The Imperfectionists (29 page)

That didn't mean Oliver had been left alone. It was he who had cared for Boyd
during the illness, and his siblings felt uncomfortably indebted. They intended to
discharge their obligation and sought a role for him. The Ott Group holdings were varied
enough to offer something. How about this paper they owned in Rome? No one in the new
generation could explain why their grandfather had founded this money-losing operation.

He must have lost his touch. But now, at least, the paper would come in handy. It would
be ideal for Oliver: no pressure, since it could scarcely do worse. Plus, Europewas artsy,
which would appeal to him. And he could live in Grandpa's empty old mansion in Rome.

Perhaps he would even stun them and turn the paper around
.

Oliver himself had no such illusions. He opposed the appointment, reminding his
brother and sisters that he knew nothing about business and had scarcely read a
newspaper in his life, except to check the arts listings. Vaughn said a business is a
business
.

"But I don't know anything about
any
business," Oliver replied
.

"You'll learn."

On his arrival, the paper was in an uproar. Kathleen and Abbey leaped at Oliver
like polar bears on a walrus--he was an actual, live Ott, and they had him in their midst.

Their demands, boiled down, were this: money. Chippy staffers beset him, too, protesting
the wage freeze, the threat of layoffs, the filthy carpeting (unwashed since 1977, they
said). He rushed off to phone Vaughn
.

"Not gonna happen," Vaughn said. "You know how much the paper is losing?"

"Not exactly."

"Well, they're lucky we're still paying their salaries."

Oliver avoided the office after that, dropping by only after hours to sign
documents and pick up mail. Otherwise, he hid out at the mansion, his sole daily
excursion to walk his basset hound, Schopenhauer
.

"GUNMAN KILLS 32

IN CAMPUS RAMPAGE"

* * *

PUBLISHER--OLIVER OTT

THE PHONE RINGS IN THE LIVING ROOM. HE KNOWS WHO IT IS, SO he puts on his coat, summons Schopenhauer, and leads the dog outside for a walk.

Oliver is a lanky man, not quite thirty but already hunched, his head dangling forward as if from a coat hook rather than mounted upon a spine. An oily blond fringe curtains his blemished forehead and pale blue eyes, while a turnip nose bobs between strands of hair as he walks. His lips bear nibbled indents, and his chin wavers as he mumbles to his dog. He gazes fixedly down the line of the leash, witnessing the world from Schopenhauer's vantage point--life at sniff level.

A scent catches the basset hound's attention and he jumps toward a urine-drizzled tussock of grass. He pulls this way, wrenches that, braiding Oliver into ever more intricate tangles. "I'm beginning to think," Oliver says, "that the leash is here largely for irony."

Their walks take them all around the city. To the Botanical Gardens on the slopes of the Janiculum. To the Valle dei Cani in Villa Borghese. To the parched turf of the Circus Maximus, where tourists trudge the ancient chariot circuit, chugging bottled water.

On the hottest days, Oliver and Schopenhauer cross the Tiber, making for the shaded alleys of Trastevere. Or they stroll up Via Giulia, whose resolutely tall buildings stand up to the sun. Or they saunter through the Protestant Cemetery in Testaccio, where Oliver's grandfather is buried.

The headstone is an uninspiring affair--"Cyrus Ott. Born 1899. Died 1960"--so Oliver proceeds to more diverting tombs, reading under his breath the inscribed names:

"Gertrude Parsons Marcella ... Lieutenant Colonel Harris Arthur McCormack ...

Wolfgang Rappaport. Dead at age four." He tells the dog, "Michael James Lamont Hosgood died at fifteen. That's him, beside his mother. But she died twenty years later in Kent. She must have asked to be buried back here, alongside her son. Don't you think, Schop?" The tomb of Devereux Plantagenet Cockburn is adorned with a life-size statue of the deceased, a young fop reclining with a cocker spaniel in his lap and his thumb inserted in a book, as if every visitor to the grave were a pleasant interruption from his studies. Oliver reads the lengthy inscription, which concludes: "He was beloved by all who knew him, and most precious to his parents and family, who had sought his health in many foreign climes. He departed this life in Rome, on the 3rd of May 1850, aged 21

years."

