The Imperfectionists Read online

  "About your article?"

  "No, no. Nothing to do with that."

  "What, then?"

  "Can we go upstairs? I'm cold. I've been out here a while." He laughs. "I'm old, you know! I might not look it, but--"

  "You're not old."

  "I am old. I am." He reaches out his hand, smiles. Jerome moves no closer. "I've been thinking about my family lately."

  "Which family?"

  "Can I come inside, Jerome? If you don't mind. My hands are ice-cold." He rubs them together, blows on them. "I had an idea. I hope you don't take offense at this. I was thinking maybe--only if you wanted--maybe I could help you with your English. If we practice regularly, you'll pick it up, I guarantee."

  Jerome flushes. "What do you mean? My English is fine. I learned it from you."

  "You didn't have that many opportunities to hear it."

  "I don't need lessons. Anyway, when would I do them? The ministry would never give me time off."

  To make a point, Lloyd switches to English, speaking intentionally fast: "I'm tempted to tell you what I know, son. I don't want to make you feel lousy, though. But what are you doing in this dump? My God, it's incredible how much you look like my father. So strange to see him again. And I know you don't work. Four kids I've produced, and you're the only one who wants to talk to me anymore."

  Jerome hasn't understood a word. Trembling with humiliation, he responds in French: "How am I supposed to know what you're saying? You're speaking so fast. This is ridiculous."

  Lloyd reverts to French himself. "I wanted to tell you something. Ask you something. You know, I'm thinking of retiring," he says. "I must have done, what, an article a day since I was twenty-two. And now I can't rustle up a single new idea. Not a one. I don't know what in hell's going on anymore. Even the paper won't publish me. It was my last--my last string. Did you know that? No one prints my stuff anymore. I think I'm leaving my apartment, Jerome. I can't pay for it. I shouldn't be there. But I don't know. Nothing's settled yet. I'm asking, I guess--I'm trying to figure it out. Quite what's the thing to do. What would you say? What's your opinion on the matter?" He struggles to ask this. "What would you advise that I should do? Son?"

  Jerome opens the door to the building. "Come in," he says. "You're staying with me."

  1953. CAFFe GRECO, ROME

  Betty rattled her highball glass and peered inside, seeking a last dribble of Campari under the ice cubes. Her husband, Leo, sat across the marble cafe tabletop, hidden behind an Italian newspaper. She reached over and knocked on his page, like the door to his study.

  "Yaaahs, m'dear," he bellowed, the great wall of newsprint having rendered him insensible to the fact that he was in public and that shouted marital chitchat could be heard by all; after years in Rome, he still assumed no one overseas understood English.

  "No sign of Ott," she said.

  "True, true."

  "Another drink?"

  "Yaaahs, m'dear." In his cupped hand, he planted a kiss and lobbed it at her like a grenade, tracing with his eyes the parabola up and over the table, down onto her cheek. "Direct hit," he declared, and disappeared behind the newspaper pages. "Everyone's so stupid!" he said, giddy at all the wonderful reports of chaos. "So amazingly stupid!"

  Betty raised her arm to hail a waiter, then caught sight of Ott, just sitting there at the bar, watching them. Her hand drooped at the wrist and she cocked her head, mouthing "What are you doing over there?," small muscles tugging at the sides of her mouth, smile rising, then falling, then rising.

  Ott observed Betty and Leo an instant longer, stood from his bar stool, and made for the seating area at the back.

  He had last seen her twenty years earlier in New York. She was in her early forties now, a married woman, her black hair a little shorter, her green eyes softened. Still, Ott glimpsed in the tilt of her head, in her hesitant smile, the woman he had known. By fading, the past seemed only to sharpen before him. He had an impulse to reach across the table and touch her.

  Instead, he took the extended hand of Betty's husband and gripped the man's shoulder, expressing toward Leo--whom Ott was meeting for the first time--the warmth he could not appropriately express toward his wife.

  Ott sat beside Betty on the velvet banquette, tapped her arm by way of greeting, and slid athletically behind the adjacent table, agile still at fifty-four. He squeezed the back of his thick neck, ran a hand over his buzz-cut scalp, touched his wrinkled brow, from under which he considered them, his pale blue eyes shifting expressions, as if threatening to fight the whole room, to laugh, to give up altogether. He patted Leo's cheek. "I'm pleased to be here."

