The Corrections

of bed before noon. He enjoyed his food and his wine, he dressed well enough to persuade himself that he was not a quivering gelatinous mess, and he managed, on four out of five evenings, to hide the worst of his anxiety and foreboding and enjoy himself with Julia. Because the sum he owed Denise was large in comparison to his proofreading wage but small by Hollywood standards, he worked less and less at Bragg Knuter & Speigh. His only real complaint was with his health. On a summer day when his work session consisted of rereading Act I, being struck afresh by its irredeemable badness, and hurrying outside to get some air, he might walk down Broadway and sit on a bench at Battery Park City and let the breeze off the Hudson flow under his collar, and listen to the ceaseless fut-fut of copter traffic and the distant shouts of millionaire Tribeca toddlers, and be overcome with guilt. To be so vigorous and healthy and yet so nothing : neither taking advantage of his good night’s sleep and his successful avoidance of a cold to get some work done, nor yet fully entering into the vacation spirit and flirting with strangers and knocking back margaritas. It would have been better, he thought, to do his getting sick and dying now, while he was failing, and save his health and vitality for some later date when, unimaginable though the prospect was, he would perhaps no longer be failing. Of all the things he was wasting—Denise’s money, Julia’s goodwill, his own abilities and education, the opportunitiesafforded by the longest sustained economic boom in American history—his sheer physical well-being, there in the sunlight by the river, hurt the worst.
    He ran out of money on a Friday in July. Facing a weekend with Julia, who could cost him fifteen dollars at a cinema refreshments counter, he purged the Marxists from his bookshelves and took them to the Strand in two extremely heavy bags. The books were in their original jackets and had an aggregate list price of $3,900. A buyer at the Strand appraised them casually and delivered his verdict: “Sixty-five.”
    Chip laughed in a breathy way, willing himself not to argue; but his U.K. edition of Jürgen Habermas’s Reason and the Rationalization of Society , which he’d found too difficult to read, let alone annotate, was in mint condition and had cost him £ 95.00. He couldn’t help pointing this out by way of example.
    “Try somewhere else, if you like,” the buyer said, his hand hesitating above the cash register.
    “No, no, you’re right,” Chip said. “Sixty-five is great.”
    It was pathetically obvious that he’d believed his books would fetch him hundreds of dollars. He turned away from their reproachful spines, remembering how each of them had called out in a bookstore with a promise of a radical critique of late-capitalist society, and how happy he’d been to take them home. But Jürgen Habermas didn’t have Julia’s long, cool, pear-tree limbs, Theodor Adorno didn’t have Julia’s grapy smell of lecherous pliability, Fred Jameson didn’t have Julia’s artful tongue. By the beginning of October, when Chip sent his finished script to Eden Procuro, he’d sold his feminists, his formalists, his structuralists, his poststructuralists, his Freudians, and his queers. To raise money for lunch for his parents and Denise, all he had left was his beloved cultural historians and his complete hardcover Arden Shakespeare; and because a kind of magic resided in the Shakespeare—the uniform volumes in theirpale blue jackets were like an archipelago of safe retreats—he piled his Foucault and Greenblatt and Hooks and Poovey into shopping bags and sold them all for $115.
    He spent sixty dollars on a haircut, some candy, a stain-removal kit, and two drinks at the Cedar Tavern. Back in August, when he’d invited his parents, he’d hoped that Eden Procuro might have read his script and advanced him money before they arrived, but now the only accomplishment and the only gift he had to offer was a home-cooked meal. He went to an East Village deli that sold reliably excellent tortellini and crusty bread. He was envisioning a rustic and affordable Italian lunch. But the deli appeared to have gone out of business, and he didn’t feel like walking ten blocks to a bakery that he was certain had good bread, and so he wandered the East Village randomly, trudging in and out of meretricious food stores, hefting cheeses, rejecting breads, examining inferior tortellini.