The sun resigns its position in the sky and the mosquitoes assume theirs, so Oliver and Schopenhauer head back to the Aventine Hill. Their home is a sixteenth-century mansion that Cyrus Ott bought cheap in the early 1950s. Oliver punches in the digital code and the mechanized steel gate parts squeakily. Inside, the telephone rings.

Oliver releases Schopenhauer, winds up the leash, and enters the living room. The ceiling is even higher than in the entrance hall, paneled with rococo reliefs, with starbursts and peach cherubim gamboling around the corners. The oil paintings on the walls are too poorly lit for their subjects to be immediately discernible--from a distance, all appear to depict woods at night; only the gilt frames glint. Into the Oriental rugs, deep paths have been worn from pedestrian traffic: to the kitchen, to the shuttered windows, to the bookshelves, to the tete-a-tete settee, to the old telephone whose antiquated bell at this moment rattles against the wallpaper. The answering machine kicks in.

"Hi, it's me again," Kathleen says. "I'm at the office. Please give me a call.

Thanks."

Oliver plucks a paperback Agatha Christie from a stack on the floor and settles himself and the dog (lured with a chocolate cookie) on the settee. At 7 P.M., the housekeepers announce dinner. It's some sort of stew. Too much rosemary and too little salt, but perfectly edible. Schopenhauer sniffs the meat-scented air beseechingly, his droopy eyes bloodshot, spittle on his chops. Oliver fetches that day's paper--the subscription department insists on sending it, though he never reads the thing. He spreads it across the table and places his plate of leftovers on top. He pulls up a chair for Schopenhauer, who leaps up and shoots his snout across the table. The dog turns his muzzle to one side to snap up meat and carrots, then jerks his head back, flinging the food down his throat.

"A knife and fork would be preferable," Oliver says. "But there's no teaching you."

Once the plate is clean, Oliver scrunches up the paper, specked with gravy and gobbets of gristle. He disposes of the mess in the kitchen as Schopenhauer drinks from his bowl, tongue and ears slapping the water.

The phone in the living room rings again. And, again, the machine gets it. "I'm headed home now," Kathleen says wearily. "You can get me on my cell. Appreciate if you'd call tonight. Kinda urgent. Thanks."

Schopenhauer noses open the door and wanders off, padding upstairs.

"Time alone is good for any relationship," Oliver comments as if the dog were still in the room to hear it. Oliver lies on his belly on the floor, piles of books ranged around him like tall grass:
Miss Marple's Final Cases
, a Taschen monograph on Turner, Sotheby's twentieth-century British art-auction listing,
The Penguin Complete Father
Brown
, a catalog from
Caravaggio: The Final Years
at the National Gallery, and
The
Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
. "Where have you gone?" he asks the absent dog. He checks in the kitchen. "Schop?" He peers into the dining room. "Where in the devil's name are you?"

He climbs the darkened staircase with a flashlight. (Oliver inhabits only the ground floor; the rest of the mansion is all darkness, covered by tarpaulins.) The beam of his torch sweeps across the second-floor landing. "Schopenhauer, where are you?" Oliver is swallowed into the black belly of the house; a chandelier twinkles; the telephone in the living room rings. The answering machine beeps, its message number flashing permanently at "99" because the display lacks a third digit.

"Where are you, you fool?" Oliver calls into the darkened ballroom. He shines the flashlight about and exclaims, "Ah!"--reflective eyes under the piano. "Sorry, I'm blinding you." He turns off the flashlight and the basset hound trots over, his overlong nails clacking on the hardwood floor. Oliver kneels to greet his friend. "What were you doing under the piano? Sleeping?" He strokes Schopenhauer's long, damp ear. "I hope I didn't wake you."

They fumble through the dark to the study, which contains documents from his grandfather's time in Rome. Oliver clicks on the lamp and, snooping like a whodunit detective, peeks into the drawers. He finds a letter pad containing Ott's notes of fifty years before--references to newsprint rolls, the price of Linotype machines, telex rates.

There is an unfinished letter from Ott to his wife and son: "Dear Jeanne and Boyd, the important thing to realize, and I need to make this clear." It ends there.

