Her problem with men, she said, was that she’d grown up without. Her father was a manic-depressive boat salesman whom she remembered meeting once and wished she’d never met at all. Her mother, a cosmetics-company executive, had fobbed Julia off on her own mother, who’d enrolled her in a Catholic girls’ school. Julia’s first significant experience with men was at college. Then she moved to New York and embarked on the long process of sleeping with every dishonest, casually sadistic, terminally uncommitted really gorgeous guy in the borough of Manhattan. By the age of twenty-eight, she had little to feel good about except her looks, her apartment, and her steady job (which mainly consisted, however, of answering the phone). So when she met Gitanas at a club and Gitanas took her seriously, and by and by produced an actual not-small diamond in a white-gold setting, and seemed to love her (and the guy was, after all, an honest-to-God ambassador to the United Nations; she’d gone and heard him do his Baltic thundering at the General Assembly), she did her level best to repay his kindness. She was As Agreeable As Humanly Possible. She refused to disappoint Gitanas even though, in hindsight, it probably would have been better to disappoint him. Gitanas was quite a bit older and fairly attentive in bed (not like Chip, Julia hastened to say, but not, you know, terrible), and he seemed to know what he was doing with the marriage thing, and so one day she went to City Hall with him. She might even have gone by “Mrs. Misevičius” if it had sounded less idiotic. Once she was married, she realized that the marble floors and black lacquer furniture and heavy modern smoked-glass fixtures of the ambassador’s apartment on the East River weren’t as entertainingly campy as she’d thought. They were more like unbearably depressing. She made Gitanas sell the place (the chief of the Paraguayan delegation was delighted to get it) and buy a smaller, nicer place on Hudson Street near some good clubs. She found a competent hairstylist for Gitanas and taught him how to pick out clothes with natural fibers. Things seemed to be going great. But somewhere she and Gitanas must have misunderstood each other, because when his party (the VIPPPAKJRIINPB17: the One True Party Unswervingly Dedicated to the Revanchist Ideals of Kazimieras Jaramaitis and the “Independent” Plebiscite of April Seventeen) lost a September election and recalled him to Vilnius to join the parliamentary opposition, he took it for granted that Julia would come along with him. And Julia understood the concept of one flesh, wife cleaving to husband, and so forth; but Gitanas in his descriptions of post-Soviet Vilnius had painted a picture of chronic coal and electricity shortages, freezing drizzles, drive-by shootings, and heavy dietary reliance on horsemeat. And so she did a really terrible thing to Gitanas, definitely the worst thing she’d ever done to anybody. She agreed to go and live in Vilnius, and she sort of got on the plane with Gitanas and sat down in first class and then sneaked off the plane and sort of changed their home phone number and had Eden tell Gitanas, when he called, that she had disappeared. Six months later Gitanas returned to New York for a weekend and made Julia feel really, really guilty. And, yes, no argument, she’d disgraced herself. But Gitanas proceeded to call her certain rough names and he slapped her pretty hard. The upshot of which was that they couldn’t be together anymore, but she continued to use their apartment on Hudson Street in exchange for staying married in case Gitanas needed quick asylum in the United States, because apparently things were going from bad to worse in Lithuania.
Anyway, that was the story of her and Gitanas, and she hoped that Chip wouldn’t be too mad at her.
And Chip was not. Indeed, at first he not only didn’t mind that Julia was married, he adored the fact. He was fascinated by her rings; he talked her into wearing them in bed. Down at the offices of the Warren Street Journal, where he sometimes felt insufficiently transgressive, as if his innermost self were still a nice midwestern boy, he took pleasure in alluding to the European statesman he was “cuckolding.” In his doctoral thesis (“Doubtful It Stood: Anxieties of the Phallus in Tudor Drama”) he’d written extensively about cuckolds, and under the cloak of his reproving modern scholarship he’d been excited by the idea of marriage as a property right, of adultery as theft.
