The Corrections

books than he did. In the last month, since he’d embarked on projects like digitally scanning Melissa Paquette’s face from a freshman facebook and suturing her head to obscene downloaded images and tinkering with these images pixel by pixel (and the hours did fly by when you were tinkering with pixels), he’d read no books at all.
    “There was a misunderstanding,” he told Denise dully. “And then it was like they could hardly wait to fire me. And now I’m being denied due process.”
    “Frankly,” Denise said, “it’s hard to see being fired as a bad thing. Colleges are nasty.”
    “This was the one place in the world I thought I fit in.”
    “I’m saying it’s very much to your credit that you don’t. Although what are you surviving on, financially?”
    “Who said I was surviving?”
    “Do you need a loan?”
    “Denise, you don’t have any money.”
    “Yes I do. I’m also thinking you should talk to my friend Julia. She’s the one in film development. I told her about that idea you had for an East Village Troilus and Cressida . She said you should call her if you’re interested in writing.”
    Chip shook his head as if Denise were with him in the kitchen and could see him. They’d talked on the phone, months ago, about modernizing some of Shakespeare’s less famous plays, and he couldn’t bear that Denise had takenthat conversation seriously; that she still believed in him.
    “What about Dad, though?” she said. “Did you forget it’s his birthday?”
    “I lost track of time here.”
    “I wouldn’t push you,” Denise said, “except that I was the person who opened your Christmas box.”
    “Christmas was a bad scene, no question.”
    “Which package went to whom was pretty much guesswork.”
    Outside, a wind from the south had picked up, a thawing wind that quickened the patter of snowmelt on the back patio. The sense that Chip had had when the phone rang—that his misery was optional—had left him again.
    “So are you going to call him?” Denise said.
    He replaced the receiver in its cradle without answering her, turned off the ringer, and pressed his face into the doorframe. He’d solved the problem of family Christmas gifts on the last possible mailing day, when, in a great rush, he’d pulled old bargains and remainders off his bookshelves and wrapped them in aluminum foil and tied them up with red ribbon and refused to imagine how his nine-year-old nephew Caleb, for example, might react to an Oxford annotated edition of Ivanhoe whose main qualification as a gift was that it was still in its original shrink-wrap. The corners of the books had immediately poked through the aluminum foil, and the foil he’d added to cover up the holes hadn’t adhered well to the underlying layers, and the result had been a soft and peely kind of effect, like onion skin or phyllo dough, which he’d tried to mitigate by plastering each package with the National Abortion Rights Action League holiday stickers that he’d received in his annual membership kit. His handiwork had looked so clumsy and childish, so mentally unbalanced really, that he tossed the packages into an old grapefruit carton just to get them out of sight. Then he FedExed the carton down to Gary’s house inPhiladelphia. He felt as if he’d taken an enormous dump, as if, no matter how smeary and disagreeable it had been, he at least was emptied out now and would not be back in this position soon. But three days later, returning home late on Christmas night after a twelve-hour vigil at the Dunkin’ Donuts in Norwalk, Connecticut, he faced the problem of opening the gifts his family had sent him: two boxes from St. Jude, a padded mailer from Denise, and a box from Gary. He decided that he would open the packages in bed and that the way he would get them up to his bedroom would be to kick them up the stairs. Which proved to be a challenge, because oblong objects had a tendency not to roll up a staircase but to catch on the steps and tumble back down. Also, if the contents of a padded mailer were too light to offer inertial resistance, it was difficult to get any lift when you kicked it. But Chip had had such a frustrating and demoralizing Christmas—he’d left a message on Melissa’s college voice mail, asking her to call him at the pay phone at the Dunkin’ Donuts or, better yet, to come over in person from her parents’ house in nearby Westport, and not until midnight had exhaustion compelled him to accept that