“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.”