The Corrections Read Online Free PDF Page A

sisters?” (Are you a spoiled only child or a Catholic with a zillion siblings?)
    Julia having passed this initial examination, Enid turned her attention to the apartment. Chip, in a late crisis of confidence, had tried to make it presentable. He’d bought a stain-removal kit and lifted the big semen stain off the red chaise longue, dismantled the wall of wine-bottle corks with which he’d been bricking in the niche above his fireplace at a rate of half a dozen Merlots and Pinot Grigios a week, taken down from his bathroom wall the close-up photographs of male and female genitalia that were the flower of his art collection, and replaced them with the three diplomas that Enid had long ago insisted on having framed for him.
    This morning, feeling as if he’d surrendered too much of himself, he’d readjusted his presentation by wearing leather to the airport.
    “This room is about the size of Dean Driblett’s bathroom,” Enid said. “Wouldn’t you say, Al?”
    Alfred rotated his bobbing hands and examined their dorsal sides.
    “I’d never seen such an enormous bathroom.”
    “Enid, you have no tact,” Alfred said.
    It might have occurred to Chip that this, too, was a tactless remark, since it implied that his father concurred in his mother’s criticism of the apartment and objected only to her airing of it. But Chip was unable to focus on anything but the hair dryer protruding from Julia’s DreamWorks tote bag. It was the hair dryer that she kept in his bathroom. She seemed, actually, to be heading out the door.
    “Dean and Trish have a whirlpool and a shower stall and a tub, all separate,” Enid went on. “The sinks are his-and-hers.”
    “Chip, I’m sorry,” Julia said.
    He raised a hand to put her on hold. “We’re going to have lunch here as soon as Denise comes,” he announced to his parents. “It’s a very simple lunch. Just make yourselves at home.”
    “It was nice to meet you both,” Julia called to Enid and Alfred. To Chip in a lower voice she said, “Denise will be here. You’ll be fine.”
    She opened the door.
    “Mom, Dad,” Chip said, “just one second.”
    He followed Julia out of the apartment and let the door fall shut behind him.
    “This is really unfortunate timing,” he said. “Just really, really unfortunate.”
    Julia shook her hair back off her temples. “I’m feeling good about the fact that it’s the first time in my life I’ve ever acted self-interestedly in a relationship.”
    “That’s nice. That’s a big step.” Chip made an effort to smile. “But what about the script? Is Eden reading it?”
    “I think maybe this weekend sometime.”
    “What about you?”
    “I read, um.” Julia looked away. “Most of it.”
    “My idea,” Chip said, “was to have this ‘hump’ that the moviegoer has to get over. Putting something offputting at the beginning, it’s a classic modernist strategy. There’s a lot of rich suspense toward the end.”
    Julia turned toward the elevator and didn’t reply.
    “ Did you get to the end yet?” Chip asked.
    “Oh, Chip,” she burst out miserably, “your script starts off with a six-page lecture about anxieties of the phallus in Tudor drama!”
    He was aware of this. Indeed, for weeks now, he’d beenawakening most nights before dawn, his stomach churning and his teeth clenched, and had wrestled with the nightmarish certainty that a long academic monologue on Tudor drama had no place in Act I of a commercial script. Often it took him hours—took getting out of bed, pacing around, drinking Merlot or Pinot Grigio—to regain his conviction that a theory-driven opening monologue was not only not a mistake but the script’s most powerful selling point; and now, with a single glance at Julia, he could see that he was wrong.
    Nodding in heartfelt agreement with her criticism, he opened the door of his apartment and called to his parents, “One second, Mom, Dad. Just one second.” As he shut the door again, however, the old