The Imperfectionists: A Novel

by Tom Rachman

  "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 byli
nes 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.

  She opens the front door and leans back slightly when he enters, as if to avoid a kiss, though none is offered. His six-year-old son, Massimiliano, trails in. "You're here too, Massi," she says, patting her grandson's head as if he were a rather pleasing spaniel, but a spaniel nonetheless.

  Dario sets up the stepladder. She watches the tendons in his wrist flexing as he grips and shifts it into position--she wants to grab his arm and stop him. She can't look at April 24, 1994. No one but she seems to remember that day. She says softly, "Wait, wait."

  He turns. "What for?"

  "Shall I make us coffee first?"

  "Not for me."

  "What about the boy?" she says, though Massi is standing right there beside them.

  "Will he want something?"