The Imperfectionists (23 page)

"Wait, wait," Menzies interrupts. "Please don't say his name. I don't want to know it. If possible."

"Okay, but I have to say some things." She is pale. "Then, after, we don't have to talk about it again. I feel like--" She shakes her head. "I feel ill. I'm really, really so sorry.

I am. I have to say this, though. Paolo only sent that--I apologize, I'm not supposed to say his name." She hesitates to find the right description. "That sickening, evil, fucking letter because I wouldn't get involved in some huge thing with him. Do you mind if I get a cigarette?" She rummages through the kitchen drawer for her Camels, which she normally smokes only when she's out with her yoga friends. She has never lit one in the apartment. She does now and exhales, shaking her head. "He's trying to force me into something. That's the point of this."

"You're

upset."

"Well, yeah." She pinches her arm. "More than. More than upset. It's, like, the only time in my life I wanted to physically harm someone. I'd like to see him hurt.

Physically. Hit by a truck. You know?" Her features strain toward Menzies, as if to grasp him. "You know?"

He looks at his hands. "Okay."

"Do you see, though?"

"I think I do."

"The reason he sent that thing was to break you and me up," she says.

"So you would have a relationship with him."

She takes another drag. "Basically." She exhales. "Yeah." She stubs out the cigarette.

"Let's not talk about it. I find that--" He doesn't finish the sentence. He picks up the TV remote. "Do you know if anything happened?" He turns on CNN to learn the answer.

Arriving at work the next day, he sits at his desk staring at his thermos for a minute. "Anything happened?" he asks his computer as it loads up.

The workday passes like any other--no one even mentions his disappearance of the day before, and Kathleen doesn't seem to remember that he never returned her calls.

At newspapers, what was of the utmost importance yesterday is immaterial today.

That night, their phone rings at home and Menzies answers. It is an Italian man.

He asks for Annika. Menzies hands it over. She hears the voice and immediately puts down the receiver. "Hang up next time," she tells Menzies. "Don't give it to me if it's him.

Just hang up."

Paolo keeps calling. He rings late and wakes them. They change the phone number. All goes quiet for a few weeks. Then legal papers arrive--astonishingly, he's suing Annika for breach of promise, claiming that she broke a verbal contract to leave her partner and buy an apartment with him. The suit says that he carried out his part and even took on a mortgage. Now he wants compensation.

No one at work asks Menzies about the humiliating email, but they haven't forgotten it. Reporters challenge him more often. Senior editors undermine him in news meetings. Only Kathleen is unchanged: she bosses him around and takes out her moods on him, same as ever.

As for Menzies and Annika themselves, they behave almost the same as before.

But the scale is off. His praise of her photo project is too intent; her queries about his inventions are too assiduous. Previously, they used to try different dishes each night at dinner. Now they repeat the same few. "It's one of your favorites, I thought."

"Yes. Great. Thanks."

When they meet with the lawyer, he advises Menzies to settle, otherwise the case will drag on. Annika almost intervenes, but she shuts up. Menzies knows that she wants to fight Paolo's case--she is raging.

"I'd prefer to be done with this," Menzies tells the lawyer. "I'll happily pay for that. Well, not happily, but ..."

They return to their apartment in silence. Later, they have a ridiculous spat: she criticizes the way he grates Parmesan. The apartment is suddenly too small for two people.

"I'm going downstairs for a bit of tinkering," he says.

And she is left alone.

She flips through their music and puts on Chet Baker's soundtrack for
Let's Get
Lost
, a documentary by one of her favorite photographers, Bruce Weber. The tune is

"You're My Thrill." She frowns with concentration to make out the lyrics, then loses interest. She opens her cellphone--no messages. What if she messaged him? Saying? She types into the phone keypad, erasing each snippet in turn: "this song" (delete) "idiot"

(delete) "i wish" (delete) "why is it always dumb stuff?" (delete) "so stupid." She erases this, too, and writes "i miss u, can i come for visit?" She sends it. From the stereo, Chet Baker sings, "Nothing seems to matter ... Here's my heart on a silver platter ... Where's my will?"

Down in the workshop, Menzies flicks a rubber band, trying to hit a mark on the wall. He achieves it once, then tries for three consecutive hits. He tires of the game and turns to sketching unrealistic inventions that he will never build.

She knocks at the door. "Hi," she says uneasily. "Am I disturbing?"

"No, no. What's up?"

She takes a hop closer. "What can you show me? Some new invention that's gonna make us millions and revolutionize life as we know it?"

"I

wish."

"You're not working on some evil plot against me, are you?"

"Yes, I'm going to drive you slowly mad with my diabolical cheese-grating."

