The Imperfectionists: A Novel Read online

  "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.

  "What would you like to drink? I'm having tea."

  "Tea would be perfect."

  "So can I assume," she asks, half turned toward the kitchen, "that you're writing my obituary?"

  He is caught out. "Oh," he says. "Why? Why do you ask?"

  "What

  are you writing, then? You said on the phone it was a profile." She disappears into the kitchen, returning a minute later with his steaming mug. She places it on the coffee table, motions him to a black leather armchair, and sits on the matching couch, which does not sink to accommodate her as he expects but holds its shape as if bearing her upon its palm. She reaches to the table for her cigarette pack and lighter.

  "I mean, yes," he admits. "It is for that. For an obituary. Is that awful to hear?"

  "No, no. I rather like it. This way, I'll know it's accurate--I won't have a chance to send a letter of complaint afterward, will I." She coughs, covering her mouth with the cigarette pack. She lights one. "You?"

  He

  declines.

  A lick of smoke slithers from her mouth, her chest rises, and the thread is yanked back inside. "Your German is excellent."

  "I lived in Berlin for six years as a teenager. My father was a correspondent there."

  "Yes, right--you're the son of R. P. Gopal, aren't you."

  "I

  am."

  "And you write obituaries?"

  "Primarily,

  yes."

  "Claw your way to the bottom, did you?"

  He responds with a polite smile. Writing for an international newspaper in Rome normally earns him a degree of respect--until, that is, people learn of his beat.

  She continues: "I liked your father's books. What was that one with 'Elephant' in the title?" She glances at her bookshelf.

  "Yes," Arthur says. "He was an excellent writer."

  "And do you write as well as he did?"

  "Alas, no." He sips his tea and pulls out a notepad and a tape recorder.

  She crushes her cigarette in the ashtray, picks at the stitches on her slippers.

  "More tea?"

  "No, I'm fine, thank you." He turns on his tape recorder and inquires about the start of her career.

  She answers impatiently, adding, "You should ask me
other things."

  "I know this is basic. I just need to confirm a few facts."

  "It's all in my books."

  "I know. I'm just--"

  "Ask what you want."

  He holds up his copy of her memoirs. "I enjoyed this, by the way."

  "Really?" Her face lights up and she takes a quick drag of her cigarette. "I'm sorry you had to suffer through the boring thing."

  "It wasn't boring."

  "I'm bored by it. That's the problem, I suppose, with writing a book about your life. Once you're done, you never want to hear about it again. But it's hard to stop talking about your own life--especially if you're me!" She leans forward solicitously.

  "Parenthetically, Mr. Gopal, I do like obituaries. I didn't mean to sound as if I was denigrating your work. You didn't take it that way?"

  "No,

  no."

  "Good. That makes me feel better. Now listen, when do I get to read this piece?"

  "You don't, I'm afraid. It's against our rules. Otherwise everyone would demand to edit this bit or that. I'm sorry."

  "Pity. How entertaining it would be to know how I'll be remembered. The single article I'd most like to read is the one I never can! Ah, well." She weighs the cigarette pack in her hand. "People must grow terribly upset when you turn up with a notepad. No?

  Like the undertaker arriving to measure the dowager."

  "I hope I'm not that bad. Although in truth, most people don't realize what I'm researching. Anyway, I'm relieved that I don't have to pretend tonight," he says. "It makes life a great deal easier for me."

  "But does it make death a great deal easier for me?"

  He attempts a laugh.

  "Ignore me," she says. "I'm only playing with words. In any case, I'm not afraid of it. Not in the least. You can't dread what you can't experience. The only death we experience is that of other people. That's as bad as it gets. And that's bad enough, surely. I remember when for the first time a dear friend of mine died. Must have been, what, 1947? It was Walter--he's in the book, the one who's always wearing his waistcoat to bed, if you remember. He got sick, and I abandoned him in Vienna and he died. I had a terror of illness. I was petrified by--by what? Not of getting sick and dying. Even then, in an elementary way, I understood what death was at its worst: something that happens to other people. And that is hard to bear; that is what I couldn't face back then with Walter, what I've never been good at.

  "But my point, you see, is that death is misunderstood. The loss of one's life is not the greatest loss. It is no loss at all. To others, perhaps, but not to oneself. From one's own perspective, experience simply halts. From one's own perspective, there is no loss. You see? Yet maybe this is a game of words, too, because it doesn't make it any less frightening, does it." She sips her tea. "What I really fear is time. That's the devil: whipping us on when we'd rather loll, so the present sprints by, impossible to grasp, and all is suddenly past, a past that won't hold still, that slides into these inauthentic tales. My past--it doesn't feel real in the slightest. The person who inhabited it is not me. It's as if the present me is constantly dissolving. There's that line of Heraclitus: 'No man steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.' That's quite right. We enjoy this illusion of continuity, and we call it memory. Which explains, perhaps, why our worst fear isn't the end of life but the end of memories." She considers him searchingly. "Do I make sense? Does that seem reasonable? Mad?"

