The Corrections

Chip laughed in a breathy way, willing himself not to argue; but his U. K. edition of Jürgen Habermas’s Reason and the Rationalization of Society, which he’d found too difficult to read, let alone annotate, was in mint condition and had cost him £ 95.00. He couldn’t help pointing this out by way of example.

“Try somewhere else, if you like,” the buyer said, his hand hesitating-above the cash register.

“No, no, you’re right,” Chip said. “Sixty-five is great.”

It was pathetically obvious that he’d believed his books would fetch him hundreds of dollars. He turned away from their reproachful spines, remembering how each of them had called out in a bookstore with a promise of a radical critique of late-capitalist society, and how happy he’d been to take them home. But Jürgen Habermas didn’t have Julia’s long, cool, pear-tree limbs, Theodor Adorno didn’t have Julia’s grapy smell of lecherous pliability, Fred Jameson didn’t have Julia’s artful tongue. By the beginning of October, when Chip sent his finished script to Eden Procuro, he’d sold his feminists, his formalists, his structuralists, his poststructuralists, his Freudians, and his queers. To raise money for lunch for his parents and Denise, all he had left was his beloved cultural historians and his complete hardcover Arden Shakespeare; and because a kind of magic resided in the Shakespeare—the uniform volumes in their pale blue jackets were like an archipelago of safe retreats—he piled his Foucault and Greenblatt and hooks and Poovey into shopping bags and sold them all for $115.

He spent sixty dollars on a haircut, some candy, a stain-removal kit, and two drinks at the Cedar Tavern. Back in August, when he’d invited his parents, he’d hoped that Eden Procuro might have read his script and advanced him money before they arrived, but now the only accomplishment and the only gift he had to offer was a home-cooked meal. He went to an East Village deli that sold reliably excellent tortellini and crusty bread. He was envisioning a rustic and affordable Italian lunch. But the deli appeared to have gone out of business, and he didn’t feel like walking ten blocks to a bakery that he was certain had good bread, and so he wandered the East Village randomly, trudging in and out of meretricious food stores, hefting cheeses, rejecting breads, examining inferior tortellini. Finally he abandoned the Italian idea altogether and fixed on the only other lunch he could think of—a salad of wild rice, avocado, and smoked turkey breast. The problem then was to find ripe avocados. In store after store he found either no avocados or walnut-hard avocados. He found ripe avocados that were the size of limes and cost $3.89 apiece. He stood holding five of them and considered what to do. He put them down and picked them up and put them down and couldn’t pull the trigger. He weathered a spasm of hatred of Denise for having guilted him into inviting his parents to lunch. He had the feeling that he’d never eaten anything in his life but wild-rice salad and tortellini, so blank was his culinary imagination.

Around eight o’clock he ended up outside the new Nightmare of Consumption (“Everything—for a Price!”) on Grand Street. A humidity had stolen over the sky, a sulfurous uneasy wind from Rahway and Bayonne. The supergentry of SoHo and Tribeca were streaming through the Nightmare’s brushed-steel portals. The men came in various shapes and sizes, but all the women were slim and thirty-six; many were both slim and pregnant. Chip had a collar rash from his haircut and felt unready to be seen by so many perfect women. But right inside the Nightmare’s door he glimpsed a box of greens marked SORREL from Belize $0.99.

He entered the Nightmare, snagged a basket, and put one bunch of sorrel in it. Ninety-nine cents. Installed above the Nightmare’s coffee bar was a screen that gave running ironic tallies of TODAY’S GROSS RECEIPTS and TODAY’S PROFIT and PROJECTED QUARTERLY PER-SHARE DIVIDEND (Unofficial Non-Binding Estimate Based on Past Quarterly Performances /This Information Provided for Entertainment Purposes Only), and COFFEE SALES THIS STATION. Chip wove among strollers and cell phone antennae to the fish counter, where, as in a dream, he found WILD NORWEGIAN SALMON, LINE CAUGHT on sale at a reasonable price. He pointed at a midsize filet, and to the fishman’s question, “What else?” he replied in a crisp tone, almost a smug tone, “That’ll do it.”

The price on the beautiful paper-wrapped filet that he was handed was $78.40. Luckily, this discovery knocked the wind out of him, otherwise he might have lodged a protest before realizing, as he did now, that the prices at the Nightmare were per quarter pound. Two years ago, two months ago, he would not have made a mistake like this.