The Imperfectionists Page 5

  "I don't think he minded. He got me my first job in the business, on Fleet Street. After that, he didn't seem bothered one way or the other. But I never really had the journo bug. I just wanted a comfortable chair. Not an ambitious man, me."

  "Meaning you're a bit of a dud."

  "That's very kind of you."

  "Compared with R. P. Gopal, anyway."

  "Yes, you're right. I don't compare to him. He didn't leave me his mind, the bastard." He looks at her. "Since you're being scathing about me, I hope you won't mind my being direct. Actually, I'm not sure that I care. You really are at odds with your writing, you know. When I read your memoirs before our first meeting, I was nervous about interviewing you. But you're much less admirable in person."

  "I'm starting to like this conversation. Is all this going in the obituary?" She coughs painfully, wheezes into the oxygen mask. When she speaks again, it is a rasp. "This is a quiet room," she says. "I was lucky to get my own. My niece comes to visit every day. Every single day. Did I tell you about her?"

  "Yes, you complained about her. Said she tormented you with hot soup and cold comfort."

  "No, no, no," she responds, "I never complained about her. You're remembering wrong. I adore my niece. She's the dearest woman. Gerasim--that's my nickname for her. Her real name is Julia. She's an angel. I'm devoted to her. You can't imagine her kindness in these past months." She coughs. "I'm running out of words. I'm losing my voice. I'll shut up. Though I've said nothing. Nothing useful." She produces a pad and writes, "I'm supposed to communicate with this thing." She sits at the ready, but he asks her nothing.

  The only noises are medical machinery and her wheezing.

  Until he speaks: "Here's something interesting. Actually, I'll tell you something. It doesn't matter but ... This thing that happened." He stops short.

  She nods and writes on the pad: "I know. An accident. Your daughter."

  "Yes. My daughter. It was an accident."

  She writes, "It is over now."

  "I can't talk about it." He puts his tape recorder and pens in his pocket.

  She takes off her mask. "I'm sorry," she says. "I had nothing to say to you in the end."

  As he waits to board his flight back to Rome, he writes out all he can recall about Erzberger. He works on the plane and, once home, looks for a space where he will be undisturbed. Only one is free, Pickle's former room. He sits on her bed and taps away at his laptop until 4 A.M., sipping whiskey to keep himself going--an old trick of his father's. The next day, he stays late at the office, compiling background on Erzberger. He stacks her books on the edge of his desk, his efforts plain to all. Kathleen passes, noticing.

  Erzberger, as she depicted herself in writing, is morally bold, uncompromised by her epoch, endearing, even inspiring. In person, she showed little of this. But when Arthur writes the obituary he adheres to the Erzberger of the memoirs, the fictional Gerda, overlooking the woman he met. This is the article they want. To add an air of authority, he inserts the phrase "in a series of interviews conducted shortly before her death." He revises the piece until he can imagine no further amendments. He reads it aloud to himself in Pickle's old room. He has made an effort this time. It's almost as good as something his father would have submitted. He emails it directly to Kathleen, bypassing Clint. This is irregular, and she points it out. In her office, Arthur explains: "I thought you'd have a better feel for this edit. I don't want to step on anybody's toes. But if you have a chance to glance at it, that'd be great. If not, or if it's inappropriate, of course no trouble."

  She does read it, and is impressed. "When Gerda dies," she says, "we'll run this as it is. Full length, if possible. This is exactly the sort of writing we need more of. With a real voice. With something to say. Really terrific. You captured her perfectly. Make sure Clint gives you the proper space. Okay? And if there's any trouble, say I said so."

  He takes the opportunity to propose a few more stories to Kathleen--not obits but general features. She doesn't object, so he pursues them in his own time. Maintaining precedent, he files directly to her, not ostensibly for her to edit but because, as he puts it, "I'd really appreciate your opinion, if you have a second." Once she has read each and enthused, he forwards it to Clint with a note stating, "KS edited." With that, Clint cannot touch a word.

  Gradually, Arthur converts Pickle's old room into his study. That is, he calls it his study. Visantha won't.

  One night, he looks up from his notes. "Hi. What's up?"

  "You busy?" she asks.

  "Fairly. What's going on?"