Oliver turns the page and finds another of Ott's letters. "I want you to have all the paintings--we bought them together and I feel they should be yours," it begins. "Take this to my lawyers and they will do as I say." The next line is illegible. Then: "I long to see you, but I will not telephone. Nothing pleasant about this illness. Nothing anybody needs to see. But you should know that I regret certain things," the letter says. "I regret that I left you in New York. But I made that decision and I must live with it. I married, then you married. I was not going to interfere after that. I was an honorable man, I believed, and did not know how to stop being one. To think of that now, it seems outright madness.

But I got myself into a tangle. I tied myself in knots. I built and I built--heaven knows I have done that well. Those skyscrapers, full of tenants, floor after floor, and not a single room containing you. You asked why I came here to Rome. I never cared about the news.

I came to be in the same room as you, even if I had to build that room, fill it with people, with typewriters, the rest. I only hope you understand that the paper was for you."

A blue ink stain follows, as if the tip of the pen rested here for some time. The handwriting resumes, tiny now: "Can't send this ... Damn well must ... Too late now ...

Don't be a fool--just send her this."

He never did.

Oliver places the pad back in the drawer. "You fat beast," he tells Schopenhauer, as he carries him down the stairs. "You're so much heavier than I think--I always forget that." He puts the dog down in the living room, as if lowering a table to its feet. The table scampers away. "Asleep under the piano!" he remarks, smacking his hands together.

"Now I'm all covered in dust."

The phone rattles the wallpaper. "I pretend it's not ringing," Oliver says, "and it pretends I'm not here."

The machine beeps. "Oliver, this is Abbey. I'm happy to brief you on my meetings in Atlanta. Anyway, I'm back now. So call me. Thanks."

Oliver coaxes Schopenhauer back onto the settee. "Stop staring at me," he tells the dog. "I'm trying to read."

Schopenhauer

burps.

"You disgusting contrarian," Oliver says. But he is unable to resist for long and strokes the dog's ears. Schopenhauer rumbles contentedly, leaning into Oliver's hip. "My dear friend," Oliver says. "I'm so lucky." He adds, suddenly self-conscious, "If anyone heard me talking to you! But it's not like I'm talking to myself. You're listening because--

" He stops there, to see if it prompts a response.

The dog yawns.

"See, I have to get to the end of my sentence. You won't have it otherwise."

The dog's eyelids sink shut.

Over the coming weeks, the phone calls increase.

"Money, money, money," Oliver tells Schopenhauer. "What am I supposed to do?

I don't run the Ott Group."

Kathleen is talking into the machine: "... and I'm going to need you at that staff meeting. I've told everyone you'll be there, so I'd appreciate it if you'd call me back."

At the Valle dei Cani, Oliver switches Schopenhauer to the extendable leash, which allows the animal to play with the dogs but not to run away. The other owners watch Oliver with amusement: he retreats to the edge of the grassy bowl, behind a tree, with a detective novel pressed to his nose, unwilling to engage human eyes as he clings to the world's longest and most unmanageable leash. Every few minutes, he must rush over to Schopenhauer and remove the cord from an animal or a person. Oliver never speaks on these occasions, even if spoken to. He unties his friend, hurries back to his tree, resumes reading--or, rather, resumes pretending to read.

He has no friends in Rome except Schopenhauer. He has no friends anywhere except Schopenhauer, unless his companion from school days, the pensioner Mr. Deveen, is still alive. But Mr. Deveen must be dead by now. How old would he be? He'd not have reached the twenty-first century, not with all those cigarettes. Dear man. Can't condemn him. He must have been lonely. That's the best way to explain it.

Dinner that evening is
bigoli al tartufo nero
, and Schopenhauer makes an ungodly mess of it again. Long pasta is not his strong point. "They warned me that you bayed,"

Oliver says, "but never about your table manners."

The two best friends embark on another expedition to the darkened upper floors.

Oliver steals through the rooms, peeking at the paintings under tarpaulin: Modigliani's portrait of a Gypsy; Leger's green bottles and black bowler hats; Chagall's blue chickens leaping over the moon; the English country landscape as seen by Pissarro.

Oliver stands before the Turner: a disintegrating ship and the spray of the sea; the way Turner captured water, the sloshing bulk of it. He could stare at it for hours--and Turner is not particularly his thing. What is his thing, then? At Yale, his thesis (aborted when Boyd fell ill) was "Wreck in the Moonlight: Caspar David Friedrich and the Nineteenth-Century German Landscape." But it's preposterous to speak of "his thing"