The Corrections (5 page)

In the haze of dinner-party smoke, as he entertained his sympathetic colleagues, Chip felt secure in the knowledge that his parents could not have been more wrong about who he was and what kind of career he was suited to pursue. For
two and a half years, until the fiasco of Thanksgiving in St. Jude, he had no troubles at D——College. But then Ruthie dumped him and a first-year female student rushed in, as it were, to fill the vacuum that Ruthie left behind.

Melissa Paquette was the most gifted student in the intro theory course, Consuming Narratives, that he taught in his third spring at D——. Melissa was a regal, theatrical person whom other students conspicuously avoided sitting close to, in part because they disliked her and in part because she always sat in the first row of desks, right in front of Chip. She was long-necked and broad-shouldered, not exactly beautiful, more like physically splendid. Her hair was very straight and had the cherry-wood color of new motor oil. She wore thrift-store clothes that tended not to flatter her—a man’s plaid polyester leisure suit, a paisley trapeze dress, gray Mr. Goodwrench coveralls with the name
Randy
embroidered on the left front pocket.

Melissa had no patience with people she considered fools. At the second meeting of Consuming Narratives, when an affable dreadlocked boy named Chad (every class at D——had at least one affable dreadlocked boy in it) took a stab at summarizing the theories of Thorstein “Webern,” Melissa began to smirk at Chip complicitly. She rolled her eyes and mouthed the word “Veblen” and clutched her hair. Soon Chip was paying more attention to her distress than to Chad’s discourse.

“Chad, sorry,” she interrupted finally. “The name is Veblen?”

“Vebern. Veblern. That’s what I’m saying.”

“No, you were saying Webern. It’s Veblen.”

“Veblern. OK. Thank you very much, Melissa.”

Melissa tossed her hair and faced Chip again, her mission accomplished. She paid no attention to the dirty looks that came her way from Chad’s friends and sympathizers. But Chip drifted to a far corner of the classroom to dissociate
himself from her, and he encouraged Chad to continue with his summary.

That evening, outside the student cinema in Hillard Wroth Hall, Melissa came pushing and squeezing through a crowd and told Chip that she was loving Walter Benjamin. She stood, he thought, too close to him. She stood too close to him at a reception for Marjorie Garber a few days later. She came galloping across the Lucent Technologies Lawn (formerly the South Lawn) to press into his hands one of the weekly short papers that Consuming Narratives required. She materialized beside him in a parking lot that a foot of snow had buried, and with her mittened hands and considerable wingspan she helped him dig out his car. She kicked a path clear with her fur-trimmed boots. She wouldn’t stop chipping at the underlayer of ice on his windshield until he took hold of her wrist and removed the scraper from her hand.

Chip had co-chaired the committee that drafted the college’s stringent new policy on faculty-student contacts. Nothing in the policy prevented a student from helping a professor clear snow off his car; and since he was also sure of his self-discipline, he had nothing to be afraid of. And yet, before long, he was ducking out of sight whenever he saw Melissa on campus. He didn’t want her to gallop over and stand too close to him. And when he caught himself wondering if the color of her hair was from a bottle, he made himself stop wondering. He never asked her if she was the one who’d left roses outside his office door on Valentine’s Day, or the chocolate statuette of Michael Jackson on Easter weekend.

In class he called on Melissa slightly less often than he called on other students; he lavished particular attention on her nemesis, Chad. He sensed, without looking, that Melissa was nodding in comprehension and solidarity when he unpacked a difficult passage of Marcuse or Baudrillard. She
generally ignored her classmates, except to turn on them in sudden hot disagreement or cool correction; her classmates, for their part, yawned audibly when she raised her hand.

One warm Friday night near the end of the semester, Chip came home from his weekly grocery run and discovered that someone had vandalized his front door. Three of the four utility lights at Tilton Ledge had burned out, and the college was apparently waiting for the fourth to burn out before investing in replacements. In the poor light, Chip could see that somebody had poked flowers and foliage—tulips, ivy—through the holes in his rotting screen door. “What is this?” he said. “Melissa, you are jailbait.”

Possibly he said other things before he realized that his stoop was strewn with torn-up tulips and ivy, a vandalism still in progress, and that he was not alone. The holly bush by his door had produced two giggling young people. “Sorry, sorry!” Melissa said. “You were talking to yourself!”

