The Imperfectionists

by Tom Rachman

  * GWOT: No one knows what this means, above all those who use the term. Nominally, it stands for Global War on Terror. But since conflict against an abstraction is, to be polite, tough to execute, the term should be understood as marketing gibberish. Our reporters adore this sort of humbug; it is the copy editor's job to exclude it. See also: OBL; Acronyms; and Nitwits.

  He hits save. It is entry No. 18,238. "The Bible"--his name for the paper's style guide--was once printed and bound, with a copy planted on every desk across the newsroom. Now it exists solely within the paper's computer network, not least because the text has grown to approximately the size of metropolitan Liechtenstein. The purpose of his Bible is to set down laws: to impart whether a "ceasefire" is, properly speaking, a "cease-fire" or indeed a "cease fire;" to adjudge when editors must use "that" and when "which;" to resolve quarrels over prepositions, false possessives, dangling modifiers--on the copydesk, fisticuffs have broken out over less.

  Kathleen raps on his door. "Such were the joys," she says wearily.

  "Which joys are these?"

  "The joys of trying to put out a non-embarrassing daily with roughly five percent of the resources I need."

  "Ah, yes," he replies. "The joys of the paper."

  "And you? Whose self-esteem are you dismantling today?"

  He massages his fingers and dips them into his trouser pocket, which is swollen as if with pebbles. He retrieves a mound of sucking sweets that have melted together. "You'll be thrilled to hear," he informs her, popping the candies into his mouth, "that I have a new copy of Why? ready." By this, he means the monthly internal newsletter in which he decants his favorite blunders from the paper. It is fair to say the staffers do not greet each edition of Why? with elation.

  Kathleen sighs.

  "Duty does call, I'm afraid," he says. "Now, what can I do for you, my dear?"

  She often stops by for advice. Her deputy may be Craig Menzies, but Herman is her true counselor. He has worked at the paper for more than thirty years, has held most editorial jobs here (though never reporter), and served as the acting editor-in-chief during interregnums in 1994, 2000, and 2004. Staffers still shiver to recall his stewardship. Yet for all his bluster Herman is not disliked. His news judgment is envied, his memory is an unfailing resource, and his kindness emerges for all those who hang around long enough.

  "What are your thoughts about my culture shake-up?" she asks.

  "You managed to dislodge Clint Oakley finally."

  "Very proud of myself over that," she says. "And you were right: Arthur Gopal isn't a write-off. Things remain ugly on the stringer front, though. Still no one in Cairo. And Paris remains unmanned."

  "How can Accounts Payable refuse to replace Lloyd?"

  "It's insane."

  "Outrageous."

  "You here tomorrow?"

  "Day off, my dear. Wait, wait--before you wander away, I wanted to warn you that I have a delightful new correction upcoming."

  She groans; he grins.

  Corrections have proliferated of late. A handful even earned a place on Herman's corkboard: Tony Blair included on a list of "recently deceased Japanese dignitaries;" Germany described as suffering from "a genital malaise in the economy;" and almost daily appearances from "the Untied States." He types out his latest publishable correction: "In an article by Hardy Benjamin in the Tuesday business section, the former dictator of Iraq was erroneously referred to as Sadism Hussein. The correct spelling is Saddam. We doubt that our typographical error impinged on the man's credibility, however, we regret--" He checks his watch. Miriam leaves tonight, and Jimmy arrives tomorrow. Herman still has much to do. He slips on his coat, jabs a finger in the air. "Credibility!" he says.

  The front door to his apartment in Monteverde won't budge, so he shoulders it halfway open and, with a grunt, squeezes inside. His wife's luggage is blocking the passage. She is scheduled on an overnight flight from Rome back to Philadelphia to visit their daughter and grandchildren. The click-clack of her heels sounds down the hallway. "Sweetie pie," he calls, and edges past the luggage. "Sweetie pie, I'm afraid I banged one of your suitcases. The red one."

  "Burgundy," she corrects him.

  "That's not red?"

  At work, Herman makes the corrections. Not here.

  "I hope I didn't break anything. Were there presents in there? Should we open and check? What do you think?" Awaiting her judgment, he contorts as if before a teetering vase.

  "It was packed perfectly," she says.

  "I'm so sorry."

  "I took ages doing that."

  "I know. I'm terrible. Can I help?"

