The Corrections: A Novel (15 page)

He knocked on the glass until Eden emerged from her office and peered out at him. Eden had high cheekbones and big watery blue eyes and thin translucent skin. Any extra calories she ate at lunch in L.A. or drank as martinis in Manhattan got burned on her home treadmill or at her private swim club or in the general madness of being Eden Procuro. She was ordinarily electric and flaming, a bundle of hot copper wire; but her expression now, as she approached the door, was tentative or flustered. She kept looking back at her office.

Chip gestured that he wanted in.

“She’s not here,” Eden said through the glass.

Chip gestured again. Eden opened the door and put her hand on her heart. “Chip, I’m
so
sorry about you and Julia—”

“I’m looking for my script. Have you read it?”

“I—? Very hastily. I need to read it again. Need to take some notes!” Eden made a scribbling motion near her temple and laughed.

“That opening monologue,” Chip said. “I’ve cut it.”

“Oh, good, I love a willingness to cut. Love it.” She looked back at her office.

“Do you think, though, that without the monologue—”

“Chip, do you need money?”

Eden smiled up at him with such odd merry frankness that he felt as if he’d caught her drunk or with her pants down.

“Well, I’m not flat broke,” he said.

“No, no, of course. But still.”

“Why?”

“And how are you with the Web?” she said. “Do you know any Java? HTML?”

“God, no.”

“Well, just come back to my office for a second. Do you mind? Come on back.”

Chip followed Eden past Julia’s desk, where the only visible Julian artifact was a stuffed toy frog on the computer monitor.

“Now that you two have broken up,” Eden said, “there’s really no reason you can’t—”

“Eden, it’s not a breakup.”

“No, no, trust me, it’s over,” Eden said. “It is absolutely over. And I’m thinking you might enjoy a little change of scenery, so you can start getting over it—”

“Eden, listen, Julia and I are having a momentary—”

“No, Chip, sorry, not momentary: permanent.” Eden laughed again. “Julia may not be blunt, but I am. And so, when I think about it, there’s really no reason for you not to meet …” She led Chip into her office. “Gitanas? Incredible stroke of luck here. I have, here, the perfect man for the job.”

Reclining in a chair by Eden’s desk was a man about Chip’s age in a red ribbed leather jacket and tight white jeans. His face was broad and baby-cheeked, his hair a sculpted blond shell.

Eden was practically climaxing with enthusiasm. “Here I’ve been racking my brain, Gitanas, I can’t think of anyone to help you, and probably the best-qualified man in New York City is knocking at the door! Chip Lambert, you know my assistant Julia?” She winked at Chip. “Well, this is
Julia’s husband
, Gitanas Misevičius.”

In almost every respect—coloration, shape of head, height and build, and especially the wary, shame-faced smile that he was wearing—Gitanas looked more like Chip than anybody Chip could remember meeting. He was like Chip with bad posture and crooked teeth. He nodded nervously without standing up or extending a hand. “How’s it going,” he said.

It was safe to say, Chip thought, that Julia had a type.

Eden patted the seat of an unoccupied chair. “Sit sit sit,” she told him.

Her daughter, April, was on the leather sofa by the windows with a mess of crayons and a sheaf of paper.

“April, hey,” Chip said. “How were those desserts?”

The question seemed not to April’s liking.

“She’ll try those tonight,” Eden said. “Somebody was testing limits last night.”

“I was not testing limits,” April said.

The paper on April’s lap was ivory-colored and had text on its reverse.

“Sit! Sit!” Eden exhorted as she retreated to her birch-laminate desk. The big window behind her was lensed with rain. There was fog on the Hudson. Blackish smudges suggestive of New Jersey. Eden’s trophies, on the walls, were movie-ad images of Kevin Kline, Chloë Sevigny, Matt Damon, Winona Ryder.

“Chip Lambert,” she told Gitanas, “is a brilliant writer, with a script in development with me right now,
and
he’s got a Ph.D. in English,
and
, for the last two years, he’s been working with my husband doing mergers and acquisitions,
and
he’s brilliant with all the Internet stuff, we were just now talking about Java and HTML, and, as you see, he cuts a very impressive, uh—” Here Eden for the first time actually gave her attention to Chip’s appearance. Her eyes widened. “It must be raining cats and
dogs
out there. Chip’s not, well, ordinarily quite so wet. (My dear, you are very wet.) In all honesty, Gitanas, you won’t find a better man. And Chip, I’m just—delighted—that you came by. (Although you are very wet.)”

