The Corrections

The cupcakes were full of butter and frosted with a butter frosting. After he’d washed his hands and opened a bottle of Chardonnay he ate four of them and put the uncooked fish in the refrigerator. The skins of the overbaked squash were like inner-tube rubber. Cent Ans de Cinéma Erotique, an edifying video that had sat on a shelf for months without making a peep, suddenly demanded his immediate and full attention. He lowered the blinds and drank the wine, and brought himself off again and again, and ate two more cupcakes, detecting peppermint in them, a faint buttery peppermint, before he slept.

The next morning he was up at seven and did four hundred crunches. He immersed Cent Ans de Cinéma Erotique in dishwater and rendered it, so to speak, non-combustible. (He’d done this with many a pack of cigarettes while kicking the habit.) He had no idea what he’d meant when he’d thrown the knife into the sink. His voice had sounded nothing like him.

He went to his office in Wroth Hall and graded papers. He wrote in a margin: Cressida’s character may inform Toyota’s choice of product name; that Toyota’s Cressida informs the Shakespearean text requires more argument than you present here. He added an exclamation point to soften his criticism. Sometimes, when ripping apart especially feeble student work, he drew smiley faces.

Spell-check! he exhorted a student who’d written “Trolius” for “Troilus” throughout her eight-page paper.

And the ever-softening question mark. Beside the sentence “Here Shakespeare proves Foucault all too right about the historicity of morals,” Chip wrote: Rephrase? Perhaps: “Here the Shakespearean text seems almost to anticipate Foucault (better: Nietzsche?. . .”?

He was still grading papers five weeks later, ten or fifteen thousand student errors later, on a windy night just after Halloween, when he heard a scrabbling outside his office door. Opening the door, he found a dime-store trick-or-treat bag hanging from the hall-side doorknob. The leaver of this gift, Melissa Paquette, was backpedaling up the hall.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“Just trying to be friends,” she said.

“Well, thanks,” he said. “I don’t get it.”

Melissa came back down the hall. She was wearing white painter’s overalls, a long-sleeve thermal undershirt, and hot-pink socks. “I went trick-or-treating,” she said. “This was like one-fifth of my haul.”

She stepped closer to Chip and he backed away. She followed him into his office and circled it on tiptoe, reading titles on his shelves. Chip leaned against his desk and folded his arms tightly.

“So I’m taking Theory of Feminism with Vendla,” Melissa said.

“That would be the logical next step. Now that you’ve rejected the nostalgic patriarchal tradition of critical theory.”

“Exactly my thinking,” Melissa said. “Unfortunately, her class is so bad. People who took it with you last year said it was great. But Vendla’s idea is that we should sit around and talk about our feelings. Because the Old Theory was about the head, see. And therefore the New True Theory has to be about the heart. I’m not convinced she’s even read all the stuff she assigns us.”

Through his open door Chip could see the door of Vendla O’Fallon’s office. It was papered with healthful images and adages—Betty Friedan in 1965, beaming Guatemalan peasant women, a triumphant female soccer star, a Bass Ale poster of Virginia Woolf, SUBVERT THE DOMINANT PARADIGM—that reminded him, in a dreary way, of his old girlfriend Tori Timmelman. His feeling about decorating doors was: What are we, high-school kids? Are these our bedrooms?

“So basically,” he said, “even though you thought my class was bullshit, it now seems like a superior brand of bullshit because you’re taking hers.”

Melissa blushed. “Basically! Except you’re a much better teacher. I mean, I learned a ton from you. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”

“Consider me told.”

“See, my mom and dad split up in April.” Melissa flung herself down on Chip’s college-issue leather sofa and assumed the full therapeutic position. “For a while it was kind of great that you were being so anti-corporate, and then suddenly it really, really irritated me. Like, my parents have a lot of money, and they’re not evil people, although my dad did just move in with this character named Vicki who’s like four years older than me. But he still loves my mom. I know he does. As soon as I was out of the house, things deteriorated a little, but I know he still loves her.”

“The college has a lot of services,” Chip said, arms folded, “for students going through these things.”

“Thanks. On the whole I’m doing brilliantly, except for having been rude to you in class that time.” Melissa hooked her heels on the arm of the sofa, pried her shoes off, and let them drop to the floor. Soft curves in thermal knitwear spilled out to either side of her overalls’ bib, Chip noticed.