  She kneels to unbuckle the luggage straps, and he raises a finger--not to prod the air this time but to beg permission. "Darling, might I possibly make you a drink? Might that be nice?"

  "Can I check my bag first?"

  "Yes, yes, of course."

  He takes refuge in the kitchen, dicing carrots and celery. At the sound of her clicking heels, he swivels around. "A nice, hearty soup to fill you up for the long trip."

  "You make me sound like a thermos."

  He resumes chopping. "These vegetables are delicious--could I slice you a few?"

  "Such a pity you can't come. But I guess you prefer Jimmy."

  "Don't say that."

  "Sorry," she says. "I'm being awful." She steals a carrot.

  "Are you worried about the flight?"

  She blinks in affirmation, then studies his soup mix. "Needs salt."

  "How can you say?" he protests, then tastes it. She is right. He salts the soup, stirs it, kisses her cheek.

  After dinner, he sees Miriam off at the airport and speeds home in their dented blue Mazda, a tiny model that, with him inside, looks like a bumper car. He tucks fresh sheets on the spare bed for Jimmy and tidies up. But there is not as much preparation as he'd expected. He runs a finger around the pot of cold soup (acquacotta di Talamone: chopped carrots and celery, chopped pancetta, pumpkin, zucchini, kidney beans, lima beans, artichoke hearts, grated pecorino, ground pepper, eight boiled eggs, fourteen pieces of toast). He and Jimmy met in Baltimore in the late 1950s, the only Jewish kids at a Presbyterian private school. Herman had been sent there by his father, a foul-tempered Zionist and a dead ringer for Karl Marx who believed the best school in the district should be forced to swallow a fat little Jew, namely, his son. The fat little Jew himself saw few benefits in being someone else's battering ram. But, thankfully, he had been preceded at the school by another Jewish kid, Jimmy Pepp, who enjoyed legendary status there for having climbed atop the church library and smoked a pipe on the roof. They said he had descended via the drainpipes and kept the tobacco smoldering all the way down. And it had been windy. The tale was dubious, but there was no denying that as a youth Jimmy had kept a pipe, a curved marvel with a meerschaum bowl and mahogany body that he puffed on the hill behind school, often leaning over a book of poetry--E. E. Cummings, say, or Baudelaire. He was also notable as the only pupil not to wear the school blazer, which he evaded with a falsified doctor's note claiming "seborrhoeic dermatitis." None of the teachers dared ask what this affliction consisted of--a fortunate turn, since Jimmy himself could only have guessed. The reason for his subterfuge was simply that he preferred to wear a donnish tweed jacket with elbow patches, in whose left pocket he kept a copy of Ulysses--the Modern Library edition, missing the dust jacket--and in whose right pocket he stored his calabash pipe and a tin of Mac Baren Club Blend tobacco. The balance between left and right pockets was grossly uneven, Ulysses being a notably heavy volume, so he evened it out with fountain pens, which often exploded, bleeding a constellation of indigo blotches into his right pocket. For a reason Herman never understood, Jimmy protected him at school from the day they met.

  He is among the last to emerge off the afternoon flight from Frankfurt.

  "Welcome," Herman says, beaming and reaching for Jimmy's bag, then changing his mind and throwing a thick arm around his narrow friend. "You got here."

 
He leads Jimmy to the car and they set off for the apartment. "Since I didn't know where your body clock would be," Herman explains while driving, "I have four possible dinner options. Scrambled eggs with truffle oil--very nice, I recommend it. Alternatively, homemade pizza. Or fresh bresaola, salad, and cheese--I have a great Taleggio. Also, there's leftover acquacotta di Talamone, which is a soup. Or we could just eat out. Is that four options?"

  Jimmy smiles.

  "What?" Herman asks, grinning back. "It's my job to fatten you up, no? Sorry, I have to concentrate here--I'm gonna crash us." He drives on in silence for a minute. "Good to see you," he says.

  Jimmy journeyed from Los Angeles via Frankfurt, and the trip totaled almost twenty-four hours. He stays awake as long as he can, then falls asleep in the spare room. The next morning around dawn, he is padding around the living room in boxers with a design of lipstick kisses. His chest hair is white. Herman emerges in pajamas, kneading a knot in his back. "You want coffee?" he asks, and gives Jimmy the morning paper. Over breakfast, they talk politics--who's ruling America, who's ruling Italy. Soon, it's time for Herman to go to work. "You only just arrived, and I'm already abandoning you--some host," he says. "You got everything you need? You want to use the computer? It's outdated, but we have the Internet. And I got the technicians at work to install word processing so you can work on your book while you're here. Here, let me log you on."

