Tom Rachman - The Imperfectionists

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 It's outdated, but we have the Internet.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 Herman 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.