He wasn’t so naïve, of course, as to take Eden Procuro’s professional effusions at face value. But the more he saw of Eden socially, the more confident he became that his script would get a sympathetic reading. For one thing, Eden was like a mother to Julia. She was only five years older, but she’d undertaken a wholesale recalibration and improvement of her personal assistant. Although Chip never quite shook the feeling that Eden was hoping to cast someone else in the role of Julia’s love interest (she habitually referred to Chip as Julia’s “escort,” not her “boyfriend,” and when she talked about Julia’s “untapped potential” and her “lack of confidence” he suspected that mate selection was one area in which she hoped to see improvement in Julia), Julia assured him that Eden thought he was “really dear” and “extremely smart.” Certainly Eden’s husband, Doug O’Brien, was on his side. Doug was a mergers-and-acquisitions specialist at Bragg Knuter & Speigh. He’d set Chip up with a flextime proofreading job and had seen to it that Chip was paid the top hourly wage. Whenever Chip tried to thank him for this favor, Doug made pshawing motions with his hand. “You’re the man with the Ph.D.,” he said. “That book of yours is scary smart stuff.” Chip had soon become a frequent guest at the O’Brien-Procuros’ dinner parties in Tribeca and their weekend house parties in Quogue. Drinking their liquor and eating their catered food, he had a foretaste of a success a hundred times sweeter than tenure. He felt that he was really living.
Then one night Julia sat him down and said there was an important fact that she hadn’t mentioned earlier, and would he promise not to be too mad at her? The important fact was that she sort of had a husband. The deputy prime minister of Lithuania—a small Baltic country—was a man named Gitanas Misevičius? Well, the fact was that Julia had married him a couple of years ago, and she hoped Chip wouldn’t be too mad at her.
