The Corrections

failing to find it (meaning that some part of her knew perfectly well that he didn’t write for the paper) but also because the author of articles like “Creative Adultery” and “Let Us Now Praise Scuzzy Motels” was conspiring to preserve, in his mother, precisely the kind of illusion that the Warren Street Journal was dedicated to exploding, and he was thirty-nine years old, and he blamed his parents for the person he had become—he was happy when his mother let the subject drop.
    “His tremor’s much better,” Enid added in a voice inaudible to Alfred. “The only side effect is that he may hallucinate.”
    “That’s quite a side effect,” Chip said.
    “Dr. Hedgpeth says that what he has is very mild and almost completely controllable with medication.”
    Alfred was surveying the baggage-claim cavern while pale travelers angled for position at the carousel. There was a confusion of tread patterns on the linoleum, gray with the pollutants that the rain had brought down. The light was the color of car sickness. “New York City!” Alfred said.
    Enid frowned at Chip’s pants. “Those aren’t leather , are they?”
    “Yes.”
    “How do you wash them?”
    “They’re leather. They’re like a second skin.”
    “We have to be at the pier no later than four o’clock,” Enid said.
    The carousel coughed up some suitcases.
    “Chip, help me,” his father said.
    Soon Chip was staggering out into the wind-blown rain with all four of his parents’ bags. Alfred shuffled forward with the jerking momentum of a man who knew there would be trouble if he had to stop and start again. Enid lagged behind, intent on the pain in her hip. She’d put on weight and maybe lost a little height since Chip had last seen her. She’d always been a pretty woman, but to Chip she was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like.
    “What’s that—wrought iron?” Alfred asked him as the taxi line crept forward.
    “Yes,” Chip said, touching his ear.
    “Looks like an old quarter-inch rivet.”
    “Yes.”
    “What do you do—crimp that? Hammer it?”
    “It’s hammered,” Chip said.
    Alfred winced and gave a low, inhaling whistle.
    “We’re doing a Luxury Fall Color Cruise,” Enid said when the three of them were in a yellow cab, speeding through Queens. “We sail up to Quebec and then we enjoy the changing leaves all the way back down. Dad so enjoyed the last cruise we were on. Didn’t you, Al? Didn’t you have a good time on that cruise?”
    The brick palisades of the East River waterfront were taking an angry beating from the rain. Chip could have wished for a sunny day, a clear view of landmarks and blue water, with nothing to hide. The only colors on the road this morning were the smeared reds of brake lights.
    “This is one of the great cities of the world,” Alfred said with emotion.
    “How are you feeling these days, Dad,” Chip managed to ask.
    “Any better I’d be in heaven, any worse I’d be in hell.”
    “We’re excited about your new job,” Enid said.
    “One of the great papers in the country,” Alfred said. “The Wall Street Journal .”
    “Does anybody smell fish, though?”
    “We’re near the ocean,” Chip said.
    “No, it’s you.” Enid leaned and buried her face in Chip’s leather sleeve. “Your jacket smells strongly of fish.”
    He wrenched free of her. “Mother. Please.”
    Chip’s problem was a loss of confidence. Gone were the days when he could afford to épater les bourgeois . Except for his Manhattan apartment and his handsome girlfriend, Julia Vrais, he now had almost nothing to persuade himself that he was a functioning male adult, no accomplishments to compare with those of his brother, Gary, who was a banker and a father of three, or of his sister, Denise, who at the age of thirty-two was the executive chef at a successful new high-end restaurant in Philadelphia. Chip had hoped he might have sold his screenplay by now, but he hadn’t finished a draft until after midnight on Tuesday, and then he’d had to work three fourteen-hour shifts at Bragg Knuter & Speigh to raise cash to pay his August rent and reassure the owner of his apartment (Chip had a sublease) about his September and October rent, and then there was a lunch to be shopped for and an apartment to be cleaned and, finally, sometime before dawn this morning, a long-hoarded Xanax to be swallowed. Meanwhile, nearly a