Melissa blushed. “Basically! Except you’re a much better teacher. I mean, I learned a ton from you. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”
“Consider me told.”
“See, my mom and dad split up in April.” Melissa flung herself down on Chip’s college-issue leather sofa and assumed the full therapeutic position. “For a while it was kind of great that you were being so anti-corporate, and then suddenly it really, really irritated me. Like, my parents have a lot of money, and they’re not evil people, although my dad did just move in with this character named Vicki who’s like four years older than me. But he still loves my mom. I know he does. As soon as I was out of the house, things deteriorated a little, but I know he still loves her.”
“The college has a lot of services,” Chip said, arms folded, “for students going through these things.”
“Thanks. On the whole I’m doing brilliantly, except for having been rude to you in class that time.” Melissa hooked her heels on the arm of the sofa, pried her shoes off, and let them drop to the floor. Soft curves in thermal knitwear spilled out to either side of her overalls’ bib, Chip noticed.
“I had an excellent childhood,” she said. “My parents have always been my best friends. They homeschooled me till seventh grade. My mom was in med school in New Haven and my dad had this punk band, the Nomatics, that was touring, and at my mom’s first ever punk show she went out with my dad and ended up in his hotel room. She quit school, he quit the Nomatics, and they were never apart after that. Totally romantic. See, and my dad had some money from a trust fund, and it was really brilliant what they did then. There were all these new IPOs, and my mom was up on all the biotech and reading JAMA, and Tom—my dad—could vet the numbers part of it, and they just made really great investments. Clair—my mom—stayed home with me and we hung out all day, you know, and I learned my times tables, et cetera, and it was always just the three of us. They were so, so in love. And parties every weekend. And finally it occurred to us, we know everybody, and we’re really good investors, so why not start a mutual fund? Which we did. And it was incredible. It’s still a great fund. It’s called the Westportfolio Biofund Forty? We started some other funds, too, when the climate got more competitive. You kind of have to offer a full array of services. That’s what the institutional investors were telling Tom, at any rate. So he started these other funds, which unfortunately have pretty much tanked. I think that’s the big problem between him and Clair. Because her fund, the Biofund Forty, where she makes the picks, is still doing great. And now she’s heartbroken and depressed. She’s holed up in our house and she never goes out. Meanwhile Tom wants me to meet this Vicki person, who he says is ‘lots of fun’ and a roller blader. The thing is, we all know my mom and dad are made for each other. They complement each other perfectly. And I just think if you knew how cool it is to start a company, and how great it is when the money starts coming in, and how romantic it can be, you wouldn’t be so harsh.”
“Possibly,” Chip said.
“Anyway, I thought you’d be somebody I could talk to. On the whole I’m coping brilliantly, but I could kind of use a friend.”
“How’s Chad?” Chip said.
“A sweet boy. Good for about three weekends.” Melissa swung a leg off the sofa and planted a stockinged foot on Chip’s leg, close to his hip. “It’s hard to imagine two people less long-term compatible than him and me.”
Through his jeans Chip could feel the deliberate flexing of her toes. He was trapped against his desk, and so, to escape, he had to take hold of her ankle and swing her leg back onto the sofa. Her pink feet immediately grasped his wrist and pulled him toward her. It was all very playful, but his door was open, and his lights were on, and his blinds were raised, and somebody was in the hall. “Code,” he said, pulling free. “There’s a code.”
Melissa rolled off the sofa, stood up, and came closer. “It’s a stupid code,” she said. “If you care about somebody.”
Chip retreated to the doorway. Up the hall, by the department office, a tiny blue-uniformed woman with a Toltec face was vacuuming. “There are good reasons to have it,” he said.
“So I can’t even give you a hug now.”
“That’s right.”
“It’s stupid.” Melissa stepped into her shoes and joined Chip in the doorway. She kissed him on the cheek, near his ear. “So there.”
He watched her slide-step and pirouette down the hall and out of sight. He heard a fire door bang shut. He carefully examined every word he’d said, and he gave himself an A for correctness. But when he returned to Tilton Ledge, where the last of the utility lights had burned out, he was swamped by loneliness. To erase the tactile memory of Melissa’s kiss, and her lively warm feet, he phoned an old college friend in New York and made a date for lunch the next day. He took Cent Ans de Cinéma Erotique from the cabinet where, in expectation of a night like this, he’d stashed it after soaking it. The tape was still playable. The image was snowy, though, and during the first really hot bit, a hotel-room scene with a wanton chambermaid, the snow thickened to a blizzard and the screen went blue. The VCR made a dry, thin choking sound. Air, need air, it seemed to say. Tape had leaked out and wound itself around the machine’s endoskeleton. Chip extracted the cassette and several handfuls of Mylar, but then something broke and the machine spat up a plastic spool. Which, all right, these things happened. But the trip to Scotland had been a financial Waterloo, and he couldn’t afford a new VCR.
Nor was New York City, on a cold rainy Saturday, the treat he needed. Every sidewalk in lower Manhattan was dotted with the metallic squared spirals of antitheft badges. The badges were bonded to the wet pavement with the world’s strongest glue, and after Chip had bought some imported cheeses (he did this every time he visited New York to be sure of accomplishing at least one thing before returning to Connecticut, and yet it felt a little sad to buy the same baby Gruyère and Fourme d’Ambert at the same store; it brought him up against the more general failure of consumerism as an approach to human happiness), and after he’d lunched with his college friend (who had recently quit teaching anthropology and hired himself out to Silicon Alley as a “marketing psychologist” and who advised Chip, now, to wake up and do the same), he returned to his car and discovered that each of his plastic-wrapped cheeses was protected by its own antitheft badge and that, indeed, a fragment of antitheft badge had stuck to the bottom of his left shoe.
Tilton Ledge was glazed with ice and very dark. In the mail Chip found an envelope containing a short note from Enid lamenting Alfred’s moral failures (“he sits in that chair all day, every day”) and a lengthy profile of Denise, clipped from Philadelphia magazine, with a slavering review of her restaurant, Mare Scuro, and a full-page glamour photo of the young chef. Denise in the photo was wearing jeans and a tank top and was all muscled shoulders and satiny pecs (“Very young and very good: Lambert in her kitchen,” the caption read), and this was just the kind of girl-as-object horseshit, Chip thought bitterly, that sold magazines. A few years ago Enid’s letters had reliably contained a paragraph of despair about Denise and Denise’s failing marriage, with phrases like he is too OLD for her! double-underlined, and a paragraph festooned with thrilleds and prouds apropos of Chip’s hiring by D—— College, and although he knew that Enid was skilled at playing her children off against each other and that her praise was usually double-edged, he was dismayed that a woman as smart and principled as Denise had used her body for marketing purposes. He threw the clipping in the trash. He opened the Saturday half of the Sunday Times and—yes, he was contradicting himself, yes, he was aware of this—paged through the Magazine in search of ads for lingerie or swimwear to rest his weary eyes on. Finding none, he began to read the Book Review, where a memoir called Daddy’s Girl, by Vendla O’Fallon, was declared “astonishing” and “courageous” and “deeply satisfying” in St. Jude. The name Vendla O’Fallon was rather unusual, but Chip had been so completely unaware that Vendla was publishing a book that he refused to believe she’d written Daddy’s Girl until, near the end of the review, he encountered a sentence that began: “O’Fallon,