Chip wanted to believe she hadn’t heard what he said, but the holly wasn’t three feet away. He set the groceries inside his house and turned a light on. Standing beside Melissa was the dreadlocked Chad.

“Professor Lambert, hello,” Chad said earnestly. He was wearing Melissa’s Mr. Goodwrench coveralls, and Melissa was wearing a
Free Mumia
T-shirt that might have belonged to Chad. She’d slung an arm around Chad’s neck and fitted a hip over his. She was flushed and sweaty and lit up on something.

“We were decorating your door,” she said.

“Actually, Melissa, it looks pretty horrible,” Chad said as he examined it in the light. Beat-up tulips were hanging down at every angle. The ivy runners had clods of dirt in their hairy feet. “Kind of a stretch to say ‘decorating.’”

“Well, you can’t
see
down here,” she said. “Where’s the
light
?”

“There is no light,” Chip said. “This is the Ghetto in the Woods. This is where your teachers live.”

“Dude, that ivy is pathetic.”

“Whose tulips are these?” Chip asked.

“College tulips,” Melissa said.

“Dude, I’m not even sure why we were doing this.” Chad turned to allow Melissa to put her mouth on his nose and suck it, which didn’t seem to bother him, although he drew his head back. “Wouldn’t you say this was sort of more your idea than mine?”

“Our tuition pays for these tulips,” Melissa said, pivoting to press her body more frontally into Chad. She hadn’t looked at Chip since he turned the outdoor light on.

“So then Hansel and Gretel came and found my screen door.”

“We’ll clean it up,” Chad said.

“Leave it,” Chip said. “I’ll see you on Tuesday.” And he went inside and shut the door and played some angry music from his college years.

For the last meeting of Consuming Narratives the weather turned hot. The sun was blazing in a pollen-filled sky, all the angiosperms in the newly rechristened Viacom Arboretum blooming hard. To Chip the air felt disagreeably intimate, like a warm spot in a swimming pool. He’d already cued up the video player and lowered the classroom shades when Melissa and Chad strolled in and took seats in a rear corner. Chip reminded the class to sit up straight like active critics rather than be passive consumers, and the students sat up enough to acknowledge his request without actually complying with it. Melissa, usually the one fully upright critic, today slumped especially low and draped an arm across Chad’s legs.

To test his students’ mastery of the critical perspectives to which he’d introduced them, Chip was showing a video of a six-part ad campaign called “You Go, Girl.” The campaign was the work of an agency, Beat Psychology, that had
also created “Howl with Rage” for G——Electric, “Do Me Dirty” for C——Jeans, “Total F***ing Anarchy!” for the W——Network, “Radical Psychedelic Underground” for Ε——com, and “Love & Work” for Μ—— Pharmaceuticals. “You Go, Girl” had had its first airing the previous fall, one episode per week, on a prime-time hospital drama. The style was black-and-white cinema verité; the content, according to analyses in the
Times
and the
Wall Street
Journal
, was “revolutionary.”

The plot was this: Four women in a small office—one sweet young African American, one middle-aged technophobic blonde, one tough and savvy beauty named Chelsea, and one radiantly benignant gray-haired Boss—dish together and banter together and, by and by, struggle together with Chelsea’s stunning announcement, at the end of Episode 2, that for nearly a year she’s had a lump in her breast that she’s too scared to see a doctor about. In Episode 3 the Boss and the sweet young African American dazzle the technophobic blonde by using the W——Corporation’s Global Desktop Version 5.0 to get up-to-the-minute cancer information and to hook Chelsea into support networks and the very best local health care providers. The blonde, who is fast learning to love technology, marvels but objects: “There’s no way Chelsea can afford all this.” To which the angelic Boss replies: “I’m paying every cent of it.” By the middle of Episode 5, however—and this was the campaign’s revolutionary inspiration—it’s clear that Chelsea will not survive her breast cancer. Tear-jerking scenes of brave jokes and tight hugs follow. In the final episode the action returns to the office, where the Boss is scanning a snapshot of the departed Chelsea, and the now rabidly technophiliac blonde is expertly utilizing the W——Corporation’s Global Desktop Version 5.0, and around the world, in rapid montage, women of all ages and races are smiling and dabbing away tears at the image of Chelsea on their own Global
Desktops. Spectral Chelsea in a digital video clip pleads: “Help us Fight for the Cure.” The episode ends with the information, offered in a sober typeface, that the W——Corporation has given more than $10,000,000.00 to the American Cancer Society to help it Fight for the Cure …