A man by himself could weather Eden’s enthusiasm, but two men together had to gaze at the floor to preserve their dignity in the face of it.

“I, unfortunately,” Eden said, “am slightly pressed for time. Gitanas having dropped in somewhat unexpectedly.
What I would love is if the two of you could go and use my conference room and work things out, and take as long as you like.”

Gitanas crossed his arms in the wound-up European style, his fists jammed in his armpits. He didn’t look at Chip but asked him: “Are you an actor?”

“No.”

“Well, Chip,” Eden said, “that’s not strictly true.”

“Yes, it is. I’ve never acted in my life.”

“Ha-ha-ha!” Eden said. “Chip is being modest.”

Gitanas shook his head and looked at the ceiling.

April’s sheaf of paper was definitely a screenplay.

“What are we talking about?” Chip said.

“Gitanas is looking to hire someone—”

“An American actor,” Gitanas said with disgust.

“To do, uh, corporate PR for him. And for more than an
hour
now”—Eden glanced at her watch and let her eyes and mouth distend in exaggerated shock—“I’ve been trying to explain that the actors I work with are more interested in film and stage than in, say, international investment schemes. And tend, also, to have wildly inflated notions of their own literacy. And what I’m trying to explain to Gitanas is that you, Chip, not only have an excellent command of language and jargon, but you don’t have to pretend to be an investment expert. You
are
an investment expert.”

“I’m a part-time legal proofreader,” Chip said.

“An expert in the language. A gifted screenwriter.”

Chip and Gitanas traded glances. Something about Chip’s person, perhaps the shared physical traits, seemed to interest the Lithuanian. “Are you looking for work?” Gitanas said.

“Possibly.”

“Are you a drug addict?”

“No.”

“I’ve
got
to go to the bathroom,” Eden said. “April, honey, come along. Bring your drawings.”

April obediently hopped off the sofa and went to Eden.

“Bring your drawings, though, honey. Here.” Eden gathered up the ivory pages and led April to the door. “You men talk.”

Gitanas put a hand to his face and squeezed his round cheeks, scratched his blond stubble. He looked out the window.

“You’re in government,” Chip said.

Gitanas tilted his head. “Yes and no. I was for many years. But my party is kaput, I’m an entrepreneur now. Sort of a governmental entrepreneur, let’s say.”

One of April’s drawings had fallen to the floor between the window and the sofa. Chip extended a toe and pulled the page toward him.

“We have so many elections,” Gitanas said, “nobody reports them internationally anymore. We have three or four elections a year. Elections are our biggest industry. We have the highest annual per capita output of elections of any country in the world. Higher than Italy, even.”

April had drawn a portrait of a man with a regular body of sticks and blobs and oblongs, but for a head he had a black and blue snarled vortex, a ratty scrabble, a scribbled mess. Through the ivory bond, Chip could see faint blocks of dialogue and action on the other side.

“Do you believe in America?” Gitanas said.

“Jesus, where to begin,” Chip said.

“Your country which saved us also ruined us.”

With his toe Chip lifted one corner of April’s drawing and identified the words—

MONA
(cradling the revolver)
What’s wrong with being in love with
myself? Why is that a problem?

—but the page had grown very heavy or his toe very weak. He let the page lie flat again. He pushed it underneath the sofa. His extremities had gone cool and a little bit numb. He couldn’t see well.

“Russia went bankrupt in August,” Gitanas said. “Maybe you heard? Unlike our elections, this was widely reported. This was
economic
news. This mattered to the investor. It also mattered to Lithuania. Our main trading partner now has crippling hard-currency debts and a worthless ruble. One guess which they use, dollars or rubles, to buy our hens’ eggs. And to buy our truck undercarriages from our truck-undercarriage plant, which is the one good plant we have: well, it would be rubles. But the rest of the truck is made in Volgograd, and that plant closed. So we can’t even get rubles.”

Chip was having trouble feeling disappointed about “The Academy Purple.” Never to look at the script again, never to show it to a soul: this might be a relief even greater than his relief in the men’s room of Fanelli’s where he’d taken the salmon from his pants.