She sticks out her tongue.

"We should work on a revenge invention," she says.

"For him, you mean?"

"Yeah."

"I must admit I've thought about that."

"You have to tell me."

"No, it's stupid."

"Come

on."

He half smiles. "It's this: a little audio player that we'd stick in his bedroom and that would play an endless loop of a mosquito whining. But it would only activate in darkness, so every time he turned off the lights the whining would start. Then he'd turn on the lights to hunt for it and the mosquito wouldn't be there. And so on and so on, until straitjackets were required."

"That's genius! We have to do it!"

"No,

no."

"Why

not?"

"Well,

many

reasons."

"Like?"

"First of all, I'm not even sure how. Also, we'd definitely get caught. And I don't want to spend my time building a gadget for the purpose of tormenting someone. What would be the point? Making this guy's life a bit annoying? So we'd sit around at night feeling happy that someone else was irritated?"

"Okay, not your mosquito thing necessarily. But something--a bit of revenge.

No?"

"I suspect revenge is one of those things that's better in principle than in practice.

I mean, there's no real satisfaction in making someone else suffer because you have."

"You are so wrong there."

"And does revenge even work? I mean, is the point to get justice--to balance out something unfair? Nothing does that. Is it to make you feel better? It wouldn't make me feel better."

"So if someone does something shitty to you, there's no way to fix it?" She looks away, as if casually.

"I don't think there is, no," he answers. "The way to get over stuff, I think, is by forgetting. But there's no way to 'fix' in the way you mean. Not in my opinion."

She shakes her head. "I hate this."

"What?"

"I feel--I don't know--out of balance. You're not a vengeful person like me. You should get pissed off."

"At

him?"

"At me. You know?"

"That doesn't appeal in the least, making you suffer."

"Then I end up suffering more."

"What do you want me to do?"

"Why are you getting mad? We're just talking."

"I'm not mad. I just don't know what I'm supposed to do." He clears his throat.

"What you don't realize is that I'd be in real trouble without you. That sounded melodramatic--sorry. I just meant that, to be honest, even if you did something worse, I'm not about to reject you. I can't. Getting hurt by you only makes me need comfort more.

Comfort from you. Not something I should admit. But ..."

"It's

okay."

It isn't okay. He ought to shut up. She's drifting away, more with each word of pardon he thrusts upon her. "I'm forty-one now," he says, "I live in a country whose language I don't speak, where, without you, I don't remotely fit it, where my colleagues consider me some kind of weasel."

"No, they don't."

"They do. Look, I'm Kathleen's henchman. She gives orders and I hop to it. And I don't have another option. That one day I'll come up with some great invention and get out of journalism? It's not going to happen."

"It

might."

"It won't. I have no alternative to this life. Without you, I'm--you've seen me, Annika. I told you what I was before you. So I'm slightly worried. I mean, I'm terrified essentially."

"Of

what?"

"I spent almost a decade alone before you."

"I know. I know that. But--" She pauses. "You can't be with someone just because you can't face being alone."

"No? Isn't that the best reason to be with someone? I'd put up with anything for that reason. I mean, look, I've never been so humiliated as I have over this situation with you. Did you know he sent that letter to everyone in my office?"

She

freezes.

"What?"

"I'm

serious."

She covers her mouth. "You never told me that."

"And there was a photo with it. Of you. On our bed."

She goes pale.

"I'm not joking," he says. "It went to everyone."

She closes her eyes and shakes her head. "I want to die."

"It's okay," he says. "It's okay. Look, my point is that all of this, from start to finish, makes me want to, makes me want to be sick or--or, because, I don't know. Sorry, I'm sort of overwhelmed. Feel free to laugh at me. But that is how I feel about it. It doesn't matter. It's all right." He touches her cheek. "Thank you," he says, "for traveling out here to Italy with me." He kisses her. "Did you come downstairs to leave me?"

She is quiet.

"You can leave me," he says.

"I," she says, "I can't bear that I humiliated you." She can scarcely get the words out, but repeats them. "I can't bear that. I wish you would
do
something. I wish you were evil like me."

"What are you talking about?"

"I could do anything to you, then? You'd put up with anything?"

"I don't have a choice."

"Do I make
any
difference here?" Her voice wavers; she is losing control. "I mean, please--get angry with me. Give me the impression I'm involved here, that I'm not just some random girl whose job it is to make sure you don't get lonely at your new life overseas." She struggles out the words. "I don't want you to--if it's possible--to think of what I did as a humiliation to you. It was my selfishness. My acting dumb, like an idiot, for my own selfish, I don't know what, boredom. It wasn't important. I wish I could, you know, make you know that."

