Free The Corrections: A Novel by Jonathan Franzen Page B

Even after she’d taken off the pants there was a residue of gender confusion on her body, not to mention the rank b.o. that was the bane of synthetic fabrics. But from her underpants, which to his relief were delicate and sheer—distinctly gendered—an affectionate warm rabbit came springing, a kicking wet autonomous warm animal. It was almost more than he could handle. He hadn’t slept two hours in the previous two nights, and he had a head full of wine and a gut full of gas (he couldn’t remember why he’d made a cassoulet for dinner; possibly for no good reason), and he worried that he hadn’t locked the front door—that there was a gap in the blinds somewhere, that one of his neighbors would drop by and try the door and find it unlocked or peer in through the window and see him flagrantly violating Sections I, II, and VI of a code that he himself had helped draft. Altogether for him it was a night of anxiety and effortfulconcentration, punctuated by little stabs of throttled pleasure, but at least Melissa seemed to find it exciting and romantic. Hour after hour, she wore a big crinkled U of a smile.
    It was Chip’s proposal, after a second extremely stressful tryst at Tilton Ledge, that he and Melissa leave campus for the week-long Thanksgiving break and find a cottage on Cape Cod where they wouldn’t feel observed and judged; and it was Melissa’s proposal, as they departed through D——’s little-used eastern gate under cover of darkness, that they stop in Middletown and buy drugs from a high-school friend of hers at Wesleyan. Chip waited in front of Wesleyan’s impressively weatherproofed Ecology House and drummed on the steering wheel of his Nissan, drummed so hard his fingers throbbed, because it was important not to think about what he was doing. He’d left behind mountains of ungraded papers and exams, and he had not yet managed to visit Jim Leviton in the rehab unit. That Jim had lost his powers of speech and now impotently strained his jaw and lips to form words—that he’d become, according to reports from colleagues who’d visited him, an angry man—made Chip all the more reluctant to visit. He was in the mode now of avoiding anything that might make him experience an emotion. He beat on the steering wheel until his fingers were stiff and burning and Melissa came out of the Ecology House. She brought into the car a smell of woodsmoke and frozen flower beds, the smell of an affair in late autumn. She put into Chip’s palm a golden caplet marked with what appeared to be the old Midland Pacific Railroad logo—without the text. “Take this,” she told him, closing the door.
     
    “This is? Some kind of Ecstasy?”
    “No. Mexican A.”
    Chip felt culturally anxious. Not long ago, there had been no drugs he hadn’t heard of. “What does it do?”
    “Nothing and everything,” she said, swallowing one herself “You’ll see.”
    “How much do I owe you for this?”
    “Never mind that.”
    For a while the drug did seem, as promised, to do nothing. But on the industrial outskirts of Norwich, still two or three hours from the Cape, he turned down the trip hop that Melissa was playing on his stereo and said, “We have to stop immediately and fuck.”
    She laughed. “I guess so .”
    “Why don’t I pull over,” he said.
    She laughed again. “No, let’s find a room.”
    They stopped at a Comfort Inn that had lost its franchise and now called itself the Comfort Valley Lodge. The night clerk was obese and her computer was down. She manually registered Chip with the labored breathing of someone lately stranded by a systems malfunction. Chip put his hand on Melissa’s belly and was about to reach into her pants when it occurred to him that fingering a woman in public was inappropriate and might cause trouble. For similar, purely rational reasons he suppressed the impulse to pull his dick out of his pants and show it to the wheezing, perspiring clerk. But he did think the clerk would be