  With these few words, Ott flooded them with gratification--Betty had forgotten what it was like to be around him.

  Cyrus Ott had traveled here from his headquarters in Atlanta, leaving his businesses plus his wife and young son, solely for this meeting. On the passenger ship over, he had read their articles. Leo, the Rome correspondent for a Chicago newspaper, had mastered every cliche, his pieces unfolding in that journalese realm where refugees are endlessly flooding across borders, cities bracing for storms, voters heading for polls. Betty was a freelancer for U.S. women's magazines, specializing in light humor pieces about life abroad and cautionary tales about American girls seduced by Italian skunks. In the old days, she'd had ambitions. Ott was sorry to see they had availed so little.

  "So," Leo said, "what was it you wanted to see us about exactly, if I may ask?"

  "I want to talk about a newspaper."

  "Which one?"

  "My own," Ott answered. "I intend to start one. An international English-language newspaper. Based in Rome and sold around the world."

  "Oh yeah?" Leo said, leaning forward and releasing his brown knit tie, which he'd been pinning against his chest to cover a missing shirt button. "Pretty interesting," he said, tie swinging like a clock pendulum, revealing a thread blossom where the button had been. "Could work," he said. "Definitely could. Uhm, you looking for people?"

  "You two. You'll run it."

  Betty wriggled up higher on the banquette. "Why would you start a newspaper?"

  "The more I think about it," Leo interrupted, "the more I like it. Nobody's done it right yet. Nobody's making real money out of something like this."

  Ott alone was sober when they parted that night. He shook their hands, patted Leo's shoulder, and walked up the Spanish Steps to the Hotel Hassler, where he was staying. Betty and Leo stumbled down Via del Babuino for home.

  Leo took her ear and whispered into it. "Was he serious?"

  "He always used to be."

  But Leo hardly heard. "That's the richest guy I ever got loaded with," he said.

  They arrived at their building and dragged themselves up to the fourth floor as if the stairwell banisters were rope. Theirs was a decent-sized apartment for a childless couple, high ceilings and bared wooden rafters, but only one window, which wasn't a bad thing when it came to the hangovers. She made coffee.

  Suddenly serious, she said, "Be sweet to me." She touched the point of Leo's cheekbone, where he had missed a patch of stubble--Betty had been noticing it all evening.

  A few blocks away, Ott sat on his hotel bed. Perhaps, he thought, I should go no further with this. Perhaps I should leave everything as it was. Perhaps I should not start this paper.

  "WORLD'S OLDEST LIAR

  DIES AT 126"

  * * *

  OBITUARY WRITER--ARTHUR GOPAL

  ARTHUR'S CUBICLE USED TO BE NEAR THE WATERCOOLER, BUT the bosses tired of having to chat with him each time they got thirsty. So the watercooler stayed and he was moved. Now his desk is in a distant corner, as far from the locus of power as possible but nearer the cupboard of pens, which is a consolation.

  He arrives at work, flops into his rolling chair, and remains still. This persists until inertia and continued employment cease to be mutually tenable, at which point he wriggles off his overcoat, flicks on the computer, and checks the latest news reports.
/>   No one has died. Or, rather, 107 people have in the previous minute, 154,000 in the past day, and 1,078,000 in the past week. But no one who matters. That's good--it has been nine days since his last obit, and he hopes to extend the streak. His overarching goal at the paper is indolence, to publish as infrequently as possible, and to sneak away when no one is looking. He is realizing these professional ambitions spectacularly.

  He opens a manila folder so that, if anyone happens past, he can flutter sheets, peer up irascibly, and mutter "Preparedness!" which seems to put most people off. Not all people, sadly.

  Clint Oakley appears behind him, and Arthur swivels around in his chair as if twisted by a garrote. "Clint. Hi. Morning. I've been over the wires. Nothing obvious. To me, at least. Not so far." He despises this tendency to justify himself so abjectly to his superiors. He should shut up.

  "Didn't you see it?"

  "See what?"