She calms somewhat. But there is a distance in her.

"Why did you come down here?" he asks. "You never come down here."

"I had something for you." She holds out an envelope.

He removes the letter and reads the opening lines. "Oh," he says with surprise.

"You applied for a patent. In my name." He looks up. "And they rejected it." He laughs.

"It says why, though. You could make some changes maybe."

He reads the letter in full. She must not have realized that his infantile science projects are not nearly sophisticated enough to obtain a patent. He won't look up from the letter. If he does and she is gone, he will not make it out of this room. Of course, that is untrue--he will make it out, climb upstairs, return to work tomorrow, and the following day's paper will come out. That feels even worse.

He must keep her here. He must make his point. But what is his point? What is the point he's been trying to make all along? His impulse is to apologize, but that's wrong, too. Another apology would surely spell the end. She wants him to do something.

"Okay," he says.

"Okay

what?"

"Thanks, but who said I wanted a patent?"

"Didn't you? I thought you did."

"And how did you get this stuff, anyway? I mean, did you go through my material down here? That project wasn't even finished."

"What's the problem?"

"Well, it's an intrusion is the problem. I mean, this is none of your business."

"Oh, come on. You're overreacting."

"I don't interfere with your shit."

She goes silent--he never swears. "Personally," she says, "I'd be happy if you entered my stuff in some competition."

"Oh, yeah? Really? You'd like it if I came waving a rejection letter in your face and said, 'Here, I thought I'd do you a favor'? Spare me your next favor."

"Why are you so angry about this?"

"I'm not. I just don't know what else to do," he says. "My stuff down here is mine alone. For no other reason than this dumb workshop is a pleasure for me. I spend my life at a job I hate, in a career I can't stand. I'm forty-one and my girlfriend gets screwed by some guy in her yoga class, by some little Italian kid, and has me pay the legal bills. So--

" He waves the rejection letter at her.

She wipes her eyes, but her face is hard.

"So," he goes on, "you can keep your fingers out of my private business. Out of the only stuff I do that isn't a fucking disgrace."

"I'm going upstairs."

"Good." He's losing his nerve. "Good," he repeats louder. "Not upstairs, though.

You can fuck off back to the States. I'll pay your ticket."

He joins her in the apartment. She's at the kitchen table, shell-shocked. He takes her suitcase from the cupboard.

"Are you kidding me?" she says.

"You need to pack."

She opens a drawer full of underwear and socks, stares at them, doing nothing for a minute.

As she fills the suitcase, he goes online and buys a ticket for her flight back to Washington, leaving the next day.

"That's three thousand bucks," she exclaims, looking at the computer screen. "Are you insane?"

"Too late. I just paid for it." He phones a hotel and books her a room for that night.

"What about my things?"

"Get them shipped. Look, don't take the flight if you don't want. But then you're paying your own way home."

He calls a taxi and carries her bags outside. He drops them beside her at the curb and goes back in, without a word. His legs tremble on the stairs up. In the apartment, he stands over the toilet, spitting bitter saliva into the bowl until his mouth is dry.

How long before she arrives at the hotel?

If he calls too soon, he'll seem insane. He must appear to have cooled down.

He sits on the cold tiles of the bathroom, his shoulder against the toilet bowl. He rereads the letter from the patent office. It was kind of her. Nothing she has done has touched him like this. And the rejection is useful: it puts an end to all these years of ridiculous daydreams. No inventor, he. That's done with, then. Good.

He waits two nauseating hours.

Has he made his point? The point he's been trying to make? But no, this isn't the point he wanted to make at all.

He picks up his cellphone and finds that she has sent him a text message: "i miss u, can i come for visit?" It was sent hours before, when he was still in the basement and she was still here. He calls her mobile, but there is no answer.

He phones the hotel. The reception desk transfers him to her room. His mouth is parched. He keeps swallowing.

"It's me," he says as the phone is answered. "My point is this. I think we both want." He hesitates. "Don't we? Or am I--"

But he is interrupted. It is a man's voice. It is Paolo.

1977. CORSO VITTORIO, ROME

The paper improved under Milton Berber. It developed pluck and humor, pulled
off the occasional scoop, even won a couple of awards--nothing stunning, but still
unprecedented in its history
.

The newsroom changed, too. In the old days, journalists were referred to as "the
boys." Now many of the boys were women. Crude jokes earned fewer snorts of approval,
and ethnic slurs did not fly. Milton demanded that ashtrays (and the floor is not an
ashtray) be used. The filthy carpeting was changed, made pristine white again. And the
cocktail bar in the east wall was replaced with a watercooler; the consequent decline in
typos was extraordinary
.