  "I'll come back later. I don't want to interrupt."

  "What's up?"

  "Nothing. I just wanted to talk."

  "About?" He turns off the desk light. He sits in darkness. She is silhouetted in the doorway. He says, "I can't talk about that."

  "I haven't said what."

  "I'm done here for the night."

  "Age-wise," she says, "it's a rush. If we want to."

  "I got a fair amount done tonight, I think."

  "Because of my age. I'm just saying."

  "No, no," he says, rising. "Not for me. No. Couldn't bear that. I'm done in here. Done for the night." He approaches and touches her shoulders. She responds, expecting an embrace. Instead, he shifts her gently aside and passes.

  The next day, a Cuban man who claimed to be 126 years old dies. Nobody believes the claim, but the paper needs to fill out page nine. So Arthur is assigned to write eight hundred words. He steals the basics from the wires and adds a few clever flourishes. He reads it over a dozen times, emails it to Clint. "You have the fake Cuban," Arthur informs him, and does a last check of his email in-box before heading to the door. He finds a message from Erzberger's niece: Gerda has died.

  Arthur checks the time to see if he can still make deadline. He calls the niece, offers his condolences, inquires about a few compulsory details: when exactly Gerda died, what the official cause was, when the funeral will be. He types these updates into the obit and walks into Clint's office. "We need to knock something off page nine."

  "Not at this hour."

  "An Austrian writer, Gerda Erzberger, just died. I have preparedness ready to go."

  "Are you insane? We've got the fucking Cuban on nine."

  "You need to kill him and put in Erzberger."

  "I need to? Kathleen didn't say I need to do nothing."

  "Kathleen wanted it in."

  Each man cites Kathleen's name as if hoisting a club.

  "Nuh-uh. Kathleen wanted the 126-year-old Cuban. She said so at the afternoon meeting."

  "Well, I want Erzberger in. At full length."

  "Who heard of this dumb-ass Austrian, anyway? Look, man, I think we can safely hold your masterpiece till tomorrow."

  "Kathleen specifically said she wanted something in the paper as soon as Erzberger died. Obviously, we could tack a brief onto the bottom of the world's oldest liar and that might satisfy her. But I don't want to do that. This is my personal request, nothing to do with Kathleen: dump the Cuban and run Erzberger. And don't hack my piece. I don't want to open the paper tomorrow and read it as a brief at the end of the Cuban. Is that clear?"

  Clint smiles. "I'll do whatever I got to do, man."

  Arthur sleeps poorly that night--he's too impatient. When the paper arrives, he flips immediately to page nine. "Yes!" he declares. "Oh, Clint, dear, dear Clint!" Just as Arthur had hoped, Clint has destroyed the Erzberger article, condensing her life into one hundred words and making it a brief at the bottom of the dead Cuban. "Perfect," Arthur says.

  He composes himself and phones Kathleen from his study. "Sorry to bug you this early at home, but did you see our obits today?"

  "Obits plural?" He hears her flipping pages. Her voice turns metallic. "Why did we run this as a brief?"

  "I know--I don't see why we couldn't have just held it for a day."

  "You didn't know it was running like this?"

  "Not a clue. I'm only seeing it now. The thin
g that bothers me is--well, a few things, I guess. First, there's all the money the paper spent sending me up there. Second, there's the effort I took in going back. Especially after everything that happened." He kicks the door of the study closed so Visantha won't hear.

  "Exactly," Kathleen says.

  "But more than anything else," he goes on, "it feels like a disservice to Gerda. An important twentieth-century writer, a serious thinker, in my view. Already she's way too overlooked. And what do we do? Clint turns her into a brief. At the bottom of some Cuban liar. I don't want to get anyone in trouble, but I find it offensive. And it makes the paper look bad. It makes us look like philistines, when all Clint needed to do was hold it for one day and then run it at full length, as I told him to. As I said you wanted. I told him, 'Don't run anything today. Kathleen would want you to hold it until tomorrow.' Anyway. I'm sorry--I'm bitching," he says. "I don't mean to slag off Clint. It's just--"

  "No, you're right to be angry. I'm pretty annoyed myself."

  "Could we run my piece at full length today?" He knows the answer.