  "Are you serious?" Clint is a specialist in queries that are at once hectoring and incomprehensible. "Don't you read email? Wake up, faggot." He raps Arthur's monitor as if it were a skull. "Anybody home?" Clint Oakley, Arthur's boss, is a dandruff-raining, baseball-obsessed, sexually resentful Alabamian with a toilet-brush mustache and an inability to maintain eye contact. He is also the culture editor, an ironic posting if considered. "Rectum," he says, apparently meaning Arthur, and struts back to his office.

  If history has taught us anything, Arthur muses, it is that men with mustaches must never achieve positions of power. Sadly, the paper has not heeded this truism, because Clint has authority over all special sections, including obituaries. Lately, he has heaped endless chores upon Arthur, ordering him to collate This Day in History, Brain Teasers, Puzzle-Wuzzle, the Daily Ha-Ha, and World Weather, in addition to his regular necrological duties.

  Arthur finds the e-mail Clint was referring to. It's from the editor-in-chief, Kathleen Solson, who wants preparedness--that is, an obituary prepared before the subject dies--on Gerda Erzberger. Who on earth is that? He checks the Internet. She turns out to be an Austrian intellectual, once lauded by feminists, then decried by them, then forgotten. Why should the paper care that she's about to die? Well, because Kathleen happens to have read Erzberger's memoirs while at college. And, as Arthur knows, "news" is often a polite way of saying "editor's whim."

  Kathleen arrives to discuss the piece.

  "I'm working on it right now," he says preemptively.

  "On Gerda?"

  "Gerda? Do you know her personally?" If the answer is yes, his assignment assumes fresh peril.

  "Not well. Met her a couple of times at events."

  "Not a friend, then," he suggests hopefully. "How urgent would you say this is?" Which is to say, When's she planning to die?

  "Unclear," Kathleen responds. "She's not having treatment."

  "Is that good or bad?"

  "Well, it's not typically good with cancer. Listen, I'd like us to do this properly for once--give you enough time to get an interview with her, go up there and so on, rather than just working from clips."

  "Go up where?"

  "She lives outside Geneva. Have the secretaries work out travel arrangements."

  Travel means effort and a night away from home. Bleak. And nothing is worse than obit interviews. He must never disclose to his subjects what he's researching because they tend to become distressed. So he claims to be working on "a profile." He draws out the moribund interviewee, confirms the facts he needs, then sits there, pretending to jot notes, stewing in guilt, remarking, "Extraordinary!" and "Did you really?" All the while, he knows how little will make it into print--decades of a person's life condensed into a few paragraphs, with a final resting place at the bottom of page nine, between Puzzle-Wuzzle and World Weather.

  At this disheartening thought, he sneaks out of the office to fetch his daughter. Pickle, who is eight, emerges from the school gate, satchel strap around her throat, arms flat at her sides, potbelly distended, glasses scanning nothing in particular, her untied shoelaces flailing with each step. "Antiques?" he asks, and she slips her hand into his, squeezing it in affirmation. To Via dei Coronari they amble hand in hand. He observes her from above, her tangled black hair, tiny ears, the thick lenses that bend and swell the cobblestones. She babbles softly and snorts with amusement. She is a wonderful nerd, and he hopes this won't change. He'd be distressed if she were cool--it'd be as if his flesh and blood had grown up to be purple.

  "Your aspect," he says, "recalls that of a chimpanzee."

  She is humming softly and offers no response. After a minute, she says, "And you remind me of an orangutan."

  "I can't argue with that. Nope, I cannot argue with that. By the way," he adds, "I have a new one for you: Tina Pachootnik."

  "Say it again?"

  "Pachootnik. Tina."

  She shakes her head. "Impossible to say."

  "Do you like Tina at least?"

  "I'm willing to consider it."

  She has been looking for a pseudonym, not for any purpose but because it took her fancy. "What about Zeus?" she asks.

  "Taken, I'm afraid. Though he's been gone long enough that there'd be little room for confusion. Would you use it like that--Zeus, on its own--or would it be Zeus something?"

  She opens her pudgy hand within his cool dry palm and he releases her. She drifts, stepping over her own feet, beside him but abstracted, apart. Then she swoops back, plunges her fingers into his, and looks up, nostrils swelling with mischief.