Typewriters disappeared next, replaced by video display terminals. Overnight, the
newsroom's distinctive
clack-clack-bing
went silent. The rumbling basement presses
hushed, too, with the work outsourced to modernized printing sites around the globe. No
longer did vast rolls of newsprint slam into the backside of the building in the late
afternoon, jolting any dozing reporter awake. No longer did delivery trucks clog Corso
Vittorio at dawn as workmen loaded the papers, copies still warm
.

News got cooler, quieter, cleaner
.

However, the biggest change was money: the paper started making it. Not a heap,
and not every month. But after decades it was profitable
.

While other publications snubbed far-flung outposts, the paper targeted them,
finding its niche at the fringes of the world, copies turning up on armchairs in the
Diamond Dealers Club of Freetown, or at a village newsagent on the island of Gozo, or
on a bar stool in Arrowtown, New Zealand. A passerby picked it up, perused a few pages
and, as often as not, the paper gained a new devotee. By the early 1980s, daily
circulation had neared twenty-five thousand, climbing annually
.

With readers around the globe, it was impossible to produce a normal daily--yesterday in Melbourne wasn't yesterday in Guadalajara. So the paper took its own
route, trusting reporters and editors to veer from themedia pack, with varying success.

The trick was to hire well: hungry reporters like Lloyd Burko in Paris; nitpicky
wordsmiths like Herman Cohen
.

The paper also gained a reputation in journalistic circles as a feeder to
prestigious U.S. publications, which attracted young hotshots to Rome. Milton trained
them, wrung copy from them for a few years, then hoisted them to high-profile positions
elsewhere. Those who moved away recalled him with affection and always dropped by
the office when transiting through Italy, showing off their expensive jobs, boasting of
bylines and babies
.

Milton's reputation was enhanced by all this, and various midsize U.S.

newspapers tried to lure him away. But he had no intention of leaving--this was the best
job of his life
.

Elsewhere in the Ott Group, matters were more bleak. The problems began when
Boyd was peripherally implicated in the fraudulent bankruptcy of a Midwestern bank. He
and eight others avoided criminal charges but were fined $120 million. His reputation
was further sullied over a stock-fixing scandal involving several Ott Group employees.

Boyd himself had no role in it, but a spate of articles conflated his bank scandal with the
stock-fixing case. The ugliest blow came in the mid-1980s, when an Ott Group copper
subsidiary was found to have dumped toxins into a rural water source in Zambia, causing
scores of birth defects. A South African newspaper printed a ghoulish price list that Ott
Group reps had used to compensate villagers: $165 for missing limbs, $40 for missing
hands, and a diminishing scale from there, concluding with the curiously exact sum of
$3.85 per lost toe. Ott Group headquarters claimed ignorance of this but built the
villagers new houses nevertheless
.

"COLD WAR OVER,

HOT WAR BEGINS"

* * *

READER--ORNELLA DE MONTERECCHI

SHE HAS BEEN DREADING TOMORROW EVER SINCE IT HAPPENED the first time.

Ornella sits on the sofa in her living room, the paper on her lap, and picks at her lower lip. A faint ripping comes from the kitchen, where the cleaner, Marta, is tearing sheets of paper towel, which she must place between stacked pots and pans to avoid scuffing the surfaces. This is among the many rules that previous cleaners--and there have been dozens--contravened. Some were dismissed for tardiness. Some for impudence. Some stole, or were suspected of it. Others failed to learn, or didn't care to, or left dust under beds. Marta has worked here for almost two years and, so far, is almost without fault, except that she is Polish, which Ornella views as a demerit. Also, Marta has an inappropriately good figure for a cleaner, though her face is a battlefield of acne, which makes up for it. She has a habit of looking down when confused or scolded, staring at the broom bristles and smiling. This has never struck anyone as defiance; it signals submission. Which is best with this mistress, for Ornella's home is a world where it is not possible to be good.

Holding a spray bottle of window cleaner, Marta treads cautiously into the living room in high-heeled cream pumps and nylons, a pencil skirt suit and a lace shawl--hopeless cleaning attire, but she has come directly from Mass. Ornella, who adopted her late husband's distaste for religion, insists that Marta clean every Sunday.

"How was God this morning?" Ornella asks. "Did he have anything nice to say about me?"

Marta smiles automatically, the window before her. It is not clear if she understands. Their common language is English, but Ornella's grasp of it, having used it at a thousand diplomats' dinners, is excellent, whereas Marta's is elementary. She hesitates in case her mistress plans further remarks. When none is forthcoming, she sprays the cleaning fluid in a blue mist that forms into beads on the pane; they hold briefly, then streak downward. She works faster than normal because her husband, Wojciech, is waiting downstairs, sitting on a park bench, leg hopping up and down, scratching dust with his dress shoe, dirtying the hem of his cheap gray suit, which Marta ironed that morning.

