Читаем The Corrections полностью

“Ha, ha!” he said, palming the seventy-eight-dollar filet like a catcher’s mitt. He dropped to one knee and touched his bootlaces and took the salmon right up inside his leather jacket and underneath his sweater and tucked the sweater into his pants and stood up again.

“Daddy, I want sword fish,” a little voice behind him said.

Chip took two steps, and the salmon, which was quite heavy, escaped from his sweater and covered his groin, for one unstable moment, like a codpiece.

“Daddy! Sword fish!”

Chip put his hand to his crotch. The dangling filet felt like a cool, loaded diaper. He repositioned it against his abs and tucked in the sweater more securely, zipped his jacket to the neck, and strode purposefully toward the whatever. Toward the dairy wall. Here he found a selection of French crèmes fraîches at prices implying transport via SST. The less unaffordable domestic crème fraîche was blocked by a man in a Yankees cap who was shouting into his cell phone while a child, apparently his, peeled back the foil tops of half-liters of French yogurt. She’d peeled back five or six already. Chip leaned to reach behind the man, but his fish belly sagged. “Excuse me,” he said.

Like a sleepwalker the man on the phone shuffled aside. “I said fuck him. Fuck him! Fuck that asshole! We never closed. There’s no ink on the line. I’ll take that asshole down another thirty, you watch me. Honey, don’t tear those, if we tear those we have to pay for them. I said it is a fucking buyer’s ball as of yesterday. We close on nuffin till this thing bottoms out. Nuffin! Nuffin! Nuffin! Nuffin!”

Chip was approaching the checkout lanes with four plausible items in his basket when he caught sight of a head of hair so new-penny bright it could only belong to Eden Procuro. Who was, herself, slim and thirty-six and hectic. Eden’s little son, Anthony, was seated on the upper level of a shopping cart with his back to a four-figure avalanche of shell fish, cheeses, meats, and caviars. Eden was leaning over Anthony and letting him pull on the taupe lapels of her Italian suit and suck on her blouse while, behind his back, she turned the pages of a script that Chip could only pray was not his own. The line-caught Norwegian salmon was soaking through its wrapping, his body heat melting the fats that had given the filet a degree of rigidity. He wanted to escape the Nightmare, but he wasn’t prepared to discuss “The Academy Purple” under the current circumstances. He veered down a frosty aisle where the gelati came in plain white cartons with small black lettering. A man in a suit was crouching beside a little girl with hair like copper in sunshine. The girl was Eden’s daughter, April. The man was Eden’s husband, Doug O’Brien.

“Chip Lambert, what’s happening?” Doug said.

There seemed to be no ways but girly ways for Chip to hold his grocery basket while he shook Doug’s square hand.

“April’s picking out her treat for after dinner,” Doug said.

“Three treats,” April said.

“Her three treats, right.”

“What’s that one?” April said, pointing.

“That is a grenadine-nasturtium sorbetto, sugar bunny.”

“Do I like it?”

“That I can’t tell you.”

Doug, who was younger and shorter than Chip, so persistently claimed to be in awe of Chip’s intellect and so consistently tested free of any irony or condescension that Chip had finally accepted that Doug really did admire him. This admiration was more grueling than belittlement.

“Eden tells me you finished the script,” Doug said, restacking some gelati that April had upset. “Man, I am psyched. This project sounds phenomenal.”

April was cradling three rimed cartons against her corduroy jumper.

“What kind did you get?” Chip asked her.

April shrugged extremely, a beginner’s shrug.

“Sugar bunny, run those up to Mommy. I’m going to talk to Chip.”

As April ran back up the aisle Chip wondered what it would be like to father a child, to always be needed instead of always needing.

“Something I wanted to ask you,” Doug said. “Do you have a second? Say somebody offered you a new personality: would you take it? Say somebody said to you, I will permanently rewire your mental hardware in whatever way you want. Would you pay to have that done?”

The salmon paper was sweat-bonded to Chip’s skin and tearing open at the bottom. This was not the ideal time to be providing Doug with the intellectual companionship he seemed to crave, but Chip wanted Doug to keep thinking highly of him and encourage Eden to buy his script. He asked why Doug asked.