Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

“I want Cheep to understand why a dollar is a lot of money. Why my offer is a valid offer.”

“My problem,” Chip said, “is I’d be servicing American debts with those very same dollars.”

“Believe me, we’re familiar with this problem in Lithuania.”

“Chip wants a base salary of a thousand a day, plus performance incentives,” Eden said.

“One thousand per week,” Gitanas said. “For lending legitimacy to my project. For creative work and reassuring callers.”

“One percent of gross,” Eden said. “One point minus his twenty-thousand-dollar monthly salary.”

Gitanas, ignoring her, took a thick envelope from his jacket and, with hands that were stubby and unmanicured, began to count out hundreds. April was crouched on a patch of white newsprint surrounded by toothed monsters and cruel scribbles in several colors. Gitanas tossed a stack of hundreds on Eden’s desk. “Three thousand,” he said, “for the first three weeks.”

“He gets business-class plane fare, too, of course,” Eden said.

“Yes, all right.”

“And first-class accommodations in Vilnius.”

“There’s a room in the villa, no problem.”

“Also, who protects him from these criminal warlords?”

“Maybe I’m a criminal warlord myself, a little bit,” Gitanas said with a wary, shame-faced smile.

Chip considered the mess of green on Eden’s desk. Something was giving him a hard-on, possibly the cash, possibly the vision of corrupt and sumptuous nineteen-year-olds, or maybe just the prospect of getting on a plane and putting five thousand miles between himself and the nightmare of his life in New York City. What made drugs perpetually so sexy was the opportunity to be other. Years after he’d figured out that pot only made him paranoid and sleepless, he still got hard-ons at the thought of smoking it. Still lusted for that jailbreak.

He touched the hundreds.

“Why don’t I get online and make plane reservations for you both,” Eden said. “You can leave right away!”

“So, you gonna do this thing?” Gitanas asked. “It’s a lot of work, lot of fun. Pretty low risk. No such thing as no risk, though. Not where there’s money.”

“I understand,” Chip said, touching the hundreds.

In the pageantry of weddings Enid reliably experienced the paroxysmal love of place —of the Midwest in general and suburban St. Jude in particular — that for her was the only true patriotism and the only viable spirituality. Living under presidents as crooked as Nixon and stupid as Reagan and disgusting as Clinton, she’d lost interest in American flag-waving, and not one of the miracles she’d ever prayed to God for had come to pass; but at a Saturday wedding in the lilac season, from a pew of the Paradise Valley Presbyterian Church, she could look around and see two hundred nice people and not a single bad one. All her friends were nice and had nice friends, and since nice people tended to raise nice children, Enid’s world was like a lawn in which the bluegrass grew so thick that evil was simply choked out: a miracle of niceness. If, for example, it was one of Esther and Kirby Root’s girls coming down the Presbyterian aisle on Kirby’s arm, Enid would remember how the little Root had trick-or-treated in a ballerina costume, vended Girl Scout cookies, and baby-sat Denise, and how, even after the Root girls had gone off to good midwestern colleges, they all still made a point, when home on holiday, of tapping on Enid’s back door and filling her in on the doings chez Root, often sitting and visiting for an hour or more (and not, Enid knew, because Esther had told them to come over but just because they were good St. Jude kids who naturally took an interest in other people), and Enid’s heart would swell at the sight of yet another sweetly charitable Root girl now receiving, as her reward, the vows of a young man with a neat haircut of the kind you saw in ads for menswear, a really super young fellow who had an upbeat attitude and was polite to older people and didn’t believe in premarital sex, and who had a job that contributed to society, such as electrical engineer or environmental biologist, and who came from a loving, stable, traditional family and wanted to start a loving, stable, traditional family of his own. Unless Enid was very much deceived by appearances, young men of this caliber continued, even as the twentieth century drew to a close, to be the norm in suburban St. Jude. All the young fellows she’d known as Cub Scouts and users of her downstairs bathroom and shovelers of her snow, the many Driblett boys, the various Persons, the young Schumpert twins, all these clean-cut and handsome young men (whom Denise, as a teenager, to Enid’s quiet rage, had dismissed with her look of “amusement”), had marched or would soon be marching down heartland Protestant aisles and exchanging vows with nice, normal girls and settling down, if not in St. Jude itself, then at least in the same time zone. Now, in her secret heart, where she was less different from her daughter than she liked to admit, Enid knew that tuxes came in better colors than powder blue and that bridesmaids’ dresses could be cut from more interesting fabrics than mauve crepe de chine; and yet, although honesty compelled her to withhold the adjective “elegant” from weddings in this style, there was a louder and happier part of her heart that loved this kind of wedding best of all, because a lack of sophistication assured the assembled guests that for the two families being joined together there were values that mattered more than style. Enid believed in matching and was happiest at a wedding where the bridesmaids suppressed their selfish individual desires and wore dresses that matched the corsages and cocktail napkins, the icing on the cake, and the ribbons on the party favors. She liked a ceremony at Chiltsville Methodist to be followed by a modest reception at the Chiltsville Sheraton. She liked a more elegant wedding at Paradise Valley Presbyterian to culminate in the clubhouse at Deepmire, where even the complimentary matches ( Dean & Trish ♦ June 13, 1987 ) matched the color scheme. Most important of all was that the bride and groom themselves match: have similar backgrounds and ages and educations. Sometimes, at a wedding hosted by less good friends of Enid’s, the bride would be heavier or significantly older than the groom, or the groom’s family would hail from a farm town upstate and be obviously overawed by Deepmire’s elegance. Enid felt sorry for the principals at a reception like that. She just knew the marriage was going to be a struggle from day one. More typically, though, the only discordant note at Deepmire would be an off-color toast offered by some secondary groomsman, often a college buddy of the groom, often mustached or weak-chinned, invariably flushed with liquor, who sounded as if he didn’t come from the Midwest at all but from some more eastern urban place, and who tried to show off by making a “humorous” reference to premarital sex, causing both groom and bride to blush or to laugh with their eyes closed (not, Enid felt, because they were amused but because they were naturally tactful and didn’t want the offender to realize how offensive his remark was) while Alfred inclined his head deafly and Enid cast her eye around the room until she found a friend with whom she could exchange a reassuring frown.

Alfred loved weddings, too. They seemed to him the one kind of party that had a real purpose. Under their spell he authorized purchases (a new dress for Enid, a new suit for himself, a top-quality ten-piece teakwood salad-bowl set for a gift) that he ordinarily would have vetoed as unreasonable.

Enid had looked forward, some day when Denise was older and had finished college, to hosting a really elegant wedding and reception (though not, alas, at Deepmire, since, almost alone among their better friends, the Lamberts could not afford the astronomical Deepmire fees) for Denise and a tall, broad-shouldered, possibly Scandinavian young man whose flaxen hair would offset the defect of the too-dark and too-curly hair Denise had inherited from Enid but who would otherwise be her match. And so it just about broke Enid’s heart when, one October night, not three weeks after Chuck Meisner had given his daughter Cindy the most lavish reception ever undertaken at Deepmire, with all the men in tails, and a champagne fountain, and a helicopter on the eighteenth fairway, and a brass octet playing fanfares, Denise called home with the news that she and her boss had driven to Atlantic City and gotten married in a courthouse. Enid, who had a very strong stomach (never got sick, never), had to hand the phone to Alfred and go kneel in the bathroom and take deep breaths.