Who’s the witness? Witness to what?”
    Chip took a bottle from the recycling bin, double-checked its emptiness, and returned it to the bin. “A former student of mine says I’m obsessed with her. She says I had a relationship with her and wrote her a term paper in a motel room. And unless I get a lawyer, which I can’t afford to do because they’ve cut my pay off, I’m not allowed to speak to this student. If I try to see her, it’s considered stalking.”
    “Is she lying?” Denise said.
    “Not that this is anything Mom and Dad need to know about.”
    “Chip, is she lying?”
    Spread open on Chip’s kitchen counter was the section of the Times in which he’d circled all the uppercase M’s . Rediscovering this artifact now, hours later, would have been like remembering a dream except that a remembered dream didn’t have the power to pull a waking person back into it, whereas the sight of a heavily marked story about severe new curtailments in M edicare and M edicaid benefits induced in Chip the same feeling of unease and unrealized lust, the same longing for unconsciousness, that had sent him to the chaise to sniff and grope. He had to struggle now to remind himself that he’d already gone to the chaise, he’d already taken that route to comfort and forgetfulness.
    He folded the Times and dropped it on top of his heaping trash can.
    “‘I never had sexual relations with that woman,’” he said.
    “You know I’m judgmental about a lot of things,” Denise said, “but not about things like this.”
    “I said I didn’t sleep with her.”
    “I’m stressing, though,” Denise said, “that this is one area where absolutely anything you say to me will fall on sympathetic ears.” And she cleared her throat pointedly.
    If Chip had wanted to come clean to someone in his family, his little sister would have been the obvious choice.Having dropped out of college and having married badly, Denise at least had some acquaintance with darkness and disappointment. Nobody but Enid, however, had ever mistaken Denise for a failure. The college she’d dropped out of was better than the one that Chip had graduated from, and her early marriage and more recent divorce had given her an emotional maturity that Chip was all too aware of lacking himself, and he suspected that even though Denise was working eighty hours a week she still managed to read more