  With his rumpled copy of the paper under his arm, Herman strides into the newsroom, shooting accusatory glances. Reporters murmur "Morning," and editors compress their lips and nod at the floor. He elbows into his office, pops a sucking sweet, and spreads out the day's paper, his yellow highlighter poised to lasso any sins. A stack of unopened letters to the editor sits on the edge of his desk. Sometimes it seems the readers do nothing but complain. They're usually on the old side--he can tell from the palsied scrawl and the diction ("Dear Sir, I expect you receive a great many letters, yet I must express my dismay over ..."). Admittedly, the paper's readership is only about ten thousand people nowadays, but at least they are passionate. And the postmarks come from all around the world, which is heartening. For many, especially those in remote locales, the paper is their only link to the greater world, to the big cities they left, or the big cities they have never seen, only built in their minds. The readers constitute a sort of fellowship that never meets, united by loved and loathed bylines, by screwed-up photo captions, by the glorious corrections box. Speaking of which.

  He spots Hardy Benjamin gossiping at the other end of the newsroom--he still hasn't finished the Sadism Hussein correction. From the doorway of his office, he bellows, "Miss Benjamin, I'll need you later."

  "Something wrong?"

  "Yes, but I'm too busy to talk now."

  "Is it serious?"

  "What I'm occupied with now is serious. You'll have to wait, Nancy Drew." He closes his door, irritated with himself. Imagine if Jimmy saw me bossing them like this, he thinks, and yanks a book at random from the shelf, the International Dictionary of Gastronomy. He flips its pages, landing at the entry for "churros." The first time he and Jimmy shared a home was on Riverside Drive at 103rd Street, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Herman was in his first year at Columbia University, while Jimmy had just returned from three months in Mexico, where he'd been romancing an older woman, an artist who sculpted Aztec monsters and whose husband in Houston had hired a kid to thump Jimmy on the head with a brick, though the kid just threw it and missed. Jimmy claimed that this was the reason he'd returned to America. But Herman suspected, guiltily, that there was another reason: that Jimmy had intuited from Herman's letters how disheartened he was alone at college in New York. There was only a single bed in his studio apartment, so Jimmy slept on the floor without sheets or pillows, which he claimed to prefer. Within a week, he had an entourage of peculiar friends and Herman's home had been transformed from monastic cell to bustling salon, crammed with all the weird of the metropolis: Dyer, the baby-faced waiter from New Orleans, who couldn't have been sweeter until he robbed everyone and bit a policeman's horse; beanpole Lorraine, who smoked marijuana cigarettes and opened her purse to show erotic drawings of herself with spiders; and Nedra, dark eyes disconnected from reason, who said she'd been born in Siam or Brooklyn, who smelled of underarm sweat, whom any street drunk could have and whom most had, though Jimmy let her sleep on the floor beside him and never touched her. Herman asked what had happened after that kid in Mexico threw the brick and missed. Jimmy said that he and the would-be assassin had started laughing. Then, Jimmy said, he'd bought the kid churros.

  Herman closes the International Dictionary of Gastronomy and feeds it back into its slot on the shelf. He opens the paper to the culture pages, which have improved considerably under Arthur Gopal. Nevertheless, Herman spots an offender: the word "literally." He snarls, wakes up his computer, and types:

  * literally: This word should be deleted. All too often, actions described as "literally" did not happen at all. As in, "He literally jumped out of his skin." No, he did not. Though if he literally had, I'd suggest raising the element and proposing the piece for page one. Inserting "literally" willy-nilly reinforces the notion that breathless nitwits lurk within this newsroom. Eliminate on sight--the usage, not the nitwits. The nitwits are to be captured and placed in the cages I have set up in the subbasement. See also: Excessive Dashes; Exclamation Points; and Nitwits.

  On his way home, Herman drives to Enoteca Costantini in Piazza Cavour to pick up a bottle of Frascati Superiore. Tonight he is preparing a traditional Roman meal for Jimmy: deep-fried fiori di zucca and carciofi alla giudia, a straightforward bucatini all'amatriciana, homemade pizza bianca to mop up the sauce, and pangiallo for dessert (this last item, alas, is store-bought).