The slick production values of a campaign like “You Go, Girl” could seduce first-year students before they’d acquired the critical tools of resistance and analysis. Chip was curious, and somewhat afraid, to see how far his students had progressed. With the exception of Melissa, whose papers were written with force and clarity, none of them had persuaded him that they were doing more than parroting the weekly jargon. Each year, it seemed, the incoming freshmen were a little more resistant to hardcore theory than they’d been the year before. Each year the moment of enlightenment, of critical mass, came a little later. Now the end of a semester was at hand, and Chip still wasn’t sure that anyone besides Melissa really
got
how to criticize mass culture.

The weather wasn’t doing him any favors. He raised the shades and beach light poured into the classroom. Summer-lust came wafting off the bared arms and legs of boys and girls alike.

A petite young woman named Hilton, a chihuahua-like person, offered that it was “brave” and “really interesting” that Chelsea had died of cancer instead of surviving like you might have expected in a commercial.

Chip waited for someone to observe that it was precisely this self-consciously “revolutionary” plot twist that had generated publicity for the ad. Normally Melissa, from her seat in the front row, could be counted on to make a point like this. But today she was sitting by Chad with her cheek on her desk. Normally, when students napped in class, Chip called on them immediately. But today he was reluctant to say Melissa’s name. He was afraid that his voice might shake.

Finally, with a tight smile, he said, “In case any of you
were visiting a different planet last fall, let’s review what happened with these ads. Remember that Nielsen Media Research took the ‘revolutionary’ step of giving Episode Six its own weekly rating. The first rating ever given to an ad. And once Nielsen rated it, the campaign was all but guaranteed an enormous audience for its rebroadcast during the November sweeps. Also remember that the Nielsen rating followed a week of print and broadcast news coverage of the ‘revolutionary’ plot twist of Chelsea’s death, plus the Internet rumor about Chelsea’s being a real person who’d really died. Which, incredibly, several hundred thousand people actually believed. Beat Psychology, remember, having fabricated her medical records and her personal history and posted them on the Web. So my question for Hilton would be, how ‘brave’ is it to engineer a surefire publicity coup for your ad campaign?”

“It was still a risk,” Hilton said. “I mean, death is a downer. It could have backfired.”

Again Chip waited for someone, anyone, to take his side of the argument. No one did. “So a wholly cynical strategy,” he said, “if there’s a financial risk attached, becomes an act of artistic bravery?”

A brigade of college lawn mowers descended on the lawn outside the classroom, smothering discussion in a blanket of noise. The sunshine was bright.

Chip soldiered on. Did it seem realistic that a small-business owner would spend her own money on special health care options for an employee?

One student averred that the boss she’d had at her last summer job had been generous and totally great.

Chad was silently fighting off the tickling hand of Melissa while, with his free hand, he counterattacked the naked skin of her midriff.

“Chad?” Chip said.

Chad, impressively, was able to answer the question
without having it repeated. “Like, that was just one office,” he said. “Maybe another boss wouldn’t have been so great. But that boss
was
great. I mean, nobody’s pretending that’s an average office, right?”

Here Chip tried to raise the question of art’s responsibilities vis-à-vis the Typical; but this discussion, too, was DOA.

“So, bottom line,” he said, “we like this campaign. We think these ads are good for the culture and good for the country. Yes?”

There were shrugs and nods in the sun-heated room.

“Melissa,” Chip said. “We haven’t heard from you.”

Melissa raised her head from her desk, shifted her attention from Chad, and looked at Chip with narrowed eyes. “Yes,” she said.

“Yes what?”

“Yes, these ads are good for the culture and good for the country.”

Chip took a deep breath, because this hurt. “Great, OK,” he said. “Thank you for your opinion.”

“As if you care about my opinion,” Melissa said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“As if you care about any of our opinions unless they’re the same as yours.”