  "We can't report her death twice," she says.

  "What stuns me is that I specifically brought up your name when Clint and I discussed this."

  "Seriously?"

  "I was crystal clear."

  "You know what," she says, anger mounting, "I don't want your stuff under Clint anymore. This is ridiculous."

  "But politically? I mean, I have to be under Clint. I'm. Which is his."

  "Nothing is his."

  "What about my fixtures: the puzzles and all that?"

  "You shouldn't have to do that crap anyway. An intern could do that."

  "Clint will give you a hard time about this."

  "I'm not worried."

  "I don't want to get ahead of myself here," he says, picking at the Scotch tape holding one of Pickle's old magazine clippings to the wall. "But I've been meaning to talk to you about something."

  When Arthur is named the new culture editor, he moves into Clint's former office. It is deemed too blatant to make Clint sit in Arthur's old cubicle, so they find him one at the edge of the sports department, facing a pillar.

  At home, the atmosphere between Arthur and Visantha is strained. She is openly hunting for a job back in the United States, and there is no talk of his returning with her. Indeed, he will be relieved when she leaves--the old Visantha is long gone anyway, just as the previous Arthur has perished.

  These days, he prefers to stay late at work. After-hours, he admires his new office. True, it is smaller than those of the other section chiefs. And he is farther from the cupboard of pens. Then again, the watercooler is a good deal nearer. And this is a consolation.

  1954. CORSO VITTORIO, ROME

  The paper was established on Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, a broad east-west thoroughfare lined with dirty-white travertine churches and blood-orange Renaissance palazzi. Many of the buildings in central Rome were colored as if from a crayon box: dagger red, trumpet yellow, rain-cloud blue. But the paper's dour seventeenth-century building seemed to have been colored with a lead pencil: it was scribble gray, set off by a towering oak door large enough to swallow a schooner, though human beings entered through a tiny portal hinged within.

  A doorman sized up new arrivals from his glass booth, pointing down the long hallway, its brilliant burgundy runner halting just short of the elevator cage, the metal door ajar, its operator sitting on a velvet stool. "Che piano, signore? What floor, sir?"

  For Cyrus Ott, it was the third, formerly the headquarters of a Fascist movie magazine that went bankrupt after the fall of Mussolini. Ott rid the place of its dusty furniture and had all the interior walls knocked down, creating a wide-open newsroom, rimmed with tidy offices that looked inward, like box seats directed toward the stage. He bought wooden swivel chairs, varnished desks, brass banker's lamps, a custom-built horseshoe table for the copy editors, shiny black phones for the reporters, thirty-eight Underwood typewriters imported from New York City, thick crystal ashtrays, and thick white carpeting, with a discreet cocktail bar in the east wall.

  Six months later, any visitor stepping out of the elevator at the third floor landed directly in a vibrating newsroom, the secretary's desk ahead, a handful of typing reporters left and right, a half-dozen copy editors defacing proofs at the horseshoe table. In the offices along the walls, salesmen hocked ad space, a stenographer copied down classifieds, the accountant inked ledgers. In the northwest corner was Ott's office, with PUBLISHER etched on the frosted door; in the northeast corner were Leopold T. Marsh, editor-in-chief, and Betty Lieb, news editor. Ranged nearby were senior staffers specializing in business, sports, wire copy, photos, layout. Copyboys buzzed back and forth like pollinating bees.

  Printing took place in the subbasement, but it could have been another land. Unionized Italian laborers ran the deafening press down there, yet few of them ever met anyone who wrote the paper just floors above. In the late afternoon, a truck arrived with a vast roll of newsprint, which the workers slid down the incline at the back, slamming it into the loading bay shuddering the building up to the third floor. Any journalists lazing around up there--joshing with one another, legs kicked up on desks, brimmed hats dangling on shoe tips, cigarettes smoldering in ashtrays--jerked upright in immediate panic. "Fuck, is it that time already?"

  Miraculously, by the 10 P.M. deadline the paper had filled every line down every column, no matter the last-minute heart palpitations and blaspheming. Editors rose from their desks for the first time in hours, shrugging tortured shoulder muscles, attempting to exhale.