From an enchantment of
breasts
and hyphens and one-inch margins he felt himself awakening to a rich and varied world to which he’d been dead for who knew how long. Years.

“I’m interested in what you’re telling me,” he told Gitanas.

“It’s interesting. It is interesting,” Gitanas agreed, still hugging himself tensely. “Brodsky said, ‘Fresh fish always smells, frozen smells only when it thaws.’ So, and after the big thaw, when all the little fish came out of the freezer, we were passionate about this and that. I was part of it. Very much part of it. But the economy was mismanaged. I had my fun in New York, but back home—there was a depression, all right. Then, too late, 1995, we pegged the litas to the dollar and started privatizing, way too fast. It wasn’t my
decision, but I might have done the same. The World Bank had money that we wanted, and the World Bank said privatize. So OK, we sold the port. We sold the airline, sold the phone system. The highest bidder was usually American, sometimes Western European. This wasn’t supposed to happen, but it did. Nobody in Vilnius had cash. And the phone company said, OK, we’ll have foreign owners with deep pockets, but the port and the airline will still be a hundred percent Lithuanian. Well, the port and the airline were thinking the same. But still it was OK. Capital was flowing, better cuts of meat at the butcher, fewer brownouts. Even the weather seemed milder. Mostly criminals took the hard currency, but that’s post-Soviet reality. After the thaw, you get the rot. Brodsky didn’t live to see that. So OK, but then all the world economies started collapsing, Thailand, Brazil, Korea, and this was a problem, because all the capital ran home to the U.S. We found out, for example, that our national airline was sixty-four percent owned by the Quad Cities Fund. Which is? A no-load growth fund managed by a young guy named Dale Meyers. You never heard of Dale Meyers, but every adult citizen of Lithuania knows his name.”

This tale of failure seemed to amuse Gitanas greatly. It had been a long time since Chip had had such a powerful sensation of
liking
somebody. His queer friends at D——College and the
Warren Street Journal
were so frank and headlong in their confidences that they foreclosed actual closeness, and his responses to straight men had long fallen into one of two categories: fear and resentment of the successes, flight from the contagion of the failures. But something in Gitanas’s tone appealed to him.

“Dale Meyers lives in eastern Iowa,” Gitanas said. “Dale Meyers has two assistants, a big computer, and a three-billion-dollar portfolio. Dale Meyers says he didn’t mean to acquire a controlling stake in our national airline. Dale says it
was program trading. He says one of his assistants misentered data that caused the computer to keep increasing its position in Lithuanian Airlines without reporting the overall size of the accumulated stake. OK, Dale apologizes to all Lithuanians for the oversight. Dale says he understands the importance of an airline to a country’s economy and self-esteem. But because of the crisis in Russia and the Baltics, nobody wants tickets on Lithuanian Airlines. So, and American investors are pulling money out of Quad Cities. Dale’s only way to meet his obligations is liquidate Lithuanian Airlines’ biggest asset. Which is its fleet. He’s gonna sell three YAK40S to a Miami-based air freight company. He’s gonna sell six Aerospatiale turboprops to a start-up commuter airline in Nova Scotia. In fact, he already did that, yesterday. So, whoops, no airline.”

“Ouch,” Chip said.

Gitanas nodded fiercely. “Yeah! Yeah! Ouch! Too bad you can’t fly a truck undercarriage! OK, and then. Then an American conglomerate called Orfic Midland liquidates the Port of Kaunas. Again, overnight. Whoops! Ouch! And then sixty percent of the Bank of Lithuania gets eaten up by a suburban bank in Atlanta, Georgia. And your suburban bank then liquidates our bank’s hard-currency reserves. Your bank doubles our country’s commercial interest rates overnight —why? To cover heavy losses in its failed line of Dilbert affinity MasterCards. Ouch! Ouch! But interesting, huh? Lithuania’s not being such a successful player, is it? Lithuania really fucked things up!”

“How are you men doing?” Eden said, returning to her office with April in tow. “Maybe you want to use the conference room?”

Gitanas put a briefcase on his lap and opened it. “I’m explaining to Cheep my gripe with America.”

“April, sweetie, sit down here,” Eden said. She had a big pad of newsprint which she opened on the floor near the
door. “This is better paper for you. You can make
big
pictures now. Like me. Like Mommy. Make a
big
picture.”

April crouched in the middle of the newsprint pad and drew a green circle around herself.