The Corrections Read Online Free PDF Page B

for Eden Procuro,” followed by Eden Procuro herself crying, “I love it, love it, love it, love it, love it!” But now a year and a half had passed. Now the one-page précis had become a 124–page script called “The Academy Purple,” and now Julia Vrais, the chocolate-haired owner of that cool, blank personal-assistant’s voice, was running away from him, and as he raced downstairs to intercept her, planting his feet sideways to take the steps three and four at a time, grabbing the newel at each landing and reversing his trajectory with a jerk, all he could see or think of was a damning entry in his nearly photographic mental concordance of those 124 pages:
    3: bee-stung lips, high round breasts , narrow hips and
    3: over the cashmere sweater that snugly hugs her breasts
    4: forward raptly, her perfect adolescent breasts eagerly
    8: (eyeing her breasts )
    9: (eyeing her breasts )
    9: (his eyes drawn helplessly to her perfect breasts )
    11: (eyeing her breasts )
    12: (mentally fondling her perfect breasts )
    13: (eyeing her breasts )
    15: (eyeing and eyeing her perfect adolescent breasts )
    23: (clinch, her perfect breasts surging against his
    24: the repressive bra to unfetter her subversive breasts .)
    28: to pinkly tongue one sweat-sheened breast .)
    29: phallically jutting nipple of her sweat-drenched breast
    29: I like your breasts .
    30: absolutely adore your honeyed, heavy breasts .
    33: (hillaire’s breasts , like twin Gestapo bullets, can be
    36: barbed glare as if to puncture and deflate her breasts
    44: Arcadian breasts with stern puritanical terry cloth and
    45: cowering, ashamed, the towel clutched to her breasts .)
    76: her guileless breasts shrouded now in militaristic
    83: I miss your body, I miss your perfect breasts , I
    117: drowned headlights fading like two milk-white breasts
    And there were probably even more! More than he could remember! And the only two readers who mattered now were women! It seemed to Chip that Julia was leaving him because “The Academy Purple” had too many breast references and a draggy opening, and that if he could correct these few obvious problems, both on Julia’s copy of the script and, more important, on the copy he’d specially laser-printed on 24-pound ivory bond paper for Eden Procuro, there might be hope not only for his finances but also for his chances of ever again unfettering and fondling Julia’s own guileless, milk-white breasts. Which by this point in the day, as by late morning of almost every day in recent months, was one of the last activities on earth in which he could still reasonably expect to take solace for his failures.
    Exiting the stairwell into the lobby, he found the elevator waiting to torment its next rider. Through the open street door he saw a taxi extinguish its roof light and pull away.Zoroaster was mopping up inblown water from the lobby’s checkerboard marble. “Goodbye, Mister Chip!” he quipped, by no means for the first time, as Chip ran outside.
    Big raindrops beating on the sidewalk raised a fresh, cold mist of pure humidity. Through the bead-curtain of water coming off the marquee, Chip saw Julia’s cab brake for a yellow light. Directly across the street, another cab had stopped to discharge a passenger, and it occurred to Chip that he could take this other cab and ask the driver to follow Julia. The idea was tempting; but there were difficulties.
    One difficulty was that by chasing Julia he would arguably be committing the worst of the offenses for which the general counsel of D——College, in a shrill, moralistic lawyer’s letter, had once upon a time threatened to counter-sue him or have him prosecuted. The alleged offenses had included fraud, breach of contract, kidnap, Title IX sexual harassment, serving liquor to a student under the legal drinking age, and possession and sale of a controlled substance; but it was the accusation of stalking —of making “obscene” and “threatening” and “abusive”