The Corrections. Jonathan Franzen
what I think we’ll do is suspend you with pay until we can have a full hearing. That’s what we’ll do. We’ll have a hearing early next week, and in the meantime you should probably get a lawyer and talk to your union rep. I also have to insist that you not speak to Melissa Paquette.
What does she say? That I wrote that paper?
Melissa violated the honor code by handing in work that was not her own. She’s facing a one-semester suspension, but we understand that there are mitigating factors. For example, your grossly inappropriate sexual relationship with her.
That’s what she says?
My personal advice, Chip, is resign now.
That’s what she says?
You have no chance.
The snowmelt was raining down harder on his patio. He lit a cigarette on the front burner of his stove, took two painful drags, and pressed the coal into the palm of his hand. He groaned through clenched teeth and opened his freezer and put his palm to its floor and stood for a minute smelling flesh smoke. Then, holding an ice cube, he went to the phone and dialed the ancient area code, the ancient number.
While the phone rang in St. Jude, he planted a foot on the section of Times in his trash and mashed it down deeper, got it out of sight.
“Oh, Chip,” Enid cried, “he’s already gone to bed!”
“Don’t wake him,” Chip said. “Just tell him—”
But Enid set the phone down and shouted Al! Al! at volumes that diminished as she moved farther from the phone and up the stairs toward the bedrooms. Chip heard her shout, It’s Chip! He heard their upstairs extension click into action. He heard Enid instructing Alfred, “Don’t just say hello and hang up. Visit with him a little.”
There was a rustling transfer of the receiver.
“Yes,” Alfred said.
“Hey, Dad, happy birthday,” Chip said.
“Yes,” Alfred said again in exactly the same flat voice.
“I’m sorry to call so late.”
“I was not asleep,” Alfred said.
“I was afraid I woke you up.”
“Yes.”
“Well, so happy seventy-fifth.”
“Yes.”
Chip hoped that Enid was motoring back down to the kitchen as fast as she could, ailing hip and all, to bail him out. “I guess you’re tired and it’s late,” he said. “We don’t have to talk.”
“Thank you for the call,” Alfred said.
Enid was back on the line. “I’m going to finish these dishes,” she said. “We had a party here tonight! Al, tell Chip about the party we had! I’m getting off the phone now.”
She hung up. Chip said, “You had a party.”
“Yes. The Roots were here for dinner and bridge.”
“Did you have a cake?”
“Your mother made a cake.”
The cigarette had made a hole in Chip’s body through which, he felt, painful harms could enter and vital factors painfully escape. Melting ice was leaking through his fingers. “How was the bridge?”
“My typical terrible cards.”
“That doesn’t seem fair on your birthday.”
“I imagine,” Alfred said, “that you are gearing up for another semester.”
“Right. Right. Although actually not. Actually I’m deciding not to teach at all this semester.”
“I didn’t hear.”
Chip raised his voice. “I said I’ve decided not to teach this semester. I’m going to take the semester off and work on my writing.”
“My recollection is that you are due for tenure soon.”
“Right. In April.”
“It seems to me that a person hoping to be offered tenure would be advised to stay and teach.”
“Right.”
“If they see you working hard, they will have no reason not to offer you tenure.”
“Right. Right.” Chip nodded. “At the same time, I have to prepare for the possibility that I won’t get it. And I’ve got a, uh. A very attractive offer from a Hollywood producer. A college friend of Denise’s who produces movies. Potentially very lucrative.”
“A great worker is almost impossible to fire,” Alfred said.
“The process can get very political, though. I have to have alternatives.”
“As you wish,” Alfred said. “However, I’ve found that it’s usually best to choose one plan and stick with it. If you don’t succeed here, you can always do something else. But you’ve worked many years to reach this point. One more semester’s hard work won’t hurt you.”
“Right.”
“You can relax when you have tenure. Then you’re safe.”
“Right.”
“Well, thank you for the call.”
“Right. Happy birthday, Dad.”
Chip dropped the phone, left the kitchen, and took a Fronsac bottle by the neck and brought its body down hard on the edge of his dining table. He broke a second bottle. The remaining six he smashed two at a time, a neck in each fist.
Anger carried him through the difficult weeks that followed. He borrowed ten thousand dollars from Denise and hired a lawyer to threaten to sue D—— College for wrongful termination of his contract. This was a waste of money, but it felt good. He went to New York and ponied up four thousand dollars in fees and deposits for a sublet on Ninth Street. He bought leather clothes and had his ears pierced. He borrowed more money from Denise and reconnected with a college friend who edited the Warren Street Journal. He conceived revenge in the form of a screenplay that would expose the narcissism and treachery of Melissa Paquette and the hypocrisy of his colleagues; he wanted the people who’d hurt him to see the movie, recognize themselves, and suffer. He flirted with Julia Vrais and asked her on a date, and soon he was spending two or three hundred dollars a week to feed and entertain her. He borrowed more money from Denise. He hung cigarettes on his lower lip and banged out a draft of a script. Julia in the back seat of cabs pressed her face against his chest and clutched his collar. He tipped waiters and cabbies thirty and forty percent. He quoted Shakespeare and Byron in funny contexts. He borrowed more money from Denise and decided that she was right, that getting fired was the best thing that had ever happened to him.
He wasn’t so naïve, of course, as to take Eden Procuro’s professional effusions at face value. But the more he saw of Eden socially, the more confident he became that his script would get a sympathetic reading. For one thing, Eden was like a mother to Julia. She was only five years older, but she’d undertaken a wholesale recalibration and improvement of her personal assistant. Although Chip never quite shook the feeling that Eden was hoping to cast someone else in the role of Julia’s love interest (she habitually referred to Chip as Julia’s “escort,” not her “boyfriend,” and when she talked about Julia’s “untapped potential” and her “lack of confidence” he suspected that mate selection was one area in which she hoped to see improvement in Julia), Julia assured him that Eden thought he was “really dear” and “extremely smart.” Certainly Eden’s husband, Doug O’Brien, was on his side. Doug was a mergers-and-acquisitions specialist at Bragg Knuter & Speigh. He’d set Chip up with a flextime proofreading job and had seen to it that Chip was paid the top hourly wage. Whenever Chip tried to thank him for this favor, Doug made pshawing motions with his hand. “You’re the man with the Ph.D.,”