Читаем The Corrections полностью

“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.