The Imperfectionists: A Novel

by Tom Rachman

  She immediately makes friends in the class. They are all locals, artistic types who smoke too much, paint their bedrooms orange, and smell of damp wool. She is particularly sympathetic to a clumsy kid called Paolo. "I've never seen anyone more uncoordinated than this guy," she says. "Poor Paolo--can't even touch his toes. Totally incapable."

  "Can

  I touch my toes?" Menzies attempts it. He groans, straining for his shoe tips.

  Annika leaps up and hugs him.

  "Thank you," he says, laughing. "What's that for?"

  Her yoga friends urge her to bring in her portfolio to show around. But when she considers her old photos she is ashamed; they'll think she's an amateur. So she embarks on a new series. Her subject is the graffiti blighting historical buildings around Rome.

  They love the pictures and urge her to exhibit them.

  With Annika out shooting or with her yoga friends, Menzies often returns to an empty apartment. Oddly, the place seems louder without her: motor scooters buzzing outside, footfalls pounding across the apartment overhead, the wall clock ticking. He prepares a sandwich for dinner and descends to his basement workshop, a room he rents to conduct science projects, his hobby since boyhood. He fiddles with balsa-wood models, browses back issues of science-and-technology magazines, and he daydreams. It is always the same daydream: about earning a patent.

  If only he'd studied sciences at college! Then again, he'd not have ended up in D.C. and not have met her. He could still invent something, of course. A creation so remarkable it would force MIT to admit him. He'd earn his doctorate in record time. And he'd have Annika with him. If she wanted to come. But would she? Here in Rome, he has something to offer her: a desirable place to live, the romance of Europe. If all he had was student housing in Boston and debts ... ? But these are absurd thoughts. He's not an inventor, he doesn't have the qualifications, and he's far too old to obtain them now. He has a different life, a newsman's life, like it or not.

  She's knocking at the door that leads down to his basement workshop. "I'm coming up now," he calls out. He finds her on the landing, leaning against the wall, wincing. She has done something to her back and must skip yoga for a while.

  Over the next few weeks, she hangs around the apartment, drinking herbal tea, watching Italian variety shows. She is crotchety with him, then apologizes. Once healed, she resumes her photography project on graffiti but does not return to yoga.

  One afternoon at the office, Menzies is reworking an awkward headline. He tries a few different versions, settling finally on the plainest, which is always his preference.

  "76 Die in Baghdad Bombings," he writes.

  Arthur Gopal appears. He is Menzies' only friend in the newsroom. Occasionally, they take lunch together at Corsi, a bustling trattoria on Via del Gesu. At these meals, Menzies always wants to ask how Arthur is faring without Visantha and Pickle; and Arthur wants to ask about Annika, of whom he knows little. But neither poses personal questions. Instead, the subject is work, with Arthur doing much of the talking. Between mouthfuls of bean soup, he slanders colleagues ("Kathleen misses the point," "Clint Oakley can't even do a basic obit," "Herman is living in another era") and elaborates ambitions ("This old editor friend of my father's says I should work for him in New York"). Once he has finished speaking, Arthur adopts a dissatisfied air and spoons at his soup as if hunting for a lost cuff link.

  On this afternoon, however, Arthur approaches Menzies' desk with an uncommon manner. "Have you checked your email?" he asks.

  "Not lately. Why? Should I?"

  "You got one from someone called jojo98. I strongly advise you to read it."

  Menzies prints off a copy. But the email is in Italian, which he understands poorly. The message refers to Annika, and it includes an attachment. He clicks on this and a photo fills his screen. The quality is poor, as if taken with a cellphone camera. It shows Annika--evidently unaware that she is being photographed--on their bed, undressed, looking away. In the foreground is a man's hairy thigh, presumably that of the photographer. Hurriedly, Menzies turns off his monitor. "What the hell is this?"

  "I have no idea. But it went to the whole staff."

  Menzies stares at his blackened screen. "Jesus."

  "I'm sorry to be the one to point it out," Arthur says.

  "What do I do? Call her?"

  "You should probably go talk in person."

  "I can't just leave work."

  "You

  can."

  Menzies takes the stairs down, hurries across Campo de' Fiori, through the Ghetto, and crosses to the narrow sidewalk that follows the Tiber. He half walks, half jogs home, gazing down at the uneven path, then up at the traffic lights on Via Marmorata, then ahead at the tall metal gate of their apartment block.

  He is here and wishes he were not.

  He cannot go up. Their bedroom could be occupied. He goes down to his basement workshop and takes out the printed email. With an Italian-English dictionary, he pieces together the sentences. It claims that Annika has been having sex with another man while Menzies is at work. It says she plans to leave him, and that she and her lover are buying an apartment together. "When you sleep at night, your sheets are stained with his sperm," the letter says.

  Everyone in the office (he closes his eyes at the thought--they all got this email) would expect him to barge into the apartment, waving the letter, swearing his throat raw, demanding, "Who is the asshole that sent this, and what the hell is going on?"

  But he can't. He stands before his workbench, hands on hips.

  When it is late, he goes up. His mobile phone, which gets no signal in the basement, returns to life. Kathleen has phoned numerous times and Annika left three messages, asking when he'll be home, that she's getting hungry, is everything okay?

  "Hey," she says, opening the front door. "What happened?"

  "Hi, yeah. No, nothing--just some confusion. Sorry," he says. "You have an okay day?"

  "Fine. But hang on--don't disappear. I'm still"--she pulls at her T-shirt--"still confused a bit. You got, like, a million calls from the office."

  "It's no big deal." Normally, when he walks in he kisses her. He hasn't tonight, and they both notice. "They're too dependent on me." He goes into the bathroom, watches himself blandly in the mirror, returns to the arena.

  She can't look at him. "He sent you that letter, right?" she says. "I can't believe that--" She says a man's name.

  "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 kno
w 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. O
n 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."