"A tribe in Rwanda killed hundreds of thousands of people belonging to another tribe in the past two weeks," Ornella says, slapping the article with the back of her hand.

"How is it possible to destroy so many humans so fast? Even in practical terms, how?

And why didn't the paper say anything about this when it was going on? Why only at the end?" She glances at Marta, who is wiping her way down the window. Ornella continues:

"Lloyd Burko, in his piece, makes the point that it's not just the Africans. The Yugoslavians are as bad, and they're Europeans. Everyone's killing everyone else. Maybe it
was
better during the Cold War. You probably don't agree, Marta--you were right in it, weren't you. Being a Pole. But at least that war was cold. Listen to this: 'Peace is a state humanity will not tolerate. Man's instinct is to commit violence.' That's from Lloyd Burko's piece. Is that true? I can't believe it is."

Marta collects the remaining cleaning rags around the apartment, rinses them, wrings them out, stashes them under the kitchen sink. For the final task of her day, she carries the stepladder into the hall and climbs to the top rung to reach the storage space, which is crammed full of copies of the paper. Editions that Ornella has read are placed to the left; unread copies are on the right. Marta reaches for tomorrow's, April 24, 1994.

"No!" Ornella cries, clamping her hands to the stepladder. "I don't
want
that one yet. I'll ask you for it when I
want
it. I'm still on April twenty-third. I'll let you know, Marta. Don't just push ahead like that, assuming."

Marta descends the ladder and takes her pay--twenty euros--her head bowed, murmuring. She hastens out of the apartment, exhaling only when she is a full flight down the stairs.

Ornella snoops around to ensure that she has not been cheated of twenty euros: hallway, bedroom, en suite bathroom, study, dining room, kitchen, terrace, guest room, guest bathroom, living room. Marta is impeccable, as usual, and this doesn't especially please Ornella.

She seats herself on the sofa and clears her throat, blinks as if to sharpen her vision, and surveys the front page of April 23, 1994, the same front page she has been stuck on for three weeks. It is a day she cannot surmount. Tomorrow--April 24, 1994--is too hard to bear again.

She has read every copy of the paper since 1976, when her husband, Cosimo de Monterecchi, was posted to Riyadh. He, the Italian ambassador, traveled without restriction in Saudi Arabia. But she, as a woman, was effectively detained in a guarded zone for Westerners, while her two sons attended the international school all day. From boredom, she took to reading the paper, which in the late 1970s was one of the few foreign periodicals available in the kingdom. She had never learned the technique of newspaper reading, so took it in order like a book, down the columns, left to right, page after page. She read every article and refused to move on until she was done, which meant that each edition took several days to complete. Much was confusing at first. At night, she posed questions to Cosimo, initially basic ones like "Where is Upper Volta?"

Later, her queries grew more complex, such as "If both the Chinese and the Russians are Communists, why do they disagree?" Until she was posing questions about the Palestinians' role in Jordanian affairs, infighting among apartheid opponents, and supply-side economics. Cosimo occasionally referred to an event that she hadn't reached yet, spoiling the surprise, so she gave him strict orders not to leak anything, even in passing.

Thus began her slow drift from the present.

One year into her newspaper reading, she was six months behind. When they returned to Rome in the 1980s, she remained stranded in the late 1970s. When it was the 1990s outside, she was just getting to know President Reagan. When planes struck the Twin Towers, she was watching the Soviet Union collapse. Today, it is February 18, 2007, outside this apartment. Within, the date remains April 23, 1994.

These are her day's headlines: "Thousands Slain in Rwanda, Red Cross Fears;"

"Mandela Set to Win South Africa Elections;" "After Suicide, 'Grunge' Star Cobain Viewed as Icon;" "Cold War Over, Hot War Begins." This last piece is a news analysis by the paper's Paris correspondent, Lloyd Burko, who reported on the siege of Sarajevo, and compares the slaughter in Yugoslavia to the recent massacres in Rwanda.

Ornella phones her eldest son, Dario, to complain about Marta. "She forgot to bring me down my paper for tomorrow," she tells him in Italian, which is the family language. "What am I going to do now?"

"Can't you get it yourself?"

Ornella flings up her arms, which tinkle with jewelry, and chops the air. "No," she says, "I cannot. You know I can't." What if she read a headline by mistake, something from 1996, or 2002? She doesn't ask Dario to come over, but repeats the problem until he volunteers.