  "I hadn't thought of it that way before," he says. "You probably have a point."

  She reclines. "It's an extraordinary fact!" She leans forward again. "Don't you find it striking? The personality is constantly dying and it feels like continuity. Meanwhile, we panic about death, which we cannot ever experience. Yet it is this illogical fear that motivates our lives. We gore each other and mutilate ourselves for victory and fame, as if these might swindle mortality and extend us somehow. Then, as death bears down, we agonize over how little we have achieved. My own life, for example, has been so inadequately realized. I will scarcely be recorded anywhere. Except, of course, in your eccentric newspaper. I won't question why you've chosen me--thank God someone has! It extends the lease on my illusions."

  "That's much too modest."

  "Nothing to do with modesty," she retorts. "Who reads my books anymore? Who has heard of me at this stage?"

  "Well, me for one," he lies.

  "Oh dear--listen to me," she goes on. "I say that ambition is absurd, and yet I remain in its thrall. It's like being a slave all your life, then learning one day that you never had a master, and returning to work all the same. Can you imagine a force in the universe greater than this? Not in my universe. You know, even from earliest childhood it dominated me. I longed for achievements, to be influential--that, in particular. To sway people. This has been my religion: the belief that I deserve attention, that they are wrong not to listen, that those who dispute me are fools. Yet, no matter what I achieve, the world lives on, impertinent, indifferent--I know all this, but I can't get it through my head.

  It is why, I suppose, I agreed to talk to you. To this day, I'll pursue any folly to make the rest of you shut up and listen to me, as you should have from the start!" She coughs and reaches for a fresh cigarette. "Here is a fact: nothing in all civilization has been as productive as ludicrous ambition. Whatever its ills, nothing has created more. Cathedrals, sonatas, encyclopedias: love of God was not behind them, nor love of life. But the love of man to be worshipped by man."

  She leaves the room without explanation and her heaving coughs are audible, muted by a closed door. She returns. "Look at me," she says. "No children, never a husband. I reach this stage of my life, Mr. Gopal, with the most comical realization: that the only legacy is genetic material. I always disdained those who made children. It was the escape of the mediocre, to substitute their own botched lives with fresh ones. Yet today I rather wish I'd borne a life myself. All I have is one niece, an officious girl (I shouldn't call her a girl--she's going gray) who looks at me as if through the wrong end of a telescope. She comes in here every week with gallons of soup, soup, soup, and an entourage of doctors and nurses and husbands and children to look me over one last time.

  You know, there's that silly saying 'We're born alone and we die alone'--it's nonsense.

  We're surrounded at birth and surrounded at death. It is in between that we're alone."

  Erzberger has veered so far off topic that Arthur is unsure how to lead her back without appearing rude. She herself, from the industry of her smoking, seems to sense that this is not what he came for.

  "Can I use your bathroom?" He closes the door after himself, rolls his shoulders, consults his watch. It's already so much later than he'd wanted. He must get some usable quotes. Nothing she has said will work. But the task feels insurmountable. All he wants is another career, one that pays him to make Nutella sandwiches and cheat at Monopoly with Pickle.

  He checks his cellphone, which is set on silent mode. It shows twenty-six missed calls. Twenty-six? That can't be right. Normally, he doesn't get twenty-six calls in a week. He checks again--but yes, twenty-six calls in the past hour. The first three are from home, the remainder are from Visantha's mobile.

  He steps from the bathroom. "Sorry, I have to make a call. Excuse me." He goes out onto the porch. The air is freezing.

  Erzberger smokes on the leather couch, hearing the murmur of his conversation but not the sense of it. His talking stops, but he does not come back in. She stubs out her cigarette, lights a new one. She swings open the front door. "What's going on? You're not even on the phone anymore. What are you doing out there? Are we finishing this interview or not?"

  "Where's

  my

  bag?"

  "What?"

  He walks past her into the living room. "Do you know where my bag is?"

  "No. Why? Are you leaving? What are you doing?" she shouts after him. He doesn't even close the front door after himself.

  I
n the following days, Arthur does not return to the paper. Soon, everyone knows why. Kathleen telephones to offer her condolences. "Come back whenever you feel ready."

  After a few weeks, his colleagues begin to grumble.

  "Hardly makes a difference with him or without him," they say.

  "We have interns doing Puzzle-Wuzzle now."

  "And doing it better."

  "He used to leave early every day. I mean, I do feel bad for the guy. But, you know? This is kind of--kind of pushing it. Don't you think? How long's he gonna be gone?"

  The news editor, Craig Menzies, turns out to be Arthur's truest ally during this period. He lobbies on Arthur's behalf, arguing that the paper should leave him alone as long as he needs. But after two months Accounts Payable informs Arthur that he must return in the New Year or lose his job.