The Corrections

Nodding in heartfelt agreement with her criticism, he opened the door of his apartment and called to his parents, “One second, Mom, Dad. Just one second.” As he shut the door again, however, the old arguments came back to him. “You see, though,” he said, “the entire story is prefigured in that monologue. Every single theme is there in capsule form—gender, power, identity, authenticity—and the thing is. . . Wait. Wait. Julia?”

Bowing her head sheepishly, as though she’d somehow hoped he wouldn’t notice she was leaving, Julia turned away from the elevator and back toward him.

“The thing is,” he said, “the girl is sitting in the front row of the classroom listening to the lecture. It’s a crucial image. The fact that he is controlling the discourse—”

“And it’s a little creepy, though,” Julia said, “the way you keep talking about her breasts.”

This, too, was true. That it was true, however, seemed unfair and cruel to Chip, who would never have had the heart to write the script at all without the lure of imagining the breasts of his young female lead. “You’re probably right,” he said. “Although some of the physicality there is intentional. Because that’s the irony, see, that she’s attracted to his mind while he’s attracted to her—”

“But for a woman reading it,” Julia said obstinately, “it’s sort of like the poultry department. Breast, breast, breast, thigh, leg.”

“I can remove some of those references,” Chip said in a low voice. “I can also shorten the opening lecture. The thing is, though, I want there to be a ‘hump’—”

“Right, for the moviegoer to get over. That’s a neat idea.”

“Please come and have lunch. Please. Julia?”

The elevator door had opened at her touch.

“I’m saying it’s a tiny bit insulting to a person somehow.”

“But that’s not you. It’s not even based on you.”

“Oh, great. It’s somebody else’s breasts.”

“Jesus. Please. One second.” Chip turned back to his apartment door and opened it, and this time he was startled to find himself face to face with his father. Alfred’s big hands were shaking violently.

“Dad, hi, just another minute here.”

“Chip,” Alfred said, “osk her to stay! Tell her we want her to stay!”

Chip nodded and closed the door in the old man’s face; but in the few seconds his back had been turned the elevator had swallowed Julia. He punched the call button, to no avail, and then opened the fire door and ran down the spiral of the service stairwell. After a series of effulgent lectures celebrating the unfettered pursuit of pleasure as a strategy of subverting the bureaucracy of rationalism, BILL QUAINTENCE, an attractive young professor of Textual Artifacts, is seduced by his beautiful and adoring student MONA. Their wildly erotic affair has hardly begun, however, when they are discovered by Bill’s estranged wife, HILLAIRE. In a tense confrontation representing the clash of Therapeutic and Transgressive worldviews, Bill and Hillaire struggle for the soul of young Mona, who lies naked between them on tangled sheets. Hillaire succeeds in seducing Mona with her crypto-repressive rhetoric, and Mona publicly denounces Bill. Bill loses his job but soon discovers e-mail records proving that Hillaire has given Mona money to ruin his career. As Bill is driving to see his lawyer with a diskette containing the incriminating evidence, his car is run off the road into the raging D—— River, and the diskette floats free of the sunken car and is borne by ceaseless, indomitable currents into the raging, erotic/chaotic open sea, and the crash is ruled vehicular suicide, and in the film’s final scenes Hillaire is hired to replace Bill on the faculty and is seen lecturing on the evils of unfettered pleasure to a classroom in which is seated her diabolical lesbian lover Mona: This was the one-page précis that Chip had assembled with the aid of store-bought screenwriting manuals and had faxed, one winter morning, to a Manhattan-based film producer named Eden Procuro. Five minutes later he’d answered his phone to the cool, blank voice of a young woman saying, “Please hold 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)