  At the apartment, he finds Jimmy flopped on the spare bed, back turned. He rolls over.

  "How you feeling?" Herman asks. "Jet-lagged?" He readies dinner as Jimmy recounts his day. He went for a walk and got lost, and someone followed him for a while--a thief, he thinks--but the guy gave up.

  "Sounds more successful than my day," Herman comments. "My style guide is out of control. It's ridiculous. Those poor putzes I work with!"

  At dinner, Jimmy eats little and drinks only water. As for tobacco, he has quit completely--it's curious to see him without the customary cloud of smoke. Herman asks about life in L.A., and Jimmy says he's busy--time just races by, consumed by all the minor activities: buying groceries, watching his TV programs, going to the laundromat. And crime is a worry.

  Herman pats his gut, sauntering with intent toward the liquor cabinet. "Care for a digestivo?" he asks. "One thing I don't have, I'm afraid, is your favorite: Barbancourt rum, right?" The old Modern Library copy of Ulysses remained in Jimmy's pocket throughout the 1960s. Leopold Bloom was his hero, not least because they shared a taste for animal innards--fried pork kidneys in particular. However, the overpowering sizzle and stench of Jimmy's food in their shared New York apartment diminished over that decade as he spent more time in Mexico, pursuing his drama with the married sculptress. He claimed she resembled Molly Bloom, which amused Herman--what on earth does Molly Bloom look like? Herman graduated from Columbia with a degree in political science and took a job as a copyboy at a city newspaper. In his conception, this was all backward--Jimmy, not he, was supposed to go into journalism, starting out as a sportswriter, say, or covering cops, then writing a Runyonesque column about booze and betting and all the affable lunatics who gravitated toward him like bugs to a bulb. The next step for Jimmy would be to cover a war overseas and perhaps take part, like Hemingway or Orwell, then publish a book about it. His first novel would follow. After that, Jimmy's career would take off. Years later, Herman could write a biography--the definitive account, composed by Jimmy Pepp's best friend, who had known the great writer from school days in Baltimore to the mad nights in New York to the sculptress in Mexico to the first crackle of publishing success and the iconic fame that followed. But at the time of this reverie He
rman was alone again in New York, a gopher at a local newspaper, fetching quarts of bourbon for ulcerated editors, making smoke runs, picking up corned beef on rye on Ninth Avenue, with the inevitable "No, hang on, kid, make mine pastrami on brown with extra mustard, and don't forget the napkins." Other copyboys busied themselves by stuffing live mice into the pneumatic tubes that connected the various departments, rocketing the creatures through the network until they popped out squeaking in the secretaries' pool. With this sort of competition, it was easy for Herman to shine.

  The editors gave him a tryout as a proofreader, and he had a knack for it--finally, arcane knowledge and pedantry came in handy. The day of this promotion, he happened to meet Miriam at a friend's party and, inflated by professional success, found the courage to ask her on a date. In the coming months, he fell in love with her. But he worried about introducing her to his best friend, afraid that he, Herman, would wilt by comparison. Yet when Jimmy next passed through the city, Herman bravely arranged for them to meet for dinner. He was nervous all that day. Surprisingly, Jimmy seemed somewhat witless during the meal: his romantic exploits in Mexico sounded childish, his writing came off as half-baked. He spent most of the meal praising Herman, boasting of his friend's brilliance at Baltimore Presbyterian (untrue), of his sparkling college career (a gross exaggeration), and of the triumphant future that inevitably lay ahead for Mr. Herman Cohen (hardly credible). After dinner, they split up. Herman felt odd parting from Jimmy and going home with Miriam--he and his oldest friend still had all the real catching up to do.

  Miriam said she liked Jimmy all right but couldn't see what Herman had been going on about. And that, Herman knew, had been the point of Jimmy's performance. He saw Jimmy off at the train station and smiled at the sight of Ulysses jutting from his luggage. "Is that the same copy from school?" Herman asked. Jimmy opened it. The pages had been cut out, and planted inside was a leather flask. "It wasn't always like that, was it?" Herman asked. Jimmy offered a sip and said how beautiful it was to see him with this girl, to see him happy. Herman blushed. "What is this poison?" he asked. Jimmy took a swig as if to double-check, then identified it as his favorite drink, Barbancourt rum.