  "What?"

  "Frog."

  "I forbid it," he says. "Frog is a boy's name."

  She shrugs, an oddly adult gesture in such a little girl.

  They enter one of the opulent antiques shops on Via dei Coronari. The clerks watch Arthur and Pickle closely. The two of them come here often, never buying, except once, when she knocked over a mantel clock and Arthur had to pay for it.

  She prods a 1920s telephone.

  "You hold that part to your ear," Arthur explains, "and you talk into the other bit."

  "But how do you make a call?"

  He sticks his fingers into the dial and cranks a rotation. "You've never seen a phone like this before? My God, when I was growing up this was all we had. Imagine the strife! Hard times, my dear, hard times."

  She purses her lips and pivots to investigate a bust of Marcus Aurelius.

  Back home, Arthur prepares her a Nutella sandwich. She eats one every afternoon, legs dangling from the kitchen chair, smudges of chocolate accruing on the underside of her nose.

  He tears off the crust and pops it into his mouth. "Father tax," he explains, chewing. She does not object.

  When Visantha's car pulls up outside, Pickle hurriedly swallows her last bite and Arthur hastens to rinse off the sticky plate--it is as if a teacher approached.

  "How was work?" he asks his wife.

  "Okay. What are you guys up to?"

  "Nothing much."

  Pickle ambles off to the television room, and Arthur absentmindedly follows. They chat in there and laugh at their TV show.

  Visantha trails in. "What are you watching?"

  "Just some junk," he replies.

  Pickle hands him the remote and wanders off to her room. He watches her go down the hall, then turns to Visantha. "You know what she told me today? She doesn't remember the twentieth century. Isn't that terrifying?"

  "Not particularly. What are we doing for dinner?"

  "Pickle," he calls down the hall. "Any thoughts on dinner?"

  The secretaries book Arthur from Rome to Geneva by rail, a ten-hour journey with connections in Milan and Brig. Supposedly this saves money on a short-notice flight but is a colossal nuisance for him. He boards the early train at Stazione Termini, buys pastries in the cafeteria carriage, and, squashed amid the second-class rabble, settles into the first volume of Erzberger's memoirs, which is called, modestly, In the Beginning. From the author photo, Erzberger is, or was, in her early thirties, pretty and gaunt, with shoulder-length dark hair and
twisted, ironic lips. The picture is from 1965, when the book came out. She must be in her seventies by now.

  As his train pulls into Geneva in the early evening, he lifts his nose from the book and stares at the seat-back before him. From the blurbs on the Internet, he had expected a weary, politically dated autobiography. Instead, her prose communicates courage and humanity. He studies her photo again and feels scandalously unprepared.

  He passes customs, obtains Swiss francs, and finds a cabbie who will take him to her house, which is just across the French border. The taxi drops him on a wet country road; the red taillights disappear down the hill. He is sweaty, uncertain, late. He dislikes being late, yet invariably is. He rubs his hands together, huffs a breath cloud onto them. This is the place: the right number, the pines, as she described. After a little searching, he finds a gate within the pleached fence and enters. Her home is built of sturdy timber beams, with icicles hanging from the eaves like wizards' caps. He snaps one off--he can never resist--and turns around to survey the twilight sky. A crust of clouds overlays the Alps. The icicle drips down his wrist.

  She opens the door behind him.

  "Hi, hi, sorry I'm late," he says, then switches to German. "Sorry, I was just admiring the view."

  "Come in," she says. "You can leave the icicle outside, please."

  The living room is illuminated by potted lights that pick out columns of dust in the air. An ebony coffee table bears an overflowing ashtray and a moonscape of stain rings from hot mugs that spilled. On the walls, African war masks leer. The bookshelves are perfectly stocked from wing to wing, like a residence whose management has ceased accepting new applicants. The room smells of strong tobacco and of hospital, too.

  Erzberger's hair is short and white, and when she passes under the lights her scalp is visible. A tall woman, she wears a hand-knitted sweater that hangs loosely around her throat, like a sock that has lost its elastic. For trousers, she has flannel pajama bottoms, and on her feet, sheepskin slippers. The sight reminds him that it is cold; he shivers.