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obtuseness then defines itself as mental health! It’s like blindness defining itself as vision. ‘Now that I’m blind, I can see there’s nothing to see.’”
    Denise sighed and let her cone of flowers droop to the sidewalk. “What are you saying? You want to follow her and take away her medicine?”
    “I’m saying the structure of the entire culture is flawed,” Chip said. “I’m saying the bureaucracy has arrogated the right to define certain states of mind as ‘diseased.’ A lack of desire to spend money becomes a symptom of disease that requires expensive medication. Which medication thendestroys the libido, in other words destroys the appetite for the one pleasure in life that’s free, which means the person has to spend even more money on compensatory pleasures. The very definition of mental ‘health’ is the ability to participate in the consumer economy. When you buy into therapy, you’re buying into buying. And I’m saying that I personally am losing the battle with a commercialized, medicalized, totalitarian modernity right this instant.”
    Denise closed one eye and opened the other very wide. Her open eye was like nearly black balsamic vinegar beading on white china. “If I grant that these are interesting issues,” she said, “will you stop talking about them and come upstairs with me?”
    Chip shook his head. “There’s a poached salmon in the fridge. Α crème fraîche with sorrel. A salad with green beans and hazelnuts. You’ll see the wine and the baguette and the butter. It’s good fresh butter from Vermont.”
    “Has it occurred to you that Dad is sick?”
    “An hour is all it’s going to take. Hour and a half at most.”
    “I said has it occurred to you that Dad is sick?”
    Chip had a vision of his father trembling and pleading in the doorway. To block it out, he tried to summon up an image of sex with Julia, with the azure-haired stranger, with Ruthie, with anyone, but all he could picture was a vengeful, Fury-like horde of disembodied breasts.
    “The faster I get to Eden’s and make those corrections,” he said, “the sooner I’ll be back. If you really want to help me.”
    An available cab was coming down the street. He made the mistake of looking at it, and Denise misunderstood him.
    “I can’t give you any more money,” she said.
    He recoiled as if she’d spat on him. “Jesus, Denise—”
    “I’d like to but I can’t.”
    “I wasn’t asking you for money!”
    “Because where does it end?”
    He turned on his heel and walked into the downpour and marched toward University Place, smiling with rage. He was ankle-deep in a boiling gray sidewalk-shaped lake. He was clutching Denise’s umbrella in his fist without opening it, and still it seemed unfair to him, it seemed not his fault , that he was getting drenched.
       
    Until recently, and without ever giving the matter much thought, Chip had believed that it was possible to be successful in America without making lots of money. He’d always been a good student, and from an early age he’d proved unfit for any form of economic activity except buying things (this he could do), and so he’d chosen to pursue a life of the mind.
    Since Alfred had once mildly but unforgettably remarked that he didn’t see the point of literary theory, and since Enid, in the florid biweekly letters by means of which she saved many dollars on long-distance dialing, had regularly begged Chip to abandon his pursuit of an “impractical” doctorate in the humanities (“I see your old science fair trophies,” she wrote, “and I think of what an able young man like you could be giving back to society as a medical doctor, but then, you see, Dad and I always hoped we’d raised children who thought of others, not just themselves”), Chip had had plenty of incentives to work hard and prove his parents wrong. By getting out of bed much earlier than his grad-school classmates, who slept off their Gauloise hangovers until noon or