The Corrections

Первые пятнадцать лет взрослой жизни Чип сталкивался с поражениями лишь косвенно: Тори Тиммелман – эта пылкая приверженка феминизма была его подружкой в колледже и еще долгие годы после выпуска – так негодовала на патриархальную систему присуждения ученых степеней и ее фаллометрические критерии, что отказалась (или не смогла) закончить диссертацию. Чип с малолетства слушал разглагольствования отца насчет мужской и женской работы и необходимости соблюдать различие между ними, потому-то, стремясь внести поправку, и оставался с Тори чуть не десять лет. В маленькой квартирке, где жили они с Тори, Чип взял на себя всю стирку, и большую часть готовки, и уход за котом, и уборку. Он читал для Тори дополнительную литературу, обсуждал и переделывал вместе с ней главы диссертации, ведь священная ярость крепко держала Тори за горло, не давая писать. Только когда Д-ский университет предложил Чипу пятилетний контракт с возможностью продления, а Тори, так и не защитившись, получила приглашение на два года (без дальнейших перспектив) в один из сельскохозяйственных колледжей Техаса, Чип, полностью исчерпав ресурсы «мужской вины», смог расстаться с подружкой.

He felt surrounded, imprisoned, by disapproving women.
There was, of course, one obvious way of breaking free: he could say yes instead of no to one of the dozen secretaries and female pedestrians and sales clerks who in any given week took note of his height and his schist-gray hair, his calfskin jacket and his French mountaineering pants, and looked him in the eye as if to say The key’s under the doormat. But there was still no pussy on earth he’d rather lick, no hair he’d rather gather in his fist like a golden silk bellpull, no gaze with which he’d rather lock his own at climax, than Caroline’s. The only guaranteed result of having an affair would be to add yet another disapproving woman to his life.

Earlier in the day, while killing some hours by circling in blue ballpoint ink every uppercase M in the front section of a month-old New York Times, Chip had concluded that he was behaving like a depressed person. Now, as his telephone began to ring, it occurred to him that a depressed person ought to continue staring at the TV and ignore the ringing—ought to light another cigarette and, with no trace of emotional affect, watch another cartoon while his machine took whoever’s message.
That his impulse, instead, was to jump to his feet and answer the phone—that he could so casually betray the arduous wasting of a day—cast doubt on the authenticity of his suffering. He felt as if he lacked the ability to lose all volition and connection with reality the way depressed people did in books and movies. It seemed to him, as he silenced the TV and hurried into his kitchen, that he was failing even at the miserable task of falling properly apart.

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.”
“This is not about opinions,” Chip said. “This is about learning to apply critical methods to textual artifacts. Which is what I’m here to teach you.”
“I don’t think it is, though,” Melissa said. “I think you’re here to teach us to hate the same things you hate."