  Most of the journalists were men, Americans chiefly, but with a few Britons, Canadians, and Australians, too. All had been based in Italy when hired, and all could speak the local language. But the paper's newsroom was strictly Anglophone. Someone hung a sign on the elevator door that read, LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA, VOI CH'USCITE--OUTSIDE IS ITALY.

  And when staffers went downstairs for sandwiches they'd say, "I'm headed to Italy--anyone need anything?"

  The first full year of operations, 1954, was packed with news: the McCarthy hearings, the Soviets testing a nuclear weapon, the Dow Jones closing at a record high of 382 points. Initially, the paper suffered under the suspicion that it was an international mouthpiece for Ott's business empire, but this was unfounded. The greatest influence over content was necessity--they had holes to fill on every page and jammed in any vaguely newsworthy string of words, provided it didn't include expletives, which they were apparently saving for their own use around the office.

  Betty and Leo ran the editorial operations jointly. He liked to say, "I handle the big picture." But it was Betty who wrote--or rewrote--most of the copy; she had an effortless way with prose. As for Ott, he handled the money side and offered advice when solicited, which was often. Betty and Leo speedwalked across the newsroom to his office, each trying to get in the door first. Solemnly, Ott listened, staring at the carpet. Then he looked up, pale blue eyes flitting between Betty and Leo, and issued his ruling.

  The three of them got along splendidly. Indeed, the only awkward moments arose when Ott stepped away, at which point Betty and Leo spoke to each other as if newly introduced and watched the door for their publisher to return.

  Normally, Ott was ruthless about profit. But the paper was an anomaly: financially, it stank. Back in the United States, his business rivals observed this Italian venture with suspicion. It must be a scheme of sorts, they figured.

  If so, the aim was far from clear.

  He never explained his business plans to Betty and Leo, and was even more opaque on personal matters. He had a wife, Jeanne, and a young son, Boyd, but had never explained why they remained in Atlanta. Leo sought to tease out details but failed--Ott had the ability to insert full stops in conversations, when and where he wished them.

  "EUROPEANS ARE LAZY,

  STUDY SAYS"

  * * *

  BUSINESS REPORTER--HARDY BENJAMIN

  HARDY SPENDS HER MORN
ING ON THE PHONE TO LONDON, PARIS, and Frankfurt, wheedling quotes from grumpy financial analysts. "Is an interest-rate hike imminent?" she asks. "Is Brussels extending the shoe tariffs? What about the trade imbalance?"

  She is unfailingly courteous even when her sources are not.

  "Hardy, I'm busy. What do you need?"

  "I could call back later."

  "I'm busy now; I'm busier later."

  "Sorry to be so annoying. Just wondering if you got my voice mail."

  "Yes, I know--you're doing another China story."

  "I'll be quick, I swear."

  "You know my line on China: 'We should all start learning Mandarin. Blah-blah-blah.' Can I go now?"

  By midafternoon she has written a thousand words, which is greater than the number of calories she has consumed since yesterday. Hardy is on a diet that started, roughly, at age twelve. She's thirty-six now and still dreaming of butter cookies.

  She takes a break at the espresso bar downstairs, where she meets up with her friend Annika, who is unemployed and therefore usually free for coffee. Hardy empties a packet of artificial sweetener over her cappuccino. "Nothing epitomizes the futility of human striving quite like aspartame," she says and sips. "Ah, but this is good."

  Meanwhile, Annika floods her caffe macchiato with an endless stream of brown sugar.

  They are an unusual duo at the bar: one is pinkish, geeky, short (Hardy); the other is bosomy, stylish, tall (Annika). The pinkish one waves for the barman, but he doesn't notice; the bosomy one nods and he bolts forward.

  "You're annoyingly good at hailing boys," Hardy says. "Though it's demeaning how they slobber over you."

  "It doesn't demean me."

  "It demeans me. I want counter staff to treat me like an object," she says. "Did I tell you, by the way, that I had another nightmare about my hair?"

  Annika smiles. "You're sick, Hardy."

  "In my dream, I was looking in the mirror and I saw this apparition blinking back at me, surrounded by orange frizz. Horrifying." She glimpses herself in the mirror behind the bar and turns from the sight. "Grotesque."